By SETH ROBSON | STARS AND STRIPES Published: April 30, 2021 YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan – Teenagers are zooming around a newly renovated skate park at the home of U.S. Forces Japan in western Tokyo after convincing the base commander to approve the work. The skate park, on the east side of the base, was torn down last year after damaged asphalt and rusting equipment rendered it unsafe. No funding was available to restore the park. However, Yokota High School freshman and Boy Scout Thomas Vogeley, 15, and Yokota Middle School seventh-grader Ben Wellons, 13, managed to reverse that decision. Both are avid skaters and Boy Scouts.
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In 1962, US commanders ordered a Marine named Don Heathcote to spray chemicals in the Okinawan jungle near his base as part of a series of biological warfare tests secretly carried out by the Pentagon during the Cold War.
Years later, Heathcote told a reporter that he did so without safety equipment and that while the herbicide killed the vegetation, it also damaged his health. “They diagnosed me with bronchitis and sinusitis connected to chemical exposure,” Heathcote said. Gerald Mohler, another Marine, was told to camp in the area, and said he later suffered from chronic breathing problems and neurological damage. “Were we Marines used as guinea pigs on Okinawa?” he asked
By JOSEPH DITZLER | STARS AND STRIPES Published: April 27, 2021
Stars and Stripes is making stories on the coronavirus pandemic available free of charge. See more staff and wire stories here. Sign up for our daily coronavirus newsletter here. Please support our journalism with a subscription. TOKYO – The U.S. military in Japan reported another six people, all in Okinawa, had contracted the coronavirus as of 6 p.m. Tuesday. As coronavirus case numbers fall to single digits at its bases, U.S. Forces Japan expects to put the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine back into circulation now that federal authorities and the Pentagon have cleared it for use.
US military drill relocation costs covertly covered by Japan s 1990s sympathy budgets
April 23, 2021 (Mainichi Japan)
Papers documenting U.S. military history including an account of the relocation of FCLP drills from the Naval Air Facility Atsugi to Iwo Jima is seen in this file photo taken on Jan. 25, 2021. (Mainichi/Hiroya Miyagi) Between 1993 and 1995, the Japanese government surreptitiously used budgets for U.S. military base hosting contributions to cover expenses for relocating drills in Japan, official United States Forces documents have revealed. U.S military drill relocation costs were not originally designated expenses covered by what s commonly referred to as the sympathy budget, or Japan s contribution to the cost of stationing U.S. troops in the country. The sympathy budget referral was carried out in response to a U.S. military request on the pretext of increasing expenses for maintaining Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tok
The senior enlisted leader for U.S. Forces Japan urged troops to travel to a shot clinic at a nearby base if they’re unable to schedule a coronavirus vaccination on their own installation.