Okinawa and Guam: More Militarisation, Less Democracy

OKINAWA:

First conquered in 1609 and annexed by Japan in 1879, Okinawa was militarized in 1944 to resist advancing US forces and thus to buy time for the Emperor System. The ensuing Battle of Okinawa claimed the lives of one-quarter of the Okinawan people. And in the battle's immediate aftermath, most Okinawans were confined to concentration camps, with more of their land seized by the United States to expand what had been Japanese military bases. In the negotiations to end the formal military occupation of Japan, Washington and Tokyo agreed to the concentration of US bases in Okinawa and to the prefecture's continued formal military occupation. The goal was to minimize opposition to the military alliance by limiting the impact of US forces on the people of Japan's main islands.

When, after years of protest, formal military occupation finally came to an end in 1972 with Okinawa's "reversion" to Japan, Okinawan hopes were shattered as US military bases - including nuclear weapons - remained. In the past four decades, US forces in Okinawa have inflicted modern versions of what the US Declaration described as the inevitable "abuses and usurpations" that accompany the hosting foreign "standing armies."

The Abe-Nakaima agreement (in late Dec. 2013) was achieved to reinforce the Obama administration's "pivot" to Asia and the Pacific and Abe's campaign to shed the last remnants of post-war Japanese pacifism. Building on the Bush-Cheney plan to "diversify" the forward locations of hundreds of US military bases and installations to better encircle China, the US has committed to deploy 60 percent of US war planes and 60 percent of the Navy to Asia and the Pacific to press China's military containment. The more than 100 US bases and military installations in Japan - with the greatest concentration in Okinawa - and the military alliance with Japan are "keystones" of the pivot.
Contrary to article nine of its Constitution - which renounces war as a sovereign right and pledges not to possess land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential - during the past half century with US encouragement, Japan has become the world's fifth-greatest military spender.


Securing the agreement to build Henoko airbase marks one more notch in Abe's and the Pentagon's militarist agendas.

GUAM:

The Abe-Nakaima deal's implications for the people of Guam also must be borne in mind. Conquered from Spain in 1898 to serve US military operations in the Western Pacific and Asia, more than a century later it remains a US military colony with more than a quarter of the small island nation occupied by massive US naval and air bases. The plans to expand Andersen Air Base and Navy Base Guam and to move an additional 5,000 Marines and their dependents from Okinawa to Guam will result in:

• One-third of the island being occupied by US bases, a 40 percent increase in the island's population.
• The further marginalization of the indigenous Chomorro people, in the tradition of cowboys and Indians.
• The creation of a shortfall of 6.1 million gallons of water per day.
• The destruction of 70 acres of vital coral reef.
• The transformation of neighboring Pagan Island, pristine and environmentally rich, into a live fire range for the Navy, Air Force and Army.
• The expansion of the Mariana Island Range Complex, now 500,000 square miles, to 984,000 square miles - larger than Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Montana and New Mexico combined.

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