By Josh Rogin, CQ Staff

It took more than a decade for the Clinton and Bush administrations to negotiate agreements with Japan to reduce the U.S. military presence on Okinawa, including relinquishing a Marine Corps airfield on the crowded southern end of the island. Now some influential members of Congress are having second thoughts about the arrangement, and their intervention might set back the whole deal, along with U.S.-Japan relations.

The plan, for instance, includes transferring 8,000 Marines now stationed on Okinawa — roughly half the Marines who are there — to Guam. When the House Armed Services Committee drew up its fiscal 2010 defense authorization bill last month, however, Democrat Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii added a provision to require that wages paid to construction workers on Guam preparing for the Marines’ arrival be based not on the local scale but on wage rates in Hawaii, which are two-and-a-half times higher. Abercrombie says his provision is needed to bring skilled U.S. workers to the island, particularly unemployed Hawaiians. However, the Congressional Budget Office estimates it would add about $10 billion to the transfer’s cost.

Then there is the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, which over the decades has been surrounded by urban development and angry neighbors. The United States agreed in 1996 to return the property to Okinawa and shift its air operations to another base.

While the Navy has supported moving out of Futenma, it doesn’t like the replacement locale and the House Armed Services chairman, Missouri Democrat Ike Skelton , agreed after visiting the island. He says there is not enough runway space and too many obstructions. “It just ain’t going to work,” Skelton says. “I wouldn’t want to land a plane there.”

Skelton added language to the defense bill that would prevent the Pentagon from waiving Navy safety requirements for the replacement airfield. That would force the Pentagon to redesign the runway and might risk the entire agreement with Japan, according to a White House policy statement.

Nobuyoshi Sakajiri, an Asia Society fellow, says revising the Futenma plan could cause trouble because of the high emotions in Japan surrounding this issue. “We can call Futenma a ‘minefield’ for the U.S.-Japan alliance,” he says, “because it could easily explode once someone tries to step into it.”