Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

attempt to elicit a confession, the “king of evidence” (shoko no o) in the minds of all Japanese prosecutors and most citizens. The Japanese believe that a lengthy process of reasoning with a suspect will cause him to see the error of his ways and that acknowledging publicly what he has done will restore the “harmony” (wa) of society. Japanese judges treat guilt established in this way much more leniently than American criminal proceedings would. (It is perhaps closest to the American practice of plea bargaining, itself uncommon in Japan.) On the other hand, a suspect in a Japanese courtroom who pulls an “O.J. defense,” refusing to cooperate or continuing to assert his innocence in the face of strong material evidence and witnesses, is likely to receive a harsh sentence. During the period of interrogation, a criminal suspect is not permitted to consult an attorney, be released on bail, or seek the equivalent of a habeas corpus hearing. In Japan, a criminal suspect who is arrested and charged is much more likely to be found guilty than in the United States, but the Japanese police and courts are much less likely to arrest or convict an innocent suspect.²⁰

The American military contends that these procedures, a long-standing part of Japanese culture, could lead American soldiers to make false confessions and so constitute political violations of their “human rights.” This argument does not carry much weight in Okinawa (or anywhere else for that matter, given the Bush administration s record of protecting human rights at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and in its other secret prisons around the world). Every time there is a sexually violent crime in which the prime suspect is an American soldier, the victim Okinawan, and the military refuses to turn him over until a Japanese court has issued an indictment, there are calls from the governor, unanimous votes in the pre-fectural assembly, and street demonstrations demanding a total rewriting of the SOFA.

Until the rape of September 4, 1995, the United States had never turned over a military criminal suspect to Japanese authorities prior to his being indicted. (In the Girard case, the Japanese authorities had already charged him with homicide.) Pressure, however, mounted on the United States to become more flexible if it hoped to keep its troops in Okinawa. In February 1996, President Clinton and Prime Minister Hashimoto met at an emergency summit in Santa Monica, California, to think of ways to defuse Okinawan anger. Finally, the United States made a concession. In a meeting of a joint committee authorized by article 2(1 )(a) of the SOFA, the United States agreed in future cases to give “sympathetic consideration” (koiteki koryo) to Japanese requests that a military culprit be handed over to Japanese authorities before indictment if suspected of “especially heinous crimes”—a category left undefined but generally taken to mean murder or rape. Despite this “flexible application” of the SOFA, the United States rejected all but one subsequent request for early hand-over until the sensational incidents considered below.²¹

Governor Inamine’s predecessor as chief executive of Okinawa prefecture was Masahide Ota, a retired university professor, prolific writer on the history of the Ryukyu Islands (of which Okinawa is the largest), and a devoted antibase activist. After leaving office in 1998, Ota became a socialist member of the upper house of the Diet, or national parliament. By contrast, Inamine, a conservative businessman, was president of Ryukyu Petroleum before taking office. He ran against Ota s record of base protest, claiming that he could broker the return of friendly relations with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in Tokyo and the U.S. military. In the seven years since he was elected, however, Inamine has drawn ever closer to Ota s positions.

In talking about excessive crime rates among American servicemen in Okinawa, Inamine likes to refer to the different perspectives of the U.S. military and Okinawans. The American high command, he says, treats each rape or murder as an exceptional “tragic occurrence” committed by a one-in-a-million “bad apple,” for which the American ambassador and commanding general now invariably apologize profusely. According to Inamine, Okinawans see not discrete crimes but rather a sixty-year-long record of sexual assaults, bar brawls, muggings, drug violations, drunken driving accidents, and arson cases committed by privileged young men who claim they are in Okinawa to protect Okinawans from the dangers of political “instability” elsewhere in East Asia. During a visit to the island in November 2003, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said to the governor, “This region has been at peace during the existence of our bilateral security treaty [which has] greatly benefited our two nations.”²² Rumsfeld’s remark infuriated Okinawans, ignoring as it did the Korean and Vietnamese wars during both of which Okinawa played a central role as a staging area for the U.S. military.

Inamine invited the Japanese and foreign press to sit in on his November 16 meeting with Rumsfeld, the only open one Rumsfeld held during his trip to Japan, and the governor conspicuously delivered a seven-point petition outlining Okinawa’s grievances, including a demand for a fundamental review of the SOFA. Inamine later acknowledged that he had been deliberately discourteous and that Rumsfeld was “visibly angered,” but, as he explained, both the American and Japanese governments take Okinawa completely for granted, which left him little choice but to use this “rare occasion” to make the people’s case.²³

The transformation of Governor Inamine into a resolute advocate of rewriting the SOFA began several years after he came into office, when three further sexual assaults occurred (on June 29, 2001, November 2, 2002, and May 25, 2003). The first of these began around 2:30 a.m. in a parking lot within the American Village entertainment and shopping plaza in the town of Chatan, just outside the main gate of Kadena Air Force Base. Several off-duty servicemen observed twenty-four-year-old air force staff sergeant Timothy Woodland of the 353rd Operations Support Squadron at Kadena with his pants down to his knees having sex with a twenty-year-old Okinawan woman on the hood of a car. Several of them later testified that they heard the woman yell, “No! Stop!” Marine lance corporal Jermaine Oliphant later testified in court that he saw Woodland rape the woman as she struggled to get away. The defense contended that Oliphant regarded the air force sergeant as his rival. Woodland fled the scene in a car with a military license plate.²⁴ On July 2, following a complaint by the woman, the Japanese police issued a warrant for his arrest on suspicion of rape and sodomy. After vacillating for four days, on July 6, the American authorities reluctantly turned him over to the Japanese—before prosecutors had obtained an indictment.

Japanese reaction, local and national, to this incident was overwhelming. In Tokyo, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, irritated over the four-day delay in turning over Woodland, voted unanimously for a revision of the SOFA. The crime and the U.S. military’s response “gave great concern and shock to the people of Okinawa, and the people of Japan are feeling indignation.” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda— the second-most influential official in the government and perhaps a future prime minister—announced that Japan would not seek a revision of the SOFA but would ask for a faster, less contentious application of the existing agreement.²⁵ (The American embassy had already informed Fukuda that the United States was adamantly opposed to a wholesale revision of the SOFA.)

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld publicly asserted his fear of setting a precedent. “One Pentagon official said the United States was concerned that if Sergeant Woodland were transferred to the local authorities before being indicted, he would have no guarantee of having a lawyer or even an interpreter with him during questioning, and that the authorities could conduct their questioning in any manner and for any length of time.”²⁶

In fact, the police did interrogate Woodland for thirty hours—without eliciting a confession. He contended that the sex on the morning of June 29, 2001, was “consensual” and pleaded not guilty to the charges. Most Okinawans thought it highly unlikely that consensual sex would have taken place on the hood of a car with several other men looking on. American soldiers disagreed. Several of them argued in print that the victim was merely an “Amejo” (an American groupie) or a “night owl,” and one went so far as to say, “Every Japanese girl I have dated or known as a friend has stated that she is intrigued by having sex in public.” Another soldier referred to the victim as “a miniskirt-wearing little ‘ydlow cab’ who couldn’t remember what her name was.... Most of these trashy tramps can’t think far enough ahead to order fries with their Big Mac.” Even the Japanese (and female) foreign minister Makiko Tanaka tried to blame the victim by saying that she should not have been out so late, drinking in a bar frequented by American servicemen.²⁷