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All Agent Orange Ingredients Unearthed at U.S. Military Dumpsite on Okinawa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Jon Mitchell
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More than six months after dozens of rusty chemical barrels were unearthed from former U.S. military land in Okinawa City, their contents have been identified - and they appear to offer conclusive proof that the toxic Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange was buried on the island.

Announced in early July, the results of two separate studies - one conducted by Okinawa City and one by the Okinawa Defense Bureau - both detected the three signature components of Agent Orange: the herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D as well as highly-toxic TCDD dioxin.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 54 , December 2012 , e180
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2012

Footnotes

Between 2012 and 2014 we posted a number of articles on contemporary affairs without giving them volume and issue numbers or dates. Often the date can be determined from internal evidence in the article, but sometimes not. We have decided retrospectively to list all of them as Volume 10, Issue 54 with a date of 2012 with the understanding that all were published between 2012 and 2014.

References

Notes

1 For an account of the discovery of the barrels, see here.

2 Honda's comments are included in a July 7 interview with Ryukyu Shimpo newspaper available here.

3 See for example Jon Mitchell, “Military Contamination on Okinawa: PCBs and Agent Orange at Kadena Air Base”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 12, No. 1, March 24, 2014. Available here.

4 See Jon Mitchell, “Herbicide Stockpile at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa: 1971 U.S. Army report on Agent Orange,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 1, No. 5, January 14, 2013. Available here.

5 The Okinawa Defense Bureau report is available from its homepage here.

6 汚染ドラム缶：枯れ葉剤成分 高まる不安 調査と除去要求, Okinawa Times, July 8, 2014.

7 Matthew Burke, “Water fountains at Kadena Air Base disconnected after new testing reveals traces of lead”, Stars and Stripes, May 30, 2014.

8 Jon Mitchell, “Agent Orange at Okinawa's Futenma Base in 1980s,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 25, No. 3, June 18, 2012. Available here.

9 For more information, see here.