Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

5

How American Imperialism Actually Works:

The SOFA in Japan

Okinawans have learned the built-in weaknesses of Japan ... through endless failed or ignored petitions to the Japanese government for the reduction and eventual closure of the U.S. military bases in Okinawa. The stock answer of the Japanese leaders is: “We will let America know of Okinawa’s wishes.” ... Okinawa’s wishes are only gossip topics, never a part of Japan’s national policy issues deserving of serious negotiation with the U.S.... The Marines believe that they are above the law and can do anything with impunity.

—KOJI TAIRA, editor,

Ryukyuanist, Summer 2004

In seeking permission to build or use one or more military bases in a foreign country, the United States first negotiates a fundamental contract— one that commonly creates an “alliance” with the other state. These basic agreements are usually short, straightforward treaties that express “common objectives” related to “national security” and “international threats to the peace.” Examples include the 1949 charter setting up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Convention on the Presence of Foreign Forces in the Federal Republic of Germany (October 1954), and the renegotiated Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (January 1960).

Once the United States has concluded this basic document, it then negotiates a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), intended above all to put any U.S. forces stationed in the host country as far beyond its domestic laws as possible. The legal systems of some of these “hosts” are every bit as sophisticated as our own, ones in which Americans would be unlikely to find themselves seriously disadvantaged by local law enforcement. What SOFAs do, however, is give American soldiers, contractors, Department of Defense civilians, and their dependents a whole range of special privileges that are not available to ordinary citizens of the country or to non-American visitors. In the great tradition of “extraterritoriality” that began in the world of nineteenth-century Western colonialism, they are almost never reciprocal—that is, the SOFAs bestow on Americans privileges that are not available to citizens of the host nation if they should visit or be assigned to the United States. The major exception is the SOFA governing NATO, which is reciprocal. Military forces of a NATO nation working in the United States are supposed to receive the same rights and benefits given to American troops in Europe.

Most empires, ancient or modern, have not felt the need to establish a legal basis for their activities in subordinate countries. Might makes right, and imperialists normally do as they please. In wartime, this is called the “law of the flag.” From 1945 on, the presence of the occupying Soviet armed forces in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany), for example, was never subject to any treaty. But in this area, American administrations have proved legalistic sticklers, crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s of the largely one-sided agreements they make to garrison the planet.

SOFAs are not in themselves basing or access agreements. For example, article 6 of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty simply says, “For the purpose of contributing to the security of Japan and the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East, the United States of America is granted the use by its land, air, and naval forces of facilities and areas of Japan. The use of these facilities and areas as well as the status of the United States armed forces in Japan shall be governed by a separate agreement.”¹ SOFAs implement these more basic agreements and spell out what the host nation has actually obligated itself to allow the United States to do.

SOFAs create many local problems for host nations. For instance, American military bases and the activities they engender regularly do damage to the environment. Article 6 of both the Japan and the South Korea SOFAs stipulates: “The United States is not obliged, when it returns facilities and areas ... on the expiration of this Agreement or at an earlier date, to restore the facilities and areas to the condition in which they were at the time they became available to the United States armed forces, or to compensate Japan [or the Republic of Korea] in lieu of such restoration.”²

This is a typical and often deeply resented aspect of U.S. SOFAs and an invitation to the U.S. military to pollute in any way it wants without fear of accountability. For example, the Fukuchi Dam provides most of the water supply to the 1.3 million residents of the island of Okinawa, but the U.S. armed forces use the dam’s reservoir for river-crossing exercises. Significant amounts of discarded munitions have been discovered in the surrounding watershed area. The South Korean government so resents this provision of the SOFA, which was imposed on South Korea in the wake of the devastation of the Korean War, that in 2006 it rejected the U.S. military’s attempt to return twenty-five closed military camps until it at least removed underground fuel tanks and undertook remediation of the water tables at each of them. In a classic of militarist hypocrisy, General B. B. Bell, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, responded, “It is fair to say that we loved this land and its people enough to die for it. To state now that we have been irresponsible stewards of Korean land, while standing side by side with you, is a charge that hurts my heart.”³

A subtler form of pollution—also much resented by those who live near U.S. bases—is noise. The sounds of warplanes and helicopters become a perpetual backdrop to daily life. The citizens of the large urban prefecture of Kanagawa have protested for years that U.S. Navy planes from Atsugi air base practicing night landings keep them awake. Cities located near large American airfields have even successfully sued for damages. In February 2005, a district court awarded the communities around Okinawa’s Kadena Air Base 2.8 billion yen ($24,472,000) in compensation for noise pollution. However, even though the citizens who brought this suit won in court, they are unlikely ever to receive any compensation from the U.S. government. Article 18 (5) (3) of Japan’s SOFA stipulates, “Where the United States alone is responsible [in a civil claims case], the amount awarded or adjudged shall be distributed in the proportion of 25 percent chargeable to Japan and 75 percent chargeable to the United States.” The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been trying unsuccessfully since 1994 to get the United States to pay its share of earlier noise judgments. U.S. administrations have regularly professed to find it “strange” that the American military should have to pay damages for practicing warfare to protect Japan. The U.S. government demands that Japan abide by what it has signed but is indifferent about its own obligations under the SOFA.⁴

The NATO SOFA and the agreements with individual European countries do not contain exemptions from responsibility for environmental and noise pollution, which is undoubtedly one reason Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wants to move American bases from Germany to the’ new Europe,” those ex-communist satellites of Eastern Europe that are poor and desperate enough to be willing—at least for now—to let the Americans pollute as they wish, cost free, in order to get what economic benefits they can.

SOFAs actually take the question of American entrances and exits out of the hands of host countries—which, of course, gives the very term “host” a curious, new meaning. Article 9(2) of Japans SOFA is typical. “Members of the United States armed forces,” it says, “shall be exempt from Japanese passport and visa laws and regulations.” This means that American servicemen accused of crimes in Japan have sometimes been spirited out of the country without facing legal obstacles, and the Japanese can do nothing about it.

