In Japan, there are 76 exclusive-use U.S. military bases, hosted at the invitation of the Japanese government under the 1960 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan. Despite occasional disagreements over how much money Japan should contribute to the alliance, both Tokyo and Washington have long supported this military presence. In her most recent meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in March 2026, for example, Japan Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae promised, “Going forward, I will continue to work with President Trump to elevate the Japan-U.S. alliance to further heights.”
However, the U.S. military presence in Okinawa Prefecture is more controversial. Although the islands consist of less than 1 percent of Japan’s total land mass, by area they host 70 percent of the U.S. military footprint in Japan. As a result, Okinawans bear the burden of military crimes, noise, and environmental damage; moreover, the bases hinder the local economy and infrastructural improvements. Many residents believe that the concentration of these bases in their communities is unfair – and that the U.S. bases should be redistributed more evenly throughout the country.
In a new book, Jon Mitchell – a journalist with Okinawa Times – draws upon his 16 years of experience reporting about Okinawa to explore how the islands came to host the bulk of the U.S. military presence in Japan. In the excerpt below, Mitchell discusses some of the arguments and misconceptions about the current U.S. military presence in Okinawa. The text has been revised from its original version for conciseness.
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The United States and Japan insist that the American military in Japan furnishes an indispensable deterrence effect, which dissuades potential enemies from attacking the nation. Given that 70 percent of the U.S. military presence can be found in Okinawa Prefecture, it would be natural to assume that the weight of deterrence lies there, too. But a closer examination shows that the elements with the most ability to deter attack are located on mainland Japan and elsewhere.
Yokosuka City, Kanagawa Prefecture, is host to the largest U.S. Navy base overseas, home to more than 50 ships and submarines, notably the only U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier homeported outside the United States. In Tokyo, Yokota Air Base is headquarters to U.S. Forces Japan (USFJ) and the Fifth Air Force. Meanwhile Camp Zama, Kanagawa Prefecture, houses the U.S. Army’s headquarters in Japan, serving four thousand soldiers and their families. Covering these bases – and Japan as a whole – is a network of defensive missiles, while above stands the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Since the Cold War, Tokyo has sought – and received – assurances from the United States that if Japan came under threat by a nuclear-armed foe, Washington would use its nuclear arsenal to defend it.
So how do the 31 U.S. bases in Okinawa serve to deter potential enemy aggression? Arguably, the facility with the largest role is Kadena Air Base, which was used to launch attacks in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The Pentagon still refers to Kadena as the “Keystone of the Pacific,” and it hosts the largest combat wing in the air force.
Despite its size, noise, and environmental damage, the possibility of shutting the base is not raised by Japanese politicians in discussions to reduce the military footprint. As Okinawa International University professor Maedomari Hiromori argued, “The reason is clear. It’s because ‘Kadena is off limits.’” Asking the Americans to remove their keystone, Japanese officials believe, would become tantamount to suggesting the dissolution of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty itself.
Besides Kadena, though, the deterrent role of Okinawa’s other 30 U.S. bases is more dubious. The army occupies a handful of facilities, but its main mission is relegated to maintaining fuel supplies for the other services, plus the management of Naha Military Port, which is only seldom used (much to the chagrin of residents, who lament the waste of waterfront real estate). The navy has five facilities, notably a port at White Beach (shared with the army), where no vessels are permanently stationed.
So that brings us to the U.S. marine corps, the most prominent military presence in Okinawa (130 square kilometers). Forced from mainland Japan by protests in the 1950s, today the marines have 13 bases in Okinawa, including Futenma Air Station in the middle of Ginowan City. Experts have attempted to assess the extent of deterrence the marines truly provide – and most have concluded the answer is very little. Professor Mike Mochizuki or George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs contended that Japanese policymakers’ assertions of the marines’ deterrence were vague and the roles of the U.S. Air Force and Navy – plus the nuclear umbrella – were more important.
According to Yanagisawa Kyōji, former head of Japan’s National Institute of Defense Studies, too, U.S. nuclear weapons and conventional missile defense systems have a more powerful deterrent effect: “The U.S. Marine Corps troops are ready to be deployed anywhere in the world. By the nature of their mission, they are not to stay and defend a specific region.”
The most thorough exploration of the deterrence provided by the marines in Okinawa was conducted by Paul O’Shea of the Center for East and Southeast Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden. O’Shea argued that “the Marines’ role in deterrence is overstated at best, and relatively insignificant at worst.” Their deployment in the event of a conflict in the East China Sea would be unlikely or difficult due to the stationing of their transport ships in mainland Japan, O’Shea found. Moreover, compared to the larger deterrence created by the U.S. Air Force and Navy and joint operations with the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF), stationing marines in Okinawa added little to the overall effect.
