One year after media reports that Aso Mining used 300 Allied prisoners of war for forced labor in 1945, Foreign Minister Aso Taro is refusing to confirm that POWs dug coal for his family's company—and even challenging reporters to produce evidence.

That is not hard to do. Records produced by both Aso Mining and the Japanese government clearly show that POWs toiled at the Aso Yoshikuma mine in Fukuoka Prefecture.

But the Foreign Ministry's provocative stance raises questions about Japan's commitment to historical reconciliation even with current Western allies. It also highlights the growing tendency of the Japanese state to contest criticism of the nation's wartime past, as the government moves to revise the no-war clause of Japan's constitution and promote patriotic education.

Last year's flurry of media coverage reflected the nationalities of the World War II prisoners involved: 197 Australian, 101 British and two Dutch.

Newspaper stories in The Australian, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald were supplemented by newscasts by the Australian Broadcasting Corp. British readers were informed by The Guardian, The Observer, The Times and The Telegraph. Survivors of forced labor at the Aso Yoshikuma coal mine were tracked down and interviewed.

An 87-year-old Australian sent a personal letter to Foreign Minister Aso, according to The Japan Times. The former POW received no reply to his request for an apology and compensation for his unpaid work for Aso Mining Co.

Japanese-language media have treated the existence of the Aso Yoshikuma labor camp, formally known as Fukuoka POW Branch Camp 26, as a virtual taboo. Aso Taro has avoided all public comment on the matter.

But when a New York Times reporter mentioned forced labor at Aso Mining in an article last November, the Foreign Ministry issued a startling public rebuttal. According to the website of the Consulate-General of Japan in New York:

"The Government of Japan is not in a position to comment on employment forms and conditions of a private company, Aso Mining, at that time. However, our government has not received any information the company has used forced laborers. It is totally unreasonable to make this kind of judgmental description without presenting any evidence."

This attitude was criticized by Linda Goetz Holmes, a Pacific War historian and author of a book on POW forced labor called Unjust Enrichment. Proof that Aso Mining exploited prisoner labor originated with the Japanese government in the immediate postwar period, she noted.

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is continuing the disturbing Japanese government trend of being unwilling to search its own archives for the corroborating evidence of POW slave labor," Holmes said. "Instead, it is challenging others to produce such records."

On Aug. 19, 1945, the imperial Japanese government's Committee to Negotiate Surrender delivered to U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur, by hand in Manila, a list of prison camps in Japan and the names of private companies using Allied POWs. The Fukuoka section of the document shows the Camp 26 workforce was assigned to Aso's Yoshikuma colliery. This POW camp list can be found today in the MacArthur Memorial Archives in Virginia (Record Group 4, Box 23).

"If copies of that document exist in the MacArthur Memorial Archives, they surely exist in Japanese archives as well," said Holmes, who served as a history adviser to the Japanese Imperial Records Interagency Working Group (IWG). Affiliated with the U.S. National Archives, the IWG recently concluded its work and issued a 1,700-page guide called Researching Japanese War Crimes.

Throughout the postwar period Japanese corporations have engaged in "multi-pronged denials" of forced labor, according to Holmes. She said companies tore down and bulldozed over all traces of POW barracks "as fast as they were able," and then falsely told American inspectors they had destroyed all records at the direction of the Japanese government.

"In fact," Holmes said, "each company retained complete lists and often photographs of each POW, along with information such as his country of origin and serial number."

1946 ASO REPORT

But in the aftermath of the nation's unconditional surrender, the Japanese government and industry were in no position to completely stonewall the victorious Allies. Occupation authorities soon ordered the Japanese government to formally document the massive forced labor enterprise, and the worst atrocities against POWs would be vigorously prosecuted at war crimes tribunals.

Japanese authorities, in turn, directed each company involved to prepare written responses to a set list of questions about POW working and living conditions. Individual company reports were submitted to the Japanese government, which compiled them and later submitted a comprehensive "master report" to American military investigators in Tokyo.

