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This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

Gendering the “Black Pacific”: Race Consciousness, National
Identity, and the Masculine/Feminine Empowerment among
African Americans in Japan under US. Military Occupation,

1945-1952

presented by

Yasuhiro Okada

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

PhD. degree in History

 

 

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5/08 KzlProilecaPres/CIRCIDateDue.indd

GENDERING THE “BLACK PACIFIC”: RACE CONSCIOUSNESS,
NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND THE MASCULINE/FEMININE EMPOWERMENT
AMONG AFRICAN AMERICANS IN JAPAN
UNDER U.S. MILITARY OCCUPATION, 1945-1952

By

Yasuhiro Okada

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

History

2008

ABSTRACT
GENDERING THE “BLACK PACIFIC”: RACE CONSCIOUSNESS,
NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND THE MASCULINE/FEMINE EMPOWERMENT
AMONG AFRICAN AMERICANS IN JAPAN
UNDER U.S. MILITARY OCCUPATION, 1945-1952
By
Yasuhiro Okada

This dissertation examines the transnational identity and subjectivity formations
of African American men and women, who were stationed in Japan under US. military
occupation during the period from 1945 to 1952, from a gendered perspective. It argues
that African American men and women in occupied Japan asserted and performed their
racialized and nationalized sense of empowerment in gender-specific ways through their
face-to-face or discursive encounters and interactions with the Japanese, as well as their
investment in racial, gender, and class dynamics within the US. Army, in the larger
American society, and in black communities on both sides of the Pacific.

After introducing the analytical framework of “gendering the Black Pacific” in
Part I, I discuss in Part II the social construction of racial manhood among African
American male soldiers in the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu through the
tri-racial interactive dynamics among black and white Americans, and the Japanese. This
section explores the masculinized contestations over racial, national, sexual, and class
identities among African American (315 in occupied Japan, who could exert considerable
power and prerogatives over Japanese citizens as members of the US. occupation force,
while being segregated and discriminated against within the US. Army.

In Part III, I focus on African American women in occupied Japan as major actors

in shaping the gendered formation of the “Black Pacific.” This section examines how

black women achieved the feminine sense of empowerment by exploring alternative
racial identities, gender roles, and class positions in Japan, while they continued facing
and challenging racism and sexism within the US. military and from the patriarchal
sector of the black community there.

In Part IV, I argue that the trans-Pacific debates over interracial intimacy,
sexuality, and marriage between African American GIs and Japanese women during the
US. occupation of Japan functioned as a transnational and international site of identity
politics. Through this, African American, as well as Japanese, men and women on both
sides of the Pacific grappled with the terms of race consciousness, gender conventions,
and international and interethnic relations in the global context of the postwar US.
political and military engagement with Japan as well as the domestic transformations in

racial and sexual regimes during the early Cold War period.

Copyright by
YASUI-IIRO OKADA
2008

To the Memory of My Father

Acknowledgements

This dissertation is a byproduct of my membership and intellectual engagement in
the Comparative Black History Ph.D. Program at Michigan State University. First, I
would like to thank the following professors in the Department of History who trained me,
as members of my guidance committee in some points of my graduate program, in
mastering historiographical knowledge and practice in a wide range of transnational and
cross-topical fields, including African American history, Asian American history,
Japanese history, and the history of sexuality in Western Europe and the US: Sayuri
Shimizu, Laurent Dubois, Dagmar Herzog, Victor Jew, and Michael Lewis. Richard
Thomas was influential in shaping the contours of my research on African American
soldiers in occupied Japan. Dr. Thomas, who himself was a veteran of the US. Marine
Corps from the late 19505, enthusiastically showed his interest in my research topic by
telling me how impactful his military experience in occupied Okinawa was on the
transformation of his racial identity as a young African American man. Special thanks go
to Pero Dagbovie for the critical comments and suggestions which he gave me in the final
stage of completing this dissertation.

I single out Darlene Clark Hine for her intellectual and emotional mentorship as
my academic advisor throughout my doctoral program at MSU, even after she moved to
Northwestern University in 2003. I am grateful for the continuous encouragement and
professional advice which she gave me at each stage of my program so that I could
successfully develop my expertise and career as a historian. Various insightful comments
and suggestions which I received from her were crucial in shaping my research agenda

and sharpening my argument during the course of my dissertation research and writing.

vi

Without my engagement with the bodies of scholarship on the histories of Afi'ican
American women, men, and gender which she produced for the past several decades, I
would not have conceptualized this dissertation as a transnational gender history of the
African American encounter with the Japanese. My academic experience in the
Comparative Black History Ph.D. Program, for which she was most responsible in its
foundation and development, challenged me to revisit the dominant analytical framework
of the “Black Atlantic” in Black Diaspora Studies and investigate the transnational and
diasporic experience of African Americans across the Pacific as a Japanese African-
Americanist.

Next, I would not have completed this dissertation without various institutional
and personal assistance and support which I received during the course of my research. I
would like to express my special gratitude to Frank Shirer and Dena Everett of the US.
Army Center of Military History at Washington DC. for permitting and processing my
access to the oral history collections of the veterans of the 24th Infantry Regiment. I am
indebted to the archivists and staff at the following archives and libraries in the US. and
Japan: the US. National Archives at College Park, Gifu Prefectural Library,
Kagamigahara City Museum of History and Folklore, Kagamigahara City Library, and
the MSU library. At MSU, I am grateful to Marshanda Smith, my fellow graduate
student and assistant to Darlene Clark Hine, for facilitating my communication with Dr.
Hine during her absence from MSU and keeping me in touch with the Comparative Black
History families. I also thank Van Kalbach, Fumiko Sakashita, and Yuki Maruyama for

their continual friendship and intellectual support in my graduate life in East Lansing.

vii

Finally, I thank my family members in Japan for their continuous support and
encouragement while I was pursuing my master’s and doctoral degrees in American
universities for the past decade: Norie Okada, Yukiko Okada, the late Ishi Okada,
Mikako Nakagome, and Kenji Okada. This dissertation is dedicated to Kunihiro Okada,
my father, who passed away in 2007 without seeing the completion of this dissertation

and my receiving a Ph.D. degree. I wish him sleep in peace.

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................ vi
LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................. xi
PARTI

INTRODUCTION, HISTORIOGRAPHY, AND BACKGROUND ...................... 1
CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: GENDERING THE “BLACK PACIFIC” ................................. 2
CHAPTER 2

A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AFRICAN
AMERICANS AND THE JAPANESE THROUGH WORLD WAR II ..................... 33
PART II

RACE, MANHOOD, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND AFRICAN AMERICAN
SOLDIERS IN JAPAN UNDER U.S. MILITARY OCCUPATION .................... 47
CHAPTER 3

RACIAL AND MASCULINE EMPOWEMENT WITHIN THE SEGREGATED ARMY
IN THE 24TH INFANTRY REGIMENT AT CAMP GIFU ................................... 48
CHAPTER 4

AFRICAN AMERICAN SOLDIERS ENCOUNTER WITH THE JAPANESE IN THE
GARRISON COMMUNITY OF GIFU ......................................................... 71
PART III

NEGOTIATING RACE AND WOMANHOOD AMONG AFRICAN AMERICAN
WOMEN IN OCCUPIED JAPAN ............................................................ 111
CHAPTER 5

RACIAL AND FEMININE EMPOWERMENT AND RESISTANCE AMONG
AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN IN OCCUPIED JAPAN ............................... 112
CHAPTER 6

BLACK MASCULINIST BACKLASH AGAINST FEMININE EMPOWERMENT IN
OCUPIED JAPAN ................................................................................. 155
PART Iv

TRANS-PACIFIC DEBATES OVER INTERRACIAL RELATIONSHIPS
BETWEEN AFRICAN AMERICAN GIS AND JAPANESE WOMEN .............. 184

ix

CHAPTER 7
BLACK REPRESENTATION OF JAPANESE FEMININITY AND THE POLITICS OF

INTERRACIAL INTIMACY IN OCCUPIED JAPAN ...................................... 185
CHAPTER 8

DEBATIN G THE BLACK-JAPANESE INTERMARRIAGE AND OCCUPATION
BABIES IN TRANS-PACIFIC BLACK COMMUNITIES ................................. 210
CHAPTER 9

RACE, BLACKNESS, AND MISCEGENATION IN JAPANESE CULTURE DURING
THE US. MILITARY OCCUPATION ........................................................ 235
CONCLUSION .................................................................................... 254
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................. 261

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1 Uncle Tom in Asia ..................................................................... 37
Figure 2.2 Mr. President, Include Me “In” ...................................................... 40
Figure 2.3 Asiatics Are Colored TOO ............................................................. 45
Figure 3.1 Location Of Camp Gifu ................................................................ 52
Figure 3.2 Camp Majestic .......................................................................... 53
Figure 3.3 Chapel Choir of the 24th Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu ....................... 61
Figure 3.4 Boxers in the 24th Infantry Regiment ................................................ 64

Figure 3.5 Parade of the 24th Infantry Regiment during an Inspection at Camp Gifu. .....66

Figure 4.1 African American GI with a Local Japanese Child in Kagamigahara .......... 77
Figure 4.2 Cpl. Ernest Steinbeck of the 24th Infantry Regiment with His Bride Miss
Teruko Enya and Their 2-Year-Old Daughter Marie ................................. 88
Figure 5.1 Army Nurses in Japan Celebrate Founding at Camp Gifu ..................... 118
Figure 5.2 Elvira Turner, Civilian Personnel, General Headquarters of SCAP, on the
Streets of Tokyo Near Provost Marshall’s Headquarters ........................... 121
Figure 5.3 Ethel Payne, Director of the Seaview Special Service Club In Tokyo, with Lt.
Charles L. Gray of the 24th Infantry .................................................... 122
Figure 5.4 Daisy Tibbs, Quaker Missionary to Hiroshima with Little Koto-Chan,
Daughter of Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto ................................................... 126
Figure 5.5 Women Volunteers Furnish Aid and Comfort to GI’s in Korea at Camp Gifu
............................................................................................... 1 30
Figure 5.6 Teachers in the American School at Camp Gifu .................................. 140
Figure 5.7 Interracial Social Activities of Daisy Tibbs in Hiroshima ...................... 145
Figure 6.1 ‘Battle’ Between Wac’s and Native Girls Rages in Japan ...................... 161
Figure 7.1 A Japanese Women Attending to an African American Man at Home ....... 194

xi

Figure 8.1 “A Visit of Thanks”: Joe Louis, Miki Sawada, and Four Black-Japanese
Orphans in the Elizabeth Saunders Home ............................................. 232

xii

Part I
Introduction, Historiography, and Background

Chapter 1
Introduction: Gendering the “Black Pacific”

This dissertation examines the transnational identity and subjectivity formations
of African American men and women who were stationed with various statuses and
purposes in Japan under US. military occupation during the period fi'om 1945 to 1952.
The major purpose of this project is to bring the traditionally marginalized perspective of
“gender” as well as “sexuality” to the center in the historical analysis of transnational
racial formations of the “Black Pacific,” more specifically, the interracial and/or
international encounters between African Americans and the Japanese within the specific
historical context of the US. military occupation of Japan. In this dissertation, I argue
that African American men and women achieved some racialized sense of empowerment
in gender specific ways through their everyday, face-tO-face interactions with Japanese
men and women, based on their political and economic privileges, elevated social
statuses, and broadened opportunities in occupied Japan which they enjoyed as members
of the US. occupation forces. African American men and women also developed a
gendered sense of racism and sexism in occupied Japan, where they continued facing and
resisting racial and gender discriminations within the US. Army and in the American
communities on the Japanese side, while they enjoyed the relative racial acceptance and
the nationalized sense of superiority and power in their relations to Japanese citizens.

This study seeks to address the following thought-provoking questions on the
intersecting identity politics of race, gender, nation, sexuality, and class among African
Americans in occupied Japan: How did African American male soldiers construct their

racial, masculine, and national identities through their engagement in the “tri-racial”

dynamics of interracial/intemational interactions among black and white Americans and
the Japanese within the political context of the US. military occupation of Japan?; How
did African American women achieve the nationalized, feminine sense of empowerment
vis-a-vis Japanese citizens while they challenged the racism and sexism in the US.
military and from the patriarchal sector of the black community in occupied Japan?; How
did African Americans and the Japanese negotiate race consciousness, gender
conventions, sexual practice, and international and interethnic relations through their
engagement in the trans-Pacific debates over interracial intimacy, sexuality, and marriage
between black GIS and Japanese women?

This dissertation attempts to bridge the historiographical gaps which deeply exist
in African American military history and African American gender history in two ways:
the introduction of a “gender” perspective in the historical analysis of the military
experience of African American male soldiers and the inclusion of the “militarized”
overseas experience of black women in the larger narrative of African American
women’s history.1 It reveals that the “masculinized” sense of racial identity among
African American male soldiers was socially constructed in the specific interracial and

intraracial dynamics of their interactions with the Japanese, white Americans, and

 

l I use the word “militarized,” instead of “military,” to include both military and civilian African American
women who were involved in the US. military occupation of Japan in certain ways, regardless of their
official affiliation with the US. Army. African American women in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) or
the Army Nurse Corps served in occupied Japan as official members of the US. Army. Those
“militarized” civilian African American women who were stationed in occupied Japan included the civilian
personnel in the Department of Army, Red Cross workers, missionary workers, and female family members
of African American male soldiers or civilian personnel. For the concept and process of “gendered
militarization,” see the multiple work of feminist political scientist Cynthia Enloe, including Maneuvers:
The International Politics of Militarizing Women ’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000);
Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Rev. ed. (Berkeley:
University Of California Press, 2000); The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

African American women in their garrison lives in occupied Japan, as well as the intra-
organizational racial and class politics of the US. Army during that period. This study
also sheds light on the diverse dimensions in the lives of African American women, both
military and civilian, who achieved the “gendered” sense of racial empowerment in quite
different ways from Afiican American men, depending on their social status and
occupation in Japan. Moreover, it pays attention to the transnational aspects of the
“gendered” contestations over race consciousness, gender conventions, and national
identity in the transnational debates over the interracial intimacy, sexuality, and marriage
between African American male soldiers and Japanese women within the African
American communities on both sides of the Pacific.

This dissertation also reconsiders the historical encounters between African
Americans and the Japanese in occupied Japan from the perspectives of gender, sex, and
intimacy, the categories which few historians employed in their race-centered narrative or
analysis of black-Japanese relationships, especially those in the pre-WWII period. It
sheds light on the gendered differences in the identity and subjectivity formations
between African American men and women in Japan, which were manifested not only
through their interracial/intemational interactions with Japanese women and men, but
also in their intraracial gender negotiations within black communities. As historian Gary
Okihiro notes in his revisiting essay of “Is Yellow Black or White?” in 2002, the
introduction of gender and sexual perspectives to the comparative analysis of black and
Asian racial formations “troubles the US. binaries of race, gender, and sexuality” and

“inspires insurgencies and solidarities across the boundaries of race, gender, sexuality,

2 This study reveals the ways African American men and women

and nation.”
reconfigured the boundaries of race consciousness, national identity, and gender and
sexual conventions in gender-specific ways, while they experienced interracial
identifications or conflicts with Japanese men and women in various settings within the
Specific historical context of US. military occupation of Japan.

This dissertation further contributes to the international historiography of the US.
military occupation of Japan by focusing on the gendered process of identity and
subjectivity formations among African American men and women in interracial,
international, and intercultural dynamics of the triadic relations among blacks, whites,
and the Japanese in occupied Japan. The gendering of the transnational racial formation
process in occupied Japan reveals the racial and sexual tensions and confrontations in
which men and women of each groups contested over race loyalty, sexual access, gender
relations, and national honor within the political parameter of the US. military
occupation of Japan. Moreover, my research sheds light on the transnational and
international dimensions of the mutual interaction and representation between African
Americans and the Japanese across the Pacific during the period of the US. military
occupation of Japan. By focusing on the transnational experience of Afiican American
men and women in occupied Japan, it reveals that black encounter with the Japanese was
informed by the trans-Pacific exchanges and negotiations of ideology and practice, which
intersected among the matrix of race, nation, gender, and sex, in the broader political and
ideological context of the early Cold War period. The black press played a critical role in

forging the trans-Pacific interaction and imaginary between the stateside and diasporic

 

2 Gary Y. Okihiro, “ls Yellow Black or White? Revisited,” in Blacks and Asians: Crossings, Conflict and
Commonality, ed. Hazel M. McFerson (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2006), 58.

African American communities because of the transnational circulation of black
newspapers and magazines.

Moreover, the conceptual framework of the “Black Pacific” will be employed in
this dissertation to explore the transnational and international dimensions of the diasporic
political and cultural encounters of African American men and women with the Japanese
during the period of the US. military occupation of Japan. In this dissertation, I
reconsider the transnational racial formations of the world of the “Black Pacific” from a
gendered perspective by focusing on the masculinized and feminized experience of
African American men and women and their encounters with the Japanese during the
period of US. military occupation of Japan. Historian George Lipsitz argues that the
understanding of gender was excluded from the politics of interracialism in the wartime
America, while the racialized nature of the Pacific War promoted the formation of the
interethnic, antiracist coalitions within communities of color. He further points out the
gendered implications of postwar US. economic expansion and military engagement in
Asia in the “new stage” of racial formation, informed by the complicated intersections of
race, gender, class, and nation which were imminent in such phenomena as the sexual
relations between US. servicemen and Asian women and the economic exploitation of
low-wage Asian women workers by the project of transnational capital.3 The gendered
analysis of the “Black Pacific” explores the possible formations of the cross-racial
gendered identifications and solidarities as well as the tensions and conflicts between

black, white and Japanese women, while revealing the masculinized homosocial bonds

 

3 George Lipsitz, “‘Frantic to Join . . . the Japanese Army’: Black Soldiers and Civilians Confront the Asia-
Pacific War,” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), eds. T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and
Lisa Yoneyama (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 368-372.

which were constructed between black and white men upon their claim on American
manhood vis-a-vis Japanese women and men.

In postwar U.S.-Japanese relations in which the military became a major vehicle
for forging the black-Japanese encounters, especially those between black male GIS and
Japanese women, their gendered and sexualized relationships have to be historicized
within the specific “militarized” political and social context of the US. engagement with
Japan during and beyond the occupation period. As feminist political scientist Cynthia
Enloe theoretically elaborates, the processes of “gendered militarization” depended on
the “maneuvers” to control women and the notions of femininity, as well as masculinity,
by militaries and the militarized civilian elites.4 During the US. occupation of Japan, the
transnational racial formation of the “Black Pacific” was a highly gendered process of
interaction and representation between African Americans and the Japanese in the
specific political context of the militarized and colonial relations between the US. and
Japan. Through this, African American, as well as Japanese, men and women
accommodated, contested, and reconfigured the racialized hierarchies of gender and
sexual ideology and practice within the tri-racial international dynamics of their trans-
Pacific encounters and interactions in occupied Japan.

*****

This dissertation poses the questions and issues in the overlapping fields of
historiography in the revisionist sense: the histories of Afiican American masculinity,
femininity, and gender, Afro-Asian relationships, the US. military occupation of Japan,

and the Black Diaspora.

 

4
Enloe, Maneuvers, x.

There is an emerging body of historical scholarships which focus on the social
construction of black masculinity and gender. In the preface to their pioneering
anthology of African American men’s history titled, A Question of Manhood: A Reader
in (1.5. Black Men ’s History and Masculinity (1999), Darlene Clark Hine and Eamestine
Jenkins suggest that “men not only are as influenced by their gender as women, but have
actively participated in a history of gender construction, shaped by certain prevailing
notions about what it means to be a man in American society and culture.”5 As the
authors point out, the traditional scholarship on African American men, which tended to
view their lives within the social pathological framework, contributed to the production
and reproduction of contemporary negative and “self-destructive” images and discourses
of black masculinity. The authors, instead, stress the need to examine black manhood as
a specific social construct which was subject to change over time and place in their
project to reconstruct US. history by gendering of the African American men’s lives and
experiences.6

Some historians are beginning to reconsider the military experience of African
American male soldiers from a gendered perspective. Steven Estes points out the

implications of the “altered conception of African American manhood,” either in the

 

5 Darlene Clark Hine and Eamestine Jenkins, eds., A Question of Manhood: A Reader in US. Black Men ’s
History and Masculinity, Vol. I: “Manhood": The Construction of Black Male History and Manhood,
1750-1870 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), xv.

