JAPAN: Japan has agreed to pay over half the cost of shifting 8,000 US marines out of Okinawa in a deal that ends months of wrangling but which papers over growing cracks in the US-Japan alliance.
The agreement will see Tokyo pay $6.1 billion, or almost 60 per cent of the estimated $10 billion the US says it will take to relocate the marines to the Pacific island of Guam. Washington demanded 75 per cent of the costs.
"We have come to an understanding that we both feel is in the best interests of our countries," defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday, on the steps of the Pentagon with his Japanese counterpart, Fukushiro Nukaga.
The deal was greeted with both relief and anger in Okinawa, which reluctantly hosts more than 75 per cent of the US military presence in Japan.
The small group of islands in the country's south is home to about 40,000 US personnel, who have lived uneasily with the locals for decades.
"If they actually move these marines out of here we'll be happy, although we're waiting to see if that will happen," said anti-base campaigner Rev Taira Natsume, "but we are against paying anything. The US has given no details of why they wanted this huge amount of money."
Okinawa is the weakest link in the half-century bilateral alliance, which allows Washington to maintain about 90 military facilities across Japan in return for shouldering the bulk of the country's defence.
But a growing number of Japanese have started to question the need for such a large military presence since the end of the Cold War.
The tensions are sharpest in areas closest to the US facilities, where residents have shown an increasing willingness to fight expansion plans.
Iwakuni city in Japan's south last month voted seven to one against the expansion of a US air base there, while the construction of a US heliport in Okinawa has stalled in the face of fierce local opposition.
Washington's plan to deploy a nuclear aircraft carrier to Yokosuka, just south of Tokyo, has also angered locals, who say they fear such moves are provoking China's own military build up.
Tokyo's determination to force its shifting defence burdens onto local communities increasingly unwilling to accept them has so far cost it little politically.
However, Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi and his likely successor, chief cabinet secretary Shinzo Abe, know the dangers of ignoring the growing opposition ahead of a handover of power in autumn, when the prime minister steps down.
"Japan needs to shoulder the necessary costs in order to achieve as early as possible our two goals of reducing the local burden and maintaining the deterrent capability," Mr Abe said yesterday.
Mr Rumsfeld heard a much sharper message when he visited Okinawa in November 2003 and was told by its governor: "You people are on an active volcano and when it explodes it is going to bring down your entire strategy in Asia."