TOKYO, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) — Japan’s Okinawa Governor Denny Tamaki informed a United Nations session on Monday in Switzerland that the focus of U.S. army bases within the southern prefecture threatens peace.
He additionally expressed his opposition to the Japanese authorities’s plan to construct a brand new U.S. army base regardless of public issues, based on native media stories.
Tamaki made the remarks whereas delivering a speech at a UN Human Rights Council assembly in Geneva, addressing the worrying pattern of accelerating army energy and increase tensions in Japan’s surrounding areas, which runs counter to the needs of the individuals of Okinawa who lengthy for peace.
Commenting on the U.S. base relocation venture within the Henoko coastal space of Nago, he mentioned that the Japanese authorities is forcibly filling in valuable sea areas to construct a brand new U.S. army base, whatever the opinions of residents in Okinawa.
Before his speech, Tamaki additionally met with the UN particular rapporteur and reported points, together with extreme ranges of poisonous per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances being detected in water round U.S. army bases in Japan.
In 2015, former Okinawa Governor Takeshi Onaga on the council accused the U.S. and Japanese governments of ignoring and violating the rights of Okinawa residents, calling on the worldwide group to take measures to help the Okinawa individuals’s efforts to struggle for self-determination.
The island prefecture of Okinawa hosts 70 % of all of the U.S. army bases in Japan whereas accounting for less than 0.6 % of the nation’s complete land space. More than 70 % of native residents opposed the bottom building on the Henoko landfill, based on the 2019 Okinawa Prefecture voting outcomes.
Earlier this month, Japan’s Supreme Court turned down the Okinawa prefectural authorities’s attraction towards the central authorities’s order associated to landfill work, based on Kyodo news company.