- Contents (click on a tree to return here..)
- US military bases in Okinawa
- Major construction projects
- Golf-courses
- Urban developers and speculators
- Municipal parks
- Militarised Islands
- Positive Aspects of Landrights in Japan
 Essays & Research Index
US Military Bases in Okinawa
The Nansei ("South West") Islands stretch from Kyushu, the southwestern most of the four main islands, to Taiwan. The southern section of this island chain forms Okinawa County. Okinawa used to be the Ryukyu Kingdom, which was at times a vassal of either Japan or China, and at times fully independent, until 1879, when it was annexed by Japan. Okinawans, of whom there are 1.2 million, are sometimes classed as an ethnic minority, as they are culturally different from the mainland Japanese, although much less so than the Ainu. Okinawan can be regarded as either the broadest dialect of, or a language closely related to, Japanese. In the Second World War Okinawa was the site of the biggest battle in world history, with the Okinawans having the misfortune to be regarded as Japanese by the Allies but as colonial subjects by the Japanese, and this led to the deaths of one third of the population. It was then under US occupation from 1945 until 1972. Okinawa is the poorest county in Japan, with a "Caribbean" economy dependent on tourism and sugar cane, and Okinawans feel that their easygoing and nonhierarchical attitudes on the one hand, and their courtesy and gentleness on the other, lay them open to mistreatment by both the Japanese and the Americans, respectively.
75% of the US bases in Japan are in Okinawa, which makes up less than 1% of the area of Japan, and their presence there is thus widely seen as being a result of anti-Okinawan bias. They occupy over 11% of the county, and 20% of the largest island, and thus contribute to overcrowding. They are also responsible for terrible social problems, such as prostitution, weapons-related accidents (live-firing exercises are carried out over inhabited areas), and violent crime, of which the gang-rape of a 12-year-old girl in 1995 was the most publicised, but not the worst, example.
In a referendum organised by the Okinawa County Council in 1996, 89% of the population voted for the bases to be removed by 2015. However, the Tokyo government maintains that this election had no legal status and will be ignored.
The County Governor, Ota Masahide, has claimed that the presence of the bases is unconstitutional, but this was rejected by the High Court in Tokyo in 1996. The land occupied by the bases is owned by 28,000 people, the number being so large partly because Okinawa has traditionally had subtropical subsistence agriculture on very small plots, and partly due to an attempt to confuse the leasing process by subdividing the plots, a strategy termed hitotsubo ("one mat") ownership. Many of these landowners have refused to renew their leases, but the High Court has now declared that the land can be compulsorily rented.
The homepage of an anti-base group is at:
http://www.walrus.com/~dawei/index.html
and their e-mail address is:
dawei@walrus.com.
Initially this group was concerned with securing the trial in a Japanese court of the above-mentioned rapists, but after they succeeded in this their aims expanded to include the removal/reduction of bases on Okinawa, the just use of land after removal of the bases, protesting against the illegal use of land for bases by the Japanese government, and helping other groups with related goals.
There is a good page of Okinawa-related links at:
http://www2.gol.com/users/johnrach/Link.html.
Major Construction Projects.
The building of roads, tunnels, bridges, land-slip prevention structures, etc., in Japan is used by the government for public works programmes to provide employment, and to subsidise poorer areas of the country. It is not absolutely certain that this is a bad thing, although one often feels that the projects are completely unnecessary, when one sees huge road tunnels leading to little fishing villages, for example, and there is also said to be a high level of corruption, with politicians pulling strings to get projects for their own districts.
More importantly, the high level of corruption and yakuza involvement in Japan means that;
- people who live in the way of projects get ruthlessly moved aside, often with actual or threatened violence;
- the choice of construction companies is extremely corrupt;
- construction workers, many of whom are alcoholics or otherwise unemployable, or are illegal aliens, get treated brutally.
There are a number of nascent Japanese anti-roads groups, who greatly admire the British actions. Recently they've been demonstrating against a new motorway in Kyoto (as though Japan's cultural capital hadn't been ruined enough), and they were on the national news just recently.
