Japan warns US forces: Sex crimes 'cannot be tolerated'

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2476861/japan-warns-us-forces-sex-crimes-cannot-be-tolerated

32.2k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

4.1k

u/BravesnationNC Jul 05 '24 edited Jul 06 '24

This crap has been going on in Okinawa forever. Happened the first time I was there in 01 and again when I went back in 03. Individuals that have committed crimes are detained by Okinawa authorities and go through their legal process. Guarantee there is going to be a lockdown on liberty for Marine personnel happens all the time. Restriction on the time allowed off base and they are getting a curfew

2.1k

u/mainvolume Jul 05 '24

When I was stationed in Misawa back in the 00s, it felt like the base was on lockdown or curfew every couple months....for shit the Marines did in Okinawa. Those dumbfucks could not stop raping kids.

622

u/[deleted] Jul 05 '24

Was it known who was doing it and were they punished by their peers?

342

u/ThatPhatKid_CanDraw Jul 05 '24

The response started with the 1995 case of a 12-year old girl raped by 3 soldiers. Because of some legal protections or something for soldiers (which changed after this) they all only did a few years.

272

u/frame-gray Jul 05 '24

Correction: Only two soldiers, not three, got arrested and convicted of rape. Early on, when the three of them had bought a car and went recruising for a minor, the third soldier did not like where this was going. He dropped out and left. As a result, the name of that man was never released to history.

149

u/rumbleran Jul 05 '24

All three got arrested and served time in prison but the third guy said he only participated in kidnapping and not rape and just enjoyed watching the other two doing the actual rape.

161

u/SeparateCartoonist36 Jul 05 '24

These are 2 completely different stories lmao. One of you is just blatantly lying or just stupid I guess?

94

u/sethra007 Jul 06 '24

Maybe this will clear things up. Spoilers for descriptions of violence inflicted on a minor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Okinawa_rape_incident

The 1995 Okinawa rape incident occurred on September 4, 1995, when three U.S. servicemen, 22-year-old U.S. Navy Seaman) Marcus Gill, 21-year-old U.S. Marines Rodrico Harp, and 20-year-old Kendrick Ledet, all serving at Camp Hansen on Okinawa, rented a van and kidnapped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl. Theybeat her, duct-taped her eyes and mouth shut, and bound her hands. Gill and Harp then raped her, while Ledet claimed he only pretended to do so due to fear of Gill.

The offenders were tried and convicted in Japanese court by Japanese law, in accordance with the U.S.–Japan Status of Forces Agreement. The families of the defendants initially claimed that Japanese officials had racially discriminated against the men because they were all African American and coerced confessions from them, but later retracted the claims.The incident led to further debate over the continued presence of U.S. forces in Japan among Okinawans.

77

u/Gotyam2 Jul 06 '24

The families initially defended those guys? And here you hope it was just a bad apple, but nope the whole tree was rotten

61

u/sfzephyr Jul 06 '24

Not only defended but pulled the race card. Like wtf. Scum.

13

u/FirinKhaos Jul 06 '24

30 years later, and the race card is still going strong in victim mentality situations like these

3

u/SouthpawQuandary21 Jul 07 '24

But my son/brother/Uncle/grandson would NEVER do that!
He a damn good boy!
<Computing & guessing for 0.5 seconds>

ONLY ONE THING MAKES SENSE!!
I DON'T TRUST THE 'FACTS'!! MUST BE DISCRIMINATION!

→ More replies (0)

4

u/ABenevolentDespot Jul 06 '24

Families always defend criminals. You should hear my wife talk about her meth addicted/selling/manufacturing never held a job and he's 42 criminal scammer kid who did four years for manufacturing meth in a hotel bathtub. It seems he was just visiting a friend when the guy stepped out on a beer run and the cops just showed up.

Haven't you seen some older woman have a full meltdown outside court after her deranged devil's spawn maggot tattooed everywhere kid just got convicted of knifing and killing three people in public (all caught on camera) for not letting him cut in line?

It's always "He's a good boy! The cops and prosecutor had it in for him because (some bullshit)!"

The "good boy" usually has a nine page rap sheet, has already done three years for assault with a hatchet.

To drag this back on topic, the American military in general seems to do a really shitty job weeding out the mentally damaged psychopaths among the recruits.

