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LANDOWNERS' PERSISTENCE PAYS OFF
Okinawa airfield returned after 61 years
By TAKUYA OKAMOTO
YOMITAN, Okinawa Pref. (Kyodo) A large part of the U.S. military's Yomitan Auxiliary Airfield in the heart of the village of Yomitan -- the site of a 1945 landing by U.S. forces that cost some 4,000 villagers their lives -- will be returned to local control next month.
The transfer comes after a long struggle by local residents to regain what they consider to be rightfully theirs.
Former Yomitan Mayor Tokushin Yamauchi, 71, still remembers his father telling him in March 1945: "At this rate, our whole family will be destroyed. Let's split up to survive."
The 11 members of his family divided into two groups, and Yamauchi, who was 10 at the time, evacuated to the northern part of the main island of Okinawa with his mother and brothers.
U.S. troops landed on April 1, and one-fifth of the village's residents died amid the fighting and mass suicides. Soon after the war's end, Yamauchi was moved to an evacuee site run by the U.S. military.
The disaster his village suffered in the closing days of the war shaped his life, leading him to lock horns with the both U.S. military and the central government as head of the village.
More than 200,000 lives were lost on both sides during the Battle of Okinawa, including roughly one-fourth of the island's estimated population of 450,000 at that time. Friday marked the 61st anniversary of the end of organized resistance.
But even after the war, the area has remained an important military site and the price paid by local residents has been high. In the 1950s, the U.S. military took over a former Imperial Japanese Army airfield and used it to train paratroops for some 40 years.
In 1965, a fifth-grade elementary school girl was crushed to death when a trailer literally fell from the sky during a training exercise.
Okinawa was returned to Japanese rule in 1972, but the villagers have still had to live next door to danger.
Eiyu Tamaki, 68, was among people who set up a group to address problems posed by the airfield at the time of the reversion. Their ultimate goal was the return of their ancestral land.
That struggle would last more than 30 years.
In 1976, the group brought together all the former owners of the land occupied by the U.S. military site and formed an association to press their claims, but in July that same year, the U.S. military began building a communications antenna complex for antisubmarine aircraft based at the airfield.
Yamauchi, who had by then become mayor of Yomitan, staged a 40-day sit-in with Tamaki and others. During a protest over the construction, an old man who experienced the fighting in Okinawa sprawled out at the bottom of a 2-meter-deep hole where a steel tower was to be built, shouting, "Pour the concrete over me!"
In 1977, Yamauchi sent a letter to then President Jimmy Carter, urging him to stop construction of the complex, and held a news conference to make his case to the nation.
Eventually, the U.S. abandoned the project. "I was scolded by the central government, which said, 'Diplomacy is a matter to be dealt exclusively by the central government and it is outrageous for a village mayor to make a direct appeal to the president,' but I fought back, saying, 'Call it local government diplomacy.' "
"If the antenna had been built, the airfield would never have been returned," Tamaki said.
The 191-hectare Yomitan Auxiliary Airfield is property of the U.S. Marine Corps. It was used as an air base until the end of the Korean War in 1953 and subsequently as a parachute training site. Under a bilateral agreement, three-fourths of the airfield will be returned to Japanese control at the end of July.
A red-brick structure stands at the northern edge of the airfield, which has a 2,000 meter runway and a 1,500 meter parallel apron.
The structure is the Yomitan village office, whose construction Yamauchi convinced the U.S. to allow. Built in 1997, it is the first Japanese government building to be located inside a U.S. base.
The base's predecessor was the Okinawa Kita Airfield, built by the Imperial army near the end of the war. More than 600 landowners were removed from the site after being told by a Japanese officer, "When the war is over, we will return the land." Anyone who refused would have been considered unpatriotic.
Tamaki, who once served as a representative of former landowners set up in 1970 to campaign for the return of their land, said, "There were people who suffered emotionally, with no place to live."
The Japanese airfield was targeted by U.S. warships immediately before the troop landing. The Japanese troops abandoned the airfield and retreated, leaving the villagers behind to fend for themselves.
As for expropriating the villagers' land before and during the war, the central government maintains the property was purchased. It considered its return to the ex-landowners to be legally problematic.
While Yamauchi was mayor of Yomitan, he repeatedly asked the central government to resolve the problem and succeeded in getting approval for the airfield's return.
In Okinawa, former bases have mostly been redeveloped as commercial sites, but Tsutomu Shimabukuro, 66, representative of the landowners' society, and other members want the land occupied by the airfield to become farmland. "It can be a base for (crop) production and employment," he said.
Once the handover is complete, the site will be leased out by former landowners to an agricultural corporation owned by the lessees.
"There is no other example anywhere in the country where landowners have been able to recover land that was owned by the state and used by the U.S. military," Shimabukuro claimed.
The Japan Times: Saturday, June 24, 2006
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