Why do we have troops in Japan?

Pretty much this.

On my first ship I saw...France, Italy, Spain, Dubai, Turkey, Canada, Bahamas, Greece, and probably others I'm forgetting at the moment. Yet I lived in a berthing where all I did was listen to people bitch about how much getting underway sucked. You know why it sucked so much for them? They walked off the ship and into the nearest bar and drank until time to pull back out. Their top priority was getting trashed and chasing tail. That's why I have no sympathy when it comes to people whining about the military, that describes must of them.

There's those types but Japan also attracts a shit ton of basement dwellers that spend their entire tour on base playing WoW and/or D&D. And I do mean entire tour as in "not even leaving base for food." I got saddled with one of those types in Saipan one time that bitched about there being nothing to do there. We're away from homeport, so it's not like there was any wifi on the ship anyway. I had to take that little asshammer back. At goddamn 2 in the afternoon, when everyone that I would've wanted to sign out with was already gone.

Oh, and the kicker? The little fruit loop manages to book a kayak trip for the next day with an equally socially inept chick. Fuck him and fuck the rest of that lot. I'd almost rather deal with the drunks.

We had the same thing with people hanging in the dorms and bitching about being in rainy old England. I hated hanging out in the dorms. We were 2 hours away from London and I had a car and a motorcycle and was going somewhere every weekend if I could. I only knew a couple people that wanted to go to the club and get trashed every night, and they were a couple of young guys .
New Mexico was different. In about a week or two at the outside, you had seen and done all there was to do in the local area. The town population was about that of the base. The joke was that there was a woman behind every tree. There is some wonderful stuff in NM but you really need to take leave and travel to see it due to the distances. It might have not been so bad for married folks, but for a single person, it was a very remote place to be. There was a 4 lane highway between the base and the town of about 15 miles and this was how the town made its revenue. Cops all over the place. You had to have a car because there was no transport between the base and the town. No buses, no cabs, nothing. NM was a 21 state and I turned 21 there and I could drink beer. I could see where someone could become a real boozer in a place like that.

That's a big reason I'm glad I didn't join the Air Force...so many bases are in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere. In the Navy, at least you have a decent chance of being stationed near a beach.