For years, both Japan and the United States have insisted that constructing a U.S. air station off Nago in Okinawa Prefecture is the “only solution” to a thorny military base issue.

But completion of the “solution” is nowhere in sight.
Local opposition to the project persists, and skepticism is rising, given the deep and soft seabed that will somehow support the new military base.

And now, former and current officers of the U.S. Marines are railing against the planned facility, calling it disastrous from the standpoint of military operations.

Most notably, they say, the planned V-shaped runways are too short to accommodate a variety of military aircraft and the overall facility will be outdated when it is completed.

The new base will replace the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Ginowan, also in Okinawa Prefecture. It is being built on reclaimed land off Nago’s Henoko district, and the project has entered the landfill stage.

Accounts from Japanese and U.S. officials involved in negotiations for the replacement facility show that the plan, agreed upon in 2006, was the product of political compromise by two desperate and increasingly impatient governments.

One former U.S. defense official said the “only” solution that the two governments agreed upon has turned out to be the “worst” solution.

CONDITIONAL RETURN OF FUTENMA

Tokyo and Washington agreed on the return of the Futenma airfield to Japan in 1996, a year after the rape of a local elementary schoolgirl by three U.S. servicemen sparked outrage across the nation.

Protesters in Okinawa demanded a reduction in U.S. military’s disproportionate presence in the island prefecture, citing noise, pollution, accidents and sexual assault cases involving U.S. military personnel and equipment.

The prefecture, which makes up only 0.6 percent of Japan’s total land mass, hosted 75 percent of U.S. military installations in the country in terms of land back then. Now, the ratio is about 70 percent.

One condition for the return of the Futenma airfield was that a replacement facility would be built within the prefecture to take over the Futenma functions.

But this condition, many critics say, was the main reason the project got off-track.

Okinawa protesters and local politicians demanded that the replacement facility be placed outside the prefecture.

Protests escalated after the Henoko district of Nago emerged as a leading candidate site for the new military facility.

TEMPERS FLARE

In 2003, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who inspected the Futenma airfield from the sky, directed his deputies to expedite efforts to find its replacement site.

The Futenma air station has been considered the most dangerous military base in the world due to its location in a crowded urban area.

In 2004, a U.S. military helicopter crashed on a university campus in Ginowan after taking off from the Futenma base. Although there were no civilian casualties, the accident drove home the danger of the base.

Richard Lawless, who led the U.S. side as deputy undersecretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, recalled in a recent interview with The Asahi Shimbun in Washington that he was irritated by the slow progress in talks in 2005.

Lawless said he was frustrated with Japanese officials when they opposed the proposal to move Futenma’s functions to the coast of Nago, the site of U.S. Marine Corps Camp Schwab.

Japanese negotiators argued there must be a Plan B, according to Lawless.

He said that he replied: “We do have Plan B if we don’t go to Schwab. Plan B is F-I-F, Futenma is forever.”

He had to repeat the same remark over and over in the talks.

He also recalled putting the ball in the Japanese side’s court: “So you tell us, government of Japan, what is your solution? Give us a solution that you support.”

A former senior official with the Defense Agency, predecessor of the Defense Ministry, said U.S. officials were “in a hurry” to resolve the Futenma relocation issue.

A meeting of the Japan-U.S. Security Consultative Committee (“2+2”) was scheduled for autumn 2005, and the two allies were expected to produce a document on the realignment of U.S. forces in Japan, including a Futenma relocation facility.

Lawless said that after nearly 10 proposals were weighed, the current plan to construct the facility with two runways aligned in a V shape “gave us maximum usage and maximum safety.”

It “evolved from a practical land use issue and from a safety issue,” he added.

Tokyo and Washington also negotiated over how much of Camp Schwab’s land would be used and whether existing facilities there would be displaced to accommodate the Futenma replacement.

The U.S. side made clear the extent of their concessions, which the Japanese side accepted.

Lawless noted that the Marines strongly opposed the Henoko relocation proposal during the talks but accepted the bilateral accord in the end.

“Our U.S. Marines did not like it because it basically removed them for where they had been” for decades, he said, referring to the Futenma airfield.

Asked about the persistent doubts expressed over the military operational use of the replacement site, Lawless said, “You will never make everybody happy.”

After Shinzo Abe became prime minister for a second time in 2012, both governments began insisting the Henoko plan was “the only solution that avoids the continued use” of the Futenma base.

FEARS ABOUT PROTESTERS

In summer 2005, Takemasa Moriya was baffled when Lawless handed him a drawing of a new landfill runway that would be built in the shallow sea south of Henoko.

At the time, Moriya, the top bureaucrat in the Defense Agency, represented the Japanese side.

Moriya told the Asahi that when he saw the drawing, he felt that the U.S. side had pulled the ladder out from under him.

Some senior Japanese defense officials believed the plan was put together to appease Okinawans because it incorporated what local general contractors, as well as a major U.S. construction company, preferred.

Bigwig lawmakers of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and officials of the Foreign Ministry apparently endorsed the plan, raising the likelihood the project would take off.

Moriya and his agency, however, had pushed for construction of the replacement site on the land of Camp Schwab, part of which included the Henoko district.

A memo produced by a former Defense Agency senior official who attended the relocation talks said: “The agency was consistently opposed to the plan involving a landfill during talks on the realignment of U.S. forces in Japan.”

The agency’s opposition, however, was not out of concerns about environmental damage.

The memo, which was prepared to brief lawmakers behind the scenes, expressed worries that protesters’ activities in the sea could derail the project.

Defense officials feared the relocation project “would be nothing but a castle in the air unless its feasibility were secured.”

After the 1996 agreement on returning the Futenma base, the Defense Agency initially leaned toward the idea of building a landfill replacement facility.

