Japan institutionalized subsidies to buy Okinawan base acceptance.

Evidence

The base expert Alexander Cooley details how the system works. “After reversion in 1972, Tokyo increased the rent it paid to the more than 30,000 private U.S. base landowners by 600 percent,” easily exceeding market value. Then, writes Cooley, “construction companies and their subcontractors colluded with the prefecture and Tokyo to apportion and undertake hundreds of … new public works and development projects.” “This quid pro quo” of economic investment in exchange for local acquiescence to the U.S. presence “has since become institutionalized,” says Cooley, “and remains a hallmark of Okinawa’s relations with the Japanese mainland.” When the Japanese government agreed to U.S. requests in 1978 to begin paying the salaries of thousands of Japanese civilians working on U.S. bases through what became known as the “sympathy budget,” it further solidified Okinawan support at a time when bases’ direct economic impact was declining. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 872

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the book’s earlier chapters on host-country cost-sharing and the sympathy budget; also echoes patterns of compensation-for-acquiescence in other host communities.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant extension of the on-base economic argument in earlier chapters; concrete numbers (600% rent increase, 30,000 landowners) on how subsidy flows secure host compliance.
• SEED: Angle: the ‘sympathy budget’ as institutionalized bribery—how the U.S. outsourced the political cost of its bases to allied taxpayers buying local tolerance.