“Henoko Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Lawsuit” plaintiffs show dugong video at July 16, 2011 court hearing

Originally posted at Okinawa Outreach on July 25, 2011

Video Footage of “Dugong Trenches” shown in Court Hearing

By Hideki Yoshikawa, Int. Director of Save the Dugong Campaign Center & Secretariat of Citizens Network for Biological Diversity in Okinawa

The 12th court hearing of the “Henoko Environmental Impact Assessment Lawsuit” was held in the Naha District Court on July 16, 2011.

Filed by 622 plaintiffs against the Okinawa Defense Bureau, the lawsuit represents one of many strategies in what has become an international endeavor to stop the construction of a US military base in the Henoko/Oura Bay area in the northern part of Okinawa Island.

(Dugong and sea turtle in Oura Bay. Photograph by Higashionna Takuma)

The Henoko/Oura Bay area is one of the most biodiversity rich coastal areas in Japan and is critical habitat for endangered dugongs.

The lawsuit revolves around the legality and scientific validity of the Bureau’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the US military base construction. The plaintiffs call for a redo of the Bureau’s EIA.

(Plaintiffs’ meeting before court hearing, Okinawan style) In the hearing, the plaintiffs’ lawyers presented a video footage of “dugong trenches” or dugongs’ feeding trails, recently found at 5-6m deep in the sandy bottom by a local scuba-diving group in Oura Bay, about 600 meters south off the coastal community of Setake.(For more about the discovery of dugong trenches, see this Ryukyu Shimpo article.)

During its EIA surveys, the Bureau was not able to find any dugong feeding trails in the Henoko/Oura Bay area, and in its Draft Environment Impact Statement it concluded that the the construction of the base in the planned area would not impact the dugongs. The Bureau in fact plans to build a work yard nearby where these “dugong trenches” were found.

In the hearing, the plaintiffs’ lawyers also presented newspaper articles and other documents relating to the Japanese government’s recent announcement that MV-22 Osprey would be deployed to US Marine Corps Futenma Air Station beginning in October 2012.

The Bureau has kept its “know nothing” stance about the deployment plan until the announcement, despite the deployment plan of the Osprey to Futenma was stated in the US Navy’s 1992 document “Master Plan for Marine Corps Air Station Futenma” and in the 1996 SACO draft.

The Bureau’s lawyers are expected to respond to the footage and the articles and documents in later hearings.

Hideki Yoshikawa is the International Director of “Save the Dugong Campaign Center and worked for the adoption of International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recommendation and resolution at the World Conservation Congress in 2004 and 2008 calling for dugong conservation and urging both the Japanese and US governments to conduct an Environment Impact Assessment on the their planned destruction of Oura Bay, a habitat of the critically endangered Okinawa dugong, to make way for a military base.

For more background about the international environmentalist legal collaboration to save the Okinawa dugong, see Hideki Yoshikawa’s article, “Dugong Swimming in Uncharted Waters: US Judicial Intervention to Protect Okinawa’s ‘Natural Monument’ and Halt Base Construction,” published at The Asia-Pacific Journal.