But the agency was subsequently forced to rethink its approach following a series of fierce protests staged in the sea off Henoko.

The memo concluded: The project “would end up being shelved or dragged on unless we take a hard look at the reality.”

Lawless suddenly suggested the plan at a time when Japanese officials believed the U.S. side fully understood the agency’s reluctance to the landfill project.

Still, this plan also fizzled before long, mainly over security issues concerning a runway and the size of the facility, according to Lawless.

AN ANSWER ‘THEY COULD SWALLOW’

Later, in 2006, Tokyo and Washington reached an agreement on the plan to build a single runway on an L-shaped plot of reclaimed land off the Henoko point.

This plan was considered a “middle course” between the proposal to use Camp Schwab’s property and the proposal for a landfill straddling Henoko Bay to the west and Oura Bay to the east.

After talks continued to April 2006, the Defense Agency and the Nago city government settled on the current plan with V-shaped airstrips by expanding the landfill and using land on Henoko.

But Okinawa prefectural government officials rejected the latest plan, arguing it was decided over their heads.

The primary consideration for the agency and the city government was where to place the runway to prevent U.S. military helicopters from flying over resorts and residential areas, according to former senior defense officials.

Conspicuously absent from the discussion was the technical challenge and high costs of building a landfill on the deep seabed of Oura Bay.

Also absent was a careful evaluation over whether the facility’s design would meet the U.S. military’s operational needs.

However, a former chief of the Defense Agency’s Okinawa Defense Bureau defended the plan.

“None of the parties involved in the negotiations was entirely happy about it, but it was an answer to a hypercomplex equation that they could swallow,” he said.

The landfill under the current plan will be 150 hectares, the equivalent of 32 Tokyo Domes.

The 39-hectare landfill in Henoko Bay was completed by December 2023, five years after work began. But the remaining portion of the landfill, to be built in Oura Bay, just started this summer.

By the end of July, 16 percent of the total amount of dirt for the entire landfill work had been poured in.

Meanwhile, 46 percent of the estimated 930 billion yen ($6.6 billion) for the project had been already spent by fiscal 2022.

The 930-billion-yen price tag, revised in late 2019, was 2.7 times the central government’s initial projection.

The construction costs were updated after it had been confirmed that many parts of the seabed in Oura Bay are soft like “mayonnaise.”

All indications are that the costs will further increase significantly.

“(The latest number) was a figure concocted to make it look like the least expensive within the 1-trillion-yen mark,” said a Defense Ministry official familiar with the construction work. “It is certain to exceed it.”

Because of the difficulty involved in creating the landfill, the return of the Futenma airfield was pushed to the latter half of the 2030s, compared with fiscal 2022 at the earliest under the original plan.

As a result, the “most dangerous” Futenma base has been used nearly three decades after the Japan-U.S. agreement on its return.

‘WORST-CASE SCENARIO’

While local residents’ remain angered about the continued use of the Futenma air station, the U.S. Marine Corps is also fretting about the relocation, particularly from a military operational standpoint.

At a briefing for media outlets in November, a senior U.S. military official stationed in Okinawa called the relocation to Henoko the “worst-case scenario” from a purely military standpoint.

He cited the lengths of the planned runways and geographical constraints as problems.

The two runways will be about 1,800 meters long, 900 meters shorter than that of the Futenma airfield. The official said the discrepancy would significantly compromise the ability of U.S. forces.

The Futenma airfield is expected to serve as a staging point for the Marines when a contingency arises on the Korean Peninsula and in the Taiwan Strait.

The official also said that unlike at the Futenma base, the Henoko site has large mountains to the west and to the north, where major adversaries are located.

These geographical features would prevent the U.S. military from having a clear line of sight through its radars and sensors.

Another critic questioning the utility of the replacement facility is Shawn Harding, a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a former Marine Corps official who was involved in talks on the realignment of U.S. forces in Japan.

The fundamental problem, Harding said, is that the new base is already “obsolete” because it does not support the Marines’ current operational concept for this region: expeditionary advanced base operations (EABO).

The EABO aims to secure forward positions for attacks and logistics by having small teams of Marines sent in and dispersed within areas highly threatened by China, rather than relying on existing Marine bases.

“During the Cold War and even post-Cold War period, bases in Japan were secure” because of the dominance of U.S. military’s airpower in the region, Harding said.

But this is no longer the case because of China’s enhanced missile capability, he added.

Robert Eldridge, who served as the U.S. Defense Department’s deputy assistant chief of staff, Marine Corps Installations Pacific/Marine Forces, said the Futenma replacement facility is the outcome of political compromise and lacks features that the U.S. military looks for.

A litany of drawbacks related to the Henoko facility, he said, include: extensive environmental damage to a rich diversity of marine life, including rare coral species; uncertainty on the landfill completion date because of the technical difficulty; exposure of noise and danger to residents because of the new airfield’s proximity to a residential neighborhood; and troublesome access to the new airfield by Marines who live in the southern part of the prefecture.

While the two allies have repeated that the current plan is the only solution to the Futenma issue, Eldridge said it is not the best nor better plan, but it’s the “worst.”

He said the Japanese government is accountable for fully explaining to the public why it has to be Henoko, given the strong local opposition to the relocation plan.

Lt. Gen. Roger Turner, the Okinawa area coordinator of U.S. Forces Japan, told The Asahi in late March that he had inspected the construction site and recognized the difficulties involved in the work, such as soil and environmental problems.

But he said the Henoko project is, after all, “the government-to-government agreement between the United States and Japan” and that U.S. Marine Corps is obliged to follow.

“We are hopeful that once that facility is in place that we will be able to move our capabilities up there,” he said.

(This story was compiled from reports by Ryo Kiyomiya, a Washington correspondent, Nen Satomi and Takashi Watanabe.)