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