Japan Delays Decision on Moving U.S. Marine Base

December 16, 2009

By MARTIN FACKLER

TOKYO — Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s postponement of a decision on relocating an American military base on Okinawa may be the product of domestic political considerations as much as deeply held foreign policy principles, analysts here said on Tuesday. But it promises to put new pressures on Japan’s already strained ties with the United States, its closest ally.

The Obama administration had pressed Mr. Hatoyama’s government to make a quick decision on whether to carry out a 2006 agreement between Washington and Tokyo to relocate the base, Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, to a less populated part of Okinawa. On Tuesday, however, he announced that he would put off that decision until sometime next year, saying that members of his governing coalition would set up a working group to discuss the current plan and other possible sites for the base.

On Tuesday evening, Mr. Hatoyama seemed to suggest that he wanted a new site for the base, something that the Obama administration has resisted.

“I want to make a situation where we can search for a place other than Henoko, and if possible select it,” Mr. Hatoyama told reporters, referring to the site of another base on Okinawa, Camp Schwab.

The row over the base has underscored the Obama administration’s difficulties in finding common ground with Mr. Hatoyama’s slightly left-leaning Democratic Party government, which ended a half-century of governing by the pro-American Liberal Democrats when it came to power in September. Mr. Hatoyama has also seemed to pull away from Washington by allowing the Japanese Navy’s mission of refueling American warships in the Indian Ocean to end and telling Asian leaders that Japan has been overly reliant on the United States.

Another challenge for Washington, analysts say, has been a lack of clarity in Mr. Hatoyama’s stance. While he has called for ending Japan’s junior status, he has also stressed that the alliance with Washington remains the cornerstone of Japan’s security. Key members of his cabinet, like Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, are seen as centrists who favor solid ties with the United States.

The inconsistencies to some extent reflect internal political pressures, analysts say, as two small leftist parties in Mr. Hatoyama’s coalition — whose votes he needs to pass bills in Parliament’s upper house — press him to honor campaign promises to move the Futenma base off Okinawa or out of Japan.

In this line of thinking, the postponement was probably meant to buy time as Mr. Hatoyama looks for some middle ground or prepares to make a tough choice between Washington and his domestic allies. But the analysts warned that the delay could further irritate American officials, who have sought a quick decision on the base’s relocation.

Some of that irritation was evident in remarks by Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, who told reporters in Washington on Tuesday that the delay could complicate plans to move the base.

“If that is their decision, then I think it’s unfortunate in terms of what we’re attempting to plan on our end,” General Conway said, according to Reuters.

Policy experts here said the United States had little choice but to put up with the delay. “It is up to the Obama administration now to decide whether it can endure for a few more months,” said Hiroshi Nakanishi, a professor of international relations at Kyoto University. “Otherwise, United States-Japan relations could get to their worst point in the postwar alliance.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Hatoyama did not say when he would make a final decision, but suggested that he wanted to do so as quickly as possible. He also said he wanted to reconvene a bilateral working group to discuss the base relocation issue. Tokyo suspended the discussions last week.

Mr. Hatoyama left open the possibility that Tokyo would still honor the 2006 agreement, which calls for relocating the Futenma air base from its current site in the city of Ginowan to Camp Schwab, a Marine base in the island’s north. Japanese news reports said the government was still including the costs of relocating the base to Camp Schwab in next year’s budget as it considered other locations.

Mr. Nakanishi and other analysts said the delay also risked alienating Japanese voters by raising doubts about Mr. Hatoyama’s leadership, as well as his ability to handle the crucial relationship with the United States. They say Japanese political opinion opposes significant changes in the Washington alliance as Japan faces a rising China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.

Some analysts have warned that the delay will only make a difficult political decision even harder for Mr. Hatoyama. In January, the city of Nago, where Camp Schwab is located, will hold a mayoral election. The leading candidate has vowed to reverse the city’s decision to accept the air base, making it harder to go back to the 2006 agreement.

Mr. Hatoyama has sought to answer calls from Okinawans to lighten the burden of American forces on their island, where many of the 50,000 American military personnel in Japan are based. But the Obama administration has asked that the 2006 deal not be changed, because doing so could fray a larger, more complex agreement to relocate 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam by 2014.

Political analysts say Mr. Hatoyama has few realistic options for locating the base besides Camp Schwab. That has led some analysts to wonder whether he may ultimately agree to the original location, but only after first making a show of resisting Washington.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company