6 Ibid., xv-xvii. Other major recent monographs which exclusively focus on the histories of gender and
black masculinity include the following: Steve Estes, I Am a Man]: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights
Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire:
The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005); Martin Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class
and the Transformation of Masculinity, I 900-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004);
Herman Graham "I, The Brother’s Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood and the Military Experience
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); Darlene Clark Hine and Eamestine Jenkins, eds., A
Question of Manhood: A Reader in US. Black Men ’s History and Masculinity, Vol. 2: The I 9” Century:
From Emancipation to Jim Crow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

battlefield or home front during World War II, for the development of the postwar civil
rights movement in one chapter of his work I Am a Man: Race, Manhood, and the Civil
Rights Movement (2005). He suggests that the emerging sense of “camaraderie” and
“confidence,” which was forged among African American soldiers based on their Shared
racism in the military as well as their combat experience during WWII, encouraged the
“militant” black veterans to join the civil rights movement in their communities.7 In The
Brothers’ Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood, and the Military Experience (2003),
Herman Graham III argues that African American soldiers developed
“counterhegemonic” notions of masculinity through their military service during the era
of the Vietnam War, while they radically nurtured racial and “Third World”
consciousness and solidarity in the context of the emerging black nationalism in the era
of Black Power movement as well as of the masculinized US. military culture.8 These
historians challenge the lack of gender perspective in the traditional scholarship on
African American military experience by focusing on the social construction of racial
masculinity of African American soldiers in the specific historical context of the US.
military engagement in the wars. In the traditional narratives of Afiican American
military history which almost exclusively focused on racial segregation and
discrimination in the US. armed forces, black soldiers’ “manhood” was considered as a
given factor in the organization of their military lives by the essentialist associations

between “manhood” and “military.”9

 

7 Estes, [Am a Man], “-38.
8 Graham, The Brother ’s Vietnam War, passim.

9 For the major traditional scholarships on the general African American military history, see, for example,
Gerald Astor, The Right to Fight: A History of Afi'ican Americans in the Military (Cambridge: Da Capo

Other historians have investigated the military experience of African American
women in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) or the Army Nurse Corps, especially during
World War II.'0 Challenging the overall marginalization of African American women in
the US. armed forces in the African American military historiographies, these historians
pose the intersecting questions of race, gender, sexuality, and class which complicated
the lives of African American WACS and Army nurses within the US. military as well as
their representations in the larger American society. However, the diverse experiences of
the “militarized” black women, including the civilian black women who were concerned
in some ways with the US. military engagement overseas as female spouses of black

soldiers or the civilian personnel of the Department of Army or Defense, as well as the

 

Press, 1998); Bernard C. Nalty, Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military (New
York: The Free Press, 1986). On the African American troops in World War 11, see, for example, Bryan D.
Booker, African Americans in the United States Army in World War 11 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, Inc., 2008); Alan M. Osur, Blacks in the Army Air Forces During World War II: The Problems
of Race Relations (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2005); Ulysses Lee, The Employment of
Negro Troops, (1966; repr., Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2004); David P. Colley, Blood for
Dignity: The Story of the First Integrated Combat Unit in the US. Army (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2003); Neil A. Wynn, The Aflo—American and the Second World War, Rev. ed. (New York: Holmes &
Meier, 1993), esp. chap. 2; Robert L. Allen, The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass
Mutiny Trial in US. Naval History (1989; repr., Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1993); Stanley Sandler,
Segregated Skies: All-Black Combat Squadrons of World War 11 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1992); Lawrence P. Scott and William M. Womack Sr., Double V: The Civil Rights
Struggle of the Tuskegee Airmen (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1992). On the postwar
African American military history in this tradition, see, for example, John Darrell Sherwood, Black Sailor,
White Navy: Racial Unrest in the Fleet During the Vietnam War Era (New York: New York University
Press, 2007); James E. Westheider, Fighting on Two Fronts: African Americans and the Vietnam War
(New York: New York University Press, 1997); William Bowers, William M. Hammond, and George L.
MacGariggle, Black Soldier, White Army: The 24'” Infantry Regiment in Korea (Washington, DC: US.
Army Center of Military History, 1996).

'0 On the role of African American women in the US. military during World War 11, see Martha S. Putney,
When the Nation Was in Need: Blacks in the Women’s Army Corps During World War II (Lanham,
Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2001); Brenda L. Moore, To Serve My Country, To Serve My Race: The
Story of the Only Afi'ican American WA Cs Stationed Overseas during World War II (New York: New York
University Press, 1996); Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in
the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), esp. chap. 8. For the
general history of Women’s Army Corps (WAC) and the Army Nurse Corps, see, for example, Mary T.
Samecky, A History of the US. Army Nurse Corps (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999);
Leisa D. Meyer, Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women ’s Army Corps During World War II
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Bettie J. Morden, The Women ’s Army Corps, I 945-1978
(Washington DC: US. Army Center of Military History, 1990).

10

black WACS and Army nurses, have been generally marginalized in the historiographies
of Afiican American women and gender. Especially, the existence of the civilian African
American women who were stationed overseas with various statuses and purposes has
been almost ignored by the double bind of prejudice among historians, who tend to
associate “military” and “manhood” in their studies Of the US. military engagement with
the world in Specific periods and locations.

Second, this dissertation on the African American experience in occupied Japan
draws on the recent development in the scholarship on interdisciplinary and transnational
studies of “Afro-Asian” relationships. For the past decade, a growing body of literature
has emerged in the overlapping fields of history, literary criticism, cultural studies, and
Black and Asian American Studies, which investigated the interracial encounters, either
in material or imaginary terms, between peoples of the African and Asian diasporas
across time and space.ll In his pivotal essay in shaping the historiography of black-Asian
relationships, “Is Yellow Black or White?” Gary Y. Okihiro configures a comparative
framework of analyzing the commonalities and differences in the racial formation and
experience of blacks and Asians in US. history in order to look for the common ground
upon which African and Asian Americans ibuild interracial solidarities in terms of their
“nonwhite” status. Okihiro states:

We are a kindred people, African and Asian Americans. We share a history of
migration, cultural interaction, and trade. We share a history of colonization,

 

H The recent general scholarship on Afro-Asian encounters include the following: Fred HO and Bill V.
Mullen, eds., Afi'o Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between Afi'ican Americans and
Asian Americans (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Heike Raphael-Hemandez and Shannon Steen,
eds., AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2006);
Hazel M. McFerson, ed., Blacks and Asians: Crossings, Conflict and Commonality (Durham: Carolina
Academic Press, 2006); Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2004); The Afro-Asian Century, special issue of positions 11, no. 1 (Spring 2003); Vijay Prashad,
Everybody Was Kung F u Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2001 ).

11

oppression and exploitation, and parallel and mutual struggles for freedom. We
are a kindred people, forged in the fire of white supremacy and tempered in the
water of resistance. Yet that kinship has been obscured from our range of vision,
and that common cause, turned into a competition for access and resources.‘2

As he points out, their shared status and experience of repression as “nonwhites” created
the conditions of possibility for both the “debilitating aspect of Asian-African antipathy”
and the “liberating nature of African-Asian unity.”l3 Under the influence of his thesis on
Asian-African interracialism, the recent historical studies on intersections between black
and Japanese diasporas in the United States explore both the conflicts and solidarities
which occurred through various interracial encounters and interactions between African
Americans and Japanese Americans or Japanese immigrants in the context of domestic
and international racial dynamics.14

The international dimensions of the formation of the interracial solidarities and
conflicts between African Americans and the Japanese across the Pacific are attracting

growing scholarly attention under the current historiographical trend of

“intemationalizing” US. history as well as in the broadening of geographical scopes in

 

'2 Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 1994), 60-61.

‘3 Ibid., 62.

14 For the historical relationship between peoples in the African and Japanese diasporas in the United States,
see, for example, Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the
Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Diane C. Fujino, “The
Black Liberation Movement and Japanese American Activism: The Radical Activism of Richard Aoki and
Ytu'i Kochiyama,” in Afi'o Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African
Americans and Asian Americans, eds. Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008),
165-197; Charlotte Brooks, “1n the Twilight Zone between Black and White: Japanese American
Resettlement and Community in Chicago, 1942-1945,” in AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics,
eds. Heike Raphael-Hemandez and Shannon Steen (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 113-
150; Daniel Widener, “‘Perhaps the Japanese Are to Be Thanked?’: Asia, Asian Americans, and the
Construction of Black California,” positions 11, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 135-181; Quintard Taylor, The
Forging of a Black Community: Seattle ’s Central District from I 8 70 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1994), esp. chap. 4.

12

Black Diaspora studies beyond Africa and the “Black Atlantic.”15 The most historical
studies on black-Japanese relationships focus on how African Americans forged an
intemationalist sense of solidarity with the Japanese as racial allies, or critiqued Japan’s
imperialist aggression and colonial projects in Asia, in the global political dynamics of
their struggle against racism, colonialism, and imperialism, as well as in the changing
international context of the U.S.-Japanese relationship before and during World War 11.
Those historians reveal the trans-Pacific power matrix within the complicated nexus of
race, nation, and empire which was contingent in the formation and transformation of the
Afiican American intemationalist identification and interracial solidarities with Japan and

the Japanese in the first half of the twentieth century. '6

 

‘5 For recent scholarship which focuses on the international and transnational dimensions of the African
American struggle against racism and colonialism within and beyond the Afiican Diaspora, see for example,
Jonathan Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land?: World Aflairs and the American Civil Rights
Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Carol
Anderson, Eyes 017' the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights,
I 944-1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the
Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001);
Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and
Anticolonialism, I 93 7-1 95 7 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind:
Black Americans and US. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996).

16 For the major historical studies on the relationship between African Americans and the Japanese in the
international context before and during World War 11, see Yuichiro Onishi, “The New Negro of the Pacific:
How African Americans Forged Cross-Racial Solidarity with Japan, 1917-1922,” The Journal of African
American History 92, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 191-193; Etsuko Taketani, “The Cartography of the Black
Pacific: James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way,” American Quarterly 59, no. 1 (March 2007): 79-106;
Keiko Araki, “Daiichiji sekaitaisen-go ni okeru beikoku kokujin no nihonjin kan: Gavi undo wo cht’rshin ni
[Black Americans’ View of Japan after World War I: Focusing on Garvey Movement],” H6gaku seijigaku
ronkyri 66 (September 2005): 69-95; Gerald Horne, Race Warl: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack
on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004), esp. chaps. 2 and 5; Onishi, “Giant
Steps of the Black Freedom Struggle: Trans-Pacific Connections between Black America and Japan in the
Twentieth Century” (PhD. diss., University of Minnesota, 2004); Hiromi Furukawa and Tetsushi F urukawa,
Nihonjin to Afitrika-kei amerikajin: nichi-bei kankeishi ni okeru sono shoso' [Japanese and Afi'ican
Americans: Historical Aspects of Their Relations] (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2004); Yukiko Koshiro,
“Beyond an Alliance of Color: The African American Impact on Modern Japan,” positions 11, no. 1
(Spring 2003): 183-215; Home, “Tokyo-Bound: Afiican Americans and Japan Confront White
Supremacy,” Souls 3, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 16-28; and “The Revenge of the Black Pacific?,” Callaloo 24,
no. 1 (2001): 94-96; George Lipsitz, “‘Frantic to Join . . . the Japanese Army’: Black Soldiers and Civilians

13

The centrality of race and nation as analytical categories to investigate the prewar
black-Japanese encounters in the intemational context, however, fails to reveal the
gendered and sexualized dynamics of the interracial relationship between African
Americans and the Japanese. The fact that there were few face-to-face encounters
between African American and Japanese men and women before the period of the US.
military occupation of Japan partly explains that the prewar black-Japanese encounter
was mainly represented by historians as a male-dominant, transnational discursive site of
cross-racial affiliations and unities across the Pacific. The existence of women, whether
black or Japanese, is marginalized or even ignored in the current scholarship on the
prewar black-Japanese relationships, except a few brief references to the black women
who visited Japan or married Japanese men.17 In contrast, the gendered and sexualized

black-Japanese relationship in the postwar period, especially those between African

 

Confi'ont the Asia-Pacific War,” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), eds. T. Fujitani, Geoffrey
M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 347-377; Mark Gallicchio, The
African American Encounter with Japanese and China: Black lnternationalism in Asia, 1895-1945 (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Masaharu Sato and Barak Kushner, “‘Negro
Propaganda Operations’: Japan’s Short-Wave Radio Broadcasts for World War 11 Black Americans,”
Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 19, no. 1 (March 1999): 5-26; Reginald Kearney, African
American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1998); and “The Pro-Japanese Utterances of W. E. B. Du Bois,” Contributions in Black Studies 13, no. 14
(1995/1996): 201-17; Masaharu Sato, “Senji-ka nihon no taigai senden ni okeru ‘kokujin kOsaku’ [Japan’s
Wartime Propaganda against Blacks],” Masukomunike‘shon Kenkyu 46 (1995): 157-170; Ernest Allen, Jr.,
“Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932-1943,” Gateway Heritage 15 (Fall
1994): 16-33; and “When Japan Was ‘Champion of the Darker Races’: Satokata Takahashi and the
Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism, The Black Scholar 24, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 23-46; Yuko
Takeuchi, “W. E. B. Duboisu to nihon [W. E. B. Du Bois and Japan],” Shien 54, no. 2 (1994): 79-96.

17 For example, Ernest Allen, Jr. refers to the interracial marriage in 1934 of Pearl Sherrod and Satokata
Takahashi, who was the leader of The Development of Our Own, the Detroit-based pro-Japanese
association. Reginald Kearney mentions three black female teachers from St. Louis, Missouri, including L.
M. Turner, Alice McGee, and Isabel Dickson, who visited Japan in 1935 to attend the Pan-Pacific New
Educational Conference in Tokyo. Kearney also points out that some African American women were
included in those who were arrested by the FBI for their pro-Japanese sentiment during WWII, like Mittie
Maude Lena Gordon, the president general of the Chicago-based Peace Movement of Ethiopia. Allen,
“When Japan Was ‘Champion of the Darker Races’”: 34; Kearney, Afi'ican American Views of the
Japanese, 84-85, 98.

14

American male soldiers and Japanese women, received more popular interest and
academic scrutiny both in Japan and the US. Some scholars pay special attention to the
discursive expansion of the interracial sexual relationships between Japanese women and
black men in Tokyo and other base towns in the mid-19803 and early 19908, through
which some Japanese female writers and the masculinist Japanese media caused heated
debates over intraracial gender relations and sexual practices among the
contemporaneous Japanese men and women.18

Historian Yuichiro Onishi pays some attention to the gendered aspect of the trans-
Pacific racial formations of interracial unity between Afiican Americans and the Japanese
within the context of the “New Negro” movement during the interwar period. Onishi
argues that the black radicals in the “New Negro” movement who forged a cross-racial
solidarity with the Japanese as the “New Negro of the Pacific” during and after the Paris
Conference, 1917-1922, articulated the “masculinist vision of black freedom,” when they
employed the masculinized tropes of war and militarism or embraced traditional gender
roles in their relation to black women. He further suggests that some African Caribbean
and American women expressed a feminist sense of black intemationalism. Onishi offers
the example Of Jessie Fauset, as the “New Negro” feminists, who evoked the motif of
sexual violence of black women in her criticism of the 1917 East St. Louis race riot in the
global context of imperialist aggression, but without giving any specific reference to

19

Japan. His gendered analysis of the “masculinized” dimension of the black

 

'8 See Karen Kelsky, Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2001), esp. chap. 3; John G. Russell, “Consuming Passions: Spectacle, Self-Transforrnation, and the
Commodification of Blackness in Japan,” positions 6, no. 1 (1998): 113-177; Nina Comyetz, “Fetishized
Blackness: Hip Hop and Racial Desire in Contemporary Japan,” Social Text 41 (Winter 1994): 113-139.

19 Onishi, “The New Negro of the Pacific”: 207-209.

15

intemationalist engagement with Japan properly contextualizes the prewar black-
Japanese encounters, which scholars formerly interpreted only within the nexus of race
and nation, in the complexly intersecting histories of black gender ideology and relations,
black radical and nationalist politics, global politics, and the US. relationship with Japan.

In one chapter of his dissertation entitled, “Giant Steps of the Black Freedom
Struggle: Trans-Pacific Connections Between Black America and Japan in the Twentieth
Century,” Onishi explores the radical possibilities of the trans-Pacific formations of the ’
cross-racial solidarities against militarism, racism, and colonialism in occupied Okinawa
in the late 19605 and 1970s. He suggests that such transnational, cross-racial alliances
against white supremacy and the militarized international security system emerged
through the contingent, strategic convergence of the reversion movement of the
Okinawans, American peace activism, and black freedom struggles into the politics of
“nonwhiteness” in Okinawa during that period.20 He describes the encounter between
African American GIS and the natives in Okinawa in the specific historical context of
colonial Situations in Okinawa under US. military occupation, the Vietnam War, and the
militant dimension of the postwar black liberation movement:

In special colonial settings, these two groups exchanged understandings for each
other and created a nonwhite space, where Okinawans’ resentment toward the
occupiers coalesced with Black Americans’ resistance to white supremacy. Both
groups recognized that what laid beneath the machinery of US. militarism
abroad and in Okinawa was American democracy’s refusal and inability to hold
Black and Okinawans equals.”

 

20 Yuichiro Onishi, “Giant Steps of the Black Freedom Struggle: Trans-Pacific Connections between Black
America and Japan in the Twentieth Century” (PhD. diss., University of Minnesota, 2004), part III.

2‘ Ibid., 242-243.

16

Onishi underscores the commonality of racial domination in occupied Okinawa and
Black America as the conditions of radical possibilities for the cross-racial unity between
black GIS and the Okinawans against white supremacist political, social, and military
regimes. However, his centering of racial identity and status of African American
soldiers to the common ground for black-Okinawan solidarities fails to capture the more
complicated racial, gender, sexual, and international dynamics between black GIS and the
Okinawans inherent in the colonial relations in the US. military occupation of Okinawa.
African American GIS, like white counterparts, enjoyed and exercised considerable
privileges and prerogatives, which were conferred upon them for their US. citizenship, in
their asymmetrical relationship with the Okinawans, although they continued facing
racial oppression and discrimination within the US. military and in American society at
large. More importantly, Onishi never questions the male privilege or patriarchal sense
of power viS-a-vis Okinawan women, which black soldiers shared with white American
GIS for their investment in the dominant masculinized sexual ideology and practice which
were influential in the US. military culture. He only makes a brief reference to the tragic
incident of 1995, in which three black Marines raped a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl
and caused a'large-scale anti-base movement among the Okinawan people as well as
those in the mainland Japan, in the end of his chapter.

This dissertation is further built upon recent developments in the US. military and
international historiography, especially in the field of the US. military occupation of

Japan and Germany.22 Historians of US. international relations pay more attention to the

 

22 For recent scholarship focusing on the encounters between African American GIS and the Germans in
occupied Germany, see Timothy L. Schroer, Recasting Race After World War II: Germans and Afi'ican
Americans in American-Occupied Germany (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007); Heide
Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton:

17

gendered and sexualized, as well as racialized, dimensions of the US. foreign policy and
its imperialist and military engagement with the world in war and peace.23 There are a
growing number of scholarships on the US. military occupation of Japan, including
Okinawa, which address the issues of gender, sexuality, and race in the encounters
between American GIs and Japanese women and men under US. military dominance.
They explore such topics as interracial intimacy and sexuality, military prostitution,

international marriage, and mixed-blood children.24 There are, however, few historical

 

Princeton University Press, 2005); Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign
Relations, 1945-1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Brenda Gayle Plummer, “Brown Babies:
Race, Gender, and Policy after World War II,” in Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign
Affairs, 1945-1988, ed. Brenda Gayle Plummer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003),
67-91; Maria thn, GIs and F rduleins: The German-American Encounter in I 950s West Germany (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); John Willoughby, Remaking the Conquering Heroes: The
Social and Geopolitical Impact of the Post- War American Occupation of Germany (New York: Palgrave,
2001).

23 See, for example, J i-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America
(New York: New York University Press, 2002); Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science,
and US. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Robert D. Dean,
Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2001); Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics
Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998); Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in (IS-Korea Relations (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997); Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex
in World War [1 Hawaii (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Saundra Pollock Sturdevant
and Brenda Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the US. Military in Asia (New York: The
New Press, 1992).

