Days ago, residents in Kinowan City of Okinawa Prefecture protested to the defense authorities against noise pollution caused by increased night flights at the Futenma U.S. air base.
Local media said that the U.S. is continuing their night flights under the pretence of protecting Japan although the governments of Japan and the U.S. have concluded an agreement on noise control to limit the night flights of the U.S. warplanes. And local residents have made more than 100 complaints about their mental and physical sufferings from noise for the last two months as the number of night flights has drastically increased since April, local media reported.
As the reality shows, the U.S. military base in Japan is not the “pillar of security” but the source of misfortune and pain and hotbed of crimes that seriously endangers the lives of Japanese people.
Last year alone, such warplane accidents as emergency landing, collision and aircraft component drop broke out one after another from the outset of the year to panic citizens and such crimes as murder of a Japanese woman, assault on a policeman, drunken driving and house burgling were committed by GIs.
In this April, there was a sensational case of large-scale poisonous material leakage at Futenma base and two GIs recently robbed an exchange house in Okinawa Prefecture.
Nevertheless, the government obliged to protect the lives and properties of its people is only busy with preserving the privileges of the U.S. troops in Japan.
Whenever an accident happens, it fails to make even a word of protest to its master but ends up with wresting an “apology” or “commitment to prevent the recurrence”. It goes against the will of the people demanding the fundamental revision of the “Japan-U.S. status of forces agreement” which gives the U.S. troops in Japan extraterritorial rights, and feigns ignorance as if the problem is in the application of agreement.
Japan, which overlooks the sufferings of its people while reading the face of foreign forces, is a “sovereign state” without sovereignty that is going to ruin.
Such mean behavior of the Japanese authorities engrossed in sycophancy toward the U.S., bereft of dignity and rights as a state, is just the sealed fate of the vassal state shackled by its master politically, economically and militarily.
The politicians of the island country are feigning that they are suffering humiliation and shame for a great thing but the reality is that Japan has neither guts to offend its master nor strength to bear the consequences.
The U.S. is urging Japan to pay an astronomical amount of money as defense cost, impudently saying that Japan is an allied country, not a vassal one, and that the relations between the two countries over the issue of security should be equal. This seems as if it is making fun of the miserable position of the island country in a fix.
The pain and misfortune of the Japanese people can never vanish as long as the government’s sycophancy goes on. -0-
