President Obama: Time to End the Korean War & US militarism in Korea

This week, April 25-26, President Obama will travel to South Korea, a key U.S. ally, as part of his current “swing” through four Asian nations.  His agenda is to reaffirm and strengthen the military and economic relationship between the United States and South Korea, a thick alliance linked by the Mutual Defense Treaty of 1953, as many as 50 U.S. bases on Korean soil, and the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement, signed in 2007 and broadened in 2011. Read more

Women and militarisms: Culture of denial: historical forgetting and making of a national memory

by Ikehara Ariko, Ginoza Ayano

A part analysis and reflection piece written by two women of Okinawan heritage about the recent statement made by Toru Hashimoto, the mayor of Osaka, regarding his public statement on the issue of “comfort women” and the current situation on US military sexual assaults in Okinawa.

On May 13, 2013, the mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto, made a deplorable comment about the necessity of a prostitution system in Okinawa and asked US military officials to enact such a policy in order to “take control of the libidinous energy of the US Marines stationed in Okinawa.” There is a colonial impulse and imperial undercurrent running through his statement. Okinawa has been shouldering the burden of the legacy of WWII by hosting approximately 75% of US bases in Japan today, which is a precarious situation after being occupied by the US military from 1946 ~ 1972, and reinstituting its governance as part of Japan in 1972. The current focus by the media on the rise of military-related sexual assault is not new. On the contrary, the problem has been going on in Okinawa since 1945 as reported by the Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, which was established in 1995 after the highly publicized rape case of a 12-year-old girl by three service men in Okinawa[1]. Furthermore, the Osprey deployment to Okinawa, not mainland Japan, continues to position Okinawa as the “dumping ground” for Japan’s unwanted problems. [2] By ignoring the colonial and the imperial markings in the present, the mayor continues to recreate a hierarchy that maintains Japan’s hegemony over Okinawa. Read more…

Military Sexual Violence: From Frontline to Fenceline

By Annie Isabel Fukushima and Gwyn Kirk

As more U.S. military women break the silence about sexual violence committed by their comrades in arms, it is clear that sporadic “scandals”—at the Tailhook Naval Aviators’ Convention (1991), Aberdeen Proving Grounds Ordnance Center (1996), the U.S. Air Force Academy (2003)—are not isolated incidents, but spring from the mycelium of U.S. military culture and ideology. Read more…