24 Keisen jogakuen daigaku heiwa bunka kenkyfijo, ed. Senryo' to set: Seisaku, jittai, hyésho [Occupation
and Sexuality: Policy, Reality, and Representation] (Tokyo: Impact shuppankai, 2007); Naoko Shibusawa,
America ’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006);
Sayuri Guthrie Shimizu, “Sei no kokka kanri wo meguru senryO-ki nichibei kankei: Amerika no kaigai
gunji shinshutsu to jenda [Sexual Control by the State in the Japanese-US. Relationship during the
Occupation Period: the US. Military Engagement Overseas and Gender],” Gunji Shigaku 41, no. 4 (2006):
26-49; Hirofumi Hayashi, “Higashi ajia no beigun kichi to seibaibai/seihanzai [U.S. Military Base in East
Asia and Prostitution/Sexual Crime],” Amerika-shi kenkyri 29 (August 2006): 18-35; and “Amerikagun no
sei-taisaku no rekishi: 1950 nendai made [A Historical Study of the US Military’s Policy toward
Prostitution: Through the [9503],” Josei, Senso, Jinken 7 (March 2005): 94-118; Hiromi Furukawa and
Tetsushi Furukawa, Nihonjin to afurika-kei amerikajin: nichi-bei kankeishi ni okeru sono shosé [Japanese
and African Americans: Historical Aspects of Their Relations] (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2004), part 3, chaps.
1-3, 9; Yukiko Koshiro, “Race as lntemational Identity?: ‘Miscegenation’ in the US. Occupation of Japan
and Beyond,” Amerikastudien 48, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 61-77; Robert A. Fish, “The Heiress and the Love
Children: Sawada Miki and the Elizabeth Saunders Home for Mixed-Blood Orphans in Postwar Japan”
(PhD. diss. University of Hawaii, 2002); Yuki Tanaka, Japan's Comfort Women: The Military and

18

studies which focus on the African American experience and their relations with Japanese
people in occupied Japan, despite the relative visibility of black male soldiers in the
popular memory and imagination in postwar J apan.25 In Embracing Defeat: Japan in the
Wake of World War II (1999), historian John W. Dower argues that the fraternization
between occupation soldiers and Japanese women became a viable cultural symbol in
Shaping the new U.S.-Japanese relationship after World War II. By employing a
gendered metaphor to interpret “ubiquitous sexuality linking conqueror and conquered,”
Dower contends that Japan was transformed in the imagination of Americans from a
“menacing, masculine threat” into a “compliant, feminine body on which the white
victors could impose their will (my italics)”26 But, the “white victors” were not the only
crucial actors in the social and cultural formations of the interracial sexual dynamics in
the US. occupation of Japan. The presence of African-American soldiers among the
occupation forces and the practice of racial discrimination toward them in the US.
military further complicated the problem of interracial fraternization between the US.

occupation troops and the Japanese.

 

Involuntary Prostitution during War and Occupation (New York: Routledge, 2002), esp. chaps. 5-6; John
W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 1999); Yukiko Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the US. Occupation of Japan (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999); Michael S. Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa:
Literature and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1999); Regina Frances Lark, “They Challenged Two
Nations: Marriages between Japanese Women and American GIS, 1945 to Present” (PhD. diss. University
of Southern California, 1999).

25 On the literary and popular cultural representations of African American male soldiers in postwar Japan,
see Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa, chap. 3; Hiromi Furukawa and Tetsushi
Furukawa, Nihonjin to afurika-kei amerikajin, part 3, chap. 9; John G. Russell, “Consuming Passions:
Spectacle, Self-Transforrnation, and the Commodification of Blackness in Japan,” positions 6, no. 1 (1998):
113-177; and “Race and Reflexivity: The Black Other in Contemporary Japanese Mass Culture,” Cultural
Anthropology 6, no. 1 (1991): 3-25; and Nihonjin no kokujin kan: mondai wa “chibikuro samba” dake
dewa nai [Japanese Views of Blacks: Beyond the Problem of “Little Black Sambo”] (Tokyo: ShinhyOron,
1991), esp. chap. 2.

2" Dower, Embracing Defeat, 138-139.

19

In GIs and Fra'uleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany
(2002), historian Maria HOhn reveals the “multifaceted” experience of African American
soldiers in Rhineland-Palatinate through their encounters with the Germans. According
to HOhn, African American GIS, on the one hand, enjoyed a “liberating” experience in
Germany for the “overall tolerance” toward black soldiers by Germans. On the other
hand, black GIS faced the “widespread racism” against them by Germans who were
especially intolerant of sexual relationships between German women and black American
GIS. She further argues that German and American racial attitudes “interacted” in the
postwar German reforrnulations of their racial perception of blackness, through which the
Germans renegotiated racial attitudes, sexual mores, and national identity in their daily
encounters with American soldiers.27 The interactive social and cultural process in the
face-to-face encounters between Americans, either black or white, and Japanese people in
occupied Japan was influential in their reconfiguration of racial perception, gender and
sexual convention, and national identity. But few scholars pay enough attention to the
political and social implications of the interracial and international dynamics of everyday
interactions between the occupiers and the occupied for the triadic racial formations and
reforrnulations between the Japanese, blacks, and whites in Japan. The scholarship on
race, blackness, and miscegenation in occupied Japan focuses mostly on the Japanese
literary representations and popular discourses of black male soldiers, Japanese warbrides

of black GIS, and the half-black, half-Japanese children, while diminishing the agency of

 

27 HOhn, 01s and Frauleins, esp. chap. 3.

20

African American men and women, who were living either in Japan or the US, as major
actors in shaping the contours of postwar black-Japanese relations.28

In Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and
America (2005), historian Heide Fehrenbach stresses the “transatlantic” interaction and
signification concerning racial and national ideologies, practices, and belonging in the
racial reformulation of postfascist Germany. She states: “German and American
responses to black occupation children after 1945 were therefore conditioned by an ironic
yet momentous bit of historical synchronicity... the study of transnational responses to
the children constitutes a rich field for the investigation of postwar reformulations of race,
citizenship, and nationhood on both Sides of the Atlantic.”29 Fehrenbach further suggests
that historians engage in the comparative history of military occupation and racial
reformulation within the transnational and international framework.30 Some scholarship
on the US. occupation of Japan pays attention to the transnational and international
aspects of the postwar Japanese racial reformulation, the experience of Japanese

3' But, there are few studies

warbrides, and the problem of mixed-blood children.
focusing on the transnational experience of African American men and women,

especially the gendered dimension of their lives, in occupied Japan.

 

28 See, for example, Koshiro, “Race as lntemational Identity”; and Trans-Pacific Racisms and the US.
Occupation of Japan, esp. chap. 5; Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa, chap. 3;
Russell, Nihonjin no kokujin-kan, chap. 2; Hiromi Furukawa and Tetsushi Furukawa, Nihonjin to afitrika-
kei amerikajin, part 3, chaps. 1-3, 9. Hiromi and Tetsushi Furukawa make a brief discussion of the black
press’s coverage of Japan during the early occupation period and overview of the African American
soldiers who were stationed in occupied Japan and Okinawa. Ibid., part 3, chaps. 1 and 3.

29 Fehrenbach, Race afier Hitler, 3.
30 Ibid., 13.

31 See, for example, Koshiro, “Race as lntemational Identity”; and T rans-Pacific Racisms and the US.
Occupation of Japan; Fish, “The Heiress and the Love Children”; Lark, “They Challenged Two Nations.”

21

Moreover, this study revisits the dominant analytical framework of the “Black
Atlantic” in Black Diaspora Studies. In the recent evolution of the Black Diaspora
Studies in the cross-disciplinary fields, sociologist Paul Gilroy was highly influential for
his theoretical formulation of the “black Atlantic” as the “intercultural” and
“transnational” formation of the modern political and cultural world of the African
Diaspora. Gilroy’s conception of the “black Atlantic” as a “counterculture of modernity”
challenges the tendency of nationalist and ethnic absolutism which he finds in the
tradition of the black, as well as white, intellectual and political culture.32 However, the
dominance of the “Black Atlantic” as an intellectual framework to comparatively analyze
the historical experience and imaginary of the peoples of African descent from Slavery to
freedom obscures the geographical and temporal horizon of the African Diaspora and
underestimates its encounters and intersections with other politics of diasporas beyond
the Atlantic world.

Challenging the centrality of the “Atlantic” in the transnational and comparative
studies of African Diaspora, some scholars introduced the “trans-Pacific” perspective in
their analysis of the international or transnational racial formations in black-Japanese
relationships or in the broader black-Asian connections.33 In Afio-Orientalism (2004),
literary critic Bill V. Mullen argues that “Gilroy’s narrow attention to a decidedly

Westernized triangle of influence—Europe/Africa/North America—occludes significant

 

32 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1993), esp. chap. 1.

33 See for example, Gary Okihiro, “Toward a Black Pacific,” in Afi'oAsian Encounters: Culture, History,
and Politics, eds. Heike Raphael-Hemandez and Shannon Steen (New York: New York University Press,
2006), 313-330; Taketani, “The Cartography of the Black Pacific”; Onishi, “Giant Steps of the Black
Freedom Struggle”; and “The New Negro of the Pacific”; Home, “The Revenge of the Black Pacific?”

22

” 3" Mullen configures “Afro-

areas of the diasporic world and black experience.
Orientalism” as an alternative discursive Site on race, nation, and global politics for the
“dialectic” formation of Afro-Asian solidarities beyond the temptations of cultural and
racial essentialism. But Mullen’s materialist criticism of the Afro-Asian connections in
the US. narrowly focuses on the interracial formations in the radical and revolutionary
terms along the nexus of race, class, nation, and gender. He fails to fully consider other
critical dimensions of Afro-Asian interaction and imagination, especially the intimate and
sexual aspects of their relationships, including interracial dating, marriage, and
reproduction, in the overlapping diasporas of Africans and Asians in the global world as
well as in the US.
*****

After discussing briefly the historical relationship between African Americans
and the Japanese through World War II as background for the next seven chapters in
Chapter 2, I examine in Part II the social construction of racial manhood among African
American soldiers in the transnational and multiracial settings of the US. military
occupation of mainland Japan, specifically at Camp Gifu in Central Japan during the
period from 1947 to 1950. I focus on the military experiences of those in the all-black
24th Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu to examine the contestations over racial, masculine,
and national identities among African American soldiers, who could exert some power

over Japanese women and men as members of the US. occupation forces, while being

segregated and discriminated against within the US. Army.

 

34 Bill V. Mullen, Afio—Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xxix.

23

In Black Soldier, White Arm: The 24” Infantry Regiment in Korea (1996),
military historians William Bowers, William Hammond, and George MacGarrigle
reevaluate the achievements of the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment in the Korean War,
challenging the racially-biased traditional interpretations of its history. Initiated by the
directive of John O. Marsh, Jr., the Secretary of the Army in 1987 and conducted by the
historians affiliated with the US. Army Center of Military History from the late 19808
through the early 1990s, this revisionist historical project aims at the reconsideration of
the regiment’s role in the Korean War from a more racially-balanced perspective on the
basis of the results of their extensive oral history interviews.35 As a result of the critical
analysis of the operations of the 24th Infantry Regiment during the Korean War with
about four-hundred oral history interview of individuals, tvvo-thirds of whom were
African Americans, and official records in the National Archives, the authors conclude
that segregation and racial prejudice were the central factors which prevented the
emergence of “effective leadership within the regiment” and the construction of the
“bonds of mutual trust and reliance that were necessary if the unit was to hold together in
combat.” 3 6 The authors also stress the combat unpreparedness among the African
American solders in the 24th Infantry Regiment who were enjoying the “relaxed
conditions of garrison life” in occupied Japan, combined with the “hostility” and

“frustration” which they experienced in their discriminatory treatments within the US.

 

35 The all-black 24th Infantry Regiment was recommended for its dissolution by Maj. Gen. William B.
Kean, the commander of the 25th Division, in late September 1950 because it had revealed itself
“untrustworthy and incapable of carrying out missions expected of an infantry regiment.” Bowers et al.,
Black Solder, White Army, v. For the traditional official history of the Korean War which criticized the
performance of African American troops in the Korean War, see Roy E. Appleman, US. Army in the
Korean War: South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu (Washington, DC: US. Government Printing Office,
1961).

36 Bowers et al., Black Solder, White Army, 263.

24

military. They explain the unit’s poor performances, which were characterized by a large
number of stragglers in the battlefields, during the early months in the Korean War in the
following way:

The 24th Infantry in Japan was a model not only of the tensions that dogged all-
black units in that day but also of the subtle interplay those problems could have
in combination with the many challenges the Army faced in the postwar period.
On the surface, conditions within the unit seemed favorable. The regiment was
well situated at Camp Gifil, and life seemed good for its troops. Down below,
however, there was much that was wrong.37

According to the authors, military unreadiness of the 24th Infantry Regiment in occupied
Japan, mainly at Camp Gifu as its host camp, was conditioned, on the one hand, by the
“extreme turbulence” which the US. Army itself was facing in the postwar period,
including the rapid decline in the personnel strengths following World War II, incomplete
training, equipment shortage, and lack of combat experiences. On the other hand, various
problems which were contingent on the “occupation-oriented duties” in Japan afflicted
the regiments of the Eighth Army, regardless of race: drug abuse, alcoholism, venereal
disease, and black-market activities.38

In some parts of Black Soldier, White Army, the authors note the formations of the
racial communities at Camp Gifu as an “enclave where black soldiers could pursue their
own interests without undue stress from the outside world” despite “segregation” and
“humiliations” within the US. military.39 Especially, they pay attention to the role of Col.

Michael E. Halloran, the 24th Infantry Regiment’s commander, in the building of the

“unit pride” among his black soldiers, who gained a reputation for its athletic prowess

 

37 Ibid., 65,264, 266.
38 .
IbId., 64-65, 264, 266.

39 Ibid., 50.

25

and fine marching.40 However, the authors generally examine various dimensions in the
military and social life of African American soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment at
Camp Gifu only in terms of their combat readiness for the Korean War, when they
discuss social segregation in base life, interracial and interclass conflicts within the
regiment, and homosexuality among the unit’s men, in addition to the underscored
problems mentioned above.41 Thus, they fail to capture how the experiences of Afiican
American soldiers in the 24’h Infantry Regiment at Gifu affected their identities in the
larger context of contestations over race, gender, nation, class, and sexuality in the
history of the US. military occupation of Japan as well as in the African American
struggle for rights during that period. More importantly, they ignore the African
American soldiers’ encounters with the local Japanese around the garrison community of
Gifu, which I argue was crucial in their racialized and gendered subjectivity formations in
occupied Japan. The interracial intimacy and sexuality between African American
soldiers and Japanese women at Gifu, especially their marriages across racial and
national boundaries, constituted the most provocative issue in occupied Japan to which
both Americans and the Japanese responded by drawing on the complexly intersecting
ideologies and practices of race, gender, sex, nation, and class during that period.

In Chapter 3, I discuss how African American soldiers in the 24th Infantry
Regiment achieved the racial and masculine empowerment while they invested in the
intra-organizational racial, class, and sexual dynamics within the segregated US. Army
at Camp Gifu. In Chapter 4, I examine African American soldiers’ encounters with the

Japanese as a racial “other” as well as the “occupied” in the garrison community of Gifir

 

4" Ibid., 51.

4‘ Ibid., 48-60.

26

as influential in their identity formation and transformation process in occupied Japan. I
draw mainly on the tapes and notes of the oral history interviews which were originally
prepared by Col. John A. Cash of the US. Army Center of Military History for the
publishing of Black Soldier, White Army, combined with autobiographies, black
newspapers and magazines, Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), official military records in the National Archives, to
reconstruct the experiences of the 24th Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu beyond the scope
of military preparedness for the Korean War. These chapters explore the ways racial,
masculine, and national identities of Afiican American soldiers in the 24th Infantry
Regiment were constructed through the “tri-racial” dynamics of international interactions
among black GIS, white GIS, and the Japanese within the political context of the US.
military occupation. Moreover, I consider the implications of the racial manhood of
African American soldiers, which was both acquired and challenged by their military
experiences in the Pacific area, for their involvement in the early stage of the modern
Civil Rights Movement.

In Part III, I focus on the experience of African American women in occupied
Japan as major actors in shaping the gendered formations of the “Black Pacific.”
Academic and popular discourses of American GIS in occupied Japan both in the United
States and Japan have largely focused on African American men as racialized and
sexualized subjects, especially in their representation of the intimate and sexual
relationship between black GIS and Japanese women. In contrast with the high visibility
of African American men, the presence of African American women who were stationed

in occupied Japan for various reasons has been completely ignored, rather than

27

marginalized, in the dominant discourses of the U.S.-Japanese encounters. While the
recent scholarship on the US. military occupation of Japan highlights its racial dimension,
coupled with perspectives of gender and sexuality, with specific attention to the
racialized experience of African American male soldiers and their encounter with the
Japanese, most studies focus on the issue of miscegenation, or the interracial romance,
sexuality, and marriage between black GIS and Japanese women and the problem of their
mixed-blood children. 42 The overseas experiences of African American women
contingent in the postwar US. military engagement with the international world have
been often neglected by historians who were more attentive to the masculine aspect of the
US. military deployment in the context of the Cold War.

In Chapter 5, I discuss the diverse experiences of African American women who
were stationed in Japan under US. military occupation. Some African American women
were directly involved with US. military occupation of Japan as military members of the
Women’s Army Corps (WAC) or the Army Nurse Corps, or as civilian personnel of the
Department of Army. Other black women were stationed in occupied Japan as family
members of African American male soldiers or worked there as civilian workers in non-
military American organizations. I argue that African American women, like their male
counterparts, reconfigured racial, gender, class, and national identities in the gender-
specific ways for their feminine empowerment in occupied Japan. Moreover, African

American women continued facing the racism and sexism within the larger American or

 

42 The representative historical studies of this tradition include the following: Koshiro, Trans-Pacific
Racisms and the US. Occupation of Japan; and “Race as lntemational Identity/’2 Fish, “The Heiress and
the Love Children”; Lark, “They Challenged Two Nations”; Furukawa, Nihonjin to afitrika-kei amerikajin,
esp. part 111.

28

African American community in occupied Japan, while they could enjoy various political
and economic privileges over Japanese citizens by claiming their US. citizenship.

In Chapter 6, I consider the gendered implications of the presence of African
American women for the formation of complex racial and sexual dynamics that
developed among black women, men, and the Japanese. African American women
resisted not only racism within the US. Army but also sexism in the African American
community in occupied Japan. They experienced the gender backlash from the African
American male soldiers stationed there, who tried to police the gender empowerment
among some African American women, enjoying the broader opportunities, enhanced
social status, and luxurious lives in Japan, in light of the dominant gender and sexual
normativity of the period. I discuss the intraracial gender conflicts between African
American women and men which were manifested over the issue of interracial intimacy
and sexual relations between black men and Japanese women in occupied Japan.

In Part IV, I examine the transnational and international discursive formations
concerning the interracial intimacy, sexuality, and marriage between African American
male soldiers and Japanese women on both sides of the Pacific during and immediately
after the US. military occupation of Japan.43 In Romance and Rights: The Politics of

Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954 (2005), historian Alex Lubin offers a brief comparative

 

43 For the recent major studies on interracial intimacy, see, for example, Renee C. Romano, Race Mixing:
Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (2003; repr., Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006);
Alex Lubin, Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-I954 (Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 2005); Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2003); Rachel F. Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and
Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing
Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999). For the
development of interracial intimacies between African American soldiers and German women in West
Germany under US. military occupation, see Schroer, Recasting Race After World War II, esp. chaps. 3-4;
Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler; Goedde, 01s and Germans, esp. chap. 3; HOhn, GIs and Frduleins;
Willoughby, Remaking the Conquering Heroes, esp. chap. 2.