(Also in 1945-46, Japan's Foreign Ministry similarly directed companies to submit extensive records concerning forced labor in Japan by Chinese nationals, many of them undeclared prisoners of war. War crimes against Chinese forced laborers were for the most part not prosecuted, however. The Japanese government suppressed the so-called Foreign Ministry Report and lied to the Diet about its existence, which was finally confirmed in 1993. Tokyo today describes the Chinese labor program as "half-forced.")

On Jan. 24, 1946, Aso Mining submitted a 16-page report detailing conditions at Yoshikuma to the Japanese government's POW Information Bureau, using company stationery and attaching an English translation.

This Aso company report claims the Westerners were fed, clothed and housed better than Aso's Japanese workers and Korean labor conscripts. On paper at least, POWs received a "main food" of 715 grams per day (compared to 570 grams or less for other workers) and were "satisfied with the completeness of the mess provisions."

Aso Mining also wrote that 150 of the healthiest Camp 26 prisoners were utilized in the third sector of the Yoshikuma mine. The remainder performed farm work and camp tasks like cooking and digging bomb shelters. The POWs were said to have been the best farmers, but only half as efficient as Japanese or Koreans in the coal pits.

The Aso report includes the company's Feb. 22, 1945, letter to the Japan War Ministry requesting use of 300 Allied prisoners for one year. Camp 26 opened on May 10, fulfilling the Aso request. The company provided an itemized list of camp construction expenses totaling 211,426 yen.

These key records produced by Aso Mining in January 1946 can be viewed in Maryland at the U.S. National Archives (Record Group 331, Box 927).

The U.S. National Archives also retain the comprehensive Camp Management Report, submitted to American war crimes investigators by the Japan POW Information Bureau on June 7, 1946. It further confirms the "Aso Mining Industry Company" utilized the Camp 26 prisoners in the adjacent Yoshikuma coal mine.

First-Hand Witness

Arthur Gigger, now 86 and living in South Australia, recalled 12-hour shifts and "pretty primitive conditions" deep in the Aso mine. He arrived at Camp 26 after American firebombing destroyed the Kobe shipyard where he had worked since late 1942. He became a POW when Singapore fell to Japanese forces.

"The food was certainly meager, but clothing was our biggest problem," Gigger said. "We were down to absolute tatters by the end of the war. I don't think we'd have seen it through another winter." The Aso-compiled records, however, say the prisoners' clothing was of superior quality.

Gigger disputed other aspects of Aso Mining's description of life at Camp 26. While the company reported that prisoners could "take a rest in the recreation room," Gigger insisted "there was no such thing."

The company report also claims that, shortly after Japan's surrender, prisoners thanked Aso officials for their kind treatment by giving them gifts. "That's all bull," Gigger said with a laugh. "Absolute rubbish."

Despite its often self-exculpatory nature, such evidence of forced labor at Aso Mining exists in the national archives of other Allied countries—and in Japan. Produced by American Occupation staff based on Japanese company reports, a copy of the "Roster of Deceased Allied POWs in Japan Proper" resides at the National Diet Library in Tokyo.

The roster records the names of the two Australian soldiers who died at Aso Yoshikuma: John Watson and Leslie Edgar George Wilkie. It is accessible online at the website of the POW Research Network Japan, run by Japanese citizens working to clarify the historical record. The remains of Watson and Wilkie are interred at the Commonwealth War Cemetery near Yokohama.

Another U.S. government document in the National Diet Library is Report No. 174, issued by the Investigation Division of GHQ's Legal Section on Feb. 1, 1946.

This report summarizes a two-day U.S. Army inspection of the Camp 26 site, referring to the statement of an Aso company official as "Exhibit One." The document also lists the names and ranks of Japanese Army personnel who guarded the POWs when they were not in Aso Mining's custody. All camp records were burned in late September 1945, it notes.

While there were no charges of war crimes involving Camp 26, the paper trail for prisoner labor at Yoshikuma is clearly extensive. A 1982 book published by Japan's National Defense Academy also states that the camp's prisoners worked for Aso Mining.

