Sat Apr 24, 2010 5:47am EDT
(Reuters) - Japan's prime minister on Saturday repeated his objection to a 2006 plan to relocate a U.S. airbase on Okinawa after a U.S. newspaper reported Tokyo had told Washington it would broadly accept the deal.
The Washington Post said on its website Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada told U.S. Ambassador John Roos on Friday Tokyo was moving toward accepting major parts of the 2006 deal to move the U.S. Marines' Futenma airbase from the center of a city to a less populated part of Okinawa.
"The report is not true ... We cannot accept the existing (2006) plan," Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama told reporters in comments aired on national television.
Hatoyama, whose support rates have been sinking ahead of a key mid-year upper house election, has said he would stake his job on settling the feud by a self-imposed end of May deadline.
In the absence of a deal, speculation has simmered he might even have to step down if he fails.
Okada said later he had met Roos "recently" but also denied the Washington Post report. Kyodo news agency said Hatoyama sidestepped the question of whether Tokyo had proposed revising the 2006 deal in talks with its key ally Washington.
The Washington Post report of movement on the deal was likely to spark anger on Japan's southern island of Okinawa, whose residents plan to hold a big anti-base rally on Sunday.
It also comes a few days ahead of a visit to Japan by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell.
Separately, a Japanese newspaper reported that some in the Japanese government are considering broadly accepting the 2006 plan because they feel it might be the only way to meet the end of May deadline to resolve the row with Washington.
FIRST STEP
The original 2006 plan called for shifting the Futenma base to another part of Okinawa, which requires legal approval from the governor of Okinawa who is expected to attend the anti-base rally on Sunday.
The Post quoted U.S. officials as saying they were pleased by the latest proposal, but stressed it was a first step and that Japanese officials would be providing more details next week.
It said Okada had suggested some changes, including altering the design of the runway at the new air station, planned for the town of Henoko, and moving parts of the Marine Corps facility to an island about 100 miles from Okinawa.
It was unclear whether the proposal referred to the small island of Tokunoshima, where a crowd of 15,000 recently protested against accepting the airbase.
Hatoyama has also said any deal must be acceptable to Washington, local residents, and his Democratic Party's small coalition partners.
The Washington Post said the Japanese government presented the Obama administration in March with what a U.S. official dismissively referred to as "ideas, not proposals."
One involved building the new station on a massive landfill near the White Beach Naval Facility, also on Okinawa. The other would have had the Marines split the base between a facility on Okinawa and another on Tokunoshima, more than 100 miles to the northeast.
None of those ideas was "operationally sustainable or politically viable," a senior Pentagon official was quoted by the Post as saying.
But it said U.S. officials characterized Okada's new package as a "proposal" after Friday's meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and expressed satisfaction both countries were now working toward a solution.
(Reporting by Yoko Nishikawa, Editing by Paul Tait)
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