Shortly after moving to this military town in Okinawa two years ago, Etsuko Higashiyama, 29, a secretary, fell in love with a U.S. Marine from Arkansas. They dated for more than a year, and when Higashiyama became pregnant, the couple considered marriage, she said.

But the Marine, who finished his tour of duty in Okinawa last December, left without warning for the United States, leaving Higashiyama to raise their daughter -- now 7 months old -- alone in a country that is not always charitable to children of mixed parentage.

Until recently, there was little she or thousands of other abandoned Okinawan women and children could do about this predicament.

U.S. servicemen left the island with no reprisals, and there was no agreement in force between Japan and the United States to make them pay child support.

Now, Annette Eddie-Callagain has taken up the cause of the Japanese women whose desperate faces, she said, came to haunt her when she was a U.S. Air Force lawyer stationed in Okinawa 10 years ago. Large numbers of women came to her for help in obtaining child support from U.S. servicemen, but she had little recourse.

"All I could do is write to the base commander, who, if he chose to, would hunt down the serviceman and convince him to assume his responsibilities," she said. "But after a few months of payments, the child support usually stopped."

Five years ago, Eddie-Callagain returned to Okinawa and opened a private law practice where she is waging her own private war on deadbeat military dads. So far, she has filed cases on behalf of 50 Okinawan women, including Higashiyama, who are seeking child support from men who have returned to the United States. Social service agencies and children's rights advocates estimate that there are about 4,000 Okinawan children abandoned by U.S. servicemen.

Many single mothers have not heard from their husbands or boyfriends for months, if not years, and cannot afford to raise their children alone, the advocates said. In some cases, the women face eviction because they lack rent money. Many of the women no longer qualify for, nor can they afford to send their children to, racially mixed military and Christian schools. So their children go to Japanese schools, where they are often bullied and many drop out.

Despite the lack of a bilateral agreement with Japan regarding child support, Eddie-Callagain is taking her clients' cases directly to the child enforcement offices in each of the 50 state governments in the United States. She is trying to persuade states where the deadbeat fathers live to prosecute them in family court.

Eddie-Callagain said she won her first case in March 1999 when Illinois began docking the wages of a former U.S. serviceman to provide financial support for his two children in Okinawa.

And the crusading lawyer's office is now authorized to collect DNA samples to establish paternity in the event that accused men claim they are not the fathers.

In addition to their battle for child support, Okinawan mothers of Amerasian children are demanding better education, free of the abuse the children often suffer in Japanese public schools, which are notorious for bullying children who do not fit in.

Two years ago, a group of mothers took matters into their own hands and turned a rented two-story house here into the country's first school for Amerasian children.

Midori Thayer, principal of the AmerAsian School in Okinawa, said the fledgling institution provided a nurturing atmosphere where children could learn in both English and Japanese, and did not have to feel ashamed of their dual backgrounds. Her three biracial children, whose father had abandoned them, were among the first students.