Another American in Okinawa Facing Allegations

This is turning into quite the debacle.

On the one hand, you’ve got the possibility that it’s all blown up false accusations and people jumping on the “band wagon” all at once to exploit a growing anti US forces sentiment.

On the other hand, you’ve got the grim possibility of a lot of marines doing some very bad things.

Obviously I don’t take rape lightly to suggest that the accusations may be false, but lying about rape is a very serious matter too. With accusations like that plaguing you, you can say goodbye to a lot of career and social opportunities…

My biggest concern here is that the curfew might not solve the problem. If it were the case that, hypothetically speaking, the soldiers were getting really aggravated and frustrated and doing these things to “blow off some steam” then cutting off any and all leisure time is just going to make things much much worse.

Regardless, I could see a lot of political agendas charging into play here. Public opinion is turning against the US forces fast, so all it takes is some opportunistic politician to jump on a soap box and start yelling “Troops out!” I’m not even going to get into whether taking the troops out would be a good thing or a bad thing, but regardless I think it’s bad when things like this happen as a political stepping stone to accelerate someone to power.

I’ve got to pity the families on the bases, though. Their leisure time just vanished too…

In regard to “chojoki’s” comment:

I don’t think for one second that what the Marines may or may not have done is excusable in any way. However, I do believe that it seems Japan seems to forget its history of “comfort women” during that same WWII. An estimated 10-200 thousand women were kidnapped and forcibly “recruited” by the Japanese army and forced into sexual slavery in order to keep up troop morale. These women were raped hundreds of times each, some until they died. If you want to pull out numbers, the “rape boom” you mentioned pales in comparison to the Japanese atrocities.

I think that in consideration of this, it’s a bit hypocritical to vilify the U.S military because of these incidences. Looking at pure numbers, many more rapes occur in Japan by Japanese…this is not something that just the MILITARY does. There are sick people everywhere. Blaming it on the US gov’t or removing all the troops is not going to get a solution. Unless you’re trying to say that as long as it’s not the U.S military who is doing the raping, it’s ok.

The Okinawa Prefectural government publishes detailed statistics about the island’s military bases, including crime data, going back to 1972 (the year of Okinawa’s reversion to Japan). I generated some graphs using those statistics and data from a couple of other sources and published them at http://nihon.awardspace.com/okinawa_sofa_crime.html along with links to the original reports for anyone who is interested.