Okinawa marks 80 years since end of one of harshest WWII battles with pledge to share tragic history
TOKYO (AP) — Okinawa marked the 80th anniversary of the end of one of the harshest battles of World War II fought on the southern island.
With global tensions escalating, its governor said on Monday it is the Okinawan 'mission' to keep telling the tragic history and its impact today.
The Battle of Okinawa killed a quarter of the island's population, leading to a 27-year U.S. occupation and a heavy American troop presence to date.
Monday's memorial comes one day after U.S. attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, adding to a sense of uncertainty on the island about the heavy American military presence and in its remote islands, already worried about getting embroiled in a potential conflict in Taiwan.
Gov. Denny Tamaki, noting the escalating global conflicts and nuclear threats, made a resolve to contribute to global peace studies, disarmament and the preservation of war remains. 'It is our mission, as those living in the present, to preserve and pass on the reality and lessons to future generations.'
U.S. troops landed on the main Okinawa island on April 1, 1945, beginning a battle in their push toward mainland Japan.
The Battle of Okinawa lasted nearly three months, killing some 200,000 people — about 12,000 Americans and more than 188,000 Japanese, half of them Okinawan civilians including students and victims forced into mass suicides by Japan's military.
Okinawa was sacrificed by Japan's Imperial Army to defend the mainland, historians say. The island group remained under U.S. occupation until its reversion in 1972, two decades longer than most of Japan.
Monday's memorial was held at the Mabuni Hill in Itoman City, where the remains of most of the war dead reside.
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba was in a hot seat when he attended Monday's ceremony. Weeks earlier, one of his ruling party lawmakers Shoji Nishida, known for whitewashing Japan's wartime atrocities, denounced an inscription on a famous cenotaph dedicated to students as 'rewriting history' by portraying the Japanese army as having caused their deaths, while Americans liberated Okinawa. Nishida also called Okinawa's history education 'a mess.'
His remark triggered an uproar in Okinawa, forcing Ishiba days later to apologize to the island's governor, who had criticized the remark as outrageous and distorting history.
The Himeyuri Cenotaph commemorates student nurses who were abandoned near the end of the battle and killed, some in group suicides with teachers. Japan's wartime military told the people never to surrender to the enemy, or die.
Nishida's remarks add to concerns about the whitewashing of Japan's embarrassing wartime past as memories of the tragedy fade and ignorance about the suffering grows.
Ishiba, at Monday's memorial, said Japan's peace and prosperity is built on the sacrifices of Okinawa's history of hardship and that it is the government's responsibility to 'devote ourselves to achieve a peaceful and prosperous Okinawa.'
Okinawa remained under U.S. occupation from 1945 until the 1972 reversion to Japan. The U.S. military maintains a heavy presence there due to Okinawa's strategic importance for security in the Pacific. Their presence serves not only to help defend Japan but also for missions elsewhere, including in the South China Sea and the Middle East.
Private properties were confiscated to build U.S. bases, and the base-dependent economy has hampered the growth of local industry.
Fear of a Taiwan conflict rekindles bitter memories of the Battle of Okinawa. Historians and many residents say Okinawa was used as a pawn to save mainland Japan.
There are also ancient tensions between Okinawa and the Japanese mainland, which annexed the islands, formerly the independent kingdom of the Ryukus, in 1879.
Okinawa remains home to the majority of about 50,000 U.S. troops stationed in Japan under a bilateral security pact. The island, which accounts for only 0.6% of Japanese land, hosts 70% of U.S. military facilities.
Even 53 years after its reversion to Japan, Okinawa is burdened with the heavy U.S. presence and faces noise, pollution, aircraft accidents and crime related to American troops, the governor said.
Nearly 2,000 tons of unexploded U.S. bombs remain in Okinawa, with some regularly dug up. A recent explosion at a storage site at a U.S. military base caused minor injuries to four Japanese soldiers.
Remains of hundreds of war dead are still unrecovered on Okinawa, as the government's search and identification effort is slow to make progress.
