Presiding judge Soichi Hayashida was having none of this. On March 28, 2002, he found Woodland guilty, declaring that the “testimony offered by the victim is highly trustworthy,” and sentenced Woodland to two years and eight months in a Japanese prison.28 Okinawan residents welcomed the verdict (though they generally found the sentence too light). The Okinawan Prefectural Assembly adopted a resolution seeking revision of the SOFA. There the dispute rested until seven months later, when another serious rape occurred, and this time the Americans refused to turn over the suspect.
In 2002, Major Michael J. Brown was forty-one years old, an eighteen-year veteran, attached to the headquarters of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Courtney, a large deployment of several thousand marines in central Okinawa. It was his second tour of duty in the Ryukyu Islands. Within the Corps, Brown was a “mustang,” that is, an officer who came up from within the ranks. At the time, Brown was living off base in the nearby community of Gushikawa with his American wife, Lisa, and two young children.
No one could remember another time when an officer was in trouble with the Okinawan police. On that November day, upon completion of his day’s work, Brown went to the Camp Courtney officers’ club. It was karaoke night, and he spent the evening with fellow officers and their wives (not including his own), drinking, playing pool, and crooning into a microphone to recorded accompaniment. When the club closed at midnight, he decided to walk to his home two miles away via an auxiliary rear gate to the base, which proved to be locked. So he walked back to the main gate. He had also forgotten his coat at the club and was getting cold. He admits he was intoxicated.
According to his own account, as he was walking back to Camp Courtney’s main gate around 1:00 a.m., he was offered a ride home by Victoria Nakamine, a forty-year-old Filipina barmaid and cashier at the officers’ club. She is married to an Okinawan. Brown says that once they left Camp Courtney in her car they stopped on a quiet road and had a heated argument about the proper route to take. Both agree that he grabbed Nakamine’s cell phone, apparently in order to prevent her from calling for help, and threw it into the nearby Tengen River.
According to Brown, Nakamine, now infuriated, drove back to the main gate alone, where she told the military police that he had twice tried to rape her. The MPs replied that since the incident occurred off base, they would have to call the Okinawan prefectural police. Gushikawa policemen came to the scene and took her complaint. She said she had fought Brown off and left the car, and when she returned to see if he had calmed down, he seized her phone and again tried to assault her. She claimed she fought ferociously to fend off his attacks.
Brown was ambiguous: in some accounts he said they just had a loud, unpleasant argument; in others, he claimed that Nakamine made sexual advances to him. He repeatedly said he “was seduced by the woman and when I would not go along with the seduction, she got angry and filed the complaint.”29
Proceeding cautiously, the police delayed acting for a month on Nakamine’s complaint. Finally, on December 3, the Naha (Okinawa) District Court issued a warrant for Brown s arrest on a charge of attempted rape and destroying private property (the cell phone).30 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo asked the Marine Corps to turn him over. After delaying for two days, the U.S. embassy curtly announced that it had decided to retain custody of Major Brown, declaring, “The government of the United States has concluded that the circumstances of this case as presented by the government of Japan do not warrant departure from the standard practice as agreed between the United States and Japan.”31 The Okinawan press speculated that the Americans did not consider a failed rape a “heinous crime.” U.S. intransigence did not go down well with anyone, except perhaps members of the Marine Corps.
On December 6, a large number of Okinawan police raided Browns off-base home and carried off anything that looked promising, in the process frightening his wife and children.32 Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said that the United States’ refusal to turn over Major Brown was acceptable, but his foreign minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi, proved less accommodating. She asserted that Japan would need a clarification of what was included under the 1996 “sympathetic consideration” agreement.33
Governor Inamine declared, “It is a heinous crime infringing upon the human rights of a woman, and it is unforgivable in that it was committed by a serviceman who is required to act as a leader. It. . . causes me to feel strong indignation.” Most significantly, a newly formed liaison group of all fourteen governors of prefectures in which American bases are located urged the Liberal Democratic Party “to secure a true Japan-U.S. partnership through a revised Status of Forces Agreement.”34
Finally, on December 19, Naha prosecutors indicted Brown and, in strict accordance with the SOFA, the United States handed him over the same day.35 From that point on, Brown, with the help of his family, waged a campaign of legal maneuvers and publicity, charging, among other things, that the Japanese criminal justice system was unfair and that American officials were willing to see him railroaded in order to keep their bases in Japan and obtain Japan’s cooperation for George W. Bush’s pending invasion of Iraq.
One of Brown’s first acts was to obtain an American lawyer, Victor Kelley of the National Military Justice Group, who, on March 7, 2003, filed a petition in U.S. federal court in Washington, D.C., for an emergency writ of habeas corpus. Kelley argued that, in turning over Brown to the Japanese, the U.S. government had violated his constitutional rights as an American citizen “to be free from compulsory incrimination, the right to the effective assistance of counsel, and the right to a reasonable bail.” He added,” [In Japan,] due process has no meaning. The Japanese ‘conviction’ rate is nearly 100 percent. To be indicted is to be convicted. The presumption of innocence is a mockery of justice. Almost without exception, all are convicted; no one goes free.” Needless to say, the Washington court did not grant the writ.36
Brown also sought to apply political pressure. He obtained the support of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (Republican from Texas) and of his Republican representative in Texas’s Twenty-first District, Congressman Lamar Smith. Both of them informed the secretary of defense of their deep concern that Brown was not being treated fairly. Brown urged his friends and fellow marines to write to their elected representatives, suggesting that they say, “It is way past time for President Bush to intervene and no longer allow the Japanese government to persecute this innocent Marine.”
Brown’s family in the United States created for him the “Free Major Brown” Web site, and the commentaries posted on it were widely distributed to marines on Okinawa. As time wore on, Brown and his family began to lash out at everyone they could think of, from Marine Corps legal officers to ordinary Okinawans—”I would love to see the Okinawans get their land and their island back and I would love to see the U.S. servicemen leaving that island and spending their money elsewhere. At least then, the slimy Okinawan officials couldn’t get their hands on our guys anymore. This solution would make us all happy, right? The Okinawans obviously don’t want us there. They don’t want our soldiers funding their local economy. They don’t want the jobs our bases provide. They don’t like the exorbitant fees we pay them to rent their lands. They don’t want us as a deterrent for their enemies. And, they don’t want us as neighbors.”37
From Brown’s point of view, the big break in his case came May 13, 2003, when, in open court, Victoria Nakamine testified, “I want... to withdraw my complaint. I cannot speak Japanese very well. I signed my written statement, but I didn’t understand what was written.” This was a serious development. Hiroyuki Kawakami, deputy chief prosecutor at the Naha District Public Prosecutors Office, commented, “This is an offense subject to prosecution only on complaint from the victim, so it’s unlikely that a criminal case can be established in defiance of the victim’s intent.”38 In response, the court released Major Brown on 10-million-yen ($87,000) bail but with the provisos that his passport be taken from him, he be confined to Camp Courtney, and he not try to leave Okinawa. This action was unusual as Japanese courts accept defendants’ requests for bail in only 14.6 percent of cases.39
