WWII 'time' bombs still litter Japan island

Eric Talmadge, Associated Press
Sunday, May 3, 2009
09:00:00 p.m. Sunday May 3, 2009 ChST

(05-03) 04:00 PDT Itoman, Japan -- Under a blazing mid-afternoon sun, 1st Lt. Toshikazu Nakano squats in a muddy pit at the edge of a housing development and brushes rocks away from a shiny metal object lodged firmly in the ground. He stops for a moment and barks orders to the rest of his team.

"This one might explode," he yells. "Everyone take cover."

Like former battlefields all over the world, the southern Japan island of Okinawa - home to more than 1 million people and the site of some of World War II's most savage fighting - is a tinderbox of unexploded bombs, thousands and thousands of tons of them, rusted and often half buried.

Photo: Self-Defense Forces members inspect an unexploded grenade found on the battle-scarred island of Okinawa.

The bombs are the bane of construction crews, divers and unsuspecting children. Because of their age and the layers of crusty dirt that usually cover them, they often don't seem dangerous.

"On the outside, these bombs look harmless - but inside, they are as good as new," said Lt. Col. Hidenori Miyata, commander of the Japan Ground Self Defense Forces bomb squad on Okinawa.

A series of incidents this year - including the death last month of an American Marine involved in their disposal - have caused an uproar on Okinawa.

"In Okinawa, even today, residents have to evacuate every two weeks," Okinawan lawmaker Osamu Ashitomi told parliament after one of the most recent accidents. "The reality in Okinawa is that the war is not over yet."

A Japanese tourist recently was stopped at Okinawa's main airport for packing an old grenade he had found in his bags as a souvenir. In late January, a group of Okinawan children brought some bombs to show off at an elementary school, forcing teachers to evacuate the area and call in members of Nakano's military bomb squad. No one was injured.

Photo: A Japan Ground Self-Defense Force member carries unexploded ordnance, among thousands of live bombs from World War II.

Just a week later, however, a power shovel operator was blinded and badly burned, and windows were blown out of a retirement home nearby. He hit a 250-kilogram bomb in the middle of the booming city of Itoman on Okinawa's southern end, where some of the worst fighting of World War II took place.

Then, March 24, Okinawa suffered its first bomb fatality in years, when U.S. Marine Staff Sgt. John H. Roy III, 32, of Muscogee, Ga., was killed while preparing a bomb for detonation at an American military disposal range. Another Marine and a sailor were injured. The U.S. military, which has several bases on Okinawa, destroys the recovered bombs.

The blast on Camp Hansen was one of the worst accidents caused by the wartime ordnance since 1974, when three people were killed, including a 2-year-old girl, during sewer repairs near a kindergarten in Okinawa's capital, Naha.

The danger is common at former battle sites around the world, according to the Mines Advisory Group, which won a Nobel Prize in 1997 for its work.

Though not involved in Okinawa, MAG has run clearing operations in 35 countries, from Angola to Vietnam. Its main concern is the removal of land mines, but it also cooperates with local authorities in recovering other explosive remnants of war.

MAG officials say much work remains to be done.

"There are still numerous countries contaminated by land mines, anti-personnel or anti-tank, and there are regions and countries contaminated by unexploded ordnance, for example Lebanon with cluster munitions," said MAG spokesman Diderik van Halsema. "Its severity differs per country and region. Heavily contaminated countries are Afghanistan, Iraq, Angola. But there are also areas where not much is being done, such as Morocco, Algeria, and North and South Korea."

Okinawa is one of the worst hot spots because of the sheer scale of the battle that raged there. The island was not mined, but it was bombed relentlessly. More people were killed in the April 1945 battle of Okinawa, called the "Storm of Steel," than by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

The bombs, mortars, bullets and artillery shells that rained down on the island left 12,000 U.S. troops dead and killed as many as 250,000 Japanese, including many civilians who were caught in the crossfire.

