Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

Similarly, Air Force Lt. Gen. Richard Myers, commander of U.S. Forces in Japan, has maintained that the 1995 rape was an isolated incident, not characteristic behavior of “99.99 percent of U.S. Forces.”¹⁰ But General Myers is simply wrong. According to the conservative Japanese newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun, which studied bookings at the Okinawan Prefectural Police Headquarters, U.S. servicemen were implicated in 4,716 crimes between 1972 and 1995—just under a crime a day throughout the period of General Myers’s command.¹¹

Of course, most of these criminal acts were not sexual assaults. Russell Carollo and a team of reporters from the Dayton Daily News went through one hundred thousand court-martial records going back to 1988 to find out how many servicemen had been brought before military courts charged with rape and how they had been treated. They discovered that since 1988, navy and marine bases in Japan have had 169 courts- martial for sexual assaults, the highest number of all U.S. bases worldwide, 66 percent more cases than at the number-two location, San Diego, which has more than twice the personnel. Since the navy has a large Okinawa base at White Beach and another contingent at Kadena and the marines have twenty different bases spread all over the island, “Japan” here essentially meant Okinawa. As getting information on courts-martial required months of filing Freedom of Information Act requests, and the army released its records only after being sued by the Dayton Daily News, the statistics cited in their stories of October 1-5, 1995, do not even include army figures.¹²

While the incidence of reported rape in the United States is forty-one for every one hundred thousand people, at the military bases in Okinawa it is eighty-two per one hundred thousand. And that, of course, is counting only reported rapes. In Okinawan culture it is unbearably humiliating for an adult woman to bring a charge of rape (something that the Marine Corps has often relied on in covering up its record). Thus, the numbers undoubtedly significantly understate the actual occurrence of rape. Disturbingly, the Dayton Daily News articles revealed that the military had allowed hundreds of accused sex offenders in its ranks to go free despite courts-martial convictions. The Nation magazine, considering what the Dayton reporters uncovered, concluded, “Covering up sexual assault is Pentagon policy.”¹³

But the Pentagon may finally have met its match in a group of women determined to publicize and bring to justice military rapists. The organization, Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, was founded by Suzuyo Takazato, a member of the Naha City Assembly, and Carolyn Francis, an American Methodist missionary in Okinawa. They had attended the Fourth U.N. Forum on Women in Beijing in September 1995, and with colleagues they presented a revealing report on and chronology of what Okinawan women had experienced during the military occupation of their country. Returning to Okinawa to news of the gang rape of the twelve-year-old girl, they spearheaded a mobilization of Okinawans and their government that led to the largest protest demonstration in Okinawa’s history. A rally of eighty-five thousand people on October 21, 1995, demanded that the American and Japanese governments pay some attention to their grievances. The Okinawan Women repeatedly (and without irony, despite her husband’s seeming indifference to the victims of sex crimes by American servicemen) quoted from the speech of Hillary Rodham Clinton, honorary chairwoman of the U.S. delegation to the Beijing women’s forum, that “women’s rights are human rights” and that military rape is a war crime.

The rape took place on September 4; by September 8, the Okinawan police had identified the perpetrators on the basis of rental-car records and had issued warrants for their arrest, but the military did not turn them over to local authorities until September 29. It was widely reported that the three had the run of their base and were spending their time “eating hamburgers.”¹⁴ This is a matter not of simple delays but of “extraterritoriality,” one of the historically most offensive aspects of Western (and Japanese) imperialism in East Asia. From the time the United States got it written into its treaty with China following the Opium War of 1839-42 (yes, it was an American invention), “extra’lity,” as it was informally called, meant that if a European, American, or Japanese committed a crime in China (or today in Japan or Korea if he or she is a member of, married to, or the child of a member of the American armed forces), that foreigner would be turned over to his or her own consular officials, rather than being tried under the laws of the country in which the crime occurred.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Chinese revolution was in part fought to be rid of this demeaning provision, which lasted in China until 1943. The Western insistence on extraterritoriality reflected the belief that Asian law was barbaric and that no “civilized” person should be subjected to it. In actuality, all sorts of Chinese criminals took advantage of it, claiming Christian conversion or other ruses to ingratiate themselves with one or another imperialist power in order to place themselves beyond the reach of local laws.

Article 17, section 5, of the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) stipulated: “When U.S. servicemen and their families commit crimes, they shall be detained by U.S. authorities until Japanese law enforcement agencies file complaints with the prosecutors’ office based on clear suspicion.” While not quite full-blown extraterritoriality, it gave U.S. authorities the right to refuse Japanese investigators’ requests to hand over suspects attached to the military. Delays built into the system were often used as opportunities to transfer American suspects back to the United States, where they were beyond the reach of Japanese authorities.

Under the pressure of escalating protests in Okinawa and mainland Japan following news of the rape, the United States and Japan signed a “side letter” to SOFA allowing G.I.s suspected of rape or murder to be placed in Japanese custody before being indicted if Japanese investigators request it. This represented a distinct break in American global policies. In Korea, suspects still get handed over to local authorities only after being convicted by a U.S. military court. Similarly, in Italy, the American fliers charged in 1998 with flying so low that their jet cut a ski- lift cable, plunging twenty skiers to their deaths, were returned to the States for a military trial where, to the outrage of Italians, they were exonerated of responsibility. It is, of course, unimaginable that Americans would accept such special treatment for foreign military personnel visiting or training in our country. And that is precisely what breeds such a deep sense of injustice among Okinawans.

Certainly, the initial American response to the rape caused the greatest crisis in Japanese-American relations since a tumultuous struggle against the renewal of the security treaty in 1960. No one should be surprised to discover, however, that the sexual offenses that had plagued Okinawans did not abate. Only three months later, in December 1995, the U.S. military released a composite sketch of an American suspected of raping a woman at knifepoint near Futenma Marine Corps Air Station. Ben Takara, an Okinawan poet and chemistry teacher at Futenma Senior High School, told Newsweek, “We once surveyed our girl students, asking if they had had any scary experiences with U.S. soldiers on their way to school or back home. One-third to one-half of the students answered yes. . . . The rape case . . . was just the tip of the iceberg. I must say that the Japan-U.S. security treaty has not protected the safety of Okinawans.”¹⁵

Many of the acts that so disrupt Okinawan life are less sensational than rape but no less disturbing to the people of that island. Traffic accidents are an example. On a Sunday in early January 1996, four months after the rape that had allegedly caused the U.S. military to tighten up discipline, a female marine from the air base at Futenma drove off the road and onto a sidewalk at high speed in Chatan, near Kadena Air Force Base, killing Rojita Kinjo, thirty-six, and her daughters, Mitsuko, ten, and Mariko, one. Lance Corporal Lori Padilla, twenty, the driver, pleaded guilty to a charge of professional negligence leading to death. It may be that she was confused by driving on the left side of the road, as is the custom in Japan. She received a two-year prison sentence.

Five months later, the remaining Kinjo family sued Padilla and the two marine co-owners of the car in the Naha District Court for sixty-two million yen (about $580,000) as a solatium to compensate them for the emotional losses due to the deaths of their relatives. The payment of a solatium in the case of accidents of all kinds is an essential and longaccepted part of Japanese culture. None of the defendants appeared at the trial, one having already left for the United States (the average tour of duty for American service personnel in Okinawa is only six months). In December, the court ordered Padilla and her two codefendants to pay the sum requested, but the second