Shoichi Kina Speaks about U.S. Military Expansion in the Documentary ANPO

The film ANPO is a sequel to Wings of Defeat, which includes rare interviews with surviving kamikazi pilots. It portrays the movement against U.S. bases through the eyes of artists and musicians:

ANPO opens as a squadron of F-16 fighter jets thunder directly over local traffic to land on Kadena, the largest U.S. airbase in Asia. Ten miles south, the urban homes that crowd Futenma Marine Corps Air Station shake from the numbing drone of C-130 cargo planes whose novice pilots repeatedly practice “touch-and-go” take-offs and landings. The U.S. base at Futenma is one of 30 bases in Okinawa, an island that makes up only 1% of Japan’s land mass while shouldering the burden of 75% of the U.S. military installations in Japan. That presence includes over 28,000 American troops, rivaling  the number deployed to the active war zone of Afghanistan. America’s military presence was negotiated in 1951 under the terms of the lopsided U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty, known in Japan as “ANPO.”  Under its provisions, American soldiers who rape Japanese women and girls are often protected from local prosecution. Prime farming lands have been confiscated from farmers to extend air force jet runways. Civilians are killed in hit-and-run accidents by drunken US servicemen with few held to account. In one particularly egregious case, a woman collecting shell casings to sell was shot in the back and killed by a US soldier who served no time for her death.

Protests by Japanese enraged by the onerous terms of the security treaty have generally been ignored by Japan’s ruling party. Yet for a brief window of time during the summer of 1960, shopkeepers, children and housewives joined a coalition of artists, farmers, students, laborers, and intellectuals in a series of massive demonstrations to block the renewal of the treaty. Tens of thousands of protestors marched on the Japanese parliament to demand an end to the unequal partnership with Washington. Among the protesters was a small cadre of Japan’s most talented artists. They used the creativity of their paintings, film, photography, manga, and music to give a powerful voice to the protests and to document the many ways in which the American military presence has intruded upon Japanese life and sovereignty.

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