Okinawan rape: the backlash begins?
Two small but significant stories to report today for you all, and both might be a little from what you were expecting. The reason is that both events were directed against Americans by Japanese. Last night (Friday) one Japanese woman was in her husband’s Y-plate car (I should explain; all cars registered to the military here in Okinawa have a “Y” prefix before the number) parked in Naha. She was waiting for her friend I believe when a few Japanese people were walking along and pointed towards their car. Paint was then thrown at the car in question before the perpetrators ran away. The girl was understandably shaken by the event. And then one of my friends has seen his neighbours car get pelted with stones while he was in the house. Both incidents were reported to the police who came and promptly told them there was nothing they could do.
Japan Update (that wonderful bastion of Okinawa news!) is now reporting that, “Hadnott, a 38-year-old Marine staff sergeant assigned to Camp Courtney, has told police “I do confess for what I did to the girl, but I didn’t know she was so young…the girl didn’t like for me to touch her”" (full story here). Firstly, the story insinuates that Hadnott has admitted to raping the girl, but this has not happened, and as I reported earlier the deputy prosecutor has said that no sex has occurred. My main gripe with this particular story is the way they use quotes to mark what Hadnott has said. I can’t be positive, but I’d be willing to stake a large amount of my savings that he has not said what is in quotation marks in this article. He may have said words to that effect, but there’s a lot of difference between indirect speech and direct speech.
Well those are Saturday’s updates. More to come as it comes in.
or Discuss this Article
Add me to your list as well. I was driving home to Nishihara near the San A last night around 5pm and parked my car in my parking lot which can be seen from the San A. About 5:30pm a group of youths who had seen me pulling in earlier started to converge and started rocking my K car back and forth. I ran out and confronted them and they started yelling racist anti-American rhetoric at me. I called the police immediately, they came and they stated no crime had occured and since I am not Japanese I must have misunderstood their Japanese racist remarks. Everyone left and now I wonder if my car will be safe tonight since the police did nothing.
Mark - I’m really sorry to hear about your bad experience. It seems like some people are just using what has allegedly happened as an excuse to show their true feelings against the American presence in Okinawa. We know it’s just the minority who feel like this, but the problem is the majority don’t really care either way what happens.