CQ WEEKLY – IN FOCUS
Feb. 11, 2012 – 12:11 p.m.
Shrinking a Base to Bolster an Alliance in Japan
By Emily Cadei, CQ Staff
TOKYO — Wedged between stacks of books in his postage-stamp-size office, national security expert Tsuneo Watanabe echoed the pessimism many in Japan share when it comes to the long-running conflict over U.S. military bases on the southern island of Okinawa.
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“Whatever happens, nothing will happen,” Watanabe, director of foreign and security policy research at the Toyko Foundation think tank, said in a January interview. Any progress on a stalled 2006 plan to reduce the burden of U.S. bases, he added, will probably “take 20 years or 30 years or a half-century.” Given that, he said, a wise man — and certainly a wise politician — “tends to avoid Okinawa.”
So it took many Okinawa watchers by surprise last week when the Obama administration and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s government revealed a decision to move thousands of U.S. Marines off the strategically located island and onto bases in Guam and elsewhere in the Pacific, breaking with elements of the 2006 plan.
It’s the first time the two countries have shown a willingness to adjust a major element of the plan, and it should help speed an ongoing American force realignment in the Pacific. What it doesn’t do is resolve the most intractable problem: where to relocate Okinawa’s Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, a noisy base on the most populated part of the island. Many analysts agree that the 2006 plan is too expensive to be workable, and a trio of senior U.S. senators are hoping an independent review they mandated last year will force the administration to consider alternatives. But there still is no obvious option that the U.S. military, the Japanese government and locals in Okinawa are all likely to accept.
The festering dispute has long been the Achilles heel in the U.S.-Japan security alliance, one of the United States’ oldest and most consequential in the region. “Whatever you are talking about” when it comes to the alliance, “it always comes back to” Okinawa, says Taro Kono, a leading member of Japan’s lower house of parliament. A failure to resolve the stalemate would continue to hurt U.S.-Japan relations, which could also damage President Obama’s heavily touted effort to “pivot” his foreign policy agenda toward Asia.
Longtime Hot Spot
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The U.S. military presence in Japan has long been a divisive factor in Japanese politics, but the issue is particularly tense in Okinawa. The Futenma Marine base — nestled in the heart of the bustling city of Ginowan, which has grown up around it since 1945 — is deeply unpopular among Okinawans. But so is the 2006 plan to move the air station to Camp Schwab, a Marine base in Henoko, a less populated area on the northern end of the island. Local officials in both municipalities say they want the Marine base off Okinawa entirely, complaining that their island bears far too much of the burden of the U.S. military presence. Indeed, despite representing just 1 percent of Japan’s land mass, Okinawa hosts more than 60 percent of U.S. forces in the country.
Last week, the U.S. and Japanese governments reiterated their commitment to the overall 2006 base relocation plan, despite opposition by locals and, more recently, key U.S. senators.
Democrat
The senators’ opposition sprang from a trip Webb and Levin took to Japan and Guam, at Webb’s urging, in May 2011. Webb, a longtime student of Asia, was already convinced that the 2006 basing plan was unworkable, and he wanted Levin to see the situation on Okinawa with his own eyes. That visit, Webb says, was a “turning point” for the senators.
Upon their return, the pair joined with McCain to publicly dismiss the realignment plan as “totally unrealistic.”
Shrinking a Base to Bolster an Alliance in Japan
“The significant estimated cost growth associated with some projects is simply unaffordable in today’s increasingly constrained fiscal environment,” they said in a joint statement.
As part of the 2006 plan, Japan agreed to pay 60 percent of the total costs. A May report from the Government Accountability Office found that the Japanese government has estimated that it will cost $3.6 billion for its share of construction for the Futenma replacement facility at Camp Schwab and $6.1 billion to relocate the Marines from Okinawa to Guam. The Defense Department has never released formal estimates of what its parts of the project will cost, but according to GAO, the Marine Corps estimated in 2011 that the relocation of Marines to Guam would cost them another $11.3 billion. The original projection for the bill for both governments for the Guam relocation was only $10 billion.
According to Levin, the relocation plan is now estimated at roughly “three times more than it was projected.”
“No one has that kind of money in their budget,” he says.
The senators have been particularly skeptical about the feasibility of building an airstrip extending into Henoko Bay, which would require significant land reclamation and has prompted opposition from local environmentalists.
Given those doubts, Webb, Levin and McCain tacked on language to the fiscal year 2012 defense authorization bill requiring an independent review of the 2006 plan and an assessment of other options for relocating the bases. The independent review is due to the Defense secretary at the end of March. The secretary then has another 90 days to transmit it to Congress.
The bill also froze funding for the relocation of Marines to Guam in fiscal 2012 because of the lack of progress on construction at Camp Schwab, another part of the 2006 agreement. And it required reports from the Marines and the Pentagon on the force structure on Guam and in the Pacific before the funds would be released.
Under the new plans revealed last week, the U.S. and Japanese governments decided to de-link the Guam and Camp Schwab components and go forward with the movement of Marines to Guam, although only about half of the 8,000 troops originally envisioned will now head to the American territory. The rest of the Marines are expected to be moved elsewhere in the Pacific.
View From Okinawa
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The senators’ efforts have been cheered in Okinawa, where locals have interpreted the Guam funding freeze as a sign that U.S. lawmakers are taking their side in the dispute.
“In effect the Congress has rejected the relocation of Futenma Air Station to Henoko,” an editorial in Okinawa’s Ryukyu Shimpo paper crowed after lawmakers voted to approve the defense authorization bill in December.
