Armitage proposes floating facility in Okinawa Pref

Japan Policy & Politics, July 26, 1999

WASHINGTON, July 20 Kyodo

A former senior U.S. defense official suggested Monday that a new facility to replace the Futemma Marine Corps Air Station in Okinawa Prefecture will probably be, at least partly, a floating base. "I don't know what the answer is. I suspect that it will be some sort of sea-based (facility), maybe not entirely, but maybe a hybrid," said Richard Armitage, former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. "Some sort of a floating facility or a combination sea-based facility might make the point clear to the people of Okinawa that the U.S. is not intent on staying in Okinawa past the time that it is necessary for us to stay there," Armitage told Kyodo News. He explained that his past experience in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf indicated that floating facilities function well as operation bases, but did not specify the details of his proposed sea-based facility. Armitage also suggested that the Okinawa Prefecture city of Nago would be an ideal location for the new facility because, for one thing, it is a coastal municipality. Also, "it would move some of the crowded southern focus of our troops into the north, and it would bring about some positive developments from the sparsely inhabited part of Okinawa so that citizens there could have a better standard of life," he said. The Futemma station is located in Ginowan, in the southern half of Okinawa Island. Nago, on the northern half's western coast, was selected by the Japanese government in April as the host of the Group of Eight (G-8) summit next year. Commenting on U.S. President Bill Clinton's hope to resolve the Futemma relocation issue before the G-8 summit in July 2000, Armitage said a solution would have to come around February or March, or else be postponed until after the summit. "The last three or four months before the G-8 summit in Okinawa will be a time that all the interest and energy in Tokyo and Okinawa will be directed toward having a successful and peaceful summit," he explained. Armitage is believed to have first come up with the idea of an offshore facility in Okinawa. Tokyo and Washington agreed in December 1996 to return the Futemma Marine Corps Air Station to Japan in five to seven years on condition that the base's helicopter operations be relocated to another site in the prefecture. In December 1997, a majority of voters in a nonbinding referendum in Nago voted against the central government's plan to build an offshore heliport in the city, off the coast of the U.S. Marines' Camp Schwab. But a number of citizens groups in Nago have recently begun requesting that a replacement heliport for the Futemma Air Station be built on reclaimed land adjoining Camp Schwab. The return of the Futemma base is the centerpiece of the broader agreement by the Special Action Committee on Okinawa (SACO) to give back some 21% of the land used by the U.S. military in the prefecture. The two nations launched the SACO process to address intensified resentment in Okinawa against the heavy U.S. military presence following the 1995 rape of a local schoolgirl by U.S. servicemen. Okinawa, which accounts for only 0.6% of Japan's total land area, is home to about 75% of all land used by the U.S. military in Japan.