Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

stance. In turning over Torres to the Japanese police, the American embassy stated that it wanted immediate negotiations to ensure that American servicemen “will be treated in a fair and humanitarian manner while in the local police’s custody.”⁴⁸ The United States now claimed that, when it agreed in 1996 to give “sympathetic consideration” to requests for preindictment turnovers, it had asked for a quid pro quo—that Japan give U.S. servicemen special treatment to compensate for the differences between the legal systems of the two countries. The Bush administration now demanded that Japan quit stalling on new rules governing implementation of the SOFA—and that it do so within forty-five days.

The Asahi Shimbun noted the refusal of the United States to join the new International Criminal Court, which had just gone into operation in The Hague, calling it a sign that the Bush administration was determined to set new rules for the world, not just for Japan. It also noted the administration’s refusal to abide by many international laws that the United States had once helped enact, its invasion of Iraq without legal sanction, and its belief that America possessed such power that it could act more or less as it pleased in international affairs. Professor Masaaki Gabe of the University of the Ryukyus, probably Japan’s best-informed commentator on base problems, has observed, “Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz and other U.S. officials in the present administration believe that American justice will pass muster anywhere in the world, and they do not necessarily give priority to the bilateral relationship with Japan.” According to Gabe, difficult military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan caused such officials to put a higher priority on maintaining the morale of troops stationed abroad than on the endless cases of military misbehavior in Okinawa.⁴⁹

The Japanese soon agreed to the United States’s request for negotiations, and talks convened on July 2, 2003, in Tokyo. The United States asked that one of its officials and an American-selected interpreter, for which it was willing to pay, be assigned to every military suspect turned over to the Japanese to ensure that he or she understood the questioning and was not tricked into confessing. The Ministry of Justice and the National Police Agency said that this request would be inconceivable interference in Japan’s settled ways of investigating crimes. The United States responded that in most of its SOFAs with other countries it turns over military suspects only after they have been indicted and that it was already giving Japan “preferential treatment.” After two days, the talks deadlocked.

When the talks resumed in Washington at the Pentagon on July 11, they proved no more productive than those in Tokyo. The main issue clearly centered not on the interpreter, since the Japanese already supply foreigner detainees with interpreters, but on the presence of that American official, possibly an attorney, at all interrogation sessions. “In our country,” Japanese officials argued, “a lawyer is not allowed to attend investigations under normal circumstances and nothing in the SOFA says that Japan has an obligation to let persons connected with the U.S. government attend investigations by Japanese authorities.”⁵⁰ Japan’s negotiators also pointed out that measures taken by American authorities to maintain discipline and prevent sex crimes in Okinawa had been manifestly insufficient. The United States responded that without progress in the consultations, it would not in the future agree to turn over U.S. military suspects before indictment.

The two sides could agree only upon the scheduling of a third meeting on July 24 at U.S. Pacific Fleet headquarters in Honolulu, where the American delegation would be headed by Richard P. Lawless, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific affairs, who was a former National Security Council staff member in the Reagan administration and before that a CIA operational agent. He is said to speak some Korean. The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made clear that, while it was prepared to accept the American requests, the Justice Ministry and Police Agency were dead set against it. The talks ended in failure, with negotiators on both sides saying that the issue would have to be referred to a higher political level.

Sometime between July 25 and 29 (to the great consternation of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs), President Bush telephoned Prime Minister Koizumi and talked over the matter. The result was that Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Teijiro Furukawa ordered senior officials in the Foreign and Justice Ministries to produce a compromise. At a fourth round of talks in Washington on July 31, Japan agreed to allow a U.S. government representative to be present during interrogations of military suspects, but only in cases of “heinous crimes.” Such a U.S. governmental presence would be authorized in the name of Japanese-American “investigative cooperation,” not “human rights,” and the Japanese investigators could, at their discretion, ask the U.S. official briefly to leave the room at critical points in the interrogation. The Bush administration rejected this compromise, insisting that it would not tolerate any conditions being placed on U.S. officials, who had to be present for all charges, not just heinous crimes. With the failure of negotiations, the 1996 agreement on “sympathetic consideration” was a dead letter. A Pentagon source argued that the military had no choice in the matter since its forces would be demoralized if their human rights abroad could not be ensured.⁵¹

From August, when the SOFA discussions collapsed, until early November, when Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld toured Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea, the Americans and the Japanese had nothing important to say to each other on the subject. On his tour, Rumsfeld merely noted that the presence of thousands of U.S. troops on Japanese soil was a source of friction and “[p]erhaps the toughest of those tensions is the question of whether to extend fuller legal protections to U.S. service members accused of crimes,” leaving the issue unresolved.⁵² While in Okinawa—the first secretary of defense to visit since President George H. W. Bush’s secretary Dick Cheney did so thirteen years earlier—Rumsfeld took a flight over Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, which is completely surrounded by the city of Ginowan. Looking out the window, he reportedly commented, “It is amazing that an accident has not occurred.”⁵³

Futenma has been an American military base since the battle of Okinawa in 1945. In 1958, the marines began to build permanent hangars and barracks; in 1960, the airfield was commissioned as a “Marine Corps Air Facility.” With some 3,259 servicemen in 2005, Futenma provides air support for the Third Marine Expeditionary Force, also garrisoned in Okinawa. The airfield covers some 1,187 acres and is a major obstacle to improving the urban infrastructure of Ginowan (Manhattan s Central Park, by contrast, is only 843 acres). Roads, sewers, and water mains have to be awkwardly and expensively rerouted around the marine base. The functions of Futenma could easily have been moved years ago to the huge Kadena Air Base a short distance to the north, but interservice rivalries regularly make any rational use of land by the U.S. military in Okinawa inconceivable.

It is a scandal of American military administration that civilian leadership in the Pentagon took so long to discover the time bomb that was ticking away at Futenma. And then did nothing about it. To understand what happened when the time bomb finally exploded in the summer of 2004, however, a brief historical note is required. Nine years earlier, the widely reported abduction and rape of a twelve-year-old schoolgirl by American servicemen had led to huge anti-American demonstrations. In an emergency meeting convened in February 1996, President Clinton asked Prime Minister Hashimoto what it would take to defuse the situation. According to press reports, Hashimoto replied with one word: “Futenma.” Clinton had no idea what Hashimoto meant, but when he was told that the prime minister wanted a Marine Corps airfield in Okinawa closed because it was a serious safety hazard, he agreed. At the time, this accord was hailed as a breakthrough in Japanese-American relations. Weeks later, it was disclosed that the U.S. embassy and the Marine Corps had quietly added a qualifier to the president’s offer. The Americans were unwilling simply to shut down the old base and the Japanese did not want it moved anywhere on their main islands. It was therefore agreed that Futenma could be closed only by relocating the airfield to some undetermined place elsewhere within Okinawa.

In December 1996, the two governments announced that an alternative air base would be built in northern Okinawa. The Okinawans regarded this as a betrayal. They wanted Futenma permanently removed from their island. More demonstrations ensued, as well as years of futile negotiations with various recalcitrant Okinawan localities that Tokyo tried to bribe with the promise of huge public-works expenditures. Only in July 2002 did the two governments announce that they had settled on a site—the Henoko subdivision of the Okinawan city of Nago, home of the old Marine Corps base of Camp Schwab. A new, sea-based facility would be constructed, including a 2,500-