Saturday’s Asahi wrote that the Ministry of Defense has canceled all of its contracts concluded with construction companies between November 2014 and March 2015 for landfill work to construct the Futenma Replacement Facility at Henoko because design changes became necessary due to the soft seabed in Oura Bay. The paper wrote that although five of the six projects had not yet begun, the ministry paid a total of 30.2 billion yen ($282.24 million), or about 70%, of the total cost of the six contracts, even though they were all terminated in February and March this year. The paper wrote that a ministry official defended the payment by saying that it was not wasteful because work that was necessary to proceed with the entire project was completed and the payments were made on the basis of the amount of work that had been finished.