Photo/Illutration Stones for building an offshore yard are dropped from a workboat off Nago, Okinawa Prefecture, on Jan. 10. (Satsuki Tanahashi)

It was a surprise attack.

When An-ichi Takushi ran out of his home at 4 a.m., he saw silhouettes of armed soldiers in the headlights of a U.S. military vehicle advancing toward him.

It occurred in 1955 in the present-day city of Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture.

To build a military base there, U.S. troops surrounded villages, threw out residents, crushed their homes with heavy machinery and roughly shoved aside anyone resisting.

Back then, a land acquisition law enabled U.S. forces to simply confiscate land in Okinawa without the approval of owners. This wanton act was dubbed “Bulldozers and Bayonets.”

But is this just an old story we can talk about in the past tense?

Reclamation work has finally begun in Oura Bay off Henoko in the city of Nago. Amid voices of protest, civilian security guards--not armed soldiers--protected vehicle gates to the project site. And instead of bulldozers, excavators put stones into the sea.

In keeping with Japan’s Local Autonomy Law, the bay was “confiscated” without the consent of locals.

In my mind, this scene overlaps what happened decades ago in 1955.

For the people of Okinawa, however, one major difference today is that they are now being treated in this manner by their own compatriots--not foreign soldiers.

Seizen Nakasone (1907-1995), an Okinawan educator who helped lead the Himeyuri Butai (Lily Corps) of female high school students mobilized as a nursing unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Battle of Okinawa, expressed his deep despair in his diary on the eve of Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese rule in 1972.

Nakasone wrote, “When we were being oppressed by the powerful U.S. military, we could somehow try to live with it. But now, Japan, itself, is trying to turn our islands again into its biggest base of national defense.”

I must say he could not have been more accurate in his prophecy of Japan today.

When public protest about a project grows loud enough, the project is changed. That’s politics--or the way it should be.

The population of Okinawa is 1 percent of the total Japanese population. We must never forget that it is the attitude of the 99 percent that is being questioned.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 12

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.

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