Word: raping
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...rape, he's told...
...truth is just as maddeningly irrelevant. No one but Woodland and the woman he was with knows what exactly went on that night. Both parties' allegations are firm, if irreconcilable: she says rape, he says consensual sex. Ideally, the case would come down to police work, lawyers' arguments, witness testimony and an impartial judiciary. But this is Okinawa in 2001, and a black American serviceman stands accused of raping a Japanese woman. Which means an already murky case has been churned into a raging whirl by nationalist politics, screaming media, a half-century of dammed-up local grief and?roiling...
...rest of the world, the central question of the trial seems clear: did Timothy Woodland rape her, or didn't he? But in Okinawa, nothing is ever so simple...
...Both racism and sexism are relevant because they may dictate this case. Still, the media tries to pretend otherwise. In the days immediately following the rape charge, most news outlets didn't report on the race of the accused. Some Western journalists did, but they didn't note that his accuser was almost certainly a kokujo and that the nightclub culture around the Okinawan bases is almost as segregated as the Jim Crow South. When off duty, most military personnel tend to congregate according to race. The clubs that black servicemen frequent are also the haunts of kokujo. Of course...
...Powell, on a visit in mid-July, flatly refused. Outrage mounted to a point that it seemed almost an offering to better U.S.-Japan relations when the Air Force did, eventually, give Woodland up. Staff Sergeant Woodland was arrested July 6, a week after the incident, and indicted on rape charges 15 days later...