order.”21
The United States today desperately needs a new analysis of its role in a post–Cold War world and of the sorts of policies that might prevent another major war, like its last three, in East Asia. Some of the significant changes to come in East Asia are already visible: China’s increasing attempt to emulate high-growth economies elsewhere in Asia; the reunification of Korea; Japan’s need to overcome its political paralysis; America’s confusion over how to adjust to a self-confident China and to a more independent Japan; the growing importance of Southeast Asia as a new economic center of gravity. American policy making needs to be taken away from military planners and military-minded civilians, including those in the White House, who today dominate Washington policy making toward the area. American ambassadors and diplomats in Asia should have at least an elementary knowledge of East Asian history, languages, and aspirations. The United States desperately needs options for dealing with crises other than relying on the carrier task force, cruise missiles, and the unfettered flow of capital, just as it needs to overcome the complacency and arrogance that characterize American official attitudes toward Asia today.
Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable. The innocent of the twenty-first century are going to harvest unexpected blowback disasters from the imperialist escapades of recent decades. Although most Americans may be largely ignorant of what was, and still is, being done in their names, all are likely to pay a steep price—individually and collectively—for their nation’s continued efforts to dominate the global scene. Before the damage of heedless triumphalist acts and the triumphalist rhetoric and propaganda that goes with them becomes irreversible, it is important to open a new discussion of our global role during and after the Cold War. There is no place more appropriate to begin a reconsideration of America’s imperial policies than with American behavior in East Asia.
OKINAWA:
ASIA’S LAST COLONY
At about eight P.M. on September 4, 1995, two American marines and a sailor seized a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl on her way home from shopping, bound and gagged her, drove her in a rented car to a remote location, and raped her. Marine Pfc. Rodrico Harp and Seaman Marcus Gill confessed that they violently beat her and that Marine Pfc. Kendrick Ledet bound her mouth, eyes, hands, and legs with duct tape. Described in court by an acquaintance as a “tank,” Gill was six feet tall and weighed 270 pounds. He confessed to raping the girl, while the other two claimed that they had merely abducted and beaten her. According to an Associated Press account of the trial, “The court interpreter broke down upon hearing [Gill’s] account of lewd jokes he and his companions made about their unconscious and bleeding victim.”1 Police introduced into the trial proceedings a plastic bag found in a trash can that contained three sets of bloodstained men’s underwear, a school notebook, and duct tape.
The three accused rapists—Gill, twenty-two, of Woodville, Texas; Harp, twenty-one, of Griffin, Georgia; and Ledet, twenty, of Waycross, Georgia—were in no way unusual for U.S. servicemen stationed on the island of Okinawa. Harp was the father of a nine-month-old daughter and a graduate of an ROTC program in Griffin. Ledet had been a Boy Scout and church usher. Gill had taken advanced-placement English and had won a football scholarship. All were based at Camp Hansen. Gill told the court that the three men had embarked on the rape “just for fun” and had picked the girl out at random as she was leaving a stationery store.
A few weeks later, from his headquarters at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral Richard C. Macke, remarked to the press, “I think that [the rape] was absolutely stupid. For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl.”2 Although Macke was permitted to retire following this lighthearted comment, there was no Congressional or official inquiry into his leadership of the Pacific Command and no review of why a decade after the end of the Cold War the United States still had one hundred thousand troops based in Japan and South Korea. There was only endless public relations spin about how the gang rape of a child was a singular “tragedy,” not a consequence of U.S. basing policy, and how East Asia “needs” its American peacekeepers.
Few Americans who have never served in the armed forces overseas have any conception of the nature or impact of an American base complex, with its massive military facilities, post exchanges, dependents’ housing estates, swimming pools, and golf courses, and the associated bars, strip clubs, whorehouses, and venereal disease clinics that they attract in a land like Okinawa. They can extend for miles, dominating localities and in some cases whole nations. In South Korea, for example, huge military camptowns (
At the height of the Cold War, the United States built a chain of military bases stretching from Korea and Japan through Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, England, and Iceland—in effect ringing the Soviet Union and China with literally thousands of overseas military installations. In Japan alone, immediately following the end of the Korean War, there were six hundred U.S. installations and approximately two hundred thousand troops. There are still today, ten years after the end of the Cold War, some eight hundred Department of Defense facilities located outside the United States, ranging from radio relay stations to major air bases. To those living around them (and often dependent upon them), the personnel based on them may feel less like “peacekeepers” than occupiers. This is certainly the case in Okinawa, a land whose people have in any case felt themselves under occupation by Japan since the seventeenth century and by the United States since 1945.
The island of Okinawa measures 454 square miles, almost exactly the size of Los Angeles and smaller than the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian chain. It now contains thirty-nine bases, ranging from Kadena Air Force Base, the largest airfield in East Asia, to the Sobe Communications Facility, known locally as the “elephant cage” because of its bizarre antennae, a center for communicating with submarines, intercepting other people’s telephone conversations, and intelligence operations. In the 1960s, when Okinawa was directly administered by the Pentagon, there were 117 bases, and at the time of the rape there were 42. Though few of them are contiguous to each other, in total they take up an estimated 20 percent of the prime agricultural land in the central and southern parts of the main island of Okinawa. The United States also controls twenty-nine areas of the surrounding seas and fifteen air spaces over the Ryukyus. As a prefecture of Japan, Okinawa occupies only 0.6 percent of Japan’s total land area, but about 75 percent of facilities exclusively used by the American armed forces stationed in Japan are concentrated there. With a population density amounting to 2,198 persons per square kilometer, it is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Neither Japanese nor Okinawan courts or police have any jurisdiction over these American-occupied lands, seas, and air spaces.
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
