Why Japan and the U.S. Can't Live Without Okinawa

The continued U.S. military presence in Japan has been a growing concern for the Japanese public, and last week it became a lever to pry Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama from office. The first Democratic Party prime minister in a half century may have brought that fate upon himself, by promising on last fall's election campaign trail to move a key U.S. air base off Okinawa, and perhaps out of Japan entirely. That would have broken his predecessors' tradition of treating the U.S. presence in Japan as an American birthright, but what proved to be Hatoyama's undoing was his failure to deliver.