23.10.2015

"I Oppose the Expansion of US Bases in Okinawa"
23. Oktober 2015
The Okinawa Movement for human rights, property rights, & democracy began in the autumn of 1955 after the kidnapping, rape, & murder of a 6-year old Okinawan girl during the violent US military "Bayonets & Bulldozers" seizures & destruction of entire Okinawan villages to make way for US military base construction:
"Yumiko went to kindergarten that day. It was noticed at about 8 p.m that she was missing, when she didn't come home from playing outdoors...The next day, her body was found in a military garbage dump on the Kadena Air Base. She had been raped & murdered, and her body looked as if it had "been cut up with a sharp knife from the abdominal region to the bowel". An indictment was submitted against Sergeant Isaac J. Hurt..."

Historian Miyume Tanji explains the connection between forced US military seizure & destruction of Okinawan land & US military rape in Okinawa:
“Victimization of Okinawan farmers & the forceful [US] acquisition of their land was combined with the physical violence inflicted on the locals personally. In Sept 1955, the mutilated corpse of a six-year-old girl was found,,,near the major US Air Force Base... Less than a week later, another US soldier raped another child. Violence directed towards the local populace by US military staff, especially rape, revealed the crudest & most brutal aspect of power relations between the occupiers and the occupied...
"...Angst explains that “the violation of the girl’s virginal body” is equated with the violation of the Okinawan body politic.” (Angst 2001:252).

"The brutality of the 1955 Yumiko-chan incident provided powerful symbols of the humiliation of all “Okinawans” in postwar Okinawan history. Irei, who was a student activist campaigning for reversion, recalls the time of the Yumiko-chan incident: ‘In tears, my university friends and I discussed that these incidents were evidence of racial insult. I was convinced that these crimes would never disappear unless we (the Okinawans) recover our human rights as Japanese guaranteed by the Constitution.’ (Irei 1983:82).
“The mass protest against US crimes after the Yumiko-chan incident was staged at the earliest Okinawan Citizens’ Rally (Kenmin taikai) (Nakano and Arasaki 1976: 83). In the Okinawan community of protest, Citizens’ Rallies have recurred - and continue today - whenever major accidents and crimes were caused by the US military and its staff.”
Source:  "Myth, Protest, and Struggle in Okinawa"(2006), p. 70
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yumiko-chan_incident





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