29

analysis of black magazine and newspaper representations of black/European
relationships with those of black/Asian relationships, although most of his investigation
focuses on black/white interracial marriage and romance. Rubin argues that “while the
politics of interracial intimacy in Europe posited white women as the appropriate judges
of black masculine desirability, the same politics in Japan posited Japanese women as
engendering black patriarchy.” AS he notes, the black/Japanese interracial romance was
represented through a narrative of “female submissiveness and male patriarchy” as well
as a narrative of “vice” in the black press during the period of his study.44 However,
Rubin fails to capture the more complex racial and sexual dynamics contingent on the
specific historical context of the US. military occupation of Japan which were reflected
in the black press representations of black/Japanese intimacies in occupied Japan. On the
one hand, African American soldiers experienced a highly enhanced masculine sense of
power and pride through their interracial relationships with Japanese women, while they
claimed a right to their patriarchal privileges vis-a-vis the native women of the occupied
nation in the asymmetrical power relations between the United States and Japan. On the
other hand, the masculinized ideologies and behaviors among Afiican American soldiers
in occupied Japan were defined not only in their interracial/international relationships
with Japanese women, but also in their intraracial gender relationships with African
American women, more specifically, those who were stationed in occupied Japan with

various social statuses during the period.45 Thus, the black newspaper and magazine

 

44 Lubin, Romance and Rights, 1 16.

45 Lubin suggests that one 1952 Ebony’s article implies that “Asian women’s docility was a welcome
change from black women’s aggressiveness,” without further elaborating this point. Lubin points out the
comparison of Japanese women and black women in the black representations of black/Japanese intimacy,
but he seems to refer to the femininity of black women in general in his remark of “black women’s

30

representations of black/Japanese intimacies in Japan served as a transnational site of
identity contestations over race, gender, sexuality, and nation within the trans-Pacific
African American communities. Through this, African American men and women on
both Sides of the Pacific employed the representations of Japanese women for their
gendered purposes in the specific political and ideological context, both domestic and
international, of the US. military engagement with the global world during the early Cold
War period as well as the postwar African American struggle for rights.

I focus on the trans-Pacific formations of racialized, gendered, and nationalized
discourses concerning the interracial intimacy and sexuality between Afiican American
soldiers and Japanese women during and immediately after US. military occupation of
Japan. Using major black newspapers and popular black magazines as primary sources, I
discuss in Chapter 7 the black press’s coverage of interracial romance and sexuality
between African American GIS and Japanese women as a transnational site of discursive
contestations in African American gender and sexual politics between African American
men and women who were stationed in occupied Japan. In Chapter 8, the focus of my
discussion shifts to the black newspaper and magazine representations of the black-
Japanese interracial marriage and their biracial children as an international forum for
debating the possibility of racial acceptance and national integration of the Japanese
brides of African American GIS, as well as their half-black, half-Japanese children, into
the black communities in the United States. In Chapter 9, I examine the Japanese

discourses of the interracial intimacy, sexuality, and marriage between Japanese women

 

aggressiveness.” He does not make any mention of the existence of African American women in occupied
Japan and the intraracial gender dynamics between African American men and women there. Ibid., 117.

31

and African American GIS during the occupation period and their implications for the

postwar reconstruction of racial perception of blackness in Japanese culture.

32

Chapter 2
A Historical Overview of the Relationship between African Americans and
the Japanese through World War II

The relationship between African Americans and the Japanese had a long history
of trans-Pacific racial, cultural, and political exchanges throughout time and space, either
in imaginative or material terms, before they experienced a large scale of face-to-face
encounters for the first time in Japan during the period of US. military occupation from
1945 to 1952. African American and Japanese people constructed, appropriated, and
reconfigured the race-based mutual representations for their own political projects in the
larger historical context of the changing U.S.-Japanese relationship as well as the global
politics of race, empire, and colonialism in the modern world. In the first half of the
twentieth century, the rise of the Japanese empire to power in the white-dominant world
of international politics attracted the special attention of the African American political
and intellectual leaders who articulated the racialized discourse of world affairs, which
historian Marc Gallicchio calls “black intemationalism.” Japan, as he argues, occupied a
“prominent” status among African American intemationalists, who stressed the role of
race and racism in world affairs and attempted to forge cross-national solidarity of the
“world’s darker races” in their antiracist and anti-imperialist struggle during the first four
decades of the century before World War II.1

It was Japan’s triumph over Russia in 1905 that was decisive in the formation of
African American political and intellectual engagement with Japan from a perspective of
international racialism. As historian Reginald Kearney notes, the victory of Japan over

Russia awakened the intemationalist sense of race relations among the contemporaneous

 

1 Mark Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japanese and China: Black lnternationalism in
Asia, 1895-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), chaps. 2-3.

33

African Americans, Since it was the “most emphatic refutation of the whole idea of white
supremacy.”2 Kearney states:

In the minds of African Americans... the victory Of the Japanese over the
Russians was vicariously satisfying an event as any achieved in their lifetime.
The Japanese most convincingly demonstrated for all the world to see that white
hegemony over nonwhites was merely situational, not genetic, a matter of
strategy and tactics, not race.

This historic event gave African Americans the opportunity to embrace the racialized
image of the Japanese as a “colored” people and identify them as possible racial allies for
overthrowing white supremacy in the global context of their antiracist and anti-
imperialist struggle.4

The African American intemationalist discourse of Japan was expanded by a
series of world affairs after World War I: Japan’s commitment to the principle of racial
equality at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and its confrontation with the Western
imperial powers in the Washington Conference of 1921-1922. As historian Yuichiro
Onishi argues, African American intellectuals and activists strategically mobilized the
“symbolic importance” of Japan as the “New Negro of the Pacific” for their own political
projects during this period, although their ideological and political orientations varied
from black nationalism, socialism, to communism.5 Japan’s support of racial equality at

Paris, on the one hand, encouraged some African Americans to project the image of

 

2 Reginald Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1998), 37.

3 Ibid., 38.

4 For the detailed discussion of African American reactions to the Russo-Japanese War, see Kearney,
African American Views of the Japanese, chap. 2.

5 Yuichiro Onishi, “The New Negro of the Pacific: How African Americans Forged Cross-Racial Solidarity
with Japan, 1917-1922,” The Journal of Afi'ican American History 92, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 191-193.

34

Japan as a “champion of the darker races.” They interpreted the Washington Conference
as the racially-motivated strategy of the Western powers to limit Japan’s naval expansion
in the Pacific area. Marcus Garvey, the black nationalist leader of the Universal Negro
Improvement Association (UNIA), and his followers regarded Japan as a leader of the
“colored” world in the coming race war, although he left unquestioned Japan’s
imperialist motives in Asia and misunderstood that Japan jointly proposed a racial
equality clause with China.6 On the other hand, black radical leaders, including socialist
A. Philip Randolph and communist Cyril V. Briggs, were critical of Japan’s imperialist
ambitions and colonial projects in Asia as well as white supremacist underpinnings Of the
Wilsonian intemationalism and the Washington Conference in terms of class analysis,
while they recognized the symbolic importance of Japan globalizing the issue of racial
equality in the arena of world politics.7

During the interwar period, especially after Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in
1931, African Americans reacted in ambiguous and complicated ways to Japan, which,
similar to Western nations, was pursuing imperialistic interests in Asia while assruning
the imagined role of the “champion of the darker races.” Some African American-
political and intellectual leaders, including Randolph, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and
black communists, criticized Japan from a de-racialized, anti-imperialist perspective and

refuted Japan’s propaganda, advocating the role of a liberator of Asians and other

 

6 Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japanese and China, 20-29; Kearney, African
American Views of the Japanese, 54-62; Onishi, “The New Negro of the Pacific,” 199-200; Keiko Araki,
“Daiichiji sekaitaisen-go ni okeru beikoku kokujin no nihonjinkan: Gévi undO wo cht'rshin ni [Black

Americans’ View of Japan after World War I: Focusing on Garvey Movement],” Hagaku seijigaku ronkyfi
66 (September 2005): 69-95.

7 Onishi, “The New Negro of the Pacific,” 194-207.

35

nonwhite peoples. However, the development of antiracist, anticolonial politics in the
19305 encouraged more African Americans to be tolerant of or even justify Japanese
imperialism in Asia within the dominant race-centered framework of black
intemationalism while it attracted their attentions to the Ethiopian crisis and Western
colonialism in Africa. Moreover, Japan’s amicable relationship with Ethiopia, which was
characterized by Japan’s political support of the regime of Haile Selassie and its
commercial and military cooperation with Ethiopia, contributed to the growth of pro-
Japanese sentiments among Afiican Americans.8

The race-centered analysis of the Sino-Japanese conflict in the broader context of
Western imperial aggressions and colonial domination in Africa and Asia was central to
the African American intemationalist discourse of Japanese imperialism before World
War 11. Representative of the black intemationalist view of Japan during this period, an
editorial of the Baltimore Afro-American in 1938 declared full support of the Japanese
govemment’s objective to “boot the white races out of China and set up an Asiatic
‘Monroe doctrine’ through which Japan can control the destinies of the Far East.”9 It
further stated that “Japan is kicking China in the pants to make it stand up straight and be
a man,” while it called China as “a kind of ‘Uncle Tom’ of Asia,” whose leaders had

“kow-towed to the white-exploiters, licked their boots and allowed themselves to become

the footstools of Western conquerors (See Figure 2.1).”lo As Gallicchio points out, this

 

8 Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japanese and China, chaps. 3-5; Kearney, African
American Views of the Japanese, chap. 5; Yasuhiro Okada, “Afiican American Views of Japanese
Imperialism, 1931-1945,” (master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1999), 2-15.

9 Baltimore Afro-American, January 15, 1938.

‘0 Ibid.

36

‘1; «55593:! - . ,
View.“ as ~‘

3“. ~
~.

" 'g-rrr‘9-‘v \- ~ .

I

m...

~ 46.9 W

. .. . .
i 1.11.19.411".

as. L.-..t.e.i...,:tl
.L . \a s.» I.

I. . Us” 3...: hwy/n?!“ ..

r .11.. 4. ....... var“: .
It‘ll-I‘ll I 1

 

in Asia

Figure 2.1. Uncle Tom
Source: Baltimore Afio-American, January 15, 1938

37

trope of China as “Uncle Tom,” as well as Japan as a leader of the darker races and
victims of white racism, was influential in shaping the pervasive pro-Japanese view of the

black intemationalists. ' I

W. E. B. Du Bois, the strongest pro-Japanese advocate among
the contemporaneous African American intellectuals, deployed the image of China as
“Asian Uncle Tom” when he compared the China’s submissiveness to Western nations to
the “same spirit that animates the ‘white folks’ nigger’ in the United States.”12 The
centrality of the color line in his View of world politics, combined with his experience of
the direct observation of Japan’s colonial project in Manchuria in 1936, the growing
commitment to the principle of economic nationalism in his evolution as a socialist in the
1930s, and the tendency of racial essentialism in his understanding of the Sino-Japanese
relationship, prompted Du Bois to consistently defend Japanese imperialism as a racial

struggle to protect Asia from the Western imperialist aggressions, distinguishable from

Western colonialism in Afiica and Asia. ’3

 

H Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japanese and China, 114.

12 Quoted from David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century,
1 919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 414.

13 For Du Bois’s endorsement of economic nationalism as a survival strategy for African American
communities and its implication for his view of Japan, see Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black
Americans and US. Foreign Aflairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996),
70-71. Plummer suggests that “rhetoric that described Japanese imperial ambitions in terms of a promising
“Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” and Japanese skill at exploiting the antiwhite sentiments of
peoples of color mirrored his own resentments at that time (p. 71).” On racial essentialism in Du Bois’s
understanding of Japan and Asia, see Yuichiro Onishi, “Giant Steps of the Black Freedom Struggle: Trans-
Pacific Connections between Black America and Japan in the Twentieth Century” (PhD. diss., University
of Minnesota, 2004), part 11. See also the following studies on Du Bois’s view of Japan: Reginald Kearney,
“The Pro-Japanese Utterances of W. E. B. Du Bois,” Contributions in Black Studies 13, no. 14
(1995/1996): 201-17; Yuko Takeuchi, “W. E. B. Duboisu to nihon [W. E. B. Du Bois and Japan],” Shien
54, no. 2 (1994): 79-96; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, esp. chap. 11; Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), chap. 1; Gallicchio, The African American Encounter
with Japanese and China, passim.

38

After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the patriotic call for
the support of the American war effort against Japan replaced the pro-Japanese discourse
of prewar black intemationalism in the black public sphere. African American leaders
and journalists on the one hand encouraged black people to rally to defend the country
against Japan so that they could insulate themselves from the charge of sedition by the
US. government suspicious of the pro-Japanese sentiments within African American
communities. They deployed the image of Japan as the “enemy” nation in the continuing
black struggle against racial discrimination and oppressions, as shown in the Pittsburgh
Courier’s “Double V” campaign, whiCh called for victory over fascism abroad and
racism at home.14 Soon after the outbreak of the war, the Baltimore Afro-American
appealed for black loyalty to President Roosevelt, when it requested the erasure of the
color line in the armed services so that African Americans could fight for the US. against
Japan (See Figure 2.2).15 The editorial of the Chicago Defender in May 1943 evoked the
analogy of the brutality of Japanese soldiers in its criticism of southern lynching by
stating, “If the inhumanity of our oriental enemy is revolting to America, then lynch law
should be more so.”16 On the other hand, black leaders and journalists perceived the US.
war against Japan from a racial perspective while avoiding their explicit identification
with Japan as a leader of the colored people. Kearney suggests that the black press

tended to view the war in the Pacific as a “race war” and blamed the US. policy toward

 

’4 Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japanese and China, 115-121; Kearney, African

American Views of the Japanese, 92-98; Okada, “African American Views of Japanese Imperialism, 1931-
1945,” 15-35.

'5 Baltimore Afro-American, December 13, 1941.

‘6 Chicago Defender, May 1, 1943.

39

 

 

 

Figure 2.2. Mr. President, Include Me “In”
Source: Baltimore Afro-American, December 13, I941

40

Japan as a racial cause of the war. The black press focused more on the racist treatment
of the Japanese in the mainstream American media than the war excesses of Japanese
oldiers, which its writers explained as reactions to white prejudice and discrimination.
Black newspapers covered the racialized views on such wartime events as the internment
of Japanese Americans, the Japanese treatment of black POWs, and the dropping of the
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.17

Despite the black leaders’ appeal for the close rank with the government in the
US. war against Japan, the militant, pro-Japanese sentiments and organizational activities
persistently existed at the grassroots level among Afiican Americans during World War
II. The pro-Japanese black organizations and activists became a major target of the
surveillance by the FBI, which was highly vigilant of those black dissidents and the
influence of Japanese racial propaganda on blacks as a threat to national security. This
culminated in the arrest of a group of Japanese admirers in black communities early in
the wartime. The most famous case among them was Leonard Robert Jordan, a former
Garveyite from Jamaica and leader of the Ethiopian Pacific League, who appealed to
black Harlemites for racial salvation through Japan’s victory over the Allied.18 In his

case study of the pro-Japanese sympathies among black Missourians, historian Ernest

 

17 Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese, chap. 6. On the racist representations of the Japanese
in the wartime American media, see John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific
War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), esp. chaps. 4-7.

18 Gerald Home, Race Warl: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York:
New York University Press, 2004), chap. 5; Gerald Horne, “Tokyo-Bound: Afiican Americans and Japan
Confront White Supremacy,” Souls 3, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 16-28; Kearney, African American Views of
the Japanese, 98-104; Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japanese and China, chap. 6. On
Japan’s racial propaganda targeting African Americans during WWII, see Masaharu Sato and Barak
Kushner, “‘Negro Propaganda Operations’: Japan’s Short-Wave Radio Broadcasts for World War 11 Black
Americans,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 19, no. 1 (March 1999): 5-26; Masaharu
Sato, “Senji-ka nihon no taigai senden ni okeru ‘kokujin késaku’ [Japan’s Wartime Propaganda against
Blacks],” Masukomunike'shon Kenkyri 46 (1995): 157-170.

41

Allen Jr. explains that the “strong” pro-Japanese proclivities within numerous black
communities had roots in a “messianic nationalist sentiment occasioned by the hard times
of the Great Depression and a populist-based admiration for Japan which dated back to
the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5.”'9 The existence of pro-Japanese sentiments among
black people prompted African American leaders and their white liberal allies to
negotiate effectively between racism, dissidence, and national security with the US.
government in order to promote racial reform throughout the war period.20

The US. military engagement with World War 11 caused several direct encounters
between African American servicemen and Japanese soldiers in the Pacific battlefields.2|
In the attack of Japanese bombers on Pearl Harbor, Doris “Dorie” Miller, a black navy
messman from Waco, Texas, fought against the enemy with a machine gun and shot
down several Japanese airplanes aboard the USS West Virginia, although he had not
received any training in the use of weapons. Miller was awarded the Navy Cross in May
1942, for his courageous act of risking his life to save his white officer and assist in

rescuing shipmates, but he was returned to mess duties with few promotions. He became

 

19 Ernest Allen, Jr., “Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932-1943,” Gateway
Heritage 15 (Fall 1994): 17. See also Ernest Allen, Jr., “When Japan Was ‘Champion of the Darker
Races’: Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism, The Black Scholar 24, no.
1 (Winter 1994): 23-46.

20 Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japanese and China, chap. 7.

21 For African Americans in the military during World War 11, see Ulysses Lee, The Employment of Negro
Troops, (1966; repr., Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2004); Bryan D. Booker, African
Americans in the United States Army in World War 11 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2008);
Bernard C. Nalty, Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military (New York: The
Free Press, 1986), esp. chaps. 10-12; Gerald Astor, The Right to Fight: A History of African Americans in
the Military (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2001), esp. chaps. 11-15; Christopher Paul Moore, Fighting for
America: Black Soldiers—The Unsung Heroes of World War II (New York: One World Book, 2005);
Bernard C. Nalty, The Right to Fight: African-American Marines in World War II (Washington, DC:
Marine Corps Historical Center, 1995); Richard E. Miller, The Messman Chronicles: African Americans in
the US. Navy, 1932-1943 (Annapolis: Navy Institute Press, 2004), esp. parts 2 and 3.

42

a heroic symbol not only for African Americans in the struggle to desegregate the US.
armed forces, but also for the Navy who employed the icon of Miller in its campaign to
recruit blacks.22

Some African American servicemen in the US. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps
saw fighting with Japanese soldiers in several battlefields in the Pacific Theater, while
they were serving mostly in segregated service units. The 24th Infantry Regiment became
the first among the few all-black combat units to militarily encounter the Japanese during
WWII, since it was sent to Efate in the New Hebrides in May 1942, for the defenses of
the islands of the South Pacific. After months of labor duties in the South Pacific,
Afiican American foot soldiers in the 1St Battalion of the 24th Infantry Regiment, joined
in the combat against the Japanese on the island of Bougainville in March 1944. The 24th
Infantry Regiment was officially recognized for its service as a garrison force against the
resisting Japanese soldiers on Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas Islands in the final stage
of the war in the Pacific.23 As historian Steve Estes suggests, the new sense of justice,
militancy, and manhood African American servicemen gained in the Pacific, as well as in
the European Theater during WWII, motivated many black veterans to join civil rights

activism in their local communities during the 1940s and 1950s.24

 

22 Christopher Paul Moore, Fighting for America: Black Soldiers—The Unsung Heroes of World War II
(New York: One World Book, 2005), 31-34; Richard E. Miller, The Messman Chronicles: African
Americans in the US. Navy, 1932-1943 (Annapolis: Navy Institute Press, 2004), chap. 15.

23 Ulysses Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, (1966; repr., Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific,
2004), 497-498, 502-504, 533-535; Bryan D. Booker, African Americans in the United States Army in
World War 11 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2008), 146-150; William Bowers, William M.
Hammond, and George L. MacGariggle, Black Soldier, White Army: The 24'h Infantry Regiment in Korea
(Washington, DC: US. Army Center of Military History, 1996), 21-22.

