by SASHA DAVIS
There is a showdown coming in Okinawa that will test the limits of US and Japanese state power.
The construction of a new US Marine Corps airbase in the rural coastal village of Henoko has been controversial since it was proposed almost two decades ago. Events in the past two months however -including a protest by thousands of people surrounding the Japanese National Diet in Tokyo on January 25th – have heated the controversy to a boiling point. The military base is meant to be a replacement for the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station which most observers in Okinawa, Japan and the US recognize needs to be closed. Futenma, dubbed by Donald Rumsfeld as “the most dangerous base in the world,” sits squarely in the middle of crowded Ginowan City in central Okinawa. The problem with finding a “Futenma Replacement Facility” is that no place in the Asia-Pacific region has been willing to pay the political, social and environmental costs of hosting a new base. Because of this, a site had to be selected based not on where the base was wanted, but where resistance to the base could most easily be overcome. The Japanese and US governments agreed to select Henoko as the site for this replacement facility because the new base could be connected to the existing US property at Camp Schwab and because Henoko is the marginalized section of a marginalized municipality (Nago), in Okinawa -the most marginalized prefecture of Japan.
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