It is possibly the most controversial US military facility in the world after the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Local residents like to call it the world’s most dangerous base. An impasse over its future could bring down the government of a key US ally.
However, this hotspot isn’t in Kyrgyzstan, or Afghanistan.
It’s an airstrip on the sleepy, semitropical tourist haven of Okinawa that hasn’t directly been involved in a conflict since the Japanese surrender in 1945 ended World War II. For decades, Marine Corps Air Station Futenma has instead been a political quagmire — and now D-Day appears to be looming.
Haunted by a campaign pledge to relocate the base, Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has vowed to settle the issue — or at least form a coherent set of proposals — by the end of this month. Polls suggest he will be under heavy pressure to resign, after barely nine months in office, if he fails to do so.
The debate has grown so convoluted and the pressure to find a compromise so intense that Hatoyama is suggesting a replacement airstrip be built on raised pilings so as not to destroy marine life below — an expensive, high-tech option that experts doubt would work and which has so far failed to appease many Okinawans.
“It is a terrible idea,” said Masaaki Gabe, a professor of international relations at the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa’s most prestigious college. “It’s no better than the previous plan. It won’t persuade Okinawans, and I don’t think it will be welcomed by Washington, either.”
So far, it hasn’t been — working-level talks in Washington this week ended in discord.
The base, home to about 2,000 US Marines, has long symbolized Okinawan concerns over safety, crime and economic development. But efforts to remove it have shaken support for the US’ most important alliance in Asia, a region where — with China ascending and North Korea unstable — Washington badly needs reliable partners.
All sides agree in theory that the base, a noisy helicopter and transport-plane hub located in a crowded city, should be closed.
An agreement to that effect was made in 1996, following uproar over the brutal rape of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor. The US also has agreed to move about 8,600 Marines from other Okinawa units to the tiny Pacific territory of Guam by 2014.
But the devil is in the details.
Washington is demanding Futenma’s replacement be built nearby.
But suggested alternate sites have fiercely protested having the base moved into their backyard and, with Tokyo unwilling to rebuff its most important ally, the impasse has only festered.
Facing key elections in July, Hatoyama is scrambling to find a consensus by his self-imposed deadline of the end of the month. But his public support ratings have plummeted to the 20 percent level.
Polls say many voters think he should step down if he can’t demonstrate more leadership, and one of his coalition partners has said it may have to quit the government if Okinawa’s concerns are not fully addressed.
Though US President Barack Obama’s administration has largely stayed out of the fray, the process has been a humiliating initiation for Hatoyama.
He ousted Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) last September with promises to forge a more equal relationship with Washington. As part of that pledge, he said Futenma’s operations should be moved off Okinawa, where more than half of the 47,000 US troops in Japan are stationed.
Hatoyama recently backed down, painfully apologizing to Okinawa during a trip there for the “nuisance” the base causes. At the same time, he said there was no feasible alternative to building the new landing strip farther to the north in the town of Nago.
“The Hatoyama government is as docile a satellite of the US as the LDP ever thought of being,” said Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a private think tank based in San Francisco. “The US is certainly the more culpable partner in simply refusing to negotiate, but the Japanese government is at fault in never standing up to us.”
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