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Atlantic
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The desire to have someone else choose might have to do with just how valueless our many options have become. Think of the expansive selection of 'mid' TV shows to pick from on Netflix, or the nearly infinite number of possible sexual partners that fly by on Tinder, or the agony of selecting a candidate at the polls (among either, usually, two flawed politicians or, as in New York City's ranked-choice Democratic primary, so many candidates that consensus feels unreachable). The notion that Trump is the wrong answer to the right question has become something of a truism for liberals. But perhaps he is, in this unintended way, pointing us to the end of 'choice idolatry.' This is the phrase that the historian Sophia Rosenfeld uses in her recent book, The Age of Choice, which sets out to explain how freedom came to be synonymous with having an endless number of possible doors to open, and how wrapped up our sense of self is with the ability 'to make one's own personally satisfying choices, with a minimum of impediments, from among a range of options.' She uses idolatry for a distinct reason, suggesting that we might be reaching a golden-calf moment: As shiny and captivating as choice has been for so long, it is revealing itself as a hollow source of identity and a distraction from what really matters. Rosenfeld, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, calls herself a ' historian of the taken-for-granted.' (A previous book of hers traced the history of common sense.) The presumption that freedom equals choice is the kind of fixed notion she is primed to deconstruct. 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The cruelty of this vision almost demands a reinvigoration of choice, an effort to salvage what had made this human impulse so liberating to begin with. For Rosenfeld, the first inklings of our choosiness could be glimpsed in Western Europe in the late 17th century. Picture a woman walking into a store that sells calicos, which were ornamental pieces of cotton from India printed with varied and colorful designs of flowers, birds, and the like. These were some of the first pieces of frippery available, sold at a price point that made them accessible to more than just the rich. No longer was the act of buying goods one of provisioning, asking for flour or butter from behind the counter. Now the products were on display, Rosenfeld writes, 'hung from hooks inside shops or on the side of entranceways in enticing folds that stretched down to the floor in a simulation of women's copious skirts.' This was not mere sustenance; it was seduction. 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The Tea Purchaser's Guide; or, The Lady and Gentleman's Tea Table and Useful Companion, in the Knowledge and Choice of Teas, authored anonymously by 'A Friend to the Public,' could be considered a kind of 18th-century Wirecutter. Such compendia were created to avoid choosing according to 'fancy' or 'whim,' two vices that made their appearance in novels of the time, as did a new stock female character: the coquette. This was the woman who exercises her power to choose by browsing extensively but also withholding a decision. She teases. As Rosenfeld emphasizes throughout her history, such excesses were often projected onto women, who were accused of causing 'social and moral decay' through their frivolity and unexpected economic power. The shopping revolution was as significant as the more obvious political revolts that occurred around the same time. The philosophers of liberalism and the authors of new constitutions may have provided a language for talking about individual freedom, but it was the consumer's habit, in Rosenfeld's framing, that eventually trickled down and transformed political systems into expressions of personal preference. Because of the dangers of unhindered possibility, the expansion of choice came with guardrails, rules meant to stave off anarchy and social disorder. The use of dance cards at 19th-century balls—another of Rosenfeld's charmingly idiosyncratic examples—expanded women's agency in choosing a mate. The little booklets allowed a woman to create a menu of options, but they also precluded a free-for-all—it was highly improper, for example, to dance with the same partner for more than a waltz or two. With the introduction of the secret ballot, in the Yorkshire town of Pontrefract in 1872, choice idolatry conquered its last frontier: voting. No longer would elections be noisy, populous affairs in which candidates would treat voters to food and drink in a shared good time for all. No longer would political choice be the result of something like a public caucus, a ritual that mostly just codified already existing social alliances. The secret ballot began as an 'experiment,' as one local paper put it, in which one was to go 'alone and unbefriended to a compartment,' in the words of another, and indicate one's favored candidate. This solitary physical act soon became, Rosenfeld writes, 'what modern freedom is supposed to feel like.' The secret ballot became the most fundamental of rights in a democracy. Attention turned to the question of who should secure this right, and understandably so: Women and minority groups understood its power, even as an emblem (recall Afghan women in 2014 proudly raising their ink-stained fingers to indicate that they had taken part). Yet even before that first ballot was shoved into a box, some saw the