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The northern hemisphere’s most precious coral reef won a reprieve this
week, thanks to the Gulf crisis and a little help from Britain’s royal family.
These two factors swayed an election in Okinawa, Japan, which unseated a
governor committed to building a new airport off the southern island of
Ishigaki. The island, which already has an airport, is home to one of the
world’s richest colonies of blue coral. Marine biologists say that building
the airport would kill the reef.

Controversy over the airport has raged for more than a decade, pitting
the Japanese establishment against international scientific opinion. The
World Conservation Union, which surveyed the reef last year, described it
as more diverse than the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, with colonies
of blue coral more than 600 years old. The reef is especially important
because pollution caused by soil erosion has killed almost all the coral
that once surrounded Japan’s southern islands. Blue coral is under threat
throughout the world because of the rise in sea temperatures.

Government officials in Okinawa accept the reef’s importance, but say
they can build the new airport without damaging it. The conservation union
disagrees: ‘If the airport is built at the proposed site, the reef will
be destroyed’, its survey concluded bluntly.

The report is the latest in a series of efforts by scientists and conservation
groups around the world to block the project. In Japan itself, criticism
has been muted. The airport’s backers included an alliance of politicians,
construction companies and civil servants of the type that has dominated
public policy in Japan for 35 years. At its head was Okinawa’s governor
Junji Nishime, a right-wing politician who had won three elections after
he promised to channel more money from Tokyo into Japan’s poorest prefecture.
Scientific societies and even mainstream conservation groups help back their
criticism of the Ishigaki project.

Two events upset the consensus. First a university lecturer, Masahide
Ota, campaigned against Nishime in the election by promising ‘to reconsider’
the Ishigaki project and, more significantly, to oppose Tokyo’s plans to
send a small contingent of soldiers to the middle East. Pacifist sentiment
runs deep in Okinawa, which suffered heavily in the Second World War.

Meanwhile, Japan’s most respected conservation organisation, the World
Wide Fund for Nature Japan, chose last Saturday, the day before the election,
to adopt the southern islands as a major campaign issue. Saburo Okita, chairman
of WWF Japan, told a symposium in Tokyo that the authorities should look
for another site for the airport. ‘It is important for us not to be too
hasty in constructing the airport.’

This was the first time that Okita, a former foreign minister known
for his diplomatic language, had publicly opposed the project. Okita was
upstaged by the symposium’s guest of honour, Prince Philip, attending as
president of WWF International Prince Philip was acting under the constraints
of diplomacy: he had cancelled a plan to visit Ishigaki because of the election
and avoided personally attacking the project.

Later Prince Philip told journalists: ‘As I understand it .. the plan
to build a new airport on the coral reef will obviously have the effect
of destroying what I understand is one of the very few viable parts of the
reef. All I can do is draw attention to the facts. The decision on what
happens depends on the people of Japan and the people of that area.’ This
was enough for Ishigaki’s local newspaper, which on polling day printed
Prince Philip’s words at the top of the front page.

WWF’s officials reacted with a mixture of consternation and delight
when the opposition candidate scraped in by 63 votes. ‘Ota will have to
keep his promise,’ said Shigeki Komori of WWF Japan’s Nature Conservation
Department. ‘He collected a lot of votes from opponents of the airport.’