Japan warned it must decide on future of Okinawa US marine base

The US air base at Futenma on Okinawa, which is due to be relocated to a coastal area of the island. Photograph: Kimimasa Mayama/Reuters
A US official who until March was in charge of American policy towards Japan has warned that unless agreement is reached soon over the transfer of a US marine base in Okinawa, Washington will drop the plan to reduce its military footprint on the island. Kevin Maher, who was sacked as director of the US state department's office of Japan affairs in March after reportedly making disparaging remarks about Okinawans, said disagreement over the future of the base threatened to prolong the island's burden of hosting about half of the 47,000 US troops in Japan. Under a 2006 agreement, Futenma base, situated in a city, is to be relocated to a coastal area of Okinawa and 8,000 US marines and their families transferred to Guam by 2014. Local opposition to the move – many Okinawans want the base moved off the island in southern Japan altogether – recently forced the countries to drop the deadline. "If decisions are not made very clearly in the next few weeks to go forward with the realignment plan, Futenma is probably going to stay where it is," Maher said in Tokyo during a speech to promote his book, The Japan That Can't Decide. "There's nowhere else to move it. I'm afraid the US Congress is not going to continue to put the [$150m] funding into the relocation of troops to Guam because they understand the condition for that is the relocation of Futenma." Maher was forced to resign on 10 March, but asked to head the state department's task force responding to the earthquake and tsunami that struck north-east Japan the following day. He said Japan's desire for consensus had slowed its response in the early days of the Fukushima nuclear crisis. "After the earthquake the focus quickly shifted to Fukushima Daiichi [nuclear power plant], and it was very clear to me as co-ordinator of the task force that no one was in charge. No one in the Japanese political system was willing to say, 'I'm going to take responsibility and make decisions'. "And decisions needed to be made, but they weren't being made. For the first five or six days of the crisis, the [Japanese] administration's position was that this wasn't the government's problem; it was Tokyo Electric Power's problem. Nothing was taking place at Fukushima Daiichi in terms of the government solving the problem." Maher said similar stalling had hampered the tsunami clean-up effort along the devastated Tohoku coast. "You have to feel sympathy for the good people of Tohoku – they're basically living on a giant garbage dump right now. The debris up there just isn't being taken care of. "It's another example of [Japan's] inability in crisis to make decisions when the system depends on everyone agreeing what that decision is." Maher denied he had insulted Okinawan people during a briefing to university students in Washington last December. A report by the Kyodo news agency in March, drawing on accounts given by some students, said he described Okinawans as "masters of manipulation and extortion" in securing government subsidies in return for hosting US bases. According to students' accounts, he also cited the island's higher than average divorce and drink-driving rates, attributing the latter to "Okinawa's culture of drinking liquor with high alcohol content". Maher accused the journalist who wrote the report, Eiichiro Ishiyama, of basing his article on hearsay, and has asked Kyodo to investigate the case and correct or retract the story. Kyodo says it stands by the article.