ONE APRIL AFTERNOON in Tokyo, the U.S. president made a welcome promise to reduce his military’s presence in Okinawa. Three U.S. service members had raped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl the previous September, and enraged locals had spent months protesting the Japanese prefecture’s dense network of U.S. bases.
“When the Prime Minister asked us to consider the concerns of the people of Okinawa and I became acquainted with them, as a result of some of the unfortunate incidents that you know well about,” said President Bill Clinton, standing side by side with Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, in the April 1996 speech, “it bothered me that these matters had not been resolved before now, before this time.” His administration agreed to close the Futenma Air Station, a major Marine Corps base in the populous Okinawan city of Ginowan, within five to seven years.
On Tuesday evening in Washington, 87 Okinawan and international civil society groups will send a letter to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, urging the Democratic Congress under President Joe Biden to at last close the base. It has been more than 26 years since Clinton promised a swift end to the Futenma Air Station, and the Japanese and U.S. governments have spent the decades pushing environmentally destructive plans for construction and moving goalposts for their completion. As the years dragged on, the likely timeline for Futenma’s closure pushed from the original 2001-03 estimates to 2025, to 2035, to 2040, to — as the letter’s authors argue — realistically, never.