Okinawa protesters form human chain outside US base

[struggle4progress]

TOKYO, May 15 (Xinhuanet) -- Tens of thousands of protesters formed a human chain Sunday around the US Marine Corps' Futemma Air Station in Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture, demanding the immediate closure of the facility.

Organizers said some 24,000 people, both from Okinawa and elsewhere in Japan, took part in the event to mark the 33rd anniversary Sunday of the US reversion of the prefecture to Japan in 1972, Kyodo News reported.

The participants who held hands around the 11-kilometer circumference of the base outnumbered those of previous similar events in 1995, 1998 and 2003. <snip>

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-05/15/content_2961370.htm

[IChing]

1. Why do they hate democracy, only 24 thousand?

I think this is one base they don't want to close.

[jwirr]

2. The answer to why they hate us so much is

in Chalmer Johnson's book "Blowback".

[Ernesto]

3. When stationed on Okinawa in '67

Riot suppression was part of our USMC readiness training. They wanted us out even back then. It seems that they weren't too crazy about us using their island in support of the "quagmire" of that time.

[MADem]

4. This isn't a new thing for them

The protestors came every year, in the good weather, like swallows to Capistrano. They liked to do the NO NUKES thing too, especially if an aircraft carrier appeared off the coast, or any large vessel appeared in port. They also would get riled during annual readiness exercises re: Korea--that was almost exclusively off-islanders.

What makes the more recent protests different is that there are a larger number of Okinawans participating.

When I was over that way, the Okinawans would counter-protest the mainland "troublemakers" and tell them to a) mind their own business and b) get the hell off their island! If they weren't coming to honeymoon, they didn't want to see them~! The confrontations would get pretty dramatic, and the US didn't have to do anything, save shut the gates, let people know which one to go out, and warn them it might be an hour or more before they could drive back in. It was far less inconvenient than, say, a typhoon.

Because the number of civilian local national jobs on the bases (and there are many over there) has fallen, the islanders just don't feel vested anymore--it's all about the contribution to the economy, and that is natural...Futenma, especially, has some fantastic sealine property associated with it (most of Oki does, it isn't very wide but it is very long). Futenma is a particular hot spot because recently, a USMC helo crashed into an apartment building not far from a primary school. No one was injured, fortunately.

They want to move Futenma to a "floating base" offshore, to keep the helos away from the buildings totally. It has been on the drawing board for aeons, it gets talked about ALOT, but it never seems to happen.

When I was over there I had a staff of somewhere around fifty, maybe more, Local National employees. They were very good folks, very loyal, and of course very invested in their jobs, which came with very good benefits. Now, most of those jobs are gone, and done by reservists in 2 week spurts, or contractors, or not at all.

[hector459]

5. They hate us for our freedoms...don't you know that!

How long before they throw the US out all over the world? If they did, we would die of our own weight in debt, and unemployed and idle military.