Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
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Okinawa is host to more than 50,000 of these American troops, military-related civilians, and dependents. According to Japanese researchers, the largest group of U.S. forces in Okinawa consists of 16,015 uniformed marines, 733 Department of Defense civilians, and 8,809 marine family members, adding up to a marine cohort of 25,557. The air force contributes 7,100 pilots and maintenance crews at the island’s huge Kadena Air Base, the largest U.S. base in East Asia, joined by 622 civilians and 12,333 family members for a total of 20,055 affiliated with the air force. The army contingent (2,233) and the navy contingent (5,081) of troops and camp followers are much smaller.17 Even without these foreign guests, Okinawa is a seriously overcrowded island.
By far the greatest SOFA-related popular outrage in Japan concerns article 17, which covers criminal justice. This article is over two pages long and contains twelve complex subclauses. It is further modified by three pages of “agreed minutes” consented to during the negotiations over the Security Treaty and which are not normally included in the publicly available, authoritative texts of the SOFA.18 Opinion in Okinawa is virtually universal that article 17 should, at the very least, be rewritten, whereas the U.S. military clings intransigently to its every stipulation—in 2003, even rescinding a slight concession it made in 1996.
The locally detested words in article 17(3)(c) are: “The custody of an accused member of the United States armed forces or the civilian component over whom Japan is to exercise jurisdiction shall, if he is in the hands of the United States, remain with the United States until he is charged.” This means that Japanese authorities investigating a crime cannot have exclusive access to a suspect until Japanese prosecutors have actually indicted him in court; that the Japanese police are hobbled in carrying out an investigation in which an American serviceman is involved; and that prosecutors may be reluctant to bring charges against an American serviceman because of their inability to gather sufficient evidence.
These long-standing grievances burst into the open in the wake of the most serious incident to influence Japanese-American relations since the Security Treaty was signed in 1960. On September 4, 1995, two marines and a sailor from Camp Hansen, a huge marine base in central Okinawa, abducted a twelve-year-old girl they picked out at random, beat and raped her, and left her on a beach while they returned to their base in a rented car. The Okinawan press reported that the three military suspects were lolling around the pool eating hamburgers and had the run of the base while the child victim was in the hospital badly injured. This attack, combined with the refusal of the U.S. high command on the island to turn over the suspects to the Japanese police in accordance with article 17(3)(c), led to some of the largest anti-American demonstrations in postwar history. On October 21, 1995, 85,000 Okinawans gathered in a park in the city of Ginowan to demand that the American and Japanese governments pay some attention to their grievances.
Comments by American military leaders contributed to the popular outrage. The then commander of U.S. Forces Japan, Lieutenant General Richard Myers, who would become President George W. Bush’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, remarked that this was a singular tragedy caused by “three bad apples” even though he knew that sexually violent crimes committed by U.S. soldiers against Okinawans were running at the rate of two per month. Even worse, Myers’s superior, Admiral Richard C. Macke, commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, said to the press, “I think that [the rape] was absolutely stupid. For the price they paid to rent the car [with which to abduct their victim], they could have had a girl.” The American military in Japan has never been allowed to forget these disgraceful acts and the spin put on them by very high ranking officers.19
All servicemen in Okinawa know that if, after committing a rape, robbery, or assault, they can make it back to base, they will remain in American custody until indicted even if the Japanese execute a warrant for their capture. By contrast, Japanese criminal law gives the police twenty-three days during which they can hold and question a suspect without charging or releasing him. During this period, a suspect meets alone with police investigators who attempt to elicit a confession, the “king of evidence” (shoko no o) in the minds of all Japanese prosecutors and most citizens. The Japanese believe that a lengthy process of reasoning with a suspect will cause him to see the error of his ways and that acknowledging publicly what he has done will restore the “harmony” (wa) of society. Japanese judges treat guilt established in this way much more leniently than American criminal proceedings would. (It is perhaps closest to the American practice of plea bargaining, itself uncommon in Japan.) On the other hand, a suspect in a Japanese courtroom who pulls an “O.J. defense,” refusing to cooperate or continuing to assert his innocence in the face of strong material evidence and witnesses, is likely to receive a harsh sentence. During the period of interrogation, a criminal suspect is not permitted to consult an attorney, be released on bail, or seek the equivalent of a habeas corpus hearing. In Japan, a criminal suspect who is arrested and charged is much more likely to be found guilty than in the United States, but the Japanese police and courts are much less likely to arrest or convict an innocent suspect.20
The American military contends that these procedures, a long-standing part of Japanese culture, could lead American soldiers to make false confessions and so constitute political violations of their “human rights.” This argument does not carry much weight in Okinawa (or anywhere else for that matter, given the Bush administration s record of protecting human rights at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and in its other secret prisons around the world). Every time there is a sexually violent crime in which the prime suspect is an American soldier, the victim Okinawan, and the military refuses to turn him over until a Japanese court has issued an indictment, there are calls from the governor, unanimous votes in the pre-fectural assembly, and street demonstrations demanding a total rewriting of the SOFA.