24 Steve Estes, I Am a Man: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2005), 35-38.

43

As the Second World War ended with Japan’s unconditional surrender to the
Allied on August 15, 1945, African American public view of Japan drastically changed in
the historical context of US. military occupation of Japan. The black press reported on
the US. occupation of Japan as a racial, rather than national, issue informed by domestic
racial situations of African Americans immediately after WWII. The editors of the
Chicago Defender expressed, in September 1945, their anxiety about the possible
importation of racism from the South into Japan as the “big battleship Mississippi”
invading Tokyo with the “civilization of the Old South.” The black newspaper began to
publicly identify the Japanese as the “colored” people again after the war, although they
did not, as Gallichio notes, admire them as a champion of racial equality any longer (See
Figure 2.3).25 In another article entitled “Democracy Abroad; Slavery At Home,” in
which they discussed the abolition of sharecropping in the Japanese agricultural reform
under the US. occupational directive, the Defender editors asked, “Why should America
so diligently root out this evil on foreign soil and allow the same abuse to flourish among
its own people?” 26 The black press’s sympathetic coverage of Japan from such a
racialized perspective was influential in reshaping the Japanese image among African
Americans in the renewed U.S.-Japanese relationship after the war. The black press paid
special attention to the military activities and lives of Afiican American soldiers and their
intimate relationship with Japan, although its coverage was on an irregular basis. Black

newspapers and magazines served not only as a major source of information for African

 

25 Chicago Defender, September 8, I945; Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japanese and
China, 204.

26 Chicago Defender, December 29, 1945.

44

 

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45

American soldiers who were stationed in occupied Japan, but also as a public forum for
appealing their overseas situations to stateside black communities.

Moreover, African Americans experienced large scale face-to-face encounters
with Japanese people in occupied Japan for the first time in the history of the black-
Japanese relationship. African American male soldiers constituted the most visible part
of the popular and academic representation of black-Japanese encounter in occupied
Japan, either in the US. or Japan, not only for their large proportion in the black
occupation personnel but also for the discursive expansion of their intimate and sexual
relationships with Japanese women. Underrepresented in the male-dominated discourse
of black experience in occupied Japan were the African American women who were
stationed there with various statuses and occupations, either civilian or military.
Although their number was small compared to the black male GIS, the presence of
African American women further complicated the racial and sexual dynamics in the
black-Japanese relationship in occupied Japan. African American men and women
developed a gendered sense of racial empowerment in Japan in political prerogative,
improved economic conditions, and elevated social status vis-a-vis Japanese citizens as
privileged members of the US. occupation forces, while they continued facing

segregation and discrimination in the racial politics of the postwar US. Army.

46

Part 11
Race, Manhood, National Identity, and African-American Soldiers
in Japan under US. Military Occupation

47

Chapter 3
Racial and Masculine Empowerment within the Segregated Army
in the 24"I Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu

In this chapter, I discuss the social construction of racial manhood among African
American soldiers in the transnational and multiracial settings of the US. military
occupation of Japan, especially in the garrison community of Camp Gifu situated in
central part of the mainland Japan. I focus on the military experiences of those in the all-
black 24‘h Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu to examine the contestations over racial,
masculine, and national identities among African American soldiers, who were
segregated and discriminated against within the US. Army throughout this period, while
they could exert considerable power and prerogatives over Japanese women and men as
members of the US. occupation forces.

The 24th Infantry Regiment was one of the traditional all-black regiments, which
was activated soon after the Civil War and joined the US. war efforts in the Spanish-
American War, World War I, World War II, and Korean War, until it was finally
disbanded and integrated into white units in October 1951.1 The 24th Infantry Regiment
became the first African American infantry unit which was deployed to the combat
theater during World War 11, since it departed Fort Benning, Georgia for the South
Pacific in April 1942. As military historian Ulysses Lee notes, the 24th Infantry
Regiment contributed to the war effort in the Pacific theater primarily as a service unit by
loading and unloading ships, guarding air bases, building roads, and performing work

details for quartermaster and ordnance services, while it continued its training and field

 

I For the history of the 24'h Infantry Regiment before World War 11, see William Bowers, William M.
Hammond, and George L. MacGariggle, Black Soldier, White Army: The 24'” Infantry Regiment in Korea
(Washington, DC: US. Army Center of Military History, 1996), 3-20.

48

duties, on Efate in the New Hebrides Islands and Guadalcanal during the period from
May 1942 to January 1944.2 Some African American servicemen in the 24th Infantry
Regiment, like those of the 1St Battalion, encountered the enemy when they joined the
combat patrols of Japanese soldiers, as a part of the regimental tactical reserves attached
to the 37th Infantry Division, on the island of Bougainville on March 1944. The 24th
Infantry Regiment was Officially recognized for its garrison duty against the resisting
Japanese soldiers on the islands of Saipan and Tinian in the final stage of the war in the
Pacific theater. In July 1945, it was deployed to Kerama Islands in the Ryukyus for its
continued duty of clearing out the remnants of the Japanese fighting forces there. After
World War II, the 24th Infantry Regiment was stationed in occupied Okinawa, including
the islands of Okinawa and 1e Shima, where African American soldiers were engaged in
various occupation duties while receiving basic training during the period from August
1945 through the end of 1946.3

In January 1947, the 24’h Infantry Regiment was relocated from Okinawa to
mainland Japan to join the occupation force of the US. Eighth Army as part of the 25th
Infantry Division, which was in charge of the occupational assignments in Central Japan,
headquartered in Osaka. The assigned strength of the 24th Infantry Regiment in the

beginning of February 1947, the first month of its occupational duty in Japan, was 102

 

2 Ulysses Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, (1966; repr., Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific,
2004), 497.

3 For the military operations of the 24th Infantry Regiment during World War 11, see Lee, The Employment
of Negro Troops, 497-498, 502-504, 533-535; Bryan D. Booker, African Americans in the United States
Army in World War [1 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2008), 146-150; Bowers et al., Black Solder,
White Army, 21-22. For the experience of the 24‘h Infantry Regiment in occupied Okinawa, see Bowers et
al., Black Solder, White Army, 39-42.

49

officers, 2 warrant officers, and 3,263 enlisted men.4 Lt. Gen. Robert L. Eichelberger,
commanding general of the Eighth Army announced on January 20, 1947 the plan to
integrate the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment into the 25th Infantry Division of the Eighth
Army. This plan of military desegregation in the Eight Army was based on the
recommendations of the “Gillem Board” on the utilization of black soldiers in the
postwar US. Army.5 Appointed by the Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson with
General Alvan C. Gillem as chairman, the Gillem Board called for the recruitment of
black troops in the ratio of one to ten and the integration of black units into all-white
divisions in the report and recommendations which were published as “War Department
Circular No. 124” in April 27, 1946.6 However, the 24th Infantry Regiment remained, in
reality, segregated as the all-black unit even though it was integrated as an organic part of
the all-white 25th Infantry Division. The editorial of the Pittsburgh Courier of February
22, 1947 pointed out the contradictions in the US. Army’s racial policy toward black
soldiers which were expressed in the supposed integration of the 24th Infantry Regiment

in occupied Japan:

 

4 Annual History of the 24th Infantry Regiment for 1947, March 2, 1948, RG 407, Entry 427, Box 21132,
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland. For reference, the
strength of the black personnel assigned to the GHQ and the Eighth Army in Japan was 10,993 as of
August, 1946. Report of Tour of Pacific Installations to the Secretary of War, Robert P. Patterson,
November 8, 1946, RG 165, Entry 13, Box 299, NARA.

5 “Army Integrates Troops: Mixed Division Formed for Peace Duty in Japan,” Baltimore Afio-American,
February 1, 1947; “24th Joining US. Forces in Japan,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 1, 1947.

6 Richard M. Dalfiume, Desegregation of the US. Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939-1953
(Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1969), 150-151. On the development of the racial policy in
the postwar US. military, see also Morris J. MacGregor, Jr., Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965
(Washington, DC: US. Government Printing Office, 1981); Bernard C. Nalty, Strength for the Fight: A
History of Black Americans in the Military (New York: Free Press, 1986); Sherie Mershon and Steven
Schlossman, F oxholes and Color Lines: Desegregating the US. Armed Forces (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998).

50

This is really not integration as it is usually understood, because these segregated
regiments are just as much segregated as they ever were and, as usually in the
past, they are assigned to divisions consisting largely of lily-white unit. A
sincere carrying out of the policy of integration would be the assignment of
colored and white soldiers alike to squads, platoons and larger units.7

As historian Richard M. Dalfiume argues, the Gillem Board did not question segregation,
or the “traditional premise of the Army’s Negro policy” in its recommendations which
became the basis of the postwar policy of the US. Army regarding the utilization of
African American soldiers. Moreover, the board even condoned the segregation in
aspects of off-duty social life, like housing, when it recommended the integration of the
black troops into overhead units for “duty hours only.”8

It was Camp Majestic, which was called Camp Gifu, that the Eighth Army chose
as a site for its new postwar experiment in the desegregation of the US. military by
merging the 24th Infantry Regiment with the 35‘h and 27th Infantry Regiments, other white
regiments in the 25th Infantry Division. This camp was founded on Kagamigahara
Airfield, the former Japanese airbase which was located about 10 miles east from the city
of Gifu and 270 miles southwest of Tokyo (See Figure 3.1).9 Camp Gifu became the host
camp for Afiican American soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment, stationed as part of the
occupation force in Central Japan and for their military training as a combat regiment
until the start of Korean War in July 1950 (See Figures 3.2).

Despite the sharing between black and white regiments of a common base, the

military and social life which African American servicemen experienced at Camp Gifu

 

7 “The Saga of the 24“,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 22, 1947.
8 Dalfiume, Desegregation of the US. Armed Forces, 151.

9 Bowers et al., Black Solder, White Army, 42-43.

51

 

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Figure 3.1. Lodation of Camp Gifu
Source: William T. Bowers, William M. Hammond, George L. MacGarrigle,
Black Solder, White Army: The 24'h Infantry Regiment in Korea

52

 

 

Figure 3.2. Camp Majestic, June 12, 1947
Above, Entrance; below, Overview

Source: US. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland

53

was the world of “isolation,” separated rigidly by race and rank. In his letter to the
Baltimore Afro-American, one African American GI critically assessed the racial
situation at Camp Gifu in May 1947:

The 24th Infantry Regiment..., which is presently undergoing a fresh
“experiment” at Camp Majestic here, is a poor excuse for an even poorer mission.
Nobody is interested in “integration” except the colored people. Camp Majestic
is, for all practical purposes, an isolated, solid colored community. This situation
follows the rule rather than the exception.10

As this letter suggests, the 24th Infantry Regiment remained, in reality, a separate black
combat unit which was only attached to the white division, although the Eighth Army
considered this process as the first step toward a future arrangement of the division in
which officers of both races could lead. Some African American soldiers around the
regiment testified that Executive Order #9981, which was issued by President Harry S.
Truman in July, 1947 to officially declare the desegregation of the US. armed forces,
was not strictly followed in the Far East and racial segregation continued to exist in the
Eighth Army while they were stationed at Gifu.ll How did social isolation and racial
segregation, which marked the life of African American soldiers in the 24th Infantry
Regiment at Gifu, influence the process of their identity formations in the intersections of
race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality?

It is important to note that the 24th Infantry Regiment, the only all-black “combat”
troop at the regiment level which was then stationed in occupied Japan, was not only

racially segregated but also regionally isolated at Camp Gifu with some other black

 

’0 “Poor Excuse,” Baltimore A fro-American, May 24, 1947-

” See interview, John Cash with John “Tommy” Martin, January 12, 1990, the US. Army Center of
Military History (CMH) files. Tapes of all the interviews hereafter cited as the CMH files can be found in
the archives of the United States Army Center of Military History in Washington, DC. See also Charles M.
Bussey, F irefight at Yechon: Courage and Racism in the Korean War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1991), 43.

54

combat units, including the 94‘h and 95th Infantry Battalions and the 77th Engineer
Combat Company.” Most of the black combat units were doubly segregated in terms of
race and geographical location in such remote areas of Japan as Gifu and Nara, while
African American soldiers in the transportation, MP, or other service units were scattered
all over mainland Japan and they were concentrated in Yokohama.13 In addition, there
were few black servicemen employed at Eighth Army Headquarters in Tokyo, except for
one public affairs officer, some MP5, and a few civilian federal employees. 14 John
Martin, who was the only black officer at Eighth Army Headquarters, attributed this
disproportionate military assignment of black soldiers to the remote areas in occupied
Japan to the prejudice of General Douglas MacArthur, who “did not really want any
black soldiers at Eighth Army Headquarters.”15

Because of this geographical isolation of Camp Gifu from Tokyo and other base
towns in occupied Japan where a large number of white GIs were stationed, many
African American servicemen did not encounter serious racial problems as long as their

military duty was confined to the Gifu area. One African American reader of Baltimore

Afio-American testified from Gifir in October 1948 that “agitation due to prejudice and

 

'2 Other black combat units stationed in occupied Japan included the 159th Field Artillery Battalion at Nara
and the 76‘” and 933rd AAA A-Weapons Battalions (Coast Artillery Corps) at Yokohama. “The Negro in
the Army,” A Special Report Prepared by the Office of the Civilian Aide to the Secretary of the Army,
April 1949, RG 319, Entry 2, Box 499, NARA.

’3 The base towns where black troops were stationed in occupied Japan included the following cities:
Sendai, Tokyo, Yokohama, Zama, Tokorozawa, Gifu, Kobe, and Kyoto. “Location of Negro Troops in
Japan,” January 31, 1949, RG 335, Entry 5, Box 72, NARA. There were twenty-six black units stationed in
Yokohama as of March 1, 1949, including 2 Coast Artillery Corps, 4 Corps of Engineers, 6 Medical Corps,
3 Corps of Military Police, 1 Band, 1 Ordinance Department, 9 Transportation Corps. “The Negro in the
Army,” RG 319, Entry 2, Box 499, NARA.

‘4 Bowers et al., Black Solder, White Army, 55.

15 Interview, John Cash with John “Tommy” Martin, January 12, 1990, CMH files.

55

race,” which was reported to have been occurring in occupied Germany, was not

“frequent” there. '6

African American soldiers experienced few interracial interactions
with white soldiers of the other two regiments at Camp Gifu, because of the isolation and
segregation which Shaped the military and social life of black soldiers. They rarely met
white soldiers of the 35th and 27th Infantry Regiments, the other two, all-white, regiments
of the 25th Infantry Division stationed at Gifu, except for special occasions, such as the
parades on the 4th of July and Armed Forces Day in Osaka.17

Several racist incidents occurred when the African American soldiers of the 24th
Infantry Regiment encountered prejudiced white soldiers during their duty at other base
towns in metropolitan areas, including Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, and Kobe in occupied
Japan. Ivory Perry of the 24th Infantry Regiment recalled that “we used to always have
some racial conflicts with them (other outfitters) when we were in Yokohama or
Tokyo.”18 When they went to Tokyo for parades in July 1948, the whole regiment
became involved in a fight with the white soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division and 11th

Airborne DiVision, who intimidated and humiliated them with racist acts and remarks.19

The geographical isolation of its location as well as the persistence of racial segregation

 

‘6 “Report From Pacific,” Baltimore Afi'o-American, October 23, 1948. This Afro-American reader,
identified himself as XYZ, wrote to the editor in response to the Ollie Stewart’s article about racial strains
in occupied Germany which was published in July 1948 and entitled, “Segregation Hurts Army: Ollie,
Leaving Germany, Bares Occupation Wrongs.” In this article, Stewart stated that “there is nothing wrong
physically with American soldiers in Germany—but among the colored ones there is frequent agitation, due
to prejudice and segregation.” Oliver Stewart, “Segregation Hurts Army: Ollie, Leaving Germany, Bares
Occupation Wrongs,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 17, 1948

17 Interview, John Cash with Alexander Shearin, August 17, 1988, CMH files.
18 Interview, John Cash with Ivory Perry, September 8, 1988, CMH files. .

[9 Interviews, John Cash with Willard D. Carter, September 24, 1988; Cash with Wilfred Matthews,
September 23, 1988; Cash with Albert S. Kimber, March 11, 1989, CMH files.

56

at Camp Gifu created the conditions allowing African American soldiers in the 24th
Infantry Regiment to explore their militarized racial manhood relatively free from
emasculating racial oppression from a larger white-dominant world in Japan under US.
occupation.

In the postwar military experiment toward integration at Camp Gifu, a substantial
number of African American servicemen were appointed as commissioned officers in the
24th Infantry Regiment. There were 65 black officers and 69 white officers in the 24th
Infantry Regiment as of May 1947. The commissioned black officers in the 24th Infantry
Regiment contained one lieutenant colonel, one major, 20 captains, 19 first lieutenants,
18 second lieutenants, five chief warrant officers, and one junior grade warrant officer.20
The Black Soldier, White Army reports that the number of black officers in the 24th
Infantry Regiment ranged from 52 percent in June 1947 to 40 percent in March 1949.”
One Afiican American soldier gave a positive assessment of the increase in the
representation of black Officers in the 24th Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu in his letter to
the Baltimore Afio-American in October 1948: “While more colored officers are needed,
most outfits have a preponderance of colored officers. The 24th Regimental Combat
Team at Camp Gifu, for example, had about 60 percent.”22

However, these African American officers in the 24th Infantry Regiment

continued to face racial discrimination in the process of their placement and promotion

 

20 “65 Officers Serve 24th Infantry Regt. in Japan: Lt. Col. R. L. Pollard of Washington, Deputy
Commander at Camp Majestic,” Baltimore Afro-American, May 31, 1947; “24‘h Infantry in Japan Numbers
65 Race Officers,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 31, I947.

2‘ Bowers et al., Black Solder, White Army, 56.

22 “Report From Pacific,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 23, 1948.

57

within the regiment, while the black noncommissioned officers were able to advance
their ranks more smoothly at the unit level without their competition with whites. For
example, black officers were excluded from appointment to positions supervising or
commanding white officers in the regiment except in rare cases. They rarely advanced to
the ranks above the company-grade positions, which allowed some black lieutenants and
captains to command only at the platoon and company levels. The few black majors and
lieutenant colonels in the regiment never receiVed positions or commands appropriate to
their rank, in comparison with white counterparts.23 African American officers also
encountered the intraclass racial segregation among the regime’s commissioned officers
and experienced few interracial interactions with white officers in their social life at
Camp Gifu. According to Jasper Johnson, the officer’s clubs were “informally”
segregated and there were no mixed companies with black and white officers under the
unwritten rules that blacks and whites never sat or danced together.24

In spite of the persistent racial discrimination and segregation which they faced in
the 24th Infantry Regiment, African American officers took advantage of their
opportunities to develop leadership skills and foster a sense of camaraderie among black
soldiers across ranks within the segregated black regiment at Camp Gifu. 25 The
experience of Charles M. Bussey, the African American officer who served along with
the 24th Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu as a company commander of the 77th Engineer

Combat Company from May through July in 1950, was representative of the ambiguity of

 

23 Bowers et al., Black Solder, White Army, 55-59.

24 Interviews, John Cash with Jasper Johnson, October 5, 1988; Cash with Roscoe Jones, June 16, I989,
CMH files.

25 Interview, Timothy Rainey with Leopold Hall, June 2, 1990, CMH files.

58

leadership roles for black officers as the Eighth Army made initial steps to alter its racial
foundation. The 77’h Engineer Combat Company was another all-black company
stationed at Camp Gifu which was attached to the 25’h Division of the Eighth Army to
provide engineering support for the 24th Infantry Regiment. As a commanding officer,
Bussey was required to effectively manage a variety of personal problems of his
company men, some of which were not directly concerned with military matters. Bussey
took a chance to show toughness toward his troops in order to let them know who was
boss, when he successfully disciplined Private Jack Beavers, who was resisting his advice
on sending some money to his destitute families in the US. while spending money for
living with his Japanese girlfriend. In another occasion, Bussey efficiently raised the
sensitive issue of interracial marriage to Co]. Horton V. White, commander of the 24th
Infantry Regiment, and persuaded him to push through for his black servicemen who had
been long waiting for the final approval of their marriages with Japanese girls by the
State Department. Being caught between his white senior officers and his black junior
officers and enlisted men as a black company commander, Bussey developed skills in
negotiating race, rank, and power within the regimental organization in the US. Army.26
African American soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment, whether officers or
enlisted men, continued to receive second-class treatment in the Army, because of the
continuation of racial segregation and discrimination in the Eighth Army during the
period of US. occupation of Japan before the opening of Korean War. However, the
persistence of racial segregation in the Army created the opportunities for Afiican

American soldiers in the all-black unit to assert racial and masculine identities for their

 

2" Bussey, Firefight at Yechon, 50-51, 58-65.

59

own empowerment in various ways within the confinement of garrison communities in
occupied Japan.

