Trump’s shadow looms over dispute in Pacific
WILD CARD EMERGES IN OKINAWA’S JAPAN- CHINA SQUEEZE
Among the tenets of karate- j utsu — the thousand- year- old unarmed combat art native to this balmy, subtropical island in the East China Sea — is that a small person can subdue a larger opponent by meeting incoming strikes obliquely, rather than head-on.
It’s a principle Okinawans, who live roughly equidistant from the Japanese main islands to the northeast and China to the West, have had to rely on for centuries, as they negotiate the vagaries of great-power politics and the inescapable fact of their island’s positioning at the strategic fulcrum of the Western Pacific.
Rarely has this been more evident than now, as Japan and China move seemingly inexorably into a new Pacific cold war, with the advent of Trumpism in the United States a potentially explosive wild card. Okinawans, on a per- capita basis among Japan’s least wealthy citizens, are caught in the squeeze, as they so often have been in the past.
Top of mind, for many Okinawans, is that their home remains the staging ground for 75 per cent of U. S. military bases in Japan, despite there having been strong grassroots opposition to this for many years.
“If something happened, many people could die,” says Dr. Kurayoshi Takara, seated in an elegant wing chair in the openair lobby of Naha’s Terrace ho- tel. He’s referring specifically to the Futenma air base, located in a heavily populated urban area near homes and schools, that has long drawn the ire of Okinawa’s populist anti-base movement.
A crash by one of the Osprey military aircraft that fly in and out of the base at all hours of the day and night, despite an agreement there be no flights after 10 p. m., is Okinawans’ worst fear, says the professor emeritus at Ryukyu University, who is also a former vice-governor of the prefecture (equivalent to a Canadian province).
But that’s by no means the only concern. The bases occupy 20 per cent of Okinawa’s land mass and were recently calculated to contribute only five per cent of its gross domestic product, compared with 25 per cent in 1972, when Okinawa passed from American occupation back into Japanese control. The opportunity cost of having so much prime real estate taken up by non- developing assets, Takara says, now outweighs the economic benefits.
That said, Okinawa has another, potentially bigger problem. Just over an hour’s flight southwest of Okinawa, a stone’s throw from Taiwan, lie the Senkaku Islands, which China calls the Diaoyus and claims as its own. These constitute eight barren rocks, essentially, near the southern tip of a crescent of islets, all Japanese, that together block Beijing’s direct access to the open ocean of the Western Pacific.
In late 2012, Japan’s central government purchased three of the islands, to prevent their being developed by a private Japanese landowner. The move was intended to prevent an international incident; instead it catalyzed angry mob scenes in China, and widespread vandalism to Japanese- owned businesses there, as Chinese police stood by. Since that flare-up, diplomacy on both sides has caused a gradual normalization of Sino- Japanese relations, including a big increase in Chinese tourism to Japan. But Japanese direct investment in China has plummeted. Polls show Japanese popular mistrust of China is soaring — including among Okinawans, whose ancient cultural and trade links with the regional giant, combined with the U. S-base protests, might have led some to expect otherwise.
Meantime, Chinese incursions into the waters around the disputed islands — some military and some civilian fishing vessels — continue apace, as does China’s transformation of various reefs in the South China Sea into potential staging grounds for military aircraft and vessels.
“China is t r ying to gradually intrude — to invade,” says Yoshitaka Nakayama, the mayor of Ishigaki City on Ishigaki Island. The tiny volcanic atoll, 300 km northeast of Taiwan, has just 47,000 inhabitants, 80 per cent of whom live in the city, which since the construction of its gleaming regional airport three years ago has become a destination for a million or so tourists each year. The Senkakus are within Ishigaki district. As a result, the mayor is dealing not just with the usual municipal issues of trash pickup and potholes but with the need to avert World War III.
“In order to deter ( China) international co-operation is necessary,” Nakayama says. “Not only Japan and the U.S. but other countries should declare this is not right.”
And there, on cue, comes the third and most weirdly unpredictable factor of all: American politics, in the era of Donald Trump. Japanese opinion leaders I’ve spoken with in Tokyo this past week are, to a man and woman, terrified of a Trump victory in the Republican nomination race, let alone the general election. The real estate billionaire’s remarks about Japan have been eclipsed in North America by his xenophobia. In Tokyo his anti- trade rhetoric, his vow to make strategic allies such as Japan pay for “protection,” has been front-page news for months.
The upshot is that, even as Okinawans demand an end to what they consider to be their unfair burden in the U. S.- Japanese security alliance in the Western Pacific, policy- makers in the Shinzo Abe administration are leery of sending even the tiniest signal to Washington that might provide a pretext for an American pullback.
“We will need to keep the bases there,” said one watcher of Japanese politics in Tokyo, even as he acknowledged Okinawans’ long- standing, legitimate grievances. The islanders will continue to hold out hope their homeland will become entirely theirs once again. And chances are, given the intense chess now underway, that they will continue to wait.
IN ORDER TO DETER (CHINA), INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION IS NECESSARY.