December Sycamore Tree

Every year around the Advent season I am always overwhelmed by the concept of peace because it seems to me as something so large that there is nothing I can do as an individual to help achieve it. Since this year was also an election year and I’ve been living abroad, the idea of world peace has been on my mind a lot because the result of our election impacts the entire world. As one of the most historic presidential races the U.S. has ever seen, it was especially captivating to watch from afar.
On Election Day, I had been asked to share some of my experiences from the Student Center’s spring Study Tour to Okinawa with Tohoku Committee on Okinawa Relations. Okinawa was one of the main battlegrounds during WWII and later annexed by the U.S. before it was returned to Japan. Today, 75% of the U.S. military bases in Japan are located in Okinawa even though these islands make up less than 1% of the total land area entire country. Because of Okinawa’s strategic location in Asia and the fact that Japanese government has continued to support these U.S. military bases financially since WWII, Okinawa provides the ideal base for soldiers before their deployment to Iraq and the Middle East.
Among the countless other environmental and economic effects of the US military presence, the most prominent news from Okinawa is the rape of a 16-year-old girl by a U.S. Marine in February of this year. But this was one reported event from the thousands of such cases on record since Okinawa was returned to Japan in 1972. As a result of strong opposition to U.S. military presence in Okinawa by the its residents, a plan was formulated to redistribute some of the military facilities to other parts of Japan like Sendai and other Pacific islands like Guam, both of which already have a strong U.S. military presence.
From the Okinawa study tour this spring I realized that few Japanese and even fewer Americans have seen the impacts of the war in Iraq on countries like Japan that have no direct military interest in the Middle East. If we all were a little more educated on how war affects not just our enemies but our allies as well we might see the urgency in finding a more peaceful solution. So, as Advent is approaching and we try to envision a world full of hope, peace, joy, and love, I’m starting to feel less overwhelmed and a little more hopeful because there are other people in this world who are thinking about how achieve peace too.

SKLT
Global Missions Intern (GMI) and
Assistant to the Director
Sendai Student/Youth Center in Sendai, Japan