Obama's first meet with Hatoyama

Obama took the easiest way out: he deferred the issue, which basically is Japan's domestic one.

Located in the center of Ginowan, a city of 92,000 just north of Naha, Futenma was built on land seized by the U.S. Marines who conquered the Ryukyu Islands in May 1945. Its busy runway lies too near homes and a university and its flight paths run too directly over crowded neighborhoods that the United States initially agreed to move it in 1996 after Okinawans took to the streets in protest against the rape of a 12-year-old girl by three American soldiers. The Americans have a status of force agreement with Japan that needed their defense umbrella during the long Cold War.

In 2006, Washington agreed to move the Marines to Henoko, a less heavily populated part of Okinawa by 2014, but Hatoyama, who was sworn in as prime minister a little more than two months ago, went on the record by saying the deal has to be renegotiated, because he had made a campaign promise to rid the island of all GIs and leathernecks. That does not sit well with the angry Okinawans, of course. Futenma is the most visible symbol of an unfair burden placed on the island chain that formed the Kingdom of the Ryukyus, a vassal of both imperial China and Japan under rule by the Tokugawa shogunate. Meiji Japan annexed the kingdom as the prefecture of Okinawa in 1872.

More than 20,000 of them protested at Ginowan last week. Hundreds of Zengakuren students demonstrated in Tokyo, when Obama arrived. They demanded that the Yankees go home. What Obama did in his first official visit to the Japanese capital was to promise to set up a high-level working group to solve the Futenma issue.

The Japanese are also angry at Washington, for Robert M. Gates, secretary of defense, is considered to have tried to bully Tokyo into submission by warning that any change in the Henoko plan may undo a broader agreement with Washington to move 8,000 Marines to Guam. Obama avoided the issue and seems to be giving Hatoyama time to assess the policies of the preceding Liberal Democratic Party administrations.

Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan came to power to end a half century of almost uninterrupted rule by the LDP, which was regarded as almost subservient to Uncle Sam. Junichiro Koizumi, the last long-serving LDP premier, followed policies that he professed were anchored on closest possible relations between Tokyo and Washington. He agreed to send Japanese troops abroad for a peacekeeping mission in Iraq and let Japan's navy refuel U.S. warships in the American war in Afghanistan. His three successors — Shinzo Abe, Yasuo Fukuda and Taro Aso — tried to modify those ties in vain. The new DPJ prime minister wants a change.

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