Futenma was built in 1945, during the final fighting on Okinawa and immediately after it. English Wikipedia says the field was first allocated to Eighth Air Force B-29 Superfortresses for the invasion of the Japanese home islands; Japanese Wikipedia says US Army engineers laid out a runway of about 2,400 m on land that had been forcibly requisitioned, where the villages of Ginowan, Kamiyama, Shinjo and Nakahara had about 14,000 residents before the war.

The invasion never came, but the airfield stayed. The Air Force handed it to the Navy on 30 June 1957, and on 7 May 1960 it was dedicated as Marine Corps Air Facility Futenma, with Marine Aircraft Group 16 as its first operational tenant. Ginowan grew up around it: the city had about 13,000 people in 1944 and has about 94,000 today.

Futenma has been a rotary-wing base for most of its Marine life. VMM-265, then a helicopter squadron, moved there entirely in early 1995. The CH-46E Sea Knight gave way to the MV-22B Osprey: VMM-262’s CH-46Es, the last of the type in Okinawa and the Pacific, made their final flight from Futenma on 30 September 2013. On 13 December 2016 a Futenma MV-22 ditched off Nago, injuring two of the five crew.

The fixed-wing tankers left. VMGR-152 moved its 15 KC-130Js to Iwakuni from June 2014, and Japanese Wikipedia says the move was complete by August. Today the base is home to two MV-22B squadrons and the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing’s air control units.

Environmental claims have added to the friction. English Wikipedia reports a claim that leaking barrels of Agent Orange were found by maintenance personnel in 1981; the US Department of Defense denies that Agent Orange was ever present on Okinawa. In 2019 high levels of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) were found in waters near the base and in the blood of Ginowan residents, and the Marine Corps did not give Okinawa Prefecture permission to inspect the base. The sources consulted record no resolution of either.

The relocation question began with the Special Action Committee on Okinawa. Its final report, on 2 December 1996, set the goal of returning Futenma in full within five to seven years, once an adequate replacement had been built. The 2006 US–Japan realignment roadmap fixed the replacement at Henoko, next to Camp Schwab in northern Okinawa, with two runways of 1,800 m in a V shape, to be finished by 2014.

The plan has survived every attempt to change it. Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama promised in 2009 to move the base at least out of the prefecture, concluded in 2010 that Henoko was unavoidable, and resigned. Governor Hirokazu Nakaima approved the landfill on 27 December 2013; Takeshi Onaga, elected in November 2014 on a promise to stop it, revoked the approval in October 2015. Construction of the Henoko seawall began in 2017.

The legal fight has gone the national government’s way. Japanese Wikipedia records that the Supreme Court ruled against the prefecture in December 2016, that the prefecture again lost after withdrawing the approval in August 2018, that the Supreme Court ruled against it in September 2023, and that in December 2023, after a court order, the government approved the design change for ground-improvement work in the prefecture’s place. Denny Tamaki, governor since September 2018, continues to oppose the project.

On 24 February 2019 Okinawans voted in a prefectural referendum on the Henoko landfill; more than 70% of votes were against it. The Japanese government’s position is that Henoko is the most appropriate solution; Okinawa Prefecture opposes it, and Governor Onaga insisted that Futenma should be moved outside Okinawa. The Defence Ministry’s cost estimate has risen from 350 billion to 930 billion yen, and completion is now expected in the 2030s. Until then Futenma keeps flying.