Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

Five months later, the remaining Kinjo family sued Padilla and the two marine co-owners of the car in the Naha District Court for sixty-two million yen (about $580,000) as a solatium to compensate them for the emotional losses due to the deaths of their relatives. The payment of a solatium in the case of accidents of all kinds is an essential and longaccepted part of Japanese culture. None of the defendants appeared at the trial, one having already left for the United States (the average tour of duty for American service personnel in Okinawa is only six months). In December, the court ordered Padilla and her two codefendants to pay the sum requested, but the second codefendant had by then also left Japan and was untraceable. Padilla had neither savings nor insurance. Ultimately the U.S. military paid the family twenty-five million yen (40 percent of the total) but extracted from them, in return, a statement that this was a gift from the U.S. government and that the family in accepting it gave up any further claims against the United States. At this point, the Japanese government paid the remaining thirty-seven million yen to the victims’ family.

It was noted that at the time of the accident the driver was neither arrested nor checked to see if she was drunk but was instead transported to a military hospital. This was, of course, only one of just over a thousand auto accidents each year in Okinawa involving U.S. service personnel (slightly under two thousand for Japan as a whole), and it was quite typical in that American drivers normally do not have insurance (or at least not enough) and have often left Japan by the time Okinawan victims catch up to them in court.

Not until after the rape incident of September 1995, as part of an effort to reduce the American “footprint” in Okinawa (as Secretary of Defense Perry called it) and fifty-one years after their arrival in Okinawa, did American military cars and trucks begin to carry license plates. Prior to that Okinawans usually had no way of identifying a vehicle that collided with theirs or injured them. It took the “sacrifice of a schoolgirl,” noted the Okinawa Times, to achieve any progress at all in making “good neighbors” out of the Americans.¹⁶ There are still about fifteen thousand licensed drivers at Kadena Air Force Base and another twenty-five thousand affiliated with the marines on Okinawa, including service personnel and Department of Defense civilians, teachers, and dependents, who also pay specially reduced automobile taxes. By one estimate, were they to pay at Japanese rates, the incomes of the Okinawan prefectural government and the Tokyo municipal government would increase by ¥250 million and ¥200 million respectively.

In February 1996, a month after the Padilla case, a nineteen-year-old on a motor scooter was struck and killed by a car driven by a U.S. Navy chief petty officer. The young man’s father, Daisuke Ebihara, a mainland schoolteacher, described the callous attitudes of U.S. military representatives to a reporter for the Japan Times. “Nobody . . . attended the funeral or sent a telegram or wreath of condolence. And a Japanese working for the U.S. military phoned my wife and urged us not to engage a lawyer, saying it would be cheaper. Even before I got to the hospital, they were telling me ‘we will decide how much compensation you get.’ ”¹⁷ An American spokesman, Major Kevin Krejcarek, admitted that the U.S. forces had not properly understood how to handle the custom of a solatium in Japanese culture. This prompted Dr. Robert Orr of Nippon Motorola and the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan to comment that there is something wrong when a military that has occupied Okinawa for half a century has never heard of such a basic aspect of local judicial custom.