The year 2016 might turn out to be a decisive one in the long-running contest between the Japanese state and Okinawa prefecture over the construction of a new base for the US Marine Corps at Henoko on Oura Bay, although it seems that this is far from being the first time on which I have written of a prospective year of crisis and change in what has become known as the “Okinawa problem,” only to find as the year wore on that the crisis steadily deepened without resolution. It is clear anyway that this will be a year of elections and court proceedings, and that it will also almost certainly be one of deepening confrontation between the popular Okinawan resistance on one side and the forces of the Abe state with their monopoly of violence and growing readiness to use it on the other.

The Tripartite Pact linking Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan was signed in Berlin on September 27, 1940. Less than two months after the pact was signed, a six-member delegation of Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) arrived in Japan. This was actually the second Hitler Jugend delegation to visit Japan, a much larger delegation having first visited in the fall of 1938. In honor of the first delegation's visit, a song was composed entitled Banzai Hitorā Jūgento (Long Live Hitler Youth!). A recording of this song together with photographs highlighting the activities of both the first and second delegations in Japan is embedded below.