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New York Timesに宜野湾市民大会の記事が掲載されています。市民、海兵隊、
辺野古の抵抗など、なかなか面白く解説しています。
A Crash, and the Scent of Pizzatocracy, Anger Okinawa
By JAMES BROOKE
Published: September 13, 2004
GINOWAN, Okinawa, Sept. 12 - For years, Okinawans have tolerated the
deafening thud-thud of United States Marine Corps cargo helicopters
over schools, playing fields and apartment buildings near the fence
of one of the busiest military airfields of the Western Pacific.
Some shrugged when one helicopter spiraled from the sky on Aug. 13,
banging into a university building, its rotor gouging a concrete
wall, its fuselage exploding into an orange fireball. Miraculously
for this congested city of 90,000, no one was killed, and the only
people injured were the three American crew members.
But what really galvanized residents of this sultry tropical island
were images of young American marines closing the crash site to
Japanese police detectives, local political leaders and diplomats
from Tokyo, but waving through pizza-delivery motorcycles.
One month after the crash, that fast-food delivery image - part
truth, part urban myth - was strong enough to help to draw about
30,000 people on Sunday for the biggest anti-base protest in Okinawa
since those a decade ago protesting the rape of a 12-year-old
schoolgirl by three American servicemen.
In the sea of parasols, sun hats, balloons and banners, Chikako
Oguma, a high school teacher, sat on the main soccer field of Okinawa
International University. She said she had rummaged through her
drawers to find an anti-United States protest shirt that she had not
worn for years.
"At first when the accident happened, I did not get angry," Ms. Oguma
said, shading herself under a parasol. "But then I learned that
Japanese police could not enter the area. At that time I felt Okinawa
is really occupied by the U.S., that it is not part of Japan."
"Tokyo doesn't care; Mr. Koizumi didn't come," she said, referring to
Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi. "He was too busy last
month watching the Olympic Games to see our governor. I feel a gap
between Tokyo and here."
Indeed, beneath the overnight surge of anti-American feeling is a
surge of regionalism in Japan's southernmost islands, an archipelago
known until the 1870's as the independent Kingdom of the Ryukus.
"Go back to Japan," was an insult thrown at soldiers of the Japanese
Self-Defense Force, seen as deferring to the Americans running the
crash site.
"The behavior of the soldiers was really shocking," said Kelly Dietz,
a Cornell University doctoral candidate in sociology who lives near
the base, referring to the Americans. "I saw marines pushing people
back, covering news cameras with their caps, pushing cameras down."
Ms. Dietz, whose apartment is near where the helicopter's tail rotor
landed, recalled watching a group of marines blocking access to a
group of senior Okinawa police detectives.
"People were getting very angry, they were shouting, 'What country
are we in?' " recalled Ms. Dietz, who took part in the protest on
Sunday.
But while the protesters marched outside, frustration reigned inside
the fence of Marine Air Station Futenma. The American marines were
angry that no one gave credit to the pilots who had wrenched their
helicopter away from a populated area, or marines who, after spotting
the struggling craft, scrambled over two 15-foot chain-link fences,
raced through the campus and dragged out the three injured crewmen
before the copter blew up.
"It would have been irresponsible to allow people to walk through the
wreckage," Lt. Gen. Robert Blackman said in his office on Sunday. "If
there were Domino's guys getting around the outer cordon, they were
not getting through the inner one to deliver pizza to the wreckage."
"We were basically following procedures, guidelines of longstanding
application," he added, referring to a five-decade agreement that
allows the United States to investigate accidents caused by American
military personnel while on duty but off base in Japan. But the
backlash has been so great that on Friday, American officials agreed
to renegotiate accident guidelines with Japan.
At Futenma, one of two American airstrips in Okinawa, there is a
larger frustration. Built more than 50 years ago on flat land
surrounded by sugar cane fields, it is now surrounded by neighbors
who want it closed.
Paint is peeling, there is a hole in a hangar roof, and Col. Richard
W. Lueking, the base commander, complains that "temporary" offices
have served for 10 years. Construction stopped in 1996, when the
United States and Japan agreed to build an alternative site at Nago.
Critics deride the plan as a classic sop to politically connected
construction companies: a $2 billion floating helicopter base that
would be built on the other side of Okinawa, in a rough area
nicknamed "typhoon alley." The military's plans involve blowing up a
coral reef, then building a huge landfill and a steel platform nearly
a mile long.
At last count, the plan is opposed by 400 international environmental
groups, 889 international experts on coral reefs, a majority of
voters of Nago in a 1997 referendum, a lawsuit in United States
District Court in San Francisco and a sit-in protest that has lasted
for 147 days.
Last Thursday, Japan's government surreptitiously tried to send
survey ships to visit the offshore site to drill 63 test holes in the
coral. But the ships were met and harassed by a flotilla of sea
kayaks, several piloted by local women in their 60's who have been
training for the past year in maritime disruption tactics.
In Tokyo, Yukio Okamoto, a former Okinawa adviser to the prime
minister, feels as if he has seen this before.
"When Okinawans feel isolated from the central government, they
rise," said Mr. Okamoto, now a lobbyist, as he recounted waves of
anti-base sentiment since World War II. "It may be happening again."
http://groups.yahoo.co.jp/group/nomorewar/message/14997
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