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US wants Japan base decision by year's end-Nikkei
Source: Agencies |
November 6, 2009, Friday
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THE United States and Japan look set to avoid a collision over where to relocate a Marine base when US President Barack Obama visits Tokyo next week, but Washington is pressing for a decision on the touchy topic by the end of this year, the Nikkei business daily reported today.
A feud over a replacement facility for Futenma air base on Japan's southern island of Okinawa, a key part of a realignment of the 47,000 US troops in Japan, has strained the alliance, seen as the core of security arrangements in a region home to a rising China and an unpredictable North Korea.
The Nikkei said in a report from Washington that the Obama administration had notified Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's new government that it would not press for a decision by Obama's Nov. 12-13 visit to Japan, but was seeking a resolution to the dispute by the year-end, partly for domestic budgetary reasons.
Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party took office in September pledging to forge more equal ties with Washington, had said in the run-up to his party's August election victory he wanted to move the base off Okinawa to ease the burden on residents there.
But US officials have stressed they want to push ahead with a 2006 deal to move it from a crowded central part of the island to a remote northern site by 2014 as a prerequisite to moving 8,000 Marines to the US territory of Guam.
Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada has also floated the end of the year as a de facto deadline, but Hatoyama himself has suggested he might wait until after an Okinawa mayoral election set for January to get a reading on local public opinion.
If Hatoyama decides before January to implement the original deal, perhaps with minor changes, that would almost certainly upset a small but vocal coalition partner ahead of an upper house election in mid-2010, but further delay would make deciding harder and risk angering key security ally Washington.
A feud over a replacement facility for Futenma air base on Japan's southern island of Okinawa, a key part of a realignment of the 47,000 US troops in Japan, has strained the alliance, seen as the core of security arrangements in a region home to a rising China and an unpredictable North Korea.
The Nikkei said in a report from Washington that the Obama administration had notified Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's new government that it would not press for a decision by Obama's Nov. 12-13 visit to Japan, but was seeking a resolution to the dispute by the year-end, partly for domestic budgetary reasons.
Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party took office in September pledging to forge more equal ties with Washington, had said in the run-up to his party's August election victory he wanted to move the base off Okinawa to ease the burden on residents there.
But US officials have stressed they want to push ahead with a 2006 deal to move it from a crowded central part of the island to a remote northern site by 2014 as a prerequisite to moving 8,000 Marines to the US territory of Guam.
Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada has also floated the end of the year as a de facto deadline, but Hatoyama himself has suggested he might wait until after an Okinawa mayoral election set for January to get a reading on local public opinion.
If Hatoyama decides before January to implement the original deal, perhaps with minor changes, that would almost certainly upset a small but vocal coalition partner ahead of an upper house election in mid-2010, but further delay would make deciding harder and risk angering key security ally Washington.
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