After years of delays, Japan finally made welcome (if minimal) progress on constructing a planned U.S. Marine Corps airfield on Okinawa.
Workers installed buoys and floats to keep protesters at bay in waters adjacent to Camp Schwab, the site of a planned replacement facility for the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station. A 1996 U.S.–Japan agreement called for the relocation of the Marine air unit from the crowded Futenma site to the more remote Schwab location. Little progress has occurred in the ensuing years, however, due to local protests and Japanese foot-dragging.
Japanese workers deployed the floats to provide a barrier against demonstrators interfering with an offshore drill survey—a preliminary step in a landfill project to build two runways extending into Oura and Henoko Bays. Japan had to cancel a similar drilling survey in 2004 because of protestors.
Ironically, the replacement airfield—expected to take nine years to complete—will be less capable than the existing Futenma facility. The U.S. agreed to the degradation to allied military capabilities to counter widespread local protests after the 1996 rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl by three American servicemen. Since then, Washington has acquiesced to numerous Okinawan demands on the replacement airfield, all of which will further degrade military capabilities or make training more difficult.
Successive Japanese administrations of both the Liberal Democratic Party and Democratic Party of Japan failed to begin construction of the replacement Marine air station. However, since assuming office in December 2012, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has implemented several positive security measures. He reversed, albeit slightly, Japan’s 11 years of continually smaller defense budgets, created a National Security Council and National Security Strategy, and made progress toward Japan adopting collective self-defense.
As such, Japanese progress on the Futenma replacement facility is consistent with Abe’s more active security policy. However, Japanese media report that the government is considering postponing the landfill project until 2015 or later due to yet another upcoming election. That would be a mistake. Tokyo has repeatedly used national, prefecture, or local elections as an excuse for postponing its fulfilment of the 1996 agreement.
Japanese government lethargy has a domino effect, since it has led the U.S. Congress to withhold funding for construction of facilities on Guam, where some Marine units are to be relocated from Okinawa. During the past year, however, there have been several developments that suggest movement on the U.S. side during upcoming defense budget deliberations.
The Okinawa governor signed the landfill permit last December and Japan committed to pay $3.1 billion for the redeployment, the U.S. Navy recommended building firing ranges away from controversial ancestral lands on Guam and stretching out construction time lines, a revised Guam environmental impact statement will be completed, and several influential U.S. Senate opponents of the plan have either retired or have become less obstructionist.
