Forty years have passed since Okinawa reverted to Japanese rule on May 15, 1972, after 27 years' of occupation by the United States following the end of World War II. Polls show that about 80 percent of Okinawans regard the restoration of Japanese rule as a positive development. The central government has poured some ¥10.2 trillion into Okinawa over the past 40 years to facilitate its development, mainly to improve infrastructure. Per capita annual income in Okinawa has also increased about 4.6 times over the same period to ¥2.04 million as of fiscal 2009 — raising it from the poorest prefecture in the nation to the second least well off ahead of Shikoku's Kochi Prefecture. Still, it is clear that the heavy U.S. military presence in Okinawa is hampering the healthy economic and social development of Japan's southernmost prefecture.
In the years when Okinawa was under U.S. military rule — the longest direct rule by the U.S. military of any occupied area after World War II — Okinawans strongly pushed for reversion to Japanese rule despite the fact that Okinawa existed as the independent Ryukyu Kingdom until 1879, when Japan fully incorporated Okinawa into the nation. The driving force behind the reversion movement was the Okinawan people's strong desire to see their islands governed under the war-renouncing Japanese Constitution — a desire deriving from having lived through the bloody 1945 Battle of Okinawa in which one-quarter of the local population — some 120,000 people — are believed to have died, and a desire to see the end to the foreign occupation by U.S. military forces.
Both the Japanese government and people must make every effort to better understand the desire and passions that launched the reversion movement. And they must strictly examine whether the nation's policies since Okinawa's return have been applied, truly embracing the principles and the spirit of the antiwar Constitution, and whether the prefecture's residents have benefitted from these policies.