Yet at the peak of overseas media coverage of the Aso-POW connection last July, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson appeared to dispute wartime events. The ministry official lashed out during a press conference at "malicious news reports that contained statements contrary to facts and nevertheless have aroused a lot of debate precisely because they were very farfetched."

Contemporary Context

Japan's prime minister, Abe Shinzo, provoked international controversy more recently by doubting the evidence of government or military coercion in Japan's wartime system of military sexual slavery. A non-binding resolution debated by the U.S. Congress in spring 2007 calls on the Japanese government to "formally acknowledge and apologize for" the comfort women system—and to refute revisionists who deny the historical reality.

That could include Foreign Minister Aso, who last February described the congressional resolution as "not based on objective facts." Aso, 66, finished second to Abe in last year's contest for prime minister and still aspires to the nation's top post.

Founded in 1872, the family firm had ceased mining and was known as Aso Cement when Aso Taro headed it in the 1970s. It is called Aso Group today and is run by Aso's younger brother. Few traces of the Yoshikuma mine remain, although the Aso Iizuka Golf Club is located near the former site.

Dozens of compensation lawsuits were filed over the past decade against Japanese corporations that profited from forced labor during WWII. All have now failed. Courts in Japan, the United States and elsewhere have held that the San Francisco Peace Treaty and other postwar accords waived the rights of victims to seek legal redress.

Hundreds of thousands of Nazi-era forced laborers and their heirs, by contrast, have received billions of dollars in compensation from the German and Austrian governments and corporate sectors since 2000. Formal apologies and educational initiatives were major components of those reparations programs.

Whereas Japan often appears stuck at the stage of historical truth telling, German President Johannes Rau displayed his nation's commitment to reconciliation with individual war victims when the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future was established by the German parliament in July 2000.

"I know that for many it is not really money that matters," Rau said. "What they want is for their suffering to be recognized as suffering and for the injustice done to them to be named injustice. I pay tribute to all those who were subjected to slave labor under German rule and, in the name of the German people, beg forgiveness. We will not forget their suffering."

"Remembrance Preserved: Third Reich Slave and Forced Labor from Poland 1939-1945" is the name of a historical exhibition that opened in May 2007 at a preserved labor camp barracks in Berlin. The exhibit will be moved to other German cities this fall, having already toured 30 cities in Poland. Researchers are now being allowed full access to Germany's millions of archival records on WWII forced labor in Europe.

The Japanese government should "take immediate action to bring about an honorable closure to the history of Japan's wartime forced labor," according to Kinue Tokudome, director of US-Japan Dialogue on POWs. The California-based non-profit organization promotes reconciliation on a humanitarian basis.

"As Japan's top diplomat and because of his family background, Foreign Minister Aso should be more sensitive to this issue and more willing to resolve it," Tokudome said. "No conscientious politician would just wait to receive the information that his family coal mine enslaved POWs and Asian civilians."

In the late 1990s the Australian government paid $25,000 in compensation to Arthur Gigger and other Australian prisoners of the Japanese. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore and even the Isle of Man have similarly used domestic funds to compensate former POWs held by Japan. The United States has not, due to adamant opposition from the executive branch.

Gigger, long active in ex-POW groups in Australia and retired from a customs service career, said he has no animosity toward Japan. But he called on the Foreign Ministry to stop denying the reality of forced labor at Aso Mining.

"I know it happened," Gigger said. "I was there."

William Underwood is a faculty member at Kurume Institute of Technology and a Japan Focus coordinator. He recently completed his doctoral dissertation at Kyushu University on forced labor in wartime Japan. He can be reached at . This is an expanded version of an article published in the Japan Times on May 29, 2007. Posted at Japan Focus on May 28, 2007.

