FOCUS: U.S. airfield in Yomitan returned after long struggle

YOMITAN, Japan, June 21 Kyodo

A large part of the U.S. military's Yomitan supplementary airfield in the heart of the village of Yomitan in Okinawa Prefecture, the site of the landing by U.S. forces in 1945 which claimed the lives of 4,000 of the village's residents, will be returned to Japanese administration this summer after a long struggle by local people.

Former Yomitan Mayor Tokushin Yamauchi, 71, still remembers his father telling him in March 1945, ''At this rate, our whole family will be destroyed. Let's divide into two for survival.''

The 11 family members divided into two groups, and Yamauchi, then aged 10, evacuated to the northern part of the Okinawa mainland with his mother and young brothers.

On April 1, U.S. troops landed on the coast, and 20 percent of the village's residents were killed in the ensuing fighting or in mass suicide. Soon after the end of the war, Yamauchi was taken into protective custody by the U.S. military at the evacuation site.

The disaster his village suffered shaped his life, eventually leading him to lock horns with the U.S. military and the Japanese government as head of the village.

The Battle of Okinawa claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people, including roughly one-third of the 450,000 inhabitants of the northern Japan islands, Okinawa Island, at that time.

The U.S. military built the supplementary airfield at the site of a former Japanese military airfield and used it to train parachute forces from 1950 to the 1990s. In 1965, an elementary school girl in the fifth grade was crushed to death under a trailer that fell from the sky during a training session.

Since the war and subsequent reversion of Okinawa to Japanese administration in 1972, villagers have been forced to live next door to danger.

Eiyu Tamaki, 68, and other young men at the time of Okinawa's reversion inaugurated a group to address the airfield problem with a view to getting back their ancestors' land. Thus, a struggle that would last more than 30 years started.

In 1976, the group gathered all former owners of land at the U.S. military site and formed a society to restore their ownership, but in July the same year, the U.S. military began to construct an antenna base for antisubmarine patrol planes at the airfield.

Yamauchi, then village mayor, staged a 40-day sit-in together with Tamaki and others. An old man who had experienced the fighting on Okinawa lay sprawled out at the bottom of a 2-meter-deep hole where an iron tower was to be built, shouting, ''Let the concrete flow from above.''

In 1977, Yamauchi sent a letter to then U.S. President Jimmy Carter, asking him to stop the construction of the antenna base, and held a news conference to appeal to the nation.

Eventually, the U.S. military gave up on the project. ''I was scolded by the government, which said, 'Diplomacy is an exclusive matter for the state, and it is outrageous for a village mayor to make a direct appeal to the president,' but I struck back, saying, 'It is local government diplomacy'.''

Tamaki said, ''If the antenna base had been built at that time, the airfield would never have been returned.''

The 191-hectare Yomitan supplementary airfield belongs to the U.S. Marine Corps. It was used as an air base until the end of the Korean War in 1953, but has since been used as a parachute training site. Under a bilateral agreement, three-fourths of the airfield will be returned to Japan at the end of July.

A red-brick structure stands at the northern edge of the airfield, which has a 2,000-meter-long runway and a 1,500-meter long apron running in parallel.

The structure is the Yomitan village office, whose construction within the airfield Yamauchi persuaded the U.S. military to approve. Built in 1997, it is the first Japanese building at a U.S. military base in Japan.

The U.S. airfield's predecessor at the site was the Okinawa Kita Airfield built by the Japanese military toward the end of World War II. More than 600 landowners were kicked off the site after being told by a military officer, ''When the war is over, we will return the land to you.'' Anybody who refused would be considered unpatriotic.

Tamaki, former representative of a society of former landowners set up in 1970 to campaign for ownership reversion, said, ''There were people who suffered mentally with no place to live.''

The Japanese military airfield, completed at the eleventh hour, was a target of bombardment by U.S. warships immediately before the landing of troops, and the Japanese forces abandoned the airfield and retreated. Villagers were left behind at the battlefield.

As for land expropriation before and during the war, the government is still of the opinion that land was purchased, and it was considered legally difficult for the state to return the airfield to the former landowners without charge.

While Yamauchi was village mayor, he repeatedly asked the state to resolve the problem as a ''postwar pending issue'' and succeeded in getting state approval for the airfield's conditional return.