Osaka Mayor: Hey, U.S. Servicemen, Use Our Brothels!

OSAKA, Japan—As anyone who's been following the news recently knows, within the past month, three U.S. military officers have been charged with sexually assaulting servicewomen and, in one case, even pimping them out to other soldiers and civilians. The big fish of the group is Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski, the Air Force's Chief of Sexual Assault Prevention, who was arrested on May 6 for allegedly having groped a woman's tits and ass in a parking lot in Arlington, VA the previous night. Then, about a week later, an unnamed Army sergeant at Fort Hood, TX, who served as the base's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Coordinator, was accused pandering, which an unnamed official said allegedly involved "managing a prostitution operation, perhaps involving a subordinate," at the base. Finally, just this week, West Point staffer Sgt. First Class Michael McClendon was accused of "videotaping female cadets without their consent, sometimes when they were undressed in the bathroom or the shower." "Officials said some of the videos were taken in the showers or the bathrooms, and some elsewhere on campus," reported The New York Times' Thom Shanker. "Documents in the case indicate that in some instances Sergeant McClendon entered women’s bathroom and shower areas without knocking." Fact is, our military is having trouble convincing its personnel to keep their hands to themselves and their dicks in their pants, and though the Pentagon released a survey in late April which estimated that more than 26,000 armed forces personnel had been sexually assaulted in 2012 (and we're guessing that not all of them were female, nor all the perps male), just 3,374 of them were officially reported—and only 10 percent of those went to trial. Still, that number of reports is six percent higher than the previous year. So with all that sexual energy* steaming up the barracks windows, maybe military commanders in Japan (and, actually, everywhere) should take the advice that Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto gave to Marine Corps Air Station Futenma’s commander on his recent visit to that base, which was that "servicemembers should make more use of Japan's legalized sex industry." "There are places where people can legally release their sexual energy in Japan," Hashimoto said during a video press conference on May 20. "Unless they make use of these facilities, it will be difficult to control the sexual energies of the wild Marines...  They need to think about a way to release that energy." Actually, Japan's legalized sex industry" isn't all that legal. Actual prostitution—money paid for sexual intercourse—is outlawed, but there are plenty of massage parlors in the Honcho neighborhood across the street from the base, which is roughly 40 miles south of Tokyo, and the women who work in them are more than willing to provide "full service" for a price. It's also currently illegal for service personnel to patronize the parlors, and Jon Nylander, a spokesman for the commander of Naval Forces-Japan, wasn't about to budge from that position. "The Navy does not condone patronizing prostitutes, massage parlors, Soaplands and any other manner of establishment that offers sexual services, as this is entirely against our core values of respect for persons, moral integrity and human dignity," Nylander said on Tuesday. Yeah, right; well, those "core values" seem to have been dented a bit over the past few years—in fact, at least 26,000 times in 2012—so maybe a little rethinking of that concept is in order. Pictured: Japanese prostitutes as shown in Kenji Mizoguchi's film Street of Shame. * Yes, we know that most rape and sexual assault is about violence and power rather than sex, but studies have also shown that in areas where prostitution (and porn) are legal, rapes and assaults go down, so just sayin'...