Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa

The first wave 63
of twenty years. An individual landowner would receive less than ¥2 per year
for 3.3 square metres of land or ¥200–300 per year for average-sized landholdings.
At the time, a box of cigarettes cost ¥23 and a bottle of Coca-Cola cost ¥10.
Not surprisingly, 98 per cent of the landowners refused to sign leases (Tōyama
1987: 360; Okinawaken 1996: 62). In response, the USCAR issued Ordinance
109 on land acquisition in April 1953. This provision legitimized the military
acquisition of land within 30 days of notification and basically amounted to legalized
theft. On the basis of this Ordinance, the US military conducted further land
expropriation.
The US military did not hesitate to use force against resistant landowners to obtain
de facto land access. Within ten days of the issue of Ordinance 109, armed soldiers
‘invaded’and flattened farmlands and houses in Central Okinawan hamlets such as
Aja, Mekaru, and Gushi, using tanks, bulldozers and tear gas. These villages had
not yet completely recovered from the devastation of the Battle of Okinawa, and
the local farmers were trying to reconstruct their livelihoods with what was left
after the war. In the longer term and within the larger community of protest, images
of US military bulldozers and soldiers armed with firearms and bayonets became
durable memories burdened with enormous symbolic significance. ‘Bulldozers and
bayonets’ became a protest slogan and the helpless farmers at their mercy became
a potent symbol in the Okinawan’s historical narrative of marginalization.
In Ie-jima, the US military took full advantage of the isolation and ignorance of
the farmers. In July 1953, a US inspector first came to Ie-jima with documents he
presented as survey forms. Later the farmers found that they had signed contract
documents for evacuation. A US missile practice range was built, and the US Forces
told them that the evacuees (of four households at the time) would receive plenty
of compensation and could continue normal farming. However, the amount of
compensation was startlingly low. As elsewhere in Okinawa, the amount paid by
the US was only 2–3 per cent of the average revenue gained from growing crops
(Arasaki 1995: 56). As soon as the missile practice started, the farmers’ crops and
fields were damaged and farming became impossible. No compensation was paid
for this collateral damage.
In September 1954, a US inspector announced further land acquisition and a plan
to evacuate 152 households and land within a 5,000-feet radius of the planned
military site where Maja and Nishizaki Districts were located. The farmers realized
they had been deceived (Ahagon 1973: 23). The villagers gathered to discuss their
plight. They realized, of course, that part of the problem was they had no knowledge
of the unilaterally issued USCAR ordinances and decrees related to land acquisition,
such as Ordinance 109. More fundamentally, for many farmers, the choice was land
or death. At the meeting, everyone agreed, ‘if we are taken away from our land,
we will only die like fish taken out of the water’ (Ahagon 1973: 33). A Maja farmer,
Namizato Seiji, lamented that his family could not drink tea or smoke any more
because the military dug a hole in the middle of his field. He said when the winter
came, ‘I will stand up against the bullets’. Another villager, Chinen Kokichi,
declared that the farmers could not afford to be intimidated by bullets. Otherwise
entire families would starve to death. This was the tough and uncompromising