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Comment by notlukesky | Hacker News Reader

The Okinawans vote against military bases are ignored:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Okinawan_referendum

I spent 4 years stationed at Camp Hansen, Okinawa and I'm not sure that represents the majority of Okinawans. Anecdotally, the rare protest was extremely tiny, like less than 20 people, and I've never had a negative interaction. I often yearn to return because the place was so lovely and friendly.

> I spent 4 years stationed at Camp Hansen, Okinawa and I'm not sure that represents the majority of Okinawans. Anecdotally, the rare protest was extremely tiny, like less than 20 people, and I've never had a negative interaction. I often yearn to return because the place was so lovely and friendly.

Huh? You're concluding that the vote was not representative because you didn't see a lot of protestors and Okinawans are friendly?

> I'm not sure that represents the majority of Okinawans.

Are you suggesting that the poll was rigged?

According to Wikipedia, 434k opposed, 115k supported, and 548k eligible voters haven't participated. Unless the poll was rigged, it's technically possible but highly unlikely that the majority of Okinawans actually supported building the US base at Henoko.

That's survivor's bias. You've interacted with people who wanted to interact with you and thus seemed (and probably were) friendly.

>I spent 4 years stationed at Camp Hansen, Okinawa and I'm not sure that represents the majority of Okinawans.

Were you allowed to leave the base or did you overlap with the period they raped too many people and were not allowed to leave after certain hours?

(I had someone think they could fight me and I'd have no recourse because I was a bald American when I visited, then rapidly make friends when I said hey, I don't like those jerks either, this isn't Saudi Arabia, let them sit in a Japanese prison for two weeks then be put on trial if they abuse the locals.)

Maybe you should listen when people repeatedly state a boundary.

(And I'm not saying you, personally, are a rapist... just that a small number of people are, combined with coworkers who excuse that behavior by refusing to deal with the pattern of behavior paired with refusing to honor the wishes of the democracy hosting their base.)

That was a response of the commands in Okinawa, not an ask from the Japanese government.

Much of the activism against Okinawa gets overruled at the national level by a Japanese government that wants the United States presence, and this is problematic,because Okinawa is much, much poorer than the rest of the country.

>That was a response of the commands in Okinawa, not an ask from the Japanese government. Much of the activism against Okinawa gets overruled at the national level by a Japanese government that wants the United States presence

Why does this small set of people want them there? I thought much of this was leftover from WWII -- but for whatever reason the Germans atoned and were given autonomy and the Japanese kept being weird about their war crimes and thus had some kind of constitutional obligation to only maintain a "self defense force"?

That's not the same as "wanting" an ally around the way folks up in Ontario might not mind if the PA national guard is willing to help out if the Russians start fucking around.

>Okinawa is much, much poorer than the rest of the country.

Maybe because they suffer discrimination in employment on the main island?

(That's what I was told happens, by multiple highly educated people who frankly had more skill than me in their respective fields compared to myself at their age.)

Ehh, the degree to which both the US and the Japanese government maintained the idea of "self defense force" is extremely fictional.

Their helicopter destroyers can and do launch jets.

A lot of realpolitik here that doesn't quite fit into the typical narratives people from a Western viewpoint want to use to drive their ideological point

Your post is dishonest the vote was against a specific landfill project.

That vote was about a specific project, there was an earlier more general one that is also discussed in the linked article. Or see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Okinawan_referendum

A specific landfill project to... what?

> The referendum asked whether voters approved or opposed the landfill work at Henoko Bay for the construction of a new United States Marine Corps base.

Can you explain how this is dishonest?

dishonest?

the US does know how to split communities, they weren't stupid when they chose Okinawa

i'm pretty sure in the future Okinawa will be the Taiwan of Japan

i'd bet all my savings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyuan_people

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/abe-ignores-cont...

> the US does know how to split communities, they weren't stupid when they chose Okinawa

> i'm pretty sure in the future Okinawa will be the Taiwan of Japan

> i'd bet all my savings

Let me get this straight. You think that the US occupied Okinawa until 1972 and then returned it to Japan, only to then decide to play 12 dimensional chess by intentionally antagonizing okinawans and making them hate the us by all the problems they've caused with their military presence, so that Okinawa will some day split from japan and... do what?

Because they sure as hell aren't going to want to have anything to do with the US. Maybe they'll become a vassal state of China again like under the Ryukyu kingdom? I'm not sure that outcome would show that the US wasn't stupid.

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