My first reaction was, So what else is new? In the 1990s, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Reader’s Digest, Time magazine, ABC’s 20/20, among other national media outfits, had a field day exposing the labor and immigration abuses in the CNMI. I know of at least two U.S. novels that recounted some of these “horror” stories. One author even called Saipan the “island of slaves.”
These reports played a major role in cleaning up the island’s notorious garment industry and led to the implementation of reforms in the CNMI (that were, however, eventually scrapped or diluted).
When the online trailer mentioned “former factory workers turn[ing] to the sex industry for survival,” I thought that Yamaguchi’s work was a Johnny-come-lately piece.
Not really. Yamaguchi never mentioned labor and immigration abuses. His target was globalization.
“We study rats and fruit flies because they have very quick life spans compared to humans,” proclaimed one online reviewer. “Saipan is like the fruit fly or rat of global economy: its quick globalization life-cycle can serve as a model for the world.”
Titled “Battle of Saipan,” the documentary is, technically speaking, a well-made film. It tried to connect the devastation brought by World War II to the island with the current global “economic war” that is “devastating” the CNMI. Its images are arresting, revealing, disturbing…sensational. It’s parachute journalism at its best. It’s always interesting, in any case, to see your homeland through the eyes of “outsiders.”
But is this film based on facts?
Nope.
Consider, for example, the old footage used to depict the a-bomb flown to and dropped on Japan by an American B-29 based on Tinian in 1945. It was actually from the 1954 fifteen-megaton nuclear test bomb that destroyed Bikini Atoll in the Marshalls.
But this is nitpicking and it’s a tiny, insignificant inaccuracy compared to the fatal flaw of the big picture that Yamaguchi’s film tried to depict — his major premise is flat out wrong.
His work is a rant against globalization and he believes Saipan is its “victim.” His “proof” is the implementation of the WTO rules in 2005 and the resulting exodus of garment factories on island. Hence the island’s economic collapse and ex-garment workers turned prostitutes. Saipan benefited from globalization and is now dying because of globalization. Case closed.
But it didn’t happen that way. The garment industry loved it here because their factories were shielded from globalization. Yamaguchi also failed to mention that Saipan and the rest of the world knew more than 10 years ago that the WTO rules would take effect on Jan. 1, 2005. That due to abuses involving garment workers in the 1980s, the CNMI government, to appease the feds, had imposed a hiring moratorium on the number of nonresident garment workers. But in 1995, the first year of the WTO transition period, the CNMI government removed the cap and brought in all the factories willing to do business here. CNMI leaders and their cronies in the private sector argued then that the island still had a 10-year window of opportunity and should make hay while the sun was still shining. And never mind what would happen 10 years later. Never mind the socio-economic consequences — not to mention the impact on infrastructure, the environment and public services — of bringing in 15,000 nonresidents to a small island. Never mind the U.S. Democrats. We could hire Jack Abramoff and be in bed with Tom DeLay anyway. Never mind the political cycle in the U.S.
It’s like a group of vendors who put up their stalls on a railroad track despite knowing that a train was scheduled to pass through. And when the train finally arrived, on schedule, destroying the stalls, Yamaguchi dropped in to shoot footage of the debris and complain about the invention of train.
“This whole story grows more and more grotesque as we go,” said Yamaguchi as he and his crew toured the La Fiesta Mall which he cleverly described as “the last mall of the Incas.”
But what has La Fiesta got to do with the garment industry? It was a Japanese owned mall that was supposed to complement the nearby Hotel Nikko. Due to the tourist numbers that started declining in 1998, establishments at La Fiesta were shutting down one after the other long before the liberalization of the global garment trade rules. In 2003, the CNMI government acquired the former mall for NMC’s Gateway project, but it never materialized and so the remaining stores at La Fiesta up and left. In late 2005 JAL pulled out of Saipan to cut its losses and Nikko was put on the block.
“As the cumulative impact of economic collapse builds up on your consciousness, Saipan can even look like a horror movie,” said Yamaguchi while exploring the “ruins” of a mall whose closure had nothing to do with the garment industry’s decline.
Let me say it again. Garment factories arrived here for a quick buck. They knew their time frame. They were aware that the party would be over in 2005. They came here to make “Made in the USA” products that could be shipped duty-free to the states where the only competition were American factories that paid higher wages and taxes. They were here, in other words, because they would not have to compete with Third World factories — until Jan. 1, 2005.
Saipan was never in the globalization game. Yet its leaders freely welcomed an industry that had an expiration date — that could not compete in the globalized economy everyone knew was coming.
Yamaguchi’s film included, as to be expected, the sleazy night life of Garapan. He should have known though that garment workers had been moonlighting as prostitutes even during the peak of the industry in the 1990s when it was earning $1 billion a year.
His historical time line was way off. He called the 10-year-old Tinian Dynasty a “new casino,” and there were no interviews of locals happy to see the death of an industry that slandered their island’s reputation around the world.
“What’s next for Saipan?” Yamaguchi asked a local man relaxing on the beach with his loved ones. “Peanut butter,” the local man said and he and his family members and friends laughed. This inside joke was lost on Yamaguchi. He didn’t know that the current governor, a former garment executive, promised to bring a peanut butter factory to the islands.
If someone who knows nothing about Saipan will watch this documentary, his reaction will be: “Wow. Capitalism and globalization suck.”
The CNMI, however, never embraced globalization. It tried to stay away from it while allowing the industry most vulnerable to globalization to do business here.
Saipan is not a victim of globalization, but of poor choices and shortsightedness.
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