Activists Urge End to US Foreign Military Bases
Tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered on Okinawa this spring, delivering an unmistakable message to Japan’s government: honor the promise to close a controversial US Marine Corps air station and remove it from the island entirely, not simply relocate it to another part of Okinawa.
An estimated 90,000 people packed an athletic field for the rally, the largest turnout to date on the long-running fight over Marine Corps Air Station Futenma. The crowd passed a resolution demanding the base’s swift closure, pressing Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to make good on a campaign pledge to move Futenma’s operations “out of Japan if possible, but out of Okinawa at the very least.”
The rally capped a renewed period of organizing that began after Hatoyama’s party swept into power in 2009, reviving hopes among longtime anti-base activists that decades of resistance might finally produce real change. Those hopes trace back further than this year’s protests. Okinawans have organized against the American military presence on their island for generations, citing not just the noise and disruption of hosting tens of thousands of foreign troops, but a documented pattern of crimes committed by US personnel against local residents — including sexual violence cases that have repeatedly ignited mass protest over the decades.
Organizers argue the burden Okinawa carries is wildly disproportionate: the island hosts the large majority of US troops stationed in Japan, despite making up a tiny fraction of the country’s land area and population. For many activists, Futenma has become the clearest symbol of that imbalance — a base sitting in the middle of a densely populated city, a source of constant noise, accidents, and resentment since it was built.
Under mounting domestic pressure, Hatoyama had been weighing alternatives to the base’s planned relocation to Henoko, a coastal site elsewhere on Okinawa long opposed by environmentalists for its proximity to coral reefs and the habitat of an endangered species of dugong. But as of this spring, no viable alternative site outside the prefecture had emerged, leaving organizers wary that the government would ultimately abandon its promise and fall back on the original relocation plan.
The Okinawa demonstrations are part of a broader, if loosely connected, pattern of resistance to the US military’s global network of overseas bases, with local movements organizing against American installations from South Korea to Puerto Rico to the Indian Ocean. Advocates in these movements argue that foreign basing perpetuates a form of ongoing occupation long after the wars that originally justified it have ended, and that host communities bear the practical costs — displacement, environmental damage, and military accidents — for a strategic posture set in Washington, not in the communities forced to live alongside it.
Whether this spring’s massive turnout in Okinawa will be enough to change Tokyo’s calculus remains to be seen.