Japan, U.S. patrol Okinawa streets after sexual assaults
The United States has around 54,000 military personnel stationed in Japan, mostly on the southern island of Okinawa, and their behaviour has long angered locals.
A 21-year-old U.S. Marine was charged with rape in June last year, three months after Okinawa prosecutors had charged a 25-year-old U.S. soldier for allegedly assaulting a girl under 16.
In the first such joint operation since 1973, participants walked along a downtown street dotted with restaurants, bars and music clubs in the vicinity of a U.S. airbase on Friday night.
The U.S. military, which proposed the patrol, said in a statement it reflects "our continued commitment to partnership, accountability and mutual respect."
It will contribute "to the safety and trust that are essential to the strength of the U.S.-Japan alliance", said Lt. Gen. Roger Turner, commanding general of the III Marine Expeditionary Force and Okinawa Area Coordinator.
The patrol continued until the early hours of the following morning.
Rules about how to treat crimes committed by U.S. military personnel are stipulated in the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement.
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said when he took office in October that he wanted to review the rules.
The 1995 gang rape of a 12-year-old girl by three U.S. soldiers in Okinawa prompted a major backlash — with calls for a rethink of the 1960 pact allowing the United States to station soldiers in Japan.
The joint patrol also comes as Tokyo and Washington continue efforts to strengthen their alliance, partly in response to China's military build-up.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NHK
18 minutes ago
- NHK
Over 300 memorandums between Japan and African nations eyed at TICAD
The Japanese government and companies plan to exchange more than 300 memorandums with their counterparts from Africa who are visiting Japan to attend the Tokyo International Conference on African Development, or TICAD. The Japan-led conference will take place over three days from Wednesday in Yokohama, near Tokyo. Sources say the Japanese government and firms plan to sign the memorandums with their partners from Africa in a bid to deepen relations with them. Some of them are designed to help the governments of African nations import Japanese products in seven fields, such as healthcare and agriculture. Japanese financial institutions will provide loans to governments in Africa via the African Export-Import Bank. Insurance companies affiliated with the Japanese government are to underwrite the loans to facilitate the transactions. In one case, the Kenyan government is expected to obtain a loan insured for hundreds of millions dollars so that it can be used as a subsidy to promote investments from Japanese automakers and others. Africa, with its growing population, is viewed as a growth market amid uncertainty for the outlook for Japanese exports due to the Trump administration's tariff measures.
Kyodo News
18 minutes ago
- Kyodo News
Fatal explosion at U.S. Steel's plant raises questions about its future, despite heavy investment
HARRISBURG, Pa. - The fatal explosion last week at U.S. Steel's Pittsburgh-area coal-processing plant has revived debate about its future just as the iconic American company was emerging from a long period of uncertainty. The fortunes of steelmaking in the U.S. — along with profits, share prices and steel prices — have been buoyed by years of friendly administrations in Washington that slapped tariffs on foreign imports and bolstered the industry's anti-competitive trade cases against China. Most recently, President Donald Trump's administration postponed new hazardous air pollution requirements for the nation's roughly dozen coke plants, like Clairton, and he approved U.S. Steel's nearly $15 billion acquisition by Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel. Nippon Steel's promised infusion of cash has brought vows that steelmaking will continue in the Mon Valley, a river valley south of Pittsburgh long synonymous with steelmaking. 'We're investing money here. And we wouldn't have done the deal with Nippon Steel if we weren't absolutely sure that we were going to have an enduring future here in the Mon Valley," David Burritt, U.S. Steel's CEO, told a news conference the day after the explosion. 'You can count on this facility to be around for a long, long time.' Will the explosion change anything? The explosion killed two workers and hospitalized 10 with a blast so powerful that it took hours to find two missing workers beneath charred wreckage and rubble. The cause is under investigation. The plant is considered the largest coking operation in North America and, along with a blast furnace and finishing mill up the Monongahela River, is one of a handful of integrated steelmaking operations left in the U.S. The explosion now could test Nippon Steel's resolve in propping up the nearly 110-year-old Clairton plant, or at least force it to spend more than it had anticipated. Nippon Steel didn't respond to a question as to whether the explosion will change its approach to the plant. Rather, a spokesperson for the company said its 'commitment to the Mon Valley remains strong' and that it sent 'technical experts to work with the local teams in the Clairton Plant, and to provide our full support.' Meanwhile, Burritt said he had talked to top Nippon Steel officials after the explosion and that 'this facility and the Mon Valley are here to stay.' U.S. Steel officials maintain that safety is their top priority and that they spend $100 million a year on environmental compliance at Clairton alone. However, repairing Clairton could be expensive, an investigation into the explosion could turn up more problems, and an official from the United Steelworkers union said it's a constant struggle to get U.S. Steel to invest in its plants. Besides that, production at the facility could be affected for some time. The plant has six batteries of ovens and two — where the explosion occurred — were damaged. Two others are on a reduced production schedule because of the explosion. There is no timeline to get the damaged batteries running again, U.S. Steel said. Accidents are nothing new at Clairton Accidents are nothing new at Clairton, which heats coal to high temperatures to make coke, a key component in steelmaking, and produces combustible gases as byproducts. An explosion in February injured two workers. Even as Nippon Steel was closing the deal in June, a breakdown at the plant dealt three days of a rotten egg odor into the air around it from elevated hydrogen sulfide emissions, the environmental group GASP reported. The Breathe Project, a public health organization, said U.S. Steel has been forced to pay $57 million in fines and settlements since Jan. 1, 2020, for problems at the Clairton plant. A lawsuit over a Christmas Eve fire at the Clairton plant in 2018 that saturated the area's air for weeks with sulfur dioxide produced a withering