Keiko Itokazu can still remember the day in 1965 when the parachute didn’t open. It was attached to a jeep trailer that was dropped from an airplane, along with U.S. paratroopers training near her home in Okinawa. The plummeting object missed her but hit a nearby house, killing a fifth-grade schoolgirl.
Until then, Ms. Itokazu, who was then a high school junior, had never thought much about the huge military presence on the semitropical island, which at that time was under U.S. control. The Americans had been there her whole life, when the United States seized Okinawa from Japan after the end of World War II.
But she knew the dead girl, who was a customer at her family’s small general store. Ever since, she has fiercely opposed the American bases, which remained even after the United States returned Okinawa to Japanese governance in 1972. Now 77, Ms. Itokazu recently joined protests at the front gate of a new U.S. Marine airfield being built on Okinawa’s northern end.
Okinawans have long felt caught between the United States and Japan, which sent troops to claim the Okinawan island chain in the 1870s. Prior to that, Okinawa was known as the Kingdom of the Ryukyus, an independent country that paid tribute to both Imperial China and Satsuma, a domain in medieval Japan.
Ever since the Japanese takeover, the islanders have complained of being second-class citizens. This includes during the war, when Japan used Okinawa as a battlefield to stop the Americans from reaching its main islands.
But the relationship has changed more recently, driven in part by the re-emergence of a third power exerting an influence on Okinawa’s destiny: China. Younger islanders now get their news from the same social media sources as other young Japanese, where there is widespread criticism of Beijing’s growing assertiveness.
They are also more inclined to see the bases as a source of jobs on an island where hourly wages are the lowest in Japan. One is Maria Badilla, a Japanese woman who, like many of Okinawa’s current residents, was not born on the island. Originally from Kyoto, she moved to Okinawa three years ago, drawn by its sunny beaches.
At first, Ms. Badilla, 26, held low-salaried service jobs, including at a hotel and a restaurant, before finding better-paying work at a housing agency on a U.S. base. While working at the restaurant, she met Pedro Badilla, 23, a Marine sergeant from Arizona, whom she married last year.
She said people around her see the bases as a protective presence, providing both economic opportunity and a measure of safety in a world that can feel far from secure.
For many members of older generations, it was Japan that was supposed to play protector — freeing Okinawa from the clutches of the U.S. military. Kazuo Senaga, 64, grew up seeing his grandfather, a prominent local journalist and politician, call for Okinawa’s return to Japan in hopes that this would lead to the exit of the U.S. military.
Instead, after 1972, Tokyo closed some U.S. bases on the mainland and allowed the Americans to remain on Okinawa. After his grandfather’s death in 2001, Mr. Senaga replaced him as a leader of the anti-base movement.
He rejects the view of Beijing as a threat, saying the Ryukyus historically had friendly ties with China as a trading partner and tributary state. He says Japan has betrayed its post-1945 Constitution, which renounces the right to wage war, by relying on the U.S. military for protection. Okinawa, with a population of 1.5 million, hosts 70 percent of the American bases despite accounting for only 0.6 percent of Japan’s landmass. There are 80,000 Americans on the island, of whom 30,000 are uniformed military personnel.
Born in 1940, Suzuyo Takazato remembers the war and how the Imperial Japanese army used Okinawan civilians as human shields against the American onslaught. After the war, she recalled, Okinawans were targeted again, this time by U.S. soldiers returning from battlegrounds in Korea and Vietnam who used the island for rest and recreation. Driven by poverty, many Okinawan women served them as prostitutes.
A Christian, Ms. Takazato started a support center for women who were victims of rape or trying to escape the sex trade. She said that so long as Okinawa was occupied by foreign militaries, it would be the site of war and sex crimes. Her island, she says, remains trapped under “an edifice of violence.”
“Okinawa was sacrificed to defend Japan,” said Ms. Takazato.