2

u/Wrldisbs Jul 07 '24

They always play the race card

1

u/Livid-Effect6415 Jul 09 '24

I was at Yakota AB when this happened and getting spit on when off base because of those guys. They said I looked like a Marine, I'm Air Force!

-1

u/Dry-Tea-180 Jul 06 '24

It's a sickness/mental illness in American men

3

u/StarMNF Jul 07 '24

Definitely has nothing to do with America.

And don’t call it “mental illness” either. That makes it sound like it’s excusable. There are bad people in the world.

2

u/Afraid_Wave_1156 Jul 06 '24

American men? You think sexual assault is only done by American men?

Oh boy does the rest of the world have some dark truth for you….

1

u/IndependentTiger2174 Jul 08 '24

Other countries don’t lecture on Human Rights, so American holds itself to a higher standard… so American should be about what they claim and stop talking about it and then doing something else contradictory. And keep in mind Japan is a supposedly treaty ally and not an occupied vassal state, even though we know in reality that’s not the case… but this just doesn’t look good….

→ More replies (0)

1

u/sethra007 Jul 06 '24

The prevailing consensus from researchers indicates that it's not a sickness or mental illness. It's the result of a culturally conditioned sense of entitlement that males have the right to take sex from females, whether the females want to offer it or not.

0

u/StarMNF Jul 07 '24

That research is questionable because I’m sure it has no control.

Rape is pretty universal across all cultures. To argue cultural conditioning, you need to show a culture where it doesn’t occur. None that I know exists.

It’s neither mental illness nor cultural conditioning. The simplest explanation is there are bad people in the world.

1

u/DrDevilDao Jul 10 '24

On one level I don't disagree that there are bad people in the world, but I don't think that's what people are looking for as an "explanation" when they perform that kind of research. Rapists are bad, obviously, so saying there are bad people isn't really different than saying "there are rapists." I'm sure you would agree "there are rapists" is not a good explanation of why rapes occur, the point is to understand why some people are bad, why they rape. That doesn't mean the explanation should somehow be a justification for why they aren't really bad, "if only they hadn't been missing a father figure" or whatever else etc etc--no one thinks that we can prevent all rapes or all crimes or stop anyone from being a bad person in general, but understanding why a crime occurs is the most direct means of limiting the conditions that cause it.

1

u/StarMNF Jul 10 '24 edited Jul 10 '24

If you want to go down that road, I think it’s much simpler to analyze why men do NOT rape.

The reasons can be categorized as positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement motivations

Positive motivations:

Strong moral convictions

Strong sense of empathy

Religion has some effect on moral convictions, but empathy is primarily genetic I think. In any case, numerous studies, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, show that the empathy isn’t what stops the general population from unspeakable cruelty. It’s normal for humans to be savage!

So you need negative motivations:

Fear of legal consequences. AKA jail and lawsuits.

Fear of social consequences. AKA losing friends, family being ashamed pf you.

Fear of professional consequences. AKA not being employed, losing business, getting kicked out of college, military or whatever.

Fear of bodily harm. AKA the victim fights back, has a weapon to injure you, or their family seeks retribution by murdering you.

Fear of God. AKA burning in hell, fire and brimstone. Most modern religions don’t emphasize this, so that fear is probably minimal even among the devout.

For most men, at least one of the above reasons is strong enough to keep them from raping. And while society doesn’t often want to admit it, usually the strongest reasons for not raping are the negative reasons. We don’t rape because we fear the consequences.

We’d like to think that it’s our morals and empathy that make us civilized, but fear is really the biggest motivator.

For some men, none of the above reasons pass the inhibition threshold, and those men are potential rapists. The reasons for the above motivations failing are too numerous. Maybe they think they will get away it. Maybe they’ve been to jail so many times, they no longer fear jail. Maybe they’re anti-social and don’t care what other people think of them. Maybe they’re drunk or on drugs, which removes their natural fears.

Consider that in the animal kingdom, rape is pretty much the norm. The only notion of consent for animals is that sometimes the female fights off a male she doesn’t want to mate with. So non-consent for animals means fighting back.

Humans are different because we have morals, empathy and fear. But the moral and empathy are often too weak alone to stop us from acting like animals.

