By COLIN DONALD Herald correspondent
NAHA - When a 19-year-old United States Marine from Futenma base on Okinawa broke into the house of a 14-year-old schoolgirl this month and tried to rape her in her bed, the consequences must have been far from his mind.
Occurring only weeks before this year's G8 summit focuses the world's attention on the southern Japanese group of islands, this was more than a heinous sex crime. The Marine's arrest (his name and rank cannot be disclosed under the terms of the US-Japan security treaty) has reignited a political bonfire that the military had hoped to damp down, at least until President Bill Clinton had been and gone.
The troubled 55-year history of the US presence in Okinawa has given the incident massive resonance, but top brass are not the only ones with pre-summit headaches.
Such events rebound on the Japanese Government, whose attitude towards their most remote and economically backward province, and their failure to protect it from an array of US base-related problems, is seen by many islanders as negligent or even racist.
"People are confused about who to display their anger to," says Nobumasa Sata, an Okinawan nationalist who campaigns for independence from Tokyo's remote bureaucratic Government.
"To the Japanese, must be my humble answer."
Japan promotes Guam, known for its brown sugar, killer rice liqueur and languid arm-waving style of dance, as a subtropical haven far from the bustle of Tokyo and Osaka.
The Okinawans have a strong tradition of hospitality and have much invested in the success of this weekend's meeting. But behind the welcome to Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the other G8 leaders there is a subtextural message: Look what we have to put up with.
The rape case and other recent crimes, including a hit-and-run traffic accident allegedly involving a US airman, have evoked September 1995, when three Marines abducted a 12-year-old on her way to the shops, bound her with adhesive tape and raped her on the beach.
Although Okinawans were long accustomed to collateral damage from the bases, the outrage shook to the core Japan's 50-year-old security agreement with its chief ally.
"We Okinawans have mixed feelings about the summit" says Takayoshi Egami, professor of international relations at Ryukyu University.
"It's good that it draws international attention to the problem and it is good for our tourist industry, but there is a risk that President Clinton will use the occasion to justify a permanent presence."
Clinton will have the support of more Okinawans than anti-US campaigners would like to admit. Despite protests, opposition to the bases is not unanimous. In Japan's poorest prefecture, where unemployment hovers between 7 and 9 per cent (the national figure is 4 per cent), the bases remain an essential provider of jobs and customers.
Many argue that Okinawa's development has been sacrificed to the need for a US Pacific stronghold. The prefecture accounts for 0.6 per cent of Japan's landmass but hosts 75 per cent of the country's US military bases. Thirty-eight military facilities take up much of the best land, and on cramped Okinawa island, 19 per cent of the available space.
The "green machine" is everywhere, counteracting the Pacific idyllic of palm trees, blue seas and fields of swaying sugar cane. The scream of jets is part of the soundscape, and everywhere there are squat military buildings and kilometres of boundary fence.
"The crimes and accidents emanating from the bases never seem to cease" announces the official Okinawan website for the G8 summit. It lists noise pollution, environmental despoliation by live firing and toxic waste, training accidents that damage property and a stunting of urban and industrial development as reasons to object to the presence of the US.
Despite highest-level apologies and resolutions to tighten discipline, the website claims that nothing is changing: citing almost 5000 incidents involving US military personnel since the islands were returned to Japan by occupying US forces in 1972.
Dependence on Tokyo's largesse for development mutes but does not eradicate Okinawan ambivalence to the Japanese state. Resentment has long roots, going back to the suppression of the ancient maritime culture of the Ryukyu kingdom, as the islands used to be called before the Japanese overran them in the 1870s.
Before then, Okinawa was the seat of a cosmopolitan maritime culture, which lives on as a tourist spectacle for honeymooning Japanese couples.
And then there was the Second World War, when the Japanese Army used the Okinawans as human shields in what they knew was a doomed attempt to stave off defeat.
The Battle of Okinawa, the only one fought on Japanese soil, was one of the most vicious of the Pacific War, costing the lives of more than 200,000 Okinawans - roughly a quarter of the population.
The Emperor, in whose name this slaughter was conducted, never dared set foot in Okinawa in his long post-war reign.
"The Japanese didn't treat us like full human beings in those days, and there is still prejudice about us on the mainland," says Okinawa-born teacher Kenji Yoshida.
"During the war people remember very well how the Japanese Army took our food, and killed those who refused to fight for them. In Okinawan dialect we called them kusarah - rats."
The death in May of Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, who chose Okinawa as the summit venue out of personal attachment, has stunted Tokyo's efforts to make it up to its poor relation. His successor, Yoshiro Mori, is a Japanese chauvinist who discreetly upholds the righteousness of the war effort. His many gaffes include accusing the Okinawans of being "communists" because of their reluctance to honour the Rising Sun flag.
What is next for Okinawa when the summit circus has moved on? The movement for autonomy, already claiming the support of 38 per cent of islanders, may become less ignorable, though probably not enough for Nobumasa Sato, who dreams of US-free Okinawa becoming the next Hong Kong.
"Japan is declining and Okinawa must find ways to help itself. Okinawans have a special quality of digesting other cultures. They are realistic."
Their realism may have to accept that while tension in Korea and between China and Taiwan necessitates a US military bastion in East Asia, little will change.
Mixed welcome awaits at talks
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