A number of other campaigns against major construction projects are currently ongoing.
One example is the campaign against locating the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano (http://www.ssctnet.or.jp/zui/no-olympic/koza/enolim01.htm), and against building the various link roads and the Asakawa Dam (http://www.iijnet.or.jp/2go-green/Env/Env.Nagano/Asakawa.html) associated with the Olympics.
The former page is in English as well as Japanese, and gives an analysis of the issues involved, including the degree to which debate has been stifled and/or censored and the quasi-fascist ideology associated with the Olympics in Japan (although I found the latter a bit far-fetched, to tell the truth).
Golf Courses.
It is very expensive to play golf in Japan, and golf-courses therefore represent very big business. Golf-courses and country clubs take up huge areas of land which
was usually previously forested (two thirds of Japan is forest). I don't think it's an exaggeration to view golfers in Japan as an arrogant aristocracy lording it over the land in a manner comparable to, say, fox-hunters in Britain. This of course isn't even to touch on the ecological destruction caused by golf-courses for Japanese in the rest of Asia.
To give one example, a great chunk of the central area of Miura Peninsula, the first rural area going southwards from Tokyo, where I go walking at the weekends, is taken up by a huge ugly golf course, in the middle of the beautiful wooded low rolling hills. It has a 15 feet high barbed wire fence all the way around it. I don't know who owned the forest before the golf-course bought it, but I can imagine that they weren't treated very well. Furthermore, in Japan people are generally free to roam through forest, and a lot of people collect forest herbs, spices, nuts, vegetables and mushrooms. This is often a hobby, but the sale of these products often forms an important income supplement for people such as housewives in rural areas, and pickled sansai ("mountain vegetables"), collected from the wild, are widely sold in shops and supermarkets. Clearly, even if the landowners were fully compensated, the ramblers and sansai-gatherers were not. In addition, golf-courses produce a lot of pollution in th
e form of nitrates in run-off, and cannot even justify themselves as important employers the way that factories, for example, can.
I remember a lot of articles in the newspapers about a campaign against the building of a golf-course in the jungle on Iriomote Island, a remote part of Okinawa County only 150 miles from Taiwan, which would destroy the habitats of numerous animals and plants, including the unique Iriomote wildcat. I cannot find any information about these campaigns on the internet, but it would appear that the golf-course has not been built, judging from the tourist information the island, which is mostly wildlife/wilderness/scuba-oriented, so there may have been a victory there that I didn't hear about.
Urban Developers and Speculators.
Construction companies often have yakuza links, and developers often use intimidation to move tenants and owners out of residential areas to make way for expensive condominiums or office blocks. Many communities and distinctive inner city areas have been destroyed in this way. One such area is Tsukishima, an island in the Sumida River, which was the only large area of working class housing in central Tokyo to survive both the 1923 earthquake and the wartim
e bombing. Only little pockets of the area now remain, and even from those one can see that, with Japan's increasing prosperity, it had been improved to make a very attractive area, a maze of little alleys, with the traditional Japanese profusion of potted flowers, cooking herbs and grape vines draped over every conceivable surface, and a real old-fashioned "low town" atmosphere.
It has to be said, in mitigation, that aggressive developing has been less common since the collapse of the 1980s bubble economy. In addition, the government's anti-yakuza policies appear to be starting to have some success, so even if developing takes off again it is unlikely that people will be treated as callously as they have been in the past.
Municipal Parks.
Tokyo has a shortage of public parks in comparison with London. This is partly due to corruption on the part of the government. For example, the area which was historically the shogunal family's mausoleum-temple complex was set aside as a park after the Second World War, and is still actually called Shiba Park, but, through a series of shady deals, it ended up being turned into one of the most exclusive golf-courses in Japan (a country club in the centre of Tokyo!). There is one enormous green area right in the centre of Tokyo. However, only a few outer parts of this area are public parks. The rest makes up the Imperial Palace grounds! It is difficult to see how this area could be opened to the public without the abolition of the monarchy, but, as in Britain, such a suggestion is not as far from the political mainstream as it was 20 years ago. Even if the monarchy were abolished, however, it would be necessary to struggle to ensure that the same fate did not befall the palace grounds as befell Shiba Park.