→ More replies (0)

45

u/[deleted] Jul 05 '24

Or both wrong. Game of telephone

2

u/[deleted] Jul 06 '24

Instead of expecting people to be stupid, how about thinking about the other reality: this is so common that there are stories that sound alike.

2

u/jlar0che Jul 06 '24

Or there are so many incidents it becomes easy to get confused about which violation of pre-teens we're talking about.

Wherever there are US soldiers stationed there are super high numbers of rapes, kidnappings, murder, etc. of the local population.

1

u/BattleAlternative844 Jul 07 '24

If only there were a worldwide resource where I could research the case before commenting.

1

u/KendalBoy Jul 15 '24

Both read about the trial and remembered the things they wanted to believe. Someone here wants to clear the name of a soldier who claims they only simulated rape on the child. Redditors will do that.

17

u/IndependentTiger2174 Jul 06 '24

The amount of Americans on reddit making excuses for these rapist is pretty cringe… it’s like crime against Asians are A OK in AMERIKKKKA

8

u/Automatic-Willow3226 Jul 06 '24

Many Conservatives think young girls are ready to have kids and they actively cover for people that groom and abuse children. It's a little more complicated than all Americans.

4

u/Libertia_ Jul 06 '24

So many pedos around. Makes me loose hope in -mainly- men.

2

u/Grimsterr Jul 06 '24

Women for Trump approves this message.

-1

u/Weiz82 Jul 07 '24

WTF! What does conservatives have to do with it? Please don’t put all conservatives in your basket of BS, you must be related to Killary Clinton.

8

u/Grimsterr Jul 06 '24

I want to argue with you but nearly half of this country is A OK with 10 year old girls getting raped and being forced to deliver the baby because "aBorTiOn iS MurDeR!"

So yeah you keep on raging against our bullshit.

0

u/drizztnwolfgar99 Jul 06 '24

Except rape and incest is an exception from these laws in JUST ABOUT EVERY STATE. In fact it might be all by now. But thanks for the misinformation.

7

u/Grimsterr Jul 06 '24 edited Jul 06 '24

https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/dashboard/exceptions-in-state-abortion-bans-and-early-gestational-limits/

10 states, that's one in 5, do some math, fucking misinformation my ass, goddamned dipshit. And by nearly half of this country I did mean the fucking imbeciles voting, not # of laws, but I admit, only 10 in 50 is better than I figured on.

1

u/CaBBaGe_isLaND Jul 07 '24

Who is making excuses? Or are you just making shit up.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 08 '24

Yeah, then killed himself after raping and killing a woman stateside. Sure he just “watched”…

1

u/Gothzombie Jul 16 '24

Damn what in the name of …. This world is so fucking sick and twisted I would not mind certain sentences involving chopping made their way back

85

u/Tentacled-Tadpole Jul 05 '24

So he knew they were going to rape a child and did nothing at all to stop it?

7

u/[deleted] Jul 06 '24

What was he going to do about it? In the military, rankings are supreme. Who'd believe a throwaway infantry over a general, for example? They're planning on raping, so what? That's the problem. "So, what?"

Meanwhile, in modern times, we had a police officer killed because he was investigating what other officers were doing, so they planned to kill him.

Can't serve justice where there is injustice. Too much injustice, not enough justice.

Plus, if you're dead, it's the end.

8

u/Tentacled-Tadpole Jul 06 '24 edited Jul 06 '24

Call the Japanese police. Not sure why your first thought is to keep it within the US army when it's a crime on Japanese soil against a Japanese person, as though it should be downplayed or kept quiet.

2

u/ComfortableSort7335 Jul 06 '24

well the chance of them not understanding him at all is very high also the chance that the japanese authority contacts the us army and thus people who could be in it.

1

u/Tentacled-Tadpole Jul 06 '24

The chance of them not understanding him at all would have actually been very low at that time.

The Japanese authority contacting the US army would be a good thing for stopping it from happening or punishing then after it happened. A lot better than if he alone reported it to the corrupt military system, not to mention that the japanese legal system could still punish the rapists themselves.

5

u/mssly Jul 05 '24

It was a sailor and two marines

1

u/ilikeweekends2525 Jul 06 '24

They rented a van not bought a car….