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(回答先: 日米安保：２プラス２共同発表案 戦略目標に北朝鮮明記 ─ （毎日新聞） 投稿者 天木ファン 日時 2005 年 2 月 19 日 10:40:10)
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20050219f1.htm
Quietude of Okinawa base -- not its noise -- has critics shouting
By NAO SHIMOYACHI
Staff writer
The U.S. Marine Corps Futenma Air Station in Okinawa is unusually quiet.
One day in late January, not a single helicopter was seen landing or departing as a group of reporters toured the base. There was none of the aircraft noise that had long bothered residents near the base, which sits in the middle of what is now the heavily populated city of Ginowan.
"We haven't seen any helicopters over the past month," Nao Yohena, a Ginowan municipal official, said Monday, prompting some to wonder why the marines are in Okinawa.
According to the city and data obtained from the U.S. Forces in Japan, at least 46 of the 61 helicopters stationed at Futenma are either in Iraq or tsunami-hit Southeast Asia as part of the U.S-led disaster relief operation.
In January 2004, roughly 20 helicopters left the Futenma base for a mission to bolster the U.S. forces in Iraq, followed by another 20 in August, according to the city, which counted the aircraft departing the base. Around those times, about 5,000 Okinawa-based marines reportedly headed for Iraq.
The corps refuses to disclose how many aircraft have departed from Okinawa for Iraq, citing security reasons.
Separately, six helicopters departed from Futenma for deployment to Indonesia in early January to join the U.S.-led relief operation to help survivors of the Dec. 26 tsunamis, according to the U.S. Marine Corps in Japan.
The counts indicate most of the marine aircraft and nearly a third of its 18,000 service members in Okinawa are away. Washington has meanwhile sent no replacements.
"The current state of Okinawa raises the question of whether we really need these forces as a deterrent," Ginowan Major Yoichi Iha told The Japan Times.
With a top-level security meeting of foreign and defense ministers of Japan and the United States slated in Washington for Saturday, bilateral talks on realignment of the U.S. Forces in Japan are expected to swing into high gear.
The realignment is part of a broader U.S. strategy to make its forces worldwide more readily deployable to counter unpredictable threats.
Attention in Japan is focused on whether the burden on Okinawa can be reduced. The prefecture hosts 75 percent of the U.S. military facilities in Japan in terms of land area, while accounting for just 0.6 percent of the nation's total land area.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has promised that the government will bring about a "visible" reduction in Okinawa's burden while ensuring the necessary U.S. military presence for Japan's security.
But Iha reckons the months-long near-empty state of the Futenma base is clear indication that the base serves little as a deterrent -- whether against an attack from North Korea or other instability in East Asia -- the reasons often cited both by the U.S. and Japanese governments for keeping the forces in Okinawa.
The Futenma base, the transport hub for marines in Okinawa, symbolizes the difficulties involved in relocating U.S. military installations in Japan.
The base site would have been returned to Japan by 2003 if a replacement airfield had been opened in line with a 1996 Japan-U.S. agreement by the Special Action Committee on Okinawa, which was formed amid local anti-U.S. base sentiment following the 1995 rape of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by three U.S. servicemen.
Tokyo and Washington, citing the strategically important role of the Futenma base, agreed that it could only be closed if an alternative airfield was built elsewhere in Okinawa, to be within reach of the marine force in the prefecture.
However, construction has yet to start on the replacement facility, an offshore military-civil airport near the port of Henoko in Nago, northern Okinawa Island, because of local opposition.
The relocation to Nago has sharply divided Okinawa and continues to draw fierce local opposition.
Last year, the central government managed to build four drilling derricks off Henoko to start a study of the airport site. But protesters blocked the derricks from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day.
"We cannot just clear away the protesters," said an official from the Naha Defense Facilities Administration bureau.
And even if construction starts, the government estimates the airport will take at least 10 years to build.
The United States is similarly frustrated with the delay in the relocation project.
During a recent vice-ministerial level meeting between Tokyo and Washington, the U.S. delegate brought a researcher from a prominent U.S. think tank and had him make a presentation showing that speeding up construction could be technically possible, according to government sources.
On another occasion in November, Washington asked Tokyo's feelings about moving the Futenma helicopter operations to Kadena Air Base, which sits less than 10 km north of Futenma, they said.
Ginowan Mayor Iha is urging both Tokyo and Washington to give up on the Nago relocation plan, which he termed "virtually dead," and instead come up with a more viable option in the ongoing negotiations on the U.S. forces realignment.
"Relocation outside of Japan should be given a thought," Iha figured.
The central government appears unwilling to restart the process of finding another replacement site because of the expected local opposition it would meet elsewhere, and has stated it will stick to the Nago plan.
The U.S. and Japan have divulged no official plans for realigning the forces in Okinawa, although ideas that included moving some of the marines away from Okinawa were floated at unofficial levels.
Military analysts, politicians, and even some marine officers who have been stationed in Okinawa have questioned the necessity of keeping 18,000 marines in the prefecture in recent years.
The Third Marine Expeditionary Force, to which the Okinawa marines belong, is the sole marine expeditionary force permanently deployed outside U.S. territory.
Proponents for keeping the marines in Okinawa have stressed the strategic Asia-Pacific importance of the prefecture for the U.S. military, even should some elements be needed for the Middle East.
But Hiromichi Umebayashi, head of Yokohama-based think tank Peace Depot, said that marines in Okinawa were dispatched only as reinforcements in the 1991 Gulf War and the recent war on Iraq. In both cases, the first marine units deployed were sent from the U.S.
He said that more than half of the marines in Okinawa are deployed on six-month rotations from the U.S. mainland and Hawaii for training, reckoning this weakens the argument for keeping permanent bases in the prefecture.
"There were no cases in the past in which Okinawa marines were useful because they were in Okinawa," Umebayashi claimed. "Marines have sufficient deployment capability from the U.S. mainland."
Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to the late U.S. President Ronald Reagan, also questions the need to keep troops in Okinawa.
Okinawa marines "are primarily reinforcements for South Korea," he reckoned, adding that if the U.S. was willing to partially pull some of its forces out of South Korea, then there should be no reason to keep troops in Okinawa as well.
Washington has announced a phased pullout of 12,500 troops from South Korea. Some 3,600 were deployed to Iraq last summer.
The U.S. presence in Okinawa has also been criticized from within.
A number of marine officers who had been stationed in Okinawa have complained about limits placed on their exercises -- including curtailments in live-fire drills and flight training, in consideration of people who live near military installations, and the dispersed nature of military units and the relatively small drill areas.
"We cannot train in Japan," Maj. Stanton Coerr, who spent a year in Okinawa, wrote in the July 2000 issue of Proceedings, a monthly magazine of the U.S. Naval Institute.
"Units deployed there are like a car that runs out of gas at 80 miles per hour -- coasting along on the momentum of the intense, worthwhile workup training and evaluation necessary to go overseas, but watching their skills atrophy at an alarming rate as they coast ever-closer toward a dead stop."
Realigning the forces in Okinawa "is a political and economic -- rather than military -- matter," Umebayashi said.
The Japan Times: Feb. 19, 2005
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写真：
The site of the planned U.S. military-Japanese civil aircraft airport off Henoko port in Nago, northern Okinawa, remains virtually untouched due to local opposition.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/images/photos2005/nn20050219f1a.jpg
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