I walk into a local cheap restaurant with my friend, M---oka. It's small and lined with booths, one across the way featuring lifesize replicas of the Sesame Street characters Bert and Cookie Monster (Ernie wasn't favored enough in Japan's televisioning programming to earn a place next to Bert anymore). As we slide into our seats toward the kitchen door, I notice two young girls sitting quietly, pensively even, just a couple of booths away on the side opposite of the entrance. One of them faces directly away from the window. She looks disturbed, perhaps even on the verge of tears, yet subtley so, such that no one in the restaurant other than myself has apparently noticed something is wrong with her. At that moment, I pick up one of the waitresses talking about the girl to the restaurant manager, not far from where M---oka and I are sitting. My brain at first has to make the quick switch to 'Japanese mode' before I can follow, but I quickly come to realize what's going on.
"That girl over there has reported herself a rape case. The rapist appears to be her father," the waitress whispers in an uneven tone.
The manager gives a scowl. "Dame yaro. No good. There's nothing we can do. We mustn't get involved in family affairs."
Without another thought, and while my friend looks at me in awkward confusion as I stand up, I march over to the other side of the room and approach the little girl.
She is so small, can't be over eight years old, yet seems to have accepted the burden of years beyond her time tragic understanding in which only a truely traumatic experience can result. She slowly looks up to me as I lean down next to her. Her hair falls straight down her back, like most Japanese hair but characteristically brown, her eyes shining weakly, as though teasing one to think of them as the entrance to timeless portals to another reality. She is technically still new to this reality.
"Hello," I say. She responds with a quiet hello. I decide to assume for now that she can speak English.
"Did someone hurt you?"
She glances away for a moment then back and gives a brief nod of her head. I can feel the eyes of the waitress and manager finally noticing me from the entrance of the kitchen door. I probably don't have much time.
"Is he here now?"
"Yes," she whispers.
I stand back up again. "Where is he?"
She looks back over her shoulder at the window. She says nothing. I walk outside into the dead, chilled evening air and stand behind a row of cars facing the restaurant. I look at her through the window from that distance and point to the first car. She shakes her head and does again at the second car. As I walk around to the next one, I see it's a blue Lincoln convertible, imported perhaps directly from the States with the driver's steering wheel noticeably kept on the left side. In the seats, laughing and romping in a manner I should have noticed earlier were two men and two women, one of the men still wearing his navy uniform. I look up and see the girl, still unalarmed and pensive, staring at me. The crowd in the car are too high strung and wrapped up in themselves to notice me behind them.
I look at her and point to the man in the backseat. He has characteristically brown hair, just a shade lighter than the girl's, and an even tan. He must be in his late thirties. Through the glass, I see her barely visible nod, accompanied by the frightened eyes of the restaurant workers peeping from the edge of the window pane.
I walk around to the side of the open car and look down at him. He bursts out laughing just at that moment from something someone else said, then follows the finger of the woman with eyes caked in mascara sitting next to him to face me. We look into each other's eyes for a moment, and then, without any premeditation on my part, I begin to punch him. I sock him in the eye and then round him in the jaw. The first hit had apparently been enough to knock him senseless. The other people in the car simply watch in horror, his friend apparently too shocked to try to react to the offense. I look at his face again for a moment and realize he's still conscious enough to probably know what I'm saying. I shout in a voice firm with conviction, "We do NOT rape in this country... We do NOT hurt innocent people in this country!" A fraction of a second passes -- an intense moment of time where I feel both the burning rage I'd already displayed and, at once, a well of deep sorrow for this man and the depravity he has embodied -- before I turn back the way I came into the restaurant.
My friend still sits on his side of the booth motionless when I walk in. Without asking, I take a small plush doll we'd found at a flea market that sits on his backpack and return to the little girl. I lean down again to give it to her, and she smoothly accepts it without a word, holding it to herself, calmly admiring it. The scene I had just made in my first true fit of physical violence slowly creeps back into my awareness, just as the waitress calls out to me.
"O-kyakusama? [Sir?] Denwa desuyo. [You have a phone call.]" She holds the receiver out to me from afar, standingly bravely but still with a tinge of apprehension from the door to the back of the restaurant.
"Moshi moshi? [Hello?]" My voice dulls against the cardboard boxes sitting against the walls in the dimly lit storage room interior. I speak in Japanese, as has become my custom with phone calls from strangers.
"Yes, this is Yamamoto Eri from the headquarters in ------ Town," she recited in her smooth and unsettlingly emotionless Japanese. "Would you please report to the nearest police station for questioning?" The question was of course not anything close to being a request as it was an indirect order.
I paused a second, then replied, "Shall I accompany the other man involved?"
"...Excuse me?"
"I mean, I'm not saying I didn't do anything wrong here, but there were two people involved in this and one of us did something far more reproachable, after all." I realize that no one is watching me, so I walk with the wireless receiver out the back of the restaurant and into the street. I feel my lungs thirsting for air from the cramped molding room.
"...Sir, we can't properly make these decisions over the phone. I assure you that the authorities are doing things by their proper procedure. Would you please make your way to nearest station as soon as possible?"
I turn around at an abrupt noise to see the blue convertible peeling down the street, running from nothing nor no one, away from the scene. It's too far away for me to see if the two little girls are inside or not, though I nonetheless search for that characteristic brown hair in the back seat.
"...Sir? ...Ano.... Hello?" she stutters a bit as she switches to English, no longer containing the air of authority her early monotone had given her. "Let me... Let me help you. I want to help."
The night humidity sits heavily on my chest, seeming to cling to everything around me. It's heavy yet utterly ineffective.
"Listen, ma'am." My abrupt American manner breaks through in the switch to English. "You wanna help me? You can start by doing your job, dammit. Stop making people like me have to take over where you guys are failing. Your government's the one that allows bastards like the guy I hit to stay in this country, and then pays the media to display their offenses as though they're distinctive of all Americans, or all foreigners even. It's sick. You wanna help me? You guys really wanna help me? Wake UP!"
I hit the off button and take a moment for myself in the dead atmosphere of the city's outskirt buildings and shops. Down the street, a couple of trees limp pitifully from their concrete and woodchip holes in the sidewalk. A line of salarymen step out of a part Pachinko arcade, part bar facility even farther down the way, their ties hanging around each other's necks and reddened foreheads, shouting and laughing. It'll be another couple of hours before they return home to their families, perhaps grabbing the newest stranger-girl voyeur magazine on the way home for reading on the train.
I take three slow breaths and head back toward the concrete figure of the restaurant.
US marine held over Japan rape
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Sgt Tyrone Luther Hadnott, from Camp Courtney base, is alleged to have raped the local girl in a parked car.
The 38-year-old denies the accusation but has admitted to forcibly kissing the girl. He has not been charged.
About 20,000 US troops are based on the southern Japanese island, and relations are tense after previous prosecutions for crimes committed against locals.more...
New US rape allegation in Okinawa
| By Chris Hogg BBC News, Tokyo |
Another US military serviceman has been detained over an alleged sexual assault on Japan's southern island of Okinawa. 
In the latest of a string of incidents involving US troops, the man is accused of raping a Filipino woman at a hotel.
The alleged rape happened before a 24-hour curfew was imposed on US troops, their families and civilians working for the military on Okinawa.
The focus on crime by military personnel in recent days is affecting relations between Japan and the US.more...
A Sneaky Attack on Japan
The Once-Rising Sun Hasn't Set Yet
By: Paul J. Scalise
more...