The government's case for pushing ahead with plans to build a new U.S. military base in Okinawa Prefecture holds no water and the project should be scrapped immediately.

Continuing with it would expose residents living near the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to at least a dozen more years of ear-splitting aircraft noise and the risk of accidents.

The government should admit its plan has gone terribly awry and start crafting a new one from scratch.

The Defense Ministry recently announced that completion of a replacement facility for the Futenma base in the crowded city of Ginowan will be delayed to the 2030s or later.

It blamed the delay mainly on a problem related to the reclamation work off the Henoko district in the city of Nago, also in the prefecture.

It emerged that the seafloor in parts of the reclamation area is “as soft as mayonnaise” to a depth of dozens of meters and will need to be shored up. The process poses tough technological challenges that will require a huge investment. The ministry also cited the time needed to build related infrastructure.

The reclamation work now looms as an unprecedentedly formidable mission, and there is no guarantee it will be finished even within the expanded time frame.

In addition, Okinawa Governor Denny Tamaki, a fierce opponent of the project, has vowed to reject any government request for his approval of a needed change to the construction plan. Going ahead with the Henoko base plan would only create more political confusion.

The government has nobody to blame but itself for this intractable situation.

It rushed to file a request for the reclamation work with a former prefectural governor without carefully examining the geological conditions in the area. When a geological survey later discovered a vast expanse of soft seabed, it did not publish the discovery and at the end of 2018 started dumping earth and sand into the reclamation area.

Even after prefectural authorities ascertained the facts through a freedom-of-information request, the Abe administration turned a deaf ear to the local government’s arguments and instead sought to establish a fait accompli.

The history of the government’s actions on this issue is a dark chronicle of betrayal and bankrupt thinking.

The governments of Japan and the United States agreed in 1996 to return the existing location of the Futenma base to Okinawa. At that time, they said the entire process would be completed within five to seven years.

But the plan has changed time and again as the Japanese government failed to respond to local criticism about simply relocating the base within the prefecture. The schedule for returning the land occupied by the Futenma base to the local community has also been extended repeatedly.

To top it all, the administration began the reclamation work in the face of strong local opposition and now says that the construction work will take at least a dozen or more years.

It is still not too late for the government to reconsider the entire plan from the viewpoint of the original purpose of eliminating the safety threat posed by the Futenma air base as a step to ease the excessive burden Okinawa bears in shouldering a disproportionately heavy U.S. military presence.

Around 9,000 Okinawa-based U.S. Marines are to be relocated to the U.S. mainland and Guam. The transfer, which is expected to begin in the first half of the 2020s, is aimed at reducing the Marine Corps presence in the southernmost prefecture by half.

The evolution of weapons and other military technologies has caused significant changes in the operations of the U.S. Marine Corps.

There is no reason to adhere to the Henoko plan, which was first conceived more than two decades ago,

Many experts have voiced concerns from a strategic viewpoint about the concentration of U.S. military bases in Okinawa, warning that the facilities present good targets for enemy attacks.

In his policy speech at the outset of the regular Diet session last January, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged to achieve the total return of the Futenma base site to Japan as soon as possible, describing the facility as the “most dangerous in the world.”

What the administration’s actions have actually achieved, however, is a perpetuation of the danger and damage.

The administration has broken its promise with the prefecture to halt the operations of the Futenma base by February 2019 and refused to set a new deadline.

It responded to a series of accidents involving U.S. military aircraft at Futenma by making half-hearted requests to the United States for an improvement.

In the meantime, a series of court rulings have ordered the government to pay compensation to local residents around the Futenma base for the noise pollution they suffer.

The government should make all-out efforts to fulfill its duty to confront the reality of constant U.S. military flights over a densely populated residential area and protect the lives, human rights and properties of local residents.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 26