Prelude to Okinawa: Nuclear Agreements and the Return of the Ogasawara Islands to Robert D. Eldridge Osaka University

Diplomacy, like law, is very much based on precedents. In the case of the ’ return of administrative rights over Okinawa to Japan in May 1972, two particularly important precedents were at work—the re- turn of the Amami Islands, just north of Okinawa, in December 1953, and of the Bonin, or Ogasawara, Islands in June 1968.1 Like Okinawa, both island groups were administratively separated from Japan by Ar- ticle 3 of the 1951 allied Treaty of Peace with Japan whereby the United States gained administrative rights over them while Japan retained “re- sidual sovereignty.”2 In most writing and research on Japan, within and beyond the coun- try, the return of the Ogasawara Islands, defined herein to include those islands, Chichi Jima, and Haha Jima, as well as the Islands

The Journal of American–East Asian Relations, Vol. 15 (2008) © Copyright 2008 by Imprint Publications. All rights reserved. This article is based on my paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Historians of American Foreign Relations, 23 June 2007, Chantilly, Va. I would like to thank Professors Roger Dingman, Michael Schaller, Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, and many others at the panel session for their constructive comments and suggestions.

1. For more on the reversion of the Amami and Ogasawara Islands, see my The Return of the Amami Islands: The Reversion Movement and U.S.-Japan Relations (Lanham, Md., 2004) and –Ogasawara Shoto\ o Meguru Nichibei Kankei (Iwo Jima and the in U.S.-Japan relations) (, 2008). 2. Article 3 read: “Japan will concur in any proposal of the United States to the United Nations to place under its trusteeship system, with the United States as the sole administering authority, Nansei Shoto south of 29 deg. north latitude (includ- ing the and the Daito Islands), Nanpo Shoto south of Sofu Gan (including the Bonin Islands, Rosario Island and the Volcano Islands) and Parece Vela and Marcus Island. Pending the making of such a proposal and affirmative action thereon, the United States will have the right to exercise all and any powers of administration, legislation and jurisdiction over the territory and inhabitants of these islands, including their territorial waters.” The phrase, “residual sovereignty,” does not appear in the above article, nor in any other part of the treaty; the treaty architect, John Foster Dulles, used the phrase orally when explaining Article 3 before the delegates on the second day of the peace treaty conference in San Francisco. For more on the making of Article 3, see Robert D. Eldridge, The Origins of the Bilateral Okinawa Problem: Okinawa in U.S.-Japan Relations, 1945–1972 (New York, 2001), chap. 7.

5 6 The Journal of American–East Asian Relations group which includes Iwo Jima, gets little or no attention, particularly in comparison to the Okinawa reversion. That is understandable, for Okinawa, with its numerous U.S. bases was (and is) infinitely more im- portant militarily, geographically larger, and more relevant strategically. It also had a population of almost one million Japanese citizens, which made it a complicated economic, social, and political problem of major proportions. Nevertheless, the relative lack of scholarship on the return of the Ogasawara Islands, which created precedents for the Okinawa reversion four years later, and which is significant as a meaningful ex- ample of one nation returning territory seized in war to another country peacefully, is both surprising and disappointing. Of course, at the time of Ogasawara’s reversion, much attention was given to the event. The major Japanese and American dailies, as well as National Geographic and American Heritage, covered the return.3 Later on, scholars in various fields, especially linguistics and anthropology, gave detailed attention to the islands (with their inhabitants of American, European, Pacific Islands, and Japanese decent) and to the social up- heavals created locally by reversion.4 Yet Nicholas Evan Sarantakes’s “Continuity through Change: The Return of Okinawa and Iwo Jima, 1967–1972,” which appeared in the pages of this journal more than a decade ago, was probably the first English-language research to devote any significant attention to the reversion process of the islands. In the article, and in his book Keystone, Sarantakes argued that “the return of the two island chains . . . was an example of diplomacy at its very best. . . . The return of these islands brought continuity through change.”5 I agree and would add that the return of both the Ogasawara and later continued, strengthened, and stabilized the U.S.-Ja- pan alliance for the long run politically and strategically by increasing

3. Paul Sampson, “The Bonins and Iwo Jima Go Back to Japan An Era Ends for the ‘Yankee’ Isles,” National Geographic Magazine (July 1968); Timothy E. Head and Gavan Daws, “The Bonins—Isles of Contention,” American Heritage 19 (1968). 4. See, for example, Daniel Long, “Ogasawara ni okeru Gengo Sesshoku Shoshi” (A short history of the language acquisition), in Daniel Long, ed., Ogasawaragaku Koto Hajime (An introduction to Ogasawara studies) (Kagoshima, 2002); and Daniel Long, “The Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands: A Multilingual, Multiethnic, and Multicultural Community in Japan,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 4th Series, 18 (2004); Mary Shepardson, “Pawns of Power: The Bonin Islanders,” in Raymond D. Fogelson and Richard N. Adams, eds., The Anthropology of Power (New York, 1977); and that of her student, Midori Arima, An Ethnographic and Historical Study of Ogasawara/the Bonin Islands, Japan (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1990). 5. Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, “Continuity through Change: The Return of Okinawa and Iwo Jima, 1967–1972,” Journal of American–East Asian Relations 3 (Spring 1994). His book was published as Keystone: The American Occupation of Okinawa and U.S.- Japan Relations (College Station, Tex., 2000).