Japan Press Weekly

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2015 June 24 - 30 [POLITICS]

JCP Akamine: residents displaced by US Futenma base

Regarding Author Hyakuta Naoki’s remark about the U.S. Futenma base (Ginowan City, Okinawa), Japanese Communist Party Dietmember Akamine Seiken said that in actuality, the base was built in the center of former Ginowan Village, and that the claim that the presence of the base lured the villagers to settle around the base is misleading.

Hyakuta recently said in front of junior-ranking lawmakers of the Liberal Democratic Party that the Futema base was constructed in the middle of agricultural land and that people then came to live around the base to earn income from military-related business.

At a House of Representatives Special Committee meeting on the war legislation on June 29, Akamine pointed out that after WWII, the U.S. occupation forces in Okinawa forcibly displaced local residents from their land to construct the Futenma base, adding that the displaced residents had no choice but to live outside the base. Akamine went on to say that Hyakuta’s remark distorts historical facts and insults Okinawans.

Akamine stated that officials of the Japanese government and the U.S. military have repeatedly made comments similar to Hyakuta which shifts onto local residents the responsibility for having the base in their area. As an example, he cited Foreign Minister Aso Taro who in 2005 said that houses popped up around the base one after another over the years.

Akamine stressed that it was the Japanese and U.S. governments which constructed the Futenma base in the middle of the downtown area of Ginowan Village.

Asked about Hyakuta’s remark, Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide declined to make any comment on the remarks on the grounds that Hyakuta is a private citizen, but admitted that the U.S. military seized land as well as municipal facilities from local residents in order to construct the Futenma base. Defense Minister Nakatani Gen also admitted that a town office and schools were in the seized area.

An official document dated October 1946 that Akahata obtained also indicates that the Futenma base was constructed in the center of Ginowan Village. According to the document which was written by the village mayor at that time, the central area had the village office, hospitals, and post offices as well as stores and cemeteries.

Yamauchi Shigeo, who used to serve as the chief of U.S. base issues in the Ginowan City government, said to Akahata that the U.S. military insists that until the completion of the Futenma base, there were only sugar cane and pineapple fields and that the villages and towns were later formed around the base, but, he stressed, the reality was totally different from such a fabrication.