Okinawan scholar Annmaria Shimabuku’s brilliant deconstruction of the US-Jp collaborative violation of human rights & democratic process in Okinawa:
The problem of the U.S. military presence in Okinawa is the product of mutual colonialism by the U.S. and Japan… After its defeat in the Pacific War, Jp was stripped of all its colonies except Hokkaido. Fearing that the Jp wd rise up against prolonged military occupation…a [peace] treaty with Jp…was preconditioned on the continued & concentrated military occupation of Okinawa.
Fully cognizant of the controversy that might arise should Jp exchange Okinawa for its sovereignty, MacArthur paved the way for the tradeoff by declaring that there will be “no Jp opposition to the US holding Okinawa since the Okinawans are not Jp.” Even though Emp. Hirohito was reduced to a puppet…he managed to send an official…to request that the occupation of Okinawa continue for 25 to 50 years” [the end year was 2001]. Hence, the price of “peace” in Jp after the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty was paid by exporting the violence of the US military from Jp to Okinawa.
The US seized Okinawa and converted it into a base island…To construct the bases, Okinawans were thrown off their land at gunpoint and left to starve…heinous crimes such as murder & rape were most often left unpunished. For these reasons and more, many Okinawans opposed the bases…
…the interests of both [the US & Jp govts] are guarded by the pretense that Okinawa Prefecture is an equal part of the Jp state, thereby obscuring the colonial relationship that is manifested by the egregiously disproportionate number of bases in Okinawa. In other words, it is in US interest to conceal Jp’s colonialism in Okinawa…Political scientists such as Chalmers Johnson have correctly identified this situation as the “permanent collusion of the US and Japan against Okinawa.” This means that even though it is US military personnel who reign over the island, commit crimes against Okinawans, and pollute the land, it is the Jp govt. that maintains & enforces this oppression.
…I will borrow from Yukiko Koshiro’s “trans-pacific racisms” to flesh out an account of “transpacific colonialism,” which signifies the mutually dependent relationship of the two [US, Jp] colonialisms that work together with synergistic effects…
“Modern Jp’s dualistic racism needed American racism to reinforce the validity of white supremacy, upon which Jp built its own superiority in Asia. Jp raciam also reinforced American racism (Koshiro, 1999).
…Hence, white supremacy in the US & Jp racism toward the people of E. Asia are mutually reinforcing. In this sense, racism
traverses the Pacific Ocean and becomes transpacific racisms…
By collapsing Okinawa’s position into a Jp state vs. US dichotomy, Jp is able to reap the benefits of a US-Jp politics of passing the buck. When Okinawans bring grievances before the US, the US automatically answers that Okinawa should bring its problems before its own govt, thus dismissing the problem as internal to the Jp state…
To avoid the fact that the US is built on the colonization of native peoples, it constantly exports this paranoia by waging war abroad and forcing the international community to recognize it as a first-class nation-state….[However] if the struggle for racial equality focuses only on equality within a single nation-state, then Okinawans and American ethnic minorities can never encounter each other as fellow colonized people betrayed by a transpacific colonialism…
This was originally posted by the Facebook group I Oppose the Expansion of US Bases in Okinawa
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