The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

United States, governed by an American lieutenant general. They could not travel to Japan or anywhere else without special documents issued by American military authorities. Okinawa was closed to the outside world, a secret enclave of military airfields, submarine pens, intelligence facilities, and CIA safe houses. Some Okinawans who protested these conditions were declared probable Communists and hundreds of them were transported to Bolivia, where they were dumped in the remote countryside of the Amazon headwaters to fend for themselves.¹⁷ During the height of the Cold War, Congress was not interested in what went on in Okinawa and exercised minimal oversight of army rule.

By the early 1970s, Okinawans were in open revolt against the use of the island as a bomber base for the Vietnam War, incensed by revelations that the military was storing nerve gas and nuclear weapons there without even warning the local population of the dangers involved. Reluctantly, the United States agreed to a pro forma “reversion” of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty so long as the Japanese government allowed us to keep our bases there. Reversion was a convenient way to perpetuate the status quo while transferring responsibility for the Okinawan people to Japan.

Over the years, the Japanese government has done everything it could to keep the American military confined to Okinawa. Some 75 percent of our bases in Japan are located on the island even though it constitutes less than 1 percent of the total Japanese land area and is the poorest of all Japanese prefectures. The island’s relationship to Japan is very similar to that of Puerto Rico to the United States. The government in Tokyo likes this arrangement because it knows that the public will tolerate American troops on Japanese soil only if they are kept out of sight. Ever since Japan forcibly annexed the Ryukyu kingdom (of which Okinawa is the largest island) in the late nineteenth century, its people have discriminated against the culturally distinct Okinawans.¹⁸ The semicolonial conditions there have not changed. In 2002, the Japanese government agreed to build for American use yet another air base on the island, one that will destroy a sensitive coral reef and endangered species that depend on it.

In imposing military colonialism on the Okinawans, our senior leaders were always aware that they were violating the United Nations Charter, our own proclaimed objectives in fighting World War II, and virtually all the political ideals and values the United States has espoused as a nation. The lack of due process of law in the military’s seizure of land from Okinawan farmers to build huge base complexes helped compromise our attempt to promote democracy in postwar Japan and elsewhere in East Asia. Numerous high-ranking American officials have acknowledged that in keeping Okinawa for twenty years after the 1952 peace treaty with Japan and giving it up only under intense pressure, they were making a mockery of the pledge in the Atlantic Charter of August 1941 that the United States sought “no aggrandizement, territorial or other,” in World War II.¹⁹ Former ambassador to Japan and Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson admitted that giving Okinawa to the military in the late 1940s was simply the price of getting the Pentagon to go along with the peace treaty, which restored Japanese sovereignty over the four main islands but kept Okinawa under American military rule.²⁰

Okinawa is not the only place in Japan with American bases; it just has more of them. The old Japanese naval base at Yokosuka, south of Yokohama, is the home port of the navy’s Seventh Fleet, and a full carrier task force is permanently stationed there. When the aircraft carrier enters port, the navy flies its aircraft off to Atsugi Naval Air Station in nearby, heavily populated Kanagawa Prefecture, where protests by residents about the noise of takeoffs and landings have become a permanent feature of local politics. The navy operates another major harbor for aircraft carriers and submarines at Sasebo, near Nagasaki, on the southern island of Kyushu. The air force, in addition to its huge facility at Kadena in Okinawa and Yokota Air Force Base in Tokyo, headquarters of U.S. Forces Japan, also operates Misawa Air Force Base, located in the most northerly prefecture of the main island of Honshu. It is home to a fighter wing of F-16s, the “Ripsaw Range” for target practice, and numerous espionage listening posts run by the navy.

The Marine Corps operates the majority of bases on Okinawa. The Third Marine Division, whose headquarters are there, is the only marine division based outside the United States. The Marine Corps also operates the big Iwakuni Air Station on southern Honshu, where for many years we illegally stored nuclear weapons on the USS San Joaquin County, moored a short distance offshore. The ship remained at the base without ever getting under way for at least six years during the 1960s, an important fact since in a secret agreement with Japan, the United States in 1960 had promised not to store nuclear weapons at its bases but adopted the position that nuclear weapons on naval vessels were merely in transit and had not actually been introduced into the country. The Japanese government went along with this ruse until June 1981, when former American ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer revealed the existence of the secret agreement in an interview in the Washington Post. An uproar ensued, during which the Pentagon neither affirmed nor denied the presence of nuclear weapons anywhere in Japan and the Japanese simply said that they trusted the United States to abide by the agreement.²¹ Certainly no one raised the possibility of calling in U.N. weapons inspectors.

According to the Pentagon’s September 2001 Base Status Report, the United States has seventy-three bases in Japan. (A careful and well-documented analysis by Japanese antibase activists gives the number as ninety-one.)²² These bases house some 40,217 uniformed service personnel, plus 6,431 civilian employees of the Department of Defense and 42,653 dependents. They also employ 29,205 Japanese and Okinawans to mow the lawns, repair the plumbing, wait on tables in officers’ clubs, operate motor pools—and translate Japanese-language books and magazines as well as communications intercepts for U.S. intelligence agencies. The Japanese government pays us some $4 billion per annum to help defray the costs of these services, making Japan perhaps the only country that pays another country to carry out espionage against itself. The troops on these bases have no military functions. They have been held in reserve for deployment elsewhere in Asia—in Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, the Philippines, East Timor, and other places—as the need (or opportunity) arises. The United States does not have to consult the Japanese government about their use.

In 1950, when the Korean War began, Japan was still under our military occupation and served as the main staging area and privileged sanctuary for our forces. This pattern was repeated during the Vietnam War, when Okinawa was still an American colony and could be used as a bomber base and supply center, despite considerable opposition. But today it seems unlikely that the United States could use any of its bases directly in a war that did not involve Japan—especially if the Bush administration went to war with North Korea over its nuclear program or with China over Taiwan—and not provoke violent resistance.

South Korea’s extensive network of American bases, established in the years of the Korean War and detailed in chapter 3, are a cross between those in Cold War Germany and present-day Japan, being located in a sovereign country, not a neocolonial enclave like Okinawa, but more hated than those in Germany. Despite an artificially maintained military standoff with North Korea, the large numbers of troops based all over South Korea have had nothing to do since the armistice of 1953. They spend their days mostly dozing in their tanks and their evenings in the arms of prostitutes. Between 1961 and 1993, the United States backed or installed a series of military dictators in South Korea, and even today representatives of the military, commanders and staff officers of the Eighth Army, by their very presence, make South Korean efforts toward a peaceful reconciliation with the North more difficult. South Korea is the only place where at the height of the Cold War the United States twice sent ambassadors who were former high-ranking officials of the CIA.

POST - VIETNAM FALLOUT

America’s defeat in Vietnam highlighted our tendency to build bases in and give military support to countries where militarists, fascists, or right-wing dictators prevailed, sometimes after these had first been installed by our military or CIA. There is virtually no case in Asia, Europe, or Latin America where in making a decision to establish bases we gave any consideration to whether or not a government was democratic. The new bases set up in 2001 in