Word: okinawa
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...locals have come to hold no faith in statistics. In the years following the war, they say rapes were shockingly rampant?and yet the U.S. military, which governed the island then, has no record of any such war crimes committed in Okinawa...
...American: July 2000, a 19-year-old Marine is charged with molesting a 14-year-old girl; January 2000, a Marine lifts the skirt of a 16-year-old to take a picture of her underwear. But the crimes committed by blacks are particularly noted and remembered, and in Okinawa, no one seemed surprised when the three servicemen who raped the 12-year-old girl turned out to be black...
...After that 1995 attack, a long-simmering rage toward the U.S. presence exploded into vociferous activism, and Okinawa has never been the same. Victims formed support groups; students learned to rally. Over every incident big and small that followed, politicians have pelted U.S. forces with demands to impose curfews, change treaties, shut down bases?and a voracious media covers...
...read the local papers now, you'd think the U.S. military's main mission in Okinawa is for its personnel to engage in crime sprees. Actually a closer look at the police blotter tells a different story. According to the Okinawa prefectural government, U.S. military personnel were responsible for 5,006 crimes between 1972 and 2001. That's 1.7% of the 290,814 crimes committed in Okinawa during that period?perpetrated by a group that comprised 4% of the population. Rapes and sexual assaults by servicemen grab the fattest headlines of all. Last year, 2,260 rapes nationwide were reported...
...spring of 1945, hell came to Okinawa. America was poised to invade; the Japanese Imperial Army drove locals from cave hideouts and told them to sharpen bamboo spears to kill the invading "devil army," which they warned would rape and kill without mercy. Like other Okinawans, the citizens of Katsuyama cowered in wait. What happened next was a secret villagers would bury in one of those caves until three years...