Most media attention to Okinawa concentrates on the bases, and rightly so since they do indeed affect everything. Here, however, author Urashima shifts the primary focus to development politics and nature, in the context of a plan conceived at the height of Japan's “bubble” in the mid- 1980s to “landfill” one of Japan's most fertile, bio-diverse and extraordinary natural resources, the Awase Tidal Wetlands of Okinawa. Okinawa City, the administrative unit in which the wetlands are located, is also home to the largest US Air Force base in East Asia, Kadena, and the authorities decided to compensate it by creating new land for the city to expand. It would be a resort, a “Future City,” etc, in keeping with the grandiloquent public works mentality of the time. Typically, it would involve substituting an artificial beach for the existing natural one.