Militarised Islands.
The farthest flung of the Japanese islands are controlled by the US and/or Japanese militaries and are closed to the public.
The Iwojima Islands consist of Iwojima, where the Second World War battle took place, Minami Iwojima, and Kita Iwojima. Iwojima is maintained by the US military essentially as a war memorial. The Iwojima Islands are about halfway between Tokyo and Guam, and form the southernmost group of the Ogasawara (or Bonin, Kazan or Volcano) Islands, some of which are inhabited. The Ogasawara Islands were uninhabited until the early 19th century, when they were settled by American and British sailors with Hawai
ian women, and they were only later annexed by Japan. Iwojima was itself inhabited in the early 20th century, by sulphur-diggers (its name means "Sulphur Island").
Minamitorishima (or Marcus Island) is even more remote, being alone way out in the Pacific Ocean, and it has never been inhabited. It is almost entirely taken up by US/Japanese military and Coast Guard installations.
These islands would be inaccessible in any case to people without seafaring boats. However, even apart from my antimilitarist feelings, I dislike the idea of the remotest bits of a country being closed to its citizens. Furthermore, these islands are not entirely inhospitable, like Rockall for example, and it is not inconceivable that there are determined would-be Robinson Crusoes in the Japanese population.
All uninhabited islands further east in the North Pacific (Wake, Midway, Palmyra, Baker, Jarvis, Howland and Johnston Atoll, and Kingman Reef) are US colonies, and are similarly militarised and closed to the public. Johnston Island was used for nuclear testing, and is now a chemical weapons storage/disposal site (this information is taken from the CIA's fact file, so the truth is probably much worse, and it is difficult to believe the alternative information that it is a bird reserve). This is of course a much wider issue than land rights, though.
POSITIVE ASPECTS OF LAND RIGHTS IN JAPAN..
I do not want to give the impression that Japan is a land rights hell, and I will give the following positive examples.
- Freedom to Roam. People are free to walk in the forests, which cover two-thirds of the country. Natural Japanese forests are rather jungle-like and impenetrable (warm temperate rainforest, technically), but forestry plantations are not too bad for strolling in. There is very little pasture land in Japan, so the issue of the right to walk on non-arable agricultural land does not really arise. I find that farmers do not mind me walking on their land, even, for example along the narrow earthen banks separating paddy fields, as long as I do not look as though I am going to do any damage. I think this is probably because British arable farmers are understandably concerned about people walking across their fields of wheat, whereas nobody would want to walk across a muddy paddy field.
- A Free Peasantry. Agriculture in Japan is very small scale, with many far
ms being only four acres. It is also very labour-intensive, and more than 10% of the population work on the land. This is partly because the most common crop is rice, and partly because Japan never went through the horrific Enclosures and Agricultural Revolution eras which England did. Furthermore, most farmers own their own land, as a result of a number of periods of land reform, the most important being under the American Occupation in the late 1940s.
- Organic farming. There is a large organic farming movement in Japan.
- Shinto. Shinto is a doctrineless nature and community religion, although it was hijacked by the militarists from the 1880s to the 1940s and is still sometimes associated with the emperor. Shinto shrines are present in all communities, and one often stumbles across them even in remote forested mountains. If a Shinto shrine can be demonstrated to be used by even one worshipper, permission to remove it becomes a complicated process, and this legal peculiarity has been used by residents to prevent or obstruct development, one example I am aware of being the Tama Hills, the first forested area west of Tokyo. I feel that the public/sacred space of even very small shrines adds character to urban areas. I also feel that the way that shrines are often built next to impressive natural phenomena (rocks, ca
ves, islets, waterfalls, etc.) or archaeological sites (eg. burial mounds) gives one a sense of wonder in nature.
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