It is one of the more uneven fights in the history of Japanese protest movements.
In the official corner is the Japanese government, which is pushing a Washington-led plan to build a new U.S. helicopter base off the coast of a fishing village in Okinawa called Heneko.
Ranged against them is a small group of mostly middle-aged and elderly protesters who have been sitting in a makeshift camp here for 166 days to block government engineers trying to begin drilling surveys for the base.