All told, about 200,000 tons of explosives were used by the United States and Okinawa's Japanese defenders. An estimated 10,000 tons of unexploded ordnance was left scattered across the island, mainly in the south.

Japan surrendered in August 1945.

Much of the ordnance had been recovered by the time the United States returned Okinawa to Japan in 1972. About 1,500 tons have been recovered since, a pace of about 30 tons a year.

Along with responding to emergency calls, Nakano's squad deploys on regular missions once a week.

"Today we went to 19 places and collected 42 explosives, from hand grenades to 5-inch artillery shells," he said after a 10-hour convoy through sugarcane farms, beachfront parks and numerous construction sites. "There is ordnance everywhere."

By the end of the trip, the crew had collected enough explosives to fill the back of their flatbed truck, which travels flanked by three jeeps. The ordnance was then taken to a storage facility. After that, it is taken farther north and blown up on U.S. military ranges.

The Japanese government is alarmed by the recent bomb-related accidents.

"We must speed up the detection and excavation of the bombs that remain buried underground," National Public Safety Commission Chairman Tsutomu Sato, who is also in charge of Okinawa affairs, said last month.

But those involved are looking at a long haul.

"It could take another 60 years, it could take 80 or it could take 100," said Miyata, the local bomb squad commander. "We still have a lot of work to do."

This article appeared on page A - 24 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Clinton first looks east

Friday, February 20, 2009

Asia is where the action is for newly minted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. On her first official trip, she jetted across the Pacific Ocean, and not the Atlantic as nearly every other top American diplomat has on a first outing.

It's a striking choice, a move filled with both symbolism and substance. Her fly-around to four nations underlines the region's present and future importance to the Obama team. The mission shores up nervous allies (Japan and South Korea), strokes a possible future one (Indonesia) and pays wary respect to that huge question mark, China.

Clinton is a good match for the job. In a sea of drab elder statesmen, she shone in bright colors and made sure to be photographed with smiling children, not the usual row of ramrod-stiff soldiers.

Also, her itinerary takes her to relatively warm and sunny places for American image-makers. For the most part, the countries she's visiting have remained American supporters, despite the Iraq war. She can build on this advantage via her softer message of "smart power" to replace the bristling Bush era.

This trip will likely be more a Clinton-style "listening tour" than a checklist of U.S. demands. She's stopping in export-driven countries slogging through a global recession, and their leaders would rather talk greenbacks with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner than sip tea even with a political superstar like Clinton. But, no matter, this voyage is all about setting the right tone for the next drop-in.

Japan, her first stop, needed assuring that the United States isn't looking past a traditional ally in favor of a surging China and a thuggish North Korea.

Indonesia, her second stop, was surprise. It's a starter-democracy with the world's largest Muslim population, regarded as politically moderate. It's a prime candidate to move closer to Washington's orbit, where it could play a mediating role in talks with Iran, Syria, Sudan and other Muslim societies. The top query to Clinton: When is Obama, who spent four childhood years there, coming back?

Also, any hope for a global climate-change treaty will need Indonesia's support. It's among the top five oil exporters, and its lax rules have allowed timber cutting to decimate its tropical forests.

South Korea comes with its own set of trade and finance issues, but nearly any topic leads directly to hand-wringing over its neighbor, the dirt-poor and dangerous North Korea. Already, Clinton caught attention for dumping bland generalities and stating the obvious: A struggle over succeeding the ailing dictator, Kim Jong Il, makes the north even more a wild card. Earlier, in another frank aside, she said that a U.S.-led boycott of Burma's military dictatorship had achieved little, and it was time for new, unspecified tactics.

China, where she is due to finish her trip this weekend, will be her biggest test. During the Bush years, relations were stable, putting economics above all else. But a long list of issues is bending this single plank: weapons controls, climate change, human rights, food safety, to name a few. Ever so gently, Clinton will need to ease into these topics even though her Chinese hosts are plainly more worried about their own sinking economy.

