Zones of conflict

A U.S. submarine surfaces and strikes a Japanese fisheries training vessel and leaves nine people dead off Hawaii. The incident raises another round of questions about an unwelcome presence in the region.

ON January 9, 2001, a 21-year-old U.S. Marine stationed in Okinawa decided to exploit the sunny climes of the islands to outrage a 16-year-old girl student's modesty by lifting her skirt and pointing a camera. He could never have imagined that his juveni le act would be the first of several events that would soon send historians back to Pearl Harbour in 1941, and strategists into the year 2015 to examine the logic of the U.S.-Japan alliance. That happened in the town called Kin.

THE HONOLULU ADVERTISER

In mid-January, Lance Corporal Kurt Billie, sitting in custody in Camp Hansen, Okinawa, suspected of committing a series of arson attacks in the town of Naha, might have wondered "where's the fire?" It took another big incident at sea two weeks later to get the Americans to capitulate hurriedly and turn over Billie to the Japanese police.

The real fires had begun a few days later. The Ryukyu Shimpo (Ryukyu is the old name for the islands) published the text of an e-mail message from Lieutenant-General Earl Hailston, commanding the U.S. forces in Okinawa. In the e-mail he said that the Governor, the Deputy Governor and officials of the local administration of Kin town who he said "falsely claim to be our friends" were "standing idly by" as the Assembly "passed an inflammatory and damaging resolution". They, in his words, "were all nuts and a bunch of wimps".

Demonstrating appalling absence of judgment, Gen. Hailston had sent the e-mail to a dozen of his top staff officers, one of whom obviously leaked it. The text reached the Okinawa government and Tokyo. A concentrated psychological attack was mounted on Ha ilston by petty politicians. He was hauled in to the office of the Governor, Keiichi Inamine, and in full view of television cameras, he conceded being the loser in a cheap game of one-upmanship by local officials. Inamine deliberately made a point, on c amera, of walking away without shaking hands with a visitor to his office.

The history of Okinawa, as the "victim" territory subject to buffer treatment by Japan before its Emperor surrendered to the U.S. for fear of heavy casualties on the mainland, and the anger over the rape of a 12-year-old girl by an American GI in June 19 95, also in the town of Kin, touches a raw nerve on these islands about U.S. troop presence. On the other hand, many livelihoods are guaranteed by the presence here of most of the U.S.' 48,000-strong troops in Japan. Okinawa accounts for just 0.6 per cen t of all land in Japan but 75 per cent of land occupied by the U.S. forces all over Japan is in Okinawa, which hosts 26,000 troops.

Okinawan officials had indeed behaved like nuts and wimps, with an eye on a mayoral election on February 12, each side playing to the gallery, at the cost of an alliance. What the General did was to try and shore up staff morale after the Okinawa Assembl y called a special session and adopted a series of motions, based on the camera incident and the arsons, to call for a reduction of U.S. forces in Okinawa.

CONFIRMATION, big-time confirmation indeed, of American misjudgment and a replay of Japanese emotion and "nuts" behaviour came on February 10. A 6,080-tonne nuclear powered submarine, the USS Greeneville, which carries Tomahawk cruise missiles, was on a training cruise just off Oahu Island in Hawaii. During a "show-off" demonstration it surfaced and struck a 499-tonne Japanese fisheries training vessel with 35 persons on aboard. The incident took place about 18 to 20 km, or nine nautical miles, off Oahu .

The smaller ship, the Ehime Maru, sank like a stone, but within an hour U.S. Coast Guard rescue crews had plucked 26 people out of the water. Nine were not found including four 17-year-old students, two teachers and three crew members. In Japan, about a dozen of some 50 fisheries training schools have their own vessels. The Ehime Maru and its passenger list belonged to the Uwajima Fisheries High School in southwestern Japan, under the command of Hisao Onishi. "The submarine made no attempt to rescue any of us," complained Onishi at a news conference in Hawaii. The U.S. side said that it was impossible to get the hatch open with waves of two metres.

