A planned technology graduate school in Okinawa will be located in the village of Onna on Okinawa island, Hiroyuki Hosoda, the state minister in charge of Okinawa affairs, said Friday.

The municipal government of Onna, a resort area in the western part of the island, owns 90 percent of the proposed 280-hectare site for the school, making it easy to secure the property for construction.

It beat out the city of Itoman and the village of Kitanakagusuku.

"For the village of Onna, this is a historic day," Mayor Fumiyasu Shikiya said.

Shikiya said he hopes to work closely with the national and prefectural governments so the construction will proceed smoothly.

Scheduled to open in September 2007, the school will be established by the public sector but run privately.

The institute is part of a promotion and development plan for Okinawa in line with a special law that took effect a year ago aimed at narrowing disparities between the mainland and the prefecture, which is lagging behind economically.

Hosoda said there are a few candidates to serve as president and he would like to choose one as soon as possible.

According to the construction plan, about 100 hectares of the land needs to be developed at an estimated cost of 6 billion yen, while the land acquisition cost will run about 3.5 billion yen. The village has offered to lease free of charge the portion of the land it owns.

The graduate school, whose official English name is yet to be decided, aims to become the world's best research institute in the fields of life sciences and nanotechnology.

According to the Okinawa Development Council of the Cabinet Office, which is overseeing the project, all classes at the school will be taught in English.

Nobel laureate Jerome Friedman, a physics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, heads the international advisory board for the project.