General and Political Advisor Naha (1955-1956) Ambassador John M. Steeves served in the China/Burma/India theater duringWorld War II in the Office of War Information. His Foreign Service career included positions in New Delhi, Tokyo, Djakarta, Naha, Kabul, and Washington, DC. This interview was conducted by Charles Stuart Kennedy and Thomas Stern on March 27, 1991 Q: Then you went from Djakarta to Naha in Okinawa as the consul general and also the political adviser. You were there from 1953 to 1955. Could you explain the situation and what your job entailed? STEEVES: From the standpoint of personal relationships and comforts that was a delightful assignment because it was with the military command. I got along with all of them extremely well. General Moore and all of his staff. I got the Command people to give up a perfectly delightful site that they had begun to fix up--in fact, put a million dollars into it actually--and useas a club. I told them that it would look very, very bad for them to be occupying a place like that as a military club--high on a cliff overlooking the China Sea and obviously beyond their needs. I said, You know what you ought to do with that? You ought to turn it in to the consulate general. I got Washingtons permission to go along with that and they did. Q: Thats diplomacy. STEEVES: It was the old Japanese naval inspection site. It had a lighthouse on it. It still had the rings on the wall where they tied up the pirates that they caught at sea. It was a marvelous place. One of the Okinawa contractors built new counters for us out of that lovely travertine that they have naturally in Okinawa and put it all in for nothing. It was one of the most delightful offices I have ever had in my life. Q: What were the issues? STEEVES: The issues were occupation problems. Getting the Command to do the types of things for the Okinawa people that would bring about the right relationships between the two, which is not very easy. Q: Was that the period when you had either a communist or socialist mayor of Naha? STEEVES: No, neither the Mayor of Naha nor Okinawa Governor were Communist. You must be referring to Senaga, a member of the native Council--or some such office. Q: How did that work? STEEVES: Senaga caused us a lot of trouble for he was an out and out communist. He was popular with the people on some issues but he had to be controlled very carefully. Under Military Rule, of course, he could have been dealt with very quickly. But that would not have been a wise course to follow. Q: This was the fifties. How did you deal with him? STEEVES: Well, he could be isolated pretty well because he didnt have a lot of influence, but he had potential influence. He was beginning to gain popularity with the teachers union. Then, we had done so many things for the Okinawans that were obvious benefits that they could kind of see where their bread was buttered. I, for instance, sent back to India and got the Coiembatore Experimental Station to send me great crate loads of experimental cuttings to revolutionize their sugar industry. One of the things that I really prize in the Foreign Service was when they sent me a silver cask with the first sugar that they got from the new cane some years later. Q: At this period I take it that Okinawa Reversion to Japan was not a major issue. STEEVES: It became a major issue somewhat later. It was just beginning when I left. It was growing all the time because the Japanese wanted the islands back and the overtures and propaganda was strong and constant. Q: How about the Okinawans? STEEVES: Yes, for cultural reasons, language especially, they would be just more at home with their own Japanese people despite the fact that they were always looked on as country second cousins. They suffered a lot by being looked down upon by the Japanese. I am afraid that is happening again--and we told them it would. RICHARD W. BOEHM Vice Consul Naha (1955-1958) Ambassador Richard W. Boehm was born in New York in 1926. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II and joined the Foreign Service in 1954. His career included positions in Japan, Germany, Luxembourg, Nepal, Turkey, Thailand, and Washington, DC, and ambassadorships to Cyprus and Oman. This interview was conducted in 1994 by Charles Stuart Kennedy. BOEHM: I was told that I was to go to [the Consulate General in] Melbourne, Australia. I really didnt want to go to Melbourne because, although Id never been to Australia, I had the idea that Australia was probably pretty much like the United States. I wanted to go to some place different. So I appealed to somebody I knew in the Personnel Office and said, Cant I get something else? He said, Ill see what I can do. He came up with [the Consular Office in] Okinawa. This was, if anything, far less exotic than Australia, because it was a United States military base. So I went there and spent two years in Naha. It was a mistake. I feel that I would have been much better off going to Australia, in a way, though not entirely. At any rate, that was that. I went to Okinawa, again with misgivings, because it wasnt at all what I had in mind. I seemed to be going, really, in the wrong direction. The Consular Unit, as it was called, in Naha was a four-man post. Organizationally speaking, it was an interesting one. It was headed by a senior officer, at that time John Steeves, who later became Director General of the Foreign Service and Ambassador to Afghanistan. He had the title of Consul General, but his main hat was as Political Adviser to the Commanding General of what was called USARYUS/IX Corps, or United States Army, Ryukyu Islands - IX Corps. The commander was a three-star general. John Steeves was his Political Adviser. That was the main function he had. There wasnt much consular activity. There was one upper middle grade officer who was his deputy, who more or less ran the Consulate. There were two junior vice consuls, of whom I was the more junior. We did everything else--the administration and the consular work. The number two guy, Steeves deputy, was an economic type. It was great training, in fact--really, very good training. The senior vice consul had entered the Foreign Service through the back door. He had been a ships radio operator earlier in his career. Then he had became sort of a consular clerk or communicator somewhere--I think