African American soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment established their own
space within the segregated Army for nurturing a sense of community and brotherhood
among black soldiers at Camp Gifu. African American GIS developed black community
institutions, such as their own newspaper and church, in response to their problems and
needs at Camp Gifu where GIs’ military and social lives were totally separated by race
and rank. 27 For example, African American soldiers created their own racial
congregation in the semi-segregated 24th Infantry Regiment’s chapel at Camp Gifu in
which they had a black chaplain, Lieutenant Colonel John Deveaux, and formed a chapel
choir (See Figure 3.3).28 As Richard Fields recalled that “there was that line dividing us,”
it was like a black church in the US. whose chapel services were predominately black
with only a few whites attending.”

Some African American soldiers created their own racialized world of music
within the Army’s segregated band or jam sessions with other black musicians at Camp
Gifu.30 Walter Bufford, a trumpeter who traveled all over occupied Japan while stationed

at Camp Gifu, played as a member of the famed all-black band, which was attached to the

 

27 Bowers et al., Black Solder, White Army, 50. There is little information available about the black
newspaper of the 24th Infantry Regiment published at Camp Gifu.

28 Interview, John Cash with W. A. Bobo and Mrs. Bobo, date unknown, CMH files; “Chapel Choir of 24th
Infantry at Camp Gifu,” Baltimore A fro-A merican, April 23, 1949; Bowers et al., Black Solder, White Army,
56.

29 Interview, John Cash with Richard L. Fields, August 18, 1988, CMH files.

30 “G1 Jam Session,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 2, 1947.

60

 

Figure 3.3. Chapel Choir of the 24th Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu
Source: Baltimore Afro-American, April 23, 1949

’61

25th Infantry Division as a part of the 8th Army Band.3| There was an interesting
testimony that Cannonball Adderly, a prominent saxophone player in American modern
jazz was stationed at Camp Gifu as a member of the 291”t Band and playing a tenor
saxophone, although he was not called “Cannonball” at that time.32 African American
soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment effectively developed their own social world to
forge racial, cultural, and spiritual ties among the black community members within the
segregated Spaces of the chapel service and music band in the US. Army at Camp Gifu.

African American soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment gained a sense of racial
and masculine pride in the context of the segregation in the US. Army in occupied Japan,
especially when they achieved honors for the unit’s prowess in the interunit athletic
competitions or the unit’s fame for their own style of marching. Ivory Perry, the civil
rights activist in Missouri who was then serving in the communications section of the 24th
Infantry Regiment, recalled:

At the time we were stationed in occupation duty in Japan I thought the 24th
Infantry Regiment was tops in everything in the First [Corps] Command. In
sports, best soldiers, best boxers. You name it. Because we always kept the E
Flag. On the Fourth of July when we went to Tokyo to parade for Douglas
MacArthur, we was [sic] outstanding.33

Assessing more critically than Perry, Richard Fields testified that parades and sports were

the only source of honors conferred upon the 24‘h Infantry Regiment. He claimed that the

 

3' Interview, John Cash with Walter Bufford, March 13, 1989, CMH files.
32 Interview, John Cash with Alexander Shearin, August 17, 1988, CMH files.

33 Interview, John Cash with Ivory Perry, September 8, 1988, CMH files.

62

regiment did not receive the deserving credit for training from the higher headquarters,
compared with the other two white regiments which were stationed at Camp Gifu.34

The prowess in the athletics of the 24th Infantry Regimen was demonstrated in
the regularly-held interunit competitions of the Eight Army in such fields as baseball,
boxing, basketball, and football.35 As the authors of Black Soldier, White Army reveal,
regiment commander Colonel Halloran, whose pride derived from the unit’s athletic
prowess, was instrumental in the strengthening of the regiment’s athletic teams by
assigning the soldiers with special talents to athletic practice and conditioning as their
principal duties.36 In an article featuring the unit’s boxing team, the Stars and Stripes, the
major military newspaper in the Pacific areas, praised the 24th Infantry Regiment as the
“outfit where everybody knows the manly art of self defense and only to willing to prove
it (See Figure 3.4).”37 As the article associated the regiment’s athletic achievement with
its masculine empowerment, athletics became one of the crucial spaces for African
American soldiers to enhance their racial manhood by demonstrating virility in the
competitions with white soldiers as well as blacks in other units in light of the segregated
and discriminatory conditions of the US. Army in occupied Japan.

The 24th Infantry Regiment was famous for its own style of marching, which was

 

34 Interview, John Cash with Richard L. Fields, August 18, 1988, CMH files.
35 Bowers et al., Black Solder, White Army, 51.
36 Ibid.

37 Stars and Stripes, June 15, I 947.

63

 

Fi re 3.4. Boxers in the 24th Infantry Regiment, June 1947
Above, 24 Infantry Regiment Boxing Team; below, Col. Michael E. Halloran,
Commanding Officer of the 24th Infantry Regiment with Pfc. Bufl’alo Simmons
Source: US. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland

64

demonstrated on various occasions, among the military personnel in occupied Japan (See
Figure 3.5). According to Howard Rouge, the 24th Infantry Regiment “had a rhythm like
nobody could believe” in its unique way of marching. Rouge, who participated in the

parade in Tokyo as a unit’s flag bearer, recalled that “everyone yelled” when the 24th
Infantry Regiment’s band “turned the comer and did a double kick,” although they were
put in the back of the march}8 It was a great honor for the African American soldiers in
the 24‘h Infantry Regiment to receive highly praise for its marching from Gen. Douglas
MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, who had never visited Camp
Gifu and who was labeled as racist by some black GIS.39 Willard D. Carter remembered
that General MacArthur said “they were the best marching troops he had ever seen” when
he saw the whole regiment marching in battalion mass formation in Tokyo.40 It was
again Colonel Halloran who was influential in contributing to the unit’s fame for
marching, having a parade every Saturday and sometimes two parades a week at Camp
Gifu." Bradford Laws, the Far East Correspondent of the Baltimore Afro-American,
attested to the honor which the 24th Infantry Regiment was achieving in occupied Japan
for its parade in his article on the first US. Armed Forces Day program on the Haneda
Air base in Tokyo in June 1950: “The appearance of the famed 24th Infantry Regiment,

veteran of many years overseas service, in full dress was among the top highlights of the

 

38 Interview, John Cash with Howard Rouge, October 14, 1988, CMH files.

39 Interviews, Jon Cash with John “Tommy” Martin, January 12, 1990; Cash with Walter Bufford, March
13, I989, CMH files.

40 Interview, John Cash with Willard D. Carter, September 24, 1988, CMH files.

41 Interview, John Cash with Waymon Ransom, August 5, 1988, CMH files.

65

 

 

Figure 3.5. Parade of the 24“I Infantry Regiment during an Inspection
at Camp Gifu, June 1947

Source: US. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland

66

parades staged throughout the Japanese Islands.”42 For the Afiican American soldiers in

the 24th Infantry Regiment who had fewer opportunities to demonstrate effectively their
combat efficiency in training than white units because of the prejudices among the higher
headquarters, athletics and parades became major sources of their racial and masculine
pride from which they could achieve a sense of empowerment within the segregated and
discriminatory conditions of the US. Army in occupied Japan.

Besides, the relative tolerance toward homosexuality within the 24th Infantry
Regiment led to a considerable number of homosexual acts among the soldiers,
regardless of race and rank, at Camp Gifu. Several African American soldiers in and
around the 24th Infantry Regiment attested that the homosexuals, who were called
“Sissies,” were concentrated in the personnel, food service, and medical sections at Camp
Gifu. 43 Some Afiican American soldiers, like James Perkins, expressed negative
reactions to their presence in their troops. Remembered being whistled at while drilling
by the assumed homosexual sergeant and corporal, whom he had met and heard them
saying, “Ain’t he cute” on the train in his first travel to Gifu, Perkins said, “It was terrible,
scared me half to death.”44 Other black soldiers did not consider the existence of
homosexuals within the unit a serious problem, unless their behaviors created nuisance in

their duties as well as in their relationship with heterosexual buddies. Richard W. Saxton

 

42 Bradford Laws, “Display of Real Integration: Far East Mixed Units Show Military Might,” Baltimore
Afio-American, June 10, 1950.

43 Interviews, John Cash with William Shepard, October 27, 1988; Cash with Howard Rouge, Jr., October
14, 1988; Cash with Fred Thomas, August 24, 1989; Cash with Roscoe Jones, June 16, 1989; Cash with
Waymon Ransom, August 5, 1988, CMH files.

44 Interview, John Cash with James Perkins. July 28, 1989, CMH files.

67

recalled that the homosexuals were good on duty and they usually stayed to themselves
and did not bother any of the “straight” soldiers.”

In addition to the relatively tolerant attitudes toward homosexuals among the
servicemen in the regiment, Col. Halloran’s position on homosexuality as a commander
of the black unit was influential in shaping the lenient policy toward them in the 24th
Infantry Regiment. Halloran, who was concerned about the concentration of
homosexuals in the higher ranks within the regiment, declared, “If I got rid of them, the
rest of them niggers are too dumb to am anything,” when General Mullens, the division
commander suggested that he “get rid of them queers” out of his outfit.46 Halloran also
responded, at a formation, to someone complaining about the homosexuals that
“everyone should be a homosexual and there wouldn’t be a VD problem?“ Halloran’s
racist view of his African American soldiers, combined with his preoccupation with the
VD prevention, was instrumental in the formation of a relative tolerant atmosphere
toward the homosexuals in the 24th Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu in the late 19403,
during which the homosexual personnel were highly repressed as a security risk in the
military as well as by the federal government in the anti-Communist political context of

the Cold War in the United States.48

 

45 Interview, John Cash with Richard W. Saxton, December 3, 1988, CMH files.
46 Interview, John Cash with Waymon Ransom, August 5, 1988, CMH files.
47 Interview, John Cash with Roscoe Jones, June 16, 1989, CMH files.

48 For the development of the antihomosexual policy of the US. military during World War 11, see Allan
Berube, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free
Press, 1990). On the antihomosexual politics in the Cold War, see John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual
Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, second edition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998): David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War
Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004).

68

The following story of Private First Class Artemis Moorehead, who was serving
as a cook in the 77th Engineer Combat Company and was called “Mabel” at his specific
request, reveals how African American gay soldiers created their own spaces to pursue
their sexual desires and assert their sexual identities within the barracks at Camp Gifu by
taking advantage of the unit’s relative lenience toward homosexuality. Charles Bussey,
as company commander, was at a loss how to deal with the problems which
“hyperactive” homosexual behaviors of Mabel was causing among the unit’s men for his
“insatiable sex drive,” “lack of discretion,” and “exhibitionist” tendency as well as the
reluctance on the part of the high commanders to take any disciplinary action against him.
According to Bussey, Mabel’s daily active practice of homosexual desires created turmoil
in the barracks, where some fights occurred among men over the possession of Mabel as
well as homophobic bashing against him. The Eighth Army headquarters refused to
accept the Mabel’s request for an “honorable discharge” from military service because of
his propensity toward homosexuality and dismissed it as a “big joke” only with an
advisory on the possible punishment of sodomy in the military. Recognizing the
emergent need to intervene with this problem by himself, Bussey charged Mabel with
“unbecoming conduct” and gave him “nonjudicial” punishment of “restriction to quarters
for thirty days and forfeiture of two-third’s pay for one month” under the Uniform Code
of Military Justice. Bussey recalled on his disciplinary action against Mabel that “I
didn’t want bullying or denial of civil rights. I knew that the restriction was not wholly
legal, but it was the best I could do with an ugly problem.”49 Certainly, some of Mabel’s

sex partners were just engaged in a “situational” type of homosexuality without

 

49 Bussey, Firefight at Yechon, 65-69.

69

identifying themselves as homosexual in the homosocial male world of the barracks at
Camp Gifu.SO But, the relative tolerance toward homosexuality among the servicemen
and commanders in the 24’h Infantry Regiment and the 77’h Engineer Combat Company
at Camp Gifu might allow some African American regiment members to explore and
define a gay identity through their contingent encounter with their fellow soldiers with
the same sexual orientation in the Army.

*****

At Camp Gifu, African American male soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment
transformed their isolated and segregated life there into a site of contestation over race,
gender, class, and sexuality. Through this, they developed their sense of identity and
community for racial and masculine empowerment within the segregated Army in
occupied Japan. The geographical and social isolation of Camp Gifu allowed African
American GIs to fully pursue their racial manhood, relatively free from the emasculating
racist oppression from white GIs. Black soldiers took advantage of the segregation
within the US. Army for fostering a sense of racial solidarity and brotherhood among
themselves. They developed leadership skills as commissioned officers, created their
own social institutions and cultural world, and derived racial and masculine pride from

their athletic prowess and famed parades.

 

50 On the “situational” type of homosexuality in the US. military, see Allan Berube, Coming Out under
Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: The Free Press, 1990), I92.

70

Chapter 4
African American Soldiers Encounter with the Japanese
in the Garrison Community of Gifu

In addition to the isolation and segregation within the US. Army, their encounter
with Japanese women and men in the local community around the camp was crucial in
the formations of racial, masculine, and national identities among African American
soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment at Gifu. Regardless of their racial stigma in
American society and their second-class status within the US. Army, the postwar
encounter between African American GIS and the Japanese was principally established
on the uneven international political dynamics between the “occupiers” and the
“occupied.” In the garrison community of Gifu, Afiican American soldiers‘experienced
greater racial acceptance among the local Japanese people and reconfigured their racial
perception beyond the social context of racial oppression and the narrow black-white
dichotomy in the US. Some African American GIs developed their intimate
relationships with Japanese women into marriage and childbearing by challenging the
US. civilian and military barriers against international marriage as well as the social
stigma against miscegenation in Japanese society. Others asserted their conqueror’s
sense of militarized masculinity through their sexual interactions with Japanese
prostitutes within the gendered colonial relations in occupied Japan.

Charles Bussey, who served as a black commanding officer of the 77th Engineer
Combat Company at Camp Gifu, generally described the way of life among American
soldiers in occupied Japan in the following way:

Military duty in Japan as part of the US. Army of Occupation was comfortable and
leisurely... Occupation meant occupying the best of Japanese commercial, residential,
and recreational facilities, holding a glass in one hand and a Japanese girlfriend, or
moosimae, in the other, and how much hell one could raise. Single soldiers concentrated

71

on the good life with lovely Japanese girls, and married soldiers concentrated on opulent
living with families, if they were present, with female servants, who were omnipresent.
The only fighting the US. soldiers engaged in was negotiating a price for a single night’s
favor, for professional services on a month-by-month basis, or for Noritake china and
Mikimoto pearls.l

Although Bussey did not refer specifically to the experience of African American soldiers
in occupied Japan, he suggests that American soldiers, regardless of race and class, could
enjoy some political and economic privileges through their American nationality in their
relationship with the Japanese, or the people of the defeated nation. African American
soldiers solidified their national identity as members of the US. occupation Army
through their everyday interactions with the local Japanese people. Afiican American
Gls could derive a masculine sense of political and economic prestige, which had been
denied in their country, in their relation to the Japanese, when they had Japanese workers,
maids, and houseboys who served them in the camp or at their house to take care of
various chores around them, including cooking, cleaning, and mechanical maintenance.2
Some black GIs even took advantage of their national economic power to negotiate their
relationship with the Japanese, whether exploitatively or intimately, when they engaged
in the illegal black-market activities or satisfied desires for interracial romance and sex
by soliciting Japanese girlfriends with their abundant commodities and monies.3

During the period of the US. military occupation, the local Japanese people

around the base community at Gifu experienced, for the first time, the face-to-face

 

1 Charles M. Bussey, Firefight at Yechon: Courage and Racism in the Korean War (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1991), 41-42.

2 Interviews, John Cash with Gorham Black III, June 28, 1989; Cash with Al Brooks, August 6, 1988, the
US. Army Center of Military History (CMH) files.

3 William Bowers, William M. Hammond, and George L. MacGariggle, Black Soldier, White Army: The
24'" Infantry Regiment in Korea (Washington, DC: US. Army Center of Military History, 1996), 51.
Interview, John Cash with Richard W. Saxton, December 3, I988, CMH files.

72

encounter with a large number of American soldiers, whether they were black or white.
In their everyday interactions with American GIs, Japanese people expressed a sense of
shock and anxiety over the presence of a group of African American soldiers in their
community, whom they distinguished clearly from white soldiers according to the
Japanese pattern of racial categorization. Many Japanese men and women perceived
Afiican American GIs as “black” soldiers (kokujin-hei or more derogatory term,
kurombo) with distinctive racialized terms, while they described white GIs only as
“American” soldiers (amerika-hei or bei-hei) in terms of their nationality.4 Fred Thomas
of the 24th Infantry Regiment recalled the “Japanese kids licking their fingers and then
running up to us and rubbing it on our skin to see if it would come off.” According to
Thomas, Japanese children called them “chockaltea” soldiers and called whites in the 27th

5 African American soldiers consolidated their

Infantry Regiment “ice cream” soldiers.
racial identity as being black men through their encounter with the Japanese as a racial
“other,” when they found their male and national identity racially constructed by the
Japanese children, who showed, with their unguarded behaviors toward occupation
soldiers, their curiosity about the skin color of black GIs more clearly than their adult
counterparts.

It was difficult for many local Japanese men and women in Gifu to negotiate

reconciliation with their wartime racial hatred against Americans in their attitudes toward

 

4 Kagamigahara-shi senji kiroku henshfi iinkai, ed., Kagamigahara shimin no senji taiken: heiwa na 21 seiki
wo mezashite [Wartime Experience of the People in Kagamigahara: Toward the Peaceful 21St Century]
(Kagamigahara: Kagamigahara-shi kyoiku iinkai, 1996), 244, 266-267, 276-277.

5 Interview, John Cash with Fred Thomas, August 24, 1989, CMH files.

73

the US. occupation troops during the period immediately after World War 11.6 As
historian John W. Dower notes, American and the British enemy were ideologically and
culturally constructed as the “demonic Other” under the banner of “devilish Americans
and British” (Kichiku Bei-ei) in the Japanese popular racial imaginations during WWII.7
In addition, they were suffering from many casualties and severe physical damages by
several bombings of American aircrafts in June 1945 in Naka and Kagamigahara, the
communities surrounding Camp Gifu. These cities often became the targets of the
American bombers during the war, because of the existence of an air base of the Japanese
Imperial Army and several civilian aircraft factories in these areas.8 The postwar racial
attitudes toward Afiican American soldiers among the local Japanese at Gifu were
constructed in the complex dynamics within the specific historical juncture of their daily
interracial/intemational encounters with black GIs, in which they contested over the
wartime hatred against Americans, the postwar traumatic memories of the violence and
deprivation of war, and the preexisting prejudice against blacks in the modern Japanese
racial ideology.

Several local Japanese men revealed their vivid sense of fear and panic when they
heard the news of the invasions of the occupation troops into their communities. The

rumors of the possible occurrences of physical or sexual violence by GIS encouraged

 

6 Kagamigahara-shi senji kiroku iinkai, ed., Kagamigahara shimin no senji kiroku: heiwa na 21-seki wo
mezashite [Wartime Record of the People in Kagamigahara: Toward the Peacefirl 21St Century]
(Kagamigahara: Kagamigahara-shi kyoiku iinkai, I999), 229.

7 John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books,
1986), esp. chap. 9.

8 Yoshinori Kobayashi, Naka-aha shi [The history of Naka] (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankokai, 1964), 354-357;

Kagamigahara-shi kyéiku iinkai, ed., Kagamigahara no rekishi [The history of Kagamigahara]
(Kagamigahara: Kagamigahara-shi, 1990), 299-302.