It will be worth watching to see which Clinton speaks up. Will there be hints of the former first lady, who rebuked China's record on human rights and women's issues in a Beijing speech some 15 years ago? Or will she come off as a cautious, controlled American diplomat looking to establish herself in a new job? The same comparison might be made for the Obama team, which has talked tough on China but may pipe down as it learns on the job.

No grand treaties will be signed or peace pacts reached on this trip. This trip is about sending messages, showing interest and letting foreign listeners meet the new sheriff at the State Department. This White House is headed in a new direction: eastwards.

This article appeared on page A - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Judge says Okinawa base move needs U.S. study

Friday, January 25, 2008
Bob Egelko
Chronicle Staff Writer

Pentagon plans to relocate a Marine base on a Japanese island that is home to an imperiled and culturally revered seagoing mammal called the Okinawan dugong have disregarded a U.S. historic preservation law, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Thursday.

The law doesn't require U.S. officials to protect the creature at all costs or cancel the relocation on the island of Okinawa, but it mandates that they study the effects of the move on any "historically significant property" and consider measures to ease those effects, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel said.

Photo: The endangered dugong is considered an ancestor of human beings in Okinawan folklore.

She said the Defense Department did not comply with those standards when it reached an agreement with Japan in May 2006 on moving the base to an offshore site alongside and atop a coral reef where the dugong grazes.

Patel ruled in 2005 that the dugong could be considered a "historically important property" protected by U.S. law because of its status in Okinawan society. A lawyer for Japanese and U.S. environmentalists said Thursday's ruling is the first by any judge to find an overseas project in violation of the National Historic Preservation Act since Congress extended the law to U.S. activities abroad in 1980.

The ruling made it clear that the Defense Department must "take a serious look at the impact of its actions overseas to avoid causing irrevocable harm to the cultural heritage of another nation," said Sarah Burt of Earthjustice, an Oakland nonprofit law firm that filed the suit in 2003.

Justice Department spokesman Andrew Ames said the government was reviewing the ruling.

The dugong, a distant relative of the Florida manatee, is considered an ancestor of human beings in Okinawan folklore and is celebrated in songs still sung by shamans and residents who live along the bay that the creature inhabits.

The Okinawan dugong, a distinct subspecies, has dwindled to about 50 in number. Environmentalists say it could become extinct if Futenma Marine Corps Air Station is moved to the offshore area.

U.S. and Japanese officials have planned at least since 1997 to relocate the base from an area of central Okinawa that has become urbanized. Construction is due to begin in about three years and continue through 2014.

In seeking dismissal of the suit, Justice Department lawyers argued that protective measures were the responsibility of the Japanese government, which is conducting an environmental review under its own law before starting construction.

But Patel said the U.S. law requires the American government to conduct its own review. The judge quoted an October 2005 document on the U.S.-Japan negotiations that said the environmental issues "are primarily a question of political will since any option will affect the environment and opponents will use environment-based arguments to advance their cause."

The statement indicates "at best, plain ignorance of, and at worst, complete defiance of (the Defense Department's) obligation to consider the impacts of the (relocation) on the dugong," Patel said.

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A - 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Book review: New Yorker writer gets lessons in labor oppression

Tom Gallagher
Sunday,
September 30, 2007

Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy
By John Bowe
RANDOM HOUSE; 305 PAGES; $25.95

Judging from the reaction to Hurricane Katrina, contemporary America seems to think it would be easier to change the planet than to change itself. Many seem to have incorporated the initial shock of a storm wreaking such havoc upon a city so major as New Orleans into a growing sense of the role of human activity in the proliferation of natural disasters. After this flood, people didn't think only of the usual questions of levees and engineering, they also thought about global warming and what they could do about it.

