Marine Corps Pfc. Garett Denton guides an asphalt zipper at Ie Shima Training Facility, Okinawa, March 17, 2025. (Jeremiah Barksdale/U.S. Marine Corps)
The Marine Corps could soon resolve a dispute with Okinawa prefecture over parachute jump training at Kadena Air Base by reopening an offshore airfield.
Repair work at Ie Shima Auxiliary Airfield is expected to finish by the end of this month, a spokesman from the Okinawa Defense Bureau, an arm of Japan’s Ministry of Defense, said by phone Friday. Runway operations will resume “around the end of this year,” he added.
The airfield on Ie Shima, a 9-square-mile island a few miles off the Motobu Peninsula on Okinawa’s northwestern coast, serves as a parachute training site for the Air Force and Marine Corps.
Construction at the airfield was scheduled to begin in March and finish this month, then-bureau director Shinya Ito told the Kadena town assembly in February. The airfield was expected to be fully operational in December.
Pending the repairs, the Air Force’s 18th Wing since December 2023 has made its training drops about once a month at the Ridout drop zone at Kadena over objections from the prefecture.
Ie village has not been given a specific date for when runway operations will resume, a village spokesman said by phone Friday.
On Wednesday, the Marine Corps notified the village that it was planning to land a C-130 Hercules airlifter on the runway between noon and 5 p.m. to check its condition, he said.
Someone from the village’s office spotted what appeared to be a C-130 flying over the island that day but could not confirm its serial number or if it landed at the airfield, he added. The village is checking with the bureau to determine if the landing took place.
The bureau spokesman declined to comment about the C-130 flight “because it is related to the operations of the U.S. military.”
Marine Corps Installations Pacific spokeswoman 1st Lt. Kelsey Enlow in an email Friday declined to answer questions from Stars and Stripes, citing operational security.
The 18th Wing has carried out seven parachute drops at Ridout this year, most recently on Sept. 26, Oct. 9 and 23, a spokesman with the prefecture’s Military Base Affairs Division said by phone Friday.
“This is something extremely unusual,” he said.
The prefecture sent protest letters dated Oct. 30 to wing commander Brig. Gen. John Gallemore and U.S. Consul General Andrew Ou, and hand-delivered the same letter to bureau director Masaru Murai and Ambassador Manabu Miyagawa of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Okinawa Liaison Office at its Naha office on Oct. 24, the spokesman said.
The letter states that the parachute training “can no longer be considered to fall under exceptional conditions” and requests that the Air Force halt training at Kadena and only conduct it outside of Japan and Okinawa until the runway is completed.
The 18th Wing referred questions emailed on Friday to the Office of the Secretary of Defense due to the U.S. government shutdown.
Some Japanese government officials speak to the press only on condition of anonymity.
AloJapan.com