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Marines in Japan living a new, limited life

OKINAWA, Japan — It’s 8:30 on a Friday night, and the neon-lit streets and sidewalks of American Village are splashed with flashing lights from the large ferris wheel that anchors the U.S.-styled outdoor mall in Chatan Town.

Young couples holding hands dash across the street. Schoolgirls dart into some of the shops. Diners occupy all the stools at a conveyor-belt sushi eatery, while nearby, a few teenagers sip drinks outside a Starbucks café.

Inside the Double Decker, a small bar and restaurant, Kazuyuki Tomihama worked behind the stately wooden bar. Several locals seated in thick cushioned seats chatted quietly. But on this weekend, few Americans stepped up to the bar for one of his artfully decorated drinks.

Despite the name, very few Marines, sailors or other U.S. service members stationed on this island visited American Village, most skipping dining, shopping and hanging out in its neighborhood bars because of stricter rules dictating off-duty liberty.

A 10 p.m. curfew in effect at the time deterred many service members from venturing outside the confines of the military bases here to enjoy a meal or shop. Under existing rules, those of legal drinking age are banned from drinking alcohol anywhere except on base.

The restrictions, slightly eased in early April to a midnight curfew — also known as “Cinderella liberty” — has forced many service members to stay on base for nighttime entertainment on this island nearly 1,000 miles south of Tokyo.

The red-felt pool tables at the Globe & Anchor drew Lance Cpl. Josh Rippel and a few buddies to the enlisted club at Camp Foster that Saturday night. If they wanted to hit a local club or pool hall out in one of Okinawa’s popular districts, they’d have to skip the beer and return to base just as their local peers would be getting ready for a night out.

“Before, we’d go out and stay out in town,” said Rippel, 23, a motor vehicle operator with Combat Logistics Battalion 4. “I try to go out and find different places to eat,” including the popular curry houses that serve variations of the Okinawan dish.

He and a friend, Pfc. Charlie Callaway, 21, sipped beers between matches around the pool table, which drew several contenders, including Pfc. Angel Vega, 21, a basic water support technician. Vega, decked out in a Chicago Bears jersey, smiled and winced at his play as he and Rippel stepped around the table.

“We’re here a lot more than we did before,” Callaway said of the club. “We can’t do anything we did off base because of the curfew.”

If they were back in the states, they wouldn’t have to plan their nighttime fun within the confining box of Japan liberty rules. But here, officials say, liberty matters most.

Liberty rules

Top Marine and Navy commanders here defend the restrictions and liberty policies as necessary measures to ensure and encourage good behavior and avoid any trouble outside the base or involving locals, to protect the delicate relationship with the Japanese government.

Outside of Iraq, Japan has the largest concentration of forward-deployed Marines and sailors. The military presence bolsters the U.S.-Japan security alliance that dates back to post-World War II, but there are pockets of vocal opposition to the U.S. military presence on Okinawa, where the U.S. military is the third-largest local employer.

A spate of recent incidents, including allegations of rape by U.S. service members and armed robbery by dependent teenagers, set off the loudest protest here in recent years. The most serious accusations were of rape: one case involves a staff sergeant who allegedly assaulted a teenage girl, while another involves four Marines who allegedly gang-raped a woman.

In Yokosuka, a naval base near the entrance to Tokyo Bay that’s home to the Navy’s 7th Fleet, the fatal stabbing of a cab driver, allegedly by a sailor, drew strong protest from Japanese officials and prompted Navy officials to impose a curfew and ban alcohol consumption.

The restrictions in Okinawa were the strictest ever imposed.

“I think our presence out in town, off base, became in itself an issue,” said Lt. Gen. Richard Zilmer, the senior military officer on Okinawa, during an interview at his Camp Courtney office.

A “vocal minority” and “a very, very anti-base media” pressed their complaints, at times portraying U.S. service members as criminals and thugs, said Zilmer, who commands III Marine Expeditionary Force and Marine Corps Bases-Japan and serves as the Okinawa Area Coordinator. He laid down the law, at one point prohibiting all military personnel, their dependents and anyone else who falls under Status of Forces Agreement rules in Japan from venturing off base.

Zilmer called for a “cooling off” period of reflection and review of policies that govern conduct, ethics, alcohol abuse and relationships with locals.

“We can never afford to have any incidents happen out in town,” he said. “That has changed dramatically” since the 1970s. Back then, in a society considered among the safest in the world, off-base incidents didn’t draw as much venomous press as today.