shift from the communal act of voting, messy as it had been, to the purely individual as carrying its own problems. Writing in 1861, John Stuart Mill, a champion of liberalism, worried about what would be let loose in the secrecy of the voting booth, where an elector might be encouraged to 'use a public function for his own interests, pleasures or caprice.' Voters would think of their choices as a way 'to please themselves,' or as an expression of their 'personal interests, or class interest, or some mean feeling in his own mind.' The whole process, Mill argued, would move voting away from a referendum on a community's values and toward an act of whimsy, like browsing from an array of calico clothes. The 20th century only further solidified the idea of choice as the paramount freedom, which also meant shedding some of the guardrails of earlier eras. Many economists came to perceive an individual as the sum of their preferences, a choosing machine, Homo economicus, acting rationally and always maximizing the collective good through their own self-interest. The celebration of market-based individualism hit a peak when Milton Friedman's neoliberalism triumphed in the 1980s. Friedman once wrote that 'the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society.' At the same time, paradoxically, the 20th century provided much reason for skepticism about how much control humans really have over their choices. Freud revealed the subterranean sources of our desires; advertisers manipulate our taste for breakfast cereals as well as presidents. In this century, at least to a behavioral psychologist such as the late Daniel Kahneman, even the question of free will seems unsettled. This insecurity is particularly glaring in a world of proliferating algorithms that serve us more of what they predict we will want and AIs that offer to do the thinking for us. If choice is the 'useless and exhausted idiom' that Rosenfeld suggests it might be by the end of her history, then maybe the concept is worth abandoning altogether. Doing so, she writes, would be akin to asking 'if we are done with capitalism and democracy and their special offspring, human rights'—if we are ready, that is, to throw out the dominant principle of the contemporary world. I don't think we are. But if choice has indeed become an end unto itself, absent a set of principles for actually making choices, then something has gone awry. Abortion rights is a telling test case. In the late 1960s, feminists began using the slogan 'My Body, My Choice' to argue for the legalization of abortion in order to make it seem to be a self-evident right: Americans would never stand in the way of freedom, and to be free was to have choices. But what is clearer now, after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, is that the pro-choice argument was fragile. It gave conservatives the chance to challenge the consumerist-sounding appeal to 'choice' with the more moral-sounding appeal of 'life.' But even more damning are critiques of this framing from the left. The decision to rely on 'choice,' Rosenfeld writes, made access to abortion 'solely a civil right, a right to fulfill individual desires without government interference, not a social or economic right framed in response to essential needs or a matter of social justice.' She explains that this made abortion seem like 'something for sale exclusively to those who had the resources—financial, familial, and psychological—to select it in a reproductive marketplace.' Is it possible to make an argument for abortion without resorting to choice idolatry? I began to hear an inkling of this possibility during the recent presidential campaign. Access to abortion was presented not as a matter of personal bodily autonomy but as a public-health concern. In one memorable speech, Michelle Obama painted a dire picture of what would happen to women if, because of abortion bans, they didn't get 'the care' they needed; to the male partners of these women, she said, 'You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.' Kamala Harris, in her one debate with Trump, also turned to images of medical distress—of 'pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room.' Rather than appealing to women's personal agency, Harris invoked other values: communal care and well-being. What I picked up in this tonal shift was a realization among liberals, conscious or not, that just arguing for having choices was not enough. It matters how you choose and what you choose. What matters is the moral choice in question, the stakes—in this case, what we value more: the health and happiness of the mother, or the existence of her fetus. This is a harder debate to have, and it demands making a more profound argument than one simply in favor of choice, but it is also more rewarding. In his 1946 lecture 'Existentialism Is a Humanism,' Jean-Paul Sartre compared making moral choices to 'the construction of a work of art.' The decisions you make at every juncture are what make you. This is as true of a person's life as it is of a society. 'Freedom could be reconfigured as the chance to do what one ought rather than simply what one desired,' Rosenfeld writes. Releasing ourselves from choice idolatry doesn't have to mean letting someone else—an imperial president, for instance—decide for us. It means separating good choices from bad, understanding these categories as the ones that matter, delineating them alongside our fellow citizens. This, rather than just being drunk on options, should be the sweet slog of modernity.
