In “Letter From Okinawa” — published in the New Yorker on October 23, 1954 — Faubion Bowers situated the American military occupation, then in its ninth year, in the trajectory of that region’s long history of foreign domination:

The American installations on the island [of Okinawa] are so massive that Okinawa has been called the Gibraltar of the Pacific. This displeases the American officials here, who are touchy about any comparison between their position on Okinawa, over which they have merely provisional authority, under the Japanese Peace Treaty, and the British position in Gibraltar, which is a colony.

More than sixty years later, not much has changed.