Japan anger at US troop incidents

[BagOfCrisps 24]

I'm always interested in stories like this - are they top news over in Japan and how do they cover it?

 

 Quote:

Further incidents involving US troops posted in Japan could "shake the foundation" of US-Japanese ties, Japan's defence minister has said.

 

Shigeru Ishiba also urged the US to take concrete prevention measures.

 

The warning comes after two rape allegations in 10 days against US servicemen on the island of Okinawa.

 

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura announced new surveillance measures agreed with the US to guard against crime around US bases.

 

Last week, a US marine living off base was arrested, accused of raping a 14-year-old girl.

 

The marine admits forcibly kissing her but denies rape. US military and civilian officials have apologised for the incident.

[RobBright 35]

check out the japan times homepage - without fear or favour, or as most people I know say, without fear or flavour

[BagOfCrisps 24]

Yeah I know I can find that easy. I was hoping to hear a more general idea from you guys.

[soubriquet 0]

Soubriquette regards US forces as a neccessary evil. Squaddies (of any nationality) generally aren`t the sharpest knives in the drawer. The message from Tohoku is that Okinawa is thankfully a long way from here.

[me jane 0]

Personally, I think they go a bit over the top. Not condoning the crimes in any way but the attention they are given is out of proportion. There are so many twisted crimes commited by Japanese people and many people here aren't even willing to acknowledge that they happen.

[bushpig 0]

yep, they are blown a bit out of proportion, but the incident a few days ago got barely a mention on the nightly news shows. They had a story about it, and the main presenter said something about the Japanese anger towards it, but there was no real feeling of outrage or anger in the story itself. They said the words, but it seemed to be more of a "ah... again..." kind of feeling.

[bobby12 0]

Theres so many troops down there, things are bound to happen from time to time. Its like the infinite monkeys/infinite time thing. Put a huge number (1000s, tens of thousands?) of young men in one place over an extended period of time and stuff will happen, regardless of nationality or location. Thats not to condone it in any way, but to expect nothing to ever happen is stupid and naive.

 

I think the real problem is that the locals simply dont like having their town overrun by foreign soliders, which is something I can sympathise with.

[IIIII 2]

It gets blown out of all proportion. Incidents like this though are bound to get the attention here. Though as bobby12 says I can totally see how the locals down there might not be happy with all those dudes walking around.

[Ezorisu 0]

At least with the recent JMSDF guided missile cruiser ramming a fishing boat off Chiba we get to see some of the outrage of the Japanese public directed at it's own military in the news - it's been the headline story for days now, even ecclipsing the "evil tainted Chinese gyoza" story.

[soubriquet 0]

It's a scandal that a ship equipped with arguably the World's most sophisticated radar system is incapable of negotiating a group of fishing boats in the dark. It's a shocking indictment of the Navy's command and control procedures.

[bobby12 0]

Hehe yeh, I guess if a war breaks out the enemy can take out the Japanese battleships by sending out the fishing boats! What could be easier? As you say, shocking.

[Ezorisu 0]

Definitely a breakdown in the C&C - just like how there were a bunch of airline disasters in the 80's and 90's because the 2nd officer and flight engineer didn't want to question the Captain because "he was in command on the flight deck" and was therefore "right".

 

This will probably result in a lot of resignations up to the cabinet level, and the ship's Captain taking early retirement but still collecting a hefty pension - just like USN Capt. Scott Waddle after the Ehime-maru incident. There will probably be compensation paid out without acknowldegement of criminal wrongdoing.

[grungy-gonads 54]

I predict a lot of (very deep and long) bowing as well. That's how you say "sorry (oops, shit, they caught me)".

[Yuki's Passion 1]

I thought this was a good article from JT:

 

U.S. military crime: SOFA so good?

The stats offer some surprises in wake of the latest Okinawa rape claim

 

By MICHAEL HASSETT

Special to The Japan Times

 

On Friday night, Aug. 18, 2006, at a third-story apartment within a gated community outside Atlanta, Ga., 31-year-old Kendrick Ledet sat contemplating life. And death.