Or take, for example, the simple matter of driving skills in countries like Japan where the direction of road traffic is the reverse of that in the United States. Article 10(1) of the Japanese SOFA states: “Japan shall accept as valid, without a driving test or fee, the driving permit or license or military driving permit issued by the United States to a member of the United States armed forces, the civilian component, and their dependents.” Citizens of Okinawa have paid a high price for this clause in head-on crashes and hit-and-run accidents since 1972, when the island was restored to Japanese sovereignty and driving on the left-hand side of the road once again became the law of the land—except for confused GIs. Article 13(1) only aggravates article 10: “The United States armed forces shall not be subject to taxes or similar charges on property held, used or transferred by such forces in Japan.” The governor of Okinawa, Keiichi Inamine, contends that U.S. military personnel now pay less than one-fifth of what Japanese citizens pay for the public services they receive and that if their vehicles were taxed as those of ordinary citizens are, Okinawa’s income would increase by 780 million yen ($6.8 million).⁵

There are a legion of other complex problems associated with SOFAs, including the large tracts of otherwise valuable land in land-poor countries like Japan that the United States “leases” for free; the host-nation employees who work on our military bases without the protection of either their own or U.S. labor laws; and the fact that host-nation customs officers are denied access to U.S. military cargos.

However, easily the most contentious issues between the United States and nations on the receiving end of our empire of bases involve problems of civil and criminal jurisdiction. For civil matters, such as damage caused by off-duty American personnel driving their cars, SOFAs often stipulate how the injury is to be determined and compensated—including the possibility of requiring our forces to carry personal property damage insurance. For criminal cases, all SOFAs differ, but most award primary jurisdiction to the United States if the crime was committed by one soldier against another or if a crime was committed while a service member was engaged in his or her official duties. In other types of crimes, the host nation usually retains jurisdiction.

This seemingly straightforward distinction has unfortunately been anything but. What if a crime, committed by a service member on duty, was unrelated to those duties? Who then gets to decide jurisdiction in such instances? The most famous Japanese-American SOFA case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (Wilson v. Girard, 354 US 524 [1957]). It concerned an incident in which the United States and Japan agreed on the facts, but the Americans claimed that their soldier was performing his duties while the Japanese insisted he was acting well beyond them. In January 1957, a twenty-one-year-old army specialist third class, William S. Girard, was guarding a machine gun on a practice range. A Japanese woman—a mother of six who earned her living by selling scrap metal— intruded onto the range to scavenge for expended shell casings. Girard, using a grenade launcher, fired an empty shell casing at her, killing her.

According to testimony, Girard lured the woman closer by tossing empty shell casings toward her and then shot her as a “joke.”⁶ The United States at first claimed primary jurisdiction under the SOFA in effect at the time, but then agreed to turn over Girard to Japan because of the public furor the incident generated. Girard sued the secretary of defense, Charles E. Wilson, claiming that, according to law, he should be tried by a U.S. court-martial, not by a Japanese court. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with Girard, but the Supreme Court then reversed this decision. A Japanese court gave Girard a three-year suspended sentence and he soon returned to the United States accompanied by his Japanese wife.⁷

It remains a major issue of constitutional law in the United States whether the Pentagon can, by ordering a soldier to serve in a particular foreign country, force him or her to give up the guarantees provided under the Bill of Rights.⁸ Much of the American press at the time of the Girard case was outraged by the Supreme Court’s decision. “The basic rights of the American soldier have been violated,” trumpeted Hearst’s New York Journal-American. But Tokyo’s Asahi Evening News expressed pleasure that Japan was granted this minimal display of sovereignty. “At no time since the signing of the San Francisco peace treaty have Japanese thought so kindly of the U.S. and the American sense of justice and fair-play.”⁹ Unfortunately, since the Girard case, it has been all downhill.

Between 1998 and 2004, U.S. military personnel in Japan have been involved in 2,024 reported crimes or accidents while on duty. Only one led to a court-martial. Commanders ordered “administrative discipline” in 318 instances; the remaining 1,706 presumably went unpunished.¹⁰

SOFAs invariably infringe on the sovereignty of the host nation. In the Girard case, the U.S. Supreme Court paraphrased Chief Justice John Marshall, fourth chief justice of the United States, defining a sovereign nation as one that “has exclusive jurisdiction to punish offenses against its laws committed within its borders unless it expressly or impliedly consents to surrender its jurisdiction.” SOFAs quite explicitly take away sovereign rights, which is why they are more easily imposed on defeated or occupied nations like Germany and Japan after World War II and South Korea after the Korean War, or extremely weak and dependent nations like Ecuador and Honduras. But while they attempt to regularize the largely one-sided relationships of the American military empire and are often willingly enforced by allied, satellite, or dependent governments, they also introduce notions that can grow into long-term discontent and popular opposition to empire itself. SOFAs cannot help but give rise to explosive political disputes when American laws and the expectations of its troops create a climate of impunity in the host nation. Outrage is then often sparked by simple differences in legal cultures. For example, in South Korea, murder is defined simply as causing the death of a Korean citizen, regardless of the presence of intent, negligence, or even motive. American troops are thus fearful of being tried in Korean courts, even though, ironically enough, they have often been dealt with more leniently in Korean courts than they would be in American ones. At the same time, Koreans are understandably outraged by U.S. military courts that define killings as “unavoidable accidents” and acquit servicemembers who seem self-evidently guilty by Korean standards.¹¹

In 1957, according to Time magazine, there were “more than” forty SOFAs “designed to legalize the status of 700,000 U.S. servicemen in friendly countries.”¹² In April 1996, the State Department said that we had SOFAs with fifty-three countries.¹³ By 9/11, the United States had publicly acknowledged SOFAs with ninety-three countries, although some SOFAs are so embarrassing to the host nation, particularly in the Islamic world, that they are kept secret.¹⁴ While the U.S. empire of bases has been expanding at a rapid rate since the mid-1990s, the true number of existing SOFAs remains publicly unknown.

The range of problems SOFAs breed could be illustrated by looking at almost any of our large complexes in almost any (non-Western European) nation, but the network of bases on the Japanese island of Okinawa catches the world of the SOFA especially sharply, suggesting some of the ways in which any Status of Forces Agreement engenders, even among America’s closest allies, a sense of being occupied, of inequality, of injustice, and of anti-Americanism in the local political system. Reaching a Status of Forces Agreement, which theoretically nails down certain long-term rights for the United States, often is like planting dangerous seeds in local soil that may, in the end, curtail or terminate those very imperial rights. A SOFA almost invariably creates resentment, turning local communities where Americans are based (but are beyond the reach of local law and authorities, beyond, that is, accountability) into potential flash points in which any set of criminal acts, impositions, or slights may stir opposition. Many of the problems created by a SOFA—and the bases that are its concrete manifestation—may seem minor and distinctly parochial to an outsider, but these are the material from which long-term changes may arise. Even as the present Japanese government moves ever closer to the needs and desires of the Bush administration, the soil in which another kind of Japan may be growing is being prepared.

