When Okinawa was turned into a killing field following the U.S. invasion of the island April 1, 1945, Fumiko Nakamura, who lived in Kawasaki, near Tokyo, constantly combed through newspaper articles to get information about the three-month-long battle raging on her homeland. She couldn’t find anything.
It’s no surprise that the state-controlled media didn’t run any negative articles about the Japanese Imperial Army. The subtropical island was believed by many to be sacrificed by the Japanese government to protect Japan’s mainland.
“I heard Okinawa became a battlefield, but I did not find anything about it in newspapers,” recalled Nakamura, a 91-year-old peace activist who now lives in Naha, the island’s capital.
That has not changed much today, as the issues regarding the U.S. military presence on the island are downplayed and even ignored by the media outside Okinawa, according to many residents and experts who saw outside coverage of a U.S. military helicopter crash on the island last August as a prime example.
Soon after the CH-53D chopper crashed into a building at the Okinawa International University adjacent to U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma on Aug. 13, 2004, extra editions with screaming headlines about the crash were distributed in the streets by two local newspapers on the island — the Okinawa Times and the Ryukyu Shimpo.
The crash, which injured three crew members and damaged the school building, coincided with the opening day of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens and the resignation of Tsuneo Watanabe, the owner of the Yomiuri Giants, Japan’s professional baseball team owned by the major daily the Yomiuri Shimbun. The media’s coverage of these two news events was larger than that of the accident, according to Sociology Professor Masaie Ishihara and four other researchers at the Institute of Ryukyuan Culture at the Okinawa International University.
In order to determine what type of coverage the crash received outside of Okinawa, Isihara’s group sent out questionnaires to 80 newspapers, radio and television broadcasters and Tokyo bureaus of some foreign media, 46 of which responded. They found that the mainstream media downplayed the helicopter crash by burying it or ignoring it. Even though some Okinawa-based correspondents reported the event to their Tokyo headquarters, the story was not picked up, the group said, adding that none of the national TV networks, with the exception of Nippon Television Network Corporation (NTV), responded to its questionnaire.
“Although there was such news on the same day, a helicopter crash could have made big news if it had happened in a university campus in Tokyo,” said Kenichi Asano, a journalism professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto. The Japanese media “do not give equal treatment to Okinawa at all,” he said.
Okinawa had been under the U.S. control until it reverted back to Japan in 1972, though “it is still treated as if it were a colony,” according to Asano.
Moreover, not only was the crash newsworthy, but the fact that the U.S. military prohibited government officials, the local police and journalists from entering the crash site should have made headlines, said Asano, a former reporter for Kyodo News Service who served as its bureau chief in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Of four major dailies, the helicopter crash was reported on the front page of The Asahi Shimbun and the Mainichi Shimbun on Aug. 14, however, neither ran follow-up stories on the front page the next day. The stories of the accident were not front-page material for the Yomiuri Shimbun or the Sankei Shimbun. Yomiuri ran a small piece on government reaction on page four and an account of the accident on page 31, while six pages were dedicated to Olympic coverage. Sankei also buried the accident, but on page 27, and gave their stories of the international athletic event five pages.
Isihara’s group’s research, however, showed that the helicopter crash in Okinawa grabbed relatively more attention in local media in prefectures that host U.S. military bases or Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, and in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where the U.S. dropped atomic bombs 60 years ago.
Since the Futenma Air Station is located in the middle of residential areas and schools, many Okinawans have long called for its closure. In fact, the U.S. and Japan did promise in 1996 to relocate the air station within the next five to seven years. In November 2003, when U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited Okinawa, he was surprised to see the bases’s central location from his plane, and conceded the dangerousness.
Those who live near the Futenma Air Station have been long put into a dangerous situation, said Masao Kishimoto, president of the Okinawa Times. “Then that accident took place. I believe it had a strong impact on public opinion.”
Not surprisingly, Okinawans, including Gov. Keiichi Inamine, and two major papers on the island — the Okinawa Times and the Ryukyu Shimpo — strongly opposed the return of U.S. Marine Corps helicopters to the air station after duties in Iraq, while the Marines issued a press release one day before the return, saying “The United States government and the American people are proud of these Okinawa-based servicemen and women, many of whom sacrificed greatly. Their return is a homecoming after a job well done. We hope that the people of Japan can join us in welcoming them back.”
When a squadron of helicopters returned to the island on April 1, the Marine Corps limited the coverage of their return to only Yomiuri, Sankei, Kyodo News, NHK and one local TV station. The two local papers as well as Asahi and Mainichi were excluded. Both Yomiuri and Sankei, however, did not run a story of the event.
When Ryukyu Shimpo reporter Takumi Takimoto, a press club member representing those who cover Okinawa politics, said such discrimination affects Okinawans’ right to know. When he asked the Marines why they discriminated against local news outlets, 1st Lt. Eric C. Tausch, the Marines’ media relations officer, responded to the reporter in an e-mail message.
