Tens of thousands of Okinawan residents rallied Sunday against a US military base on the island, raising the heat in a simmering row days before US President Barack Obama is due in Japan. Opposition has often flared on the island against the presence of the large US military base, strategically located within easy reach of China, Taiwan and North Korea and dubbed the United States' "unsinkable aircraft carrier".
But the election of a new centre-left government in Tokyo in September, ending decades of conservative rule, has brought the issue to the centre of national politics and strained Japan's most important security alliance. "I urge Prime Minister (Yukio) Hatoyama to tell President Obama that Okinawa needs no more US bases," said Ginowan mayor Yoichi Iha at the rally. "I urge Prime Minister Hatoyama to make a brave decision and put an end to Okinawa's burden and ordeal."
Protesters, from elderly people wearing straw hats to young families carrying babies, applauded the mayor's speech in a park near the controversial US Marine Corps Futenma Air Base in Ginowan city.
Organisers said some 21,000 people had gathered for the event, which comes ahead of Obama's visit to Tokyo on Friday and Saturday. The Futenma base, located in a densely populated urban area, has emerged as a flashpoint for local opponents who have been angered by aircraft noise, pollution, the risk of accidents and crimes committed by US service personnel.
Okinawans reacted with fury to the 1995 rape of a schoolgirl by three US servicemen. Demands to close the base on safety grounds grew when a US helicopter crashed in the grounds of a local university in 2004.
Hatoyama's government, which swept to power in a landslide and has vowed a less subservient relationship with Washington, has said it may want the base moved off the island or even out of the country. The United States has demanded Japan honour a 2006 agreement under which the Futenma base would be closed but its air operations moved to an alternative site to be built on Okinawa by 2014 in the coastal Camp Schwab area.
But many Okinawans and activists also oppose the planned new base, which would be built on reclaimed land and would include two runways protesters say are likely to affect a marine habitat that is home to corals and an endangered sea mammal, the dugong. On a visit to Japan last month, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates bluntly urged Tokyo to "move on" and resolve the issue before Obama's arrival, stressing that Washington does not want to renegotiate an agreed pact.
Hatoyama has said Japan will need more time as it weighs the demands of Washington and of the people of Okinawa, a heartland of left-leaning and pacifist groups who oppose the bases.