I remember the first time that I walked by the concrete and barbed wire wall surrounding the U.S. Army Sagamihara Supply Depot. It was about five years ago. I craned my neck to get a peek inside, hoping to see lines of soldiers and tanks. I saw a lot of nothing. Each day I repeated my routine at the sightline through the gate.

Nothing. Each time, I saw nothing.

I never saw any movement; though I am sure that there were people in the storage facilities there. I was always kind of disappointed at the lack of visible activity, half expecting to see uniformed soldiers with guns marching off to something. I was hoping to see something that howled militarism, something that would help to outrage me and the thousands of others that lived in neighborhood. The place continues to be terribly quiet — which is kind of weird since it is huge, spanning the distance between JR Sagamihara and Yabe stations.

Hearing military jets roaring overhead, seeing uniformed U.S. personnel in the streets, and reading about bar fights between locals and foreign soldiers are constant reminders that there is a foreign military stationed in your backyard. You don't hear, see or read much about these kinds of happenings in the Sagamihara area, which is host to three major U.S. military facilities.

When the former mayor of Sagamihara threatened a couple of years ago to lie down in front of a tank to prevent the expansion of U.S. Camp Zama, he was likely harkening back to a year, 1972, when neither the "camp" nor the "depot" was all that quiet. There was plenty of movement inside and outside the gate of the Sagamihara Depot when students and people living in the community obstructed the movement of tanks bound for the Vietnam War.

The U. S. military presence in Kanagawa now seems to be much more understated, partially because the military has become much more savvy about how it presents itself in public. Many of the soldiers have made an honest effort to reach out to their "host" communities of Sagamihara and Zama.

There are a number of days called "Friendship Days," days in which Japanese nationals are allowed to visit designated bases. I think of these days as a time when the bases have an open house at which people living in the "host nation" can visit an exclusive neighborhood of their "guests," one that has its own auto shop, bowling alley, recreation center and 18-hole golf course, complete with pro shop and clubhouse. With world-class soldiers, Camp Zama and the Sagamihara Housing Area are the ultimate gated communities in Japan.

Before finishing this article, I decided to take a walk by the entrance of the Sagamihara Housing Area, which I have never seen before. I half expected to see something a little different as I walked up to the gate. Even if I couldn't go through the gate, at least I could see through the wall this time. It still had the barbed wire, but it was a chain-link fence instead of stone. In comparison to wall-to-wall houses and apartment buildings, it looked great.

With 50-year-plus-old trees and plenty of space, it was a green zone in an otherwise crowded and concrete-dominated landscape. Frankly, it looked like a nice place for families to live and it looked like it had been well lived in for a long time with plenty of space for children to play. But I didn't hear any of that. I didn't hear much of anything coming from the compound.

It was quiet. Few signs of soldiers. No sound of children. No loud music.

Stripped of the noxious elements that we can hear, see and smell, it is almost as if the militarized landscape of the Sagami Plain for many of the people living here has become so naturalized that we forget about past incidents of sexual violence, 90,000 tons of toxic waste and rolling tanks.

The writer lives in Japan and is completing his Ph.D. in history.