Word: okinawa
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...action this Thursday night in Okinawa is on the third floor of a building in a candy-colored, open-air mall called the American Village. A pink and blue neon sign shows where everyone's going: 3F, a bar and restaurant with a Southeast Asian theme. A couple hundred people are already there, drawn by $3 cocktails and reggae and hip-hop tunes. It's so crowded that manager Jeff Short has abandoned his tiki-hut office to help behind the bar. The crowd is familiar, mostly female Japanese partyers and U.S. servicemen. Many of the girls dress alike?stiletto...
TURNED OVER. TIMOTHY WOODLAND, 24, U.S. Air Force sergeant accused of raping a Japanese woman in her 20s in a parking lot last month; to local authorities; in Okinawa, Japan. The U.S. released Woodland into Japanese custody without an indictment after the Japanese government agreed to allow him access to legal counsel and a translator during police interrogations--privileges not usually available to suspects in Japan...
...film is opening at a sensitive moment in Japanese-U.S. relations. The recent alleged rape of a Japanese woman on Okinawa by a U.S. serviceman once again sparked an outcry against the continued presence of 47,000 U.S. troops in the country. Further, for many Japanese citizens, Pearl Harbor recalls not the surprise attack of a half-century ago but the accidental sinking of the Ehime Maru, a Japanese fishing trawler, by a U.S. Navy submarine earlier this year. News accounts of the film's U.S. premiere in Pearl Harbor focused on the proximity of the Navy carrier...
...answer to Takazato's plea is that the issue is a lot larger than Okinawa, as unsatisfying or patronizing as that may sound to the Okinawans. Japan's nominally pacifist postwar constitution paved the way for the U.S. to establish a military beachhead in the land of its World War II enemy. Okinawa, by virtue of geography, suits American purposes because it is near the Korean peninsula and the rest of Asia. It suits Tokyo's in two ways: the U.S. presence reduces Japan's need for fielding its own army, and it segregates a substantial portion of the American...
...Okinawa, geopolitics seem abstract, but life in the shadow of the American military does produce strange anomalies. On Saturday and Sunday, following the furor over Friday's alleged rape, the Kadena base opened its gates to visitors for an "American Fest" with carnival rides, a haunted house and a menu of hotdogs, hamburgers and barbecued ribs. One of the visitors, 27-year-old Kaori Teruya, stepped inside a huge transport plane, the reports of the rape attack not far from her mind. "My girlfriends and I are always bothered by these American servicemen," Teruya said. "I am scared." The disturbing...