Buy Land Under a US Air Base: Okinawa's Military-Land Investment Market

Private landowners whose fields were bulldozed for American bases now collect rent from Tokyo, and mainland investors are paying 55 times that rent to join them.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Market • 2026-10-13

A 288 square meter patch of woodland in Uechi, Okinawa City, sits on the market for 27.32 million yen. The parcel sits next to Kadena Air Base, and a buyer will never get to use it: owners of military land cannot enter it, and brokers warn that even confirming where a lot lies can be hard. What the buyer gets instead is a check: 496,908 yen a year in fiscal 2025, paid by the Japanese government, which leases the ground and hands it to the US Air Force. The listing notes that no return of the land is scheduled, and the broker pitches the arrangement the way Okinawa's agents always do, with the nation as tenant. The trade is called gun'yochi, military land, and it is priced the way a bond is priced: as a multiple of the coupon.

A Bond Disguised as Dirt

The arithmetic is simple enough to do on a napkin. The Uechi parcel's 27.32 million yen price is 55 times its annual rent, a gross yield of 1.82 percent. Fixed asset tax of 47,174 yen and a landowner association fee of 1,987 yen leave about 447,700 yen, roughly 1.64 percent of the price before brokerage and acquisition costs. Next door in Kadena Town, a 1,269 square meter parcel in Kunao is listed at 116.04 million yen against 2,189,544 yen of rent, a multiple of 53. Other listings around Kadena run from 48 to 53 times.

Further north the multiples drop. A 470 square meter lot inside Camp Hansen in Kin Town carries 286,632 yen of annual rent and a 2.32 percent yield, about 43 times. At Camp Courtney in Uruma, an 89 square meter plot priced at 4.85 million yen pays 110,121 yen, or 44 times, and its listing says the rent rises by at least 1 percent every year. A Camp Hansen parcel in Onna Village shows a 2.00 percent rent increase for fiscal 2025.

Those escalators are the heart of the pitch. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported in 2022 that rents had been rising about 1 percent a year, and one Courtney listing stresses that the state has no history of arrears. A building ages and a tenant leaves. A parcel of Kadena earth does neither, and its rent compounds. At 55 times and a 1.4 percent annual increase, a 1.82 percent yield on cost drifts to about 2.1 percent after a decade; at 2 percent growth it reaches 2.2 percent. Brokers describe it as a deposit account that never gets cheaper to hold.

How Seized Land Became an Asset Class

None of this would exist without what happened to the land first. On July 19, 1955, American soldiers with bayonets drawn arrived at Isahama, in what is now Ginowan, at 4:30 in the morning with bulldozers and dump trucks. By 10 a.m. the houses were flattened and the rice fields were buried under pumped beach sand. Ten families later emigrated to Brazil. Okinawans have a name for the method of the era: bayonets and bulldozers.

Washington's answer to the resistance was the Price Report, a 1956 House Armed Services subcommittee study that endorsed acquiring the land outright, and it set off an island-wide protest movement. Landowners such as Choko Kuwae, the first chairman of the federation of military landowners, argued that the plots belonged to Okinawans and that rent was owed, and the American side moved to paying rent every year. After reversion to Japan in 1972, Tokyo raised the rent roughly sixfold and set up a system in which the amount is negotiated every year with the landowners' federation, a structure the Yomiuri says was designed to keep owners from drifting toward refusal.

The result is an ownership map found almost nowhere else in the alliance. On the Japanese mainland nearly 90 percent of land used by US forces belongs to the state. In Okinawa, about 7,381 hectares of exclusive-use base land, around 40 percent as of 2019, is private. Roughly 4,000 owners still refuse to sign leases at all; in 2018 the count was 2,032 in Okinawa and 2,125 elsewhere, and the government takes their land under a special measures law. The rest, tens of thousands of owners, collect rent that Okinawa Prefecture puts at 85.8 billion yen for fiscal 2016.

What the Multiple Is Really Pricing

Ordinary logic says a base about to close is the dangerous asset. The market prices it the opposite way, and in a more interesting way than the brochures admit. Land with no return plan, Kadena and everything north, commands the highest multiples because the rent is expected to run indefinitely. Land inside the zones slated for return under the 2013 consolidation plan, about 1,000 hectares south of Kadena, is where the risk sits. Camp Kinser, the Makiminato Service Area, is the best-known case. Keiichi Nakazato, a military-land consultant who writes extensively on the subject, observed that as a return nears, price stops following the rent multiple and starts following the per-tsubo value of neighboring land. At the time of his writing, Makiminato's multiple had even overtaken Kadena's, although banks valued the two the same for collateral.

