Word: okinawa
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...global security priorities. In January, Hatoyama ended the refueling missions in the Indian Ocean, just as Obama was ramping up operations in Afghanistan. Most irritating to Washington has been Hatoyama's effort to renegotiate an important agreement on the redeployment of American troops stationed on the Japanese island of Okinawa. Hatoyama's stand has caused a rare chill to beset Japan-U.S. ties, leading some Japan watchers to fret over the health of the alliance. "This is probably the lowest point [for U.S.-Japan relations] since the early 1990s," when the two were engaged in bitter trade wars, says...
...vision of their strategy" on security issues, says Sheila Smith, senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. "They're working it out as they go." Nowhere has that been more apparent than in Hatoyama's handling of the status of American bases on Okinawa. That southern Japanese island, a famous World War II battleground, still hosts roughly 25,000 troops, almost all of them Marines, and the local Okinawans have long resented the heavy military presence. In 2006, the U.S. and Japan reached an agreement to move a Marine air base on Okinawa...
...accord and reopened negotiations with the U.S. After months of waffling and breaking self-imposed deadlines, it's not clear exactly what Hatoyama will propose to Washington, but he told reporters in late March, "I personally should like to consider a path to relocate the air station outside Okinawa...
...that Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, and that the American revenge came on August 6, 1945, when Army pilot Paul Tibbets dropped an atomic bomb from the Enola Gay on Hiroshima. For Hanks, the U.S. armed forces' island-hopping - Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, among other bloody military engagements - was just a blur on a map that seemed impossibly exotic and faraway. "Strange to think that I've become the World War II guy," Hanks laughs. "All my friends had dads who were on the U.S.S. Nimitz or U.S.S. Enterprise or U.S.S. Coral...
...farther and farther west. You get a dramatic sense of what it must have been like to be on one of those battleships. I used to wonder why in hell little Peleliu was in any way, shape or form so damn important. But then when you see how close Okinawa is, well, you immediately understand. Peleliu was a stepping-stone...