in Australia. Then he made it and was commissioned a vice consul. He was a very salty old guy. However, he knew his business. He took it very seriously and taught me not only the consular business but administrative affairs as well. All of this, plus my experience [in the Department] as a press officer stood me in very good stead throughout my career. Even though, at the time, I was frustrated at being in Okinawa, I came to appreciate it and realized that it was a very useful experience. Living in Okinawa was nothing much. You lived in a fenced-in area, a US military compound where a few houses were set aside for the people from the Consular Unit, as it was called. It was called the Consular Unit, because the United States was the administrative power in Okinawa, and you couldnt have a Consulate, as such. Technically, it was treated as a branch of the Consular Section of the Embassy in Tokyo, for consular purposes. There were several military compounds--some of them in one area, some in another. Life was kind of like Levittown with a fence around it. So that was a disappointment. We did our best and struggled along. I got a chance to do something--Im not sure what role it played in my career. Maybe none, except in my own mind. We had an inspection during my tour there. There were two inspectors. One of them was Ed Gullion, a well-known Foreign Service Officer and later an Ambassador. He eventually became the head of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Ed Gullion sat down with John Steeves, the Consul General, at the end of his inspection. He said, We have a list here of political subjects on which there has been no reporting. You have this young vice consul. We think that it would be a good idea if you and he, between you, would pick one of these subjects, turn him loose for a couple of weeks from his other responsibilities, and let him do it. John Steeves was a very fine guy and a very good developer of his staff. He said OK. The inspectors went their way and John called me in and said, Lets look at this list. The subject that attracted me was Reversionist sentiment among the Okinawans. At the time Okinawa was being run by a military governor--not the commanding general to whom Steeves was an adviser, but a civil administrator, who was an Army officer. All of the civilian Americans living there worked for the military government. They had a notion that the Okinawans loved us so much that what they really wanted was to become the 51st State. However, there were a few people who believed that Okinawa should revert to Taiwan, because it had historic ties with China at one time or another. It had been an independent kingdom, and there were some who wanted it to be an independent kingdom again. However, those with any sense realized that the Okinawans considered themselves Japanese. If they went anywhere, it would be to become a province of Japan. I was asked to do a report on this. I did. I took two weeks off. I didnt have very many sources. I must admit also--and I might want to take this out of the transcript later--that I had a preconceived notion of what the answer should be, even before I began my research. The preconceived answer was that the Okinawans really wanted reversion to Japan. This probably also served US interests best, and I thought that we probably should start preparing for it. At that time we kept Japan very much at arms length in Okinawa. There was no official Japanese representation in Okinawa. When a Japanese ship came into the harbor, it couldnt fly the Japanese flag. We kept the Japanese away, which might have been a mistake. We should have begun to involve them and gotten them to pay some of the bills [for the Occupation]. I had these ideas before I began my research. So I cant say that it was entirely objective, although I think that the conclusions I reached were correct. I came up with this report, which concluded that reversion to Japan was the way to go. Q: Method and process are always very interesting things. Here you were--obviously, you didnt speak Japanese, or certainly not the Okinawan dialect in Japanese. How did you go about this? BOEHM: I went about it as best I could. I would say now, with the perspective of four decades later, that it was a very inadequate kind of research. But you talk to anybody you can lay hands on. There was a structure, a Ryukyuan government structure, with a governor, a mayor of Naha, various officials, and an Okinawan staff. Im afraid that all too often we drew on our local staff for this kind of report. I tried to find Okinawans who would talk to me and I talked to Americans, as well, who had contacts, to see what they thought, looking to those who were as objective as you could find. So I put together what I could. I would say now that what I did was inadequate, in terms of research--although I think that the conclusions of the report were correct. Anyhow, I prepared the report. It was a bombshell. By the time the report was completed, John Steeves had moved on. Hed gone to become Political Adviser to CINCPAC [Commander in Chief, Pacific] in Hawaii. But the American military command in Okinawa was outraged at this report. They wouldnt speak to me. I was shunned. Q: Could you explain what the American military attitude was at that time? BOEHM: They were convinced that we had to keep Okinawa. It was ours. They thought the Okinawans liked it that way, and the idea of more or less inviting Japan to start coming in and preparing eventually to take over was anathema to them. My report, by implication, rebutted their notion that the Okinawans loved us and wanted us to stay. A few of the military would come to me privately and say that it was a great report. They said that they couldnt say this publicly, but You are absolutely right about what you said. The official American military reaction was very bad. It happened that just after the report came out, I went to a consular conference in Tokyo. At that time the Ambassador was Douglas MacArthur II. Q: General Douglas MacArthurs nephew. BOEHM: Yes. The DCM in Tokyo at that time was Outerbridge Horsey. Q: Two very much establishment types. BOEHM: Very establishment. Horsey gave a luncheon for the visiting consular officers, to which Ambassador MacArthur, of course, was invited. Since Horsey had a protocol problem of whom to put next to