Just further evidence that no incident involving the US military in Japan, much like in Korea, is too small not to make national headlines:
A child playing in a park nearby Camp Zama was hit by a stray golf ball yesterday.
The 11-year-old was hit in the face with the golf ball after a member of the U.S. military playing golf on the course inside the base accidentally hit it over the fence and into a park. The kid was not seriously hurt, but he did get a bloody nose.
The U.S. military has said it will take measures to make sure such an incident will not occur again in the future. [Japan Probe]
Could you imagine a Fox News Alert announcing that a golf ball from a Japanese servicemember stationed in America hit somebody walking outside a golf course?
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6:41 am on May 17th, 2008 1
[...] HT to ROKdrop. [...]
7:05 am on May 17th, 2008 2
lol good one
7:19 am on May 17th, 2008 3
This is a boring story. I don’t know why there hasn’t been any blogging about this:
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=62095&archive=true
Everyone in Daegu knows about it. It’s horrible.
8:38 am on May 17th, 2008 4
I was struck by the last paragraph in the Stars and Stripes story:
“South Korean police have no plans to investigate the death, the spokesman said, because the woman falls under the U.S. military’s Status of Forces Agreement.”
Can that be right? Does SoFA prevent a South Korean investigation into the off-base death of a US dependent?
10:25 am on May 17th, 2008 5
A US dependent suspected to have been murdered by a US servicemember. The ROKs also had nothing to do with the investigation when the US major threw his wife’s body off the Incheon Airport bridge a few years back, even though it was the ROKs who caught him in the act.
12:23 pm on May 17th, 2008 6
Poor kid.
It sounds like a terrible case of birdie flew.
1:37 pm on May 17th, 2008 7
A commenter at the Marmot’s Hole wondered if the story was just some short filler produced by a local station. Out of curiosity, I went to the Asahi Shimbun. Nothing in English, but there was a short blurb in Japanese titled “Golf Ball from US Military Golf Course Injures 6th Grader, Sagamihara City Protests.” The concluding paragraph notes that in 2006 and 2007 there were two incidents each of wayward golf ball causing property damage and in 1980 a woman was injured by a stray ball. For some reason, I wasn’t able to link directly to the story at the Marmot’s, but I’ll post the URL here:
http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0517/TKY200805170017.html
I’d post the title in Japanese, but since your blog doesn’t like Hangeul, it probably doesn’t like Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana either.
6:27 am on May 18th, 2008 8
Thanks Sonagi, even if it was just a short blurb in the media it is still stupid to even include it. You are right about the hangeul, I really need to figure out how to change the code on this blog to support it.
11:43 am on May 18th, 2008 9