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Residents Fight Back Against Militarization of the Ryukyu Islands and the Philippines

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From Draft NOtices, July-September 2025

— Simeon Man

Photo caption: Residents and protesters outside Bora Training Ground on Miyako Island, blocking a construction truck from entering the base. The banners read: “Don't deploy missile or ammunition depot!” and “We will not let the islands become a battleground!" Photo by Simeon Man. April 2024.

In June 2025, Japan ratified the Reciprocal Access Agreement with the Philippines, allowing their armed forces to deploy to each other's countries for joint exercises and live-fire drills. This followed the annual U.S./Philippine Balikatan war games in which the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) participated for the first time. As the United States escalates aggression against China, Japan and the Philippines have proven their eagerness to play along, jointly militarizing the Pacific region, dragging more and more people and places into war.

Japan's military buildup violates its pacifist Constitution, yet in recent years it has pursued more bases, more weapons, and more soldiers. In 2025 the JSDF introduced sweeping reforms to boost the recruitment of young men and women into the ranks. In March, it acquired $200 million worth of hypersonic missiles from the United States, adding to the $2.4 billion purchase of 400 Raytheon Tomahawk missiles last year. This is consistent with U.S. policies to develop Japan into a full-fledged military partner in the Indo-Pacific, capable of deploying alongside U.S. forces.

In the Ryukyu Islands of Okinawa Prefecture, where the JSDF buildup has largely concentrated, communities are fighting back. When in 2015 the Okinawa Defense Bureau announced that a missile base will come to Miyako Island, residents of the Chiyoda residential district organized daily protests, objecting to the desecration of their ancestral lands and the dangers brought into their lives. Although the base was completed in 2019, the protests haven't stopped. Residents continue to demand the base's closure and an end to the buildup that has made them a target of war.

After the missile base was finished and one thousand JSDF soldiers and their families began arriving on Miyako Island, the JSDF began building another one nearby. The Bora Training Ground includes an indoor and outdoor live-firing range (the indoor range doubles as a bunker in case of a missile attack) and a high-explosives munition depot. All of which is located just 200 meters away from the closest home of the Bora residential district. Residents did not want the threat of war in their backyard and commenced a daily sit-in. Today, six years since construction began, the residents are still outside the gate every day, protesting. They continue to monitor activities on base and look out for the U.S. troops that they are certain have visited their island for training purposes.

The possible presence of U.S. troops concerns Miyako Island residents, not least because of the history of sexual violence associated with the U.S. military presence in Okinawa and elsewhere. Activists in the Philippines, who have long dealt with the issue of military sexual violence by U.S. troops, are now also concerned about similar crimes committed by Japanese troops because of the Reciprocal Access Agreement.

In the Philippines, there are technically no U.S. bases. That's because in the 1980s a coalition of anti-base activists organized a campaign to oust the U.S. military, which succeeded in 1991. This victory remains a testament to what's possible for antimilitarism activists around the globe; and yet, U.S. soldiers have steadily returned over the years. The 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) allows U.S. troops to conduct joint-training exercises in the Philippines; the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) permits the United States to build nine joint-use military facilities, all which are now completed, with more being built as we speak. Ask those who drove out the U.S. military all those decades ago about the current militarization of their country, and they will say that the U.S. military never left.

In a recent trip to Olongapo, Philippines, I met with the women activists of Buklod Women Empowerment, an organization led by survivors of the sex industry that once thrived alongside the massive U.S. naval presence. In the 1980s, Buklod organized women in the bars and opened a drop-in health and counseling center, educating women about the possibility of pursuing alternative forms of livelihood beyond a life catering to American troops. Buklod was part of the coalition that drove out the U.S. military in 1991, and they have continued organizing ever since. Today, much of their work focuses on organizing young women against online sex trafficking and supporting their education and job training.

The Buklod activists took me to Subic Bay, near where Subic Naval Base once stood, and there we watched a new naval shipyard being built. The Agila Subic Shipyard will open this September, though it is already partly operational. Agila Subic is owned by Cerberus Capital Management, a U.S.-based investment firm whose co-founder and CEO Stephen Feinberg was appointed by Donald Trump as the Deputy Secretary of Defense back in March, a reward for his role in supposedly preventing a “Chinese takeover” of the strategic shipyard when his company acquired it in 2022. Cerberus currently leases half of the shipyard to the Philippine Navy, as the site of the new Philippine Navy headquarters; roughly one-third to Hyundai Heavy Industries, one of the largest shipbuilders in the world; and the rest to other tenants, including Vectrus, or V2X, a U.S. defense logistics contractor. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has praised the multi-use facility for promising to bring warmaking and associated jobs back to the region, while the U.S. Navy is eyeing its “return” to Subic Bay for ship repairs, joint exercises, and R&R.

The women of Buklod are devastated to learn of the navy's return and the sex industry they know will come with it, and they're prepared to fight it at all costs. The struggle, they know, is long. They are tired. But they've also collectively nurtured a kind of strength that I will never fully understand, though I was privileged to witness it. I suspect it's something akin to what Miyako Islanders conveyed to me when I visited last year. Outside the Bora Training Ground, I had asked the protesters with the help of my translator friend what Bora, the residential community, means to them, and one person said: “We feel a sense of safety in the relationships we've built here. Our ancestors lived here for 300 years and we want to pass on this peaceful community to the next generation. This is our home. The base here represents a different idea of safety that is harmful to our community.”

The notion that there are other means of “security” not premised on militarization will never be fathomed by the warmongers who see these places only as small sites from which to wage endless war. And so it is that the islands of the Philippines, the Ryukyu archipelago, and elsewhere in the Pacific undergoing hyper-militarization today are the very places we should pay attention to in our ongoing collective struggles to dismantle U.S. militarism and empire.

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This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (https://www.comdsd.org/).