There was to be no Valentine's Day exchanges three days later between the world's two closest military allies. The act perpetrated by the camera-toting Marine in Okinawa, followed by the arsons, the e-mail and now this incident, led historians to look ba ck to Pearl Harbour. In fact, the gift from Japan on Valentine's Day came in the shape of a condemnation by Toshitsugu Saito, Japan's Defence Agency chief. "The U.S. Navy is slack," said Saito, in a comment, the kind of which is seldom heard from one und er protection about one's protector, but making common cause with The New York Times, which admonished "the Navy's clumsy handling of the incident."

The Uwajima school has been training in waters near Hawaii for 20 years. In fact, the irony is that Japanese fisheries training earlier took place in the pirate-infested Indian Ocean. Later they moved to Hawaii, with its excellent maritime rescue, medica l assistance and overall safety facilities.

As soon as the magnitude of the accident had become as clear as the inexplicability of how a sonar and periscope scan had failed to detect a 58-metre civilian vessel on a clear afternoon, the U.S. had moved fast to take steps that it thought would mollif y Japan.

General Colin Powell, the new U.S. Secretary of State, called Yohei Kono, emphasising to the Japanese Foreign Minister that President George Bush was most apologetic about the matter. Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld called Saito to tell him that eve ry relevant agency had been pressed into service. The National Transportation Safety Board and the Pentagon would investigate the matter fully.

The American Embassy in Tokyo offered to pay for all relatives travel to Hawaii and for their stay there. When President Bush went to Georgia to visit troops, he began with a prayer for the Japanese victims. "I am deeply sorry about the accident that too k place, our nation is sorry that it happened and we will do everything we can to help recover the bodies," said the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces.

But, East is East and West is West, ne'er shall the twain meet. Two or three countries can sign military alliances and hold any number of joint exercises a month, but the cultural distance never bridges the Pacific. The Japanese relatives of those who we nt down are appalled that the skipper of the submarine, Commander Scott Waddle, has not appeared before them or in public, to apologise. A week after the incident, at their first news conference in Honolulu, 20 relatives said the same thing.

"I want the captain to apologise to us directly," said Ryosuke Terata, whose 17-year-old son is believed dead. "If you are a man, you should fall on your knees and ask for our pardon," one of them said. Incidentally, after the 1995 rape of a schoolgirl, no less an officer than the commander of the U.S. forces in the Pacific, Richard Macke, wore the unfair but situationally true Ugly American badge, when he said publicly that the serviceman who raped the schoolgirl should have instead paid a prostitute.

NEVER MIND that in situations similar to that in Hawaii, the Japanese authorities would look for cover-ups and scapegoats, but in a super-charged atmosphere when Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori too was under a cloud for having refused to rush back from a gol f course when informed of the incident, he was so testy that even at that level there was no politeness. His office put out a statement that Mori was all business with the U.S. President. When Bush called to apologise, Mori asked him to do all he could a nd pressed him to continue the search for the nine missing persons.

When the U.S. Ambassador in Tokyo, Thomas Foley, met Mori, he was told that the U.S. explanations about the submarine's inability to rescue anybody was scarcely credible. It seemed that civility too had gone overboard, on both sides. By the way, eight da ys after the sinking, neither Mori nor anyone from his Cabinet had visited Ehime province or Uwajima town.

A week later, a Scorpio-I robot vessel located the wreck of the Ehime Maru resting upright 600 m below the surface but the missing people were not immediately located. The Japanese were pressing for the bodies to be brought up so as to complete Buddhist rites.

The U.S. had instantly relieved the Greeneville's captain of his charge, effectively ending a naval career. A week later, a full court of inquiry was ordered by Admiral Thomas Fargo to find out if any of the three top officers on board were culpable, if not who was, and to make recommendations and prescribe punitive measures. The proceedings will be open to the public.

