I hate soft news, I really do. Even in America where they keep reporting about black men killing white women. It’s the same thing with the Japanese media reporting about American military raping Japanese women.

So, how is it fair that the Japanese media hypes up foreign crimes, even when the ratios for crimes done by foreigners is 8% lower than Japanese mainlanders, themselves?

And yes, removing US troops would actually stop troops raping women in Okinawa, because there would be no troops doing the rape.

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.

This has been happening since the American Fleet Landed on Okinawa in WWII, and they experienced the “Rape Boom”. 3000 rapes in the span of 3 months or so. This is an ongoing problem and unless the US plans to better police their troops or pull out of Japan all together it will continue to happen.

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…

Does this mean the “hype” over a marine’s alleged rape of a child is illegitimite? Why? Because the Japanese Mass Gomi is silent about domestic problems does not excuse the marine’s behavior.

Oh but that is a domestic issue.

Funny how the Japanese Navy runs over a fishing boat and KILLS 2 people last week, and that news disappears.

I guess you don’t bother checking the news much before posting your comments. I watched 3 channels’ 5-6pm news broadcasts today, and they all gave extensive coverage to the Fishing boat story. The fishing boat story is also getting top story coverage on Japanese language news portals such as Yahoo.

Apparently death caused by Japanese is not as important as alleged rape by Americans.

Do we need more proof this is all hype?

How many disgruntled girlfriends and jilted lovers of US servicemen are now weighing whether they can get away with crying “rape”?