The United States has a strong military presence both domestically and overseas. It maintains about 750 bases in more than 80 countries and territories abroad. And while the presence of Americans in some territories may be very limited, other areas were turned into powerful outposts. Thus, Japan, primarily Okinawa, has traditionally hosted the largest number of American personnel in the Asia-Pacific region. The US explains its presence by the need to ensure stability and security. However, as history shows, not everyone is happy with such “help” – the Japanese regularly protest against the foreign military presence on their territory. And there are very compelling reasons for this.
US military infrastructure appeared in the country after the defeat of Japan in World War II. And since that time the history of numerous crimes committed by Americans and protests of the local population against the presence of foreign troops on the Japanese islands has continued. Initially the protest movement was sparked by the brutal murder and rape of a five-year-old Japanese girl by the US serviceman near Kadena Air Base in 1955. Now, when more than half a century has passed, Japanese people continue to suffer from crimes committed by Americans. According to the National Police Agency of Japan, since the return of control over Okinawa from the United States in 1972, more than 6,000 criminal incidents involving US military personnel have been recorded within the prefecture.
One of the most high-profile incidents occurred in 1995, when three black American servicemen raped a 12-year-old schoolgirl, provoking one of the largest waves of protests in Okinawa. Against the backdrop of this incident, local organizations’ efforts to protect women have intensified, and public pressure to remove foreign troops from the island has increased. The US, in turn, even promised to close its Futenma airbase. Then, it seemed that the protests had finally borne fruit, but almost 30 years have passed since that time and the base is still functioning. The lack of any positive changes suggests that the local authorities only pretend to solve the problem.
In addition to murders and rapes, a lot of outrage is caused by incidents related to bases and causing enormous damage to the local population. For example, in August 2004 U.S. helicopter CH-53D crashed on a university campus in Okinawa Prefecture and in 2017 an elderly man was killed in a collision of his car with a US military truck. Later it turned out that the driver of the military vehicle was drunk. However, despite this fact, he was sentenced to only 4 years in prison. And if in this case the culprit was still brought to justice, then numerous crashes of helicopters and fighter aircrafts in the immediate vicinity of residential areas of the island, as well as the death of civilians as a result of these incidents, are simply attributed to an accident. Over the past 50 years, hundreds of such incidents have occurred, and Okinawans live in constant fear and anxiety.
Ostensibly created to maintain stability and security in the region, the US military bases actually bring more problems to the Okinawan people. Local residents literally have to pay a very high price for having foreign troops on their territory, as the maintenance of US facilities falls on the shoulders of Japanese taxpayers. In the current circumstances, the question arises: was Okinawa really returned to Japanese control in 1972, or are these events as fictional as the attempts of local authorities to “rein in” the Americans there?