Okinawa is Japans most southerly prefecture and its poorest. As of 2005, it was host to thirty-seven of the eighty-eight American military bases in Japan. These Okinawan bases cover a total area of 233 square kilometers, representing 75 percent of the territory occupied by U.S. military facilities in Japan, even though Okinawa itself has only .6 percent of Japans total land area.¹⁵ Since 2001, Okinawa has been the scene of a particularly fierce confrontation over the Japanese-American SOFA.

Japan, like Germany, has been a post-World War II keystone of the American military empire. If it should ever defect from our embrace, the rest of our imperial structure in East Asia would likely unravel. The Bush administration has already alienated Germany through its unilateralist diplomacy and its war with Iraq. Despite a far more obsequious government in Tokyo, Washington may sooner or later be in danger of doing the same with Japan, thanks to the way our SOFA agreement emphasizes American ignorance of and insensitivity to the fissures our military presence has opened in that country. While the United States mechanically relies on the SOFA to shield military felons from the application of Japanese law, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld schemes to reform our global base structure in part by enlisting Japan to become a much more active imperial partner with us, to become an “East Asian Britain,” as the Pentagon phrases it. Japan never agreed in the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty to help the United States garrison Asia or the Persian Gulf, and much of its population is deeply opposed. The various, never-ending local disputes in Okinawa, where U.S. Marines and Japanese citizens live cheek by jowl, over how the SOFA dilutes Japanese sovereignty is the place where the wounds fester and threaten to spread.

As of November 2004, according to Pentagon statistics, the United States had stationed some 36,365 uniformed military personnel in Japan, not counting 11,887 sailors attached to the Seventh Fleet at its bases at Yokosuka (Kanagawa prefecture) and Sasebo (Nagasaki prefecture), some of whom are intermittently at sea. In addition there were 45,140 American dependents, 27,019 civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and approximately 20,000 Japanese citizens working for the U.S. forces in jobs ranging from maintaining golf courses and waiting on tables in the numerous officers’ clubs to translating Japanese newspapers for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.¹⁶

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 Inamine, 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 circumstances 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.

One of Brown’s first acts was to obtain an American lawyer, Victor Kelley of the National Military Justice Group, who, on March 7, 2003, filed a petition in U.S. federal court in Washington, D.C., for an emergency writ of habeas corpus. Kelley argued that, in turning over Brown to the Japanese, the U.S. government had violated his constitutional rights as an American citizen “to be free from compulsory incrimination, the right to the effective assistance of counsel, and the right to a reasonable bail.” He added,” [In Japan,] due process has no meaning. The Japanese ‘conviction’ rate is nearly 100 percent. To be indicted is to be convicted. The presumption of innocence is a mockery of justice. Almost without exception, all are convicted; no one goes free.” Needless to say, the Washington court did not grant the writ.³⁶

Brown also sought to apply political pressure. He obtained the support of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (Republican from Texas) and of his Republican representative in Texas’s Twenty-first District, Congressman Lamar Smith. Both of them informed the secretary of defense of their deep concern that Brown was not being treated fairly. Brown urged his friends and fellow marines to write to their elected representatives, suggesting that they say, “It is way past time for President Bush to intervene and no longer allow the Japanese government to persecute this innocent Marine.”

Brown’s family in the United States created for him the “Free Major Brown” Web site, and the commentaries posted on it were widely distributed to marines on Okinawa. As time wore on, Brown and his family began to lash out at everyone they could think of, from Marine Corps legal officers to ordinary Okinawans—”I would love to see the Okinawans get their land and their island back and I would love to see the U.S. servicemen leaving that island and spending their money elsewhere. At least then, the slimy Okinawan officials couldn’t get their hands on our guys anymore. This solution would make us all happy, right? The Okinawans obviously don’t want us there. They don’t want our soldiers funding their local economy. They don’t want the jobs our bases provide. They don’t like the exorbitant fees we pay them to rent their lands. They don’t want us as a deterrent for their enemies. And, they don’t want us as neighbors.”³⁷

From Brown’s point of view, the big break in his case came May 13, 2003, when, in open court, Victoria Nakamine testified, “I want... to withdraw my complaint. I cannot speak Japanese very well. I signed my written statement, but I didn’t understand what was written.” This was a serious development. Hiroyuki Kawakami, deputy chief prosecutor at the Naha District Public Prosecutors Office, commented, “This is an offense subject to prosecution only on complaint from the victim, so it’s unlikely that a criminal case can be established in defiance of the victim’s intent.”³⁸ In response, the court released Major Brown on 10-million-yen ($87,000) bail but with the provisos that his passport be taken from him, he be confined to Camp Courtney, and he not try to leave Okinawa. This action was unusual as Japanese courts accept defendants’ requests for bail in only 14.6 percent of cases.³⁹

Japanese criminal trials are normally adjudicated by a panel of three judges, not by juries, and these judges regard themselves—and are regarded by the public—as highly experienced experts on whether or not someone is telling the truth. They are not subject to rules of evidence, and they want to hear anything and everything about a case, including hearsay evidence, gossip, and rumor. One admirable element of Japanese law is the presumption by judges that the testimony of a woman who claims to be a victim of a sex crime should be given more weight than that of the suspected offender. In the Brown case, presiding judge Nobuyuki Yokota found Nakamine’s original statement to the police believable, inferring that she had probably withdrawn it under pressure from her employer or the society in which she lived. He therefore ordered Browns trial to proceed.

