One of the most contentious issues in the alliance has been the stationing of U.S. Marines on Japan's Okinawa prefecture, which hosts around 65 percent of total U.S. forces in Japan and is also the poorest of Japan's forty-seven prefectures. Locals deeply resent the outsize burden of hosting U.S. troops at the Futenma base and have voiced serious concerns about the accidents and incidents of crime (including recurring cases of sexual assault) that have persisted on the base. The gang rape of a twelve-year-old girl in 1995 by three U.S. servicemen galvanized eighty-five thousand locals to protest. A year after the mass demonstration, then prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto directly asked then U.S. president Bill Clinton to return Futenma to Japanese control. Other allegations of sexual violence by U.S. military personnel in Okinawa surfaced in 2008 and 2012, and various plans for relocating Futenma were put forward, but they were met with local opposition.