74

them to make the local women and children escape as far way as possible into
mountainous areas for their safety.9 Some local Japanese attested to the tendency to
criminalize African American soldiers in the popular memories of their encounter with
American GIs in their communities. One of them recalled that his father frankly
expressed his racial prejudice against black soldiers when the father instructed his mother
to hide in the attic by saying, “Niggers (kurombo) are coming. Women will be all raped
by them.”'0

Others had more ambivalent feelings toward African American soldiers in their
daily interactions with them during the occupation period. One woman recalled that she
chased a black soldier who shoplifted peanuts from her store and that black soldiers
frightened the local people with their frequent invasions into their neighborhoods either
in the daytime or at night. However, she gradually developed friendship with African

American troops and became known among them as “Mama-san” who understood them

 

9 Kagamigahara-shi senji kiroku henshfi iinkai, ed., Kagamigahara shimin no senji taiken, 243-244, 264,
266.

'0 Ibid., 266. Kurombo is the most derogatory term in Japanese language to describe the people of African
descent, including African Americans and this term has a long tradition in the history of the Japanese
encounter with the Western World as well as Africa. Kuro is a descriptive word for black skin, and b0 has
a connotation of infantilizing blacks as non-mature, adolescent, and dependent beings. This term has been
used by the Japanese as a negative signification of blackness since their early contacts with the African and
East Indian servants, who came to Japanese ports accompanied by Italian missionaries or Portuguese and
Dutch traders in the 16th and 17th centuries. I used the N-word as the English translation of the term
kurombo to describe the negative racial perception of blackness among the Japanese during the US.
occupation of Japan. But, the contemporaneous Japanese used this term to express their inferiority
complex toward whites and condescending attitude toward blacks within the specific historical and cultural
context of the modern Japanese racial ideology and practice, differing from the American context in which
the N-word was used. As anthropologist John Russell suggests, the modern Japanese employed the “black
Other” as a “reflexive symbol,” through which they attempted to negotiate their own ambiguous racial and
cultural identity in the Eurocentric world within the boundaries of the influential Western dichotomy
between “European Culture and Civilization” and “African Barbarity and Savagery.” John G. Russell,
“Race and Reflexivity: The Black Other in Contemporary Japanese Mass Culture,” Cultural Anthropology
6, no. 1 (1991): 5-6. See also Hiromi Furukawa and Tetsushi Furukawa, Nihonjin to afurika-kei
amerikajin: nichi-bei kankeishi ni okeru sono shoso [Japanese and African Americans: Historical Aspects
of Their Relations] (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2004), 27-29.

75

in English, while she courageously confronted their misbehaviors and tried actively to
communicate with them in broken English. One day, her husband suggested that one
black soldier, who was impressed with their “cutie” little son, take him out for a walk in
their neighborhood. Afier a while, they found him coming back with some snacks with
which he was treated by the black GI. She interpreted this incident as a reflection of the
fiiendly attitude toward the soldier on the part of her family members, all of whom did
“not belittle” (tawakeni sezu) him because he was black (See Figure 4.1).” Although her
remarks revealed a condescending racial attitude toward Afiican American soldiers
among the local Japanese, this episode suggests that some local Japanese men and
women tried to reconcile their wartime hatred of Americans and their preexisting
prejudice against blacks with their friendly or, at least, tolerant racial attitudes toward
black GIs in their everyday encounters with them in their communities surrounding Camp
Gifu.

Through their daily interactions with the Japanese in the local community around
Camp Gifu, some Afiican American soldiers recognized that the Japanese also embraced
racial prejudice against black people. Referring critically to the existence of a long
tradition of racial superiority among the Japanese in their attitudes toward Koreans and
other Asian people, Charles Bussey observed that “now they were being conditioned by
the Caucasian majority to mistreat, cheat, and even hate the Negro and other
minorities.”12 As Bussey points out, white GIs played a critical role in the reproduction

of Japanese racial attitudes toward black men in occupied Japan. For example, white

 

" Ibid., 276—277.

'2 Bussey, Firefight at Yechon, 44.

76

 

Figure 4.1. African American G1 with a Local Japanese Child in Kagamigahara
around the Year of 1950

Source: Yoshiko Kamitsu ed., Shashinshu: omoide n0 arubamu: Kagamigahara

77

soldiers told the local Japanese people that black soldiers had tails, so there were some
Japanese who were really apprehensive about the tail question of black soldiers. Rollie
Evans recalled that he was asked by the Japanese to take off his clothes on more than one
occasion, so that he could show that he did not have a tail for those who believed in the
myth of black tails.l3 Drawing upon their own tradition of racial attitudes toward blacks
and different racial “others,” the Japanese reinforced, reconfigured, and complicated their
racial perception of black men during the period of the US. occupation, through their
face-to-face encounters with black soldiers on the local community level, as well as their
interactions with the white soldiers who brought their racist attitudes and practices with
their Jim Crow Army to occupied Japan.

Despite the existence of racial prejudice toward blacks on the part of the Japanese,
African American soldiers generally held a positive view of their interracial relationship
with the Japanese in the local community around Camp Gifu. In the oral history
interviews which were prepared by the US. Army Center of Military History for Black
Soldier/White Army in the late 19805 through the early 19903, many African American

soldiers stressed their good relationships with the local Japanese people and the absence

 

'3 Interviews, Timothy Rainey with Michael Pierre, November 29, 1989; John Cash with Theodore R.
Eldridge, Jr., August 26, 1988; Cash with Rollie Evans, October 13, 1988, CMH files. The racist
propaganda on black tails, which was spread among local people by white soldiers, was widely found in the
domestic and foreign communities surrounding the US. military bases during and immediately after World
War II, including Hawaii, Britain, and Germany. See Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange
Place: Race and Sex in World War 1] Hawaii (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1992), 150—151;
Brenda L. Moore, To Serve My Country, To Serve My Race: The Story of the Only African American WA Cs
Stationed Overseas during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 120; Heide
Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005), 32.

78

of racial problems in their interactions with the Japanese at Gifu.14 Some African
American soldiers interpreted their relationships with the Japanese within the framework
of tri-racial dynamics of interactions in occupied Japan, believing that they got along
better with the Japanese and treated them better than white soldiers did.15 Other black
soldiers were more conscious of the political power which was conferred upon them with
their American citizenship in occupied Japan in their explanations of the relationship
between black GIs and the Japanese. Remembering that there was no antagonism found
on the parts of the Japanese with whom he associated, Richard Fields said, “Of course we
were American soldiers in a beaten nation.”16 African American soldiers could enhance
their sense of racial and masculine pride through their everyday interactions with the
Japanese people, when they experienced relatively greater racial acceptance expressed in
the general attitudes of the Japanese toward black men as well as the relative absence of
racist incidents caused by the Japanese, advantages which they had never experienced in
their local communities in America.17

For some African American soldiers, their encounters with the local Japanese
around Camp Gifu gave them opportunities to expand their sense of the world, especially

their perceptions of race and race relations beyond the domestic social context of the

 

‘4 Interviews, Bernard Muehlbauer with Clarence Ferguson, September 2, 1988; Cash with W. A. Bobo
and Mrs. Bobo, date unknown; Cash with Alexander Shearin, August 17, 1988; Cash with Raymond C.
Hagins, August 28, 1988; Timothy Rainey with Michael Pierre, November 29, 1989, CMH files.

15 Interviews, Bernard Muehlbauer with Charles B. Gregg, September 8, 1988; John Cash with Theodore R.
Eldridge, Jr., August 26, 1988, CMH files.

'6 Interview, John Cash with Richard L. Fields, August 18, 1988, CMH files.

17 African American soldiers who were stationed in occupied Germany had a similar liberating experience
from the relative racial tolerance toward black Gls on the part of the Germans. See Maria HOhn, GIS and
Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 19503 West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2002), esp. chap. 3; F ehrenbach, Race afier Hitler, esp. chap. 1.

79

United States. In his biography of Ivory Perry, the local civil rights activist in St. Louis,
Missouri, historian George Lipsitz argues that Perry felt that the “Japanese people treated
black soldiers very nicely” while he was serving in occupied Japan as a member of the
24th Infantry Regiment.18 Enlisted in the US. Army on November 2, 1948, Perry was
assigned to duties in occupied Japan after eight weeks of basic training at Fort Knox,
Kentucky and stationed at Camp Gifu until he was sent to the battle fields in the Korea
War in July 1950. During his station in occupied Japan, Perry had a chance to meet
students and professors from Japanese universities, who not only spoke English but also
had “as much or more” knowledge about the US. racial situations as himself.19 Lipsitz
observed:

From them, he learned that differences in skin color did not automatically have to
mean prejudice and hatred. As he learned more about Japanese customs and
beliefs, he came to feel that all human beings had the same basic desires. Army
life had its problems, but Perry felt that as a soldier, he got to see other places
and share other cultures, and that he could develop skills and abilities that would
have remained dormant at home.20

As the case of Ivory Perry revealed, African American encounters with the Japanese in
the specific context of US. military occupation of Japan were crucial in their
reconfiguration of racial identities beyond the oppressive racist ideologies and practices
in the US. which were dominantly shaping their racial subjectivities within the narrower

dichotomy of black and white.

*****

 

'8 George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Oppression, Rev. ed.
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, I995), 40.

‘9 Ibid., 33,40.

2" Ibid., 40.

8O

The interracial fraternization between African American GIs and Japanese women,
which took both intimate and exploitative forms, became highly influential in the process
of the gendered, as well as racialized and nationalized, subjectivity formations among
African American soldiers stationed in occupied Japan. The Supreme Commander for
the Allied Powers (SCAP) adopted the non-fraternization policy between American GIs
and the Japanese in its military occupation of Japan. The SCAP prohibited all mention of
interracial fraternization between the Japanese and Americans in the Japanese media
under the November 26, 1946, directive. Historian Yukiko Koshiro suggests that the
SCAP banned any discussion of the interracial interaction between American GIs and
Japanese women, which could be interpreted as “having sexual connotations,” because
“such liaisons could both provoke Japanese racial hatred against whites and ridicule
American authority.”2| SCAP had already launched the policy to prohibit any mention of
race and racism in the Japanese media, particularly Japanese criticism of American
racism, so that it could contain Japanese racial identity as the “colored” and maintain
American authority as an occupation force. The SCAP’s nonfraternization policies
continued in occupied Japan until it began to remove them to nurture a more friendly
relationship between Americans and Japanese in a series of cultural programs in the
historical context of the growing danger of Communism since around the year of 1948.22

Despite the SCAP’s policy of nonfraternization between the occupiers and the
occupied, considerable interracial fraternizations occurred between American GIs, both

black and white, and Japanese women in Japan under US. military occupation. Richard

 

21 Yukiko Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the US. Occupation of Japan (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999), 63.

22 Ibid., 62-66, 70-81.

81

W. Saxton of the 24th Infantry Regiment attested to the prevalence to which American
soldiers developed intimate relationships with Japanese women in the base communities
surrounding Camp Gifu, where Sears and Roebuck probably sold more than anywhere
else in occupied Japan because of the GIs who were lavishing gifts on their girlfiiends.23
At Camp Gifu, the enforcement of the nonfratemization policy within the 24th Infantry
Regiment had different impacts on its servicemen according to their race and rank.
According to some GIs stationed at Gifu, the fraternization between American GIs and
Japanese women was tolerated or ignored mostly in the case of enlisted men and the
NCOs, while it was frowned upon and punished especially for commissioned officers,
whether they were black or white.24 Richard W. Saxton recalled that black junior officers
were allowed to bring their girlfriends into the NCO club. 25 This rank-specific
enforcement of the nonfratemization policy in the 24‘h Infantry Regiment created more
opportunities for Afiican American soldiers, many of whom remained in the lower ranks
within the regiment, to develop interracial intimacies with Japanese women at various
levels at Gifu.

Some Afiican American soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment formed marital
relationships with Japanese women at Gifu, whether they received official approval of the

American consul or not.26 The Ebony magazine article of March 1952 introduced the

 

23 Interview, John Cash with Richard W. Saxton, December 3, I988, CMH files.

24 Interviews, John Cash with Richard L. Fields, August 18, I988; Cash with W. A. Bobo and Mrs. Bobo,
date unknown, CMH files.

25 Interview, John Cash with Richard W. Saxton, December 3, I988, CMH files.

26 For the recent studies on Asian warbrides, see J i-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean
Military Brides in America (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Regina Frances Lark, “They
Challenged Two Nations: Marriages between Japanese Women and American GIs, I945 to Present” (PhD.

82

story of Sgt. Paul Shaw, who was then stationed in Tokyo and living with his wife
Mishiko, their daughter Paulette, and Mishiko’s mother there, as typical of the African
American soldiers who married Japanese girls in occupied Japan. Shaw met the former
Mishiko Kawashima, who was working as an usher at the GI movie house in Gifu where
he was stationed as a member of the 24th Infantry Regiment. Shaw and Mishiko married
in 1948 in a Shinto wedding ceremony without getting their nuptials approved by the US.
consulate, even though such a religious ceremony meant only a symbolic sanction of their
marriage in Japanese society without any official status in terms of American law. Shaw
and Mishiko encountered strong opposition to their marriage from a part of her Japanese
family. Insisting that “Shaw was using a trick to seduce his sister,” Mishiko’s brother
refused to attend their Shinto marriage ceremony and continued rejecting to have any
relationship with them even after their wedding was finally confirmed by the US.
consul.27 This episode of Michiko’s brother’s refusal to accept her interracial marriage
with a black American soldier attested to the existence of the prevailing stigma which
was attached to Japanese women fratemizing with American GIs, regardless of race, and
their families within the Japanese communities surrounding Camp Gifu during the period

of US. occupation.28

 

diss. University of Southern California, 1999); Gina Marchetti, Romance and the ‘Yellow Peril Race, Sex,
and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

27 “The Truth About Japanese War Brides: Negro Soldiers Lear to Admire Legendary Qualities of
Attractive Nippon Women,” Ebony 7, no. 5 (March 1952), I8.

28 There was an aversion to interracial fraternization between Japanese women and American 015,
regardless of their race, among the contemporary Japanese. Yukiko Koshiro argues that Japanese people
were intolerant of the interracial fratemization between Japanese women and American 015, “whether in
the form of dating, marriage, or childbearing,” and a stigma by Japanese society was attached to the
Japanese women who fratemized with GIs. She suggests that there was an aversion to any sexual or
physical contact with American Gls among the Japanese, despite their rising interest in American culture

83

African American soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment, who decided to marry
Japanese women despite official discouragement from the SCAP’s nonfratemization
policy, encountered various barriers which prevented the official approval of their
marriages at the American Consulate and the immigration of their wives and their half-
American, half-Japanese children into the United States. Afiican American GIs who
intended to officially marry the Japanese in terms of American law needed to first receive
the approval of their commanding officers in the regiment. Afiican American soldiers of
the 24th Infantry Regiment were often discouraged from marrying the Japanese by the
high commanders in the Army. 29 Alexander Shearin of the 24th Infantry Regiment
claimed that the Army kept its “unofficial” policy of discouraging the marriages between
GIs and the Japanese and blocked them, for example, by “threatening” to not reenlist
them, even after the SCAP allowed soldiers to marry their Japanese girlfriends by
changing its fraternization policy in 1947 to 1948.30

African American soldiers, who successfully had their marriage with their
Japanese fiancées approved by their regiment’s commanding officers, still encountered
the legal barriers of the US. Immigration Act against their international marriage with
Japanese women. American servicemen could not take their wives and their half-
American, half-Japanese dependants to the United States because of the 1924
Immigration Act which barred the immigration of Japanese war brides to the US. either

as citizens or permanent residents, until the enactment of the McCarran-Walter Act in

 

and life styles in the postwar period. Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the US. Occupation of Japan,
69-70.

29 Interview, John Cash with Roscoe Jones, June I6, 1989, CMH files.

30 Interview, John Cash with Alexander Shearin, August I7, 1988, CMH files.

84

1952.31 Japanese women were excluded from the application of the War Brides Act of
1945 and the GI. Fiancées Act of 1946, which were enacted by President Truman to
facilitate the entry into the United States of alien spouses, fiancé(e)s, and minor children
of US. citizens serving in, or honorably discharged from the US. armed forces during
World War II on a nonquota basis, because of their racial status as the aliens ineligible
for the US. citizenship which had been defined under the Immigration Act of 1924.32

In July 22, 1947, the Amendment of the War Brides Act (Public Law 213) was
signed by President Truman as a result of the lobby of the Japanese American Citizenship
League (JACL), under the leadership of Mike Masaoka, to introduce and pass a bill for
granting U.S. servicemen, particularly those of Japanese descent, the rights to marry
Japanese women and bring them back to the United States. The 1947 Amendment of the
War Brides Act permitted the entrance of the Japanese aliens, who applied their marriage
applications within the 30 days of its enactment, into the US. without the racial
restrictions under the 1924 Immigration Act.33 During the period fi'om July 22 through
August 22, 1947, 823 American servicemen, the majority of whom were Nisei (597) and
who included only 15 blacks compared with 211 whites, married Japanese women under
this amendment.34 Ira H. Blake was one of six African American servicemen who took

their Japanese brides, under. the extension of Public Law 213, to the American Consulate

 

3] Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the US. Occupation of Japan, 156-157.

32 Masako Nakamura, “Families Precede Nation and Race?: 1947 Amendment of the War Brides Act and
the American Family,” unpublished manuscript.

33 Ibid. I thank Masako Nakamura for sharing her unpublished paper with me and attracting my attention
to the importance of this amendment in the US. immigration history regarding the Japanese warbrides. On
the 1947 Amendment of the War Brides Act, see also Lark, “They Challenged Two Nations,” 193-201.

34 Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the US. Occupation of Japan, 157.

85

in Kobe on August 19, 1947, while he was serving as interpreter and translator with the
24th Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu. In his letter to the editor of the Ebony, Blake
expressed his appreciation for the “untiring efforts” of Joe and Mike Masaoka of the
Japanese American Citizens League in its enactment.35

In August 1950, another amendment to the War Brides Act (Public Law 717),
which was enacted as extension of Public Law 213 of 1947, permitted more African
American soldiers in occupied Japan to apply for their marriages with Japanese women at
the American Consulate only within the six months of its enactment without racial
restrictions under the 1924 Immigration Act. After the outbreak of the Korean War in
July 1950, many of the applications submitted under this amendment were supposed to
come from the American soldiers serving in Korea, expecting to return to Japan to
consummate their marriages with Japanese women upon the approval of their marriage
applications.36 L. Alex Wilson of the Chicago Defender reported that an estimated 400
servicemen of the 24th Infantry Regiment filed official applications to seek permission to
many Japanese women so that they could meet the eligibility deadline of February 18,
1951 under Public Law 717.37 Corporal Ernest Steinback was one of those African
American soldiers in the 24‘h Infantry Regiment who filed applications to marry their
Japanese fiance'es during this period. Steinback tried to take advantage of this
opportunity within the temporary extension of the War Brides Act under Public Law 717

to make official his marital life with Teruko Enya and their two-year-old daughter, Marie,

 

35 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 7, no. 8 (June 1952).
36 Lark, “They Challenged Two Nations,” 206.

37 L. Alex Wilson, “Lovesick GIs Marry 400 Japanese Girls,” Chicago Defender, November 4, 1950.

86

in terms of American laws, so that he could bring his bride and daughter to the United
States in the near future (See Figure 4.2).38

In the 24th Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu, two African American officers
played a critical role in the submission of a large number of marriage applications by
black soldiers under Public Law 717. Lieutenant Colonel Harry Lofton, one of the few
black commanding officers of the regiment, and Chaplain Captain Sullus B. Washington
were positive about the interracial/international marriages between African American
soldiers and Japanese women and strongly supported the request for marriage permission
from their regiment’s men, especially exhibiting their deep concern about the welfare of
the “brown babies.”39 Colonel Lofion told James Hicks, the Baltimore Afi'o-American
correspondent, that he “heartily” approved such marriages and felt that the women would
“make the men good wives.” Lofton was concerned about the current miserable
circumstances of occupation marriages surrounding Camp Gifu where many Japanese
mothers were suffering hardships after their American husbands left Japan for Korea and
some of them deserted their “brown babies” in desperation. Hicks reported in November
1950 that Lofion had already approved some marriage requests of the returning black
servicemen in the 24th Infantry Regiment from Korea and the first marriage under Public
Law 717 was to be expected soon afterward at Camp Gifu”0

However, African American soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment who submitted

marriage applications from Korea encountered another obstacle from the Army’s high

 

38 L. Alex Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls: Wilson Reveals Story Behind Love Affairs
Between Tan Yanks And Oriental Beauties,” Chicago Defender, November 11, I950.