This spring saw the return of uniformed “courtesy” patrols in Okinawa — Navy officials in Yokosuka also beefed up patrols there — and saw new agreements among bar, club and restaurant owners in Okinawa to ban underage drinking, limit alcohol promotions and allow entry to the patrols. Officials expanded their orientation briefs for newcomers.

“We want to make sure that everyone — everyone — understands the political implications of bad behavior here in Okinawa,” Zilmer said.

“They need to understand what’s at stake when they go outside the gates. It’s not just going out to Oceanside, it’s not going out to Jacksonville. They are going out into another nation, and there are great expectations that they will represent the United States and their services,” he said. “We can’t afford any mistakes out there.”

Japan history and sensitivities

The U.S. military relationship with residents and elected officials in Okinawa, especially, is considered more fragile and the most sensitive.

For five centuries, Okinawans lived as part of the Ryukyu kingdom, an archipelago stretching south from Japan’s Kyushu island to Taiwan, until 1879, when Japan overthrew the emperor, abolished the kingdom and merged it into the prefecture. By early 1944, Japanese military occupied the islands and mobilized Okinawans, forcing many to build airfields from farmlands and turned ancestral tombs into military fortifications to fight the United States and allies during World War II. That fall, U.S. air raids against Japanese forces, which survivors called the “typhoon of steel,” caused hundreds of casualties among Okinawans.

The Battle of Okinawa, which began in the spring of 1945, resulted in 12,250 Americans and 92,000 Japanese troops killed, along with 94,000 Okinawans caught up in the fighting, some plunging to their deaths from coastal cliffs for fear of rape and torture. Many older Okinawans remember the battle and the transition from their more agrarian roots.

To this day, many Okinawans consider themselves Okinawans first, Japanese second. Some retain grudges against the central government, recalling “that Japan would sacrifice Okinawa to protect the mainland,” said Carmela A. Conroy, deputy principal officer at the U.S. Consulate General office in Naha, Okinawa’s prefecture capital.

“Okinawans were horribly transformed by their war experiences and even brutality by the Japanese,” Conroy said. “They really are treated like third-class or even fourth-class citizens.”

The United States returned Japan to local control in 1952, and its economy flourished. But Okinawa stayed under U.S. control until 1972. “This, too, is a great sense of complaint for Okinawans,” she noted. “People in their 40s remember the occupation.”

Officials and observers say that vocal anti-U.S. or military sentiments, even by elected officials, should be viewed through the lens of Japanese politics. These include local conservatives who support the U.S.-Japan alliance but also placate their constituents who want less or no military presence and reformists who oppose having even Japan’s self-defense forces on the island.

The anti-military drumbeat continues in local newspapers. While prompting the stricter liberty rules and restrictions, the recent incidents haven’t drawn the sort of huge protests last seen in 1995, when two Marines and a sailor were charged with and later convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl. Small protests remain, with some locals paid by left-wing groups opposed to the U.S. bases.

Zero tolerance

In Japanese and Okinawan society, U.S. service members are regarded highly, like police and other authorities deemed worthy of respect, which, in turn, means higher expectations of behavior and trust. Alleged crimes are few relative to the larger population of U.S. service members here, but a single incident can fuel opposition and backlash.

“There are national political implications of even one service member acting out in town,” Zilmer said. “And it’s larger than just the service members,” noting that the rules include civilian contractors and other SOFA-status personnel.

Zilmer and other leaders often talk and meet with local officials in a continual effort to build and hold their trust.

“This relationship is very, very fragile here with the local community,” he said. “I do not take that for granted.

“There is an alliance that’s at stake here, the mutual treaty that we’ve had in Japan since 1960,” he said, adding that the most-recent rape allegation “has drawn us all close to the edge.”

At the same time, top leaders know they must justify the broad restrictions on a population of service members, most of whom avoid trouble and follow the rules. Restrictions seem illogical to many, who say they’re unfairly punished along with the wrongdoers. But officials believe most understand it’s necessary in Japan.

“I think 99.9 percent of our Marines do not cause trouble,” said Col. Russell I. Jones, who commands 1,300 members of Headquarters and Service Battalion at Marine Corps Base Camp Smedley D. Butler in Okinawa. “I think they get it.”

“Here, everything is magnified,” Jones said. “The balancing act that General Zilmer has ... is how to do everything we can that is reasonable and gets the numbers as low as possible.”