Extracts from documents are available at http://japanfocus.org/products/topdf/2432

Previous Japan Focus articles about forced labor at Aso Mining:

Family Skeletons: Japan's Foreign Minister and Forced Labor by Koreans and Allied POWs, by Christopher Reed

Japan Foreign Minister's Visit to POW Remembrance Service Backfires, by Matsubara Hiroshi

Previous Japan Focus articles by William Underwood about forced labor in Japan:

Chinese Forced Labor, the Japanese Government and the Prospects for Redress

Mitsubishi, Historical Revisionism and Japanese Corporate Resistance to Chinese Forced Labor Redress

NHK's Finest Hour: Japan's Official Record of Chinese Forced Labor

Names, Bones and Unpaid Wages (1): Reparations for Korean Forced Labor in Japan

Three months before he became Prime Minister, in July 2006 Abe Shinzo published his political manifesto, under the title Utsukushii kuni e (Towards a beautiful country). It is well known that Abe's sense of beauty involves a denial of the darkest aspects of wartime history and insistence on compulsory love of country, and that he is committed to revision of the country's basic institutions accordingly. But the fundamental changes in the country's military posture, and especially in its relationship with the United States, have received less attention. Here we consider evidence of a new domestic role for the Self Defense Forces (SDF) as enforcer of unpopular policies, and the implications of a new law to facilitate US military reorganization. Okinawa is at the center of both.

On 11 May 2007, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force's Bungo minesweeper set sail from the naval port of Yokosuka for Okinawa, under orders from Prime Minister Abe to assist in a "preliminary" survey of the ocean floor of Oura Bay, where his government plans to construct a state-of-the-art base for the American marines. Under cover of darkness, divers from the Bungo carried out their seabed survey and the ship then withdrew. The operation took only a few days, and neither the media nor the local and national groups opposing the base caught sight of the Bungo or its divers.

Insignificant, one might say, yet it would be a mistake to dismiss it as such for the event reveals much about the character of Abe's Japan. In 2005 and 2006, the US and Japanese governments drew up a major agreement on the reorganization of US forces in Japan.[1] It was a complex deal, but the bottom line was integrating the forces of the two countries, especially their intelligence and command functions, and transforming Japan's "Self-Defense Forces," whose justification had hitherto rested on their role in the defense of Japan "against direct or indirect aggression" into a junior partner role of the US in the global war on terror, as the "Great Britain of East Asia." Japan was to meet the cost of the reorganization, including six and a half billion dollars just for re-locating 8,000 marines and their families to Guam (even building houses and recreational facilities there for them) and an unspecified sum for the construction of the new base in Okinawa (for which estimates range in the ten billion dollar plus range), quite apart from the institutionally entrenched subsidies that have been going on for over thirty years, and will continue.

Despite Japan's "pacifist" constitution, which Prime Minister Abe is moving aggressively to consign to the dustbin of history, Japan is the world's No 3 or No 4 military power. In naval terms it is probably No 2, its Maritime Self Defense Force having 45,842 sailors, 152 major vessels including four Aegis destroyers (cost about three to four billion dollars each), 54 convoy ships (conventional destroyers), 16 submarines, and multiple anti-submarine, reconnaissance, supply, rescue and minesweeping vessels (such as the Bungo)—pretty much everything but aircraft carriers. For over a decade, the Japanese government has worked to soften Japanese public opinion about its steady military expansion program by stretching the constitution to the limits, sending the SDF to participate, first in UN peace-peeking operations, and then in US-led, "Coalition of the Willing," operations in the Indian Ocean and Iraq. But that has not been enough to satisfy the Pentagon, which now clearly wants Japan to remove the remaining constitutional and legal shackles from this formidable force so that it can be fully incorporated under US command throughout the "Arc of Instability."

A raft of legislation—ultimately intended to include revision of the constitution—became necessary to implement the various new Japanese commitments. As the Bungo sailed, the Diet was considering a bill "to facilitate the implementation of plans to realign US forces in Japan" (Beigun saihen tokusoho), which it passed a few days later, on 23 May. [2]

The 23 May law is designed to step up the pressure on local governments by financially rewarding those who submit to the paramount will of the national government and accept the primacy of defense and US considerations over civil and democratic ones, while punishing those who give priority to local democratic opinion and processes. Cooperative local governments are to be given substantial sums, in tranches at the various stages of specific projects—consent, survey, construction, completion. It was designed with Okinawa particularly in mind, but other localities too now face a panoply of financial and other interventions.

