News Analysis: Rising crime by U.S. servicepeople in Okinawa bolsters anti-base relocation moves, SOFA review push

A recent spate of internationally-reported crimes committed by U.S base-linked personnel in Okinawa Prefecture in Japan's southwest has renewed calls from prefectural officials as well as locals for the tiny island to comprehensively have its base-hosting burdens lifted as the disproportionate number of bases being hosted on the tiny island is thought to be directly attributable to the rising instances of crime.

Okinawa Governor Takeshi Onaga is a stanch advocate of lessening the island's burden by at first blocking the planned transfer of the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma from the crowed area of Ginowan to the coastal Nago region also on the island, and along with other prefectural officials opposed to the move, following recent elections, now comprise a majority in the prefectural assembly.

As such, and in light of crimes committed by U.S. base-affiliated personnel, calls are becoming more vociferous from assembly officials to not only scrap the plan to relocate the controversial marine base, but to see a key agreement made between Japan and the U.S. governing how U.S. servicepeople are dealt with legally, following instances of crime and infraction, reviewed.

"Following the most recent drunk driving incident, that actually occurred on the same day as the prefectural election and saw a car driven by a member of the U.S. Navy off base, careening out of its lane and striking at least two other cars and injuring two civilians, and the sexual assault, murder and dumping of the body of a young women by a base-linked worker last month, it's unsurprising that anti-U.S. sentiment is now reaching a fever pitch in Okinawa and this will play nicely into the hands of Onaga and other officials who are fully taking on the central government and demanding comprehensive change," David McLellan, a professor emeritus of postgraduate Asian Studies told Xinhua on Tuesday.

McLellan went on to say that the gravity of the recent crimes of late, which also include a U.S. Navy sailor raping a women after she had passed out in a hotel in Naha City, the capital of Okinawa, has ensured the international spotlight is now firmly concentrated on the U.S. presence in Okinawa, with the fact that 75 percent of U.S. bases in Japan are in Okinawa, the island of which accounts for just 1 percent of Japan's land mass, no longer being just a "quotable statistic."

"U.S. President Barack Obama was called out by Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe when he was here during the recent Group of Seven (G7) leaders' summit which was hosted by Abe, over the rape and murder of the 20-year-old local girl, with the U.S. leader offering his apologies and pledge that U.S. officials would fully-cooperate with Japanese investigators, while U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy was summoned to the foreign ministry here after the incident to hear Japan's extreme condemnation for yet another U.S. indiscretion in Okinawa," McLellan said.

The apparent increase in frequency of crimes being committed by U.S. service people in Okinawa will come as a blow to both Nagatacho and Washington who have committed to a deal to shift the Futenma base within the island, with the coastal Nago region being picked for the colossal replacement facility, as Onaga himself, backed by the support of the islanders, is set to become an even bigger thorn in Abe's side, and has already sued and counter-sued the central government over the issue and has, at least, ensured an ongoing impasse with little progress being made on the construction of the new base, which involves reclaiming a wide swathe of land from the pristine coastal region.

"While the crimes are heinous and unforgivable, in a cruel twist of irony they add ammunition to Onaga and other assembly official's plans to prevent the relocation of the base within the island, at a bare minimum, and possibly see it relocated outside the prefecture or the country all together. This, at a time when the U.S. is gearing up to realign its forces here as part of the Washington's plans to 're-balance to the Asia-Pacific'," said McLellan, adding that Washington must now be "utterly vexed" about the worsening situation.

The crimes by U.S. servicepeople against Japanese citizens are not just being committed in Okinawa, which has even more serious implication for the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), McLellan explained, adding that there would almost certainly be a sizable "dark figure" of lesser crimes that go unpunished or unreported, meaning the actual scale of the problem is likely far larger than thought and should be dealt with as such.

In part, he was referring to yet another U.S. Navy officer who was arrested in March after sexually assaulting and repeatedly punching a Japanese woman in the face as he sat next to her on a commercial air flight from the United States to Japan.

The Navy lieutenant, based at the Atsugi Naval Air Facility, Japan, was arrested for assaulting the 19-year-old female college student on a flight from San Diego to Japan. According to testimony, he repeatedly groped her body while she was sat in her seat, before punching her in the head several times, in a brutal assault that lasted 90 minutes.

Flight attendants finally managed to intervene and seat the girl elsewhere on the plane and the Navy lieutenant was arrested at Narita Airport although handed over to U.S. personnel under the SOFA.

With curfews issued by the U.S. military and strict guidelines on driving having already been issued yet consistently thwarted by U.S. military personnel in Okinawa, as well as elsewhere on the mainland, with the likelihood that the current indefinite blanket ban issued on Monday by the the U.S. Navy covering the consumption of all alcohol by Navy personnel in Japan following the recent drink driving arrest, may also be snubbed, Okinawa officials believe it is high time that Japan and the United States review the rights granted to U.S. servicepeople in Japan.

Abe said he plans to expedite a review of the current SOFA, which was originally inked in Washington between the United States and Japan in 1960, with many political watchers also believing it does not work to effectively legislate treatment of U.S. servicepeople here who commit crimes and doesn't reflect the growing instances and severity of such.

Under the current agreement, U.S forces' personnel can be granted a great deal of legal autonomy and while the Japanese court system has jurisdiction for most crimes committed by U.S. service members, if the accused was "acting in official duty," or if the victim was another American, the U.S. justice system is used, not Japan's, despite the location.

In some instances, as McLellan pointed out, "Under SOFA the majority of U.S. military members are exempt from Japan's visa and passport laws and past offenders have dodged the Japanese legal system here by being transferred back to the United States before being charged. Another loophole that exists in the agreement is that unless an offender is arrested outside of a base by Japanese police or invesitigators, then U.S. authorities are allowed to retain custody of that individual, while senior politicians all the way up to the president, as has been seen recently, will try and 'appease' the situation by offering full cooperation with local investigators."

"This is not always the case," McLellan said, adding that once the media and social hype dies down, the U.S. often invokes its extraterritorial rights and deals with the case as per U.S. law and out of the view of Japanese investigators or prosecutors; with suspicions constantly aroused about leniency being used by the U.S. in favor of its own nations in cases that Japanese prosecutors would come down far harder on."

Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani and his U.S. counterpart Defense Secretary Ashton Carter agreed on Saturday to review the scope of the accord following the latest spate of crimes, while the Okinawa prefectural government is gearing up to lodge a protest against the U.S. forces stationed in Japan, as well as the Japanese Foreign and Defense ministries, to demand the stricter enforcement of discipline for U.S. service-people and mechanisms to stamp out such instances of fatal, brutal and mindless crimes against innocent Okinawans, who have collectively suffered for decades having been effectively occupied by the U.S. since the end of WWII. Endit