Japan: American soldiers subject to curfew in Okinawa after the murder of a woman attributed to a marine

American forces in the Okinawa department of Japan were banned from drinking alcohol for 48 hours on Wednesday and will be subject to a curfew for 30 days following the murder of a woman for which a US marine is suspected. The case has sparked outrage in Japan, where crimes involving American soldiers have long fueled criticism of the presence of these troops.

Benjamin T. Watson, Okinawa area coordinator and commander of the III Marine Expeditionary Force, announced a “total ban on the consumption of alcohol on bases or off” for 48 hours starting this Wednesday. He said this period would provide time to conduct training for the entire military on "standards, discipline and our responsibilities as members of the Okinawan community."

The lieutenant general, the top US military official in Okinawa, also announced a 30-day “cooling off period” starting Friday, with a curfew between midnight and 5 a.m. Police said Sunday that a U.S. Marine stationed in Okinawa was arrested on suspicion of killing a 39-year-old woman at a hotel in the city of Naha and stealing her wallet. According to local media, she was strangled. The marine denies the charges against him.

The United States has about 54,000 military personnel stationed in Japan, mainly in Okinawa, and crimes committed by American service members have long been a source of tension in the security relationship between the two close allies. On Wednesday, the governor of Okinawa, the southernmost island of the Japanese archipelago, went to Tokyo to express his emotion to Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. “This theft followed by a murder deeply shocked the inhabitants, and it is urgent to reduce the weight linked to the American bases,” declared Genta Koja, without giving more details on what he envisages.

Before that, he met with Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi. “The departmental government has repeatedly asked the American army to take measures to prevent such events from happening again, but the fact that such an incident has occurred again leads us to the conclusion that the discipline within the American forces and their education in human rights are absolutely not working,” he reported to the minister. Mr. Koizumi said he wanted to “advance discussions with the United States on how to implement effective measures” to prevent such incidents from happening again.

Last year, a Japanese court sentenced a U.S. marine to seven years in prison accused of strangling a woman in her 20s and attempting to rape her. In 2017, a former Marine, a civilian employee on a military base, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape and murder of an Okinawan resident. The same year, US forces in Japan banned all personnel from consuming alcohol after an intoxicated US Marine crashed his vehicle into a small truck, killing its driver, a 61-year-old resident.