Although another American serviceman has been charged with sexual assault in Okinawa, provoking outrage among the local population and putting the large and controversial US military presence on the island back in the headlines, fear of China appears to have combined with a phenomenon that may be termed “base fatigue” to mute popular anger.
As reported by the Japanese press, airman Brennon Washington, age 25, found a teenage girl in a park on the night of December 24, 2023, convinced her to get into his car and then drove back to his residence, where he raped her. The girl was under the age of 16, which has been the age of consent in Japan since June 2023, when it was raised from 13.
A person related to the girl called the police after the incident. Washington was identified from images taken by security cameras. The US Air Force confirmed the identification and said he was off duty at the time. On March 27, Washington was indicted on charges of nonconsensual sexual intercourse and kidnapping.
The Japanese Foreign Ministry was informed of the indictment on the same day and made a formal complaint to US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel. However, the Okinawa prefectural government did not find out about the incident and the news media did not report it until June 25.
On June 16, candidates supported by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won a majority of seats in the Okinawa prefectural assembly. They defeated a coalition of leftist parties backing Governor Denny Tamaki, whose has built his career on opposition to the US military bases in Okinawa.
On June 23, Kishida attended the ceremony marking the 79th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Okinawa, which was held at the Peace Memorial Park in the city of Itoman at the southern end of the island where the fighting came to an end.
In his address, Kishida, who also represents Hiroshima in the Japanese Diet, said that the dreadful reality of the Battle of Okinawa must not be forgotten. He expressed his resolve to maintain peace. Kishida was born in Tokyo, but his family is from Hiroshima.
Governor Tamaki told the gathering that the “ongoing rapid expansion of the Self-Defense Forces’ deployment, coupled with the memories of the tragic Battle of Okinawa, has made the people of Okinawa deeply anxious.” Protestors in the audience jeered Kishida, but did not disrupt the event.
On June 27, Governor Tamaki lodged a formal complaint with the 18th Wing of the US Air Force at Kadena Air Base. Vice Governor Takekuni Ikeda delivered the message to wing commander Brigadier General Nicholas Evans in person, expressing strong resentment and requesting an apology and compensation.
Japan’s left-leaning Asahi Shimbun wrote that the meeting lasted about 15 minutes and ended without Evans offering an apology or saying why it had taken so long to inform Okinawa prefectural officials.
As reported by the US military’s daily newspaper Stars and Stripes, Evans did say that the crime allegation “does not reflect most of the US service members that work for the Japan-U.S. alliance. It is very regretful that it is causing concerns to the citizens of Okinawa.”
Washington has been released on bail, but is confined to Kadena Air Base while awaiting trial. A hearing is scheduled on July 12 at Naha District Court. Naha is the capital of Okinawa Prefecture.
Governor Tamaki told the press “Not receiving any notice about this kind of crime will raise mistrust.” Speaking in Tokyo, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi did not explain why Tamaki was not informed at the time of the indictment, but did say that “incidents and accidents involving U.S. military personnel cause great concern to local residents and must not be allowed to happen. We will continue to request the US side to prevent such incidents and accidents at every opportunity.”
The Japanese government has been making such requests for a long time. In 1995, three US servicemen kidnapped and raped a 12-year-old girl in Okinawa. In 2016, there were two high-profile incidents. In the first, a US Navy seaman assigned to US Marine Corps Camp Schwab raped a Japanese woman at a hotel in Naha.
In the second, a former Marine working as a civilian employee at Kadena Air Base raped and murdered a 20-year-old Japanese woman who had gone out for a walk, striking her in the head, choking and stabbing her, and dumping her body in the bushes where it was found badly decomposed weeks later. Lieutenant General Lawrence Nicholson, commander of III Marine Expeditionary Force, visited the prefecture’s then-Governor Onaga Takeshi to express his “deepest regret and remorse at the incident.” The accused, Kenneth Franklin Gadson, was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor in 2017.
The local Ryukyu Shimpo newspaper reminded its readers of the rape-murder of a 6-year-old Japanese girl by an American soldier in 1955 and wrote that “The U.S. and Japanese governments have a heavy responsibility for not being able to prevent these recurring incidents.”
The Okinawa Times attributed the crime to the “violent structure” of the military and, as reported by Stars and Stripes, lamented “the reality that one cannot safely go for a walk in a private community even 72 years since the Battle of Okinawa.”
Suzuyo Takazato, a founder of Okinawan Women Against Military Violence, notes that statistics show about 120 rapes committed by US military personnel in Okinawa since 1972, but since most rapes are not reported, that is just “the tip of an iceberg.”
Okinawa reverted from US military occupation to Japanese sovereignty in 1972. Before then no official records were kept, but a booklet entitled “Postwar U.S. Military Crimes Against Women in Okinawa,” compiled from newspaper reports and other local sources, lists about 350 sex crimes committed by US troops since 1945.
More than half of the 54,000 US military personnel in Japan – about 30,000, of whom 18,000 are Marines – are stationed in Okinawa, which has a population of less than 1.5 million and accounts for only 0.6% of Japan’s total land area. The Okinawa Times was expressing a commonly accepted opinion when it wrote in 2017 that “The fundamental problem is that [US] ground forces are too concentrated on Okinawa.”
There is no way to know how the voters would have reacted if the details of the recent kidnapping and rape incident had been made public before the Okinawa prefectural assembly election. Before the election, each side held 24 seats. Now the pro-base faction led by the LDP holdz 27, the anti-base forces of Governor Tamaki holds 20 and one is held by an independent.
How the assembly members will vote now that the incident has become big news is also unclear, but public opinion appears to be shifting from an idealistic pacifism that seeks to have the US bases removed toward a practical awareness of the risks posed by China’s assertiveness and the disputes over the Senkaku Islands (called Diaoyu in Chinese), Taiwan and the South China Sea.
The failure of Tamaki’s long campaign to stop the relocation of the US Marine Corps’ Futenma Air Station to a new site built on a coastal landfill at Henoko has also resulted in what might be called base fatigue. An IT engineer in Naha who voted for change told the Asahi Shimbun that Tamaki “is too preoccupied with the base issue, and other things are not getting done.” Those other things include child-care, healthcare and job creation. Perhaps even worse for Tamaki, voter turnout was only 45.3 percent, the lowest ever.
History is moving on. Brennon Washington will have his day in court, but the US-Japan military alliance will not be on trial.
Last year, the editor of the Ryukyu Shimpo newspaper told the Voice of America that “young people feel that there is nothing we can do about the US military bases, since they already exist, and that they are also necessary for the defense of Japan.”
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