'Completely ineffective': what Okinawa already knows about foreign bases

When the governor of Okinawa says American efforts to discipline their troops are "completely ineffective", he is not describing a failure. He is describing a design. The 20-year-old Marine arrested this week over the strangling of a 39-year-old woman in Naha is the latest name in a ledger the island has been keeping for eighty years — and the ledger never closes, because the system that produces it never changes.

Every few years the script repeats: a crime, an arrest, a formal protest from Tokyo, a pledge of cooperation from the Marine Corps, a promise of "maximum discipline". Then the condolences are filed away and the bases remain. The 1995 rape of a 12-year-old girl by three servicemen brought tens of thousands onto the streets; it did not bring the troops home. Futenma was supposed to move to Henoko; the killing happened on Futenma's watch regardless.

This is what impunity looks like when it wears a uniform. The Status of Forces Agreement was written by the occupier, for the occupier, and its spirit survives in every case where a foreign soldier's crime becomes a diplomatic incident to be managed rather than a citizen's murder to be punished. A host country that must summon an ambassador to demand that its own people be kept safe is not fully sovereign.

Periyar taught that power which cannot be questioned will always find someone to crush; Anna warned that the ballot means nothing if the foreign bayonet decides the terms of the land. Okinawa's people have voted, protested, and elected governors against the bases — and the bases remain, because their presence was never a democratic decision. It was a wartime imposition, renewed by treaty every time a host government chooses alliance over its own citizens.

The dead woman in Naha deserves justice in a courtroom, and the accused deserves due process — including the presumption of innocence he now claims. But Okinawa deserves something larger: an end to the arrangement where one nation's "security" requires another nation's daughters to be expendable. No base, no matter how strategic, is worth a society that must teach its women to fear the men sent to "protect" them.