In March 1996, three US servicemen stationed in Okinawa were convicted of the abduction and sexual assault of a 12-year-old Japanese girl. It was the first time the US military prosecuted any of its soldiers since they first occupied the island in the 1940s. This is despite the fact that Japanese activists had protested both the occupation itself, and the apparent impunity of the servicemen since one of them raped a six-year-old girl in 1955.

Those three servicemen all pleaded guilty to various charges associated with the assault. This caused ripples in a military known to be myopically protective of its own at all costs. ‘Everything from a traffic violation to rape resulted in the same verdict: innocent,’ said Okinawan feminist Nobuko Karimata in the book Women of Okinawa. The three soldiers were clearly considered expendable, a small sacrifice to make in order to placate an increasingly frustrated and fed-up population. This could have been seen as a victory, a sign of a military finally taking the sexual assault of women seriously. Except for one thing: all three soldiers were black.