Atlantic
39 minutes ago
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Trump's Worst-Possible Economic Plan
When President Donald Trump won a second term, the question wasn't whether his economic policy would be different from the first-term version, but how. Two factions have vied to steer the administration's agenda: Conservative populists came with a plan to roll back globalization and empower the working class. And the tech right brought a vision of an accelerated future driven by innovation and disruption. Vice President J. D. Vance announced in March that 'as a proud member of both tribes,' he believed that 'this idea that tech-forward people and the populists are somehow inevitably going to come to loggerheads is wrong.' Trump would blend the two visions into a new synthesis that would simultaneously lift up his downscale voting base and unleash technological progress. Three months later, the product that has emerged is not a better iteration of the original Trumponomics, which consisted largely of conventional Republican policy, but a worse one, much worse. It has managed, amazingly, to abandon the two tribes' most attractive proposals while retaining the least-appealing elements of each. It discards the futuristic ambition of the tech right while preserving its social Darwinism. It leans into the closed-off nostalgia of the populist right while ignoring populists' impulse to help workers. One measure of the dismal result of the administration's agenda is the slew of projections about the fiscal and economic effects of its tariffs and the megabill racing through Congress. The policies, in combination, amount to an enormous transfer of resources from people at the bottom of the economic scale to those at the top. The Yale Budget Lab projects that the bottom four-fifths of the income distribution would be made poorer by the combined tariffs and megabill, while only the most affluent would come out ahead. That is an incredible result for an administration that is increasing the national debt. Jonathan Chait: The largest upward transfer of wealth in American history Various economic models disagree as to whether the megabill would have no effect on economic growth or actually inhibit it. Again, this would be a normal outcome for a plan that would shrink the deficit, but it's a difficult result to pull off when you are pumping stimulus into the economy. The perverse consequence of Trump's plan to tariff foreign trade, cut taxes for the affluent, and take health insurance from some 10 million Americans is a smaller pie, divided less equally. You might suspect that Republicans reject the assumptions behind such projections. Indeed they do. Yet it's not as though Trump's economic plan has satisfied the president's own coalition. Elon Musk, the foremost spokesperson for the tech right, lambasted Trump for blowing out the deficit while cutting support for solar and battery technology (at least, he did before Trump bullied him into silence). Oren Cass, the chief economist at the right-wing think tank American Compass and a leading advocate for populist conservatism, denounced Trump's legislation as 'a death march through a series of choices that nobody really wanted to be making.' Vance's prediction that the populists and the tech right could come together turned out to be, in a way, correct. The two factions quietly agree that Trump's plan is a failure. The effort to change the Republican Party's economic program has been going in fits and starts for the better part of two decades. Starting in George W. Bush's second term, a clique of reform conservatives, or 'reformicons,' critiqued the party's attachment to tax cuts for the rich as a political drag that fit poorly with its growing share of working-class voters. They derided the tax-cut fetish as 'Zombie Reaganism,' a mindless adherence to an obsolete program. Yet they failed to make headway, precisely because Republicans believed, with theological certainty, that Ronald Reagan had discovered the eternally correct set of economic policies in the late 1970s, and that questioning their efficacy amounted to heresy. The internal debate seemed to die down—until Trump emerged with his claim that every previous Republican, including the sainted Reagan, had been a total loser. At times, Trump made populist rhetorical gestures that resembled elements of the reformicon plan (promising to raise taxes on the rich, rein in Wall Street, and give everybody terrific health insurance). When he took office in 2017, however, he fell back on the old formula. After Trump's first term ended in defeat, his supporters set out to ensure that they would not squander their next opportunity. Most of the intellectual energy went toward building up authoritarian power that would overwhelm the hated 'deep state,' as well as the judiciary, the media, and other forces that Trump loyalists blamed for undermining him. At the same time, his partisans sought to supply a second Trump administration with authentically Trumpian policies. The populist version is laid out in a new book edited by Cass, The New Conservatives: Restoring America's Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry. The authors lament the squandered potential of Trump's first term, which could boast only another regressive tax cut as its sole major domestic-policy accomplishment was. Rather than continue lavishing such gifts on the affluent, Cass and his colleagues argue, the new administration should tax the rich more heavily and give the working class a break. The policies they favor would combine protection of key domestic enterprises with an industrial policy to create good-paying jobs for blue-collar workers. The alternative vision floated by the tech right is more amorphous, as you might expect from supremely confident billionaires unburdened by deep familiarity with public policy. The general thrust is a desire to cut the deficit by slashing social-insurance programs, while supercharging economic growth by encouraging high-skilled immigration and investing heavily in science. Each tribe's plan has its merits and drawbacks. The strength of