Japan Speaking Tour #2 - Yokota U.S. Air Base in Tokyo, Japan is an abomination
Shut it down and clean it up!
By Pat Elder
September 24, 2024
Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo is located in the center of one of the most densely populated places on earth. The pollution and noise are insufferable.
TOKYO, JAPAN (August 10, 2024) Yokota Air Base is a massive installation with a runway that stretches 2 miles and houses 14,000 personnel. Nearby residents say the screaming jets are so loud they create a health hazard. The 5th generation, nuclear-capable jets are known to create sounds topping 120 decibels. The headquarters of U.S. Forces Japan and the Japan Air Defense Command Headquarters are located here. Yokota is the tip of the American spear in East Asia.
I don’t know if you remember the movie and Broadway production of the “Music Man,” but he didn’t know the territory. I feel like him. Reading press accounts, DOD studies, and scouring Google images can only get you halfway there. Listening to locals completes the story. It’s humbling.
We met with leaders of the opposition who share our passion for demanding the closure of Yokota Air Base and point to the PFAS contamination emanating from the base as a casus belli, or a cause for battle – in this case, a nonviolent one. We are witnessing the growth of a worldwide movement demanding environmental accountability and transparency from the imperial Americans in this regard. The radicals in Tokyo are the vanguard of this revolution.
On August 9, 2024, we met with Ms. Mieko Takahashi and Mr. Kiichi Okutomi, leaders of the Association of West Tama residents demanding the closure of the Yokota Air Base. The base is located in the Tama section of Tokyo.
Ms. Takahashi showed us this amazing Google Earth
image of the fire training pit on the base. It is the spot of the bruised and infected hypodermic needle injection of carcinogens into Mother Earth.
Like most Air Bases since the early 1970’s Yokota held bi-weekly or monthly fire training exercises. Firefighters would pour thousands of gallons of jet fuel on the burnt-out fuselage and ignite it. They would extinguish the mushroom-like inferno with a kind of carcinogenic foamy substance that snuffed out the fire in 10 to 20 seconds. The aqueous film-forming foam contained PFAS chemicals that were allowed to drain into the soil, groundwater, and surface water. The entire region is fantastically contaminated.
The Japanese government is in denial about these deadly substances. You can see in the burn pit photo here that residents outside of the base are growing green tea and vegetables just a few hundred meters north of the fire pit. PFAS is known to poison crops. It also becomes airborne and settles in people’s lungs and homes as dust.
Ms. Mieko Takahashi holds a graphic showing concentrations of the carcinogens in groundwater and the directional flow of the groundwater. The base is shown in green. The poisons are flowing east toward the sea.
A monitoring well in Tachikawa City, east of Yokota Air Base, detected PFOS, a deadly type of PFAS, at 1,340 parts per trillion. The US enforces a limit of 4 ppt in Groundwater and drinking water so the levels in Yokota are 335 times higher than the US standard. Japan has a voluntary standard of 50 parts per trillion but does not pressure the US to clean up its act.
The use of cancer-causing foams in training exercises has stopped but the US continues to use PFAS in hundreds of products and applications on base. The waste water treatment plants dump the poisonous substances into Japanese rivers.
The Air Force denied it is poisoning the water in Tokyo and released this statement, “We will continue to adhere to all relevant agreements, obligations and procedures as good stewards of our installations and the environment and continue to closely coordinate with the Government of Japan.”
The Downs Law Group helps to make this work possible. Their support allows us to research and write about military contamination around the world. They’ve helped us buy hundreds of PFAS kits and they’ve helped pay for flights and hotels. The firm is working to provide legal representation to individuals in the U.S. and abroad with a high likelihood of exposure to a host of contaminants.
The Downs Law Group employs attorneys accredited by the Department of Veterans Affairs to assist those who have served in obtaining VA Compensation and Pension Benefits they are rightly owed.