Recently declassified U.S. documents (1967-1968) show that the deal was made when Japan and the United States were negotiating the return to Japan of the administrative rights over the Ogasawara Islands off Tokyo. The latest revelations include (1) secret minutes of the Japan-U.S. Joint Com mittee meetings in which Japan promised that the U.S. would keep military privileges on the islands and (2) a U.S. aide-memoir stating that Japan promised to deploy the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) on the Ogasawara Islands in

accordance with U.S. strategy for the Western Pacific.

Similar revelations of secret Japan-U.S. agreements on nuclear weapons have been exposed so far in relation to the 1960 revision of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty and the 1972 return to Japan of the administrative rights over Okinawa.

The Ogasawara Islands, which became part of Tokyo in 1968, are composed of four islands: Chichi Jima, Haha Jima, Muko Jima and Iwo Jima. Iwo Jima residents still are not allowed to go back to live on their native island. Iwo Jima continues to be a Japanese Air Self-Defense Force base which is also used by U.S. Forces. The United States also maintains a military communication facility there.

Former islanders who were ousted from their islands at the end of World War II carried on a strenuous movement, backed by public opinion, to achieve the return to Japan of the Ogasawara Islands. In late June 1968 Japan's Prime Minister Eisaku Sato and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson reached agreement on their return to Japan in their November 1967 talks. A formal agreement was signed in April 1968.

The secret minutes on the Japan-U.S. Joint Committee show that Japan agreed to provide as the U.S. a new base site as quickly as possible to help the U.S. to respond to an emergency. Another declassifed document of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the June 4 1957 memoir, confirms that the U.S. Navy stored one nuclear weapon on Chichi Jima in February 1956 when the island was under complete U.S. occupation, and the Ogasawara Islands became a nuclear storage.