‘We Won’t Quit Until We Stop It’
Despite the pandemic, US-backed ravaging of Okinawa continues. So does the people’s direct action.
By C. Douglas Lummis
The Nation
Naha, Okinawa—Every day except weekends, holidays, and
typhoon days, even in the pandemic, charter buses leave from Naha and other
cities on this island to transport protesters to three locations in the north,
where the Japanese government is trying to build a super airbase for the US
Marines.
One location is Shirakawa, on the Pacific Ocean side of the
island, where the government’s Okinawa Defense Bureau is tearing down a
mountain and loading it into dump trucks. There, protesters delay the work by
standing in front of the trucks. The second location is the nearby Awa Pier,
where the mountain-become-dirt is loaded onto small cargo ships. There, by
milling around on the sidewalk at the gate where there’s a traffic light,
protesters reduce the number of trucks entering the area to one per green
light. This reduces the number of ships that depart each day. In the water, the
ships are further delayed by a brave fleet of sea-kayakers, who crowd around
the bow of each ship until they are hauled away. Once free of the kayakers, the
ships sail to the East China Sea side of the island, to Cape Henoko, site of
the US Marines’ Camp Schwab, and dump the dirt into the sea as landfill to
support the airstrip that is planned to cut across the cape and stick out into
the sea on both sides, wreaking ecocatastrophe on the coral garden there.
Another team of kayakers meets them, delaying the process still more.
The third charter bus destination is the gate on the inland
side of Camp Schwab, where a daily sit-in slows down the huge fleets of
trucks—cement trucks, trucks carrying building materials, and dump trucks
carrying more dirt from nearby locations—that enter the construction site in
the form of three convoys of 200–300 vehicles a day, even during the pandemic.
Okinawa was a peaceful independent kingdom until Japan
seized it in the same historical era that the United States seized Puerto Rico.
Legally, Okinawans are Japanese; culturally, they are a colonized indigenous
people. Occupying 0.6 percent of Japanese territory, they are stuck with more
than 70 percent of the US military installations in Japan, a situation they
call structural discrimination. Okinawan conservatives and progressives are
united in opposing the construction of yet another base.
The protesters are mostly retired people. It makes sense.
Direct action targeting construction needs to be carried out during working
hours. Also, people living on retirement incomes don’t need to worry about
getting fired. But more than that, most of these folks remember the Battle of
Okinawa or the devastation that came after, and see this as their last chance
to put their hatred of war into the form of a concrete achievement. Asked why
they think they can win against the combined force of the US and Japanese
governments, their fixed answer is “Because we won’t quit until we do.”
Last week, I took the Wednesday bus to Henoko. Fifteen
people were on it, a bit down from the previous average of around 20, probably
because of Covid, but the reduced number made it easier to keep our distance.
The mood was good, with lots of happy greetings. These
people enjoy one another’s company and love having something meaningful to do
each day. The 90-minute drive was spent listening to self-introductions from
three who’d come down from mainland Japan (these buses have mics), discussing
politics, exchanging information, and singing. H-san, who presides over the
Wednesday bus, was her usual bubbly self, alternating between humor and anger
as she talked about Japan’s new prime minister. Her punch line: “As for being
Japanese, I resign. I’m Okinawan!” C-san, an eloquent raconteur who always sits
in the left rear seat, talked (half in Japanese, half in the Okinawan language)
about why he is confident the airbase will never get built: The sea bottom on
the northern side of Cape Henoko is unstable slime—mayonnaise, they call it—and
will never support a concrete airstrip. T-san, who specializes in irony and
black humor, got lots of laughs. The Henoko action, including the bus ride, has
been called Henoko University.
A few months ago, Covid appeared inside the construction
site, and work was shut down briefly. When it resumed, the question at the gate
became how both the protesters and the riot policemen could carry out their
respective roles while observing social distancing rules.
This was the 2,313th day of the sit-in. Our job at the gate,
together with several dozen others who’d come on different buses, was to delay
the second and the third of that day’s truck convoys. In the past, the
interaction between police and protesters was pretty rough, especially when
most of the riot police were from mainland Japan. In those days there was a lot
of anger on both sides. Nonviolence resembled that of a rugby match—no hitting
but lots of pushing and shoving. Now most of the Japanese have been sent home.
The remaining Okinawan riot police have probably heard more anti-Henoko-base
speeches than any humans on earth. Most of those speeches are delivered by
women, who must remind them of their mothers or grandmothers. That, plus the
adamant nonviolence of the protesters, has had its effect. The action has come
to look less and less like rugby.
It’s quite something to see. With a convoy of a couple
hundred trucks halted on the highway, the officer in charge of this police
unit—who has become pretty friendly toward the protesters—repeats through his
bullhorn that the sit-inners are violating traffic law and must move aside.
From time to time, he looks at his watch. The sit-inners continue speech-making
and singing. The riot police stand silently, waiting for the order. After 15 or
20 minutes, he gives it—not to carry protesters away, but to ask them politely.
This the riot police do, one by one. The protesters refuse, and refuse, and
refuse again, but when the policemen make as if to pick them up, they stand up
and amble to the side.
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| Part of a Veterans For Peace delegation helping to block dump trucks waiting to enter | |
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Camp Schwab with fill for the runway being built on top of the pristine waters of Oura Bay
(Doug Lummis, author of this article, in gold shirt on right)
This slow-motion, spatially distant enactment of conflict
may not be exciting, and it slows down the delivery by only about 20 minutes.
But repeated three times, that’s one lost hour a day. More important, the
sit-in deprives the builders of free access to the gate and the efficiency of
just-in-time deliveries; it forces them to organize convoys and protect them
with hundreds of police. Through the repetition of these protest tactics,
combined with refusal of the Prefectural Government to issue permits, refusal
of the City of Nago to allow construction work on land it controls, and many
lawsuits and protests from environmentalists, the cost estimate has tripled,
the target date has been postponed by more than a decade, and many
people—including some in the US Congress—believe (or worry, in the case of the
Congresspeople) that the thing will never get done.
~ C. Douglas Lummis is the coordinator of Veterans
for Peace—Ryukyus/Okinawa Chapter Kokusai (VFP-ROCK)—and the author of Radical
Democracy.
