The U.S. military in 1947 banned the construction of buildings in a zone near an airfield in Okinawa, citing the risk of aircraft accidents, but directed local residents to live in the area during its occupation of the prefecture through 1972, declassified U.S. documents showed Thursday.
The documents are rare evidence that the U.S. military, which built what is now U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in 1945 after landing on Okinawa in the final stages of World War II, apparently used a double standard about the safety of the facility and recognized the risk of accident from the use of the airfield long before Tokyo and Washington agreed in 1996 to move it from a densely populated residential area to a coastal zone in the prefecture.
Hirofumi Hayashi, an expert on modern Japanese history at Kanto Gakuin University, and Fumihiko Shimizu, a historian working for the government of Onna in Okinawa, made their research findings available to Kyodo News.