The effect of Katrina's second shock, the revelation of poverty in New Orleans deeper and broader than many had thought could exist in 21st century America, is less clear. If it has fed into a movement to do something about the plight of the nation's lower class, that has not yet become apparent.

Journalist John Bowe believes that "equality and social justice could come to be viewed as the environment has," but understands, as George Orwell wrote, that "economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner." And he has written "Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy" in an effort to move that moment forward.

Bowe's eagerness to grab the reader by the lapels and give voice to the voiceless may stem from a bit of a personal transformation he experienced in researching the book. Writing at that time for the New Yorker, he walked into his first meeting with migrant farmworker organizers from Florida's Coalition of Imokalee Workers and "called them 'do-gooders,' " intending it ironically, "to convey how other people (not me, of course) might have thought of them." Not only did he quickly realize how dense it was to expect them "to understand my own personal code of irony," but more importantly he recognized he was "less politically informed, more mainstream, and less liberal than I had thought I was." He was "shocked by their earnestness ... about something as straightforward as fighting for social justice." (New Yorker readers might wish the magazine required a humility-inducing experience of all its writers but, oh, I digress.)

As an organizer explained to him, the cases of workers kept in conditions of legal slavery that the Coalition sometimes encounters "occur in degraded labor environments ... where the labor force is contingent, day-haul, with subpoverty wages, no benefits, no right to overtime, no right to organize," as is the case with farm labor which, Bowe explains, was excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, "as if for some reason the production of food is necessarily different from the production of other goods." As a result of this exclusion, today's average farmworker would need to make an additional $3,200 a year to reach the minimum wage, an increase that would cost the average American household $50.

Bowe next encountered a group of truly 21st century migrant laborers who arrived in Oklahoma by plane from India. He writes that while "pundits like [New York Times columnist] Thomas Friedman" like "to cite India as a shining example of the many benefits of globalization," they paid little attention as, simultaneous with the arrival of the "Starbucks, shops, software programmers, and Internet start-ups" that impress them, "tens of millions of rural Indians were driven from villages to city slums" and the country's children "who once averaged nine hundred calories of food intake per day, were now receiving six hundred calories per day."

And it seems unlikely they've ever met anyone like these Indian workers who went into debt to pay local recruiters for the chance to become trainee welders at an oil equipment company only to find themselves virtual prisoners. The company owner told Bowe he was only doing what was necessary to compete with foreign companies that didn't have their "government f- with 'em like they do over here."

But Bowe's main interest is the strange case of Saipan, a Pacific island acquired by the United States for World War II military use and now part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands. Saipan's 60,000 residents are U.S. citizens (although unrepresented in Congress), but the islands are exempt from most U.S. taxes, labor laws and quotas on foreign textiles - facts that have driven a vast importation of cheaper labor, creating a sort of low-rent Kuwait where 90 percent of the island's private-sector workers are foreign. And Bowe's description of the involvement of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and the right-wing Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation in shaping this less than inspiring society demonstrates his point that "Like any economic system, free trade is not a force of nature, controlled by God or science." So in the end, he reminds us, a proposition that has seemingly become unthinkable in recent years - "a world where it is unacceptable to force quite so much misery upon those whose productive labor provides our freedom and comfort" - is a choice within our power to make. {sbox}

Tom Gallagher is a San Francisco writer.

Imperiled mammal threatened by plan for Okinawa base

Bob Egelko,
Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, August 5, 2004

Court in S.F. hears activists advocate applying U.S. law

The shy, grass-eating dugong is in peril in the waters off the Japanese island of Okinawa, where a planned U.S. Marine base threatens its habitat. Its only hope may be a U.S. law designed to preserve historic properties.

On Wednesday, environmentalists argued in a San Francisco courtroom that the federal law be applied to the dugong, a distant relative of the Florida manatee, revered by Okinawans and classified as a "natural monument'' under Japanese law.

