(3 of 5)
One Okinawan businessman has contracted to build the U.S. Army's new $7,000,000 hospital; another, a onetime gardener, now owns 30 movie theaters. There are new power plants, new dams, new roads, new schools. The number of schoolrooms has increased tenfold since war's end; the death rate is down to less than 40% of prewar. Many Okinawans who once existed exclusively on a sweet-potato diet have climbed a rung on the Oriental living scale and eat rice. "Before the war, only section chiefs and above in the government wore shoes," says one Okinawan. "Now everybody has a pair." The Colonial Business. Without anyone really intending it that way, the U.S. has been thrust into the colonial business. It has taken on 790,000 wards; and U.S. officials on the scene are a little sheepish about their role. Okinawans see all about them — in the widening airstrips, the concrete barracks, the four-lane highways — visible evidence that their latest conquerors are in Okinawa to stay. The legal situation is deliberately fuzzy. The U.S. has acknowledged Japan's "residual sovereignty" over Okinawa. But by the Japanese Peace Treaty, Japan promised to concur if the U.S. proposed a U.N. trusteeship for 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 Okinawa and makes no bones about it. Even the currency is U.S. occupation yen, and though the Okinawans are theoretically Japanese citizens, they travel abroad on a certificate of identity issued by U.S. authorities.
The U.S. Far East commander, General Lyman Lemnitzer, holds the title of Governor of the Ryukyu Islands. His deputy governor and actual operating boss of the islands is Major General James E. Moore, 53, who was the Ninth Army's chief of staff in World War II, most recently served as commandant of the Army War College.
Conscientiously, the U.S. has set up a representative government for Okinawa, with native courts and a 29-man elective legislature, for which it has built a fine modern building that any U.S. state legislature might envy. But the chief executive, a pleasant, bald, one-armed ex-schoolteacher named Shuhei Higa, is appointed by the U.S. Civil Administration (USCAR), and his office is in the U.S. administration building directly beneath USCAR offices. Anything that the native government does, USCAR can veto —though it rarely has. Newspapers are not censored, but editors who criticize the U.S. occupation too freely are apt to get a talking to. "Step by step, they are training us for self-government," says Chief Executive Higa, nodding his head upward at the floor above him. Was such training necessary? "That's an embarrassing question" says Higa.