ON 16 SEPTEMBER 2009, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won a landslide victory in national parliamentary elections. For the first time since its founding in 1996, the DP J was asked to form a government, having displaced the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) as the governing party for only the second time since the LDP was formed in 1955 (the first time, in 1993, the LDP was out of power for only nine months). After the DPJ's victory, much ink was spilled proclaiming, or at least musing about, imminent, significant, even strategic changes to the U.S.-Japan relationship. Much of the controversy surrounded an agreement between the United States and Japan to remove Marine Coips Air Station (MCAS) Futenma from its current location in the middle of a crowded urban area in the southern part of the island of Okinawa. In 2006, after years of negotiations, the United States and Japanese governments agreed to replace the MCAS with a new and smaller facility on Camp Schwab, another Marine Coips facility in the northern, less crowded part of Okinawa. Nine months after the DPJ's landslide, the party's first prime minister, Hatoyama Yukio, resigned, largely over a contretemps surrounding the Futenma issue.
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