News Analysis: Okinawa calls for permanent ban of U.S. military Osprey aircraft

Residents and officials of Okinawa on Wednesday voiced shock and condemnation following the crash-landing of a U.S. Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey in the sea off Nago a day earlier.

The incident, which saw five crew members airlifted to safety and treated for injuries, was the first major accident involving an Osprey since the U.S. military deployed Osprey squadrons in Japan in 2012.

Pictures beamed across the nation by public broadcaster NHK showed debris from the crash strewn across a wide area on shore.

In a bid to quell as much anger as possible from local residents and officials of the island, the U.S. Marines on Wednesday grounded all flights of its Ospreys.

"It was only a matter of time until something like this happened. We are only lucky that the accident wasn't more serious," a utility worker in Nago city in northern Okinawa was quoted by the local media as saying Wednesday.

"Unless these planes are banned completely, I'm 100 percent certain there will be further and more serious cases like these and more lives of innocent Okinawans will be lost at the hands of the U.S. military," he said.

While Tsukasa Kawada, a Foreign Ministry official in charge of Okinawa affairs, tried to allay the concerns of the locals, following an emergency meeting with Lt. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, top U.S. military commander in Okinawa, on the matter, stating that the latest accident was the result of an "oil duct problem" during an air-to-air refueling operation, Okinawan officials were quick to voice consternation.

Okinawa governor Takeshi Onaga, who has been working tirelessly to try to reduce Okinawa's disproportionate post-war U.S. base hosting burdens was furious at the crash.

"It's absolutely outrageous," Onaga said Wednesday, echoing the sentiments of the islanders who have on repeated occasions taken to the streets to voice their opposition to the deployment of the U.S. military aircraft so close to where they live.

With anti-U.S. sentiment already on the rise in the island, following a spate of crimes committed against locals including the brutal rape and murder earlier this year of a young local lady by a U.S. base-linked worker and former Marine, the Osprey incident will only lead to greater abhorrence for the central government and the U.S. for its persistent overloading of Okinawa with U.S. base hosting responsibilities.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe also described the accident as "extremely deplorable."

The crashed plane was based in Futenma, with the latest incident coming at a time when Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF) has earmarked plans to add 17 Osprey aircraft units, each of which can carry 24 combat troops, to its fleet, with flights expected to be made commencing 2019.

Prior to Tuesday's crash, the infamous Osprey has never been far from the accident headlines since its inception.

The planes' safety was called into question when an MV-22B Osprey crashed in Hawaii in May last year, leaving two dead and 20 others injured.

In August a year earlier, concerns about the plane were further stoked here when four crew members narrowly escaped injury when a Marine Corps' Osprey made a hard-landing near the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, in the United States.

Prior to that, an Osprey crashed in Morocco and killed two Marines in April 2012 and another crash in Florida injured all five crew members in June 2012.

The planes are also known for creating an unbearable amount of noise due to their massive turboprop engines.

A court in Japan handed down a ruling in October, ordering the state to pay 558 million yen (4.85 million U.S. dollars) in damages to residents over excessive noise from aircraft stationed at the Iwakuni base, which is jointly used by the U.S. military and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces in Yamaguchi Prefecture, in the Chugoku region on Japan's main island of Honshu.

The central government has also been partitioned to suspend some of the flights from the base and called for U.S. fighter jets flying to Iwakuni from the Atsugi base near Tokyo, that are involved in aircraft carrier maneuvers, to be canceled, as well as a blanket ban on all flights from the notorious, accident-prone MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircrafts.

For the locals in Okinawa, however, such damaging nuisances have been tolerated for years with the aggravation and potential danger showing no signs of letting up.

As the local media reported on Dec. 7, a U.S. Marine Corps' MV-22 Osprey plane in Okinawa repeatedly flew over residential areas a day earlier, transporting an unidentified object suspended below its airframe by cables.

The Defense Ministry's Okinawa bureau officially lodged a protest against the U.S. side, describing the actions as "intolerable."

"The history of the plane suggests that sooner or later innocent lives will be lost here (in Okinawa) because this plane is unsafe," a 30-year-old female tour operator in Nago said.

"Why should we have to live in fear of more accidents happening. It's not fair. The Ospreys should be withdrawn from Okinawa and based on the mainland or withdrawn from Japan altogether," she demanded.

Okinawa, which was under U.S. occupation until 1972, hosts some 75 percent of Japan's U.S. bases and around half of the 50,000 U.S. military personnel in Japan. Endit