Okinawa Voters Replace Governor With Opponent of U.S. Base
By MARTIN FACKLER

TOKYO — Dealing a new blow to plans by Japan and the United States to relocate a busy Marine air base on Okinawa, the island’s voters handed a landslide victory on Sunday to an anti-base candidate for governor, rejecting the Tokyo-backed incumbent.

Minutes after the polls closed, Takeshi Onaga, the former mayor of Naha, the Okinawan capital, was declared the winner over Hirokazu Nakaima, the current governor, who was backed by Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party. Waving to jubilant supporters, Mr. Onaga, 64, said that as governor he would resist construction of a new American airfield.

“The new military base will not be built,” Mr. Onaga said in comments carried by the Japanese national broadcaster NHK. “I will convey the will of the Okinawan people to the governments of Japan and the United States.”

The contest was closely watched in Tokyo and Washington for signs of weakening in local opposition to the huge American military footprint on this southern Japanese island, which is strategically near China, Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula. Political analysts said the result showed that resentment of the presence, long seen by many islanders as an unfairly heavy burden, remained as strong as ever. About two-thirds of the 50,000 American military personnel in Japan are stationed in Okinawa, an island slightly larger than Cape Cod.

The election was fought over the fate of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, a particularly unpopular base whose aging runway is surrounded by homes and schools in the middle of the densely populated city of Ginowan. Mr. Nakaima, 75, was supported by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has tried to restart an almost two-decade-old plan to move the base to a less-populated spot on the northern end of the island near Henoko, a village in the city of Nago.

Mr. Onaga campaigned on a platform of opposing the relocation, calling for the airfield to be moved off the island altogether. Two other minor candidates also staked out positions on what to do about the Futenma base, a highly emotional issue that has become a rallying point for Okinawan anger at the noise, pollution and crime brought by the American presence.

While Mr. Onaga’s victory was not a surprise — he had been leading in polls — political analysts called it a blow to budding hopes in Tokyo and Washington that Mr. Abe might finally get the new base built. The United States and Japanese governments first agreed in 1996 to relocate the airfield to an American base called Camp Schwab, near Henoko, but stiff local opposition has blocked the move.

The project seemed to take a big step forward in December when the prime minister persuaded Mr. Nakaima to drop his opposition to the relocation and approve a contentious landfill permit. Mr. Abe, who has vowed to build closer military ties with the United States, won over Mr. Nakaima with offers of more than $3 billion in public works projects for Okinawa, including the construction of a second runway at Naha’s busy airport.

Despite Mr. Nakaima’s defeat, analysts said Mr. Abe could still try to move ahead with the construction of the new Marine airfield because his government already has the permit to begin filling in the sea for its twin runways. But doing so would require him to push past the opposition of both the new governor and the current mayor of Nago, who won re-election in January.

“This will make building the new airfield extremely difficult, to say the least,” said Moriteru Arasaki, a retired professor of history at Okinawa University who has written several books on modern Okinawa. “Both the Japanese government and the United States government must now recognize that the people of Okinawa have spoken, and they are against this base.”

In its final count, the Okinawa prefectural election commission said Mr. Onaga had won 360,820 votes, easily beating Mr. Nakaima’s 261,076. Despite the setback, a member of Mr. Abe’s party said Sunday that the governing coalition would move forward with the relocation plan.

“We think this is an extremely harsh outcome,” Toshimitsu Motegi, the chairman of the party’s election strategy commission, told reporters in Tokyo. However, “the danger of Futenma has to be removed, and the government and governing parties intend to proceed with the plan.”

Mr. Arasaki and others said the margin of Mr. Onaga’s victory reflected the depth of the betrayal felt by voters toward Mr. Nakaima, a two-term governor who had won re-election four years ago on a platform of opposing the relocation. At that time, Mr. Onaga supported Mr. Nakaima.

In his victory comments on Sunday, Mr. Onaga immediately declared that he would start looking for legal grounds that would allow him to cancel Mr. Nakaima’s approval of the landfill permit. In particular, he said, he will look for “legal flaws” in the approval process.

“The current governor acted unilaterally to approve the permit,” said Mr. Onaga, who will take over as governor next month. “I want to look into whether it is possible to revoke it.”

美軍基地「遷」動沖繩選情 反對派當選

日本沖繩16日舉行縣知事選舉，由反對把美軍普天軍事基地遷往邊野谷的翁長雄志當選。雖然安倍政府先前表明，遷移作業不受選舉結果影響，但還是有部分工程需要沖繩當局配合。現在隨著反對派的當選，遷移基地的作業預料會受到更多阻撓。

沖繩現任知事仲景真弘多對美軍普天機場的遷移計畫態度堅決，引發民眾反彈。為此沖繩民眾還曾走上街頭，抗議機場新基地會帶來噪音、填海造陸會影響生態、大量飛航訓練可能導致重大事故等等。

據民調顯示，當地有超過7成民眾反對美軍基地搬遷案。但仲景真弘多仍執意執行搬遷計畫。果然，他在16日的縣知事大選輸給反對搬遷案的前那霸市長翁長雄志。

翁長的反對立場不但贏得選票，也贏得共產黨及社民黨的支持。確定當選後，他明確表示將毫不動搖反對美軍基地搬遷案的承諾。而安倍政府雖然早就表示，無論選舉結果如何，都不影響搬遷案的執行。但反對派的當選勢必會在搬遷過程中掀起重重波瀾。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/world/okinawa-elects-governor-who-opposes-us-base.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/asia-pacific/20141117/c17okinawa/zh-hant/

2014/11/17 聯合新聞網 數位新聞中心