Girard incident

In the Girard incident (ジラード事件, Jirādo jiken^?) of 1957, a Japanese housewife named Naka Sakai was shot and killed by an American soldier, William S. Girard.

On January 30, 1957, the 46-year-old Sakai was collecting scrap metal on a U.S. Army shooting range in Soumagahara, Gunma Prefecture, Japan. Sakai, a mother of six, earned a living selling scrap metal, and had entered the Army area for the purpose of collecting spent rifle cartridges. Specialist Third Class Girard, a 21-year-old enlisted man from Ottawa, Illinois, used a grenade launcher mounted on an M1 rifle to fire an empty casing at Sakai, which killed her.

The strong Japanese outcry over the killing led to a jurisdictional dispute between the Japanese authorities and the U.S. Army. The Army maintained that Girard had acted while on duty and was thus under the jurisdiction of U.S. military courts, while the Japanese government held that Girard's actions had taken place during a period of rest, making him subject to Japanese law. Girard had been assigned to guard a machine gun at the firing range in between sessions of target practice; the Japanese contention was that since Girard had not fired a weapon during exercises, he could not be considered as actively on duty. Eventually, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson ruled that Girard's specific action "was not authorized", and he was turned over for trial. Girard appealed this decision to the Supreme Court, but the Court rejected his request for intervention.

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