Voters headed to the polls in Okinawa yesterday to choose between two gubernatorial candidates campaigning for a US Marine base there to be removed.
The Marine Corps Air Station Futenma has been on Okinawa since 1945, and residents have long complained it produces aircraft noise and crime.
A 2006 deal between the US and Japan to move the base to a less crowded part of Okinawa has stalled over public opposition. The controversy even toppled former Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama earlier this year.
The two candidates for Okinawan governor have both run on a platform that opposes the relocation plan, and the alliance between Washington and Tokyo will likely be tested no matter the outcome of the vote.
Okinawa, home to about half of the about 50,000 US troops stationed in Japan, is a strategically important island close to Taiwan and China and not far from the Korean Peninsula.
Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan has said the US military presence in Okinawa was crucial deterrence of regional security threats, an argument perhaps driven home by North Korea’s artillery strike on a South Korean island on Tuesday, as well as worries over China’s growing military power.
A half-century security alliance allows the US to station military forces in Japan, while guaranteeing the US will defend Japan from any attack. However, local opposition to the troops’ presence is vocal, and the relocation of Futenma will need the governor’s approval.
Okinawan Governor Hirokazu Nakaima, 71, had once accepted the base relocation plan, but now calls for the base to be moved from Okinawa.
His opponent, Yoichi Iha, 58, former mayor of Ginowan city, where Futenma is located, wants the base moved out of Japan entirely.
The base controversy is growing into a major thorn for the US-Japan alliance. Both Kan and Hatoyama are from the Democratic Party of Japan, which promised a foreign policy less beholden to the US before its election last year.
The largely untested party trounced the long-ruling Liberal Democrats, which had smoothly engineered the alliance with the US and rarely questioned what Washington wanted.
The relocation of Futenma is part of a bigger plan to move more than 8,000 US Marines off Okinawa to the US Pacific island of Guam, but this plan assumes a still unbuilt base in another part of Okinawa will be completed.
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