JAPAN: Okinawa Mayor-Elect Opposes U.S. Base

Susumu Inamine, center, celebrated with his supporters as he was virtually assured of his victory in a mayoral election for the Okinawan city of Nago on Sunday. Kyodo News, via Associated Press

Published: January 24, 2010

By MARTIN FACKLER

TOKYO — A candidate who opposes a planned American air base on Okinawa won a crucial mayoral election on Sunday, raising pressure on Japan’s prime minister to move the base off the island, something opposed by Washington.

Sunday’s election result in the small city of Nago could force Tokyo to scrap or at least significantly modify a 2006 deal to build a replacement facility in the city for the busy Futenma United States Marine air station, currently in a crowded part of the southern Japanese island.

The fate of that deal has already become the focus of a growing diplomatic rift between the United States and Japan, its closest Asian ally. The Obama administration has been pushing Tokyo to honor the deal, but the new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has said he will take until May to decide whether to support it or name a new site for the base.

Political experts have said losing Nago as a site for the base would only complicate that decision for Mr. Hatoyama because few other Japanese communities appear willing to host the base and its noisy helicopters. This means Mr. Hatoyama could try to merge the Marine base with a nearby United States Air Force base, or move it to Guam; both are options that the Obama administration has resisted.

Prior to his Democratic Party’s historic victory in national elections last summer, Mr. Hatoyama had campaigned on promises to move the base off of Okinawa or out of Japan altogether. In doing so, he was tapping deep misgivings in Japan about the 2006 agreement, which was signed by Mr. Hatoyama’s predecessors, the Liberal Democrats. Many Japanese say the move to Nago would cause excessive environmental damage and impose an unfair burden on Okinawa, where almost half of the some 50,000 United States military personnel in Japan are located.

In deciding on whether to support the 2006 deal, Mr. Hatoyama has said he will heed the voice of Okinawa, which overwhelmingly supported his party in last summer’s victory that ended the Liberal Democrats’ half-century rule. That made Sunday’s vote in Nago, a city of 60,000 in the island’s underdeveloped north, widely watched here as an important litmus test of Okinawan public opinion ahead of Mr. Hatoyama’s self-imposed deadline.

On Sunday, Susumu Inamine, the city’s school board chairman, defeated his opponent, incumbent Mayor Yoshikazu Shimabukuro, who supported the base as a source of jobs and investment. Mr. Inamine, 64, secured 52 percent of the vote, according to Japan’s Kyodo News Service.

Mr. Shimabukuro, 63, and two other previous mayors of Nago had supported plans to build a base there. Those plans call for building two runways partly on landfill that extends into the coral-filled waters near Henoko, a tiny fishing village administered by Nago.

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