OKINAWA: Levittown-on-the-Pacific

History of Okinawa reveal distinguished record of conquerors.

We have honor to be subjugated in 14th century by Chinese pirates.

In 16th century by English missionaries.

In 18th century by Japanese warlords.

And in 20th century by American marines . . .

But Okinawans most eager to be educated by conquerors.

Deep desire to improve friction.

Not easy to learn.

--Sakini, in The Teahouse of the August Moon.

AT the bitter end of World War II, the U.S. captured Okinawa in the bloodiest engagement of the Pacific, and for four years the despondency of devastation settled over the island. On its fields, supplies--stockpiled for an invasion of Japan that never happened--moldered and rotted. Okinawa became "the junkyard of the Pacific," the outpost of the outcasts, the place where old jeeps and obsolete colonels went to rust away under the gentle melancholy of the August moon.

There was even talk of returning it to Japan forthwith.

But in the U.S. awakening that followed the Communist conquest of China and the invasion of Korea, U.S. strategists discovered that Okinawa could be a valuable outpost for more than teahouses. At that point, Okinawa too awoke.

Atomic Cannon. Last week Okinawa was no longer anybody's junkyard. Four-lane highways lace the island. Modern typhoon-proof buildings dot the lush hills. On the seaside flatlands, Army warehouses stretch for serried miles. Hillsides are honeycombed with underground ammunition dumps. Offshore, sleek F-84s practice simulated A-bomb drops. And as the final cap to its new significance, the Army last week landed atomic cannon on Okinawa, the first in the Far East.

Since 1949 the U.S. has poured $350 million into Okinawa for construction that will eventually total half a billion dollars.

The garrison now includes 30,000 U.S. military personnel.

Kadena Air Base, with its 9,000-ft. runway, has become the Air Force's most important Far Eastern home. Naha Air Base is nearly as big. The Army, Defense Secretary Wilson declared recently, expects to make Okinawa its major troop base, capable of staging more troops than it handled (182,000) in World War II. And when the rest of the 3rd Marine Division, now scattered from Japan to Hawaii, makes its scheduled move to Okinawa when housing is ready, Okinawa will be headquarters for the largest Marine striking force in the Orient.

The U.S. often proclaimed that it wanted no territorial gain out of World War II. The big exception is Okinawa. According to an official U.S. Army handout, Okinawa-based bombers "have a far greater flexibility in choice of target areas than those based in either Japan or in the Philippines . . . They can reach all important target areas within an arc which includes all of Southeast Asia, the whole of China, the Lake Baikal industrial area, eastern Siberia, and the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula." In other words, Okinawa is the spearhead of U.S. retaliatory power in the Far East.

G.I. without KP. It has also become one of the Army's lushest assignments. Instead of hot and confined Quonset huts, there are new G.I. housing developments that look like Levittowns-on-the-Pacific. Modern concrete houses, bright with yellow, grey and white paint, stand on winding streets behind broad green lawns. Sergeants with families get three-bedroom, two-bathroom ranch-style houses complete with Government-supplied furniture, the latest-model refrigerators, and excellent plumbing. Closets are electrically dehumidified against mildew in Okinawa's muggy climate, and a full-time maid costs only $153 month. For military personnel there are three golf courses, four bathing beaches, air-conditioned PXs. Officers' and noncoms' clubs feature dancing nightly, advertise on the Armed Forces Radio: "For an enjoyable evening, why not come on up tonight to the Club Top Three? It's within easy distance of most installations on the island." On one post, G.I.s even get out of KP by chipping in about $1 a month to hire Okinawan stand-ins.

As a result of all the military bustle, the Okinawan economy has boomed. One of every four in Okinawa's labor force works for the U.S. military. Though Okinawans are paid only from 8-c- to 21-c- an hour, these are the highest wages in Okinawan history. A new city of paved streets and concrete-block buildings is rising to replace the dirt streets and shattered houses of the old capital city of Naha. Last week stonemasons and carpenters worked under lights until midnight rushing a new $350,000 movie theater, which will have a CinemaScope screen, air conditioning, and a cabaret in the basement.

One Okinawan businessman has contracted to build the U.S. Army's new $7,000,000 hospital; another, a onetime gardener, now owns 30 movie theaters. There are new power plants, new dams, new roads, new schools. The number of schoolrooms has increased tenfold since war's end; the death rate is down to less than 40% of prewar. Many Okinawans who once existed exclusively on a sweet-potato diet have climbed a rung on the Oriental living scale and eat rice. "Before the war, only section chiefs and above in the government wore shoes," says one Okinawan. "Now everybody has a pair." The Colonial Business. Without anyone really intending it that way, the U.S. has been thrust into the colonial business. It has taken on 790,000 wards; and U.S. officials on the scene are a little sheepish about their role. Okinawans see all about them -- in the widening airstrips, the concrete barracks, the four-lane highways -- visible evidence that their latest conquerors are in Okinawa to stay. The legal situation is deliberately fuzzy. The U.S. has acknowledged Japan's "residual sovereignty" over Okinawa. But by the Japanese Peace Treaty, Japan promised to concur if the U.S. proposed a U.N. trusteeship for Okinawa "with the U.S. as sole administering authority," and pending such trusteeship, granted the U.S. full jurisdiction. The U.S. has never applied for a U.N. trusteeship. The Japanese government has expressed "pain and anxiety" about the future of the Ryukyu Islands, and in 1953 the U.S. returned the northern Ryukyus to Japan. At the same time, the U.S. stated that it would keep control of Okinawa and the rest of the Ryukyus, "so long as conditions of threat and tension exist in the Far East"--that is, said Secretary of State Dulles, "for the foreseeable future." The U.S. military runs Okinawa and makes no bones about it. Even the currency is U.S. occupation yen, and though the Okinawans are theoretically Japanese citizens, they travel abroad on a certificate of identity issued by U.S. authorities.