Brown erupted. In a letter to American ambassador Howard Baker, Brown charged that there had been “collusion between the court and prosecutor” and that he had been framed by the Gushikawa police. He instructed his attorney to appeal to the Okinawa branch of the Fukuoka High Court and then to the Japanese Supreme Court, asking that the three judges in his case be dismissed for prejudice. Neither appeal succeeded, but they kept Brown’s case in the newspapers and heightened the growing worries of the American embassy that the cultural conflicts embedded in the SOFA were an insoluble problem.⁴⁰

By the summer of 2003, Brown’s Web site had received more than sixty-eight thousand hits, and inquiries from congressional staff assistants about the fairness of Japanese justice were becoming routine at the State Department. Moreover, the war in Iraq was influencing attitudes. Given the rising casualty rate among American troops, the Pentagon increasingly felt that the protection of the “human rights” of military personnel was a morale matter. The Asahi Shimbun quoted a U.S. official as saying, “American soldiers are in Okinawa to defend Japan. They’re even prepared to die if necessary. And yet, when something happens, they [the Okinawans] will treat U.S. military personnel as criminals right away.”⁴¹

On July 8, 2004, at the Naha District Court, Judge Yokota finally delivered the verdict. He dismissed the attempted rape charge against Brown but found him guilty of indecent assault and destroying Nakamine’s property (her cell phone). He sentenced Brown to a one-year prison sentence suspended for three years and fined him about $1,400. Judge Yokota said it was clear to the court that a degree of consensual contact had occurred, but marks on Nakamine’s neck showed that Brown had also used force in an attempt to compel her to perform an “indecent act.”

The most sensational revelation in the verdict was that, on the day before Nakamine changed her story in court, an unknown person or group had deposited $13,500 into her bank account. The court did not know who had done this—Brown, his family, Filipino friends of Nakamine’s, fellow workers at Camp Courtney’s officers club, or the U.S. government—but concluded that the money probably caused her to change her story. Brown received a suspended sentence because he had no prior criminal record.⁴²

As it turned out, there was a sad sequel to the Major Brown case. In August 2005, he left Okinawa and reported for duty at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. His wife and children had already moved back to Texas. Brown was actually living at his brother’s house in Laurel, Maryland, and commuting to Quantico. On October 4, 2005, a Maryland SWAT team arrested him in Laurel and charged that, on October 2, he had kidnapped an eighteen-year-old Chinese high school student, Lu Jin, at a flea market in Milton, West Virginia. Extradited to West Virginia, on October 20, he was indicted on a felony kidnapping charge, released on $75,000 bond, and ordered to keep out of West Virginia until his trial. If convicted, he could face life in prison.⁴³

Meanwhile, in May 2003 in Okinawa, while Major Brown’s case was still pending, yet another brutal rape and beating further inflamed popular sentiment. Kin is a small, central Okinawan village with many once-unspoiled beaches. The huge expanse of Camp Hansen dominates the village. The Marine Corps uses Kin’s beaches to practice amphibious landings as well as for recreation by the troops and their families. In 1995, Kin had been the scene of the abduction, beating, and rape of the twelve-year-old schoolgirl that launched the Okinawan mass movement to get rid of the American bases.

At around 3:15 a.m. on Sunday morning, May 25, 2003, a twenty-one-year-old Camp Hansen marine, Lance Corporal Jose Torres, left a Kin village bar with a local nineteen-year-old woman, had sex with her in a nearby alley, and hit her in the face, breaking her nose. A female friend of hers went to the Camp Hansen main gate and reported Torres, whom the MPs at once took into custody. On June 12, the local police opened an investigation and, on June 16, obtained a warrant for Torres’s arrest for rape and battery.

The same day, the Japanese government in Tokyo asked the U.S. embassy to hand him over. The newly arrived U.S. ambassador, Howard Baker, promptly apologized for the incident and urged Lieutenant General Wallace C. Gregson, commander of all marine forces in Okinawa, to comply rapidly. Gregson vacillated but did call on Governor Inamine to express “regret.” Inamine replied, “I expect that [the United States] will hand over the suspect to Japan as soon as possible, without wasting a minute or even a second.”⁴⁴ In Phnom Penh, while attending a meeting of the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Regional Forum, then secretary of state Colin Powell also apologized to Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi.

The Bush administration now sensed that it had to turn over the suspect quickly, but it also decided that the time had come to force Japan to modify its criminal procedures. This decision produced a Japanese-American deadlock. On June 18, two days after the arrest warrant was issued, the marines turned Torres over to the Japanese authorities. At first he claimed that the sex was “consensual”—that the victim was a prostitute he had hired—but on July 8, after prosecutors had indicted him, Torres confessed to charges of raping and beating the woman. On September 12, the Naha District Court sentenced Torres to three and a half years in prison for his crime.⁴⁵

This case, as banal and routine as it was in the context of the vast array of military sex crimes in Okinawa, was nonetheless the last straw for both the Japanese and American governments and led them to harden their positions. On the Japanese side, the issue of the SOFA and Japan’s sovereignty was already in the public eye. Major Brown’s trial was continuing; in March 2003, a drunken Defense Department employee from Camp Hansen had driven his car head-on into another car, killing its Okinawan driver; on May 7, a marine was arrested for mugging a store clerk as he was walking home; the wife of a marine assigned to Camp Foster punched and tried to strangle an Okinawan woman in the restroom of an Okinawa City bar; and on May 31—the day after they were paid—five drunken marines were arrested between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. for failing to pay a 4,800-yen ($42) cab fare, trespassing on the premises of a private home, and damaging the glass entrance to the civic hall in Okinawa City. Okinawa City, which lies directly outside Kadena Air Base, had changed its name from Koza in 1972, after the Ryukyus reverted to Japanese administration, because Koza had become synonymous with incessant bar brawls and race riots among American servicemen.⁴⁶

During June 2003, Governor Inamine and his deputy governor set out on a “pilgrimage” to the thirteen other Japanese prefectures that host U.S. military facilities and asked each governor to cooperate in a campaign to force the central government to revise the SOFA. All the governors agreed, including Tokyo’s governor, Shintaro Ishihara, a popular right-wing politician with a long record of hostility to the American bases. Ishihara commented, “America’s international strategy cannot be implemented without the bases in Japan. We are doing them a big favor here.... A half century has passed since the end of World War II, but Japan remains in an inferior position. It is strange to anyone who looks at it.”⁴⁷ This remark from the politically powerful governor of one of the world’s largest cities put further pressure on the national government to end its timidity toward the Americans.

However, just as the Japanese side was fortifying its position, the Americans also decided to toughen their 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-meter runway built on a coral reef more than a mile offshore.