The Oura Bay/Cape Henoko base whose construction the Abe government is so anxious to advance that it sent in the SDF has long been a running sore in the US-Japan relationship.[3] In 1996 such a base, at first called a "heliport" was proposed as part of the deal between the Hashimoto and Clinton administrations to allow the return to Japan of the Futenma marine base in central Okinawa. Futenma sits incongruously and threateningly in the middle of the bustling town of Ginowan. Henoko—the chosen replacement site, was a sleepy fishing hamlet, long coveted by the Pentagon as part of its plan to rationalize and concentrate its forces in the north of the island.

In 1997, however, the people of Nago City (the administrative unit that included the base site) intervened. In a historic referendum held under great political and financial pressure from Tokyo, the majority withheld consent from any base construction plan. Tokyo, refusing to consider any alternative, tried everything to break the city's will: refusal of cooperation with the then prefectural Governor (who in 1998 decided to abide by the will of the Nago people rather than do the wishes of Tokyo), political arm-twisting, lavish handouts (bribery), and psychological warfare (a campaign to persuade Okinawans that their role in the defense of the rest of Japan should be something to be proud of). It achieved some success in cultivating an obedient, base-oriented mentality on the part of local government officials, and managed to sway the outcomes of a string of local elections, but the resistance remained strong. For much of 2004 and 2005 all attempts to conduct the necessary preliminary environmental survey of the base site (a few hundred meters from the current one) were defeated by a coalition of local and national environmental and anti-base groups, which camped around the clock at the site and surrounded and blocked the survey workers in canoes and small craft. In September 2005, Prime Minister Koizumi withdrew the plan. The new site was chosen in part because it would allow construction to be done from within an existing US base, Camp Schwab, a few hundred meters away from the one that Koizumi had abandoned. It consisted of a much expanded, dual runway, v-shaped structure that would span Cape Henoko and extend into the sea at both ends. Centering it on the base would make the site virtually inaccessible to protesters.

Nobody in Okinawa was consulted, and the decision sparked outrage across Okinawan society, from the Governor down. Surveys recorded unprecedented (85 per cent) levels of opposition to the project [4]. By sending in the SDF in May 2007 to help conduct the survey, Abe signaled his contempt for such Okinawan sentiment and his readiness to use force if necessary to deliver what the Pentagon (and Abe) wanted.

There was an especially bitter irony in the fact of the first dispatch of the forces of the newly (2006) upgraded Ministry of Defense against Okinawans. Okinawan understanding of "national defense" is forever marked by the experience of 1945, when tens of thousands died as the Imperial Japanese Army prolonged a futile resistance to the allied forces in the attempt to stave off as long as possible the attack on mainland Japan. Having been major victims then of Japanese militarism, Okinawans since then have had foisted on them the militarism that mainland "peace constitution" Japan on the whole avoided, first from 1945 to 1972 as a direct US military colony and then, from 1972, as administratively a part of Japan but one that was uniquely war-oriented and militarized.

By covertly deploying Japan's military to Oura Bay, Abe was signaling a shift in the postwar state, something he is determined to consolidate by major constitutional revision, drastically diminishing local powers and extending the central authority of the state, giving priority to state over citizen, US over Japanese, military over civilian rights, and dismissing unheard the claims of the internationally protected species, including the dugong and the sea-turtles, that now thrive in the bay waters. When it came to a Japanese promise to the government of the United States, all stops would be pulled out to ensure compliance. While Prime Minister Hashimoto in 1998 promised that "the heliport [as the massive structure was then described] will not be build without local consent," and Prime Minister Koizumi chose to abandon the project in 2005 rather than resort to force to implement it, Abe was not to be deterred. He would cross a line on Okinawa at which previous Japanese conservative administrations had stopped.

