TOKYO — Japanese development staff on Wednesday resumed landfill work on the new website of the U.S. army base on Okinawa regardless of protests by the island’s residents that the transfer tramples on their rights and raises environmental considerations.
The deliberate relocation website for the bottom, on Okinawa’s jap coast, has been on the heart of a dispute between the federal government in Tokyo and the native authorities at a time of the island’s rising strategic significance.
Okinawa is turning into key for the Japan-U.S. army alliance within the face of rising tensions with China whereas Japan additionally quickly seeks to construct up its army within the southwestern area.
Three weeks in the past, the Fukuoka Excessive Courtroom’s Naha department ordered Okinawa Gov. Denny Tamaki to approve the central authorities’s modified landfill plan, and allowed the Land and Transport Ministry to order the work to renew by overriding the governor’s disapproval.
On a barge delivered to the placement on Wednesday, a pair of loader machines scooped up mounds of rock and gravel and dumped them into the ocean as a part of reclamation wanted to bolster the extraordinarily delicate seabed on the website deliberate for U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma.
Tamaki, who has appealed the order to the Supreme Courtroom, stated the court docket ruling was unjust and goes in opposition to the need of the residents. Beneath Japanese regulation, development can proceed whereas the court docket choice is pending. He referred to as the resumption of the landfill work “extraordinarily regrettable.”
Okinawa and Tokyo have lengthy tussled over the relocation of the Futenma base. Tokyo and Washington agreed in 1996 to shut the Futenma air station after the rape of a schoolgirl by three U.S. servicemen led to an enormous anti-base motion. However the closing was held up for almost 30 years due to persistent protests and lawsuits in opposition to the relocation plan.
In 2018, Japan’s central authorities started the reclamation work off Henoko Bay on Okinawa’s jap coast to pave the way in which for the relocation of the Futenma base from its populated neighborhood on the island.
The central authorities later found that segments of the designated reclamation website are on delicate floor, and submitted a revision to the unique plan with extra land enchancment at an estimated value of 930 billion yen ($6.5 billion). However Okinawa’s prefectural authorities rejected the revision plan and suspended the reclamation work.
Tamaki, the governor, has sought a major discount of the U.S. army on Okinawa, which is house to greater than half of fifty,000 American troops based mostly in Japan below a bilateral safety pact.
A whole bunch of students, movie administrators and extraordinary residents who’ve advocated for Okinawans’ autonomy, signed a world petition demanding the island stop to be “a de facto army colony of the USA and Japan ever because the finish of the World Warfare II.”
One of many petition organizers, Satoko Norimatsu Oka who heads the Vancouver-based Peace Philosophy Heart, offered a duplicate of the doc to The Related Press.
“We should finish the discrimination and army colonization of Okinawa,” stated the petitioners, who embody filmmaker Oliver Stone.
The petition urged President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to “cancel the development of the brand new base in Henoko.”
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