U.S. Arrogance Claims the Japanese Prime Minister
"U.S. arrogance has claimed a high-profile victim: the prime minister of Japan.
Yukio Hatoyama has had to tender his resignation after he was caught in a bind between the intransigence of the Obama Administration and the wishes of his own people. Many Japanese have become fed up with a huge U.S. base on the island of Okinawa and want it moved off.
“Nearly 100,000 people staged a protest [in April] on the southern island, demanding that the base be removed,” reports the BBC.
Hell no, we won’t go, replied the Obama Administration, publicly humiliating a longstanding Asian ally and forcing Hatoyama to tearfully exit days after he issued a heartfelt public apology to Okinawans.
The United States refuses to leave Okinawa because it’s a key link in an astonishing chain of 700-plus bases the U.S. possesses in 130 countries around the world. Chalmers Johnson, one of the leading American scholars on this issue, recently published a concise account of the history of Okinawa in the Los Angeles Times. He underlined that the United States occupied Okinawa outright till 1972 and even after that has had sovereignty over the bases and the island’s airspace.
Japanese resentment at the Americans has festered due to a number of reasons."