Arab News Japan

TOKYO: While Gaza’s fate is in the balance, Japan’s southern prefecture of Okinawa has already been “taken captive by the United States,” according to NORIMATSU Satoko, the Director of the Vancouver-based Peace Philosophy Centre.

Norimatsu was asked what would happen if Trump decided to take over Okinawa. She replied that he wouldn’t have to do anything as “it has already been taken.”

She added that Japan has been “brainwashed by the American military” into doing what the United States wants in the 80 years since the end of World War II.

“It’s been suffering from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome,” she told a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.

“Japan is willingly subservient to the United States and of course, there’s a lot of propaganda because Japanese media are mostly copying the Western media. Japanese people are led to love the United States and to rely on the United States, and that kind of thinking must be changed.”

She accused Japanese and Western media of failing to offer alternative perspectives from countries that she says are adversaries to the West.

“I think it is a time for people in Japan – or people anywhere – to try to get different sources of information, especially for the Japanese people to try to get out of this US-centered Stockholm kind of thinking about the United States,” she said.

Norimatsu pointed out that the United States controls large areas of Okinawa as well as a great deal of airspace above Tokyo.

“How can you let so much of your land and air be taken by a foreign country?” she asked. “Why is the United States allowed to do anything that, you know, Japan wouldn’t allow other countries to do?”