This would be a game changer. It’s part of a high stakes international poker game between superpowers that is being surveyed very closely. Ultimately, China wants to see the reunification with Taiwan, but the overlap and maneuvering in Asia, after sixty plus years of relative stability is starting to adjust slightly. And Okinawa is a big piece, a fulcrum over a wide range of geographic and economic interests that have been essentially managed by the United States as a fallout from its defeat of Japan after WWII.
Okinawa was seen as the forward departure point for an invasion of Japan, though the A-Bomb scuttled the invasion, the island remained as a central component of American military strategy in the region. For China, you have to question whether the posturing, though serious at some point, is part of this larger context in which military spending is used to help inflate their economy and in a sense keep world demand for natural resources and tech products at a level that would prevent a crash or hard landing.
—The joint statement made no mention of a timetable for moving the approximately 9,000 Marines off of Okinawa. It said it would happen “when appropriate facilities are available to receive them” on Guam and elsewhere.
Under the new agreement, about 10,000 Marines will remain on Okinawa, which has been a key element of the U.S. military presence in Asia for decades. The U.S. also has a substantial Air Force presence on Okinawa.
Japan, including Okinawa, is a linchpin of U.S. strategy for deterring aggression in the region and for reinforcing the Korean peninsula in the event North Korea attacked South Korea.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/04/27/us-japan-reach-deal-to-move-forces-as-000-us-marines-will-be-relocated-from/#ixzz221LZtPvL
image:http://dogatemytank.tumblr.com/post/25734938597/1945-us-marine-okinawa-japan
It is not a far reach to consider the noise coming from Beijing is timed to frame other issues, in particular the Iran-Syria scenario which China would like to resolve through their “soft power” while some elements in the leadership hanker for some form of militarized intervention as an affirmation of national pride and capability.
( see link at end) …The Global Times, the newspaper run by China’s Communist Party, ran an editorial this month suggesting that Beijing challenge Japan’s control of Okinawa, part of the Ryukyu island chain.
Why would China want to start a fight over Okinawa? At the moment, China, Taiwan, and Japan are engaged in a particularly nasty sovereignty dispute in the East China Sea over five islands and three barren rocks called the Senkakus by the Japanese and the Diaoyus by the other claimants. The disputed chain is north of the southern end of the Ryukyus and about midway between Taiwan and Okinawa….
—The base was seized by the American army in 1945, but since then Ginowan has grown to surround it with offices, homes and government buildings. Ginowan is only a small city, of 92,000 people; even so, imagine how New Yorkers living around Central Park would feel, were it an air base bristling with marines belonging to a country that once colonised them. That gives a sense of why Futenma, however much it has helped keep the peace in East Asia, has long needed to move.
That much America and Japan agree upon. Negotiations to find a replacement have dragged on since 1996, the year after three American marines gang-raped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl. But since the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) took power last September, the issue has opened an unusually deep wound in relations between the two countries. It still festers. On January 12th Katsuya Okada, Japan’s foreign minister, and Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, agreed not to let the dispute stop them discussing other ways to bolster their military alliance. But Mrs Clinton continued to press for Futenma to be relocated in Okinawa.—Read More:http://www.economist.com/node/15271146 image:http://www.dipity.com/tickr/Flickr_okinawa/
The Senkakus are administered by Japan, which appears to have a stronger legal claim to the chain than the other two nations. The United States, which takes no position on the sovereignty issue, returned the islands to Tokyo at the same time it gave back Okinawa in 1972. The People’s Republic of China made no formal claim to the Senkakus until 1971.Read More:http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/gordon-g-chang/china-now-claims-japan%
( see link at end) …In a fiery editorial earlier this month, the Global Times newspaper urged Beijing to consider challenging Japan’s control over its southern prefecture of Okinawa – an island chain with a population of 1.4m people that bristles with US military bases.
“China should not be afraid of engaging with Japan in a mutual undermining of territorial integrity,” the Communist party-run paper declared.
Major General Jin Yinan, head of the strategy research institute at China’s National Defense University, went even further. He told state radio that limiting discussion to the Diaoyu was “too narrow”, saying Beijing should question own
ip of the whole Ryukyu archipelago – which by some definitions extends beyond Okinawa.While the Chinese government has offered no endorsement of such radical views, their open espousal by senior commentators is likely to be deeply unsettling both to Japan and other neighbouring nations.Read More: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9692e93a-d3b5-11e1-b554-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz221UgS8Nf
ADDENDUM:
…(see link at end)…Dan (not his real name) is a member of the US Marine Corps. He’s based in Camp Foster, a military base near to Futenma, on Okinawa Island.
