The U.S. Air Force’s Kadena base is seen in Okinawa Prefecture in this Nov. 20, 2021, file photo. (Mainichi)
One thousand, one hundred and one people. This is a figure the Japanese government presented during last year’s regular Diet session. What does it refer to? It is the number of Japanese people who died, or were killed, in incidents and accidents caused by U.S. forces in Japan from fiscal 1952, after the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty took effect, through fiscal 2023.
The figure was provided by the Ministry of Defense during a House of Representatives national security committee meeting on March 25, 2025, in response to a question from then lower house lawmaker Seiken Akamine of the Japanese Communist Party. Based on a simple calculation, that means that an average of about 15 Japanese citizens have died each year because of the U.S. military or U.S. service members.
What’s more, this figure of 1,101 people does not include Okinawa Prefecture residents living under U.S. rule before Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972.
For this reason, it doesn’t take into account the U.S. military ammunition transport ship explosion of Aug. 6, 1948, which killed 107 residents of the Okinawa Prefecture island of Iejima; the “Yumiko-chan incident” of Sept. 3, 1955, in which a 6-year-old girl on her way to a festival was sexually assaulted and killed by a U.S. serviceman; the Miyamori Elementary School U.S. military aircraft crash of June 30, 1959, in which 17 people, including schoolchildren, died; or the Hideo Kokuba incident of Feb. 28, 1963, in which a junior high school boy was run over and killed by a U.S. military truck that ran a red light.
These incidents are only part of a long, long list. How many victims are there in all? At the very least, several hundred more than 1,000. The mind reels.
According to the Defense Ministry’s response at the lower house Committee on National Security, of the 1,101 people it cited, the number of victims nationwide from fiscal 1972 onward — after Okinawa’s reversion to Japan — reached 210. But it is not possible to determine how many of these people died on the “mainland” and how many died in Okinawa. The dead had names, families and lives. We know the total, but not the breakdown. What are we to make of this reality?
Three weeks after the tragedy at Miyamori Elementary School, the Mainichi Shimbun, in its July 22, 1959, edition, conveyed the voice of a resident who said, “If they hadn’t built bases in Okinawa, this never would have happened.”
In a post on Twitter (now X) on Jan. 16, 2018, Hiroshi Yamada, a Liberal Democratic Party member of the House of Councillors, denounced people from Okinawa opposing U.S. military bases there, describing them as “pro-China, anti-U.S., anti-Japan forces.” Yamada is known to be close to Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.
It was not China that caused the deaths of well over 1,000 Japanese people. I think the very people who chant slogans like “patriotism” and “defend Japan” should be angry at this reality, but I do not see many such people. This, too, is hard to understand.
(Japanese original by Riki Yoshii, Opinion Editorial Department)
AloJapan.com