{"id":18733,"date":"2013-03-14T09:31:44","date_gmt":"2013-03-14T17:31:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=18733"},"modified":"2013-03-14T19:16:24","modified_gmt":"2013-03-15T03:16:24","slug":"us-airman-in-japan-charged-with-beating-teenage-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/14\/us-airman-in-japan-charged-with-beating-teenage-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"US Airman in Japan Charged With Beating Teenage Girl"},"content":{"rendered":"

An American airman at the US military base in Okinawa, Japan has been suspended for one year<\/a> after pleading guilty to breaking into a Japanese home, ransacking the place, and punching a teenage girl in the face while she was sleeping. He had been drinking heavily, according to reports.<\/p>\n

\"US

US Marines training in Okinawa, Japan<\/p><\/div>\n

The\u00a0delinquency by US troops stationed in Japan is appalling. Between 1972 and 2009,\u00a0there were 5,634 criminal offenses committed by US servicemen<\/a>, including 25 murders, 385 burglaries, 25 arsons, 127 rapes, 306 assaults and 2,827 thefts.\u00a0Last October<\/a>, “two US servicemen were arrested on suspicion of gang-raping a Japanese woman in Okinawa.”<\/p>\n

Tens of thousands of US troops have been stationed in Japan since WWII, and the local population has been firmly against the occupation with frequent protests urging their removal.\u00a0Up to\u00a085% of the Okinawan population wants US troops out. Not only do they not want to be occupied by a foreign military, but they\u2019re fed up with the outrageous behavior of the American Marines.<\/p>\n

Japanese leaders can\u2019t submit to the will of the people on this issue for obvious reasons: the mafia don in Washington won\u2019t allow it. \u201cIn 2010, Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama pledged to relocate the U.S. base, then\u00a0backtracked<\/a>\u00a0under US pressure,\u201d\u00a0reports<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>. \u201cOutraged Okinawans staged public protests, demonstrations spread to Tokyo, Hatoyama\u2019s approval rating plummeted to 25 percent and he\u00a0resigned<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seemingly in order to placate the Japanese, Washington pledged last year to\u00a0relocate about 9,000 US Marines from their bases in Okinawa, with about 5,000 transferred to Guam and the rest spread among other locations in the region. This coincided with Obama’s Asia-Pivot, an unconcealed policy of military containment of China that requires boosting US presence in the region.\u00a0The deadline for the adjustment was 2014.<\/p>\n

But now the US is saying the transfer might take up to 13 years<\/a>. So, basically, it isn’t happening.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the Japanese people will continue to be ignored by Washington and terrorized by US soldiers for the sake of US power projection in China’s backyard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An American airman at the US military base in Okinawa, Japan has been suspended for one year after pleading guilty to breaking into a Japanese home, ransacking the place, and punching a teenage girl in the face while she was sleeping. He had been drinking heavily, according to reports. The\u00a0delinquency by US troops stationed in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-18733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18733"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18758,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18733\/revisions\/18758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18733"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=18733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}