A senior US senator and defense expert has said that he believes the American military presence in Japan “can be modified.”
Senator Jim Webb’s remark comes as the row between Tokyo and Washington over the US airbase in Okinawa remains unresolved.
Senator Webb insisted that the US armed forces in Japan remain concentrated on the southern Okinawa Island to maintain stability in the East Asian region.
Washington says a previously agreed deal to relocate the Futenma base to a coastal region of Okinawa must go ahead but the government of Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is resisting the accord.
Washington has about 47,000 troops based in Japan, more than half of which are on Okinawa.
Local residents have been angered by crimes committed by US service personnel.
In 1995, the rape of a 12-year old Japanese schoolgirl by three US servicemen infuriated Okinawa residents.
U.S. Navy Seaman Marcus Gill and U.S. Marines Rodrico Harp and Kendrick Ledet abducted the 12-year-old 6th-grade Japanese girl. They beat her, duct-taped her eyes and mouth shut, and bound her hands. Gill and Harp then proceeded to rape her, while Ledet claims he only pretended to do so out of fear of Gill. The three men served prison terms in Japanese prisons and were released in 2003 and then given dishonorable discharges from the military. After release, Rodrico Harp decried prison conditions in Japan and said that the electronics assembly prison labor he was forced to do amounted to slave labor. Ledet, who had claimed he did not rape the girl, died in 2006 in an apparent murder-suicide in the United States. He was found in the third-floor apartment of Lauren Cooper, a junior Kennesaw State University student and acquaintance whom he had apparently sexually assaulted and then murdered (by strangulation). It appears that he then took his own life by slashing his wrists.
Also, in January a piece of a US Navy jet fell off in midflight, causing minor damage to a residential home.
The base is also unpopular because of aircraft noise and the risk of accidents. Demands to close the base on safety grounds grew in 2004, when a US helicopter crashed in the grounds of a local university. The base is due to be moved from the urban area to a coastal one by 2014.
Tokyo and Washington have been at loggerheads over the presence of US military forces in the country since the new Japanese government took office in September.
The agreement was signed between Washington and the previous administration in Tokyo but now, Hatoyama wants US forces to leave Okinawa or even Japan altogether.
bron: www.presstv.ir [15-2-2010], www.wikipedia.org (quote section)
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