Okinawa Elects a Governor Backed by Tokyo, Ending Opposition to the US Base Relocation

Genta Koja, backed by Japan's prime minister, won the Okinawa gubernatorial election with about 59 percent of the vote to Denny Tamaki's 38 percent, defeating the two-term incumbent, who had made his political career by opposing the presence and relocation of a major United States military base on the island. Koja received 423,124 votes to Tamaki's 276,060, the highest vote total for any Okinawa gubernatorial candidate since 1972, on turnout of about 61 percent, roughly four points higher than in 2022. The result removes the most persistent local obstacle to Japanese and American basing plans in the southwest islands.

Okinawa hosts the majority of United States military facilities in Japan on a small fraction of its land, and the prefecture has voted against expansion for most of the past decade. Its reversal matters because the southwest islands sit closest to Taiwan and to the contested waters around the Senkaku or Diaoyu islands, claimed by both Japan and China.

Post-election reporting complicates the simplest reading of the result. The Japan Times found that voters weighed the local economy, particularly high consumer prices, more heavily than the question of moving the base in deciding how to vote. Koja, a 42-year-old former deputy mayor of Naha, has said he accepts relocating Marine Corps Air Station Futenma from Ginowan to the Henoko district of Nago, the plan Tamaki spent his tenure fighting. His margin of victory appears to owe as much to economic frustration with the outgoing administration as to any change in how Okinawans view the base itself.

Security policy is already affecting the local economy on a separate front. The Japan Times reports that a revision to Japan's drone law has widened no-fly zones so far that some now cover entire towns hosting military structures, which Okinawan businesses in tourism, surveying, and agriculture say has harmed their operations. In Tokyo, the governing Liberal Democratic Party is reshuffling the cabinet and arranging for the secretary-general of the Japan Innovation Party to take a ministerial post, consolidating a coalition that has favoured higher defence spending. Whatever weighed most on voters' minds, the direction of Japanese security policy no longer depends on winning a local argument it has been losing for ten years.