Every day except Sundays, holidays and typhoon days, Okinawans confront the US military at Henoko, site of a planned new base

Every day except for Sundays, holidays and typhoon days hundreds of huge dump trucks enter the US Marine Corps' Camp Schwab at Henoko, in northern Okinawa, carrying landfill - dirt, sand, stones - and dump it into the sea offshore from the base. Eventually, they hope, they will be able to dump enough to support an airstrip on top of the pile, and transform Schwab from a camp into a superbase. Every day except for Sundays, holidays and typhoon days, Okinawans and their supporters from Japan and abroad carry out a sit-in at the gate aimed at preventing, or at least slowing, the entry of these trucks. This sit-in has continued now for more than 1700 days - possibly qualifying for the Guinness Book, if anyone would take the trouble to make the application. Okinawans have any number of reasons for opposing this new base: the fact that the land reclamation will probably kill one of the world's last undamaged coral gardens in the adjacent Oura Bay; the fact that US bases have always brought with them crimes, accidents and pollution; the fact that mainland Japan's refusing to accept this base but forcing it on tiny Okinawa is a straw-that-breaks-the-camel's-back act of discrimination. And there is the fact that this and all the other bases here trample on Okinawa's essentially peace-loving sensibilities

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