The US promised in 1996 to hand back its huge Marine Corps base at Futenma in Okinawa unconditionally within seven years. But Okinawa is still waiting and, despite strong local opposition, the Japanese government wants to build an even bigger base to replace it.

For 18 years, the people of the Okinawa archipelago (Ryukyu Islands) in southern Japan have blocked plans drawn up in Tokyo and Washington to construct a huge new US Marine Corps base at Henoko in the north of Okinawa Island. The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has made this project high priority but opposition to it has increased.

The US Congress acclaimed Abe when he declared his commitment this April to the “shared values” of democracy, rule of law and human rights, as well as specific goals such as the construction of the base. But Abe’s words sounded hollow to Okinawans because in their experience constitutional and democratic rights are always subordinate to US military privilege. A month after Abe’s US visit, the governor of Okinawa Prefecture, Takeshi Onaga, arrived in Washington to make it clear that Okinawa would not tolerate construction of a new base.

The Okinawa islands stretch for 1,000km from Kyushu, the southernmost mainland island of Japan, almost to Taiwan. To the Chinese they are potentially a maritime Great Wall controlling access to the Pacific, so their status is crucial to any East Asian order. For centuries the islands, as part of the kingdom of Ryukyu, were affiliated to both China and Japan, and benefited from 500 years of friendly relations across the East China Sea under the Chinese tribute system. In the 1850s Ryukyu was independent enough to negotiate treaties opening relations with the US, France and the Netherlands.

This relative autonomy ended in the 1870s. The modern Japanese state, founded in 1868, abolished the kingdom as punishment for attempting to retain its links with China, incorporated the islands as Okinawa Prefecture and converted Shuri castle, overlooking the capital, Naha, into Okinawa’s first military base. Okinawans were forbidden to use their own language and forced to adopt Japanese names and the imperial Shinto religion. Incorporation into Japan meant hostility to China and later the US; a quarter of all (...)