The Americans liked the idea of an airfield surrounded by water, which would eliminate protests from nearby residents over accidents and noise; and the politically powerful Japanese construction industry liked the exceedingly expensive, unconventional plans for constructing it. (Japan had agreed to pay for the new airfield.) Even though the proposed location was directly in the Pacific Ocean s “typhoon alley” and nothing like it had ever been built before, the United States enthusiastically endorsed the proposal. The Okinawan government, however, accepted the relocation only on two conditions: that the airport would be for joint civil-military use and that the American military presence would end after fifteen years. The United States went along with the planning while stonewalling on the conditions. What neither the Tokyo government nor the Americans had factored in was the reaction of local Okinawans, who deeply resented the potential destruction of one of the few coral reefs still surrounding their semitropical island.

Environmentalists further pointed out that the airport would ruin the habitat of an endangered, protected, and iconic sea mammal, the dugong. In 2004, when the Japanese government began to construct seabed drilling platforms over the reef, some thirty thousand Okinawans joined by supporters from other prefectures and overseas sympathizers (including representatives of the environmental group Greenpeace) began a sit-in that brought the work to a halt. The protesters occupied the drilling rigs and went to sea in small boats and canoes to chase away the surveyors. Tokyo had planned to drill in some sixty-three locations, but by mid-2004 no work had begun.⁵⁴

Then, on Friday, August 13, the accident that Secretary Rumsfeld had predicted occurred. A thirty-year-old Marine Corps CH-53D Sea Stallion helicopter took off from Futenma—widely described in the Okinawan press as “the most dangerous base on earth”—and crashed into the main administration building of nearby Okinawa International University. It was the forty-first military helicopter crash in Okinawa since Japan regained sovereignty in 1972, and it transformed the 2004 situation.⁵⁵ In an unexpected way, the crash again raised the issue of the SOFA, set off massive Okinawan protests, forced the Pentagon to make closing Futenma a priority in its global force transformation schemes, and caused the Japanese government finally to try to break the domestic standoff over where Futenma’s replacement should go.

The three-man crew of the helicopter that crashed survived without life-threatening injuries and, miraculously, no one on the ground was killed. The rear vertical stabilizer and rotor of the helicopter broke off in flight, falling to the street, but the university itself was closed for summer vacation. This accident raised at once the issue of slipshod maintenance. And what happened immediately afterward turned it into a major political incident.

Within minutes of the crash, a woman in the neighborhood called the fire department, which promptly dispatched four fire engines. Simultaneously, some twenty marines from Futenma showed up and began assisting the Ginowan firemen in rescuing the crew and bringing the fire under control. However, the moment the local firemen withdrew, the marines surrounded the crash site with yellow tape carrying the English words, “No Entry.” They barred everyone, including firefighters, from returning to the crash scene, ran through the university administration building and ordered everyone out, halted all traffic on an adjacent street, and tried to stop TV cameramen from photographing the wreck. By then, several hundred people had gathered nearby and on the university grounds, shouting, “What kind of authority do they have? Whose country is this? The occupation isn’t over.”

Yoichi Iha, the mayor of Ginowan, was also barred from the site. It was “too dangerous,” he was told, even though relaxed American troops could be seen lounging about and pizza-delivery motorbikes were allowed into the crash scene.⁵⁶ The following morning a large delegation of Ginowan police officers visited the scene armed with a court order to investigate possible violations of aviation safety laws, but they, too, were prevented from entering and informed that they could do so only with the permission of U.S. military authorities. The marines, they were assured, would investigate the crash and let the Japanese government know their findings.

That morning, Shogo Arai, a Liberal Democratic member of the Diet and parliamentary vice minister of foreign affairs, flew in from Tokyo to view the scene. Afterward, he called a press conference to announce: “I myself was not allowed onto the crash site. Japan is not Iraq. To claim American sovereignty in this situation is ridiculous.”⁵⁷ The police formally asked Lieutenant General Robert L. Blackman, the marine commanding general in Okinawa, for authorization to investigate the cause of the crash. He vacillated for several days and then denied the request. Without getting permission from the university, the marines used chain saws to cut down over thirty trees on the campus, hauled away the helicopter’s burned fuselage, and scraped off the topsoil where the helicopter had come down. When the Japanese were finally allowed in, there was nothing left to inspect.

It soon became clear that the marines were relying on a section of the so-called Agreed Minutes to the SOFA. These additional rules included article 17, paragraph 10(b): “The Japanese authorities will normally not exercise the right to search, seizure, or inspection with respect to any person or property within facilities and areas in use by and guarded under the authority of the United States or with respect to property of the United States armed forces wherever situated, except in cases where the competent authorities of the United States armed forces consent to such search, seizure, or inspection by the Japanese authorities of such persons or property.”⁵⁸

This provision of the SOFA had been unknown to the Japanese public. Okinawa and virtually all other Japanese prefectures housing U.S. bases demanded an instant revision of the SOFA. It was pointed out that both Germany and Italy have the right to investigate military accidents occurring on their territories, while Okinawan authorities were unable even to interview the helicopter pilots or gather other valuable evidence. The nationwide newspaper Asahi Shimbun asked rhetorically, “Is Japan Still Under U.S. Occupation?”⁵⁹ The widespread outrage reflected a new popular understanding of just how unequal and colonial Japan s relations with the United States really were.

Okinawans suspected that there might have been secret technology involved in the crash, explaining why the Americans were so eager to keep them away, but the CH-53D is actually so old that everything connected with it is public knowledge. It was possible that the helicopter might have been transporting depleted-uranium ammunition, in violation of American agreements with Japan, which would explain why some marines were spotted carrying Geiger counters around the site and why all the topsoil was removed. But the most persuasive reason the Japanese press could come up with for the incident was simply to maintain the “almighty SOFA,” the forty-five-year-old license governing America’s imperial presence in their country.⁶⁰

The next year, on July 29, 2005, the association of governors of prefectures housing U.S. bases submitted to the Japanese Defense Agency and Foreign Ministry a list of seventy-one changes to the SOFA that it said were desperately needed.⁶¹ The governors argued that Tokyo was far too obsequious toward the Pentagon and indifferent to the hardships the bases inflicted on ordinary Japanese. Their view was bolstered by the fact that, at the time of the crash, Prime Minister Koizumi was spending a two-week vacation in an upscale Tokyo hotel room watching the summer Olympics and refused even to meet with Governor Inamine until he returned to work nor did he ever visit the crash site in Ginowan.⁶² Many commentators observed that had the crash occurred on the campus of Keio University in Tokyo—the Princeton of Japan—vacation or no, he would have been there in a flash.