The SDF dispatch was thus unprecedented. The Japanese force whose sole constitutional justification was for the defense of Japan "against direct or indirect threat" was deployed instead to intimidate and impose the government's will on a local community. The SDF dispatch was illegal (in breach of the purposes specified under the Self-Defense Law), and rode roughshod over Okinawan sentiment,[5] and was in breach of the constitution's guarantees of local self-government autonomy. Even the conservative Okinawan Governor, Nakaima Hirokazu, whose candidacy in 2006 had been strongly supported by the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the national government, is on record as opposing the base construction plan (albeit "in its present form") and spoke of the Bungo dispatch as "likely to stir in Okinawan minds memories of living under [American] bayonets."[6] Military affairs critic, Maeda Tetsuo, remarked that if the SDF could be used on this occasion with impunity then they would be able henceforth to be used in any way the government of the day chose.[7]

The SDF dispatch also appeared to contravene the law relating to environmental impact assessment. The Cape Henoko/Oura Bay "preliminary survey" did not constitute the "Environmental Impact Study" required by law. It had no claim to be a serious or independent scientific survey since the government was firmly committed in advance and at the highest diplomatic level to delivery of this base to the Pentagon. Independent scientific opinion could therefore have no role to play, let alone local or international environmental groups. The company entrusted with the task well knew how important a positive evaluation was, and could be relied on not to disappoint or shock its employer; the outcome could not be in doubt.

For the US and Japanese governments, the attractiveness of this site stemmed from the assumption that local opposition could be bought off and/or crushed and from the physical proximity and therefore usefulness for the projection of force against North Korea and/or China. Neither paid serious attention to the dugong and turtles, or to the implications for the environment as a whole of building massive military installations in such a location. For both, this was a project already ten years delayed because of the stubborn opposition of Okinawan (and some mainland) citizens. This time, they reckoned, the deal would be implemented whatever the cost.

While the government thus defied the law, and treated Okinawans with contempt, the opposition movement continued, as it had done since 1996, to rely on democratic and legal means. Despite all the pressure, no opinion survey has ever found any majority accepting the Tokyo position. Despite the exhaustion of a decade of sustained struggle in defense of the constitutional principles of democracy and pacifism, the movement continues to come up with innovative strategies. One major action (still continuing) was launched in 2003 in a San Francisco court against the US Defense Secretary and Department of Defense seeking an order to halt the project on environmental grounds. In similar vein, a coalition of environmental groups in 2007 launched an international campaign calling for public hearings as part of a serious and transparent environmental impact assessment.[8]

The special measures law and the covert SDF action were necessary, in the view of the Abe government, because of the widespread opposition on the part of local governments and people, not only in Okinawa but also elsewhere to the military reorganization More than twenty local administrative authorities throughout Japan refuse to cooperate in the reorganization despite the blandishments and the pressures. The new law would multiply the pressures on such regions.

Nago City, the administrative district in which the new base site was included, was one such. When it opposed the decision of the two governments in 2005-6, it was told that in consequence the budgetary tax allocation for the city might be zero.[9] Tax allocations had hitherto been distributed on an impartial basis according to general principles and such sanction would, in effect, make local administration impossible; it would be tantamount to imposition of a blockade. Faced with that threat, and even before the new law came into operation, the Henoko District Administrative Committee withdrew its 1999 resolution against the "heliport" construction plan [10] and the Nago City authorities, by agreeing to the "preliminary" survey, were deemed to have given consent to the project within the terms of the law and thus to be entitled to the first installment of the designated subsidy.[11] Having thus tasted the fruits "of the subsidy for the obedient", it would be more difficult in future for it to withhold cooperation.

