Japan Press Weekly

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2016 June 1 - 7 [US FORCES]

Drunken US sailor causes car accidents despite ‘tightened official discipline’

The Okinawa prefectural police on June 5 arrested a U.S. servicewoman who drove under the influence of alcohol and collided with other vehicles. This shows that the “strict official discipline” being enforced by the U.S. military in Japan is not working at all.

At around 11:40 p.m. on June 4, a 21-year-old U.S. Navy sailor, Aimee Mejia, drove the wrong way on a national road in Kadena Town while drunk and crashed into two cars one after the other. The driver of the car she hit first, a 35-year-old Japanese woman, broke her breastbone in the accident.

The police said that in the suspect’s breath test they detected about six times as much alcohol as the legal limit. The sailor reportedly testified that she had drunk alcohol at her friend’s home in Yomitan Village.

Following an incident in which an ex-U.S. marine abandoned the body of a young Japanese woman he brutally murdered in May in Okinawa, the U.S. military banned its servicepersons stationed in Okinawa from drinking outside the bases for the time being.

Meanwhile, by the end of May, Okinawa’s local public prosecutor’s office indicted two American workers at the U.S. Kadena Air Base on drug-related charges.

A 51-year-old U.S. military employee is suspected of smuggling 28 grams of a stimulant drug from the United States at the end of March. The other military employee, a 23-year-old U.S. base worker, is facing a charge of possessing marijuana.

Similar crimes involving U.S. servicepersons and base employees have frequently occurred on the Japanese mainland as well. This indicates that illegal drugs are commonly available at U.S. military facilities across the country.

Even though the U.S. forces claim themselves to be a “good neighbor” to Japanese, it seems more accurate to call them a “criminal gang”.

Past related article:
> Serious crimes by US personnel occur more than once a month in Okinawa [May 26, 2016]