Word: serviceman
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...ladies, they're all beee-auuu-tiful." There's a difference between viewing the ladies as delectable temptations, though, and viewing them as a free buffet course. "A young, dumb guy can get to thinking they're there for the taking," says Ray Fernandez, 33, a black former serviceman with 15 years in Okinawa...
...local police receive a call from the woman's friend. Soon, blue-uniformed officers are pacing the parking lot. Short, the bar manager, has just closed up and is puzzled by the crowd gathering outside. "What's up?" he asks a serviceman...
...incident instantly became a lead television news story, another point of contention in U.S.-Japan relations, and a disturbing metaphor for how the two countries coexist. With 25,203 U.S. servicemen stationed in Okinawa, there is a depressing predictability to the news cycle surrounding a serviceman's being accused of raping a native woman: outrage by the Okinawans, expressed concern by the American military, formal protest by the Japanese government, and finally, an indictment and trial of another flyboy or marine...
...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 unmentioned beneath it all?an undercurrent of racism...
...That his case has become a focal point for U.S.-Japan relations bodes badly for Woodland, as does continuing media coverage of subsequent stupid escapades by servicemen. Over a single steamy week in late July, one U.S. serviceman in Okinawa fired a BB gun at pizza-delivery boys, another tipped over a stranger's motor scooter, another set fire to a car and a Lance Corporal Marine got sentenced to five years in Japanese prison for repeated arson attacks on stores...