Denny Tamaki Loses to Genta Koja

Okinawa voters ended 12 years of prefectural leadership built around opposition to U.S. bases, handing two-term Gov. Denny Tamaki a clear defeat on Sept. 13.

Genta Koja, a 42-year-old former Naha vice mayor backed by Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), won 59% of the vote to Tamaki’s 38%, according to election results reported by Stars and Stripes.

Koja received 423,124 votes, the most of any Okinawa gubernatorial candidate since the prefecture reverted to Japanese control in 1972. Tamaki received 276,060. Koja takes office Sept. 30.

Tamaki spent two terms fighting the relocation of Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Futenma from crowded Ginowan to a replacement airfield under construction at Camp Schwab in Henoko. He took Tokyo to court to slow that work and argued Futenma should close without finishing the move inside the prefecture. That fight defined his administration. It did not define this election.

Economy First, Bases Second

Dr. Robert D. Eldridge, president of the Eldridge Think Tank and a former political advisor to Marines in Japan, argued the result was not a single-issue referendum on American forces. In an interim analysis of the race, he wrote that Koja won because he ran the campaign Okinawans wanted in 2026, about income, prices, children, and whether the prefectural government could produce results with Tokyo.

A Kyodo News election-day exit poll of 2,909 voters at 60 polling places, cited in Eldridge’s analysis, is the cleanest numbers set available. Nearly half of respondents, 49.5%, named economic revitalization as their top issue. Of those economy-first voters, 78.7% chose Koja. Only 20.9% put the base issue first. Tamaki still won that smaller group, taking 72.9% of base-first voters. He did not have enough of them.

Koja also took more than 70% of voters in their teens, twenties, and thirties and led every age group through the sixties, according to the same Kyodo poll. He captured 30.8% of people who had voted for Tamaki in 2022.

On the Henoko relocation itself, the poll found 50.2% in support and 43.8% opposed. While that is still a split, it is no longer an anti-relocation majority in that survey.

Stars and Stripes reported turnout at 61%, about four points higher than the 2022 governor’s race. A separate Ryukyu Shimpo/JX Press survey published before the vote found a similar ranking: nearly 47% pointed to the economy, jobs, and prices, while 16.6% named U.S. bases and security.

Eldridge’s list of causes is longer than the exit poll. He pointed to younger voters consuming politics on social media instead of through the island’s traditional newspapers, fatigue after 12 years of confrontation with the central government, a unified center-right campaign behind Koja, and municipal politics that had already moved. Before election day, he wrote, 29 of Okinawa’s 41 mayors reportedly backed Koja and only six backed Tamaki.

He also noted something Marines on the island already understand from previous campaigns: no major U.S. military accident or crime landed in the final weeks that opponents could hang on to the race. The incidents that did make local news, he wrote, involved Japan Air Self-Defense Force F-15s at Naha Airport, not American aircraft.

What This Means for Marines

Okinawa still hosts the bulk of U.S. facilities in Japan. III Marine Expeditionary Force (III MEF), the Corps’ only permanently forward-deployed Marine Air-Ground Task Force, is based there with tens of thousands of Marines and sailors across the camps.

Futenma remains the most politically exposed airfield on the island. Camp Schwab, in a more rural area in the north, is where Tokyo and Washington have been trying to put its aviation functions for decades.

A governor who accepts that plan still cannot make the move happen right away, but it does change the local political weather around the work already underway at Henoko and around the 2013 Consolidation Plan that would return U.S. property south of Kadena Air Base to Japan.

For Marines and families, the daily questions are smaller and more practical than the campaign slogans. Housing, schools, off-base leases, and PCS timing all sit on top of basing decisions that have been tied up in prefectural politics and Japanese courts for years.

A Naha government that is no longer organized around stopping Henoko is likelier to spend its energy on the economy Koja ran on, and less likely to treat every construction milestone as a new political offensive.

This changing political landscape matters for units already training and operating in the theater. III MEF Marines 3D-printed a raiding craft at White Beach this summer and put it in the water during Exercise Valiant Shield.

Littoral units on the island have been training with long-range anti-ship systems. Those jobs do not require a friendly governor, but they do get easier when the prefectural office is not running a permanent legal campaign against the airfield those units will need to use if the plan is to give Futenma back.

Koja has not promised Marines a blank check. In a Sept. 3 post on X, reported by Stars and Stripes, he pledged to see construction on the Oura Bay side of the Henoko project finished within 12 years and to lock in “a definite date for the base’s return.” He also supports the planned return of land south of Kadena. Both of these lines are about reducing the southern footprint over time, not expanding it.

Remaining Issues

The election does not instantly remove existing legal hurdles. For example, Japan’s Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that three residents have standing to keep challenging landfill approval for the Henoko work. That decision, reported by NHK and covered by Military.com in July, did not cancel existing permits or the U.S.-Japan agreements that govern the move, but it did keep a live case in the lower courts.

Eldridge’s reckoning is that many voters concluded that the old strategy had stopped producing results. Construction continued through Onaga’s term and Tamaki’s two terms. Litigation and protests did not deliver a closed Futenma without a replacement.

Koja’s pitch was that a governor who can work with the Cabinet can get more done on income and infrastructure than a governor locked in permanent conflict with it.

Tamaki conceded and did not rule out running again in four years, according to remarks reported by the Okinawa Times. He told supporters he was not wrong to argue against Henoko. The vote total says a large share of the prefecture wanted something different.

Koja becomes the first Okinawa governor born after the 1972 reversion and the first LDP-backed governor since Hirokazu Nakaima left office after approving the landfill work in 2013. He is also the youngest governor since reversion.

For Marines at Futenma, Schwab, Foster, Hansen, and Kinser, the future is intriguing: whether the next four years bring fewer political shocks around the gates, a clearer timeline on the airfield, and a prefectural government that treats the alliance as a fact to manage instead of a campaign to wage.