By TARO ONO/ Staff Writer
January 22, 2024 at 18:42 JST
Ground reinforcement work is being conducted on Jan. 12 in the Henoko district of Nago, Okinawa Prefecture, to prepare the soft seabed in Oura Bay for land reclamation work for a planned U.S. military base. (Minako Yoshimoto)
NAHA--Celebrities and renowned activists including U.S. Academy Award-winning film director Oliver Stone have filed an international petition against the construction of a new U.S. military base in Nago, Okinawa Prefecture.
Stone and Mairead Maguire, a Nobel Peace laureate from Northern Ireland, are among more than 400 people who signed the statement issued earlier this month to U.S. President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and the people of both nations.
“We must end the discrimination and military colonization of Okinawa,” the petitioners demanded in the statement. “The first step is to cancel the construction of the new base, which is expected to cost over $6.5 billion and take more than 10 years to complete.”
The signees join Okinawa Governor Denny Tamaki and the prefectural government in their opposition to building a facility in Nago’s Henoko district to replace U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Ginowan, also in the prefecture.
Condemning the ongoing land reclamation work off the coast of Henoko, the petition said, “the U.S. and Japanese governments persist with this costly landfill project in the face of opposition by the majority of Okinawans, recklessly damaging the irreplaceable ecosystem.”
Last month, the central government exercised by proxy a legal mechanism to act in place of the Okinawa prefectural government and push ahead with reclamation work at the site including shoring up the soft seabed.
“The court has effectively allowed the state to take the law into its own hands and trample on the right to autonomy of the local government,” the statement said, in criticizing the central government's move.
“The rest of Japan does not care, and the vast majority of U.S. citizens are unaware of what their government is doing in Okinawa,” said the petitioners, calling it “colonial indifference.”
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