Their suit, filed last fall against the Defense Department, seeks a court order shelving plans -- at least until measures are taken to preserve the dugong -- for the relocation of the Futenma air base from central Okinawa to an offshore site alongside and atop a coral reef that plaintiffs say is the creature's chief remaining habitat.

The plaintiffs, environmental advocates from both the United States and Japan, say the U.S. courts are their only option because the Pentagon and the Japanese government have been unresponsive. The Justice Department challenges their unprecedented attempt to use the historic preservation law to protect a foreign species.

Photo: Higashionna Takuma, an Okinawan fisherman and boat captain, prepares to enter U.S. District Court.

The 1966 National Historic Preservation Act requires the U.S. government to conduct an analysis, similar to an environmental impact report, before working on a project that would harm historically significant properties. The law defines those properties broadly to include subjects of cultural importance at home or abroad, the plaintiffs say.

The law "leaves it up to each nation to decide what's culturally significant,'' Marcello Mollo, a lawyer with Earthjustice in Oakland, told Chief U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in a courtroom filled with supporters from Okinawa.

Other opponents of the project have occupied a beach encampment at the proposed airfield site for the past 100 days to protest preliminary undersea drilling in preparation of construction. The plaintiffs say noise from the drilling could harm the dugongs.

The Okinawan dugong, a distinct subspecies, has dwindled to about 50 in number -- a casualty, in part, of fierce battles near the end of World War II -- and could be extinguished by the impact of the Marine air base on an adjacent coral reef, environmentalists contend. The creatures, which in adulthood grow up to 111/2 feet long and weigh 800 pounds, spend their entire lives in sheltered, shallow waters.

Justice Department lawyer Charles Shockey argued that the environmentalist groups' suit should be dismissed, for two reasons: Animals aren't historic properties, and the U.S. government isn't involved in the site selection, funding or construction of the base. That is all being handled by Japan, Shockey said, and "the Japanese are very sensitive to protecting the dugong.''

Patel suggested that Japan was acting on behalf of the United States, but she did not rule immediately on whether the suit could proceed. Lawyers said it was the first suit to test international application of the U.S. historic properties law.

Okinawa, 1,000 miles southwest of Tokyo at the southern edge of Japan, has been the location of many U.S. military bases since World War II that have been the focus of long-standing resentment. Protests erupted after three U.S. servicemen abducted and raped a 12-year-old girl in 1995.

Outside the courtroom Wednesday, Takamichi Sekine, a professor of policy studies at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan who is a member of the Okinawan delegation, said the dugong has had a special meaning to Okinawa since the days of independence, when the creature's meat was ceremonially presented to the king.

Despite Shockey's assurances that Japan was sensitive to the dugong, Sekine said, "the ineffectiveness of Japanese environmental law'' makes U.S. court intervention essential.

Patel, during the hearing, also questioned the effectiveness of Japanese law, saying it required Japan's government to study the environmental impact of the base but did not require it to take steps to protect the dugong.

On the other hand, the judge asked Mollo, "isn't it a little bit chauvinistic or paternalistic to impose our laws on them?''

Not really, the Earthjustice lawyer replied, because Patel would actually be "imposing our law on a U.S. agency.''

Photo: A local fisherman watches a dugong at Yomitanson on the island of Okinawa on April 26, 2004. Japanese environmentalists urged a federal judge here Wednesday to block the U.S. military's proposed construction of a military base in Okinawa that they say could jeopardize the giant ocean creatures that eat sea grass in the ocean shallows.

Facts about dugongs / Dugong dugon (sea cows)

Adult

Maximum age: About 70 years

Length: 11 1/2 feet

Weight: 800 lbs.

-- Found in shallow, tropical waters throughout the Indo-Pacific region, the Okinawan animal is a distinct subspecies.

-- Diet consists of grazing on seagrasses in sheltered coastal waters.

-- Mothers produce one calf per litter with a gestation of 13-15 months.

Source: Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Australia

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page B - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle