By Panayiota Bertzikis,
On October 3, 2026 a 39-year-old woman named Anna Yagi was found dead in a hotel room in Naha, the capital of Okinawa. Investigators say she appears to have been strangled with a cord. Her wallet and backpack were gone. Okinawa police have arrested Lance Cpl. Devin Jacob Ballard, a Marine with III Marine Expeditionary Force stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma.
Ballard is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and the Japanese courts will decide his guilt. But Anna Yagi is entitled to something too: a public that refuses to treat her death as an isolated tragedy. It is not isolated. It is the latest entry in a record that Okinawans have been documenting, protesting and burying for decades.
In 1995, three American servicemen kidnapped and raped a 12-year-old girl, and 85,000 people filled the streets in protest. In 2016, former Marine Kenneth Shinzato murdered 20-year-old Rina Shimabukuro as she walked near her home; he was later sentenced to life in prison. In 2024, Okinawans learned that a Kadena airman had been charged months earlier with kidnapping and sexually assaulting a girl, and that a Marine had been indicted for choking a woman during an attempted sexual assault in Yomitan. Neither indictment had been made public. Later that year, a Camp Foster Marine was arrested for choking his former girlfriend in Urasoe. In February of this year, a Camp Schwab corporal was arrested for allegedly entering an elementary school without authorization.
Notice the strangulation. In the domestic violence field, we know that non-fatal strangulation is one of the strongest predictors that a man will eventually kill. When it shows up again and again in the conduct of personnel at one set of bases is a warning that institutions have chosen not to hear.
I have spent twenty years working with survivors of military sexual violence, first through the Military Rape Crisis Center and now through the International Center for Survivor Justice, which supports women-led organizations in communities that host U.S. bases abroad. I am also a veteran. I know how the military responds to cases like this, because the script never changes. A general apologizes. An ambassador expresses regret. A curfew or a drinking ban is announced. The news cycle moves on, and the restrictions are quietly relaxed. Then it happens again.
That cycle is a form of institutional betrayal. It asks the people of Okinawa, who host roughly half of the U.S. troops in Japan on less than one percent of the country’s land, to accept apology as a substitute for accountability. They have accepted it for fifty years. They should not have to accept it for one more.
Here is what accountability would actually look like.
First, full and visible cooperation with Japanese authorities in the Yagi investigation, with no delay in evidence, records or witnesses, and a public commitment that the U.S. will not use the Status of Forces Agreement to shield anyone.
Second, transparency. The Department of Defense should publish, every year, data on off-duty crimes committed by U.S. personnel against civilians in every host country, broken down by installation and offense. Communities cannot hold an institution accountable for a pattern it refuses to count. The 2024 cases, which surfaced only through local reporting, show what happens when disclosure is left to chance.
Third, Congress should act. When we drafted the I Am Vanessa Guillén Act, the lesson was that the military cannot be trusted to police violence within its own ranks without outside pressure. The same is true of violence its members commit against civilians overseas. The armed services committees should hold hearings on crimes against host-nation civilians and require the reporting described above. That is why I have also architected the Survivors and Children of Military Rape Compensation Act which would provide financial support to individuals abroad harmed by members of the United States Armed Forces.
Fourth, resources for the people who are actually doing this work. Survivors and families in Okinawa turn first to local, women-led organizations that have tracked military violence for decades with almost no funding. Victims’ families also face a slow, opaque process for compensation. Both need direct support, not more statements of sympathy.
Anna Yagi was a person with a life of her own, not a diplomatic incident. The question before the United States is whether her name will be followed by real change, or simply by the next name.
Panayiota Bertzikis is a veteran and the founder of the Military Rape Crisis Center and the International Center for Survivor Justice, a joint project of the Military Rape Crisis Center and the Global Women Impact Fund.
