opinion

It was disclosed again that an American soldier in Okinawa, Japan, has recently committed sexual assault on a Japanese woman.

It is said that a US marine sexually assaulted a Japanese woman and injured her in November last year, but the case was reported to the prefectural authorities only in January this year.

The governor of Okinawa Prefecture said he was indignant at this, adding that he could not but have strong suspicion about the effectiveness of the US forces’ measure for preventing the recurrence of such case, urging the governments of the two countries to make due compensations to the victim.

GI crimes have ceaselessly been committed in Okinawa for decades since the US forces’ presence in the prefecture. It is by no means fortuitous that the US military base in Okinawa has already been branded as the “cesspool of crimes”.

The problem is that all kinds of crimes committed by US soldiers at its military base are not known in time.

In December 2023, a soldier of the US Air Force in Okinawa abducted a girl under 16 and raped her. After receiving the indictment on the US military crime, the Japanese Foreign Ministry shelved the problem. The ministry reluctantly conveyed the contents to the local side on June 25 2024, six months after receiving an inquiry about the case.

The fact that a marine of the US forces in Okinawa committed sexual assaults to injure a woman in the area in May last year was opened to public on June 28 and it was revealed once again on July 2 that there were three more cases of sexual assaults by the US service personnel in Okinawa, which had not been indicted since 2023.

The anger of the prefectural residents at the authorities and the US forces in Japan is growing higher.

“The Japanese government should accept that locals are always living in such uneasiness” and the “women and children cannot walk in peace”. This is the voice of the inhabitants of Okinawa Prefecture and other Japanese people.

But as the Japanese authorities have given the US forces in Japan an extraterritorial status, deciding not to apply their domestic law to them, the people’s voices of pain and protest fall on deaf dears.

The Japanese authorities, who are at the US’ beck and call and take submission to it as their lifeline, are bound to be blind and dumb even though the dignity and vital rights of the local people are trampled and abused.

Submission to the US only leads to disgrace and death.