Japan to decide on US base pact by May

Japan's Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa sets May as the deadline to decide where to relocate a controversial US military air base currently in Okinawa.

"We must work as quickly as possible," Kitazawa told reporters on Tuesday, stressing that Tokyo hopes to settle the issue as quickly as possible.

Kitazawa said he supported a plan agreed with Washington in 2006 to move the US Marine Corps Futenma Air Station from an urban area to a less populated coastal region within the southern prefecture of Okinawa.

But the plan is facing strong opposition from residents and the Socialists in the ruling coalition, including Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who want the base to be totally moved off the island.

Hatoyama's center-left government, which came to power in Japan in August after almost five decades of conservative rule, has pledged to reconsider past agreements on the US military presence and adopt a less subservient position toward Washington.

The announcement of the deadline came on the heels of a call by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who urged Japan's ambassador in Washington to implement the 2006 agreement reached after years of negotiations.

Last week, the Japanese prime minister said it would take "several months" before he could announce his decision on the issue and that he was seeking an alternative site to the previously agreed area for the relocation of the base.

Locals in Okinawa, which currently hosts more than half the 47,000 US troops stationed in Japan, associate the US military presence on the island with crime and pollution, recalling the outrageous account of the rape of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by three American soldiers in 1995.