Ambassador MacArthur, he solved it by choosing the two most junior persons present to sit next to the Ambassador. I was one of them. Ambassador MacArthur turned to me and said, That was a first rate report on the reversion of Okinawa. Congratulations. I was stunned and thrilled. I doubt if he had actually read it. His staff probably drew it to his attention. It gave me a tremendous lift. Q: Oh, Im sure. BOEHM: And I got a letter from John Steeves, congratulating me on the report which, he said, was being read with interest in Hawaii. Even though the local reaction in Okinawa among our military was very negative, the report got some attention and attracted interest elsewhere. Q: I think that it was the first time we really started to look at this issue. BOEHM: It did that. I would like to think that I made a decisive contribution to something. As we go along in this interview, Ill come to other points in my career where I felt that I did something that was crucial at the time that I did it. But Im not at all sure that this was the case [with regard to Okinawan reversion]. It was something which was going to happen, either then or a little bit later, in any case. Q: Anyway, it was a timely report. BOEHM: It was. It took a little time before we started to negotiate with Japan and to hand Okinawa back to them, although we kept our bases there. It worked out all right. Okinawa is still chafing a little bit. I read in the press the other day that the Japanese governor has been in Washington, asking us to give back a lot of land which we now use on our bases. Okinawa is land-poor. So that kind of issue--the base presence--goes on. But that is something that we will negotiate with the Government of Japan. Q: I had a call from Japanese Public TV earlier this year--not too long ago. They wanted to do something or talk to people about the reversion issue and all of that. I said, You know, you dont have to talk to the Japanese authorities. If you want to get different views, talk to the Pentagon and the Department of State people at that time, because thats really where the conflict was. BOEHM: They ought to talk to Dick Sneider, who was head of the Political Section [in the Embassy in Tokyo] a little later. It was he who, while in Japan, or perhaps back in Washington in some capacity, gave impetus to the negotiations which ended up in the reversion of Okinawa. Anyway, Id like to think that I made some kind of a contribution. But the point was that, as a very junior officer, I was given the opportunity to prepare this report. It made a splash. It was a great lift for me. Q: Oh, absolutely. Was there anything else in Okinawa? Who was Consul General after Steeves? BOEHM: It was another very fine career Foreign Service Officer named Olcott Deming. He went from there to be Ambassador to Uganda or Malawi and then retired. His son is now, I think, a senior officer in the Foreign Service. I was lucky in my assignment to the Consulate in Okinawa. Both Steeves and Deming were very good guys. I was in Naha for two years [1956-1958]. Q: You left Naha in 1958. BOEHM: It was a two year tour. OLCOTT H. DEMING Consul General Naha (1957-1959) Olcott H. Deming was born in New York in 1909 and was raised in Connecticut. As a Foreign Service officer, he served in Thailand, Japan, and Uganda. Mr. Deming was interviewed by Horace G. Torbert on April 20, 1988. DEMING: Let me just catch up with my history here in my mind. After a long tour in the United Nations Bureau here and in New York, I was assigned, without much prior notice or expectation, to the post as Counselor of Embassy, Tokyo, and Consul General in Naha, Okinawa, which was still occupied by the American military and administered by the United States Army. At that time things were still very unsettled in China only 400 miles across the South China Sea from Okinawa. The military called Okinawa the bastion of the Pacific. While the war with Korea was on, Okinawa was a base for jet fighters that could make just two bombing runs over Korea and get back without running out of fuel. So you can imagine that the priority of Okinawa as a Pacific base for not only the Seventh Fleet but for the Air Force and the Marines. I had never served with the Army or in the military. It probably would have helped me if I had. But I found the military mind not inscrutable but difficult to accommodate to. Q: Channeled along somewhat different lines than you were yourself. DEMING: Than the diplomatic service, youre absolutely right, Ambassador. When problems came up Id have to consult with the High Commissioner, who was a three-star general, and I was the equivalent of a one-star general. When on an Army base civilian officers have an assimilated rank. As a Class 3 Officer I was equivalent to a brigadier general. The brigadier general on the base with whom I served, said, Olcott on this base, Consul Generals rank with but after Brigadiers. So when meeting VIPs at the airport, I stood at the left of the brigadier general. Q: Respectfully one pace to the rear. DEMING: Respectfully. When ran into a political matter, because I was really a political advisor although they didnt call it POLAD at that time, I would consult with the brigadier or the lieutenant general who were my superiors. The High Commissioner on occasion would point out to me that Okinawa is not a democracy, it is not a sovereign country, it is an occupied island and we go by the book. Dont you have a book to go by in the diplomatic field? I would say, no, we dont have a book. We improvise. Its the art of the possible, diplomacy is, within accepted limits. The Commissioner might shake his head and repeat that the book tells us how to behave when youre on Okinawa. This is an occupied island, we are surrounded by the enemy. We do not fraternize with the enemy. At one meeting I noted that the army had a cultural program here that sends a great many Okinawans to the United States for education. The returned students called themselves The Golden Gate Club. As a ranking civilian officer here, I give them receptions or parties from time to time. I said Id like to have the High Commissioner come and talk to them. That apparently was very difficult for him. He said, were still an occupied
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 22:45:36 +0000
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