MANILA, Philippines – The national women’s alliance GABRIELA condemns in the strongest terms the brutal murder of 39-year-old Anna Yagi in Naha, Okinawa, committed by U.S. Lance-Corporal Devin Jacob Ballard, who was reportedly caught on security footage entering a hotel room with the victim and later leaving alone with her belongings. We extend our deepest solidarity to the family and loved ones of Anna Yagi and to the people of Okinawa, who have been made to bear the burden of a foreign military presence imposed upon them for generations.
We refuse to accept the framing of this killing as an isolated case or the act of a single troubled individual. This murder is the latest link in a long and bloody chain. Japanese authorities estimate that some six thousand U.S. military personnel have been arrested in Okinawa since 1972, with eighty arrests recorded in 2024, the highest in twenty years. In 1995, the rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl by three U.S. servicemen ignited mass protests across the island. In 2017, a former U.S. marine and military base worker was sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape and murder of a local woman, and in the same year an intoxicated U.S. marine crashed his vehicle into a mini-truck and killed its sixty-one-year-old driver. Last year, a U.S. marine was sentenced to seven years for attempting to rape a woman in her twenties. Each time, Washington and the Marine Corps issue condolences and promises of tighter discipline. Each time, nothing changes.
What makes this pattern possible is not discipline but impunity. Under the U.S.-Japan Status of Forces Agreement, U.S. personnel enjoy privileged treatment, and crimes committed against the people whose land hosts their bases are absorbed into the machinery of the U.S.-Japan alliance. Okinawa, less than one percent of Japan's landmass, carries roughly 70% of U.S. military facilities in the country. The Japanese government has repeatedly chosen the alliance over the lives and safety of Okinawans. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's expressions of outrage and her protests to Washington ring hollow when the same government continues to treat the country as a strategic sacrifice zone on the altar of the so-called first island chain and the confrontation with China.
Filipino women know this story by heart because we are living it. The same legal architecture of impunity thrives in our country through the Visiting Forces Agreement and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. The same Pentagon that sends U.S. marines to Okinawa stations its troops in Philippine camps, in our communities, and in ports and airfields that were never meant to host foreign armies. The 2005 Subic rape case, in which a U.S. marine was convicted of raping a Filipino woman, exposed to the entire country how the VFA shields foreign soldiers from accountability, how victims are dragged through humiliating proceedings, and how the state itself becomes an obstacle to justice. For every case that reaches the courts, countless more are silenced, buried in shame, or dismissed outright because the victim is a poor woman and the perpetrator wears a foreign uniform.
We likewise point out that U.S. bases do not exist in a vacuum. Wherever foreign troops are stationed, a sexual entertainment economy springs up around the camps, trafficking networks flourish, and poor women are pushed into survival sex. This is not collateral damage. This is a structural feature of military occupation, and it is why GABRIELA has long documented how foreign military presence feeds the exploitation of Filipino women and fought for justice for victims of military sexual violence.
The escalation of tensions between the United States and China is now being used to justify the further entrenchment of U.S. forces in the Philippines, the expansion of EDCA sites, and the deployment of weapons systems that turn our islands into targets. We reject the lie that U.S. bases protect us. They do not defend a single Filipino woman from rape, a single Okinawan woman from murder, or a single community from the violence that follows the imperialist flag. They expose us, endanger us, and place our sovereignty and our lives at the disposal of foreign interests.
GABRIELA therefore demands:
Justice for Anna Yagi! The suspect must be held fully accountable under Japanese law, and the pattern of shielding U.S. personnel from prosecution must end.
The abrogation of the Visiting Forces Agreement and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, the scrapping of all agreements granting foreign troops baseless privileges and immunity, and the removal of all U.S. troops, facilities, and weapons from Philippine soil and waters.
An immediate end to U.S. military exercises in the Philippines and an end to the treatment of the country as a staging ground for the power projection of other nations.
An end to the impunity that U.S. forces enjoy in Japan and the Philippines and the dismantling of the military-related sex industry and trafficking networks that feed on poor women around foreign bases.
The full recognition of the right of the peoples of Okinawa, the Philippines, and all of world to live free from foreign military presence, foreign domination, and war.
The blood of Anna Yagi is the blood of Okinawa. And it is also the blood of Filipino women sexually abused and killed in Subic and Olongapo, in Angeles and Clark, in every town that has been made to host the flag of a foreign army. So long as U.S. troops remain in our region, no woman is safe. So long as the U.S.-Japan and U.S.-Philippines military alliances stand, the violence will continue.
We stand with the people of Okinawa. We stand with the women of Japan. We stand with all women who refuse to be the price of empire.
U.S. troops out of Okinawa. U.S. troops out of the Philippines. U.S. troops out now!