Okinawa-raised, retired U.S. serviceman keeps island in heart as base issues linger
Thomas Shimabukuro's mouth tenses as he stands outside the U.S. military's Camp Zukeran in Okinawa. (Mainichi)
(Mainichi Japan) August 7, 2010
Inside the spacious compound of Camp Zukeran, a U.S. base in southern Okinawa surrounded by wire netting and barbed wire, the Stars and Stripes and a Japanese flag flap in the wind. Beyond the fence lies a residential area.
"I used to work there," says 76-year-old Thomas Shimabukuro, a resident of Nago, Okinawa Prefecture, pointing to a Marine Corps command center building. Shimabukuro, a retired U.S. military serviceman, has seen Okinawa from inside and outside the wire fence.
He was born in Los Angeles, but his parents, born in Okinawa, decided to return to their homeland when relations between Japan and the United States started deteriorating. Shimabukuro was just 1 year old at the time.
In April 1945, during World War II, U.S. battleships that had taken the East China Sea unleashed booming cannon fire on Okinawa. Shimabukuro, who was 11 at the time, fled from the attacks with his mother and hid in the mountains. They survived there, eating wild plants and potatoes, but Shimabukuro's father, who was drafted into Okinawa's defense force, would not come home.
Several years after Japan's defeat in the war, Shimabukuro received an unexpected notice from the United States that forced him to make a decision: undergo a conscription exam in the United States or lose his U.S. citizenship. Even after graduating from high school, finding a job was not easy. Wanting to ease the burden on his mother, who was raising eight children single-handedly, Shimabukuro decided to cross the ocean to the United States and enlist in the army.
Shimabukuro became a part of the military force that likely killed his father. When he was sent to fight in the Vietnam War, he couldn't bring himself to tell his mother.
At the time, Shimabukuro's fellow soldiers threw candy to the children living in the war zone. Listening to the children say, "Give me chocolate" brought him back to his days as a child 20 years before. He recalled himself in Okinawa, where he had lost everything, collecting lilies and using them to bargain for candy from soldiers. Shimabukuro himself made bags of candy and handed them to the children. At the time, he encountered one elderly Vietnamese woman who, puzzled, asked him, "Are you an American?"
"I'm from Okinawa," he replied. As soon as he did, the woman started crying. Both he and that woman had experienced life in a fierce battle zone; they shared that in common.
In 1970, Shimabukuro was sent to Okinawa before its reversion to Japan. At one point he was in charge of handling a traffic accident caused by a U.S. serviceman. Shimabukuro told the victim in the accident that he would handle the case properly, but the day after, the U.S. serviceman fled back to his country.
"Liar." Shimabukuro was stung by the word, hurled at him by the victim.
"I was always fighting with myself, worried that I wasn't being of use to the people of Okinawa," he says. In 1976, still unable to shake himself free of such concerns, he retired from military service.
A change for Shimabukuro came in 2000. The Bankoku Shinryokan convention center near his family home in Nago was one of the venues for the Kyushu-Okinawa G8 summit, and one of his former classmates wrote to Shimabukuro, who was living in Seattle at the time, asking him to come and help out by teaching residents English and assisting in international exchange. He agreed, and it became the happiest time of his life.
"I felt like I was able to repay my debt to Okinawa," he says.
In 2001, Shimabukuro returned to his family home to care for his mother. Looking around the area as a resident, he felt the U.S. military bases were too many.
Now, in 2010, it is possible that U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma will be moved to the nearby coastal Henoko region.
"Do they really need something that big?" Shimabukuro asks himself. At the same time he feels that there is nothing to do but to accept the Japan-U.S. agreement. When he thinks about Nago, a town tired from being tossed to and fro by politicians, his heart grows troubled.
Shimabukuro hold both U.S. and Japanese nationality, but he considers himself to be an Okinawan. After a life of adversity, Okinawa is like a haven to him. But to Shimabukuro, the sea of his hometown seems more turbulent than ever.
(This is part three of a series on U.S.-Okinawa history.)
Click here for the original Japanese story
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