For an owner, a base closure is a default event with a cushion. After a return, the government pays owners benefits equivalent to rent for up to three years, with further payments tied to redevelopment approval. The upside can be large: Okinawa Prefecture says three returned districts now generate direct economic effects about 28 times what they did as bases, and the Naha New Downtown area about 32 times. But the cushion does not cover fragmentation. Nakazato warned the Yomiuri that parcels inherited by many relatives splinter, which makes consensus hard when redevelopment begins, and Urasoe's mayor asked the Defense Bureau in 2015 to survey Makiminato for contamination before any return, citing reports of Agent Orange storage. Tokyo itself labels its return dates best-case estimates.

The Tax Shelter and Its Expiring Edge

The second pillar of the pitch is inheritance tax. Military land is valued for estate purposes at its fixed asset tax value, multiplied by a public-land factor, then reduced by 40 percent for the state's tenancy. An illustration published by a consultant used a 1,000 square meter Kadena parcel with about 1.61 million yen of rent, priced at 62 times, or about 99.8 million yen. Its estate value came to 24.6 million yen, a compression of roughly three quarters. That is why older wealthy buyers keep appearing in the data, and why Okinawan banks offer loans secured on military land.

The edge may be narrowing. Japan's fiscal 2026 tax reform outline would value rental property bought within five years of death at about 80 percent of its adjusted purchase price rather than the cheaper formulas, for inheritances from January 1, 2027. Whether leased military land falls inside that definition depends on circulars not yet published, but one broker's listing already tells buyers to watch the post-April 2026 changes.

Who Is Buying

For years the owners were Okinawans whose families lost land in the 1950s, and most are not rich. Prefecture data for fiscal 2015 show 57.4 percent of owners of US base land received less than 1 million yen a year, and more than three quarters less than 2 million. Then the investors arrived. Owners living outside Okinawa rose from 2,786 in fiscal 2012, 6.3 percent of 44,233, to 4,027 in 2018, 9.0 percent of 44,523, a gain of 44.5 percent, according to Ryukyu Shimpo's reporting of Defense Bureau figures. They numbered 4,775 in 2022, passed 10 percent in 2023 and topped 5,000 in fiscal 2024. By the end of that year they collected 6.308 billion yen of annual rent, 6.8 percent of the total.

One of the most visible promoters was inside the machinery. In June 2018 a lawmaker submitted a written question to the Abe government about a Defense Bureau employee in his 40s who had published a guide to buying military land and owned Kadena parcels himself. Ryukyu Shimpo reported that he began with Camp Hansen, bought about 560 square meters at Kadena in 2007, and earns roughly 600,000 yen a year. The government's reply was that nothing bars ministry staff from owning military land, that it does not comprehensively track their holdings, and that officials must avoid inviting public distrust. The title cited appears in the biography of Nakazato, whose publisher says he left the bureau in 2018 and now runs a consulting firm. A Ryukyu Shimpo editorial argued that the real problem was not unauthorized publication but marketing a US base as a financial product, since the rent increases are in effect a political price paid with taxpayer money to keep owners content.

Repricing the Coupon

The timing is what makes the market worth watching now. The Bank of Japan lifted its policy rate to 1.25 percent on September 18 by a 7 to 2 vote, the highest since 1995. A 10-year government bond auctioned on October 6 cleared at an average yield of 3.101 percent. A military-land buyer at 55 times rent earns 1.8 percent; at 43 times, 2.3 percent. The sovereign tenant, in other words, now pays more on its own bonds than on the ground under its own runway, and rent growth of 1 to 2 percent a year narrows that gap without closing it before transaction costs.

Okinawa has seen this coming in pieces. Ryukyu Shimpo reported in January 2025 that land prices and deal counts had stayed subdued since before the pandemic, and in January 2026 it flagged forecasts that rate hikes would dull the yield's appeal. Brokers still lead with the same list: a tenant that does not default, no repairs, rents that rise, a tax discount. The next test of the multiples is whether buyers keep paying 55 times a coupon that Tokyo itself can now beat. The asset's real default event is a base closure, the outcome Okinawa Prefecture says its residents strongly want, and every investor who buys at 55 times is betting that it will not come.