Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa

70 Myth, protest and struggle in Okinawa
Additionally, Ahagon was an influential and charasmatic figure who significantly
contributed to the legendary and myth-making status of the Ie-jima struggle in the
community of protest.
The unbearable lightness of Okinawans’ rights – land
acquisition and rape
In July 1955, one of the US military’s most brutal land seizures happened in
Isahama, in central Okinawa. According to a former resident, 85-year-old Tazato
Tomoyasu, the Isahama hamlet in Ginowan village in central Okinawa provided
abundant water and used to have good rice paddies (Okinawa Taimususha 1997:
230). Anticipating the forced acquisition of their hamlet, farmers had formed a
landowners’ committee, and prepared for resistance (Okinawa Taimususha 1997:
230–1). When the local council told the farmers to evacuate the paddy fields because
of the danger of infection from mosquito spawning, thousands of supporters from
all over the Island came to ‘protect’ the farmers in Isahama from the US forces.
Kokuba Kōtaro, a former OPP member who was supporting the Isahama farmers’
struggle, recalls:
At around 3am, when most supporters of the resistance had gone home, there
were only 200–300 hamlet residents left. Slowly, one after another, bulldozers
with their headlights off and military trucks filled with armed soldiers entered
the hamlet. Off the coast, I could hear the sound of pipelines being connected
to a military vessel to drain in the sand and water taken from the ocean. It was
just like war. At dawn, all the supporters helplessly watched the paddy fields
being destroyed by soldiers across barbed wires. Farmers were still inside the
last 32 houses, but were finally dragged out at gunpoint. The bulldozers went
over and flattened the houses, timbers and roof tiles of the houses were collected
to be discarded in the ocean. Women were screaming at this sight, and I could
not help my tears.
(quoted in Arasaki 1995: 63–5)
The Isahama farmers were relocated to the highland areas about ten kilometres
away, where it was impossible to continue farming. Many of them moved to the
Yaeyama region and, with some mediation of the US military, some emigrated to
Latin America (Arasaki 1995: 65). These emigrants led difficult lives trying to make
livelihoods out of often barren and uncultivated land in foreign countries, and many
of them returned to Okinawa. 30 Ahagon was one of these. Others who lost their
land commonly found jobs in the US military bases (Nagumo 1996: 28). Isahama
also symbolized what the US land acquisition did to Okinawa, and deeply shocked
the entire Okinawan population.
Victimization of Okinawans’ farmers and the forceful acquisition of their land
was combined with the physical violence inflicted on the locals personally. In
September 1955, the mutilated corpse of a six-year-old girl was found in bushland
in Kadena village, near the major US Air Force Base (usually called ‘the Yumiko-