Big Victory

Among 977 passengers aboard the 11,828-ton troop transport General Anderson that sailed from Yokohama last week, bound for San Francisco: Army Private William S. Girard, 22, and his Japanese bride Haru ("Candy") Sueyama, 27. Five months before, wild eagle screams had sounded across the U.S. when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Girard, accused of shooting a Japanese woman in the back on a firing range, would have to stand trial for manslaughter in a Japanese court; from Capitol Hill to Girard's home town of Ottawa, Ill., flag-waving orators, commentators and editorialists deplored handing over an American to non-American (and presumably barbaric) justice.

During the course of a notably fair and painstaking trial 60 miles from Tokyo, Japanese Judge Yuzo Kawachi had effectively silenced the eagle screams. Verdict: guilty. Sentence: three years' imprisonment, suspended (i.e., not to be served). "I was terribly impressed with that Japanese court," said Alvin Owsley, the official American Legion observer. "I stood in awe. I was amazed at the fairness of Judge Kawachi."

Only three days before Girard walked up the gangplank, the Japanese Ministry of Justice was still weighing legal protests and public clamorings that Judge Kawachi had been too lenient, that Girard ought to be haled in for retrial. Candy Girard, onetime B-girl, even got notes from Japanese suggesting that she ought to go commit harakiri. But the Justice Ministry decided in the end to let Girard go home. Said the ministry, with remarkably broad understanding of the case's basic meanings: "We pay our respects to the [U.S. Supreme Court] verdict that gave Japan jurisdiction over the case, thereby clarifying the prestige of the Japanese courts at home and abroad . . . The verdict recognized the crime ... In the light of the above fact, it is hard to say that the sentence was such a serious mistake that its abandonment should be sought."

The Girard case--from the hard-fought U.S. decision to turn Girard over to Japan for trial to the final Japanese verdict--was in fact a big victory for law and its due process. The U.S.'s worldwide system of status-of-forces agreements recognizes that U.S. servicemen stationed in friendly nations must be subject to local law for crimes that violate local law and have nothing to do with military duty. Far from being an abandonment of the serviceman, the procedure is a recognition that the U.S. has far more to offer the free world than strength of arms. In its respect for local law the U.S. underscores its faith in law itself, and thus by example challenges local law to be its responsible best. At its responsible best, a free world rule of law can do more to cinch for all time the high ambitions of U.S. foreign policy than even arms and soldiers.

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