the populist program is its emphasis on low-income workers and its willingness to tax the rich. Its weakness is its static impulse to restore a 20th-century economy. The reverse holds true for the tech right: Its strength is its emphasis on dynamism, and its weakness is its social-Darwinist-infused hostility to the safety net. Trump might have chosen one approach or the other, or—per Vance—tried to blend their best features. Instead, he did the precise opposite: He made scientists leave the country and put in doubt the future of hundreds of high-tech factories while exploding the deficit, jacking up inequality, and taking medical care from millions. Amazingly, in the most obvious area of overlap between the populists and the tech right—government support for a domestic battery industry, which would be vital for powering AI, drones, and other key products—Republicans have imposed deep rollbacks. The House version would cut battery production by three-quarters in coming years, eliminating manufacturing jobs and strangling this tech incubator. And by cutting funds for green energy, the House bill would raise energy prices by 7 to 9 percent, according to different projections. Trump's determination to crush low-carbon energy sources at any price was exemplified by his recent order to reopen antiquated coal plants in Michigan, which forced consumers to pay higher electric bills simply to subsidize coal. The perversity of this outcome is almost impressive. Trump is not even mortgaging the future for the benefit of cheap, dirty energy. He is combining short-term pain with even greater long-term pain. The collapse of the attempt to reform Republican economic policy under Trump has been so swift and complete that we can already discern causes for the failure. I propose four. First, Trump, flushed with victory, rashly attempted to speedrun versions of both reform visions via executive order. DOGE was the tech right's turn at the wheel. Trump gave Musk virtual carte blanche to remake the federal government. Rather than pursue a coherent reform agenda, Musk appeared to fall for a series of conspiracy theories, alienated Trump's Cabinet, and wound up kneecapping some of the federal government's tiniest but most cost-effective functions. In the process, he failed to generate any meaningful fiscal savings or operational improvements. One could envision a tech right–driven government overhaul that accomplished something useful, but Musk's blundering resulted in fiasco. In tandem with all of that, Trump worked with his populist trade adviser Peter Navarro to impose a set of global tariffs, on the erroneous premise that the trade deficit amounted to per se evidence of unfair foreign-trade practices. The 'Liberation Day' tariffs overreached, generating a stock-market blowback that Trump couldn't tolerate, causing him to fall back on lower across-the-board tariffs that have served little strategic purpose. No really smart way to use trade to revive manufacturing, as the populists had hoped, may have been available to Trump—but there were less dumb ways. In both cases, Trump opted for speed and unilateral authority instead of care and legislative consultation; ham-fisted management by his ill-chosen staff did the rest. A second source of failure is that Trump prioritized political control above any other objective, including economic outcomes. His slashing attacks on the bureaucracy, including deep cuts to scientific and medical research, incapacitated agencies that play a vital role in the economy. After paying lip service to the tech right's hope for more high-skilled immigration, Trump not only abandoned the goal but also created a brain drain with his war on universities. In every case where Trump could choose between building human capital and punishing his enemies, he selected the latter. Third, the deliberations among Republicans in Congress and the White House have revealed the hold that Zombie Reaganism retains over the party. The fiscal gravity of Trump's tax cuts is so huge that it has pulled every other aspect of the party's economic program into its orbit. Republicans have taken politically toxic votes to cut Medicaid and SNAP benefits because those cuts were needed to offset the cost of making Trump's tax breaks permanent. The same dynamic drove Republicans to pull spending on batteries and green-energy manufacturing. Republicans have not so much embraced these trade-offs anew as assumed them to be self-evidently good. No senior Republican elected official has advocated for letting the Trump tax cuts expire. Although many of them complain about deficits, they've blamed spending, not tax cuts—despite the fact that the megabill is slated to reduce spending. The final and most profound reason that Republicans failed to revise their economic program is the corrosive influence of the Trump personality cult. However strongly the populist wing wants to expand the party's appeal by jettisoning unpopular policy baggage, it is committed above all to elevating Trump. Although populists such as Steve Bannon and Josh Hawley might warn of the dangers of cutting Medicaid, or urge their party to raise taxes on the rich, they have neither the leverage nor any willingness to press their complaints. The source of their political authority is loyalty to MAGA before all else, and they know that dissenting from Trump on any policy matter is a ticket to political exile—as the tech right has already discovered. Ardent Trump supporters horrified by his trade war have had to couch their dismay in obsequious pleading. Even Musk, after briefly entertaining the notion that he was free to argue with Trump in the way that Trump argues with people, shrank into humiliating contrition, adopting the tone of a defrocked Soviet official apologizing at his show trial to Stalin. Remaking an economic strategy is an intellectual endeavor, one that is inherently fraught in the atmosphere of conformity and obfuscation that Trump has cultivated. The Republican Party's economic philosophy was long trapped in mindless dogma. But rather than escaping it, the GOP has exchanged one cult for another.
