Sex Crime Perpetrators Linked to U.S. Military in 166 Cases in Japan over 35 years; Local, Prefectural Governments Often Not Aware of Crimes

The Yomiuri Shimbun

1:00 JST, July 21, 2024

There have been 166 cases where U.S. servicemen and those connected to the U.S. military in Japan were charged with sex crimes, from 1989 to May this year, according to the National Police Agency.

The prefectural police headquarters decide whether the cases are made public, so it is not known how many were shared with local governments accommodating U.S. bases or other military facilities.

According to the NPA, those charged were soldiers, civilian employees and their family members and.

By crime category, 91 cases fall under the crime of nonconsensual intercourse, formerly called rape or forcible sexual intercourse, and 75 cases were indecency without consent, formerly termed indecency through compulsion.

Since 2014, prefectural police charged U.S. soldiers and others related to the military in the prefectures of Aomori, Iwate, Saitama, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Fukuoka, Nagasaki and Okinawa.

The Okinawa prefectural police had 16 cases, the Metropolitan Police Department of Tokyo had 14, the Yamaguchi prefectural police had four and the Kanagawa prefectural police had three.

Regarding the problem that the Okinawa prefectural government was not notified of sex crimes committed by people connected to the U.S. military, The Yomiuri Shimbun’s research found that local governments in other prefectures that have U.S. military facilities were not made aware of the crimes.

In Aomori Prefecture, there were two cases that were not made public. In both, soldiers from the U.S. base in Misawa were referred to prosecutors but were not indicted.

The prefectural police said that making such cases public is judged after carefully considering the privacy of the victims and how large the impact on society would be.

The prefectural and Misawa city governments said that the central government did not notify them of the crimes in both cases.

The Kanagawa prefectural government also said such information had not been shared by the central government. “If [the central government] had information about such cases, we demand improvement of the situation,” said a prefectural government official.