As for Iwakuni City in Yamaguchi prefecture, when it was told that, under the "reorganization," it had to host 59 carrier-borne US fighters to be transferred from the naval air facility in Atsugi, mayor Ihara Katsunosuke, following the Nago City 1997 precedent, in March 2006 conducted a plebiscite. He found a solid local majority (89 per cent of those voting, 51 per cent of eligible voters) saying "No", and shortly afterwards was also returned to office. The national government's response to the rebuff followed in December 2006 (i.e., even before the passage of the new law): it cut off funds promised for the building of new municipal offices [12]. As Ihara put it, the choice was: submit and gain 500 billion yen, or oppose and be plunged into bankruptcy.[13] In March 2007, the Iwakuni Assembly buckled to the pressure and passed a resolution asking him to take "practical and effective measures."[14] Following the passage of the May law, Ihara's position continues to erode under intense Tokyo pressure. Like Okinawa, Iwakuni is required to pay a heavy price to be made "beautiful."

The situation is similar in Yokosuka (in Kanagawa prefecture). Reluctant "homeport" for 34 years to a US aircraft carrier, the mayor and assembly were shocked when told that under the "reorganization" from 2008 the existing carrier would be replaced by a nuclear one. Under heavy pressure, persuaded that defense matters had to be the exclusive preserve of the national government and local sentiment should play no part, the Yokosuka mayor agreed—despite a unanimous declaration of opposition by the municipal assembly. For their part, however, the mayors of the cities of Zama and Sagamihara (both also in Kanagawa prefecture), declared their determination to resist reorganization, in the case of the mayor of Zama even if a cruise missile was sent against him and in the case of the mayor of Sagamihara even if he was run over by a tank).[15]

Reliance on money and force under the May 2007 law was a recipe for dividing local communities, entrenching an opportunist and/or dependent mentality on the part of local officials, and reinforcing the priority of military over civilian, US over national priorities. As the Tokyo shimbun put it on 24 May, the threat of force was intended to deter local resistance. Such threats were only effective when accompanied by a readiness actually to use force. In that context, the dispatch of the Bungo was ominous.

Okinawan people have other reasons to be angry with the Abe government. It has been known for decades that the government of Japan lied about the agreement for the "reversion" of Okinawa to Japan in 1972, and that the "reversion" was really a "purchase," the government of Japan paying the US substantially more, around 685 million dollars, for the "return" of facilities (which under the agreement actually remained under US control) than it had paid in 1965 to South Korea as compensation for four and half decades of Japanese colonialism, plus untold millions in subsequent subsidies.[16] It lied too by referring to the deal as one for Okinawa to be placed on a kaku-nuki hondo-nami (without nuclear weapons and on a par with the rest of Japan) basis when secret clauses of the agreement made clear that it would be neither. Despite the mounting evidence on this over recent decades, from US archival sources and from Japanese officials who played a central part in the process, the Japanese government sticks to its formal position of denial. Most recently, it was revealed that not only did the Japanese government pay the four million dollar component that was ear-marked to compensate local Okinawan landowners (which the US government was obliged by the agreement to pay), but that it put pressure on the US to delay the payment—evidently in fear the truth might out—with the result that only one quarter of the designated sum ever reached its supposed Okinawan beneficiaries.[17]

The Tokyo government's stance on war and war memory is also especially sensitive to Okinawans. The Abe government is comprised almost entirely of those who deny Japan's war responsibility and call for a "proud" version of Japanese history and a compulsory patriotism to be taught in the schools. Not only have they been successful in eliminating reference to comfort women from the nation's school texts, but in the 2006 text screening process reference to the "compulsory suicide" of Okinawans was also deleted. No memory of the catastrophe of 1945 is more sacred to Okinawans than that of their forbears being ordered to kill themselves so as not to inconvenience the Imperial Japanese Army's war.[18] Unsurprisingly, 81 per cent of Okinawans opposed this directive.[19] Since then, one after another, local governments across Okinawa have passed resolutions of protest and demands for the withdrawal of the order.[20]

Okinawa reveals in concentrated form the contours of the Abe state that are less visible from Tokyo or Osaka. The Abe project, including proving loyalty to Washington, depends on purging Okinawans of their pacifism and overcoming their commitment to preservation of their environment and co-existence with endangered species; ultimately, it may even require purging their war memories too.

