80 Years On: Concerns Rising over Lack of Okinawa Backers in LDP

Newsfrom Japan

Politics

Aug 17, 2025 08:00 (JST)

Tokyo, Aug. 17 (Jiji Press)–With this year marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, concerns are rising in Okinawa Prefecture over the dwindling number of lawmakers in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party who put weight on measures to support the development of the southernmost Japan prefecture.

In the past, many influential politicians put efforts into promoting the economic development of the prefecture out of a sense of atonement for fierce battles waged in Okinawa between the former Japanese military and Allied powers in the late stage of the war and for the postwar U.S. occupation of the region.

At present, not many lawmakers are putting priority on Okinawa after measures taken by the Japanese government in the past for the development of the prefecture produced certain results.

“There were many lawmakers supportive of Okinawa,” Kosuke Gushi, an 80-year-old former Okinawa prefectural assembly member of the LDP, said in an interview on Monday. Gushi delivered a speech as a youth representative in a ceremony in May 1972 to mark Okinawa’s return to Japan from the United States.

Particularly prominent was former Minister of International Trade and Industry Sadanori Yamanaka.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]

Jiji Press