According to the NHK news outlet, Japanese State Minister of Defence Tomohiro Yamamoto met on Thursday with the governor of the southern Yamaguchi prefecture, Tsugumasa Muraoka, to discuss the reported violations.
Muraoka condemned the acts as outrageous and urged Yamamoto to request the US forces to ensure safety as their top priority. Yamamoto, in response, said that it had done so on multiple occasions, the outlet said.
On 5 November, a US military report revealed that the members of the US Marine Corps that were involved in a deadly air crash over Japan last December had frequently engaged in inappropriate activities during flights, such as reading books and taking selfies.
Following the US military report, which explicitly states that there is a climate of unprofessionalism in the US Marine Corps unit, the Japanese Defense Ministry is calling on the US military to provide details into another incident that took place in 2016. At that time, the same unit was involved in a mid-air collision in the Okinawa Prefecture, following which, the US forces categorised the incident as a Class C accident, which did not warrant an investigation and did not report it to Japanese forces.
