May 28 09:09 AM US/Eastern
TOKYO, May 28 (AP) - (Kyodo) — The issue of where to relocate the U.S. Marine Corps' Futenma Air Station in Okinawa Prefecture has been pending for more than a decade.
Spurred on by mass protests over the rape of a 12-year-old girl in Okinawa by two U.S. Marines and a U.S. sailor in 1995, Japan and the United States agreed the following year on fully returning the land used for the Futenma facility to Japan within five to seven years.
The air base, located in the middle of a residential area in the city of Ginowan on Okinawa's main island, has become a symbol of the heavy U.S. military presence in the prefecture. While the island accounts for 0.6 percent of Japanese soil, 75 percent of the land used exclusively by the U.S. military in the country is located in Okinawa.
In 1999, the Japanese government decided to move the Futenma facility to a coastal area of Henoko in Nago, a city on the same island, and it reached an agreement with the prefectural government in 2002 on a basic plan to reclaim land off Henoko and build a 2,000-meter runway for both military and civilian use.
But in 2006, Japan and the United States agreed on the realignment of U.S. forces in Japan, including the relocation of the Futenma functions to a coastal area of the Marines' Camp Schwab, a slightly different location from the 2002 basic plan. The 2006 plan called for the construction of two 1,600-meter runways in a V-shaped formation with 100-meter overruns at the start and end of each runway.
As environmental assessment was being conducted for the planned landfill, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama took office last September after his Democratic Party of Japan's historic election victory.
He expressed his intention to review the relocation plan and said he would seek to resolve the matter by the end of May by obtaining consent on where the base ought to be relocated from the United States, local governments that would host Futenma's replacement facility, and the parties comprising his coalition government.
But Hatoyama effectively gave up on reaching an agreement with future hosts and the coalition parties by his self-imposed deadline and instead prioritized striking a deal with the United States.
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