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Dec 22, 2025 15:57 (JST)
Haebaru, Okinawa Pref., Dec. 22 (Jiji Press)–A suicide note left by Japan’s under-the-table negotiator on the 1972 Okinawa reversion has been exhibited at the Okinawa Prefectural Archives, telling visitors the envoy’s grief of 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 southernmost 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 in 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 the reversion of Okinawa, whose strategic significance at the time was extremely high for the United States to carry out its war in Vietnam, was disclosed by Wakaizumi in his book in 1994.
The note was written as a “petition” on Okinawa Memorial Day on June 23 that year, and Wakaizumi killed himself in July 1996.
The letter addressed to “all people in Okinawa” says: “I will punish myself to fulfill my heavy accountability for history. … Simply I feel sorry … I have no words to express my apologies.”
[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]
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