Tokyo, April 27: Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said on Tuesday he was finalizing a plan to resolve a row over a U.S. airbase by an end-of-May deadline, as he struggles to revive sagging support in the run-up to an election.
Hatoyama spoke to reporters hours ahead of the arrival of a U.S. envoy who said in a newspaper interview that Japan had presented a “serious” proposal that could enable talks to progress to a new level.
“The situation is that we are considering a government proposal seriously,” Hatoyama told reporters outside his residence. “I want to put the final touches to it.”
But he said working-level talks on the plan between Japan and the United States had not yet begun.
Hatoyama’s support has slumped to about 25 percent in recent polls, partly on voters’ perception that he has mishandled the base issue, boding ill for his ruling Democratic Party’s chances of winning an upper house election expected in July or August.
Failure to secure a majority could mean policy deadlock just as the country seeks to maintain a fragile economic recovery while reining in its massive debt.
Under a 2006 agreement, the U.S. Marines’ Futenma base was to be shifted from a city center to a less heavily populated part of Okinawa, but Hatoyama raised hopes before his election victory last year that Futenma could be moved off the island.
MODIFIED PLAN
The government has not revealed details of the latest proposal, but domestic media say it is a modified version of the 2006 plan, with an offshore runway built on piles driven into the seabed off the existing U.S. Camp Schwab base in Okinawa.
The plan avoids the use of reclaimed land in an effort to lessen damage to the environment and shifts the runway further offshore to alleviate noise pollution in a neighboring village, the Sankei newspaper said.
Some of Futenma’s training facilities would be moved elsewhere in Japan, media reports say.
It is unclear if such a plan would be accepted in Okinawa, where tens of thousands of people rallied last weekend to call for the base to be moved off the island.
A few dozen renewed their demands with a sit-in protest outside the parliament building in Tokyo on Tuesday and Okinawa lawmakers were set to meet cabinet ministers to press their case.
Angered by the noise, pollution and crime they associate with the bases, many Okinawans feel they bear an unfair share of the burden of hosting the U.S. military.
Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Kurt Campbell referred to a “serious” proposal in an interview with the Asahi newspaper published on Tuesday, but did not specify what it involved. He arrives in Tokyo on Tuesday and is set to meet Japanese officials on Wednesday.
Washington has repeatedly said it believes the 2006 plan is the best option, but Japan’s Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa told reporters that plan was currently far from consideration.
—Agencies