It's 6 a.m. outside the gates of U.S. Marine Corps Camp Schwab, Nago City, and 100 demonstrators are limbering up with calisthenic stretches designed to reduce their chances of injury from confrontations with the dozens of riot police lined up behind the installation's barbed wire fence.
For more than a year and a half, demonstrators have maintained a 24-hour sit-in to try to stop construction of a new base in the nearby bay at Henoko. Some days the protesters succeed in blocking the government construction trucks; other days, the police manage to clear them away, often injuring demonstrators in the process.
It's a war of attrition and both sides know how high the geo-political stakes are.