assessment of conditions there. An engineer for the environmental groups that sued wrote that he 'found no indication that U.S. Steel has an effective, comprehensive maintenance program for the Clairton plant.' The Clairton plant, he wrote, is "inherently dangerous because of the combination of its deficient maintenance and its defective design." U.S. Steel settled, agreeing to spend millions on upgrades. Matthew Mehalik, executive director of the Breathe Project, said U.S. Steel has shown more willingness to spend money on fines, lobbying the government and buying back shares to reward shareholders than making its plants safe. Will Clairton be modernized? It's not clear whether Nippon Steel will change Clairton. Central to Trump's approval of the acquisition was Nippon Steel's promises to invest $11 billion into U.S. Steel's aging plants and to give the federal government a say in decisions involving domestic steel production, including plant closings. But much of the $2.2 billion that Nippon Steel has earmarked for the Mon Valley plants is expected to go toward upgrading the finishing mill, or building a new one. For years before the acquisition, U.S. Steel had signaled that the Mon Valley was on the chopping block. That left workers there uncertain whether they'd have jobs in a couple years and whispering that U.S. Steel couldn't fill openings because nobody believed the jobs would exist much longer. Relics of steelmaking's past In many ways, U.S. Steel's Mon Valley plants are relics of steelmaking's past. In the early 1970s, U.S. steel production led the world and was at an all-time high, thanks to 62 coke plants that fed 141 blast furnaces. Nobody in the U.S. has opened a new blast furnace in decades, as foreign competition devastated the American steel industry and coal fell out of favor. Now, China is dominant in steel and heavily invested in coal-based steelmaking. In the U.S., there are barely a dozen coke plants and blast furnaces left, as the country's steelmaking has shifted to cheaper electric arc furnaces that use electricity, not coal. Blast furnaces won't entirely go away, analysts say, since they produce metals that are preferred by automakers, appliance makers and oil and gas exploration firms. Still, Christopher Briem, an economist at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Social and Urban Research, questioned whether the Clairton plant really will survive much longer, given its age and condition. It could be particularly vulnerable if the economy slides into recession or the fundamentals of the American steel market shift, he said. 'I'm not quite sure it's all set in stone as people believe,' Briem said. 'If the market does not bode well for U.S. Steel, for American steel, is Nippon Steel really going to keep these things?'
Japan Times
2 hours ago
- Japan Times
80 years on: Tokyo prospers while local revitalization still insufficient
After its devastation in World War II, Tokyo saw a rapid population inflow in the 1960s on the back of Japan's strong economic recovery, and some 14 million people now live in the Japanese capital. Meanwhile, the Japanese government in fiscal 2015 started to work on a comprehensive strategy for local revitalization to help stem depopulation in regional areas and rev up their economies. As the population concentration in Tokyo has accelerated since then, however, the government began to take a different approach in the current fiscal 2025 in anticipation of a population decline. Experts stress the importance of setting up a system in which industrial resources are circulated locally in order to create a sustainable society. World War II claimed the lives of about 3.1 million people, including civilians. Large cities were hit by heavy air raids by the Allied powers, and the population of Tokyo fell to 3.49 million in 1945, when the war ended, from 7.35 million in 1940. After the postwar turmoil subsided, Japan entered a period of strong economic expansion, backed by the growth of steelmakers, machinery makers and other heavy industries. Industrial cities that were scattered around the country gradually declined, while functions to control factories that mass-produce automobiles, household appliances and other products were concentrated in urban cities. According to internal affairs ministry data based on the basic resident register, the Tokyo metropolitan area logged a record net population inflow of 388,000 in 1962. Other areas recorded a net population decrease of 651,000 in 1961. As urban overcrowding became a problem, the second cabinet of then Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda drew up a plan in 1962 to promote the relocation of factories to regional areas. Economic turmoil caused by the oil crises in the 1970s and the collapse of the speculation-driven bubble economy in the early 1990s temporarily curbed population inflows into urban areas. Naohiko Jinno, honorary professor at the University of Tokyo, said: "The oil crises were a warning that the era of the heavy industries was over. However, Japan did not change its industrial structure, with companies moving their factories overseas in search of cheap labor and control functions being concentrated in Tokyo as a result." In fiscal 2015, the cabinet of then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe launched a regional revitalization program featuring measures to promote migrations to regional areas in an effort to halt the concentration in Tokyo and a drop in Japan's population. But the situation is serious. According to the internal affairs ministry, Japan's population stood at 120.65 million as of January this year, down by 900,000 from a year before. Of Japan's 47 prefectures, only Tokyo continues to enjoy population growth. A senior Cabinet Secretariat official said, "We may not have faced up to the scenario that the country's population would decrease so rapidly." Learning lessons from this, the government of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba adopted in June this year a basic concept for the Regional Revitalization 2.0 initiative. Measures in the initiative will be implemented over the next 10 years to make sure that local communities continue to exist even if the population continues to decline. Through the initiative, the government aims to double the proportion of young people moving out of the Tokyo area to rural areas and increase the connected population, or nonresidents who steadily interact with regional areas, to a total of 100 million. Jinno said, "People who know well about their own communities must think about how to develop the areas," rather than attracting factories that have nothing to do with the regions. "The risk of war will become very high if confrontations between countries increase and military buildups create a very tense situation," Jinno said, expressing concern over countries' possible tilting to the right. "Life will be threatened by global events unless each region creates a society in which life and industries circulate," he warned.
