This paper interrogates Okinawans’ protest movement against extraterritorial American military justice in the 1950s. Historians have examined multifaced aspects of the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa (1945-1972) and its far-reaching implications on the present Japan-U.S.-Okinawa relationship. Despite the historicity of, and continuing public attention to, the issue of American military legal immunities in the post-reversion period, there is no single historical study that traces the genealogy of protest movements against American GI crime and its place in the history of Okinawans’ anti-base struggles.

My paper illustrates how the year of 1955 marked a pivotal moment for the history of American military justice in Okinawa given the rise of an unprecedentedly massive and popular protest movement against American GI crime and military extraterritoriality.

I argue that Okinawans’ widespread references to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights in their 1955 movement—triggered by the gruesome rape murder of a five-year-old Okinawan girl by an American GI—reveal the significance of emerging transnational human rights activism between the American Civil Liberties Union and the Japan Civil Liberties Union. In the absence of constitutional democracy, Okinawans strategically employed the language of universal human rights, eventually forcing the American occupiers to permit, for the first time in history, the indigenous police to join investigations on U.S. military related incidents and the locals to attend court-martials. The 1955 movement was critical for the development of human-rights-based anti-base struggles in Okinawa, as seen in the foundation of the Okinawa Civil Liberties Union in 1961.