Okinawa is far from Tokyo, even farther from Washington. An insignificant group of islands with a mere 1.3 million people, it is, more than anywhere, the child of the US-Japan relationship, in which the essential nature of both, and of their relationship, is starkly revealed. Insignificant … and yet, by their location between China and Japan, and between Japan and Southeast Asia, they are of extraordinary strategic significance in the postwar strategic calculus in the Asia Pacific region. Only in Okinawa does one become conscious that Japan's “peace state” has long had its counterpart of Okinawa as “war state.” Now, as the rest of Japan faces the implications of US pressure to become a fully-fledged ally, the “Great Britain of the Far East,” and as forces associated with the Libral Democratic Party relish and seek to advance this prospect, it is to Okinawa that one may look to see what this might mean.