Shuden Teruya is known in the city of Okinawa as an "anti-war landowner" and he wouldn't want it any other way.
Teruya, 77, owns some 7,000 sq. meters of land within the huge U.S. Kadena Air Base that straddles the city as well as the towns of Kadena and Chatan on Okinawa Island. With two 4,000-meter-long runways, the U.S. Air Force base is the largest in East Asia.
The land lot owned by Teruya was expropriated by the Japanese government as part of the Kadena base even though he has refused to sign a lease contract since 1971, the year before Okinawa reverted to Japanese rule.