Gavan McCormack here explores matters raised in his 2018 book with Satoko Oka Norimatsu (Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States, 2nd edition), outlines recent judicial, political, diplomatic and ecological developments with a bearing on the “Okinawa problem,” and considers the tactics and strategy employed in the long-running contest by Okinawa's social movements on the one hand and the Japanese and American states on the other. The text that follows is a slightly revised version of the invited lecture he delivered at International Christian University in Tokyo on 11 November 2019.

A vivid close up view from the front lines of the protest by Okinawans and their supporters against construction of a new US Marine Base at Henoko, Okinawa.

On November 8, 2019 in Seoul, Wada Haruki delivered this urgent call to peace. It is in many respects a summation of his life's thinking, and APJ presents it as such.

As Northeast Asia confronts the stark choice between constructive peace and its cataclysmic opposite, nuclear war, Wada forcefully demands peace, well aware that his plan —like others in his career—is a “sheer product of imagination.” That said, his imagined ideas, springing from a lifelong commitment to a world without war, are more important than ever. Born in Tokyo in 1938, one of Professor Wada's recent books includes reproduction of the eight year old elementary-school handwriting practice of the Chinese character for “peace,” which he juxtaposes below now-retired Emperor Akihito's similar calligraphy homework (older than Wada by five years). For their shared immediate post-1945 era, “peace” was the order of the day; some students like Wada and arguably the former emperor learned; others did not.