by Jon Day
TOKYO, June 6 (Xinhua) -- Okinawa Governor Takeshi Onaga has received a huge boost to his tireless campaign to block the transfer of a highly-controversial U.S. military base within Japan's southernmost prefecture, following candidates also opposing the relocation plan gaining a majority in the prefectural assembly election there on Sunday as anti-U.S. sentiment continues to rise on the island.
Candidates in the election who specifically backed Onaga comprised a majority and gained 27 seats, whereas four others also won their races, bringing the total seat holders in the prefectural assembly opposed to the relocation of the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, from the crowed area of Ginowan to the coastal Nago region also on the island, to 31 out of 48 seats.
The winning bloc now includes politicians from the Japanese Communist Party and Social Democratic Party of Japan.
Onaga told local reporters that the victory had huge implications for the future of U.S. bases hosted in Okinawa and said that the victory would give his campaign to block the relocation of the Futenma base within the island, increased momentum and add gravitas to the relevance of his dispute on the issue with the central government and the United States.
"It is a big victory and our position to block the base's relocation within Okinawa has won great support," Onaga told local media, adding, "We will continue to address the issue in the current manner."
He said that the outcome incontrovertibly proved that the people of Okinawa are united in their support for U.S. bases being moved off the island and the prefecture's decades of post-war base-hosting burdens be significantly reduced if not lifted entirely.
While the election campaign was based around the notion of how to reduce the U.S.'s military footprint on the tiny sub-tropical island, whose land accounts for less than 1 percent of Japan's total land mass, yet hosts some 75 percent of U.S. bases in Japan, anti-U.S. sentiment has been rapidly heating up on the island following a spate of recent crimes committed by U.S. base-linked personnel.
On the very day of the vote, a U.S. Navy sailor was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving and injuring at least two people in a traffic accident on the island, with the arrest coming on the heels of an internationally-condemned murder by a base-linked worker on May 19, which involved a former U.S. Marine admitting that he had kidnapped, raped, strangled and bludgeoned a young girl to death before dumping her body in a forested area on the island, in what he also admitted was premeditated attack.
Such was the anger at this heinous crime, that Onaga demanded to speak with U.S. President Barack Obama directly and voice his harsh condemnation of the attack, while Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, although himself a proponent of relocating the base, voiced his fury with the American leader while he was in Japan recently for a Group of Seven leaders' summit, which Abe was hosting.
Prior to this, and also fanning the flames of growing discontent in Okinawa at the presence of the U.S. military, a U.S. Navy sailor was arrested in March after raping a woman in a hotel in Naha City, the capital of Okinawa.
The latest murder and previous attacks have led to strong vilification from the people of Okinawa towards the United States, and saw some 4,000 people rally against having to forcibly host the U.S. bases recently, with local officials, including Onaga, stating that the rising trend of crime by U.S. base-linked personnel against locals is directly attributable to the disproportionately high base-hosting obligations of the tiny prefecture.
Anti-U.S. sentiment has been steadily rising on the island, and spiked in 1995, when an elementary schoolgirl was savagely gang-raped by three U.S. servicemen and despite the anti-Onaga camp during the recent elections trying to focus the race on local economic policies, the island's base-hosting-linked traumas remained the predominant front-and-center issue of the campaign, with voter turnout rising to 53.31 percent from the previous election.
