A woman was strangled to death in Okinawa. The suspect is a 20-year-old US service member. On the 2nd of this month the woman met the suspect on Gate Street in Okinawa City, a strip crowded with American military personnel, and that night the two entered a love hotel in Naha together. The next morning she was found dead on the bed, strangled.
The case has revived a long-running grievance in Okinawa: that US military organizations do not take responsibility when their personnel commit crimes, and that suspects in serious cases are not handed over quickly. Under the status of forces agreement (SOFA) that governs the US military presence in Japan, American service members suspected of crimes remain in US custody until Japanese prosecutors indict them.
Eri Ie, a 50-year-old single mother who runs a company in Okinawa, started a signature campaign soon after the case became public. She called for the system to change, both so that the US military takes organizational responsibility for crimes by its personnel and so that suspects are handed over promptly even in serious cases. Supporters passed 1,000 within two weeks, and on October 26 Ie and others held an emergency meeting at the members' office building of the House of Councillors.
The case echoes the killing of a woman in Uruma 10 years ago. She was out walking when a man attached to the US military killed her. She went missing in April 2016, and her body, largely reduced to a skeleton, was found in mid-May. About a month later, on June 19, a prefectural rally drew 65,000 people.
“Please make my daughter the last victim.”the victim's father, in a message read at the start of the rally
The crowd stood in a plaza with no shade in the blazing sun, and what filled the space was a deep, angry silence. The writer Minori Kitahara, who attended, said she believed at the time that the grief and anger would change reality. This case, she wrote in AERA DIGITAL, shows that it did not.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ie was living in Onna, a village that hosts US military training grounds. Live-fire drills at Camp Hansen ran through the night after the invasion began, according to the account, with rifle practice continuing regardless of the hour. At one point a wild boar got into the attic of a neighboring house.
In this year's Okinawa gubernatorial election, the incumbent who pushed forward the relocation of the Futenma base to Henoko won by a wide margin, running under the slogan of not blaming anyone.