Living Under the Metal Osprey

In late October 2015, I toured Okinawa Island, Japan, with three Okinawa peace activists and a British solidarity activist to investigate local resistance to U.S. military bases. After an hour of driving north from the city of Nago, crossing deep ravines and shimmering blue bays, we approached a dense forest way up in the northernmost section of the island, where the U.S. military’s jungle warfare training center is situated.

As we continued driving, large, camouflaged military vehicles suddenly blocked the highway, and we got out to investigate. One of the vehicles was an armored personnel carrier with what looked to be about 25 soldiers inside, some of them looking out at us quizzically. I waved and a few of them waved back. We watched two soldiers get out and direct traffic around their convoy, as the vehicles waited to enter the training center’s main gate. Soon, they vacated the highway and disappeared into the training center.

Such a sight seems to be commonplace in this region. A more grave concern is that military aircraft fly low over people’s homes and fields. One family, keeping a decibel meter in their home, says that the noise level sometimes reaches 100 decibels and that sometimes the pilots’ faces are visible. The blasts of heat from the flying machines and the smell of fuel irritate the senses.

The U.S. Air Force plans to build six new helipads in the jungle as part of a deal to give close to one-half of the training center acreage back to Japan. Yet right in the middle of these proposed helipad sites lies Takae, a village of about 150 residents. They are the people who will suffer the increased air traffic that is sure to result if the helipads are built. They will also have to abide the possibility of a crash — there have been at least 43 aircraft accidents since 1972, and in 1959 a plane carrying two missiles crashed into a school, killing 17 people and injuring 210.

Now that the air force has a new toy, the MV-22 Osprey helicopter, there have been a lot of trainee pilots going out on practice runs. Unfortunately, the Osprey has established an abysmal safety record compared to earlier models. Its “safety” features are not, in fact, safe for potential bystanders.

Takae residents also believe that the U.S. military would like to use their village as part of its training exercises, an idea that doesn’t seem so farfetched after considering what happened during the Vietnam War. At that time, the U.S. military built a “dummy” village in the jungle and forcefully conscripted Takae residents, one as young as six years old, to wear black clothing and carry on as though they were living in a Vietcong stronghold. The conscripted residents were even required to stage mock attacks from the village.

Now, Takae residents and solidarity activists from other parts of Okinawa maintain two protest camps that block either end of an access road to two of the helipad construction sites. Two more entrances to two already-constructed helipads are permanently blocked with parked beater vehicles surrounded by a kind of welded scaffolding. A handful of activists watch the road to the unfinished helipads 24 hours a day, often in rotating shifts. So far, construction vehicles have been unable to enter the access road in order to finish building the helipads.

On the day I visited the protest camp, I met Professor Kosuzu from Ryukyu University. She typically spends her weekends at the Takae encampment. A specialist in American geography, particularly the Caribbean region, she says the Takae movement draws a lot of inspiration from the 1990s struggle that ended U.S. military training on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.

“One of the Puerto Rican campaigners came to Okinawa to help us completely encircle Futenma Air Base back in 1995. I feel like the U.S. relationship with Okinawa is also a kind of colonialism,” she said.

My goal in travelling to Okinawa is to tell other people in the U.S. about that reality — of bases maintained on forcefully expropriated land. With enough of a persistent uproar, coming from the Okinawa side and from the U.S. side, we can make it ever more difficult for the U.S. to maintain its overseas bases.