Japanese criminal trials are normally adjudicated by a panel of three judges, not by juries, and these judges regard themselves—and are regarded by the public—as highly experienced experts on whether or not someone is telling the truth. They are not subject to rules of evidence, and they want to hear anything and everything about a case, including hearsay evidence, gossip, and rumor. One admirable element of Japanese law is the presumption by judges that the testimony of a woman who claims to be a victim of a sex crime should be given more weight than that of the suspected offender. In the Brown case, presiding judge Nobuyuki Yokota found Nakamine’s original statement to the police believable, inferring that she had probably withdrawn it under pressure from her employer or the society in which she lived. He therefore ordered Browns trial to proceed.
Brown erupted. In a letter to American ambassador Howard Baker, Brown charged that there had been “collusion between the court and prosecutor” and that he had been framed by the Gushikawa police. He instructed his attorney to appeal to the Okinawa branch of the Fukuoka High Court and then to the Japanese Supreme Court, asking that the three judges in his case be dismissed for prejudice. Neither appeal succeeded, but they kept Brown’s case in the newspapers and heightened the growing worries of the American embassy that the cultural conflicts embedded in the SOFA were an insoluble problem.40
By the summer of 2003, Brown’s Web site had received more than sixty-eight thousand hits, and inquiries from congressional staff assistants about the fairness of Japanese justice were becoming routine at the State Department. Moreover, the war in Iraq was influencing attitudes. Given the rising casualty rate among American troops, the Pentagon increasingly felt that the protection of the “human rights” of military personnel was a morale matter. The
On July 8, 2004, at the Naha District Court, Judge Yokota finally delivered the verdict. He dismissed the attempted rape charge against Brown but found him guilty of indecent assault and destroying Nakamine’s property (her cell phone). He sentenced Brown to a one-year prison sentence suspended for three years and fined him about $1,400. Judge Yokota said it was clear to the court that a degree of consensual contact had occurred, but marks on Nakamine’s neck showed that Brown had also used force in an attempt to compel her to perform an “indecent act.”
The most sensational revelation in the verdict was that, on the day before Nakamine changed her story in court, an unknown person or group had deposited $13,500 into her bank account. The court did not know who had done this—Brown, his family, Filipino friends of Nakamine’s, fellow workers at Camp Courtney’s officers club, or the U.S. government—but concluded that the money probably caused her to change her story. Brown received a suspended sentence because he had no prior criminal record.42
As it turned out, there was a sad sequel to the Major Brown case. In August 2005, he left Okinawa and reported for duty at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. His wife and children had already moved back to Texas. Brown was actually living at his brother’s house in Laurel, Maryland, and commuting to Quantico. On October 4, 2005, a Maryland SWAT team arrested him in Laurel and charged that, on October 2, he had kidnapped an eighteen-year-old Chinese high school student, Lu Jin, at a flea market in Milton, West Virginia. Extradited to West Virginia, on October 20, he was indicted on a felony kidnapping charge, released on $75,000 bond, and ordered to keep out of West Virginia until his trial. If convicted, he could face life in prison.43
Meanwhile, in May 2003 in Okinawa, while Major Brown’s case was still pending, yet another brutal rape and beating further inflamed popular sentiment. Kin is a small, central Okinawan village with many once-unspoiled beaches. The huge expanse of Camp Hansen dominates the village. The Marine Corps uses Kin’s beaches to practice amphibious landings as well as for recreation by the troops and their families. In 1995, Kin had been the scene of the abduction, beating, and rape of the twelve-year-old schoolgirl that launched the Okinawan mass movement to get rid of the American bases.
At around 3:15 a.m. on Sunday morning, May 25, 2003, a twenty-one-year-old Camp Hansen marine, Lance Corporal Jose Torres, left a Kin village bar with a local nineteen-year-old woman, had sex with her in a nearby alley, and hit her in the face, breaking her nose. A female friend of hers went to the Camp Hansen main gate and reported Torres, whom the MPs at once took into custody. On June 12, the local police opened an investigation and, on June 16, obtained a warrant for Torres’s arrest for rape and battery.
The same day, the Japanese government in Tokyo asked the U.S. embassy to hand him over. The newly arrived U.S. ambassador, Howard Baker, promptly apologized for the incident and urged Lieutenant General Wallace C. Gregson, commander of all marine forces in Okinawa, to comply rapidly. Gregson vacillated but did call on Governor Inamine to express “regret.” Inamine replied, “I expect that [the United States] will hand over the suspect to Japan as soon as possible, without wasting a minute or even a second.”44 In Phnom Penh, while attending a meeting of the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Regional Forum, then secretary of state Colin Powell also apologized to Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi.
The Bush administration now sensed that it had to turn over the suspect quickly, but it also decided that the time had come to force Japan to modify its criminal procedures. This decision produced a Japanese-American deadlock. On June 18, two days after the arrest warrant was issued, the marines turned Torres over to the Japanese authorities. At first he claimed that the sex was “consensual”—that the victim was a prostitute he had hired—but on July 8, after prosecutors had indicted him, Torres confessed to charges of raping and beating the woman. On September 12, the Naha District Court sentenced Torres to three and a half years in prison for his crime.45
This case, as banal and routine as it was in the context of the vast array of military sex crimes in Okinawa, was nonetheless the last straw for both the Japanese and American governments and led them to harden their positions. On the Japanese side, the issue of the SOFA and Japan’s sovereignty was already in the public eye. Major Brown’s trial was continuing; in March 2003, a drunken Defense Department employee from Camp Hansen had driven his car head-on into another car, killing its Okinawan driver; on May 7, a marine was arrested for mugging a store clerk as he was walking home; the wife of a marine assigned to Camp Foster punched and tried to strangle an Okinawan woman in the restroom of an Okinawa City bar; and on May 31—the day after they were paid—five drunken marines were arrested between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. for failing to pay a 4,800-yen ($42) cab fare, trespassing on the premises of a private home, and damaging the glass entrance to the civic hall in Okinawa City. Okinawa City, which lies directly outside Kadena Air Base, had changed its name from Koza in 1972, after the Ryukyus reverted to Japanese administration, because Koza had become synonymous with incessant bar brawls and race riots among American servicemen.46
During June 2003, Governor Inamine and his deputy governor set out on a “pilgrimage” to the thirteen other Japanese prefectures that host U.S. military facilities and asked each governor to cooperate in a campaign to force the central government to revise the SOFA. All the governors agreed, including Tokyo’s governor, Shintaro Ishihara, a popular right-wing politician with a long record of hostility to the American bases. Ishihara commented, “America’s international strategy cannot be implemented without the bases in Japan. We are doing them a big favor here.... A half century has passed since the end of World War II, but Japan remains in an inferior position. It is strange to anyone who looks at it.”47 This remark from the politically powerful governor of one of the world’s largest cities put further pressure on the national government to end its timidity toward the Americans.
However, just as the Japanese side was fortifying its position, the Americans also decided to toughen their