U.S. Marine Corps selections for news coverage of the event “were based on diversity of news medium (TV, newspaper, wire service) and origin (national, local and U.S.), as well as the size and scope of audience/circulation,” Lt. Tausch explained. “Considering these factors, we invited news agencies with which we have established solid, professional working relationships with and have a reputation for providing fair and balanced news coverage.”
Takimoto countered that “fair coverage” is not made possible when they are not allowed to cover an event and hear what the U.S. military wants to say. He was told that the local newspapers could pick up wire stories, but he insisted that local papers see and report occurrences from a local angle, much differently than national dailies.
“When important information is not opened to people in Okinawa, that puts the residents at a disadvantage,” said Takimoto.
The U.S. military stationed on Okinawa seems to be dissatisfied with how they are treated by the Japanese media, according to Takimoto.
He said the Americans want the media to cover how they contribute to local residents through charities and volunteer work, making an effort to be “good neighbors.” His paper has occasionally covered such events while also running a series of stories about soil contamination caused by the U.S. military.
Which events or occurrences his paper focuses on “depends on how much impact on residents’ lives” events have, Takimoto explained.
American bases on Okinawa cover about 20 percent of the main island. This forward deployment has played a key role in U.S. military strategy in East Asia. But to the Japanese islanders, the U.S. military presence means crowding, government subsidies, an oppressive burden, and occasional accidents and crimes involving American service personnel.
The U.S. and Japanese governments have long failed to deal with the issues of the U.S. military presence, critics and Okinawans said. Although the administration of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has repeatedly claimed the issues are “one of the most important,” the premier has done nothing, they said, adding that the Japanese mainstream media have not advanced public debate on the issues.
For example, the U.S. and Japanese governments have decided to construct an alternate facility to the Futenma Air Station near the east bay of Nago, a northern Okinawa city. The plan has met adamant opposition from islanders, anti-base activists and international environmental groups. The environmentalists say the construction will destroy coral reefs and sea-grass beds and threaten the survival of dugongs. And perhaps most importantly, the base could cost Japanese taxpayers about 1 trillion yen ($10 billion). However, critics and activists say the major media outlets have downplayed this controversial plan. The public relations department of the Yomiuri Shimbun’s Tokyo headquarters insisted when questioned that the paper “reports local residents’ voice[s] accordingly.”
“Issues concerning the U.S. military on Okinawa have been only local news these 10 years. The Japanese mainstream media have never put them on the agenda,” said Asano, of Doshisha University. “It seems those who work for the media think they should not imagine Japanese society or Okinawa without the U.S. military.”
“Although that is reality, it is journalism that [should] still make an issue of it. There is no such attitude” among the media, according to Asano.
The issues of the U.S. military presence on the island had not captured world attention until a 12-year-old local girl was raped by three U.S. servicemen 10 years ago. But it was only after the U.S. media’s intense coverage of the incident and Okinawans’ protests against the U.S. military that Japanese major dailies gradually increased their reporting on Okinawa.
On Sept. 8, 1995, four days after the incident, the Ryukyu Shimpo decided to break the story after local police identified three suspects. On the following day, the Okinawa Times and Mainichi ran a story of the incident. though Mainichi did so on page 27. Asahi first reported it on page 18 of its Sept. 14 evening edition, while Yomiuri buried its first report on page 34 on Sept. 15, 11 days after the girl was raped.
“I still cannot understand why the media here did not report it. I still cannot understand that,” Mary Jordan, a Tokyo correspondent for the Washington Post at the time, said in a 1998 interview.
As soon as Jordan heard of the incident, she flew to Okinawa from Tokyo and wrote a story. The Post first reported it on Sept. 20.
The four major Japanese dailies primarily focused on conflicts between Okinawa and Tokyo since the rape incident prompted then-Okinawa Gov. Masahide Ota to refuse to renew leases on U.S. military installations on the island. But less attention was given to the rape incident itself or the issues surrounding the U.S. military presence.
Still, today the Japanese media fail to highlight the issues, said Koichi Makishi, an architect and author in Okinawa.
“The media call them the issues of Okinawa. They are wrong. The issues are Japan’s problems. The Japanese public needs to consider the issues to be our own problems,” he said. “It is journalism that sets the stage for the public to think about the issues. Journalists should dig up accurate information about them and transmit it to the public. The Japanese mainstream media, however, have no such attitudes. They just report government announcements as they are.”
Ota, now a Social Democratic Party member of the upper house of the Japanese parliament, agreed.
The mainstream media “don’t report the plight of Okinawa at all,” he said. Ota, who has a master’s degree in journalism, added that Japanese journalists also fail to make government leaders held accountable for their statements.
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