Thursday, March 22, 2001

Story and photos by Carlos Bongioanni
Okinawa bureau

Excavation workers clear away dirt from a tomb uncovered in an archaeological dig at Kadena Air Base.

KADENA AIR BASE — An archaeological dig here is turning up cultural relics of Okinawa.

The work is part of a yearlong environmental and cultural survey of land on Kadena, where military officials and the government of Japan want to construct a new fuel pipeline. During those surveys, Japanese excavation workers uncovered 13 large tombs.

Ancestral land documents from the neighboring town of Chatan indicated that the proposed construction site contained the pre-World War II tombs.

They apparently were covered over years ago when construction workers built a major road along Kadena’s south perimeter fence, said George Komine, the air base’s cultural resources manager.

The tombs are located just inside the perimeter fence at the southwest corner of the base at the juncture of Highways 58 and 23.

The tombs have intrinsic value as cultural artifacts, said Nathan Rowland, chief of Kadena’s Environmental Flight.

"They are a link to the past … by preserving the remains of the past, we can learn about the past," he said.

A site survey must be completed for each military construction project, Rowland said.

"The underlying principle is we want to know what’s on a site, before we disturb it and then decide … what to do with it."

Kadena spokesman Masao Doi said the base is working with the town of Chatan and the government of Japan to preserve the cultural resources. The government of Japan is paying for the excavation and will pay for the new fuel line construction when it is approved.

Nathan Rowland, front, and George Komine give a survey tour of an archaeological dig at Kadena Air Base.

After World War II, when the U.S. military took possession of Okinawa, many of the locals had to leave their ancestral lands to make room for the military bases. All but one of the 13 landowners with tombs at the current archaeological dig site at Kadena "vacated their old tombs," Komine said. "Since the tombs are opened, it means they vacated them. They break the urns inside so different spirits will not come back in."

The one tomb that is still sealed belongs to a family that was not on Okinawa when the American occupation occurred, said Yasuo Yamashiro of Chatan’s board of education’s cultural section. It is believed that there are six urns with the remains of ancestors still inside.

The dig site at Kadena is about a half-mile long and several hundred feet wide.

"This is a very impressive site because of the size of it, the number of tombs and the density of tombs in the area" said Rowland.

Komine noted that the size of the tombs, which are very large in comparison to current Okinawan standards, indicate that the owners were very wealthy.

After the excavation is completed next fall, Japanese cultural officials may decide that Kadena’s new fuel pipeline will not be able to go through the site. In that case, the base will have to find another site, said Rowland.

"Our role, as environmental people, is to keep the base in compliance to all the environmental standards, natural as well as cultural. It’s just good stewardship conservation," Rowland said.

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