Both Mochizuki and O’Shea argued that instead of providing essential deterrence, the preponderance of marine (and other bases) in Okinawa might conversely have the opposite result. “One could argue that the Marines play as much a ‘magnet’ role as a deterrent one,” O’Shea wrote.
Sitting Ducks
Long before China and North Korea developed missiles capable of reaching Okinawa, American officials questioned the wisdom of cramming so many bases into such a tight space. During the mid-1950s, even as the United States was forcibly expanding its facilities in Okinawa, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned they were “sitting ducks – difficult if not impossible to defend, likely to be knocked out completely in a one-shot operation.” In the following years, the Soviet Union and China developed their nuclear arsenals, heightening the risks. As well as enemy attack, the military’s own negligence posed an equally catastrophic threat, as shown by a 1959 Nike Hercules misfire at Naha Air Base and a hydrogen bomb lost from the USS Ticonderoga in 1965. (And then there are the natural dangers posed by typhoons, earthquakes, and tsunami.)
As China developed its missile capabilities and staged strikes against a mocked-up Kadena Air Base in its western deserts, even military commanders were ringing alarm bells. In 2020, the Indo-Pacific Command told U.S. Congress, “It is not strategically prudent, nor operationally viable to physically concentrate on large, close-in bases that are highly vulnerable to a potential adversary’s strike capability.” Then in 2023, the Congressional Research Service published an assessment of military infrastructure, quoting specialists who surmised that Kadena Air Base was “uniquely ill-positioned for permanently basing large numbers of American aircraft” and urged rotating and dispersing U.S. forces in the region.
It is a stark irony that, as of the mid-2020s, many military officials finally aligned their thinking with what Okinawans had been demanding for decades: the relocation of the bases away from their islands. Nevertheless, the U.S. military still possessed 31 military bases in Okinawa, consisting of 70 percent of its presence in Japan.
So Why Is the U.S. Military Really in Okinawa?
Responsibility for the ongoing overconcentration of bases in Okinawa must be apportioned between the United States and Japan. For America, the islands provide three advantages: the projection of power; the ability to train forces without civilian interference; and, most importantly, money. For Japan, Okinawa serves as a national sacrifice zone, a place geographically distant from the mainland that can be forced to bear the dangers that the rest of the nation refuses to tolerate.
Power Projection
For eight decades, the United States has used Okinawa to stage military, covert, and psychological warfare around the world. Initially, it used the veneer of U.N. trusteeship to control Okinawa, alongside islands in Micronesia, from which to run CIA operations, test and stockpile weapons of mass destruction, and fight wars throughout Asia (while denying these islands’ residents the freedoms it was claiming to promote). These aggressions compelled Okinawans to campaign for reversion, but after 1972, the United States continued to use its bases to dispatch troops to wars in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Successive Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) governments have backed these wars, for example contributing $13 billion toward the U.S.-led Gulf War.
Freedom to Train
The U.S. military regards Okinawa Prefecture as one big training site, teaching jungle and urban warfare, beach assaults, parachute drops, and air-to-ground bombings. Unlike within the United States, where such exercises tend to occur far from residential areas and the Pentagon (sometimes) heeds local communities’ complaints, it routinely ignores Okinawans’ objections. When training goes wrong (as it often does), the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) allows the military to escape the consequences, covering up aircraft accidents and blocking local officials from accessing crash sites. Military exercises take a heavy toll on the environment, and Japanese taxpayers are left with the tab to clean up unexploded ordnance, depleted uranium, and drinking water contaminated with PFAS from decades of on-base firefighter training.
The Money
In 1935, decorated marine General Smedley D. Butler wrote the best-selling booklet “War Is a Racket,” in which he railed against arms manufacturers profiting from conflict and U.S. colonialism. Ninety years later, the general’s name adorns marine corps bases in Okinawa via the collective title for six facilities: Camp Smedley D. Butler. Whether intended or not, the naming rubs Japanese taxpayers’ noses in the fact that they pay 211 billion yen a year in host-nation support, an estimated 75 percent of the cost of stationing U.S. troops in Japan and almost double the ratio paid by South Korea. It is cheaper for the United States to keep its troops in Japan than at home.
