U.S., Japan agree to troop drawdown

TOKYO — With an eye to the ongoing U.S. military re- configuration, President Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi agreed Tuesday in New York to try to reduce the U.S. military presence in Japan, especially on Okinawa.

The two leaders discussed the issue less than six weeks after the Aug. 13 crash of a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter on a university campus in Ginowan City adjacent to Futenma U.S. Marine Corps Air Station.

The CH-53 military transport helicopter crashed and burst into flames, injuring the three crew members aboard and damaging a building at Okinawa International University, which was fortunately empty on a sunny Friday afternoon in August.

Residents were angered not only by the crash, but by the attitude of American soldiers and Japanese government leaders. The U.S. military refused to let local police enter the crash site and also rejected Japanese demands to participate in the investigation.

Moreover, although Okinawa prefectural officials asked for a meeting to discuss the accident, Mr. Koizumi did not meet Gov. Keiichi Inamine until Aug. 25 — two days after the prime minister returned to work from a two-week break.

“If a helicopter had crashed on a university campus in Tokyo, the prime minister wouldn’t have said: ‘I’m in the middle of a summer vacation,’ would he?” asked peace activist Fumiko Nakamura, 91.

Frustrated, about 30,000 people gathered Sept. 12 for the biggest anti-base rally in nine years.

Tokushin Yamauchi, a director of Yamauchi Pacifist Constitution and Local Issues Research Institute, a long-time mayor of Yomitan Village on Okinawa, said that although Mr. Koizumi emphasized repeatedly that U.S.-Japan relations are very important, he failed to respond to the accident promptly.

“The next time Prime Minister Koizumi comes to Okinawa for an official event, he should get a cold shoulder from every resident” of the island, Japan’s southernmost prefecture, said Mr. Yamauchi.

Many Okinawans said they did not expect the two national leaders to achieve anything. In fact, Mrs. Nakamura, a former teacher, pointed to the same day’s news report that Japan’s Defense Agency plans to augment the size of its ground forces in Okinawa by about 850 troops, to 2,300, to beef up the defense of the prefecture’s remote southwestern islands.

“Okinawa used to be a bulwark of the Imperial Japanese Empire. They are now trying to make Okinawa a bulwark of Japan and the United States,” Mrs. Nakamura said angrily.

Okinawa, main island of the Ryukyu chain, formerly a tropical kingdom paying tribute to China’s emperors, has had a turbulent modern history.

Claimed by Japan in the 1870s, it was captured by the United States in the spring of 1945 after the bloodiest land battles of World War II in the Pacific, which claimed more than 200,000 lives, including a fourth of the island’s population. The United States turned Okinawa island into a military bastion after Mao Tse-tung gained control of mainland China for the Communists in 1949 and the Korean War began in 1950.

Its military importance lies in the island’s proximity by air to Japan, China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Southeast Asia.

In May 1972, 20 years after the U.S. military occupation ended in most parts of Japan, Okinawa reverted to Japan, but friction between the population and the American presence continues. A fifth of Okinawa’s main island is still reserved for use by the U.S. military, whose young men are far from home.

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