Allied and Japanese troops committed a number of rapes during the Battle of Okinawa during the last months of the Pacific War and the subsequent Allied occupation of Japan. The Allies occupied Japan until 1952 following the end of World War II and Okinawa Prefecture remained under US governance for two decades after.

Estimates of the incidence of sexual violence by Allied occupation personnel differ considerably. Some historians have written that there were a large number of sexual assaults and others that the number was low.

Background By 1945 U.S. troops were entering and occupying territory with a Japanese civilian population. On February 19, 1945, U.S. troops landed on Iwo Jima, and on April 1, 1945, on Okinawa. In August 1945, Japan surrendered and Allied occupation troops landed on the main islands, starting the formal occupation of Japan. The Allied occupation ended in most of Japan on April 28, 1952, but did not end in Okinawa until May 15, 1972, when the terms of the Treaty of San Francisco went into effect.

During the Pacific War, the Japanese Government frequently issued propaganda claiming that if the country was defeated, Japanese women would be raped and murdered by Allied soldiers. The government used this claim to justify orders to soldiers and civilians in areas which were invaded by Allied forces to fight to the death or commit suicide. Japanese civilians on Saipan committed mass suicide (including at Banzai Cliff and Suicide Cliff) in July 1944 as a result of this propaganda.

Battle of Okinawa

According to Calvin Sims of The New York Times: "Much has been written and debated about atrocities that Okinawans suffered at the hands of both the Americans and Japanese in one of the deadliest battles of the war. More than 200,000 soldiers and civilians, including one-third of the population of Okinawa, were killed".

U.S. military rapes There is no documentary evidence that mass rape was committed by Allied troops during the Pacific War. There are, however, numerous credible testimony accounts which allege that a large number of rapes were committed by U.S. forces during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.

Okinawan historian Oshiro Masayasu (former director of the Okinawa Prefectural Historical Archives) writes:

According to Toshiyuki Tanaka, 76 cases of rape or rape-murder were reported during the first five years of the American occupation of Okinawa. However, he asserts this is probably not the true figure, as most cases were unreported.

Peter Schrijvers finds it remarkable that looking East Asian was enough to be in danger of rape by American soldiers, as for example happened to some of the Korean sex slaves that the Japanese had by force brought to the island. Schrijvers writes that "many women" were brutally violated with "not even the least mercy".

Although reports of rape were largely ignored at the time due to lack of records, as many as 10,000 Okinawan women may have been raped according to an estimate from one Okinawan historian. It has been claimed that the rape was so prevalent that most Okinawans over age 65 around the year 2000 either knew or had heard of a woman who was raped in the aftermath of the war. US Military officials stated in 2000 that there is no evidence of mass rapes.

Katsuyama killing incident

According to interviews carried out by The New York Times and published by them in 2000, multiple elderly people from an Okinawan village confessed that after the United States had won the Battle of Okinawa three armed African American Marines kept coming to the village every week to force the villagers to gather all the local women, who were then carried off into the hills and raped. The article goes deeper into the matter and claims that the villagers' tale – true or not – is part of a "dark, long-kept secret" the unraveling of which "refocused attention on what historians say is one of the most widely ignored crimes of the war": "the widespread rape of Okinawan women by American servicemen".

When the Marines started to confidently carry out their weekly ritual unarmed, the villagers reportedly overwhelmed the men and killed them. Their bodies were hidden in the nearby cave out of fear for retaliation against the village, a village secret until 1997. Since the killings, the cave has been known by the locals as Kurombo Gama, which is translated either as "Cave of The Negros" or, less commonly, "Niggers' Cave" (Kurombo 黒んぼ is an ethnic slur referring to black people).

Silence about rape Professor of East Asian Studies and expert on Okinawa Steve Rabson said: "I have read many accounts of such rapes in Okinawan newspapers and books, but few people know about them or are willing to talk about them". Books, diaries, articles and other documents refer to rapes by American soldiers of various races and backgrounds. Masaie Ishihara, a sociology professor, supports this: "There is a lot of historical amnesia out there, many people don't want to acknowledge what really happened".

An explanation given for why the US military has no record of any rapes is that few – if any – Okinawan women reported abuse, mostly out of fear and embarrassment. Those who did report them are believed by historians to have been ignored by the U.S. military police. A large scale effort to determine the extent of such crimes has also never been called for. Over five decades after the war has ended, the women who were believed to have been raped still refused to give a public statement, with friends, local historians and university professors who had spoken with the women instead saying they preferred not to discuss it publicly. According to a Nago, Okinawan police spokesman: "Victimized women feel too ashamed to make it public".

