Unskilled Labor

OKINAWA Unskilled Labor

With no political dexterity at all, the U.S. military government authorities on Okinawa moved two months ago to remove a political irritant--skinny little pro-Communist Kamejiro Senaga, mayor of Okinawa's capital and chief city, Naha. The method: Lieut. General James E. Moore, U.S. High Commissioner, rewrote Naha's laws to permit the city assembly's conservative majority to oust the mayor on a vote of no confidence, then effectively barred his re-election by decreeing that no convicted felons could hold office (Senaga was jailed by the U.S. authorities in 1954 for harboring a Japanese Communist).

Last week the U.S. authorities reaped the consequences of their ineptness as 70,000 Naha citizens clacked briskly to the polls on wooden geta to choose a new mayor. Both candidates were anti-American, and the winner was chosen chiefly because he was more anti-American than his rival.

Trampled Will. The plain fact was that the U.S. faced increasing antagonism among Okinawa's 600,000 people. Despite the prosperity brought by 55,000 U.S. military personnel and their dependents, Okinawans resent the fact that the U.S. has commandeered one-fifth of the crowded island's arable land for military use, chafe under the U.S. refusal to consider returning the island to Japan "in the foreseeable future." * After Moore's highhanded tactics with Senaga, feeling ran so high that no pro-American candidate dared even enter the race.

Senaga brought forth a longtime lieutenant named Saichi Kaneshi to run for his old job. Kaneshi's only opponent was Tatsuo Taira, a onetime Japanese bureaucrat and small businessman whom U.S. authorities ejected as governor of Okinawa in 1952 because of his vaguely Socialist and pro-Japanese leanings. In the campaign, even Businessman Taira charged that "the Americans are trampling on the will of the people." As for Left-Winger Kaneshi, he called on the electorate to "avenge Senaga." Much of the time, Kaneshi sat smirking nervously at the back of his own platform while ex-Mayor Senaga hailed him as "a Sputnik," denounced "American oppression," and gleefully boasted that "Russia now has a weapon which can blow up the White House in Washington."

Conservative Advice. Concluding that Businessman Taira was the lesser of two evils, the U.S. military administration went into some more political flimflam to ensure his election. On the advice of Okinawan conservatives, General Moore consented to the merger of Naha proper with the neighboring town of Mawashi, supposedly an anti-Senaga stronghold. As it turned out, this bit of gerrymandering was what elected Senaga's candidate Kaneshi. When the votes were tallied last week, Kaneshi proved to have lost Naha proper by 3,000 votes. But in Mawashi, Kaneshi picked up enough votes to give him a narrow 35,491-to-34,507 victory over Taira.

Since World War II, the U.S. has spent $588 million converting Okinawa into the key U.S. military bastion in the Far East. Last week Okinawa's biggest city (pop. 180,000) had a chief executive pledged to rid the island of its "atom-hydrogen bomb base," and to return it to Japanese rule. Said a high-ranking U.S. officer: "Our chief task is to prevent Okinawa becoming a Pacific Cyprus."

*Under the Japanese Peace Treaty of 1951 Japan retains "residual" sovereignty in Okinawa, but the U.S. has "the right to exercise all and any power of administration, legislation and jurisdiction" over the island, indefinitely.

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