OKINAWA: Winner: the U.S.

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As elections to the local legislature approached in the great Pacific bastion of Okinawa and 46 other islands of the Ryukyu chain, Washington officialdom had its fingers crossed. In the last elections in 1958, Red-lining anti-American candidates had shown alarming strength; five months ago when Dwight Eisenhower flew into Okinawa during his Asian tour, jeering agitators greeted him with placards reading I HATE IKE. Last week, when the ballots of 374,000 Ryukyu voters were finally tallied, Washington began rubbing its eyes in stunned but joyous surprise.

As usual, the pro-Communist People's Party campaigned on a "Yankee Go Home" platform, demanding immediate, unconditional reunification with the "Japanese homeland." But this time the People's Party was deprived of a vital talking point by the U.S. military government's generously increased compensation to farmers whose fields had been gobbled up by Air Force runways and Army housing. Ranged against the People's Party was the moderate, pro-U.S. Liberal-Democratic Party headed by scholarly Seisaku Ota, 56, current chief executive of the local government. The Liberal Democrats, too, plumped for reunification with Japan, but unlike their opponents, wanted it to come about gradually and without ruining the Ryukyus' prospering economy —which depends on the billion-dollar network of U.S. bases and the presence of some 60,000 dollar-spending servicemen, civilians and their families.

The result was a landslide for the Liberal Democrats who won a whopping 22 of the 29 seats in the legislature—a gain of seven. In the sweep, the People's Party was all but wiped out; it lost four of its five seats in the last legislature and suffered the additional humiliation of seeing the voters reject Mme. Kamejiro Senaga, wife of the party's spellbinding boss. (The other six legislature seats went to the mildly leftist Socialist Masses Party and a conservative independent.) With uncommon political maturity, most Okinawans had clearly accepted Liberal Democrat Ota's common-sense argument that in a time of cold war the U.S. could not realistically be expected to return to Japan the keystone of the American military position in the western Pacific.