Okinawa group takes base case to City Hall

By: DARRIN MORTENSON - Staff Writer | Monday, July 18, 2005 9:17 PM PDT ∞

OCEANSIDE ---- Yoichi Iha said he came to visit Oceanside Mayor Jim Wood on Monday hoping that someone with Wood's close ties to the Marines at Camp Pendleton would listen to the hopes and dreams of his people and take note of their growing frustration with the U.S. Marines.

Iha, mayor of Ginowan City, on the Japanese island of Okinawa, said his city has been occupied by U.S. Marines for more than 60 years and that his people overwhelmingly want them to leave.

The Marines' Futenma Air Station occupies 25 percent of Ginowan City, which is located in the southern part of the narrow island of 1.3 million people.

Iha said misconduct by Marines and noisy helicopters flying low over civilian areas endanger his nearly 90,000 residents' safety and diminish the quality of their lives.

"It's important for us to let Americans and the people of California to know that we don't want the bases anymore," Iha said through an interpreter in the mayor's office Monday. "We don't want the Marines."

U.S. military leaders have long defended the Okinawa holdings, saying they are important bulwarks against possible aggression by North Korea or military crisis in China. Officials point to Okinawa-based forces' role in relief efforts, including the recent rush of aid to tsunami victims in Asia.

Closing the Futenma base is already part of a Defense Department plan to reduce the U.S. military imprint on the island. But the closure is conditioned on the construction of an alternative site that Iha says is politically impossible on the island.

Iha said base officials at Camp Pendleton and Miramar Marine Corps Air Station refused to meet with him and his small delegation of aides and entourage of Japanese journalists to discuss the issue Monday.

Marine Corps spokesman Chuck Little said the group failed to ask the right people for a visit.

"These international visits have to be conducted through the embassy," Little said by phone from Hawaii on Monday. "There is a process, and unfortunately the process was not followed."

The impasse left Oceanside Mayor Wood and City Planner Gerald Gilbert alone to hear their grievances and proposals.

Crowded and dangerous

Mayor to mayor and side by side, Wood and Iha sat poring over maps and aerial photos Monday on a long, glass-topped table in Oceanside City Hall, as Iha explained how the base was a "significant burden" to the city's residents.

Since World War II, Okinawa has shouldered the burden of a large U.S. military presence. About three-quarters of the land U.S. forces occupy in Japan is on Okinawa, and about half of the 47,000 U.S. troops in Japan are stationed on the island.

Marines make up the largest group of U.S. troops on the island, some 18,000 at full strength, usually including troops from Camp Pendleton and Miramar temporarily stationed there to train.

Their presence is wildly unpopular.

After three U.S. servicemen raped and beat a 12-year old Okinawan girl in 1995, U.S. officials agreed to shrink its forces and close some of its bases in the face of massive protests and an islandwide surge of anti-American fervor that built on years of similar incidents.

In the 1996 agreement, the U.S. government said it would return about 21 percent of its holdings on Okinawa, clamp down on service-member misconduct with strict curfews, and help clean up the environment and limit the noise.

Though the Futenma air base was supposed to be closed under the agreement, Iha said that nearly eight years later, nothing has been done to close or move the base.

Construction on a replacement site, an offshore airfield in the north of the island, is still a highly contentious issue with environmentalists, and the Okinawan government believes it would cost $3.5 billion and take more than 15 years to build.

Meanwhile, Iha said conditions in his island city have just gotten worse.

Crash fueled anger

Pointing to an aerial photo that showed the 1,865-acre air base and runway surrounded by densely populated urban areas, Iha showed Wood where Marine helicopters make training flights low over packed residential neighborhoods, more than a dozen schools, several hospitals and the city's university.

In August of last year, a Marine helicopter crashed into the university and spread heavy debris into the surrounding neighborhood, sparking massive protests that fueled anti-American sentiment on the island. Students were gone on vacation, and no one was reported killed or injured in the wreck.

In the wake of the crash, Iha said 51 of the island's 52 municipalities signed resolutions to seek the Marines' departure from Futenma, regardless of whether an alternate site for their air base can be built.

Gilbert, the planner, was born and raised on Okinawa. He said the relationship between the people of Ginowan City and the Marines was very different from that of Oceanside and Camp Pendleton.

He said he has seen how close the base is to civilian areas and how much the activities and helicopter flights could impact the surrounding communities.

"There is no comparison," he said.

Okinawa a liability

Little, a spokesman for the Marines' Pacific Command in Hawaii, said Monday that the troubles in Ginowan City should be resolved because the situation is "dangerous" the way it is.

"It's obviously an arrangement that is not good for the Marines or the community," he said.

"We'd like nothing more than to move," he said. "But we cannot do that until a suitable alternate facility is constructed and opened."

The Japanese agreed in the 1996 accord to find another suitable place for the U.S. base and have not done so.

Iha said that an increase in accidents and military misconduct has changed the public's mind about the agreement, and residents are calling for immediate reduction and eventual withdrawal of the Marines in Futenma.

Chalmers Johnson, head of the Del Mar-based Japan Policy Research Institute and author of the best-selling book "Blowback," a searing critique of U.S. foreign policy, said he thinks the Marines' tenure on Okinawa is more about institutional stubbornness than about military necessity.

The damage that ugly incidents, bad accidents and large civilian protests on Okinawa do to U.S. image abroad outweighs the strategic advantages of keeping the token force there, he said.

"It's simply a scandal," Johnson said Monday. "And it smacks of imperialism."

A voice in the process

While Iha and his delegation steered clear of the inflammatory rhetoric of Okinawa's protesters ---- a massive rally is scheduled for today at a U.S. Army base on Okinawa, he said ---- Iha said their trip did have a political strategy.

He said he timed his visit to San Diego and Oceanside this week to coincide with the U.S. government's ongoing base realignment and closure process ---- known as BRAC ---- in hopes that changes to stateside bases such as Camp Pendleton and Miramar might make room for the Marines who now occupy the base in his city.

"We want to highlight the Defense Department's own proposal to reduce the number of Marines by half, from about 16,000 to 8,000," Iha said, referring to the 1996 recommendations of the bilateral Special Action Committee on Okinawa. "Troops are always rotating out of their areas anyway. It makes sense that they just return here."

Wood said he would probably take the Marines back if it were up to him.

"I'd say 'sure!' " Wood said in the pleasant tone he used through the meeting. "But it's just not my call."

Wood promised to share what he learned with officials on Camp Pendleton and to keep the issue alive with state politicians and California's congressional delegation, many of whom Iha has already visited.

He and Gilbert said that while they understood and wanted to support Iha's cause, Oceanside's experience with its Marine neighbors has been good.

"We don't even think about it," Wood said. "But, on the other hand, we don't have these problems."

Contact staff writer Darrin Mortenson at (760) 740-5442 or dmortenson@nctimes.com.

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