The Japanese military is pretty limited and the country has quite a peaceful mindset today. In the US, every police officer has a gun. Here, there’s one gun for a whole unit, and it’s another one that has the pepper spray. So I think we come in quite useful to them. For example, we’re particularly watchful of what’s going on in North Korea.
It has to be said that Okinawa Island is a key spot for the US in the Pacific zone. Closing bases here would mean moving 30,000 to 40,000 people; it’s a big task; not something you can do overnight. But it’s true we don’t do much here. We do daily training exercises and often go off to train in Australia, Thailand etc., My work is mainly a computer job.
—The weather could be expected to be stormy for at least 20 per cent of the time and the island lay in the center of the path of most of the typhoons, which were frequent and severe.
The directive added a bit of the “Chamber of Commerce” touch. Okinawa, it informed us, was intensively cultivated with many small farms. The principal crops were sugar cane and sweet potatoes, none of which were edible because they were fertilized with “night soil” which is a polite name for human excretion. There were many tombs of rock construction which would lend themselves to machine gun nests and strong points. Of potable drinking water there was none. Such diseases as leprosy, typhus, malaria, dysentery, yellow fever, plague, and dengue could be contracted with ease. As an added attraction, there were snakes. The death rate among the native population from this source alone was exceedingly high. To be bitten by one of these reptiles meant certain death within one half hour and our men of medicine had no antidote for their poison.
All in all, it appeared to be quite likely that the forces assigned to the capture of this island were in for a rather brisk time. One might have gone so far as to say they were going to have a hell of a hot time.—Read More:http://www.navalhistory.org/2012/06/21/okinawa-operation/
I went along to the demonstration and spoke to some of the locals. They told me that what bothers them most is the noise of the fighter planes taking off and landing. Another big issue, which I do understand, is that the base takes up a massive amount of space, leaving the town overcrowded. Read More:http://observers.france24.com/content/20100506-american-soldier-japan-only-minority-think-we-monsters-okinawa-futenma
…(see link at end)…Defenders of the alliance argue that it has done more than keep the peace: it has enabled Japan to keep its military spending low, and attract global status in other ways, notably economic. Nonetheless, some in Japan feel the country has subordinated itself to America, and this has riled nationalists. And in Washington, DC, critics accuse Japan of “cheap-riding” on American security guarantees.
It is against this backdrop that the new government’s review of the Futenma accord raised hackles in Washington. Adding to the sense of drift was Tokyo’s decision to end an eight-year maritime refuelling mission for troops fighting in Afghanistan this month. It has also promised to investigate secret agreements in the 1960s and 1970s that enabled nuclear-armed American warships to enter Japan.
Read More:http://observers.france24.com/content/20100506-american-soldier-japan-only-minority-think-we-monsters-okinawa-futenma
Above all, since the DPJ took power, it has been unclear how its goal of partially balancing Japan’s ties to America with closer ones to China would affect the American alliance. The 50th anniversary of the security treaty might be a good chance to update the accord to reflect China’s rise. But security analysts say the Futenma dispute threatens the mutual trust needed for such an undertaking. Read More:http://www.economist.com/node/15271146
( see link at end) …Chinese questioning of Japanese sovereignty over Okinawa is based on the prefecture’s roots in an independent state known as the Ryukyu Kingdom that won control of the archipelago in the 15th century.
Ryukyu kings paid formal tribute to Chinese emperors, a practice allowing lucrative trade that continued even after the kingdom was conquered by a Japanese feudal domain in 1609. Okinawa only officially became part of Japan in 1879.
For some in China, this history is enough to render illegitimate Japanese rule over a strategically important archipelago seen as the biggest impediment to the expansion of Chinese naval power in the Pacific.
Tang Chunfeng, a former official at the Chinese embassy in Tokyo, is one of those campaigning for China to rethink its acceptance of Japanese rule over Okinawa, saying past restraint has “done a lot of harm”. Read More:http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9692e93a-d3b5-11e1-b554-00144feabdc0.html#axzz221TnEbUS
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