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

A sizable number of small landholders have become explicit and outspoken antiwar landlords, including some three thousand Okinawan and mainland intellectuals who have bought handkerchief-sized parcels of base land in order to protest the continued American presence. They are known as the one-tsubo landlords—a tsubo being a measure equal to 3.3 square meters—and have proved a severe thorn in Tokyo’s side. In May 1997, as the leases of many of the one-tsubo landlords came up for renewal, it became clear that the prefectural government would not save Tokyo’s face by forcibly renewing them. Prime Minister Hashimoto therefore introduced and guided through the Diet legislation that transferred all control over leases for base land to the central government. This law is almost surely unconstitutional on several grounds—it deprives Japanese citizens of their property rights without due process of law and it applies to only one place, Okinawa, although Article 95 of the Constitution stipulates that no law can deal with a particular area without its people’s consent.

The most famous of the Okinawan antiwar landlords is Shoichi Chibana. In 1945, his grandfather, armed only with a bamboo pole, attempted to protect his land from seizure and was shot to death. This land, in American hands ever since, is today on the site of the Sobe Communications Facility, one of numerous American installations in Okinawa for eavesdropping on the conversations of the surrounding nations, including Japan, and for communicating with U.S. submarines. In the spring of 1996, the lease on that land expired and Chibana refused to renew it. As a result, until the enactment of Hashimoto’s law a year later, the Americans were illegally occupying Chibana’s land. Much to the irritation of the American and Japanese governments, the Okinawan police forced the Americans to open their gates to Chibana and let him visit his land. On May 14, 1996, he and twenty-nine friends legally entered the Sobe Communications Facility, held a picnic on the lawn, sang Okinawan songs, and conducted a memorial service for his grandfather and father. The Japanese government will go to almost any lengths to avoid a repetition of this widely reported and photographed event.

One of the lengths to which it will go is to spend large amounts of public money to cover the costs of the bases, thereby turning the Pentagon into a central component of the Japan lobby in Washington, D.C. Japan is not obligated by any treaty to do this. The Status of Forces Agreement clearly states that “the United States will bear without cost to Japan all expenditures incident to the maintenance of the United States forces in Japan” except for the “construction of facilities.” But in May 1978, Shin Kanemaru, then chief of the Japanese Defense Agency and one of the legendary power brokers of the Liberal Democratic Party, arranged for Japan to donate ?6.2 billion toward support of the U.S. forces. Kanemaru dubbed this the omoiyari yosan, or “sympathy budget,” because the American government had said to Tokyo that it was experiencing budgetary difficulties following the Vietnam War and could not cover all the costs of its bases in Japan. Initially the omoiyari yosan covered only the medical insurance of Japanese civilians working on the bases, but the Americans have asked for an increase in the sympathy budget every year since, and by 1997 it was ?273.7 billion ($2.36 billion), more than forty-four times larger than the original sum.

Needless to say, the American press has barely reported these developments; and the Pentagon certainly never uses the term “sympathy budget,” preferring instead the euphemism “host nation support.” According to a 1998 Department of Defense report on allied nations’ “contributions to the common defense,” Japan’s host nation support is the most generous of all. It supplied 78 percent of the costs of the 42,962 U.S. troops on its soil, while Germany paid only 27 percent of the costs of the 48,878 U.S. troops based there. Of the 1997 omoiyari yosan, a bit more than half, or ?146.2 billion, went to pay the salaries of Japanese who provide some 1,472 separate services to the U.S. troops as translators, gardeners, waitresses, and manicurists, among other things; ?95.3 billion went to improve American apartments, golf courses, and churches; and ?31.9 billion, to pay the costs of the public utilities supplied to the bases.³⁰

The overall Japanese government budget for the bases in fiscal year 1997 was ?647 billion, including rents paid to landowners for use of their land, investments in countermeasures against noise pollution, and funds to “realign” bases in Okinawa in fulfillment of promises made by the Americans after the rape incident (“realignment” was the official Japanese-American euphemism for moving bases around within Okinawa but not actually changing them in any substantial ways). The total national budgetary support for U.S. forces is ?28 billion more than the entire 1997 budget of Okinawa Prefecture, 2.2 times greater than Japan’s expenditures for university subsidies, and 2.1 times the amount it spends for day-care centers. The United States has military bases in nineteen countries, but Japan is the only one that pays all the costs of local employees. Whatever economic interest some people in Okinawa might have in the presence of the facilities, one wonders why the rest of Japan puts up with this use of national tax moneys.

In May 1997, 296 Japanese citizens from twenty-nine prefectures filed suit in Osaka District Court arguing that the omoiyari yosan violates Article 9 of Japan’s pacifist Constitution and asking that the amount of their national taxes spent for the bases be returned to them. This was the first suit to legally challenge the use of public money to maintain the American military, and its sponsors say that it was partly motivated by the 1995 rape incident. Given the length of time that Japan’s ultraconservative court system can take to resolve something it basically does not want to touch, it is extremely unlikely that this suit will ever be concluded. However, the global economic crisis that began in East Asia in 1997 may very well spell the end of the omoiyari yosan when it next comes up for reauthorization. Even Japan’s obsequiously pro-American government may find it has better things on which to spend its money in the coming century.

Nonetheless, according to the Pacific Stars and Stripes, in 1998 the marines asked the Japanese to build them what would be, if completed, in 2003, the largest golf course on Okinawa. The new four-hundred-acre facility on virgin land at the Kadena Ammunition Storage Area would replace the 116-acre Awase Meadows Golf Course in urban Naha, which the Americans agreed to return to “civilian use” if Japan would supply them with equivalent facilities elsewhere on the island. The government has no desire to build the new golf course, noting that there is already an eighteen-hole course within Kadena Air Force Base. (Kadena also houses a twenty- six-lane bowling alley, two gymnasiums, two parks, two theaters, two libraries, three swimming pools, four tennis courts, seventeen baseball diamonds, four officers’ and enlisted men’s clubs, a riding academy, a ballet studio, and a dog obedience school.) But these are Air Force facilities, as Lt. Col. Billy Birdwell, deputy director of U.S. Forces Japan Public Affairs, explained: “We want the public to know that this is not going to be another golf course on Kadena Air Base. This will be a Marine facility, Marine managed.”³¹

In 1996, General C. C. Krulak, the marine commandant, became so worried that the rape incident might force his troops to give up Okinawa’s plush officers’ clubs and golf courses that he proposed moving the 3rd Marine Division to Darwin, Australia. This idea fell through when it became clear that Australia would not pay the same lucrative benefits to keep the marines happy.

The prefecture of Okinawa is, in fact, forced to pay many other costs that are incidental to housing the bases. There are an estimated ten thousand children of mixed parentage—offspring of unknown or longgone American fathers and Okinawan mothers—whom the prefecture is obliged to support and educate. During his 1998 visit to Washington, Governor Ota indicated to Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia and the Pacific, that “we have a situation in Okinawa where children with dual citizenship and one parent who is American are not receiving an adequate education.” He asked that they be allowed to attend schools on the bases free of charge. Campbell, who was three years old when the revision of the security treaty was signed in 1960, fobbed off the seventy-three-year-old Ota with a standard response that disguises the nature of the de facto American colonialism in Okinawa: he urged the governor to take up such issues with the government in Tokyo. Since Okinawa is part of Japan, the United States now pretends that its military bases are there as a result of Japan’s allocation of base sites. This amounts to a permanent collusion of the United States and Japan against Okinawa.³²