The Sad Song of Okinawa, Part IV: An Occupation is an Occupation

There are Occupations, and there are Occupations. 

The one of the West Bank by the state of Israel, now in its 50th year, is an example of a pernicious takeover of a civilian population by a foreign power. The state of Israel, as explained so articulately here, effectively runs the lives of the Palestinian population against the tenets of international law, in a discriminatory fashion. Those identified as Jews are given preferential treatment in just about all aspects of life, while Palestinians receive few or no services from the occupiers, yet are taxed by them. Palestinians endure harassment, movement restrictions, extra-legal treatment and discriminatory judicial arrest, detention without charge, often indefinite incarceration. Collective punishment for perceived crimes against the state of Israel is also normative under this occupation.

Okinawa is also effectively occupied by a foreign power. The United States has a huge military presence in eastern Asia, since the Second World War. 70% of this military presence is located on Okinawa. Okinawa is not a large island. It is roughly half the size of Prince Edward Island, with a population of 1,384,762 people and a density of 1,014.93 /km squared. PEI, as we Canadians often call it, has a population of an estimated (1st quarter 2021) 160,000, with a density of  25.25/km squared. Why is the comparison important? Because an already well-populated island is having to make room for military operations whose radius of influence (area covered, noise, pollution, physical danger to civilians) is huge.

In fact, the percentage of exclusive land use by the US military is 73.8--the highest of any part of the Japanese land mass. Much of the exclusive holdings are on the best and most useful of the Okinawan land mass. Read more here. According to a US Marine information sheet for prospective Okinawa-service military personnel, the US military population is around 80,000--literally that of a medium-sized city.

Added to this is the relative (almost total) immunity of US military personnel from Japanese civil law. Not surprisingly, such personnel are under US military law, which has a different orientation than local civil law. How is this a problem? When US military personnel engage in criminal acts against Okinawa civilian residents, the most obvious outcome over the years is, lack of accountability and punishment for the offenders.

A classic case is that of Catherine Jane Fisher, an Australian national living in Okinawa, who was raped in 2002 by an American serviceman. Her case is a horrendous example of the above gap in justice. And hers is not the only one. There are strong elements of male denial and victim-blaming on the part of Japanese officials and police in Ms Fisher's case, again and unfortunately, not unusual.

Part of the problem, perhaps its core, is the so-called Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the US military and Japan. The impunity with which some 210,000 cases of accident, assault, rape, and/or murder of Japanese nationals (including Okinawans) by US military personnel between 1952 and 2017, is essentially abetted under the SOFA, which among other things places US soldiers under US military law, exclusively. Ms Fisher and others have been campaigning to drastically amend this agreement, for some time.