US insists on keeping military base in Japan

A top US diplomat says that Washington wants Tokyo to keep the US military airfield in the Japanese southern island of Okinawa.

“Our preference is for the current plan to go forward, but we are prepared to face a variety of different possibilities going forward,” US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell said.

In 2006, Washington and Tokyo agreed to relocate US troops stationed at Futenma Marine airfield in Okinawa to a smaller town of Nago.

The new government in Japan has launched a review of the agreement, saying it may have to move the US base off Okinawa or even outside of Japan.

Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama later announced that it would decide on the deal by May.

“I am not going to get into the specifics, but we also have studied many different potential solutions very closely, not over a period of months, but years,” Campbell said in an interview with the Japanese daily The Sankei Shimbun.

Accidents and crimes committed by American service personnel near residential areas have turned the local population of Okinawa against the presence of the US forces there.

Earlier this week, US Senator Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat and a former secretary of the US Navy, claimed that the nearly 50,000 US armed forces in Japan remain essential to maintaining stability in the East Asian region.