Print

Mail

wiki links

Ishigaki needs airport to live

This tiny Japanese island in the East China Sea is, as a signpost near city hall indicates, a mere 266km from Taiwan but 1,920km from Tokyo.

As evidence of the spiritual distance from the rest of Japan, the locals of this subtropical island of 46,000 people do not say that a new resident has "moved" here from the mainland. Instead, they use the word "immigrate," as if this were another country.

Which it was, at one point, before it was absorbed by bigger islands in Okinawa, then ruled by Japan, then the US, and Japan once again. Today, the island's leaders do not speak of achieving political independence, but they want more economic autonomy.

To that end, the islanders want to build a new airport that will allow more planes to bring tourists in and to ship out more pineapples, mangos and fish.

Blocking them are a group of 522 people -- almost all off-islanders -- who, worried about the environmental effects of a new airport, bought a tiny parcel of the land allocated for the airport and are refusing to sell it.

The battle has dragged on for a generation, pitting Ishigaki, a place of ancient rivalries and fiercely guarded secrets, against what have sometimes seemed to them Kafkaesque forces a world away in Tokyo.

But with the study of a fourth plan nearing completion, the fight, too, may be drawing to a close. White banners demanding a new airport have been unfurled all over the island, a final battle cry against the outsiders.

"I wonder why they are opposing it if they don't live here?" said Gako Tamashiro, 78, a retired fisherman who was sitting under the sun with some friends, asking the question that has always been at the heart of the matter.

Talk of a new airport began soon after Ishigaki and the rest of Okinawa reverted from the US to Japan in 1972. The airport then and now -- a small terminal attached to a short runway of 1.6km, in an urbanized area -- was considered insufficient and is now the busiest airport of its size in Japan.

The first plan, reflecting an era when Japan was little concerned about the environment, called for a 2.2km runway to be built on landfill over the southeastern edge of the island -- over the world's largest surviving blue coral reef. The plan, which caused an outcry both on and off the island, was abandoned in 1989.

The fourth and current plan -- the first one drawn up by the island and not by prefectural officials -- would place the airport and its 2.2km runway entirely on land, in an area occupied mostly by a golf course. Even opponents admit that most of the islanders favor this plan. Environmentalists argue that the area contains precious wildlife, like bats, and construction would cause red-soil erosion that would smother the blue coral.

"They don't live here so they don't understand," Nagateru Ohama, Ishigaki's mayor, said of the opponents. "We're trying our best to survive here. We were born here and we'll die here. And to live, we need this airport. I want them to understand that inside their own hearts."
This story has been viewed 1875 times.