Until the rape of September 4, 1995, the United States had never turned over a military criminal suspect to Japanese authorities prior to his being indicted. (In the Girard case, the Japanese authorities had already charged him with homicide.) Pressure, however, mounted on the United States to become more flexible if it hoped to keep its troops in Okinawa. In February 1996, President Clinton and Prime Minister Hashimoto met at an emergency summit in Santa Monica, California, to think of ways to defuse Okinawan anger. Finally, the United States made a concession. In a meeting of a joint committee authorized by article 2(1 )(a) of the SOFA, the United States agreed in future cases to give “sympathetic consideration” (koiteki koryo) to Japanese requests that a military culprit be handed over to Japanese authorities before indictment if suspected of “especially heinous crimes”—a category left undefined but generally taken to mean murder or rape. Despite this “flexible application” of the SOFA, the United States rejected all but one subsequent request for early hand-over until the sensational incidents considered below.21
Governor Inamine’s predecessor as chief executive of Okinawa prefecture was Masahide Ota, a retired university professor, prolific writer on the history of the Ryukyu Islands (of which Okinawa is the largest), and a devoted antibase activist. After leaving office in 1998, Ota became a socialist member of the upper house of the Diet, or national parliament. By contrast, Inamine, a conservative businessman, was president of Ryukyu Petroleum before taking office. He ran against Ota s record of base protest, claiming that he could broker the return of friendly relations with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in Tokyo and the U.S. military. In the seven years since he was elected, however, Inamine has drawn ever closer to Ota s positions.
In talking about excessive crime rates among American servicemen in Okinawa, Inamine likes to refer to the different perspectives of the U.S. military and Okinawans. The American high command, he says, treats each rape or murder as an exceptional “tragic occurrence” committed by a one-in-a-million “bad apple,” for which the American ambassador and commanding general now invariably apologize profusely. According to I
namine, Okinawans see not discrete crimes but rather a sixty-year-long record of sexual assaults, bar brawls, muggings, drug violations, drunken driving accidents, and arson cases committed by privileged young men who claim they are in Okinawa to protect Okinawans from the dangers of political “instability” elsewhere in East Asia. During a visit to the island in November 2003, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said to the governor, “This region has been at peace during the existence of our bilateral security treaty [which has] greatly benefited our two nations.”22 Rumsfeld’s remark infuriated Okinawans, ignoring as it did the Korean and Vietnamese wars during both of which Okinawa played a central role as a staging area for the U.S. military.
Inamine invited the Japanese and foreign press to sit in on his November 16 meeting with Rumsfeld, the only open one Rumsfeld held during his trip to Japan, and the governor conspicuously delivered a seven-point petition outlining Okinawa’s grievances, including a demand for a fundamental review of the SOFA. Inamine later acknowledged that he had been deliberately discourteous and that Rumsfeld was “visibly angered,” but, as he explained, both the American and Japanese governments take Okinawa completely for granted, which left him little choice but to use this “rare occasion” to make the people’s case.23
The transformation of Governor Inamine into a resolute advocate of rewriting the SOFA began several years after he came into office, when three further sexual assaults occurred (on June 29, 2001, November 2, 2002, and May 25, 2003). The first of these began around 2:30 a.m. in a parking lot within the American Village entertainment and shopping plaza in the town of Chatan, just outside the main gate of Kadena Air Force Base. Several off-duty servicemen observed twenty-four-year-old air force staff sergeant Timothy Woodland of the 353rd Operations Support Squadron at Kadena with his pants down to his knees having sex with a twenty-year-old Okinawan woman on the hood of a car. Several of them later testified that they heard the woman yell, “No! Stop!” Marine lance corporal Jermaine Oliphant later testified in court that he saw Woodland rape the woman as she struggled to get away. The defense contended that Oliphant regarded the air force sergeant as his rival. Woodland fled the scene in a car with a military license plate.24 On July 2, following a complaint by the woman, the Japanese police issued a warrant for his arrest on suspicion of rape and sodomy. After vacillating for four days, on July 6, the American authorities reluctantly turned him over to the Japanese—before prosecutors had obtained an indictment.
Japanese reaction, local and national, to this incident was overwhelming. In Tokyo, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, irritated over the four-day delay in turning over Woodland, voted unanimously for a revision of the SOFA. The crime and the U.S. military’s response “gave great concern and shock to the people of Okinawa, and the people of Japan are feeling indignation.” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda—the second-most influential official in the government and perhaps a future prime minister—announced that Japan would not seek a revision of the SOFA but would ask for a faster, less contentious application of the existing agreement.25 (The American embassy had already informed Fukuda that the United States was adamantly opposed to a wholesale revision of the SOFA.)