The U.S. Far East commander, General Lyman Lemnitzer, holds the title of Governor of the Ryukyu Islands. His deputy governor and actual operating boss of the islands is Major General James E. Moore, 53, who was the Ninth Army's chief of staff in World War II, most recently served as commandant of the Army War College.

Conscientiously, the U.S. has set up a representative government for Okinawa, with native courts and a 29-man elective legislature, for which it has built a fine modern building that any U.S. state legislature might envy. But the chief executive, a pleasant, bald, one-armed ex-schoolteacher named Shuhei Higa, is appointed by the U.S. Civil Administration (USCAR), and his office is in the U.S. administration building directly beneath USCAR offices. Anything that the native government does, USCAR can veto --though it rarely has. Newspapers are not censored, but editors who criticize the U.S. occupation too freely are apt to get a talking to. "Step by step, they are training us for self-government," says Chief Executive Higa, nodding his head upward at the floor above him. Was such training necessary? "That's an embarrassing question" says Higa.

"Land Is Forever."Actually the Okinawans have more self-government than they ever did under the Japanese. Their chief complaint is land. For its expanding bases and installations, the U.S. has taken or will take almost one-quarter of all the arable land on an island where the population density is already 800 per square mile. The U.S. fixed rents at 6% of assessed value, and made the assessments apparently generous -- an average $330 an acre. But the average Okinawan family owned only 0.8 acre. At the 6% rate, this came to only $15.84 a year--"Coca-Cola money," the Okinawans said bitterly. On the 0.8-acre plot, an Okinawan can grow enough sweet potatoes to keep his family alive; on $15.84, he starves unless he finds another job.

Even so, land is lying fallow all over Okinawa because the owner makes better money working for the U.S. Army--running laundry machines, driving trucks, working in construction gangs. General Moore argues that Okinawans must learn to give up subsistence farming and adjust to an economy like Hawaii's, which lives off servicing the military. The U.S.

has tried earnestly to make things as easy as possible. It has cut its own requirements to the bone. It tries to find substitute land, has stamped out malaria on the southern offshore islands where displaced farmers might settle.

Okinawans, like landowners anywhere, are apt to regard their own plot as "a poor thing but mine own," and to be exasperatingly impervious to generosity in the name of progress. The U.S. pays each farmer up to $150 for moving costs, supplies him with trucks to move, lumber and corrugated iron for new houses, lays out water systems and roads on new sites.

First, the Okinawans said that annual payments were too small, so the U.S. decided to pay a lump sum for each piece of land. At this point Okinawa's Chief Executive Higa flew off to Washington and persuaded Congress to defer the plan.

Explains Higa: "It is more than economic.

It is the feeling of the people, handed down from generation to generation. If we sell land to others, we do a very bad thing against our ancestors, against our children. They say, 'Money is for a year; land is forever.' " When U.S. authorities recently tried to take over the little village of Isahama for a new military housing project, 150 villagers sat down in front of the construction crew's draglines. Surveyors' stakes were yanked out and burned. In the end, the Army had to stage a predawn assault with bulldozers and trucks. Paddy dikes that took years to build were churned flat under the bulldozer's blade. One group of farmers made a feeble stand before a bulldozer. A pistol-carrying U.S. officer shouted them off. Shrugging at the inevitable, they shuffled away.

Okinawan laborers hired by the Army dismantled the thatched-roof huts and carefully numbered each beam and board. They were loaded on trucks along with rice bowls, bundles of clothing, pans and mats. A few hundred yards away on the other side of the highway, they were unloaded in neat piles. Over a cup of tea, one of the Okinawan drivers sympathized with a dispossessed farmer. "This touches me to the quick," he muttered. He waved one arm in the direction of a sleek U.S. installation. "Like kings," he said. Of 50,000 dispossessed farmers, 92% have appealed for redress.

"Our mission is to defend this island and to ensure its uninterrupted use as a military base," says General Moore. "If we don't have land to train on, we might as well send our troops back home." But if the U.S. wants to be secure in its new island fortress and in the esteem of watching Asia, it must reach decisions soon on how it is to compensate, and how generously, for the land it has taken. Occupation, even with CinemaScope and four-lane highways, never was easy.

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