More reason to oppose U.S. base

Shinichi Fujiwara

Is the U.S. building an air base on top of the remains of war dead? asked Shinichi Fujiwara. The Pentagon is in the process of relocating a Marine air base from the densely populated Okinawan city of Ginowan, whose residents have long protested its noise and pollution and complained of crimes by the Americans. A new site was chosen on Okinawa’s remote northern coast, and the military is reclaiming ground for it with a giant landfill. The soil for the landfill is being excavated in the south, and now “disturbing signs are emerging that human remains from the ferocious 1945 Battle of Okinawa might be mixed” with that soil.

Some 200,000 Japanese—including a quarter of the civilian population of Okinawa—perished in the U.S. invasion, among them many civilians who blew themselves up with grenades rather than be captured. Volunteers still search for bone fragments to give these dead proper burials, and one recently found a jawbone in the south of the island. When he went back to the site a few weeks later, though, the entire area had been quarried, almost certainly for the new base. The land reclamation was already “bitterly opposed by the majority of Okinawans,” who wanted the Marine base moved to another island entirely. This new allegation will enrage them.