Japan, U.S. eye security talks during Golden Week holidays

TOKYO, March 10 Kyodo - Japan and the United States have decided to hold security talks involving their foreign and defense ministers at an early date, with an eye to scheduling the talks during Japan's Golden Week holidays from late April to early May, sources close to the matter said Thursday.
The agreement over the general schedule for the so-called ''two-plus-two'' talks was reached during a senior official-level meeting Thursday that came amid a furor over reported remarks by a U.S. diplomat in which he allegedly disparaged the people of Okinawa, according to the sources.
The two-plus-two meeting is aimed at updating common strategic goals to deepen the bilateral security alliance.
During Thursday's meeting in Tokyo, the senior officials did not hold in-depth discussions on the planned relocation of the U.S. Marine Corps' Futenma Air Station within Okinawa Prefecture.
The relocation deal, confirmed in the latest Japan-U.S. agreement last May, stipulates that the Futenma base will be moved from a densely populated district in Ginowan to a coastal area in Nago, but local people are fiercely opposed to the plan and want the base to be moved outside of the southern prefecture.
The sources said Kurt Campbell, U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told his fellow participants about the U.S. government's decision to remove Kevin Maher, director of the Office of Japan Affairs at the U.S. State Department, over his alleged remarks.
Maher's reported comments describing people in Okinawa as ''lazy'' and ''masters of manipulation and extortion'' have caused an uproar, especially in Okinawa, prompting the U.S. government to remove him from his post and apologize to Japan.