GIs committed about 350 rapes and assaults against Okinawan women from 1945 to 2011

Evidence

Yumi Tomita’s case was one of around three hundred and fifty rapes, sexual assaults, and other crimes that GIs have committed against Okinawan women between 1945 and 2011, according to documentation compiled by the group Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence. (Since sexual assaults are especially prone to underreporting, this is likely an undercount of the true number of incidents.) The rape of the sixth grader that Yumi mentioned was the most notorious among these. On September 4, 1995, marines Rodrico Harp and Kendric Ledet and Navy seaman Marcus Gill grabbed the twelve-year-old girl at knifepoint off the streets of Kin Town, near the Marine Corps’ Camp Hansen. They threw her in a rental car, taped her eyes and mouth shut, bound her arms and legs, and then repeatedly raped her, discarding her bloodied body when they were finished. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 564

Categorization

• QUESTION: The 1995 rape case is cited as the catalyst for anti-base mobilization in Okinawa — worth verifying what specific political change it produced.