Word: okinawa
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Trouble is, it's all about politics too. Last week, just hours before Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi met at Camp David with George W. Bush, Okinawa saw the type of ugly incident that happens there with depressing regularity--becoming, once again, a tawdry pivot in the complex relationship between the U.S. and Japan. A woman in her 20s told police that a foreigner raped her early Friday morning in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Chatan, not far from the Kadena base. Details of the alleged crime are sketchy, but for several hours police questioned...
When night falls outside the sprawling Kadena Air Force Base in the center of Okinawa, the streets turn into a bacchanal of hard drinking, drag racing, loud music and raucous, sweaty dancing. Tattooed guys in muscle shirts and cargo pants rub against women in midriff-baring T shirts and tight jeans, and as the crowd spills from bars onto sidewalks, the night shifts into overdrive. "Hey, we're 19-year-old guys, we're away from home, we're pumped up and we're horny," says a young Marine from California. "Of course it's all about...
While the police continued their investigation, diplomats dealt with the fallout. With some 26,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines on the tropical island, Okinawa is the cornerstone of Washington's defense strategy in Asia. But Okinawans have long considered themselves pawns in a geopolitical game. In 1995, after three U.S. servicemen raped a 12-year-old girl, 85,000 Okinawans took to the streets to protest. Alleged crimes like the one last week just feed the sour mood. "How long do we have to wait until this ends?" asks Suzuyo Takazato, a member of the legislature of Naha, Okinawa...
...borderland between democracy and communism, is now the most dangerous place on Earth. If any country is going to be a strategic threat to the U.S., it will be China, not Russia. There are growing local political challenges to the continued presence of American bases in South Korea and Okinawa, which makes Asia, not Europe, the likely place for employing new military technologies?like pilotless planes or weapons platforms positioned "over the horizon." Since Washington's last thoroughgoing review of its defense policy, its relationship with key allies in Asia has also expanded. Australia showed in East Timor...
...suddenness. The first thing to understand is that this was just a drop in the cauldron that was World War II, which, globally, cost at least 50 million lives. We Americans lost more men in our victories--more than 6,000 at Iwo Jima, for example, 12,000 at Okinawa--than we did in that defeat. This is one of the many things you won't learn from the blockbuster movie on the subject that opened last week. Perhaps more important, of the 408,439 service members who gave their lives in the war, only a few died heroically. Most...