But wander up Henoko’s narrow streets, and the villagers will tell you a different story. They say the activists are outsiders. Most residents, they say, still support the village’s “painful decision” of more than a decade ago to accept the planned air base, with its noise and risk of crashes, in exchange for jobs and compensation payments. “Of course, it would be better not to have the air base, but we are not dogmatic like them,” Masaaki Shiroma, a community association leader, said as he nodded toward the tent encampment. This southern island can often seem united in its resistance to the new airfield at Henoko and, more broadly, to the large number of military bases that the United States has maintained here since the end of World War II. But look more deeply and a nuanced picture emerges, one that seems to offer a possible chance of some sort of compromise. There is much truth to the image of an angry Okinawa, an island of 1.4 million residents about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island. Much of the resentment over the large American military presence is focused on one base, Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, a busy heliport that has come to symbolize the island’s burden because of its dangerous location in the middle of a city, Ginowan. The United States and Japan first agreed to move the base in 1996 to appease Okinawan outrage over the rape of a schoolgirl by three American servicemen, later choosing Henoko, in the island’s less populated north, as the site to build a replacement airfield. But construction never started because, local leaders say, the Henoko agreement failed to address Okinawans’ resentment at the oversize American presence on the island, which is host to two-thirds of the 37,000 shore-based United States military personnel in Japan. The biggest setback came two years ago, when the prime minister at the time, Yukio Hatoyama, broke an election promise to move the base off the island entirely, which only seemed to confirm Tokyo’s willingness to allow the Americans to remain on Okinawa. Both the American and the Japanese governments still formally support the original plan to move the Futenma base to Henoko. However, opinion polls show that about 80 percent of voters on Okinawa now oppose it, enough for many analysts and politicians to proclaim the agreement to be as good as dead. But look across Okinawa’s divided political spectrum and the depth of that opposition varies. For those on the left, the Futenma base had become a symbol not only of an unfair base burden but also of a history of discrimination by Japan, going back to its 1879 annexation of this once independent Kingdom of the Ryukyus. A similarly large bloc of voters on the right, though sharing some of this anger, supported the Futenma relocation plan until recently. They voice more concern about national security issues and support the bases as a way to help offset the rising threat of China, just across the East China Sea. They say they also want the jobs and other money the bases bring to Okinawa, by many measures the poorest of Japan’s 47 prefectures. Many conservatives turned against the Henoko plan two years ago, in the popular outrage that followed Mr. Hatoyama’s broken promise. The Okinawa chapter of the right-leaning Liberal Democratic Party broke ranks with the party’s national headquarters in Tokyo and opposed moving the base to the village. In late 2010, the island’s L.D.P.-backed governor, Hirokazu Nakaima, won re-election by switching to an antibase platform. “We had to reverse our position for political survival,” said Sunao Ikema, the secretary general of the L.D.P.’s Okinawa chapter. In interviews, Mr. Ikema and other L.D.P. members did not exclude the possibility of changing their position once again, this time in support of the base, once public passions showed signs of cooling. But at best, conservative leaders and political analysts said that allowing construction of a new air base on Okinawa would take time, and would probably require scrapping the current agreement for some other approach. The governor, Mr. Nakaima, declined a request for an interview, but Vice Governor Kanetoshi Yoseda indicated that it would be difficult to go back to supporting the relocation without clearer signs of receding public passions. Some analysts say that could come in June, when conservatives will try to regain control of the 48-seat prefectural assembly, where they now hold 22 seats. That prospect has many on the left alarmed that their side may be losing momentum.