Between 1978 and 2010, Japan paid some $22 billion in improvements to U.S. facilities. Then it funded a $500 million NSA listening post at Camp Hansen and MV-22 Osprey landing pads in the Yanbaru forests. Under the 2009 Guam Agreement – slammed by historian Gavan McCormack as “illegal, colonial, and deceitful” – Tokyo also promised to build two new marine corps bases: one atop Oura Bay (costing between $2-22 billion) and the other in Guam ($6 billion). Tokyo’s funding is so generous that even when the U.S. military breaks the law, Japanese taxpayers foot the costs – in court rulings for illegal noise from U.S. air bases, the compensation comes from the Japanese government. Moreover, American arms manufacturers have enjoyed a windfall. According to the Department of State, as of 2021, Japan was paying at least $32.5 billion for U.S. weaponry and other military equipment. If war is a racket, then Japanese taxpayers are the marks.
Structural Discrimination
Although the three aforementioned factors make it attractive for the United States to locate its military in Japan, this still leaves unanswered the question of why the bases need to be in Okinawa. Under the terms of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, the United States would enjoy these benefits wherever in Japan its troops were stationed. Ultimately, then, the answer must lie with the Japanese government.
In previous decades, Tokyo has spurned repeated U.S. suggestions to move the military from Okinawa because mainland politicians are unwilling to force bases on their constituents. The hypocrisy was highlighted by former Governor of Okinawa Onaga Takeshi, who said, “If the majority of the citizens of Japan feel that the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty is necessary, then the government should fairly distribute the burden of the U.S. bases to the rest of Japan.”
Many Okinawans assert that such treatment is a manifestation of structural discrimination (kōzōteki sabetsu). In addition to the overt discrimination historically experienced by Okinawans (slurs; signs barring them from businesses; and racist 1950s wage scales), structural discrimination refers to the ways in which U.S. and Japanese government policies have colluded to keep the bases there.
The Okinawa Human Rights Association attributed structural discrimination to the “coexistence of the U.S. government’s self-righteousness and the Japanese government’s abnormal subordination towards the United States.” Historian Arasaki Moriteru took the argument further, asserting that structural discrimination against Okinawans was a fundamental pillar of Japan-U.S. relations: “This mechanism was created by the United States, the victor and occupier, and was carried over even after Japan’s independence.”
Meanwhile, academic Matsushima Yasukatsu drew a reptilian analogy: Okinawa “can be sacrificed like the cut-off tail of a lizard. Whenever Japan faces an inconvenient situation, it makes use of Okinawa, historically as a negotiator with China, or as a commodity to sell, as a place to fight her battles or to establish military bases.”
As these arguments demonstrate, without the sacrifice of Okinawa, modern Japan would not exist as it is. The nation is predicated on the past and present exploitation of the islands’ residents. Since the 1879 Ryukyu Disposal through World War II, Japan used the islands to secure its own safety. In 1951, Japan ceded Okinawa in exchange for the return of its own sovereignty (albeit nominal). Then, thanks to base-construction contracts and the sieve economy, Japan was able to boost its dollar reserves. Today, because more than two-thirds of U.S. bases are shunted onto Okinawa, mainland Japanese residents are largely safe from military crimes, accidents, and environmental damage. Likewise, many enjoy the (illusory) sense of security provided by the bases located out of sight and mind far away to the south. Accordingly, the happiness of mainland Japan remains rooted in the exploitation of Okinawans, but you would be hard-pressed to find mainland residents of any political stripe who would willingly acknowledge this fact.
Persistent discrimination against Okinawans begs the question: why is there not more international acknowledgment of the problem? For certain, some blame lies with the global media’s poor track record of covering indigenous movements that clash with U.S. defense priorities. Another factor is the extent to which the two governments have been able to limit knowledge about Okinawa. Between 1945 and 1972, the U.S. military controlled travel to the islands, and after reversion, both countries destroyed vast volumes of official documents. The Japanese government, too, pushes to erase evidence of its wartime atrocities from history textbooks, paving the way for a new generation to embrace a remilitarized Japan.
Because the media, the military, and schools are failing to report about Okinawa, misinformation often seeps in to fill the vacuum. This confusion provides fertile ground for Chinese nationalists to launch their own erroneous claims that Okinawa does not belong to Japan and the Senkaku Islands have always been an inherent part of Chinese territory.
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This article was excerpted from “Why are We in Okinawa? A History of Violence” by Jon Mitchell. © Bloomsbury Publishing 2026.
“Why are We in Okinawa? A History of Violence” can be purchased directly from the publisher here. Enter the code GLR BD8 for a 20 percent discount.
