Word: ryukyus
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Having served with the University of the Ryukyus project on Okinawa, I am sure that some of the student demonstrations [Sept. 3] reflect more of a confused and growing spirit of nationalism than rabid anti-Americanism. Indeed, the Okinawans have been blessed by a most generous handout at all levels, and, now being so much in our debt, struggle to become independent in thought and action...
Tons of rain sweeping across the island at speeds of up to 156 m.p.h. breached sea walls, wrecked the Ryukyus Command building, reduced 3rd Marine Division headquarters to rubble and killed a military policeman. While Okinawa's 40,000 Americans shook inside their typhoon-proof but half-flooded houses, World War II Quonset huts were hurled into paddies and wrapped around telegraph poles. Thirty-five hours later, Okinawans found 7,000 homes and 80 public buildings totally destroyed, 27 fishing boats wrecked. Gone was 40% of the island's precious rice crop, 80% of the sweet-potato crop...
Though the U.S. has often boasted that it had no territorial ambitions in World War II, it has in fact kept Okinawa and the Southern Ryukyus and intends to, "so long as conditions of threat and tension exist in the Far East." The U.S. has invested more than half a billion dollars in making Okinawa its military "nerve center" in the Western Pacific, and has told Japan that it has only "residual sovereignty" over the islands...
...school's creator, Kansas-born Henry Earl Diffenderfer, 41, now Director of Education for the U.S. Civil Administration on Okinawa. Diffenderfer has toiled so hard to raise funds for the university that he is called Kojeki Ryu Dai Kagu Zeidan (begger for the University of the Ryukyus). Pressured by disenchanted donors (including a U.S. Marine outfit), Diffenderfer drafted an angry letter to University President Genshu Asato. The school's foundation is withholding all funds, said the letter, until "you can honestly assure us that anti-American and pro-Communist personnel of your student body and faculty have been...
...Okinawa "with the U.S. as sole administering authority," and pending such trusteeship, granted the U.S. full jurisdiction. The U.S. has never applied for a U.N. trusteeship. The Japanese government has expressed "pain and anxiety" about the future of the Ryukyu Islands, and in 1953 the U.S. returned the northern Ryukyus to Japan. At the same time, the U.S. stated that it would keep control of Okinawa and the rest of the Ryukyus, "so long as conditions of threat and tension exist in the Far East"-that is, said Secretary of State Dulles, "for the foreseeable future." The U.S. military runs...