Keiko Itokazu can still remember the day in 1965 when the parachute did not open its doors. He was attached to a jeep trailer that has fallen from an airplane, as well as paratroopers who train near her house in Okinawa. The falling object missed it but struck a neighboring house, killing a fifth year schoolgirl.
Until then, Mrs. Itokazu, who was then a junior high school student, had never thought of the huge military presence on the semitropical island, which at the time was under American control. The Americans had been there all his life when the United States seized Japan Okinawa after the end of the Second World War.
But she knew the dead girl, who was a customer of the small general store of her family. Since then, she fiercely opposes the American bases, which remained even after the return of the United States to Okinawa to Japanese governance in 1972. Now 77, Ms. Itokazu has recently joined demonstrations at the gateway to a New American marine aerodrome on northern Okinawa at the end.
The Okinawans have been feeling for a long time taken between the United States and Japan, which sent troops to claim the chain of the island of Okinawa in the 1870s. Before that, Okinawa was known as the Kingdom of the Ryukyus, a Independent country which paid tribute to imperial China and Satsuma, an area of medieval Japan.
Since the Japanese takeover, Icelanders have complained to be second -class citizens. This includes during the war, when Japan used Okinawa as a battlefield to prevent Americans from reaching its main islands.
But the relationship has changed more recently, drawn partly by the re -emergence of a third power exercising an influence on the destiny of Okinawa: China. Young islanders are now obtaining their news from the same social media sources as other young Japanese, where there is a general criticism of the growing statement of Beijing.
They are also more likely to see the basics as a source of jobs on an island where time wages are the lowest in Japan. One is Maria Badilla, a Japanese woman who, like many current residents of Okinawa, was not born on the island. Originally from Kyoto, she moved to Okinawa three years ago, drawn by her sunny beaches.
At the beginning, Ms. Badilla, 26, held little -employed service jobs, including in a hotel and a restaurant, before finding a better paid job in an accommodation agency on an American basis. While working at the restaurant, she met Pedro Badilla, 23, a sea sergeant from Arizona, whom she married last year.
She said that people around her saw the basics as a protective presence, offering both economic opportunities and a security measure in a world that can feel far from safe.
For many members of older generations, Japan was supposed to play Protector – freeing Okinawa from the US military claws. Kazuo Senaga, 64, grew up when he saw his grandfather, an eminent local journalist and politician, call Okinawa’s return to Japan in the hope that this would lead to the exit of the American army.
Instead, after 1972, Tokyo closed certain American bases on the continent and allowed the Americans to stay on Okinawa. After the death of his grandfather in 2001, Mr. Senaga replaced him as head of the anti-base movement.
He rejects Beijing’s point of view as a threat, saying that Ryukyus has historically had friendly ties with China as a trading partner and tributary state. He said that Japan betrayed its constitution after 1945, which renounces the right to wage war, based on the American army for protection. Okinawa, with a population of 1.5 million inhabitants, welcomes 70% of the American bases despite the fact that 0.6% of the Japanese land mass. There is 80,000 Americans on the islandof which 30,000 are soldiers in uniform.
Born in 1940, Suzuyo Takazato remembers the war and the way the Imperial Japanese army used Okinawa civilians as human shields against the American assault. After the war, she recalls, the Okinawans were again targeted, this time by American soldiers returning from the battlefields in Korea and Vietnam who used the island to rest and leisure. Under poverty, many Okinawan women have served them as prostitutes.
Christian, Ms. Takazato launched a support center for women victims of rape or trying to escape sex trade. She said that as long as Alsoinawa was occupied by foreign soldiers, it would be the war and sexual crimes site. Her island, she says, remains trapped under “a building of violence”.
“Okinawa was sacrificed to defend Japan,” said Takazato.