 

News photo

ILLUSTRATION CHRIS MacKENZIE

 

Ledet was familiar with various forms of high-tech weaponry — particularly the semi-automatic M-16 rifle — but on this day he decided to go low-tech, departing from us slowly by slicing through the arteries in his arms with a knife.

 

Moments earlier, this terribly troubled soul had forcefully struck a coworker in the head before strangling her with his forearm. And that was preceded by a violent sexual assault. She was only 22 years old, a student studying marketing at a nearby university.

 

Three years before the parents of Lauren Cooper happened upon this awful scene inside their daughter's apartment, the perpetrator of this crime, Ledet, was among us here in Japan.

 

Well, not exactly among us, since he was doing hard labor inside a Japanese prison. From 1996 to 2003 Ledet resided in a Yokosuka jail, where he spent many of his waking hours assembling cell phones and making auto parts for Mazdas and Nissans.

 

And before that? Well, if you've been in Japan for a while, you probably know the rest of the sordid story: In September 1995, Ledet and two of his buddies from Camp Hanson on Okinawa decided to rent a van, kidnap a 12-year-old Japanese girl, force duct tape over her mouth, bind her hands and rape her repeatedly.

 

Disgusted? I was. The memory of this atrocious crime came flooding back to me upon hearing of the latest charge of rape against yet another U.S. serviceman. Moreover, it brought back to mind a remarkable claim I came across while reading about the shift of many U.S. forces to Guam: The assertion that members of the U.S. military are four times less likely than a Japanese citizen to commit a crime on the island of Okinawa.

 

Skeptical? I was. Let's look at the numbers and see what they really tell us.

 

First, we need to know how many Japanese and non-Japanese we have in this country, and how many tourists are passing through. In 2006, Japan had a total population of 127.77 million people. Some 2.08 million of those were registered foreigners, and 51,321 of those registered foreigners were U.S. citizens not covered under the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between Japan and the U.S.

 

A SOFA clarifies the terms under which a foreign military is allowed to operate in another country, and covers service members, their dependents and certain civilian workers. In October 2006, the American military community in Japan consisted of 96,790 SOFA-covered individuals.

 

During the same year, Japan welcomed a little more than 4.98 million foreign tourists, and 490,472 of those were from the U.S.

 

Now let's see how many arrests we had that year. The National Police Agency reports 384,250 for penal code offenses, such as murder, bodily injury, bicycle theft and the like. Of these arrests, 14,418 were of non-Japanese, 211 of which were U.S. citizens not covered by the SOFA and 120 of which were SOFA-covered individuals. Illegal immigrants were responsible for 13.2 percent of penal code offenses by non-Japanese.

 

In addition to penal code offenses, there were 83,147 arrests for special law violations. Non-Japanese accounted for 12,303 of these, 84 of which were U.S. citizens not covered by the SOFA and 25 of which were SOFA-covered individuals.

 

What's a "special law violation"? Basically it's a breach of a certain established law, such as the Stimulants Control Law, Firearms and Swords Control Law, or even the Horse Racing Law.

 

Now, before we continue, take note that here in Japan an arrest indicates that a person was taken into custody by police. It does not indicate whether the case was prosecuted in court or whether the suspect was convicted.

 

A little math gives us an arrest rate of 0.351 percent for Japanese in Japan. For non-Japanese here — tourists and registered residents, excluding illegal immigrants and SOFA-covered individuals — the arrest rate would be a little lower at 0.326 percent, assuming that illegal immigrants were also responsible for 13.2 percent of special law violations. And if we were to deem arrests of tourists to be negligible, the rate for registered non-Japanese residents would surge to around 1.115 percent.

 

For U.S. tourists and U.S. citizen residents of Japan not covered by the SOFA, the arrest rate would be 0.054 percent. And if we were to assume arrests of U.S. tourists to be negligible, the arrest rate for U.S. citizens not covered by the SOFA would increase to 0.575 percent.