Okinawan bitterness at the Abe government continues to build. Okinawan elites may be swayed by promises of subsidies or deterred by threats, but the Abe sense of beauty is widely seen as a bizarre 21st century attempt to return to the fantasies of the emperor-worshiping militaristic past. Most Okinawans watch in fascinated horror as the Abe government's calls for beauty contrast ever more starkly with the reality of its sinking into a morass of corruption scandals and bizarre statements (women as baby-producing machines, human rights as a non-Japanese ideology best kept within limits, and "Comfort Women" as volunteer prostitutes providing the wartime Japanese forces a service akin to present-day university cafeterias). They are not inclined to see much beauty in this or in the reorganization of Japan to serve US security concerns. They sense that they are prime targets for the May reorganization law.

Furthermore, they understand that the economic benefits of obedience to Tokyo and dependence in the past have been more illusory than real, and expect little change under the "incentive" system of the new law. Tellingly, those contending for office in Okinawa have never presented themselves as proponents of militarization. Instead, both the previous and the present Governors, Inamine Keiichi elected in 1998 and Nakaima Hirokazu elected in 2006, adopted a pose of studied ambiguity on the bases while campaigning instead on their promise to use their superior national government connections to lift Okinawa out of poverty. Yet the poverty remains, Okinawa's economy remains stubbornly flat—joblessness at about double the national average and per capita income half that of Tokyo. Abe's "beautiful country" policies enforce a dependence that prolongs and deepens it.

Notes

[1] For details, Gavan McCormack, Client State: Japan in the American Embrace, New York and London, Verso, 2007, chapter 4 (published June 2007).

[2] For a short account: "Diet passes 'incentive' bill to realign US forces," Asahi shimbun, 24 May 2007; Editorial: US military alignment," Asahi shimbun, 25 May 2007.

[3] The following account draws from chapter 7 of Client State.

[4] Details in Client State.

[5] Protest statement by representative Okinawan intellectuals and public figures to Prime Minister Abe and Defense Minister Kyuma, 24 May 2007, courtesy Sato Manabu of Okinawa International University. See reports in Okinawa Times and Ryukyu shimpo, 25 August 2007.

[6] "Beigun saihenho—kane to atsuryoku dake de wa," Tokyo shimbun, 24 May 2007.

[7] Nishi Nihon shimbun, 19 May 2007.

[8] Launched in May 2007 by Save the Dugong Campaign Center and Citizens Assessment Nago, with support of WWF (World Wildlife Fund)-Japan, Nature Conservation Society of Japan, Save the Dugong Foundation, and the "Ten Districts Association" of Eastern Nago. (Information from Hideki Yoshikawa, Nago City. For an earlier analysis, see Yoshikawa's January 2007 Japan Focus essay "Internationalizing the Okinawan struggle.")

[9] "Beigun saihenho seiritsu—chiiki no jiritsushin mushibamu," editorial, Okinawa Times, 24 May 2007.

[10] "Hantai ketsugi o bankai– Henoko ku hyosei-i 'kensetsu nara yobo jitsugen o," Ryukyu shimpo, 16 May 2007.

[11] "Nago-shi wa ukire bun—saihen kofukin," Okinawa Times, 25 May 2007.

[12] Voters might have assumed, when voting in the March 2006 plebiscite, that they would not get any future, defense-related subsidies; that was their choice. But probably none suspected that Tokyo would go so far as to renege on an existing commitment, unrelated to base issues but stemming from the huge expansion in the size of the city under an administrative reorganization.

[13] Quoted in Imai Hajime, "Abe seiken ga Iwakuni shimin ni kaeshita 'utsukushii kotae'," Shukan Kinyobi, 23 March 2007, pp. 56-58.

[14]Realignment of US forces should be sped up," Yomiuri shimbun, 24 May 2007.

[15] "Hondo no Beigun saihen," Asahi shimbun, 19-22 February 2007.

[16] The official figure is 320 million, but Gabe Masaaki of the University of the Ryukyus concludes from his painstaking research that the real figure was 685 million. See my discussion in Client State, p. 158.