Protest Camps Form Against American Military Bases in Japan and Italy

By Ann Wright, TruthOut.org. Posted May 15, 2008.

The presence of the U.S. military, 63 years after World War II, is a huge source of anger for the citizens of Japan, Korea, Germany and Italy. On the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, the U.S. military uses an artillery firing range known as Yausubetsu. The range is small in comparison to ranges in the United States and Germany -- only 30 kilometers by 10 kilometers -- but the source of irritation to Japanese farmers whose land was taken for the range and for those who live near the range is large. The peaceful rolling hills and valleys of the area are the home of the dairy industry of Hokkaido. The Japanese have used a cartoon of an angry dairy cow with boxing gloves as their symbol of protest of the U.S. military's use of the range.

The Japanese government pressured farmers in the area to sell their land when the artillery range was established in 1962. All but three families eventually sold out. Mr. Kawase refused to sell or move, and instead has built three structures that are used by activists year round to protest Japanese and American use of Yausubetsu for artillery practice. Mr. Kawase, a very spry 82 years old, build a huge Quonset hut on his property where 100 activists can sleep on mats, make posters and banners and listen to speakers. In the kitchen of the building, activists cook huge meals from plants and vegetables of the Hokkaido countryside and serve fresh milk and cheeses from angry local dairy herd owners.

On the roof of the building, for military aircraft flying over and those on the land to see, Mr. Kawase has painted in huge Japanese script the text of Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan:

"Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of forces as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized."

That is a big statement, both morally and physically. Mr. Kawase painstakingly painted every character on the roof himself.

The majority of Japanese citizens approve the spirit of Article 9, but some believe that Japan should commit Self-Defense Forces to international collective defense efforts, such as the authorization by the U.N. Security Council for an international military operation to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. In 2007, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in marking the 60th anniversary of the Japanese Constitution, called for a review of the document to allow Japan to take on a larger role in global security, appealing to the Japanese people to consider this as a means to revive national pride.

Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution is under siege by the Bush administration, which wants Japan to provide more military support for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the "war on terror." In torpedoing Article 9, the Japanese government kowtowed to the force of the Bush administration and sent a refueling ship to the Indian Ocean to provide fuel to U.S. warships, and more recently has flown military transport aircraft into Iraq. Those actions have outraged millions of Japanese who do not want their country to become involved in the wars of other nations.

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Ann Wright is a retired U.S. Army Reserves colonel with 29 years of military service. She also was a U.S. diplomat who served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. She was on the small team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in December 2001. She resigned from the U.S. diplomatic corps in March 2003 in opposition to the Bush administration's decision to invade and occupy Iraq. She is the co-author of "Dissent: Voices of Conscience," profiles of government insiders who have spoken and acted on their concerns of their governments' policies.