In his 1992 book Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb, George Feifer noted that by 1946 there had been fewer than 10 reported cases of rape in Okinawa. He explains that it was: "partly because of shame and disgrace, partly because Americans were victors and occupiers". Feifer argued: "In all there were probably thousands of incidents, but the victims' silence kept rape another dirty secret of the campaign".

According to Feifer in his 2001 book The Battle of Okinawa: The Blood and the Bomb, the majority of the likely thousands of rapes were committed in the north, where the campaign was easier and the American troops were not as exhausted as in the south, and it was mostly troops landed for occupation duty who committed rapes. Almost all rape victims were silent about what had happened to them, which helped to keep the rapes a "dirty secret" of the Okinawa campaign. The main reasons for the women's silence and the low number of reported rapes was the American role as victor and occupiers, and feelings of shame and disgrace. Of the approximately 10 rapes that were formally reported by 1946, almost all were connected to "severe bodily harm".

Several factors contributed to few telltale American rape-induced pregnancies coming to term; many women had become temporarily infertile due to the stress and malnutrition, and some who did become pregnant managed to abort before their husbands returned. In interviews, historians and Okinawan elders said that some Okinawan women who were raped did give birth to biracial children, but that many of them were immediately killed or left behind out of shame, disgust or fearful trauma. More often, however, rape victims underwent crude abortions with the help of village midwives.

Japanese Army rapes According to Thomas Huber from the United States Army Combined Arms Center, Japanese soldiers also mistreated Okinawan civilians during the battle there. Huber writes that rape was "freely committed" by Japanese soldiers who knew that they had little chance of surviving due to the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) prohibitions against surrender. These abuses contributed to a post-war divide between Okinawans and mainland Japanese.

Official American policy and Japanese civilian expectations Having historically been a separate nation until 1879, Okinawan language and culture differ in many ways from that of mainland Japan, where they often were discriminated against and treated in the same manner as Chinese and Koreans.

In 1944 heavy American air-bombings of Naha had left 1,000 dead and 50,000 homeless and sheltering in caves, and US naval bombardments contributed additionally to the death toll. During the Battle of Okinawa between 40,000 and 150,000 residents died. The survivors were put in internment camps by Americans.

During the fighting some Japanese troops mistreated Okinawan civilians, for example taking over the caves they sheltered in and forcing them out into the open, as well as killing some directly whom they suspected of being American spies. During the last months of desperate fighting they were also unable to supply the Okinawan population with food and medicine.

Japanese propaganda about American atrocities had led many Okinawan civilians to believe that when the Americans came they would first rape all the women and then kill them. At least 700 civilians committed suicide. The Americans also provided food and medicine, something the Japanese had been unable to do. In view of the propaganda claiming that American policy would be rape, torture and murder, the Okinawans were often surprised at "the comparatively humane treatment". Over time, Okinawans would become increasingly despondent with the Americans, but at the time of surrender the American soldiers were less vicious than had been expected.

Post-war

Allied and Japanese governance The victorious Allied powers created the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), which was headquartered in Tokyo. During the Occupation SCAP was the supreme legal authority in Japan. Unlike Germany, the Japanese government (including the police and central bank) was not dismantled. The Japanese government created a Central Liaison Office or CLO to liaise with SCAP.

Public fear and other psychological factors In the period after the Emperor of Japan announced that Japan would surrender, many Japanese civilians feared that Allied occupation troops were likely to rape Japanese women when they arrived. The Japanese Government and the governments of several prefectures issued warnings recommending that women take measures to avoid contact with occupation troops, such as staying in their homes and staying with Japanese men. Police in Kanagawa Prefecture, where the Americans were expected to first land, recommended that young women and girls evacuate the area. Several prefectural authorities also suggested that women kill themselves if they were threatened with rape or raped and called for "moral and spiritual education" to enforce this view.

In his The "Rape" of Japan: The Myth of Mass Sexual Violence During the Allied Occupation (2024), Brian Walsh makes the following observations of Japanese public opinion and culture, all of which made many Japanese susceptible to believe unverified allegations of mass rape:

Japanese veterans were well aware of the IJA's sexual violence in China and elsewhere, and assumed that the Allied occupational soldiers would behave in a similar manner. During the occupation, many Japanese people saw the good behavior of the occupiers as "some sort of trick" and assumed that while they saw no mass rapes such crimes must be happening elsewhere, or would happen in the future after more disciplined American units were rotated out of the country and replaced. Most Japanese men and some Japanese women saw the Allied orders to grant legal equality to women – first ordered on 11 October 1945 – and the ending of licensed prostitution on 21 January 1946 (which the Americans came to see as debt-based sexual slavery and a human rights violation) as attacks on the traditional Japanese view of masculinity.