The essay is merely designed to provide a brief sketch of the political process involved in the Okinawa Reversion, while pointing out an asymmetrical pattern of the decision-making process between Japan and the United States. It also aims at accounting for the structure of this special issue of Kokusai Seiji.

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The main objective of this paper is to clarify the basic character of the reversion movement in Okinawa. To achieve this objective, the paper has first explored the patterns of orientations among Okinawan inhabitants towards the politics of reversion, then examined the attitudes of several influential Okinawan political groups towards the reversion problem, and finally analyzed some important reversion activities, especially in the period after 1965. As a result, it was found that the pattern of resistance or rejection, rather than that of easy accommodation, prevailed among the Okinawans under U. S. administration, that a wide range of differences in attitudes towards the reversion problem, particularly towards the issue of U. S. military bases, existed among the Okinawan groups, and that three closely related aspects or phases of the reversion movement, characterized respectively as the nationalistic, Constitution-oriented and antidiscrimination movement, were discernible.

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This study aims at elucidating the significance of the struggle against the U. S. military land acquisition program in Okinawa, a movement which gained momentum immediately following the announcement of the so-called Price report in June 1956. To accomplish this aim, we divided the movement into the three periods of inception, enhancement and expansion, and analyzed the character and distinguishing features of each period. The significance of the land struggle may be summarized by the following two points. First, this struggle represented an Okinawan people's challenge to the basic U. S. policy of maintaining military bases in Okinawa for the defense of the free world as well as to the concomitant policy of retaining long-term administrative rights over the islands. Second, the struggle was not only a movement against the U. S. military land acquisition program but also a prototype of the reversion movement in the 1950's. The character of this reversion movement was clearly based on the concept of reversion developed during the land struggle.

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The purpose of this paper is to analyze USCAR's administration policies in terms of High Commissioners' perception of political situations in Okinawa, thereby clarifying what advice and information High Commissioner offered to Washington. It is hoped that this paper will supplement the Clapp paper and also serve as a sort of link between Okinawan-Japanese pressures and U. S. policy. As background, organizational and political setting in which USCAR operated is discussed, and the two following sections analyze USCAR policies between mid-1964 and 1969, namely, the concession policy (mid-1964-1967) and the policy of maintaining effective use of the bases after reversion (1968-1969), in relation with the perceived Okinawan pressures and Japanese participation in Okinawa. The concluding section summarizes consistencies and changes in USCAR policies, and analyzes their possible relations with moves in Washington.

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The Japanese policy formation on the Okinawa reversion was characterized by the prolongation of the issue as well as by the extent to which the matter attracted public sentiment and a wide range of group interests became activated. These characteristics seem to suggest that the politics of Okinawa reversion provides an excellent case for the group theory or the pressure-group approach to foreign policy-making in contemporary Japan.
In this paper the author attempts to draw the contours of the Japanese foreign policy formation by examining the way in which various individuals and groups outside the government became activated and by assessing the effects that their activities had upon the final outcome of governmental decision on the reversion of Okinawa.
The paper emphasizes the importance of the roles played by the various non-governmental and/or non-bureaucratic groups without, however, denying the fact that crucial decisions were taken by a small group of politicians aided by bureaucratic experts. It is argued that these facts —the excitement of the broad sectors of public and the elitist nature of decision-making within the government— make the case of Okinawa reversion fall into the category of ‘redistributive politics’ in Theodore J. Lowi's theoretical scheme.

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The article attempts to analyze and explain the decision process of Okinawa reversion in the Japanese government as a case of what the writer calls a model of “critical” decision making. The model and its general paradigmatic perspective are outlined in the first section, while the middle section discusses in terms of the model five selected events in the evolution of the reversion issue in the years 1964-69. The last section summarizes the major points of the discussion and suggests that the model used in the study deserves further elaboration and refinement as a potential additional tool of empirical research and theory building in foreign policy decision making, in the Japanese government and in general.

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The rigid position of the U. S. government on retaining administrative control over the Ryukyu Islands is in many ways a typical example of perceptions lagging behind reality. The case for this position had been made originally in the late 1940s and reinforced with the cold war of the 1950s, when American leaders, both civilian and military, came to see Okinawa as the essential center of a chain of U. S. forward bases in Asia, extending from Korea to the Philippines. At that time, of course, the forward base system was considered the backbone of American defense capabilities. Although many American officials in the early 60s developed increasing distaste for the idea of indefinite military occupation of foreign territory, no concerted effort to change this situation by challenging the value of the Okinawa bases was made until 1966.
The change in thinking that occurred between 1966 and 1969 was brought about largely by careful articulation of the trade-offs between the specific military values afforded by American administration of the Ryukyu Island and the increasingly serious political pressures, in both Okinawa and Japan, against continued administration. During this process of systematic rationalization it became apparent that not only could the essential military value of the Okinawan bases be retained under Japanese administration, but, even more importantly, it could be retained under the terms of the existing U. S. -Japanese security treaty. The only sacrifice that would be required was the right to deploy or store nuclear weapons on Okinawa and this loss could be overcome. It was also made clear that the utility of the bases was ultimately determined by their acceptability with the local population. Furthermore, if final settlement of this problem was not reached by 1970, it would begin to threaten the security treaty with Japan.
In the United States the debate over Okinawa reversion was confined almost exclusively to the official bureaucracy and was shrouded by security classification. Very little surfaced in the news, the public was largely uninterested, and Congressional pressure one way or the other was almost insignificant. Thus the major contenders in the debate were the parts of the bureaucracy with direct stakes in the issue: the Far Eastern bureau of the State Department, the U. S. Ambassador to Japan, the International Security Affairs Office of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, combined, and ultimately the President. It was definitely a second-order issue and most of the differences of opinion were settled at the middle level of government. The only decision left specifically to the President in 1969 was the decision to honor the Japanese desire for removal of the nuclear weapons. By that time there was little military resistance to such a decision, particularly when the President himself, in the interests of maintaining a firm alliance with Japan, took the responsibility.

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