Politics & Power Quote by Eisaku Sato

A phrase like "broad national consensus" is politics at its most strategic: it turns a contested, interest-driven objective into something that sounds inevitable, almost organic. Eisaku Sato isn’t merely describing public opinion; he’s manufacturing legitimacy. If the desire to see Okinawa returned is shared by "our people", then dissent can be framed as fringe, and American reluctance can be cast as obstruction to a settled moral order rather than a negotiation over bases, sovereignty, and Cold War leverage.

The specific intent is twofold. Domestically, Sato is binding Okinawa to the postwar story of Japanese recovery: the nation that lost everything is now, piece by piece, being made whole. The language subtly absolves the state of earlier failures to protect Okinawa from becoming a long-term U.S. military hub; it suggests Japan is finally acting in concert with its citizens, not calculating from Tokyo. Internationally, he’s signaling to Washington that reversion is not just a diplomatic preference but a political requirement, raising the cost of delay.

The subtext, though, is that "consensus" can be a convenient mask. Okinawans themselves had their own priorities and grievances - land seizures, accidents, crimes, the daily reality of living alongside bases - and those don’t neatly dissolve into a mainland narrative of national restoration. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, amid protests and the Vietnam War’s intensification, Sato’s formulation compresses a complex ethical problem into a single, manageable demand: return the territory, and the story can move forward, even if the structures of power on the island largely remain.