Staff writer GINOWAN, Okinawa Pref. -- After dropping out of junior high school here, Steve Oakley, 16, spent all his time at home because it was the only place he would be understood.

Students attend a class at the Amerasian School in Ginowan, the first school in Okinawa to cater to children of mixed parentage.

Steve's father, an American serviceman, had abandoned the family in the United States, prompting him and his mother to return to Okinawa. When they arrived, they found that "nonbase kids" attended Okinawa Christian School, a private facility for children of U.S. servicemen.

Unable to afford tuition, his mother put him in a Japanese school. But he soon gave up.

With his head down, Steve mumbled tersely that he left "because they thought I was stupid."

Ginowan is the divorce capital of the nation, in a prefecture that has been consistently ranked tops for birth rate and single-parent households since the turn of the century.

In a country where foreign-looking Japanese are stigmatized when they can't speak fluent English, Steve should have found Ginowan to be the most understanding place in Japan.

But like other Amerasians -- mainly those born to an American father and Asian mother -- Steve soon found that the communal safety nets that exist here for so many others often fail miserably to save those like him.

"These children and their mothers fall through the cracks between the Japanese and U.S. education, welfare and legal systems," said Naomi Noiri, a professor of law at the University of the Ryukyus.

Nobody knows the exact number of Amerasians living in Okinawa, but based on figures compiled by the Health and Welfare Ministry, Noiri estimates there may be as many as 3,900 facing problems ranging from discrimination and poor education to absent fathers who refuse to pay child care, if they can be found at all.

One sign of progress has been the Amerasian School in Okinawa.

While children educated abroad receive preferential treatment when applying to Japanese high schools and universities, Amerasians are denied that privilege, said Amerasian School Principal Midori Thayer.

The school, established in September 1998, aims to provide a bilingual education by conducting classes in English. As Okinawa's first school for children of mixed parentage, it offers children an alternative to both the Japanese and U.S. curricula and allows them to take entrance exams for Japanese high schools upon graduation.

But the children and their mothers face more than just schooling problems. The voices of the people who call Annette Eddie-Callagain, a lawyer in Ginowan, are full of panic. They come from Okinawan women who are seeking child support from former husbands who were also U.S. servicemen.

"He's leaving the country? . . . Listen to me -- let him leave," is her advice.

A total of 215 Japanese women married American men in 1998, according to the latest figure available from the Okinawa Prefecture-backed Women's Center in Naha. In the same year, however, there were 80 divorces among the same pairings.

International marriages accounted for roughly 4.6 percent of all marriages in Okinawa in 1998, but they are not solely responsible for the prefecture's high divorce rate. Other factors include lack of economic stability.

Double-digit unemployment combined with single mothers in Okinawa falling back on their family have meant that Okinawa's divorce rate of 2.78 per 1,000 people in 1999 surpasses the national average, which was 2.00 in the same year, observers say.

But with more than 70 percent of all single-parent homes reporting monthly incomes of less than 150,000 yen, according to a 1999 prefecture study, and with nearly 90 percent not receiving child support, the issue of how to collect child support has been a keen one.

"There's nothing I can do so long as (the husband) is in Japan," Callagain explained. "If he's in the States, it doesn't matter where he is, we can find him . . . and take measures to have child support sent directly from his paycheck to the mother here."

Under the Japanese Civil Code, divorced parents are required to pay child support, but there is no organized system here to track down and secure payments from delinquent parents.

At the Amerasian School, roughly 70 percent of the students come from single-parent homes.

Thayer and supporters are lobbying for public funding, as the school's monthly 25,000 yen tuition is a heavy burden for many of the parents.

"(But) it's going to take time for (the school) to be recognized as a necessary part of the Japanese public education system," Thayer said. In Japan, "Amerasian students are an asset that only Okinawa has, and our school system should be set up to reflect that."

Callagain's efforts to secure child support are of utmost importance, Thayer said. Her strategy is to apply personally to individuals at child support centers in different U.S. states for help.

These centers have the legal authority to issue court orders demand DNA-paternity tests, and take measures so that child support fees are deducted from a parent's paycheck. In this way, Callagain has been able to secure child support, ranging from about 20,000 yen to 50,000 yen per month per child from 16 fathers since 1996.

Attempts have been made to include a clause in the Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. military and Japan that states that both nations would cooperate to secure child-support payments when international divorces occur.

But although Germany and the U.S. have such an agreement, it is not possible for a similar pact between Japan and the U.S. without starting necessary services here, including free DNA-testing and a network of child-support centers to oversee claims made by U.S. citizens for child support from Japanese.

"It is one of the sad contradictions in this system, where if the father goes to the U.S., we can secure child support that we couldn't while the father was in Japan," said Masanori Takeda, a lawyer in Ginowan who specializes in divorce cases.

The problem is a persistent one. Callagain, Takeda and other lawyers have run a hotline twice a month since February to give legal advice on international divorces and marriages.

So far, 51 people have called for advice. "But this is definitely just the tip of the iceberg," Callagain said. "We do this pro bono in our free time. There are a lot of people we never get to."

Supporters are now lobbying the prefecture to set up an office to file claims and contact child-support centers in the U.S. to help more people.

But there are other places where international couples fall through the cracks.

The lack of counseling services for U.S. servicemen who want to secure a life in Okinawa with a Japanese wife is one of the gaping holes in the U.S. military, where the assumption is that servicemen are transient.

Few men are fully aware of the challenges ahead when they fall in love and make the series of decisions that lead to marriage and raising a family in Okinawa, said Paul Odya, a former serviceman who met his Japanese wife 15 years ago.

"There is a great deal of environmental stress (when) marrying and living here, and there are absolutely no counseling services," Odya said.