Is Japan’s Okinawa finally moving past anti-base politics?

Okinawa has handed a landslide victory to a conservative who accepts Tokyo’s plans for relocating a controversial US airbase – delivering a blow to 12 years of anti-base politics in Japan’s southernmost prefecture.

Genta Koja’s victory on Sunday over two-term governor Denny Tamaki raised a question cutting to the heart of Okinawa’s post-war politics: is it finally starting to move on from the US military base issue?

Koja, a 42-year-old conservative backed by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party, campaigned on economic revival and accepting Tokyo’s plan to relocate the US Marine Corps’ Futenma air station from densely populated Ginowan to the coastal Henoko district in Nago, both on Okinawa Island.

Tamaki, by contrast, had opposed the base project for his entire tenure as governor, a stance he inherited from his late predecessor after winning 2018’s election on an anti-base platform.