Compensation cases will come later, as they did in 1981. A U.S. Polaris submarine and a Japanese freighter had collided off Japan in a hit-and-run case. The U.S. was found responsible and the crew of the sunken Nissho Maru were paid yen 255 million. In 1 954, the Fukuryu Maru No. 5, a fishing boat, had its crew exposed to radiation from a hydrogen bomb test in the Bikini Atoll. Initially there were U.S. denials about any test. Then it said the fisherfolk were not exposed, then refused compensation.

In Hawaii, from the first day, the media were after the truth, and it came drip by drip and had to be extracted. There was no voluntary disclosure about having been civilians at the controls of the submarine, about the names of the 16 civilians. The N ew York Times editorialised: "It is imperative for the Navy to stop dodging legitimate questions and share what it already knows." The next day the Navy released the names but said the initial results of its own inquiry would be withheld because a co urt of inquiry, the highest form of administrative investigation, would be looking into that.

HOW could a late 20th century submarine of the world's foremost military machine miss a 58-metre long vessel? There are two detection mechanisms for submerged vessels. The periscope and the sighting flat screen image records and the active and passive so nars. The active sonar sends out what is called a "ping". The ping signals hit solid objects and bounce off them before detecting range.Passive sonar merely listens, and the sounds received are amplified through hydrophones. Passive sonar tracks surface traffic best as it covers an area much wider than an active one with its narrow focus. As it turns out, nothing worked here - except gung-ho.

THE HONOLULU ADVERTISER

The U.S. has among the most disciplined and highly trained forces, post-Vietnam. But it also has a history of the devil-may-care attitude when it comes to civilian aircraft and vessels, even if one accounts for the fact that their presence is global and mistakes are part of life. The Aegis cruiser hit on an Iranian Airbus in the late 1980s and the Nissho Maru incident, are two incidents in the last decade or so. Perhaps just as controversial was the bombing of that part of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrad e in May 1999 where the communications gear was located. "I am unable to believe," said Chinese President Jiang Zemin, "that a country with cutting-edge military technology did not know" what was evident in Belgrade street maps.

The Greeneville error will cost the U.S. dear in terms of compensation to be paid to relatives of people in an area where wages are quite high. Especially now that it turns out that even during the so-called emergency main ballast bow manoeuvre, or blow deck, civilians were asked to be at the controls. It is not unusual for many armed forces to do some public relations demonstrations and show off to civilian benefactors. In this case, among the 16 aboard were donors to a non-profit foundation restoring the USS battleship Missouri. The chairman of the foundation is former President George Bush. But letting civilians undertake the fast ascent manoeuvre is a different matter.

The emergency manoeuvre is one where a submerging is followed by a quick surfacing. Safety is not sacrificed. John Hammerschmidt of the National Transportation Safety Board determined that the crew in the control room had scanned and tracked several civi lian vessels in the area before the demonstration. A Texas oilman, John Hall, told NBC TV that he was at the controls. "I was asked by the captain if I would like the opportunity to pull the levers that start the procedure called blow deck. "Sure, I'd lo ve to do that," Hall had replied. He added that the skipper personally inspected the seas at periscope depth, after a crew member had already done two complete rotations at 360. "All was clear," they reported, before surfacing.

That in substance was the situation as the U.S. shut down active search by planes and ships (to rescue survivors) and went into passive search mode, to bring up the bodies. The nine persons will not come up breathing, but the rising giant in the East in the shape of China will force the two allies, the U.S. and Japan, to put this incident behind them and retrieve the debris of public opinion about the U.S. forces. The only thing non-retrievable from the incident is Yoshiro Mori's political future. But t hat is another fallout from this episode and many others preceding this.

The bottomline is that Japan cannot afford to let the forces go, and the U.S. cannot afford it financially to take them away and pay what Japan pays for their upkeep.