Japan's Okinawa on Friday approved the long-stalled relocation of a controversial U.S. military base, a breakthrough that could remove a decades-long source of friction between Tokyo and Washington, Agence France-Presse reported.
The plan to relocate U.S. Marines Futenma air base to a less populous part of the southern island instead of moving the base off the island altogether invited opposition from Okinawa residents, many of whom associate the U.S. bases with crime, pollution and noise.
The nod from Okinawa, long a reluctant host to the bulk of U.S. military forces in Japan, is an achievement for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has promised a more robust military and tighter security ties with the U.S. amid escalating tension with China, Reuters reported.
Abe met Okinawa's governor Hirokazu Nakaima this week to pledge a big cash injection into the island's economy every year until 2021. When Abe came out of the meeting and declared himself impressed with the package on offer, which includes the shutting of Futenma within five years, he put his support behind the move and gave it his blessing, according to AFP.
Nakaima told a news conference that he had approved a central government request for a landfill project at the new site, on the Henoko coast near the town of Nago.
His approval for that project, required by law and a first step to building the replacement facility, was the last procedural barrier to eventually replacing the U.S. Marines Futenma air base in the crowded town of Ginowan, Reuters reported.
"The government has recently met our requests in compiling a plan to reinvigorate Okinawa. We felt that the Abe government's regard for Okinawa is higher than any previous governments'," Nakaima told a news conference.
The decision was met by an angry popular reaction when the governor announced his decision on Friday afternoon.
Thousands of protesters surrounded the Okinawa local government office, media reports said, with footage showing demonstrators holding banners reading: "Never bend". Several hundred had stormed the lobby of the building and were staging a sit-in protest, a government spokeswoman said.
Nakaima has been a bitter critic of the central government, which he says is unsympathetic to the southern tropical island and still treats it as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" of the U.S. military, more than 40 years after it was handed back to Japan.
The United States and Japan agreed in 1996 to shut the Futenma base in response to soaring anti-base feeling after a gang-rape of a 12-year-old girl by three servicemen in 1995, but plans for a replacement stalled in the face of opposition in Okinawa, which hosts more than half of the U.S. forces in Japan. Okinawa was occupied by the United States after Japan's defeat in World War II until 1972.
The Futenma base has been a lightning rod for criticism because of its location in a densely populated area.
The deal Abe appears to have struck marks a significant achievement, and one that is expected to smooth relations after years of frustration, according to AFP.
In April, the U.S. and Japan announced a plan to close Futenma as early as 2022.
According to Reuters, Abe said the government would study whether that plan could be accelerated and would begin negotiating an agreement with the U.S. that could allow for more local oversight of environmental issues at U.S. bases.