Liberation with a Qualm

To many Americans over 40, a simple ceremony in Tokyo this week will perhaps serve as a strange and vaguely reassuring reminder of how shallow are the tracks of former wars. During 82 savage and bloody spring days in 1945, 12,300 American servicemen died in the closing months of the Pacific war for the control of Okinawa, a 60-mile-long island in the East China Sea. Early this week, in the gardens of the Imperial Palace, Vice President Spiro Agnew is to read a presidential proclamation, signed by Richard Nixon, that will end the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa and 140 other islands of the Ryukyu chain. For both nations this reversion to Japanese control will resolve what Agnew describes as "the last major issue of the war."

On Okinawa (pop. 1,000,000), worshipers at a memorial service in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Naha, the island capital, will give thanks to the spirits of the dead for the return of sovereignty to the motherland. But there will probably not be a repetition of the dancing in the streets or displays of fireworks that accompanied the first reports in late 1969 that the U.S. was getting ready to return political control to Tokyo. Even though most Okinawans welcome the change, they have had time enough for uneasy second thoughts about their island's future. "After all," Okinawan Banker Hiroshi Senaga told TIME Correspondent Frank Iwama, "the younger generation was brought up under U.S. administration, and the older generation knows only the discriminatory policies of Tokyo that made prewar Okinawa a second-class prefecture of Japan."

Raising Income. The changeover will affect almost every aspect of island life. Pay telephones are being fitted to take ten-yen coins instead of nickels; price tags and taximeters are being adjusted. Road signs will soon be changed from miles to kilometers, and eventually drivers will have to learn to use the left-hand side of the street. In what the Bank of Japan describes as the biggest shipment of money in history, a cargo of 54 billion yen (about $180 million) in bank notes and coins reached Okinawa secretly last month in preparation for a massive conversion of currency. The islanders are being permitted to exchange most of their U.S. money at the pre-revaluation rate of 360 yen to the dollar (v. 302 at the current rate).

One major problem for the Japanese is how to strengthen Okinawa's economy, which is still heavily dependent on U.S. military spending. To improve the island's unfavorable trade balance ($102 million in exports last year, v. $424 million in imports), the government has urged Japanese firms to open Okinawan branches. Most U.S. firms now on the island expect to remain. As an additional boost, the government plans to hold a huge International Ocean Exposition in 1975 and expects to spend about $1 billion on roads, buildings and other facilities that will continue to help the economy when the exposition is over.

Despite the political changeover, the U.S. military presence--which includes 43,000 servicemen and 24,000 dependents at 88 installations--will remain for the foreseeable future. The Okinawan response to this fact is somewhat paradoxical. Island workers at the U.S. bases have joined in protests against the continuing American presence, while complaining at the same time about cuts in the labor forces at the bases. One union leader explained that the workers favor a military-free Okinawa. "But in the meantime," he argued, "we have to eat, you know."

Under terms of the U.S.-Japan Security Pact, the U.S. will no longer be able to use its Okinawa bases to house nuclear weapons or for supplying U.S. forces in Viet Nam. In practice, however, the Japanese are resigned to the fact that the bases will still be used in an indirect way for Viet Nam operations. While B-52 flights out of Okinawa were moved to airstrips on Guam last year, the big KC-135 tankers that refuel Viet Nam-bound bombers still operate out of giant Kadena Airbase, twelve miles north of Naha.

From now on, the Japanese Self-Defense Force will assume the principal responsibility for defending the island. Some 2,900 S.D.F. troops will be on duty there by the end of the year, including an antisubmarine unit and an F-104 fighter squadron stationed at an airbase in Naha. The Tokyo government is moving cautiously, but already it too has become the target of Okinawa's antiwar fervor. "The heat is off the U.S. military," says Seishiro Hokama, editor of Naha's Ryukyu Shimpo newspaper. "It has been transferred to the Japanese forces. The S.D.F. will not be popular here." Adds Ryoshin Nakayoshi, head of the Government Workers Union: "We are going to fight against turning Okinawa into the advance base for Japanese militarism."

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