Secret Okinawa-reversion negotiator’s suicide note now open to public

HAEBARU, OKINAWA PREF. –

A suicide note left by Japan’s under-the-table negotiator on the 1972 Okinawa reversion is being exhibited at the Okinawa Prefectural Archives, telling visitors the envoy’s grief over brokering a secret nuclear agreement with the United States.

It has been known that international politics scholar Kei Wakaizumi was assigned to negotiate with the United States on the return to Japan of the prefecture as a confidential envoy to then-Prime Minister Eisaku Sato and secretly promised that the Japanese government would allow the U.S. military to bring nuclear weapons into Japan again in case of emergencies.

The secret deal, which broke the impasse in the tough negotiations and paved the way for Sato and then-U.S. President Richard Nixon to sign off on the reversion of Okinawa, was disclosed by Wakaizumi in his book in 1994. The strategic significance of U.S. bases in Okinawa at the time was extremely high for the United States as it carried out its war in Vietnam.