A Marine’s Son Takes On U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa

OKINAWA, Japan — Concluding a stump speech before more than 500 supporters in a large auditorium, Denny Tamaki, a candidate for governor on this southern Japanese island blanketed by U.S. military installations, invoked his parentage to explain why he thinks he is uniquely qualified for the job.

“My father is American and my mother is Okinawan,” said Tamaki, 58, who never actually met his father, a Marine who returned to the United State before Tamaki was born.

On this island chain about 650 miles from the Japanese mainland, the presence of U.S. military bases, dating to the end of World War II, has been a recurring source of tension. Okinawans have complained about crime, noise and other problems associated with the bases and have questioned why half of the 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan are stationed on Okinawa.

Tamaki is running in an election Sunday to succeed Takeshi Onaga, an outspoken critic of the U.S. bases who died last month of pancreatic cancer.

Tamaki says that his American heritage could help him negotiate with the U.S. government over a planned relocation of a busy Marine air base from a central Okinawan city to a less-populated coastal area. Tamaki wants the base moved off Okinawa altogether.

“It’s not possible that the democracy of the country of my father will reject me,” Tamaki said at the campaign rally Monday night, to laughter from the audience. “Only Denny can say that.”

Tamaki — who describes himself in a campaign video as a “symbol of postwar Okinawa” — is running neck and neck in the polls with his chief opponent, Atsushi Sakima, until recently the mayor of Ginowan, where the Marine air base is located. Sakima is backed by the governing party of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who won a party leadership election last week and supports the plan to relocate the base.

Just two weeks after Naomi Osaka, the daughter of a Haitian-American father and Japanese mother, won the U.S. Open, Tamaki is defying the discrimination he experienced as a mixed-race child in Okinawa, where such children are not uncommon given intermarriages between U.S. soldiers and Japanese women.

Tamaki, the first Amerasian to be elected to Japan’s House of Representatives, has been taunted on social media for his background. “Denny Tamaki, you can’t be a true Japanese no matter how hard you try but you are an incomplete ‘half,'” one commentator wrote on Twitter.

“Denny says, ‘I am half American so I can talk to the U.S.’ Hahaha, the world is not that optimistic,” someone else wrote on Twitter. “You can’t even speak English!”

Tamaki’s supporters said they view his blended heritage as an asset. “Being a mixed-race governor is unprecedented,” said Yuichi Kiwaki, a beverage salesman who attended the campaign rally Monday with his family. “So I think there are some things only he can do.”

Tamaki faces a considerable challenge from his opponent, who is receiving heavy support from Tokyo.

Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party has sent heavy hitters, including Shinjiro Koizumi, the son of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, and Yuriko Koike, the governor of Tokyo, to campaign for Sakima. The Komeito party, the Liberal Democrats’ coalition partner in Parliament, has also endorsed Sakima.

The election comes at a time when Abe is ever watchful for signals that President Donald Trump might pull back from the long-standing U.S. security alliance with Japan.

As Japan monitors territorial disputes with China in the East China Sea and China has claimed sovereignty over nearly all of the South China Sea, the Japanese government considers the U.S. bases on Okinawa crucial to the country’s security.

“For the Abe administration, the picture is that the election in Okinawa is the one that they have to win,” said Seiji Endo, professor of international politics at Seikei University in Tokyo. “They want to make sure that the operation of the U.S.-Japan security pact will be kept stable.”

The governor’s race is complicated by Okinawans’ evolving — and often ambivalent — views.

Many residents recognize that the bases have lifted the local economy, contributing slightly more than 5 percent of the region’s revenue. Okinawa is Japan’s poorest prefecture.

But residents have also been angered by accidents involving U.S. aircraft and violent crimes committed by U.S. service members, including the rape and murder of an Okinawan woman by a military contractor and Marine veteran in 2016.

A generational divide is emerging between older residents who nurse the wounds of history and younger voters who are looking for practical improvements more closely related to their daily lives.

To people like Naomi Machida, 62, the owner of a cafe near the Marine air base who was among Tamaki’s supporters at the campaign event Monday, rejecting the relocation of the U.S. base is the primary driver of her vote.

“I want to reject anything related to war in Okinawa,” said Machida, who recalled her mother’s experiences during the Battle of Okinawa, the World War II battle that cost tens of thousands of lives. “I can’t express with words the importance of this election. It is a life-or-death issue.”

To many younger people, the bases are less central to their political calculations.

“Military bases have been here since they were born,” said Manabu Sato, professor of political science at Okinawa International University, which overlooks the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma that is slated for relocation. “The U.S. military personnel and their families are on the street and come to the shopping malls and supermarkets and fast-food restaurants where my students work part-time, so the presence of the U.S. military is nothing to question for them.”

On the campus, Shin Tanahara, 22, a law major, said most of his classmates were more worried about job hunting than the fate of the base.

“People tend to focus only on the bases, but we have to think of other issues as well,” Tanahara said. Among his concerns, he said, was poverty and helping to increase tourism in the region. He plans to vote for Sakima. Up in Henoko Bay, a fishing village where the Japanese and U.S. governments agreed to move the Futenma air base a dozen years ago, a chain-link fence topped by barbed wire blocked off a long stretch of beach designated for a new runway.

Just before he died, Onaga announced that he would rescind his predecessor’s approval to use landfill in the construction of the runway, the latest in a series of legal maneuvers he used to thwart the base’s relocation.

Miwako Aragaki, a clerk at a grocery store in town, said she voted for Onaga four years ago because of his opposition to the new base and would vote for Tamaki this time.

During the campaign, U.S. military officials are trying to remain “as invisible as we can humanly be,” said Lt. Gen. Eric Smith, the commander of the III Marine Expeditionary Force on Okinawa.

In an interview in his office overlooking an expanse of ocean about 20 miles south of Henoko, Smith said it would be up to Okinawa to negotiate with Tokyo over the location of any new bases.

“That is a really an internal question for the government of Japan,” he said.

On the campaign trail, Sakima has steadfastly avoided talking directly about the U.S. bases, focusing instead on the economy. At a campaign event in Yonabaru on the southern end of the island Tuesday night, Sakima touted his work to reduce school lunch fees and medical costs as mayor of Ginowan.

Ryogo Okuhira, 31, a construction worker who attended the campaign event, said he liked Sakima’s focus on the economy and was skeptical that Tamaki would lure new businesses to Okinawa if he was preoccupied with the fate of the military base.

“Reality is more important than ideals,” Okuhira said.