 

A strong argument can be made against the inclusion of transgressions of the Immigration Control Law and the Alien Registration Law, which may inflate arrest numbers of non-Japanese. But Japanese can and do violate these laws. In 2006, of the 35 arrests for violations to the Alien Registration Law, eight of those arrests were of Japanese.

 

Moreover, once we move down this path of discounting particular transgressions, we open up a giant can of worms because certain other laws — the Public Elections Law, for instance — could be considered to be inherently biased against Japanese.

 

The rates we have calculated so far are for the entire Japanese archipelago. However, approximately 75 percent of the total land area exclusively used by U.S. forces in Japan is located in Okinawa. So let's narrow our focus to Okinawa Prefecture.

 

In 2006, the Okinawan islands had a population of 1,368,000 people, 6,808 of which were registered foreign residents not covered by the SOFA. In 2006, there were 4,188 arrests for penal code offenses and 605 arrests for special law violations. Foreigners not covered by the SOFA were responsible for 44 of these penal code offenses, and we can use partially reported figures to estimate that this group committed around 22 special law violations.

 

Doing the math gives us an arrest rate of 0.342 percent for Japanese in Okinawa, a bit lower than the rate for the entire country.

 

Now let's turn to the U.S. military in Okinawa. There are about 42,570 SOFA-covered Americans living in the prefecture. In 2006, 63 SOFA-covered individuals were arrested for penal code offenses. Eleven arrests for special law violations can be estimated. A little math using these numbers gives us an arrest rate of 0.174 percent, about half that of Japanese in Okinawa (0.342) and the entire country (0.351).

 

Shocked? I am! It's particularly surprising when you consider that almost half the U.S. military population is 25 years old or younger. In fact, 80 percent of U.S. service members are younger than 35. And men comprise nearly 85 percent of the U.S. military force.

 

If we were to attribute 80 percent of arrests of Japanese in Okinawa to men and women aged 15 to 64, a group that makes up 65.1 percent of the prefecture, the arrest rate among Japanese in this age bracket in Okinawa would rise to 0.420 percent. In fact, we would have to attribute 67 percent of arrests in Okinawa to those under the age of 15 and over the age of 64 before the arrest rate of Japanese in the 15-to-64 age bracket would fall below that of SOFA-covered individuals in the area. Shocking indeed!

 

Let's not pretend, though, that living among foreigners trained to kill is Disney in fatigues. On-base arrest data is not released. Environmental issues and land-use concerns abound. And noise has always been a problem.

 

However, there were no arrests in Japan of SOFA-covered individuals for rape or sexual assault in 2006, even though the NPA did arrest 1,094 Japanese for rape and another 4,733 for sexual offenses — that's nearly 16 a day.

 

Many feel that society would be great if we had no need for military forces, but as long as governments don't feel the same way the fact remains that we have to put them somewhere. All of which raises the question: Is it hypocritical to give such disproportionate media exposure to crimes committed by U.S. service members when the data shows that their adherence to our laws apparently exceeds our own?

[bushpig 0]

Interesting read CB.

[soubriquet 0]

Interesting, thanks.

 

Here's an article in the Grauniad which tells a contrasting story.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/01/usa

 

"More than one in a hundred adult Americans are in prison, a higher rate of incarceration than at any time in US history that is pushing the budgets of several states to breaking point, a report warns.

 

The Pew Centre on the States, a Washington-based research body, reveals that in 2007 the inexorable rise in the prison population saw the US cross what it calls a "sobering threshold". The number of prisoners in federal and local jails grew to 2.3 million, out of the country's adult population of 229.8 million, which gives a ratio of one in 99 adults behind bars.

 

When that statistic is broken down for different demographic groups, the proportion is even more startling. One in nine black men aged 20 to 34 is incarcerated."

 

It seems to show that the US Military is doing a rather better job than the Nation, either due to its selection, or by providing an appropriate environment for its personnel.

 

FEIW, the US Military gave my niece's husband a training as an electronics technician, and they have sponsored him through uni. He will soon be graduating with a degree in computer science. That's a big leg up for a first generation Hispanic from SoCal.