NEWS
July 17, 2000 | VALERIE REITMAN, TIMES STAFF WRITER
It's less than a week until the leaders of the world's most powerful nations and their entourages descend on the tiny island of Okinawa for their annual summit. Most hotels are already fully booked for the gathering of the Group of 8. Everywhere around this island ringed by azure seas hang the participants' national flags. Even local sake bottles sport the leaders' caricatures. So why, despite all the hoopla, are so many merchants and hotel operators feeling so glum?
NEWS
March 19, 1989 | KARL SCHOENBERGER, Times Staff Writer
This tiny hamlet of sugar cane farmers, nestled quietly in a thick forest in the north of Okinawa, is waging a symbolic battle that may signal a new era in the military alliance binding the United States and Japan. The U.S. Marine Corps wants to build a landing pad about a mile away to train Marines in the tactical use of Harrier jets, a combat aircraft that can take off and land vertically.
NEWS
September 5, 1996 | SONNI EFRON, TIMES STAFF WRITER
The Japanese government is using Okinawa to protect the peace and prosperity of mainland Japan while ignoring the hardships that Okinawans have suffered from 50 years of a heavy U.S. military presence, the province's embattled leader charged Wednesday. "I am afraid they don't care," Gov. Masahide Ota of Okinawa said bitterly. In an hourlong, exclusive interview conducted on the anniversary of the rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl involving three U.S.
NEWS
April 1, 1995 | TOM REINKEN, Tom Reinken is deputy graphics editor for the Times Orange County Edition
Exactly 50 years ago, my father, his buddy Thomas Perry Rutherford and several thousand other Marines landed on Okinawa to open what would become the final battle of World War II. Like some kind of fugitive from the law of averages, my dad survived that carnage unscratched. I arrived a couple of years later and enjoyed something close to an idyllic boyhood--lots of baseball, excellent credit with the Good Humor man. So my adolescent angst found another outlet.
WORLD
November 20, 2006 | From Times Wire Reports
A candidate who supports a plan for a new base for thousands of U.S. troops has won a closely watched gubernatorial election in Okinawa, electoral officials announced. Hirokazu Nakaima, 67, a bureaucrat with support from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling bloc, narrowly beat Keiko Itokazu, said local election board official Maiko Tashiro. Itokazu opposed Tokyo's plan to relocate a U.S. Marine Corps airstrip to another site on the island. There are about 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan.
NEWS
December 2, 1996 | TERESA WATANABE, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Japan and the United States agreed today to marshal their combined technological powers to build the world's first floating heliport in a proposal that represents one of the largest reversions of land by U.S. military forces on the southern island of Okinawa. One year after three U.S.