New Japan Women's Association & War Resisters League: End U.S. Base Payments from Japan and Remove U.S. Bases

A request from the New Japan Women's Association and the War Resisters League: "End U.S. Base Payments from Japan and Remove U.S. Bases":

As the people of Japan are facing a nuclear crisis second only to the 1986 nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in Ukraine and a future of uncertainty about the impacts of radiation in Japan, support a call by Shinfujin (the New Japan Women's Association) to demand that the U.S. government relieve Japan of its close to $1.6 billion in yearly payments to the U.S. to "host" U.S. military bases in their country.

The Japanese people need these resources for their own recovery from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that killed over 13,000 people and left 150,000 people without homes. Take action to write your Congressperson and President Obama and ask them to relieve the Japanese of their payments to the U.S. war machine and to remove all U.S. military bases from Japan.

The War Resisters League affirms that war is a crime against humanity. We therefore are determined not to support any kind of war, international or civil, and to strive nonviolently for the removal of all causes of war, including racism, sexism and all forms of exploitation.

At the urging of Washington during the Cold War, Tokyo, in contradiction to its pacifist Constitution, built up a vast defensive military to protect the archipelago from invasions and attacks. Tokyo is one of the top military spenders in the world; and, also at the urging of Washington, has contributed financially to U.S. wars in East Asia and Central Asia.

Since the Cold War, according to Japan scholars of "Reverse Course" (the shift during and after the U.S. Occupation of Japan from democratization to transforming Japan into a U.S.-managed Far Eastern bulwark against the USSR and communist China), Washington hawks with ties to military industries have pushed Tokyo militarists (includinng direct descendants of WWII-era militarists put back into power with CIA assistance) to abandon Japan's pacifist constitution. Michael Schaller in "America's Favorite War Criminal: Kishi Nobusuke and the Transformation of U.S.-Japan Relations" writes:

Evidence in a variety of open and still classified U.S. government documents strongly indicates that early in 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, making what he and his aides earlier called a "big bet," authorized the CIA to provide secret campaign funds to Japanese Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke--formerly an accused war criminal--and selected members of the Liberal Democratic Party.

Of course, these influences ought not be equated with Liberal Democratic Party (members of the LDP have supported Article 9, the Peace Clause of the Japanese Constitution at great political cost); but instead with elements in the Japanese bureaucracy which indicated their presence during the Hatoyama administion. They obstructed the idealistic former prime minister's promise to stop new U.S. military construction in Okinawa and efforts to use diplomatic rather than military responses to conflicts in East Asia.

The end goal of remilitarists is to make way for increased Japanese taxpayer spending on U.S. military products and U.S. wars; to allow Japanese military industries to partner with U.S. military industries to produce weapons for export; and to send Japanese soldiers to fight in U.S. war zones. Japanese citizens pay for most the costs of 90-100 U.S. military installations throughout Japan, except for the salaries of U.S. troops.

The 3/11 triple tsunami/earthquake/triple nuclear meltdown disaster is set to break the record as the world's costliest disaster.