EDITORIAL: Noda should win Okinawa's trust to solve Futenma

In tackling major political tasks, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda apparently places great importance on visiting key places and listening to the opinions of people concerned.

Shortly after taking office, Noda visited the three prefectures that were hardest hit by the Great East Japan Earthquake and then the Kii Peninsula, which suffered huge damage from a recent typhoon. He also met with the families of citizens abducted by North Korea decades ago.

But Noda has not adopted this approach for dealing with the long-standing issue of relocating the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, located in a densely populated area in Okinawa Prefecture.

He has neither visited the Henoko district of the city of Nago, a less populated area in the prefecture where a new runway is to be built, nor has he met Okinawa's governor. In his policy speech, delivered at the beginning of the extraordinary Diet session, Noda pledged to adhere to the agreement between Japan and the United States to relocate the Futenma airbase to the Henoko district.

Noda also intends to bring this message to his first meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama, to be held in New York soon.

Both the city of Nago and Okinawa Prefecture have been voicing their opposition to the bilateral agreement. Even some political heavyweights in the U.S. Congress have described the current relocation plan as "unrealistic and unworkable."

Still, the Japanese government plans to restart the procedures for an environmental impact assessment for reclamation of land off Henoko to build the new runway. The move is clearly aimed at setting the stage for filing a request with Okinawa's governor for permission for the planned reclamation.

Behind the move is strong diplomatic pressure from the U.S. government. The Obama administration is in urgent need to show concrete progress on the Futenma issue to Congress, which wants to reduce the cost of transferring thousands of Marines currently stationed in Okinawa to Guam as part of the agreement to move the Futenma airbase to Henoko. Congress is bent on reducing the government's spending as much as possible to cut the towering federal budget deficit.

What good, however, will come out of Tokyo's move to go ahead with the environmental impact assessment for the relocation plan just to show to the United States that it is doing something, when there is actually no prospect of implementing the plan?

Such an action would only add fuel to the resentment among Okinawans over the way the government has been handling the issue and further complicate the situation.

There is already skepticism about the feasibility of the relocation plan even within the U.S. administration.

Noda should confront the reality and seek a realistic solution to the issue.

There are, however, still some Japanese government policymakers who are holding out hope for a deal to extract a concession from people in Okinawa. An attractive reward like lump-sum, no-strings-attached state subsidies that a local government can use freely, unlike ordinary subsidies for specific projects and programs, could soften the attitude of Okinawans, they say.

But this kind of old-fashioned "carrot-and-stick" tactic would not resolve the situation.

Noda has clearly told the Diet that the government's policy measures to shore up Okinawa's local economy will not be linked in any way to the prefecture's acceptance of a new U.S. base.

Noda should match his words with action.

But both Foreign Minister Koichiro Genba and Defense Minister Yasuo Ichikawa, the two members of the Noda Cabinet who should play the leading role in tackling the Futenma issue, have no more than an amateur's knowledge of this problem, to put it bluntly.

They must be careful not to be excessively influenced by bureaucrats at the foreign and defense ministries, who tend to put the top priority on cooperation with the United States.

True to his slogan of "politics of the golden mean," Noda has so far refrained from articulating his controversial positions on such sensitive issues as visits to Yasukuni Shrine, a revision of the Constitution and Japan's right to collective self-defense.

Noda has also maintained a cautious stance toward the proposed review of Japan's traditional three principles regarding arms exports. In his recent speech in the United States, Democratic Party of Japan policy chief Seiji Maehara proposed to reconsider the principles to ease the restrictions on Japan's weapons exports.

We hope Noda will also judge policy priorities correctly in grappling with the Futenma issue by using his good sense of proportion.

He should act according to his vow to deal with matters honestly and sincerely and start by trying to win the trust of people in Okinawa.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Sept. 18