The General & the Mayor

When fiery, brittle little Kamejiro Senaga was elected mayor of Naha last year, conservative Okinawan businessmen and U.S. authorities immediately went to work to unseat him. Senaga, an ex-journalist who ran a general store as a sideline to his job as mayor, had already served 18 months of a two-year jail sentence for harboring a wanted Japanese Communist, and was widely regarded as a Communist himself.

Mayor Senaga lost no time in making the U.S. occupation authorities miserable. Though the money spent by the U.S. on its base has made Okinawans rich beyond their modest dreams, there is resentment that the U.S. has reserved 21% of the arable land for U.S. use, planted on it jet runways, housing for 40,000 military people, and three golf courses. The Okinawan base is crucial to the West's Pacific defenses, and the U.S. has made it clear that it has no intention of turning over administration to local authorities "in the foreseeable future." Senaga played on these resentments with dialectical skill. "We are antiCommunists, but Senaga is the only man who really stands up to the Americans," explained one admirer.

Lost Trousers. But unseating Mayor Senaga proved a more difficult task than either U.S. military authorities or the Okinawan businessmen reckoned. Last summer, when the anti-Senaga city assembly rapped him with a no-confidence vote, Senaga dissolved the assembly and called new elections, in which he increased his supporters in the 30-man assembly from six to twelve.

Senaga promptly took advantage of an assembly bylaw that requires a two-thirds quorum for a no-confidence vote. Every time the opposition majority tried to vote him out, Senaga's twelve assemblymen simply walked out of the meeting. When the opposition tried physically to prevent Senaga's men from leaving, they took to the windows; one Senaga assemblyman once left his trousers behind in the tight clutch of an anti-Senaga assemblyman who had tried to stop him.

Jeers & Contempt. Last week, after Okinawa's High Court and the Ryukyus legislature refused to interfere, Army Lieut. General James E. Moore, the U.S. High Commissioner, intervened. Acting nominally on an appeal by 24 of Okinawa's 64 mayors, he decreed a change in the assembly's bylaws to allow a no-confidence vote if a simple majority is present. He thoughtfully added a new electoral regulation barring "convicted felons" from holding public office--which effectively barred Senaga from seeking reelection. When the assemblymen gathered at Naha's city hall and voted the mayor out of office by a 16-to-10 vote, hundreds of Okinawans stood outside and jeered at them: "Are you Okinawans or prostitutes?" U.S. civilian administrators privately criticized Moore's action as another example of what they regard as highhanded military practices.

In Japan, which would like to get Okinawa and the rest of the Ryukyu chain back some day, reaction was sharp. "Utter contempt for voters' rights," said Asahi Shimbun. "The prestige of American administration on Okinawa has reached an alltime low in Japanese eyes," said the Japan Times. Summed up one Japanese: "It is unAmerican, and counter to the democratic principles the Americans have taught us."

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