History
The island of Okinawa was the site of most of the ground warfare in the Battle of Okinawa during World War II, when American Army and Marine Corps troops fought a long and bloody battle to capture Okinawa, so it could next be used as the major air force and troop base for the planned invasion of Japan. During this 82-day-long battle, about 95,000 Imperial Japanese Army troops and 12,510 Americans were killed, and in addition to these deaths, somewhere between 42,000 and 150,000 Okinawan civilians - approximately one quarter of the civilian population - were either killed or committed suicide.
During the American military occupation of Japan (1945–52), which followed the Imperial Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay, the United States controlled Okinawa Island and the nearby Ryukyu islands and islets. These all remained in American military possession until June 17, 1972, with numerous U.S. Army, U.S. Marine Corps, and U.S. Air Force bases there.
Since 1972, United States Armed Forces personnel remained on Okinawa Island by the invitation of the Government of Japan as a measure partially fulfilling the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan.
There has been a movement among some of the local Japanese Okinawan population against the American military and naval presence on Okinawa. Several rape cases have been prosecuted against American servicemen. The most publicized rape took place on September 4, 1995, when three American servicemen from Camp Hansen, kidnapped and raped a 12-year-old 6th-grade Japanese girl. All three were arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for this crime.
In February 2010 an earthquake, measuring 7.0 on the Richter Scale, hit the island.
Read more about this topic: Okinawa Island
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)