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Redeployment plan needs amending

Japan and the US might have to amend their controversial plan to redeploy troops within the southern island chain of Okinawa to appease local objections, Foreign Minister Taro Aso said on Friday.

Aso said after talks with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that "it would be very difficult, pragmatically speaking, to reach a final agreement on this issue based on the current recommendations.

"Certain adjustments might have to be made because there is certain opposition in the local communities," Aso said in Japanese remarks translated by a foreign ministry interpreter.

The Japanese envoy, making his first visit here as foreign minister, said that Rice "was very aware of that fact that there was such opposition, and we agreed to continue our discussions on this issue."

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has acknowledged that it will be tough to persuade local residents to accept an Oct. 29 accord to shift a US base in Okinawa and pull troops from the area. But he vowed to try.

The plan would transfer the facilities of Futenma Air Base, long a source of grievances in Okinawa, to an existing camp elsewhere in the province, rather than building a new site away from urban centers.

It would also pull 7,000 Marines from the tiny province, which has hosted about half of the more than 40,000 US troops in Japan, and move them to Guam.

Local leaders have demanded that more troops be removed from Okinawa, which was under US rule from 1945 to 1972.

US troops remain stationed in the country under a security alliance with Japan, which was barred after World War II from maintaining its own military.

A US State Department official confirmed that Aso and Rice discussed the troop redeployment question but would not confirm the possibility that the October accord might be amended.

He did acknowledge that Aso was slated to meet with US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday, where the issue would likely be raised again.

Aso also told Rice on Friday that Tokyo "will continue its effort to finalize the initiative of the realignment of the US forces no later than March next year," his spokesman, Yoshinori Katori, told reporters.

"The path is very difficult. But we have time until March and the government will continue the effort," he said.

On the Oct. 29 accord, Katori said: "It is an interim agreement, it is not a final agreement and of course adjustments can be possible in working out the final document.

"But at this stage, we don't have a concrete idea if there should be any adjustment," he said.

Tokyo and Washington have held marathon talks since 1996 on relocating Futenma Air Base out of the crowded urban center of Ginowan, where residents complain about aircraft noise.

Opposition to the US military presence was heightened in August last year, when a Marine helicopter crashed into a college building in Ginowan. No one was injured.

Aso also told Rice that revising the US-imposed 1947 Constitution to permit Japan to maintain a military "could take place within a couple of years," Katori said.

Amid persistent fears at home and abroad about a revival of militarist Japan, Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party has worked out a draft to amend the charter for the first time since its inception.

Aso told his Rice he believed that "many" lawmakers from Japan's largest opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, were "forthcoming" over changes to the Constitution, Katori said.

The Constitution is nearly certain to pass parliament, after which it would be submitted to a referendum, with opinion polls indicating it would also easily pass.
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