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld publicly asserted his fear of setting a precedent. “One Pentagon official said the United States was concerned that if Sergeant Woodland were transferred to the local authorities before being indicted, he would have no guarantee of having a lawyer or even an interpreter with him during questioning, and that the authorities could conduct their questioning in any manner and for any length of time.”26
In fact, the police did interrogate Woodland for thirty hours—without eliciting a confession. He contended that the sex on the morning of June 29, 2001, was “consensual” and pleaded not guilty to the charges. Most Okinawans thought it highly unlikely that consensual sex would have taken place on the hood of a car with several other men looking on. American soldiers disagreed. Several of them argued in print that the victim was merely an “Amejo” (an American groupie) or a “night owl,” and one went so far as to say, “Every Japanese girl I have dated or known as a friend has stated that she is intrigued by having sex in public.” Another soldier referred to the victim as “a miniskirt-wearing little ‘ydlow cab’ who couldn’t remember what her name was.... Most of these trashy tramps can’t think far enough ahead to order fries with their Big Mac.” Even the Japanese (and female) foreign minister Makiko Tanaka tried to blame the victim by saying that she should not have been out so late, drinking in a bar frequented by American servicemen.27
Presiding judge Soichi Hayashida was having none of this. On March 28, 2002, he found Woodland guilty, declaring that the “testimony offered by the victim is highly trustworthy,” and sentenced Woodland to two years and eight months in a Japanese prison.28 Okinawan residents welcomed the verdict (though they generally found the sentence too light). The Okinawan Prefectural Assembly adopted a resolution seeking revision of the SOFA. There the dispute rested until seven months later, when another serious rape occurred, and this time the Americans refused to turn over the suspect.
In 2002, Major Michael J. Brown was forty-one years old, an eighteen-year veteran, attached to the headquarters of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Courtney, a large deployment of several thousand marines in central Okinawa. It was his second tour of duty in the Ryukyu Islands. Within the Corps, Brown was a “mustang,” that is, an officer who came up from within the ranks. At the time, Brown was living off base in the nearby community of Gushikawa with his American wife, Lisa, and two young children.
No one could remember another time when an officer was in trouble with the Okinawan police. On that November day, upon completion of his day’s work, Brown went to the Camp Courtney officers’ club. It was karaoke night, and he spent the evening with fellow officers and their wives (not including his own), drinking, playing pool, and crooning into a microphone to recorded accompaniment. When the club closed at midnight, he decided to walk to his home two miles away via an auxiliary rear gate to the base, which proved to be locked. So he walked back to the main gate. He had also forgotten his coat at the club and was getting cold. He admits he was intoxicated.
According to his own account, as he was walking back to Camp Courtney’s main gate around 1:00 a.m., he was offered a ride home by Victoria Nakamine, a forty-year-old Filipina barmaid and cashier at the officers’ club. She is married to an Okinawan. Brown says that once they left Camp Courtney in her car they stopped on a quiet road and had a heated argument about the proper route to take. Both agree that he grabbed Nakamine’s cell phone, apparently in order to prevent her from calling for help, and threw it into the nearby Tengen River.
According to Brown, Nakamine, now infuriated, drove back to the main gate alone, where she told the military police that he had twice tried to rape her. The MPs replied that since the incident occurred off base, they would have to call the Okinawan prefectural police. Gushikawa policemen came to the scene and took her complaint. She said she had fought Brown off and left the car, and when she returned to see if he had calmed down, he seized her phone and again tried to assault her. She claimed she fought ferociously to fend off his attacks.
Brown was ambiguous: in some accounts he said they just had a loud, unpleasant argument; in others, he claimed that Nakamine made sexual advances to him. He repeatedly said he “was seduced by the woman and when I would not go along with the seduction, she got angry and filed the complaint.”29
Proceeding cautiously, the police delayed acting for a month on Nakamine’s complaint. Finally, on December 3, the Naha (Okinawa) District Court issued a warrant for Brown s arrest on a charge of attempted rape and destroying private property (the cell phone).30 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo asked the Marine Corps to turn him over. After delaying for two days, the U.S. embassy curtly announced that it had decided to retain custody of Major Brown, declaring, “The government of the United States has concluded that the circumsta
nces of this case as presented by the government of Japan do not warrant departure from the standard practice as agreed between the United States and Japan.”31 The Okinawan press speculated that the Americans did not consider a failed rape a “heinous crime.” U.S. intransigence did not go down well with anyone, except perhaps members of the Marine Corps.
On December 6, a large number of Okinawan police raided Browns off-base home and carried off anything that looked promising, in the process frightening his wife and children.32 Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said that the United States’ refusal to turn over Major Brown was acceptable, but his foreign minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi, proved less accommodating. She asserted that Japan would need a clarification of what was included under the 1996 “sympathetic consideration” agreement.33
Governor Inamine declared, “It is a heinous crime infringing upon the human rights of a woman, and it is unforgivable in that it was committed by a serviceman who is required to act as a leader. It. . . causes me to feel strong indignation.” Most significantly, a newly formed liaison group of all fourteen governors of prefectures in which American bases are located urged the Liberal Democratic Party “to secure a true Japan-U.S. partnership through a revised Status of Forces Agreement.”34
Finally, on December 19, Naha prosecutors indicted Brown and, in strict accordance with the SOFA, the United States handed him over the same day.35 From that point on, Brown, with the help of his family, waged a campaign of legal maneuvers and publicity, charging, among other things, that the Japanese criminal justice system was unfair and that American officials were willing to see him railroaded in order to keep their bases in Japan and obtain Japan’s cooperation for George W. Bush’s pending invasion of Iraq.