Takeshi Onaga, Okinawa Governor and Critic of US Bases, Dies at 67

TOKYO — Takeshi Onaga, the governor of Okinawa and an outspoken critic of U.S. military bases in Japan’s southern archipelago, died Wednesday in Urasoe, on the main island. He was 67.

Kiichiro Jahana, Okinawa’s vice governor, said the cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, which Onaga discovered he had in April. He had undergone surgery for the cancer four months ago and was readmitted to the hospital on July 30.

Just before then, he vowed to renew a legal fight to stop the moving of a Marine air base from central Okinawa to a less-populated coastal area. Echoing public protests in the region, he said the base, in Futenma, should be moved out of Okinawa Prefecture altogether.

Onaga was a rare conservative politician willing to stand up to leaders of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party. In opposing the relocation of the base, he put himself at odds with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who supports keeping the bases in Okinawa, more than 650 miles from the Japanese mainland.

“Many conservatives had been reluctant to oppose central government,” said Toru Kinjo, a conservative leader on Okinawa and a friend of Onaga’s. “But Onaga thought that speaking out about what is necessary would lead to the protection of our next generations and the pride of people in Okinawa.”

In Japan, where local lawmakers tend to follow dictates from the central government, Onaga stood out as a singularly independent politician.

Born into a conservative political family and previously a member of the Liberal Democratic Party, he became one of the fiercest critics of the relocation and of the U.S. military presence on Okinawa generally. He traveled to Washington several times to speak with members of Congress about the island prefecture’s tangled relationship with the United States and the Japanese government.

In remarks Wednesday after Onaga’s death, Yoshihide Suga, Abe’s chief cabinet secretary, acknowledged that Onaga’s views on the U.S. bases “often conflicted with that of the government.”

“We will accept Mr. Onaga’s passion for Okinawa,” Suga said, “and we will try to do in a palpable manner everything possible” for it.

For years, residents had protested the noise, accidents and sometimes brutal violence, including murder and rape, associated with the U.S. military presence on the island. Nearly half of the roughly 50,000 American troops in Japan are stationed on Okinawa.

Onaga had said that he understood the anger of Okinawans, many of whom also resented what they believed was Japan’s original betrayal of the island in 1879, when the country annexed the archipelago. Okinawa was then an independent kingdom known as the Ryukyus.

Adding to their bitterness, many Okinawans also say that during the Battle of Okinawa, the only battle of World War II fought on Japanese soil and one that cost thousands of lives, the people of the island were ordered by the Japanese military to commit suicide rather than surrender to the Americans.

Takeshi Onaga was born on Oct. 2, 1950, in the coastal city of Naha, the capital of Okinawa, during the U.S. postwar occupation of Japan. His father, Josei, was mayor of the city at one time, and his mother, Kazuko, ran a market stall to help support the family.

Although his mother discouraged him from following in his father’s footsteps, Takeshi decided he wanted to become a politician while still in elementary school. Onaga’s biographer, Koji Matsubara, wrote that just days after his father had lost an election, Takeshi announced to his elementary school classmates that he would run for mayor. He was 12 years old.

Onaga’s Okinawan patriotism was awakened in college when he went to Tokyo to attend Hosei University. Okinawa was still under U.S. occupation (it reverted to Japanese rule in 1972, 20 years after the rest of Japan), and Onaga needed a passport to travel to the Japanese mainland. He recalled that landlords in Tokyo had discriminated against Okinawans and that he had difficulty finding an apartment.

After graduation, he returned to Okinawa to work for a construction company run by his older brother. At 35, he ran for the city assembly in Naha as a member of the Liberal Democratic Party. He went on to be elected mayor and served four terms as an independent.

As mayor, he supported a plan by the United States and Japan to move the Marine base from Futenma, a residential part of the island, to the less dense Nago, on the island’s eastern coast.

“It was an agonizing decision,” he told his biographer of his initial support for the plan. “The Okinawan people really hated it, but what could they do? Given the huge state power of the central government of Japan, Okinawa was firmly suppressed.”

But after the Democratic Party won in parliamentary elections in 2009, breaking a half century of nearly uninterrupted one-party rule by the Liberal Democrats, the new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, suggested that the base did not need to be in Okinawa at all. It was then that Onaga felt emboldened to express his true views.

He ran for governor in 2014 on a platform opposing moving the base, and defeated the incumbent by about 100,000 votes. His stance against the U.S. military presence on the island was so firm that in 2016, though he was an avowed admirer of President John F. Kennedy, he nevertheless boycotted a ceremony presided over by the president’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, then the U.S. ambassador to Japan, when the United States officially returned 10,000 acres of land on Okinawa to Japan.

“I greatly regret that the U.S. military doesn’t have any consideration for the people of Okinawa,” Onaga said in a statement at the time.

Onaga confronted central Japanese government leaders, accusing Suga, the chief cabinet secretary, of “looking down on” Okinawans and contending that the Abe administration was ignoring the will of the local people in forging ahead with the relocation plan. He also fought the central government in court, seeking to stop landfill and construction at the new base site.

He learned he had a pancreatic tumor during a routine checkup in April. After surgery to remove the tumor, he went back to work in May. Looking visibly weakened, he attended a memorial service for Okinawa’s war dead in June. In late July, he announced that he would rescind his predecessor’s approval to use landfill in the construction of the base in Nago.

Had he survived, he would have been up for re-election in November against a candidate supported by the central government.

“Onaga showed staying power and seemed to be a principled politician,” said Jeff Kingston, the director of Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo.

“In a profession where principles are usually readily exchanged for benefits, Onaga seemed to think that enough is enough; you can’t buy or rent our compliance.”