Not always a paradise

When I did my research for Japan's Road to Popular Empowerment, I was surprised by the number of civilians in Okinawa who have to die because of accidents caused by the US military.

The Pacific War, in which one third (I put that it words so no one would think I mistyped the number 1/3) of the population of Okinawa was killed, ended in 1945. The official US occupation of this Japanese prefecture ended in 1972. One Okinawa city (Ginowan) still has to host five US military installations. There are more throughout the prefecture, including a deep water harbor off Katsuren----the site of my novel.

I have been to Katsuren many times, and never noticed the US base because it is farther out along the peninsula, some distance from Katsuren Castle. I probably never would have been aware of its presence, until it made the papers.

A US military vehicle--without so much as an "excuse me can we use your property for a sec"-- drove through the playground of a school for the handicapped in Katsuren. Luckily, no one was hurt. No one was hurt, either, when a US helicopter fell out of the sky and crashed and burned against the wall of an Okinawa university building, either.

Luck! Sometimes it works.

It didn't work for the nine year old girl who died in the garden of her family's home when a jeep that was being airlifted went astray and fell on her.

There's more, so much more.

More than five US bases in a single, peaceful foreign city sounds like a very expensive proposition. I certainly wouldn't spend any of my own money on such a project, would you?

Meanwhile, in researching the Koza riots of 1970--triggered when US military police fired guns on the crowd that gathered when an Okinawa civilian was run down and killed by a military vehicle--I found the following position paper by a US reporter who once upon a time was stationed in Okinawa. Interesting point of view.

http://www.jpri.org/publications/occasionalpapers/op11.html