Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

It may be hard for Americans to imagine why a single rape case would cause such outrage among Okinawans or endanger an almost half-century-old Japanese-American security relationship. Part of the reason is because it is hard to grasp the particular imperial circumstances under which they live. A reader trying to imagine what follows would perhaps have to transpose the Okinawan situation to Greater Los Angeles, imagining the choicest fifth of it to be occupied in a similar way by an allied and “friendly” foreign military. In addition, the reader would have to understand that the very reason for the presence of those bases, weapons, and personnel, dinned into public consciousness for forty years—the enmity of an ominous neighboring superpower and its bloc of allies—had ceased to be relevant for a decade.

Certainly, from an Okinawan point of view, Admiral Macke’s remark merely confirmed what they had already long experienced: that this was not an isolated incident committed by undisciplined enlisted men but part of a pattern ignored, if not condoned, at the highest levels of the American military hierarchy. But even more important, it posed in the starkest terms a question increasingly asked in the satellites of the informal American empire: Why absorb such costs? Why, in fact, are foreign troops based in countries like Japan more than half a century after the end of World War II and more than a decade after the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a military threat?

Okinawa is the largest island in the Ryukyu chain, which is located at the southernmost tip of Japan. Its capital, Naha, is considerably closer to Shanghai than to Tokyo, and the culture of the Ryukyu Islands reflects strong Chinese as well as Japanese influences. The Ryukyus were formerly an independent kingdom, annexed by Japan in the late nineteenth century, at about the same time the United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands.

The main island of Okinawa was the scene of the last great battle of World War II—also the last time the United States used military force victoriously in East Asia. (During the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur’s landing at Inchon was successful but led to his march north to the Yalu River, which precipitated Chinese intervention and the United States’ ultimately having to settle for a divided Korea.) Some 14,005 Americans and 234,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians were killed in that brutal, three-month-long campaign, so bloody that it became the main American rationale for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If using atomic weapons to end the war prevented more Okinawan-type carnage in an invasion of Japan’s main islands, then, the Americans claimed, it was more than justified.

The monument the Okinawan government built to the war dead, unveiled on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, is testimony to what the Okinawans call the “typhoon of steel.” On dozens of stone tablets, it lists the names of all the people on all sides killed in the battle—Japanese and American soldiers and affiliated personnel (including the journalist Ernie Pyle), Okinawan and Japanese civilians, and Korean slave laborers. The battle lasted from April to June 1945 and totally devastated the island. In September 1945, the American armed forces occupied defeated Japan, promising to bring to those emperorruled islands an American-style series of democratic reforms. Okinawa, however, was separated off from Japan and ruled by the military in a purely autocratic manner.

From 1945 to 1972, American military officers governed Okinawa as their exclusive preserve. In 1952, retention of Okinawa proved to be the price the American government extracted from Japan in return for the signing of an early peace treaty and of the Japanese-American Security Treaty, which signaled the end of the occupation of Japan’s main islands. Many Okinawans believe that Emperor Hirohito sacrificed them in 1945 in a meaningless battle meant to elicit better surrender terms from the Allies, and that Tokyo sacrificed them again in 1952 so that the rest of Japan could regain its independence and enjoy the beginnings of a return to economic prosperity. In this view, Japan felt relatively comfortable with the Japanese-American Security Treaty largely because most American military bases were consigned to a small southern island, where they and the problems that come with them could be ignored by the majority of Japanese. (There are still, it should be added, eight major American bases in Japan proper, located at Atsugi, Iwakuni, Misawa, Sagamihara, Sasebo, Yokosuka, Yokota, and Zama.)