The official American accident report was not released to the public, but a few leaked details confirmed American negligence. The CH-53D that crashed was one of several being prepared for shipment to Iraq on board the amphibious assault ship USS Essex. Maintenance crews were working night and day to get the helicopters ready. One mechanic testified that after three consecutive days of seventeen-hour shifts, he was so exhausted he had to be relieved. He had reattached the main bolt holding the rear rotor but had not yet installed the cotter pin, which prevents a bolt from becoming unscrewed due to vibration in flight, when he went back to his quarters. He failed to tell his day-shift replacement to do so. The bolt subsequently came off, sending the helicopter out of control.⁶³

The helicopter accident and arguments over the Japanese SOFA were the context in which President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld introduced their grand plans for redesigning the United States’s military empire. The issues of local crime and criminal jurisdiction in Okinawa did not go away, but they were upstaged by the strategic implications of China s explosive economic growth, which is soon likely to challenge the United States’s status as “the world’s only superpower.” It has long been an article of neocon faith that the United States must do everything in its power to prevent the development of rival power centers, whether friendly or hostile, which meant that after the collapse of the Soviet Union they turned their attention to China as one of our probable next enemies. In 2001, having come to power along with George W. Bush, the neocon-servatives had shifted much of our nuclear targeting from Russia to China. They also began regular high-level military talks with Taiwan, China’s breakaway province, over defense of the island; ordered a shift of army personnel and supplies to the Asia-Pacific region; and worked strenuously to promote the remilitarization of Japan.

On April 25, 2001, during an interview on national television, President Bush was asked whether he would ever use “the full force of the American military” against China for the sake of Taiwan. He responded, “Whatever it takes to help Taiwan defend herself.”⁶⁴ This was American policy until 9/11, when China enthusiastically joined the “war on terrorism” and the president and his advisers became preoccupied with their “axis of evil” and making war on Iraq. At the time, the United States and China were also enjoying extremely close economic relations, which the big-business wing of the Republican Party did not want to jeopardize. The Middle East thus trumped the neocons’ Asia policy.

While the Americans were distracted, China went about its economic business for almost four years, emerging as a powerhouse of Asia and the center of gravity for all Asian economies, including Japans. Rapidly industrializing China also developed a voracious appetite for petroleum and other raw materials, which brought it into direct competition with the world’s largest importers, the United States and Japan. By the summer of 2004, Bush’s strategists again became alarmed over China’s growing power and its potential to challenge American hegemony in East Asia. The Republican Party platform, unveiled at its convention in New York in August 2004, proclaimed that “America will help Taiwan defend itself.”

Toward that end, the United States has repeatedly pressured Japan to revise article 9 of its constitution (renouncing the use of force except as a matter of self-defense) and become what American officials call a “normal nation.” On August 13, 2004, in Tokyo, Secretary of State Colin Powell stated baldly that if Japan ever hoped to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council it would first have to get rid of its pacifist constitution. Bush administration officials would like to turn Japan into what they call the “Britain of the Far East”—and then use it as a proxy in checkmating North Korea and balancing China. Another major goal of the Americans is to gain Japan’s active participation in their massively expensive missile defense program. The Bush administration is seeking, among other things, an end to Japan’s ban on the export of military technology, since it wants Japanese engineers to help solve some of the technical problems of its so far failing Star Wars system. The Koizumi cabinet has not resisted this American pressure since it complements a renewed nationalism and xenophobia among Japanese voters—attitudes that the Koizumi government has fostered—and a fear that a burgeoning capitalist China threatens Japan’s established position as the leading economic power in East Asia.

What the Bush strategists and the Pentagon do not seem to understand is that China has real grievances against Japan and that American policy is exacerbating them. During World War II, the Japanese killed approximately twenty-three million Chinese throughout East Asia—higher casualties than the staggering ones suffered by Russia at the hands of the Nazis—and yet Japan refuses to atone for or even acknowledge its historical war crimes. Quite the opposite, it continues to rewrite history, portraying itself as the liberator of Asia and a victim of European and American imperialism.⁶⁵ In what for the Chinese is a painful act of symbolism, Junichiro Koizumi made his first official visit to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo after becoming Japanese prime minister in 2001, a practice he has repeated every year since. Koizumi likes to say that he is merely honoring Japan’s war dead, but Yasukuni is anything but a military cemetery or a war memorial. It was established in 1869 by Emperor Meiji as a Shinto shrine (though with its torii archways made of steel rather than the traditional red-painted wood) to commemorate the lives lost in domestic military campaigns aimed at returning direct imperial rule to Japan. During World War II, Japanese militarists took over the shrine and used it to promote patriotic and nationalistic sentiments. Today Yasukuni is said to be dedicated to the spirits of approximately 2.4 million Japanese who have died in the country’s wars, both civil and foreign, since 1853.

In 1978, for reasons that have never been made clear, General Hideki Tojo and six other wartime leaders who had been hanged by the Allied Powers as war criminals were collectively enshrined at Yasukuni. The current chief priest of the shrine denies that they were war criminals, saying only, “The winner passed judgment on the loser.”⁶⁶ In a museum on the shrine’s grounds, there is a fully restored Mitsubishi Zero Type 52 fighter aircraft that, according to a placard, made its 1940 combat debut over Chongqing, then the wartime capital of the Republic of China. It was undoubtedly no accident that, during the 2004 Asian Cup soccer finals in Chongqing, Chinese spectators booed the playing of the Japanese national anthem.⁶⁷

Yasukuni’s priests have always claimed close ties to the Japanese imperial household, but the late emperor Hirohito last visited the shrine in 1975 and Emperor Akihito has never been there. In July 2006, the Tokyo press reported on recently discovered diaries kept by a former high-ranking aide to Emperor Hirohito. They revealed that the wartime emperor objected to the 1978 decision of the Yasukuni priests to add the names of fourteen World War II leaders who had been convicted of crimes against humanity to the list of those honored at the shrine. According to the diarist, who died in 2003, Hirohito said to him, “That is why I have not visited the shrine since.” Hirohito died in 1989.

