ISTANBUL

A new medical center has opened on a former US military site in Okinawa Prefecture, which was returned to Japan by the US military in 2015, Jiji Press reported on Monday.

The facility, said to feature state-of-the-art equipment, was built at the former West Futenma Housing Area located in Okinawa, Japan’s southern island province.

"This is one of the visible results of reducing Okinawa's base-hosting burden," Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said Sunday at the facility’s opening ceremony.

“The government will make (its) best efforts to realize the reduction of the burden,” Hayashi added.

The University of the Ryukyus Medical School, along with its affiliated hospital, has relocated to the new medical center.

This development follows the US decision in December to begin transferring its marine corps troops from Okinawa to Guam, according to local media.

Under a 2012 plan, over 4,000 of the approximately 19,000 marines currently in Okinawa will be moved to the US island territory in the Pacific, the US military had said.

Okinawa hosts 31 US military-exclusive facilities covering 70.3% of such sites nationwide by land area and is home to roughly half of the 50,000 US troops deployed in Japan under a bilateral security pact.

In December, hundreds of people held demonstrations in Okinawa demanding an apology from the military over a sexual assault case involving a serviceman.

There were 118 criminal cases involving US military personnel in Japan in 2023, and of those, 72, or 61%, were committed in Okinawa.