US pledges 'full cooperation' investigating Marine murder arrest, its third on this island in twenty years.

As it ran on the front

A Marine, 20, sat in an Okinawa jail this week on suspicion of robbing and murdering a Japanese woman, Anna Yagi, 39, at a hotel. The U.S. ambassador's office said it was "providing full cooperation with the investigation," which is the exact temperature Washington keeps on hand for a killing like this: warm enough to sound engaged, cool enough to commit to nothing. That same week, Japan's prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, registered a protest with the United States, and the word doing the heavy lifting in the wire reports was "threatened" — the case "threatened to revive tensions over the American military presence," as if the tension on Okinawa were a dormant thing that needed waking rather than a thing that never left.

It never left because this is not the first time. In June of 2016, after a U.S. Marine veteran working as a civilian contractor was arrested for raping and killing a 20-year-old woman on the island, more than fifty thousand people filled the streets of Naha to protest the American military presence there. Fifty thousand people in the street is not a dormant tension reviving; it is a standing account coming due on schedule. A decade before that, in 2006, the U.S.…