Okinawans’ resentment has mounted over decades, fueled by the practical inconveniences of sharing a 466-square-mile island with more than 30 U.S. military facilities. More recently, it has been exacerbated by a series of American aircraft crashes and a particularly ugly rape incident in 1995 in which three American service members assaulted an Okinawan schoolgirl in Ginowan.
Shrinking a Base to Bolster an Alliance in Japan
The unrest prompted the United States and Japan to negotiate the base realignment agreement completed in 2006. Conservative local leaders then in power in Okinawa signed on, somewhat reluctantly. However, local opposition has hardened in the last five years.
Many observers in Japan blame former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama — the first-ever prime minister from the Democratic Party of Japan, swept into power in the party’s 2009 victory over the long-entrenched Liberal Democratic Party — for creating the immovable divide that plagues the negotiations today.
Chief among Hatoyama’s transgressions: making, then breaking, an election pledge to renegotiate the relocation plan and move the Futenma base off Okinawa entirely. The blunder ultimately forced him to resign. In the interim, it raised the expectations of Okinawans and cemented a higher threshold for their demands.
“Until then, the conservative local politicians in Okinawa . . . loyally supported the Futenma relocation to Camp Schwab, and that was their weak point when they were up for re-election,” says Kono. “Now they are free to say anything they want to say, because even the prime minister said, ‘Oh, let’s move the thing off Okinawa.’”
Back-Burnered
For the past several years, few in Washington or Tokyo have been eager to reignite the Okinawa debate. The Pentagon has been distracted by wars and far bigger budgetary battles. And the Noda government already has a major domestic political fight on its hands this year over reforming the tax system. Also on Tokyo’s plate: rebuilding after the catastrophic earthquake and nuclear power plant meltdown last March.
But Congress’ freeze on Guam relocation funds sparked political blowback in Japan. And the two governments have clearly calculated that they need to show tangible signs of progress or resign themselves to more years of paralysis on the issue.
Advancing the movement of Marines off the island is, in that sense, a major step. But if the White House and the Noda government expect the move to ease the opposition to building the new facility in Henoko, they may well be disappointed.
In a sign of just how determined opponents of the new facility are, the Noda government had to deliver its positive environmental impact assessment of the Henoko construction plan in the dead of night in December, after protesters blocked a courier from delivering it to Okinawa Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima during normal business hours. And Nakaima has already signaled that he will reject the report. Short of a major power play in Tokyo — which an aide to the prime minister signaled the government is not entertaining at the moment — there is little the Noda government can do to overcome that roadblock.
That leaves Futenma in place, unless Tokyo and Washington are willing to find other alternatives. The latest developments signal that they may be more flexible on the issue than previously assumed.
One option being proffered by Webb, Levin and McCain would shelve the Henoko plan and instead move the Marine air station from Futenma to the nearby Kadena Air Base, co-locating with the Air Force’s 18th Wing.
Predictably, neither the Air Force nor the Marines are wild about the idea. And it’s hard to find anyone in Tokyo or Okinawa who likes it, either. A senior official in Tokyo said the option had been reviewed in the past and dismissed.
Masahide Ota, the governor of Okinawa from 1990 to 1998, says his government also “checked it very carefully” when he was in office. “It’s impossible,” he says, citing the environmental impact as well as the urban areas surrounding Kadena, whose residents already complain about the noise from Air Force aircraft.
Shrinking a Base to Bolster an Alliance in Japan
But Webb says the proposal has been misunderstood. Among other things, it would entail moving some of the Air Force units out of Kadena so that there would be no net increase in noise, he said.
Another option Webb cited would be to create a joint-use runway at the commercial airport in Naha, Okinawa’s main city.
Like Levin and McCain, Webb said he is not wedded to any one proposal. “I think we should wait for the independent study,” he says. “I don’t want to get ahead of the curve here.”
But one option Webb doesn’t want to consider is moving all the Marines based at Futenma off the island, as Okinawan leaders are demanding. “I think you can find a formula” to keep those Marines on Okinawa, he said.
Many security strategists worry that transferring all the Marines could send the wrong signal to China and others in Asia just when the United States is trying to demonstrate a renewed commitment to the region. “The presence of Marines in Okinawa I think is important for deterrence purposes,” says Kono, noting Okinawa’s close proximity to the Senkaku Islands, a group of uninhabited islands that are controlled by Japan, but whose ownership is the subject of dispute with both China and Taiwan. “Moving it elsewhere might give China the wrong idea. So I think we need to solve that problem within Okinawa.”
Keeping Futenma open has its own risks. It’s hard to maintain stable operations at Okinawa’s bases over the long term with constant protests and local hostility. And the negative perception of the American military presence in Okinawa undermines broader public perceptions in Japan regarding the alliance, Japanese experts say.
But the biggest risk of all is the backlash that would follow a military-related accident, threatening not just Futenma but other bases on the island. “Nowadays local people will not insist on the abolition of the U.S.-Japan security treaty,” said Ota, but he warned that the next time a local is injured in an assault or crash involving U.S. forces, “they will request termination of the U.S.-Japan security treaty; they will request the removal of all military bases out of Okinawa.”
FOR FURTHER READING: Fiscal 2012 defense authorization law (PL 112-81), CQ Weekly, p. 31; realigning U.S. bases in Asia, 2011 CQ Weekly, p. 1253.