“I don’t like the way the (Okinawa) delegation responded to the question that there was no truth to the story. I was the one who asked the question,” Tenorio said.
He believes there could have been a “problem with the translation” when he and other members of the CNMI House of Representatives asked the visiting Okinawa Prefecture Assembly delegation about the proposed relocation of 4,000 Marines to Tinian.
He said he and other local lawmakers wanted to know if the Japanese government was willing to shoulder the cost of relocating the Marines.
According to Tenorio, Onaga Masatoshi, the vice president of the Federation of Okinawa Prefecture Liberal Democratic Party branches, responded “yes.”
This is an important issue, Tenorio said, because the U.S. government does not want all its Marines to leave Okinawa.
The U.S. only agreed to relocate 8,000 Marines to Guam because the Japanese government would help pay for this “realignment” of American forces, Tenorio said.
He said he told the Okinawa delegation that it would be easier for the U.S. government to expand its military facilities on Guam than build new facilities on Tinian.
“So who’s going to pay for that? It was a logical question for me to ask that time. And now, they are saying there’s no truth to it? Come on.”
The Japanese government has said that it would be” impossible” to move Futenma’s facilities off Okinawa due to “a need to maintain deterrence under the Japan-U.S. alliance.”
