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"Land Is Forever."Actually the Okinawans have more self-government than they ever did under the Japanese. Their chief complaint is land. For its expanding bases and installations, the U.S. has taken or will take almost one-quarter of all the arable land on an island where the population density is already 800 per square mile. The U.S. fixed rents at 6% of assessed value, and made the assessments apparently generous — an average $330 an acre. But the average Okinawan family owned only 0.8 acre. At the 6% rate, this came to only $15.84 a year—"Coca-Cola money," the Okinawans said bitterly. On the 0.8-acre plot, an Okinawan can grow enough sweet potatoes to keep his family alive; on $15.84, he starves unless he finds another job.
Even so, land is lying fallow all over Okinawa because the owner makes better money working for the U.S. Army—running laundry machines, driving trucks, working in construction gangs. General Moore argues that Okinawans must learn to give up subsistence farming and adjust to an economy like Hawaii's, which lives off servicing the military. The U.S.
has tried earnestly to make things as easy as possible. It has cut its own requirements to the bone. It tries to find substitute land, has stamped out malaria on the southern offshore islands where displaced farmers might settle.
Okinawans, like landowners anywhere, are apt to regard their own plot as "a poor thing but mine own," and to be exasperatingly impervious to generosity in the name of progress. The U.S. pays each farmer up to $150 for moving costs, supplies him with trucks to move, lumber and corrugated iron for new houses, lays out water systems and roads on new sites.
First, the Okinawans said that annual payments were too small, so the U.S. decided to pay a lump sum for each piece of land. At this point Okinawa's Chief Executive Higa flew off to Washington and persuaded Congress to defer the plan.
Explains Higa: "It is more than economic.
It is the feeling of the people, handed down from generation to generation. If we sell land to others, we do a very bad thing against our ancestors, against our children. They say, 'Money is for a year; land is forever.' " When U.S. authorities recently tried to take over the little village of Isahama for a new military housing project, 150 villagers sat down in front of the construction crew's draglines. Surveyors' stakes were yanked out and burned. In the end, the Army had to stage a predawn assault with bulldozers and trucks. Paddy dikes that took years to build were churned flat under the bulldozer's blade. One group of farmers made a feeble stand before a bulldozer. A pistol-carrying U.S. officer shouted them off. Shrugging at the inevitable, they shuffled away.