The Futenma issue a hot potato
Saturday,December 6, 2003
Saturday Evening Edition
The deadline for the return of land used by U.S. Futenma Marine Corps Air Station to the local community passed last Thursday. It was on December 2, 1996 that the Japanese Prime Minister and the U.S. Ambassador to Japan had declared the return of Futemna within five to seven years. The condition for land return was to provide a new air station within Okinawa, but plans have not even been put down on blueprint and it seems the process will take ten years or more.
The idea of relocating Futenma to Camp Shwab in Nago City is seemingly halted. Nago wants several limitations on the kinds of planes, flight patterns, and for environmental protection. And the dugong, a natural treasure, resides around the seashore of Camp Shwab. Many issues lie in the way of planning to build a new military airbase there.
Going back seven years, the declaration by both the U.S. and Japanese governments was to return Futenma by making a helipad to land helicopters and other related facilities. Later it was revealed that they needed a runway and certain other facilities, which was far from image of a pad, and proposed locations for the new air station jumped from one place to another like a grasshopper.
Keiichi Inamine became governor in 1998 and decided to accept the building of a new air station in Henoko, Nago City and within the area of Camp Shwab on the conditions of making an additional runway for commercial use and limiting military use for only fifteen years. Many local residents supported his appeal during his gubernatorial election campaign.
But the U.S. government publicly stated it would be impossible to accept a time limitation regarding security matters and they believed the governor's request could not be granted. The Japanese government also took the same stance.
The horrible crime of U.S. servicemen assaulting an elementary schoolgirl in 1995 attracted world-wide attention to Okinawa military base issues. Both governments set up a Special Action Committee, SACO, for the consolidation and reduction of military bases on Okinawa to ease the burden of the local people. It included the return of Futenma.
Although SACO agreed to return eleven military facilities, only two have actually been returned to local communities. It proved difficult to relocate military bases within Okinawa which was already saturated by bases. Even if the SACO agreement would be implemented, Okinawa would still host seventy percent of the total U.S. military facilities in all Japan.
The seven-year anniversary of the SACO agreement was not a celebration, but the reality and difficulty of U.S. military base issues remains.
There is little progress on the Futenma issue between Tokyo and Okinawa. There was the question of who would be in charge of the commercial runway and it was agreed that the central government would be. Before agreeing, Okinawa argued that accepting a new military base was itself a heavy political cost and the Defense Agency said it could not manage anything other than a military facility.
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