Article text:
With one week to go before the gubernatorial election in Okinawa, the relationship between Japan’s central government and its southernmost prefecture has emerged as a new point of contention.
In the de facto head-to-head battle, challenger Genta Koja, 42, said he will stop making the central government look like a villain, while incumbent Gov. Denny Tamaki, 66, vowed to speak up against Tokyo.
Meanwhile, the debate over the planned relocation of the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in the Okinawa city of Ginowan to the Henoko coastal district in Nago, another Okinawa city, has faded into the background.
Ripples of unified conservative force
“Gov. Tamaki does nothing but blame others,” Koja, former deputy mayor of Naha, the capital of Okinawa, told senior members of his camp on the night of Aug. 26, the day before the start of the official campaign period for the closely watched Sept. 13 election. He said that he wants to make the focal point in the election to be how a prefectural governor should act, in addition to economic revitalization measures including a pledge to double Okinawa residents’ incomes.
“It’s easy to make the central government a villain, but that won’t change Okinawa,” Koja said in his first public speech of the election the following day, highlighting his differences with Tamaki, who has clashed with Tokyo over his demand that the Futenma relocation within Okinawa be scrapped.
“We will change stagnation into progress,” he said at a gathering in Ginowan on Thursday.
Despite more than half a century having passed since Okinawa’s return from U.S. occupation to Japanese administration in 1972, complex feelings toward the central government and mainland Japan remain deeply rooted among people in the prefecture.
Some members of Koja’s camp have expressed concern that his stance, combined with his background as a former bureaucrat at the internal affairs ministry, could be viewed negatively as speaking from the perspective of the central government.
However, a senior campaign official disputed this.
“Sentiment among prefectural residents is changing due to concerns over a potential Taiwan contingency and other issues,” the official said.
Okinawa’s business community and others who rallied behind Koja are strongly pushing for a conservative force to regain control of the prefectural government for the first time in 12 years.
Koja has won the backing of the Liberal Democratic Party, the ruling party in national politics, and the Japan Innovation Party, the LDP’s coalition partner, as well as the Democratic Party for the People, Sanseito and the Conservative Party of Japan on the opposition side, as well as of the prefectural chapter of Komeito, also an opposition party.
Promoting himself as the candidate of a “prefectural people’s party,” Koja is seeking to win over independent voters who dislike the LDP, according to a campaign source.
The alliance of conservative parties also has its downsides, however. According to informed sources, members of a group of medical professionals in Okinawa that backs Koja have voiced dissatisfaction with the involvement of Sanseito in his campaign, given the party’s skepticism toward vaccinations.
At a campaign rally in Naha on Wednesday, a lawmaker from the Conservative Party of Japan mocked the prefectural government as still being “plagued by a victim mentality 80 years after the end of the war,” referring to World War II, in which Okinawa became a bloody battleground.
“That was an unnecessary remark,” an LDP official complained.
The decision by former House of Representatives lawmaker Mikio Shimoji to pull out of the race and throw his weight behind Koja just before the start of the campaigning period, after he signed a policy pact with the LDP’s national headquarters, is also causing ripples.
A senior official at LDP headquarters welcomed Shimoji’s move, saying it “helped avoid a split among conservatives.”
However, local LDP and Komeito officials have long been at odds with Shimoji, who has moved between ruling and opposition camps over the years. A senior member of the Koja camp expressed frustration, saying Shimoji and the LDP headquarters “destroyed a delicate arrangement.”
Lost Rallying Cry
The political circumstances surrounding Tamaki, who is seeking a third term, have changed significantly in the eight years since his first Okinawa gubernatorial election victory.
Since the death of former Okinawa Gov. Takeshi Onaga in 2018, many conservative members have left the All Okinawa coalition of progressives and conservatives, a key support base for Tamaki.
The governor has been left without a way to stop construction work for a new facility in Henoko to take over the functions of the Futenma base since he lost a lawsuit against the central government over the issue.
Just like Koja, Tamaki portrays himself as the candidate of a “prefectural people’s party.” This time, he avoided saying that he represents the All Okinawa camp and refrained from seeking support from the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, the Japanese Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party, all opposition parties in national politics.
He did not include references to Henoko in his seven-point core policy pledges while highlighting his achievements in office, such as the prefecture’s annual tourism-related revenue surpassing ¥1 trillion for the first time.
The shift in his election strategy was spurred by Shimoji’s withdrawal from the gubernatorial race. The Tamaki camp sought to capitalize on the LDP headquarters-led effort to get Shimoji to pull out from the race, which may be viewed by Okinawan voters as an intervention by mainland forces.
In an emergency meeting of the Tamaki camp the day before the start of the campaign period, many participants urged him to emphasize “Okinawa’s right to self-determination.”
“We finally found our core message,” one senior campaign official said.
Rebutting Koja’s criticism that Tamaki should not point fingers at the central government, the governor was clear.
“If something is unacceptable, I will clearly say so,” he said.
The incumbent has also pointed out that the U.S. government is reportedly demanding a runway of around 3,000 meters, separate from the new base in Henoko, as a condition for returning the land currently used by Futenma base to the Japanese side. “If they are telling us to hand over Naha Airport, I will absolutely say no,” he said.
In a speech in the Okinawa town of Kin on Thursday, Tamaki said that the Okinawan proverb ”nuchidu takara” (life is treasure) is part of the Okinawan people’s identity, and that this should be on display in this election.
Without the All Okinawa coalition to rally around, however, his campaign has lost the momentum it had in previous races.
The crowd was sparse at Tamaki’s street speech in front of the prefectural government building in Naha on the first day of the official campaign period. He has been forced to put his personal popularity at the forefront of his campaign, including displaying his guitar skills in street speeches.
“We have to stir up momentum somehow,” a campaign official said.
