Usually American soldiers and military personnel are exempt from local policing. In Germany, they couldn’t be stopped for a traffic control or asked to identify themselves by German police, only US military police. There even was a guy that got away with murder because of some related issues.
Here’s the story:
Yeah, the lack of local accountability was a large part of why Trump “threatening” to pull the military out of Japan was a monumentally stupid bluff. Japanese people already hate the US military, because the average Japanese person’s perception of the US military is “drunk dude causes damage/hurts someone and flees back to base where he will never see any punishment.” It also came at a time when hardline conservatism and patriotism (bordering on jingoism) is increasingly popular in Japan. Japan basically went “fucking do it then.”
I was immediately reminded of the g20 summit in Hamburg (not because of America) Well…