The Chinese regard Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni as insulting and somewhat comparable to President Reagan’s ill-considered 1985 visit to Bitburg cemetery in Germany, where SS soldiers are buried. The Chinese thus are not inclined to see the reorganization of American bases in Japan as a response to the Okinawans’ outrage over the SOFA or any other technical issue. Instead, Beijing regards the new deployments as part of a provocative policy of American imperialism to shore up its hegemony in East Asia.

On November 27, 2003, President Bush issued an official statement: “Beginning today, the United States will intensify ... our ongoing review of our overseas force posture.”⁶⁸ The administration indicated that nations such as Germany, South Korea, and even Japan could see significant redeployments of military forces as the Pentagon focused more on the “war on terror.” China was not mentioned directly, but it was certainly on the minds of Bush’s advisers. If, in the cases of Germany and South Korea, the United States was retaliating—for German hostility to the invasion of Iraq and South Korea’s openly expressed feeling that including North Korea in the president’s “axis of evil” was a strategic blunder—Japan was still being touted as the “keystone” to America’s position in East Asia.

Nonetheless, the Bush administration had clearly not given much thought to how to sell its plans for “global force repositioning” to Japan. In their monthly meetings with Japanese defense officials, Pentagon subordinates began by talking about making Japan into a “frontline base” or an “East Asian Britain.” These trial balloons so alarmed the Japanese that they asked for further discussions to be delayed until after the July 2004 elections for the upper house of the Diet. While the United States complied, the Japanese press reported that “the Pentagon is irritated by Japan’s unenthusiastic response to U.S. plans.”⁶⁹

From July 15 to 17, 2004, the two sides met in San Francisco, where American negotiators introduced some of their concrete proposals. The United States would replace the air force lieutenant general who normally commanded U.S. Forces Japan (USFJ) with an army four-star general, and move USFJ headquarters from Yokota Air Force Base to Camp Zama, the elegant old army base south of Tokyo (and site of the prewar Japanese military academy). All army, navy, air force, and marine troops stationed in Japan would be placed under the general, who would also replace the army commander in Korea—his headquarters would be abolished—giving the new commander authority to direct all American military operations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. His only superior officer would be the PACOM commander in Hawaii. The Thirteenth Air Force headquarters in Guam would be merged with that of the U.S. Fifth Air Force at Yokota, near Tokyo, while the headquarters of the army’s First Corps, stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, would be moved to Zama, closer to possible imperial policing duties. The idea behind these changes was to have American troops “forward based” but not in potential areas of conflict, as in Korea.⁷⁰

The Pentagon has many other plans for Japan, including replacing the forty-five-year-old aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, currently homeported at the old Japanese naval base of Yokosuka, with the USS George Washington, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, despite Japan’s well-known “nuclear allergy.”⁷¹ The United States, in short, is planning to turn Japan into the “control tower” of U.S.-enforced security in Asia.⁷²

For the Japanese, such changes are intensely controversial, unleashing powerful grassroots protests not just in Okinawa but in many Japanese prefectures, particularly Kanagawa, which includes Prime Minister Koizumi’s own electoral district. From the autumn of 2004 through 2005, the United States and Japan engaged in acrimonious negotiations, while Richard Lawless, the chief American negotiator, berated the Japanese for their “false kabuki”—a reference to the allegedly slow pace of traditional Japanese theater.⁷³ The most important issue at stake, however, is not base realignment but the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty itself.

When the treaty was first drawn up in the aftermath of World War II, the intent on both sides was not just to protect Japan in case of international conflict but to keep Japan, then seen as the scourge of Asia, disarmed. As a result the treaty is deeply one-sided. In return for bases in Japan, the United States pledges to defend the country; Japan, however, does not assume any comparable responsibilities toward the defense of the United States. Moreover, according to the treaty, the bases in Japan are to be used for “the security of Japan and the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East,” not to shore up and police the U.S. global empire. Article 9 of Japan’s American-drafted constitution explicitly states that Japan will not maintain any offensive military capability or resort to war in its international relations. In fact, however, other than nuclear arms, virtually all of Japan’s postwar pacifism is, some fifty-plus years after Article 9 was written, a fiction. According to one source, Japan, with 139 warships, now has the second most powerful navy on the planet.⁷⁴ Its army, navy, and air force has a total of 239,000 officers and men, deploys 452 combat aircraft, and is financed by a budget roughly equal to China’s military expenditures. Despite its low profile, Japan is a growing military powerhouse and its conservative leaders have increasingly wanted to stretch the country’s martial legs and the boundaries of Article 9. Deployment of a fairly large contingent of soldiers to Iraq gave Prime Minister Koizumi the chance to overcome the old constraints and precedents on Japanese “offensive” operations. When the Bush administration “persuaded” him to send troops to Iraq, Koizumi finessed the constitutionality of his action by insisting that the troops would only be engaged in peaceful reconstruction and not take part in warfare.

Large sections of the Japanese public remain devoted to Article 9, even if only as a statement of an ideal. They do not want to be dragged into America’s “preventive wars” as a result of the Security Treaty.⁷⁵ The political left in Japan, although in decline, argues that the military realignments in Japan are changing the nature of the treaty from defense to war.⁷⁶ Some influential politicians on the right, which is dominant, see the basing changes the Pentagon now favors as challenges to Japan’s sovereignty.

The U.S. at first tried to argue that since Japan depends on oil from the Middle East, its security should not technically be restricted to the “Far East” and that support for the broader American mission in Iraq and elsewhere under the rubric of the war on terror is therefore not in conflict with the Security Treaty. This formulation convinced no one, particularly since many Japanese believe that U.S. policy in the Middle East actually threatens their fuel supply. To finesse this issue, the United States decided to call Zama a “forward operational headquarters” and pledged that it will not do “global control” from there, although it certainly will. This linguistic hairsplitting temporarily resolved the legal difficulties, but the population around Camp Zama—an upscale residential area—remains adamantly opposed to enlarging the base. The Japanese government ultimately agreed to an upgraded military command at Camp Zama, but before that came about, the acrimonious dispute concerning the relocation of Futenma Air Base within Okinawa had to be resolved.⁷⁷

In 2005, after protesters had stopped even survey work for the airfield on the coral reef, the Japanese government proposed building it on land within the little-used Camp Schwab.⁷⁸ The United States rejected this recommendation. Japan then proposed building half of the airport in Camp Schwab and half on pilings extending into the ocean. The United States rejected this as well, suggesting among other things that it would be too noisy for the troops barracked at the base. At this point, the talks broke down.⁷⁹

The two sides never seriously discussed the most obvious solution— simply closing Futenma and moving what few functions it still performs into existing locations elsewhere in Japan or to Guam or Hawaii. Lawless rejected this out of hand on grounds that the United States has to maintain a “deterrent capability” in Okinawa, particularly to restrain China, and his view was seconded by the U.S. consul general in Okinawa.⁸⁰ The idea that China might be “deterred” by an understrength American marine division on a distant island is, of course, absurd, not to mention that during 2004 and 2005 significant numbers of the marines based in Okinawa were actually in Iraq.

After intense negotiations, on October 29, 2005, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Japanese Defense Agency chief, and the minister of foreign affairs finally signed an “Interim Agreement.”⁸¹ It included setting up the army’s command headquarters at Camp Zama and moving Futenma to the ecologically delicate coastal area of Henoko within Camp Schwab. (There was no agreement on joint civil-military use nor on the fifteen-year limit demanded by the Okinawans.) The United States promised that if everything goes as agreed, it would transfer several thousand marines, mostly headquarters and staff personnel, from Okinawa to Guam over a six-year period. Until the new airport is completed—an estimated decade in the future—Futenma remains open and a threat to surrounding communities.

Rumsfeld seems not to have understood a fundamental feature of Japanese politics. The Japanese people are riven about their defense relationship with the United States. They like being protected by the United States against possible threats from China and North Korea, but they do not like having foreign troops living anywhere near them. Over the past half century of alliance, the Japanese government has cynically dealt with this problem by using Okinawa as the dumping ground for the overwhelming majority of U.S. forces based in Japan. From the perspective of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled Japan since 1955, Okinawan anger is a small price to pay so long as the troops are physically removed from daily contact with the politically more influential population on the main islands.

By deciding to shift bases around Japan like so many chess pieces, Rumsfeld disturbed this Japanese political arrangement for living with the American military. While the defense secretary has gotten the Koizumi government to agree to his proposals, his actions may sooner or later turn the endemic antibase protests of Okinawa into a feature of mainstream Japanese life. Many of the affected communities in the base repositioning scheme are, for the first time, expressing their solidarity with Okinawa. The officials say they will take their cue from whatever the Okinawan pre-fectural government espouses; Okinawa’s initial reaction was to reject the Interim Agreement in favor of moving Futenma Air Base entirely out of Japan.⁸² On these developments, Masaaki Gabe wrote, “Historians in the future may note that the bilateral alliance between Japan and the United States gradually declined after it peaked in November 2005. In the ongoing talks between the Japanese and U.S. governments over the realignment of U.S. forces in Japan, the Japanese government neglected to seek public support. An alliance that is not supported by the people is fragile.... The interim report has encountered a deep-seated backlash from Okinawa and Kanagawa prefectures.... If the U.S. troops do not have the support of the local base-hosting communities, the troops will probably have to withdraw from their bases.”⁸³

To resolve this impasse, at least for the time being, the Japanese government resorted to the old tried-and-true practice of bribery. It offered huge amounts of central government money to Okinawa and other affected communities if they would go along with what the U.S. and Japanese governments had already agreed to do. Prime Minister Koizumi made clear that acceptance of the planned reorganization of American forces—even if it amounted to a de facto rewriting of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty—was settled national policy and could not be further modified. In view of this stance, most of the localities, despite some ambiguous responses, caved in. On May 30, 2006, the cabinet formally approved the planned realignment of U.S. forces in Japan.

The terms of the May 30 decision are extraordinary. They include an agreement by the United States to remove some 8,000 marines from Okinawa and relocate them to new facilities to be built on the American island of Guam. Secretary Rumsfeld estimates that this transfer will cost some $10.3 billion and take at least six years to accomplish. Astonishingly enough, the Japanese government agreed to pay $6.1 billion—a highly unusual decision in that the funds will be used to build quarters for American forces and their families on American territory. In addition, Japan will construct a new seaside airport within Camp Schwab in northern Okinawa for the troops and aircraft now based at Futenma. Japan will also accept a new army command center to be located at Camp Zama and a nuclear aircraft carrier to replace the conventional one homeported at Yokosuka.

Article 4 of the cabinet decision says, “[These accords] are among the government’s most critical policy measures to ensure bilateral security arrangements in order for Japan to maintain its peace and security.... The government will consider the wishes of local public entities to be additionally burdened in implementing the realignment-related steps. In return for their great contributions to Japan’s peace and national security, the government will implement economic stimulus packages, including measures for the development of local communities.”⁸⁴

This may work. It has in the past. But the complex negotiations failed even to address the Japanese-American disagreements over the SOFA and Japan’s criminal justice procedures. Meanwhile, American servicemen continue to make sensational headlines in the Japanese press. In early July 2005, a drunken air force staff sergeant molested a ten-year-old Okinawan girl on her way to Sunday school. He at first claimed to be innocent, but then the police found a photo of the girl’s nude torso on his cell phone. In November, a Japanese court sentenced him to eighteen months in prison, suspended for four years. On November 2, 2005, six marines from Okinawa who had been dispatched to the Philippines to “train” Filipino soldiers in antiterrorist tactics allegedly raped a Filipina student outside the former U.S. naval base at Subic Bay. The mayor of Okinawa City commented, “No matter how many times we ask the U.S. military to strengthen discipline, such incidents are repeated.” In June 2006, a court in Kanagawa prefecture sentenced a twenty-two-year-old crew member of the USS Kitty Hawk to life in prison for robbing and beating to death a fifty-six-year-old woman outside the railroad station in Yokosuka.⁸⁵

The Koizumi government and its right-wing supporters, eager to come out of the military closet and into the world as a rearmed major power, acceded to various unpalatable U.S. basing decisions despite popular opposition. They did so because their perceptions of the security situation and their desire not to be marginalized by China overrode any difficulties that living with American military forces pose for citizens of their country. They ignored the facts that they themselves were responsible for much of the deterioration in their relations with China and that America’s doctrine of preemptive war threatened to draw them into conflicts not of their choosing. Far from bringing stability to international relations in East Asia, the United States and Japan are contributing to heightened tensions with China and North Korea. How long this increasingly fragile situation can be perpetuated is an open question.