39 Ibid.

40 James L. Hicks, “Many 24th Men Eye Brides in Japan,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 4, 1950.

87

 

Figure 4.2. Cpl. Ernest Steinbeck of the 24th Infantry Regiment with His Bride Miss
Teruko Enya and Their 2-Year-Old Daughter Marie
Source: Chicago Defender, November 11, 1950

88

commanders in occupied Japan, even after they temporarily overcame the legal barriers
within the US. immigration. L. Alex Wilson of the Chicago Defender was not optimistic
about the situations of those Afiican American soldiers intending to marry Japanese
women in occupied Japan under American law. Wilson reported: “the big problem
facing love sick Tan Yank, now engaged in mopping up activity in North Korea, is their
return to their former base in Gifu in order to complete arrangements for marital unions
with their Oriental sweethearts.”4| Two African American newsmen, Wilson and Hicks,
reported by using some high officials as sources that the Army was taking some measures
to prevent the 24th Infantry Regiment from returning to Camp Gifu for the consummation
of their marriages until after the passing of the marriage deadline under Public Law
717.42

The following remarks of Ivory Perry further substantiate their coverage that
African American soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment were not permitted to come back
to Camp Gifu from Korea because of the high commanders’ attention to the considerable
black-Japanese intimate relationships there:

They had put out a memo before we went to Korea that they didn’t want to see
no black walking down the street holding some Japanese girl’s hand. They
couldn’t even come on the post in Gifu... They couldn’t even—but the whites,
they could come on Gifu and go to the service club. But they couldn’t come, you
know, On the black soldier’s. . .43

Perry harshly charged General Walker, the 8th Army Commander, by name as the suspect

of “putting out the memo” to block the black-Japanese marriages at Camp Gifu. Perry

 

41 Wilson, “Lovesick Gls Marry 400 Japanese Girls,” Chicago Defender, November 4, 1950.

42 Wilson, “Lovesick 615 Many 400 Japanese Girls,” Chicago Defender, November 4, I950; Hicks,
“Many 24th Men Eye Brides in Japan,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 4, 1950.

43 Interview, John Cash with Ivory Perry, September 8, 1988, CMH files.

89

himself was assigned to Camp Sendai, not Gifu, when he was returned to Japan after the
disbandment of the 24th Infantry Regiment in 1951.44 The testimony of Ivory Perry,
combined with two black newsmen, suggested that the racist concerns among the high
commanders in the Eighth Army about black-Japanese interracial intimacy and sexuality
might contribute to the disintegration of the African American GIs’ familial relationships
with Japanese women and their biracial children surrounding Camp Gifu, in spite of the
enthusiastic supports for their marriage from black commanding officers in the regiment
as well as the temporary lenience in the US. Immigration laws toward Japanese
warbrides in 1950.

As African American officers of the 24th Infantry Regiment evidenced deep
concern in their treatment of the issue of black-Japanese marriage, the welfare of the
biracial children fathered by American GIs was one of the most serious problems which
the base communities, both American and Japanese, surrounding Camp Gifu were facing
as a result of the widespread interracial romance and sexual relations that occurred
between American soldiers and Japanese women during the period of US. occupation of
Japan.45 L. Alex Wilson of the Chicago Defender observed that every child, except one,
looked “healthy and well clothed” when he visited half a dozen mothers of occupation
babies living near Camp Gifir. However, he learned during the course of his interviews at
Gifu that the one exception, who apparently reflected the “neglect” or “desertion” on the

part of the American GIs and the financial problems of the Japanese mother, was “typical

 

4" Ibid.

45 For recent scholarship on mixed-blood children in occupied Japan, see Yukiko Koshiro, “Race as
lntemational Identity?: ‘Miscegenation’ in the US. Occupation of Japan and Beyond,” Amerikastudien 48,
no. 1 (Spring 2003): 61-77; Robert A. Fish, “The Heiress and the Love Children: Sawada Miki and the
Elizabeth Saunders Home for Mixed-Blood Orphans in Postwar Japan” (PhD. diss. University of Hawaii,
2002).

90

of a large number of cases, of which something must be done to prevent suffering by the
children.”46 More seriously, the infanticide of biracial children who were fathered by
Afiican American soldiers sometimes occurred at Gifu during that period. One local
Japanese man vividly recalled that one half-black, half-Japanese baby, who was brought
into the world “without crying,” was soon taken away by a midwife, wrapped in an oil
paper and stored in a small box.47 This episode suggested that the economic hardships
facing the Japanese mothers of those biracial babies, as well as the strong stigma attached
to them by Japanese society, drove some of them to desperation without establishing
stable relationships with their GIS under the current quasi-antifraternization policies of
the US. Army and the federal government.

In response to the problems of biracial children in occupied Japan, some African
American wives on Camp Gifu, a few of whom were opposed to the marriages between
GIs and Japanese women, proposed their adoption by American families as a solution to
the problem of biracial babies. One black woman, a wife of MSgt. “Big Boy” Jackson,
the 1949 All-Army heavyweight boxing champion, was living with a “brown baby”
deserted by its mother and seeking to gain approval of its adoption from the father who
was then fighting in Korea.48 However, Japanese mothers strongly opposed the adoption
of their babies by American families. Sachiko Harai was one of those desperate mothers
in Naka around Camp Gifu, who was living with her one-year-old daughter Treena while

waiting for Sgt. M. Sammons, her fiance, to come back from Korea. In response to L.

 

46 Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls,” Chicago Defender, November 11, I950.
47 Kagamigahara-shi senjikiroku henshfi iinkai, ed., Kagamigahara shimin no senji taiken, 266.

48 Hicks, “Many 24th Men Eye Brides in Japan,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 4, I950.

91

Alex Wilson who asked her if “she would let the baby be adopted by a good family in
America,” Harai rejected point-blank its possibility with her face “frozen” and
“clutching” her child.49

One African American soldier was planning to establish an institution at Gifu for
the biracial babies, who were fathered but deserted by American GIs, in light of the
desperate living conditions of their mothers. Corporal Theodore R. Washington, Jr., an
African American soldier of the 567th Engineer Service Company stationed at Camp Gifu,
wrote in July 1949 to Walter White, the executive secretary of the National Association
of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to seek legal assistance in his plan to
take care of the Japanese occupation babies by following a home or nursery in Europe as
a model. Although Washington was then childless by his present wife and not involved
in the intimate affairs with any Japanese woman, he appealed to White with an
enthusiastic sense of mission to save the “unfortunate Babies” on behalf of his fellow
American GIs for a humanitarian cause: “At present our laws place a barrier against
admittance to the security of the United States of Mother or Baby. Yet both are human
and the Baby does have our blood in. it’s veins. Can we stand by to ignore such a phase
of humanity?”50

Washington also emphasized the miserable conditions of the Japanese mothers of
those babies who were suffering from the patriarchal domination of Japanese men as well

as the desertion by American GIs of their fathers when he noted that, “all Women of

 

49 Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls,” Chicago Defender, November I l, 1950.

50 Theodore R. Washington, Jr. to Walter White, July 19, 1949, Papers of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People flVAACP), Library of Congress, Washington, DC, microfilm edition,
pt.9-B, reel 14.

92

Japan are certain that once we depart the shores of Japan, the male will again revert back
to the ways of old. The women, still carry in their hearts and minds the thoughts of
inferiority as far as the male is concerned. They alone succor and love the Babies.”5 ’ He
invested highly in the dominant American Orientalist discourse of Japanese women
during the period of US. occupation of Japan in his victimization of the Japanese
mothers of those occupation babies.52 In response to his letter, Franklin H. Williams, the
Assistant Special Counsel of the NAACP, expressed his willingness to be of “assistance”
to Washington and requested the “greater details” of his proposal so that the organization
could advise him more efficiently in his plan.53 It is not certain if any institution for
occupation babies was established by the initiative of Washington, but the existence of a
Methodist orphanage at Gifu was confirmed by the testimony of W. A. Bobo.54 In
addition to the shared interest in the welfare of biracial babies among African American
soldiers and officers at Camp Gifu, the correspondence between Washington and the
NAACP suggested the transnational dimension in the postwar black struggle for rights, in
which some black GIs in Japan connected their humanitarian struggle for racial and

gender justice for the biracial children of black servicemen and their Japanese mothers to

 

5' Ibid.

52 Cultural critic Lisa Yoneyama argues that the US. occupation authorities and the US. media actively
promoted the representation of Japanese women as victims of the male-dominant militarism and traditional
gender norms so that they could emphasize “women’s liberation,” especially Japanese women’s
enfranchisement under the US. occupation in their cold war propaganda. Lisa Yoneyama, “Liberation
under Siege: US. Military Occupation and Japanese Women’s Enfranchisement,” American Quarterly 57,
no. 3 (Sep. 2005): 885-910.

53 Franklin H. Williams to Theodore R. Washington, Jr., August 9, 1949, Papers of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), pt.9-B, reel 14.

54 Interview, John Cash with W. A. Bobo and Mrs. Bobo, date unknown, CMH files.

93

the larger contemporaneous antiracist movement in the US. thorough their trans-Pacific
exchanges with the NAACP.55

The widespread interracial intimate relationships between African American
soldiers and Japanese women surrounding Camp Gifu attracted the attention of African
American men and women in the US, when their news were reported and spread by
black journalists through the trans-Pacific circulation of black newspapers and magazines.
On September 9, 1950, James L. Hicks, the Baltimore Afi'o-American war correspondent,
wrote an article focusing on the Japanese women in Gifu, boosting the “fighting morale”
of the 24th Infantry Regiment by contributing 10,000 Japanese yen, which was equivalent
to about $26 in US. dollars, to the provost marshal for the purchase of delicacies for the
regiment’s members fighting on the front lines. Hicks explained that the intimate
relationships which were constructed between African American soldiers and Japanese
women around the Camp Gifu motivated their charitable donation to the regiment. Hicks
elaborated that “many of them (black GIs) have sweethearts in Japan; and much of the

mail received by men of the regiment comes from the women of Japan. Some of the 24th

 

55 On the postwar civil rights activism of the NAACP, see, for example, Gilbert Jonas, Freedom 's Sword:
The NAACP and the Struggle against Racism in America, 1909-1969 (New York: Routledge, 2007); Mark
V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994); and The NAACP ’s Legal Strategz against Segregated Education, 1925-
1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). For the recent growing scholarly attention to
the transnational and international dimensions of the African American struggle for rights in postwar
America, see Jonathan Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land?: World Aflairs and the American Civil
Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006);
Brenda Gayle Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1 945-1 988
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United
Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, [944-1955 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2003); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race
Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War
Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000);
Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1997); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and US. Foreign
Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

94

Regiment Soldiers have children by Japanese women.”56 In spite of its small amount in
terms of American standards, Hicks appreciated their monetary donation as “illustrative
of the warm respect and feelings” of the Japanese women, many of whom were engaged
to Afiican American soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment and had been a waiting
clearance to marry them for the previous eighteen months. As the title of this article,
“Japanese Boost 24’h’s Morale,” indicated, Hicks focused on the international
cooperation on the part of Japanese women during the US. war efforts in Korea, rather
than their intimate relationships with African American soldiers in occupied Japan in his
article.57

However, Hick’s article on the black-Japanese intimacies attracted some critical
attention from his African American readers both in the United States and in Japan and
provoked controversies on the issues of race, gender, and sex in occupied Japan within
the African American communities across the Pacific. One of the problems stemmed
from Hick’s careless treatment of this sensitive issue of interracial romance in occupied
Japan without taking the gendered reactions of black female readers into consideration in
his report. As the outbreak of the Korean War in July 1950, the Baltimore Aflo-
American initiated a “pen-gal” campaign to boost the fighting morale of the African
American soldiers stationed in Korea and Japan. A week before Hick’s report on the
Japanese women boosting the 24””s morale appeared, the Afio-American published an
article entitled “Your Letter Can Cheer GI’s Battlefront,” which encouraged its “girl”
readers to send letters with their pictures and a stamped-addressed envelope to Afiican

American soldiers on the battle line, with a list of names and addresses of some

 

56 James L. Hicks, “Japanese Boost 24""5 Morale,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 9, 1950.

57 Ibid.

95

soldiers.58 As the main advocate of this campaign, James Hicks asked his female readers
to tell a soldier that “you are proud of what he is doing (You should be for he is fighting
for your neck too),” as well as to “make it gay” by telling him the latest dance step in the
U.S., number one song in the hit parade, and some “vital statistics” about themselves
which “he looks for when he sizes a woman up on the street comer.”59 He called upon
black female readers to make gendered contributions to the US. war efforts in Korea by
emotionally comforting the fighting soldiers from their home communities as pen-pals
and pin-up girls.

In response to the Hick’s article on the black-Japanese intimacies in Gifu, which
appeared in the middle of the Afro-American’s “pen-gal” campaign, one reader from New
York, seemingly female, expressed her resentment against the supposedly “lonesome”
black soldiers in Korea. She asked in her letter to the editor: “Why should nice girls in
this country correspond with soldiers who have sweethearts in Japan? Moreover, some of
the 24‘h soldiers even have children by Japanese women.” She objected to interracial
romance and sexual relations between black soldiers and Japanese women in occupied
Japan, and suggested that the government “teach the Japanese females to write English so
that they can write to their lonesome lovers in Korea” or “send them all to Korea.”60
Three months later, four soldiers who had been stationed in Japan as corporal or sergeant

since 1946, responded in a jointly signed letter to the Afro-American to soothe this black

female reader. These soldiers argued that “a woman is a woman regardless of race, creed

 

58 “Your Letter Can Cheer Gl’s at Battlefront,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 2, I950.

59 James L. Hicks, “Here’re Some Do’s for Pin-Up Girls: Gl’s Want to Know Latest Dances, Top Song,
Some Vital Statistics,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 30, I950.

60 Baltimore Afro-American, October 14, 1950.

96

or color... until they prove otherwise” and opposed her idea of teaching them English by
praising their high competency in writing English. They tried to persuade her and other
black female readers not to be bothered by the temporary relationship between black
soldiers and Japanese women in occupied Japan: “We tell the American women not to

”61 The comments of those

worry; their chances of becoming old maids are very slim.
soldiers clearly revealed a double standard in the militarized sexual behaviors among
many American GIs, who would eventually return home and marry American women,
however intimate relationships they developed with native women while they were
stationed overseas.

The above dialogue between one black woman reader from New York and four
black soldiers in occupied Japan over black-Japanese intimate relationships in Japan was
not an isolated event on the reader’s forum in Baltimore Afro-American, but a part of the
larger transnational debate over the problems of race relation, gender convention, and
sexual practice in occupied Japan which were evolving in the African American
communities across the Pacific in the early 19503.62

The outbreak of the Korean War in July 1950 was the most impactful event on the
already unstable relationships between African American soldiers and Japanese women
that occurred at Gifu, whether they were married or not. Afiican American GIs of the

24th Infantry Regiment were not certain either about returning safe from the battlefield in

Korea, or coming back to Camp Gifu to see their wives, fiancées, or girlfiiends even if

 

6] Baltimore Afro-American, January 13, I951.

62 See Chapter 7 and 8 for the discussion on the black newspaper and magazine representations of the
interracial intimacy, sexuality, and marriage between African American soldiers and Japanese women in
the trans-Pacific African American communities in the early 19505.

97

they survived the war. in Korea. Japanese women were left by Afiican American soldiers
alone or with their biracial children in the Japanese communities surrounding Camp Gifu,
which were hostile toward the GI-Japanese miscegenation, while their intimate or marital
relationships remained unstable in terms of the US. military and immigration policies.
During the week before they moved out for Korea, Afiican American soldiers
went to see their girlfriends without official leave and confronted the MP5 who were
trying to stop them. According to James T. Burke of the 24th Infantry Regiment, the
incidents sometimes became “real heavy, real heavy” when, for example, a black soldier
with a basic load of ammunition would shoot some fire against the MP5.63 On the night
before the regiment lefi Gifu, there was an “invasion vice-versa” of the Japanese girls
coming on the post to see their soldiers.64 Their separation at the Gifu train station in
which African American soldiers were kissing and hugging their girlfiiends, with both of
them crying, became the most memorable scene among both Afiican American GIs in the
24th Infantry Regiment and local Japanese people at Gifu.65 Some violent confrontations
occurred at the station between Japanese women who were breaking through the lines to
approach as near as the soldiers in the train and the MP5 who were keeping them back by
force.66 But, any action on the parts of the Japanese women who were resisting their
separation with their GIs at the station did not prevent the African American troops from

leaving the garrison community of Camp Gifu for Korea.

 

63 Interview, Bernard Muehlbauer with James T. Burke, January 23, I989, CMH files.
6" Ibid.

65 Interview, Bernard Muehlbauer with Charles B. Gregg, September 8, I988; Kagamigahara-shi senji
kiroku henshl'r iinkai, ed., Kagamigahara shimin no senji taiken, 268-69.

66 Interview, Bernard Muehlbauer with Charles B. Gregg, September 8, 1988, CMH files.

98

The combat mobilization of the 24th Infantry Regiment as the outbreak of the
Korean War, as a consequence, contributed to the disintegration of the intimate or marital
relationships between Afiican American soldiers and Japanese women which occurred
widely in the base communities surrounding Camp Gifu. As W. A. Bobo, the senior
black officer in the 24th Infantry Regiment attested, the institutional blockade against the
GI-Japanese marriage in the Army as well as on the part of US. government was so
strong that most of the junior officers’ marriages in occupied Japan were broken after
they left Gifu.67

In spite of various institutional, ideological, and sentimental opposition against
their interracial/intemational marriage or miscegenation both in Japan and the U.S., some
African American soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment expressed their sincere decisions
and efforts to consummate their intimate relationships with Japanese women in the
marital and familial formations with their biracial children in the US. These Afiican
American 615, who had been discouraged from fostering interracial intimacies, especially
those with white women, in their own country, could fillfill their sense of racial and
masculine prides, when they had opportunities to explore interracial romance and
construct mutual relationships with Japanese women within the specific historical
juncture of US. military occupation of Japan.

As indicated in the high rate of venereal disease among the soldiers at Camp Gifu,
despite the regimental authorities’ strenuous efforts to reduce it, the interracial sexual
contacts between black G15 and Japanese women through the system of prostitution

became another form of gendered interracial interactions in occupied Japan, through

 

67 Interview, John Cash with W. A. Bobo and Mrs. Bobo, date unknown, CMH files.

99

which African American soldiers consolidated their racial, masculine, and national
identities in relation to both Japanese women and men.68 Approximately five hundred
Japanese prostitutes catered to occupation soldiers in the red light districts surrounding
Camp Gifu during the period of the US. occupation.69 Furthermore, the US. military at
Gifu operated its own sex houses called “Shi-Naka club” or “houses of entertainment” to
provide occupation soldiers with girls for a mere one dollar.70 On the one hand, having
sex with Japanese women while off duty became a means of measuring heterosexual
masculine achievements as well as promoting homosocial bonds among the American
occupation troops. American soldiers, regardless of race, appealed to the Victor’s sense
of militarized masculinity through sexual conquest and subjugation of the native women
in occupied Japan. Houston McMurray of the 24th Infantry Regiment recalled that it
became a “matter of honor” how to respond when asked if the men had had a sexual

intercourse while on leave in the sign—out book placed at the main gate of the camp.

 

68 On the postwar US. military policy on venereal disease and prostitution in Japan, see Sayuri Guthrie
Shimizu, “Sei no kokka kanri wo meguru senryo-ki nichibei kankei: Amerika no kaigai gunji shinshutsu to
jenda [Sexual Control by the State in the Japanese-US. Relationship during the Occupation Period: the US.
Military Engagement Overseas and Gender]? Gunji Shigaku 41, no. 4 (2006): 26-49; Hirofumi Hayashi,
“Higashi ajia no beigun kichi to seibaibai/seihanzai [U.S. Military Base in East Asia and
Prostitution/Sexual Crime]? Amerika-shi ken/(yr? 29 (August 2006): 18-35; and “Amerikagun no sei-
taisaku no rekishi: 1950 nendai made [A Historical Study of the US Military’s Policy toward Prostitution:
Through the 19505]? Josei, Sensa, Jinken 7 (March 2005): 94-118. On military prostitution in other
foreign or domestic communities surrounding the US. bases, see, for example, Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex
among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korean Relations (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997); Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War 11 Hawaii
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1992), esp. chap. 3; Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda
Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the US. Military in Asia (New York: New Press,
1992).

69 Kagamigahara—shi kyéiku iinkai, ed., Kagamigahara shishi: tszishi hen: kinse, kindai, gendai [History of
the City of Kagamigahara: General History in the Pro-Modem, Modern, and Contemporary periods]
(Kagamigahara: Kagamigahara-shi, 1987), 584-585.

70 Interview, John Cash with Fred Thomas, August 24, I989, CMH files.

100

McMurray recalled, “if you put down ‘no,’ why everybody would laugh you out of the
place or everybody checked off ‘yes’ as though big deal.”71

On the other hand, catching VD from or as a result of sexual intercourse with
Japanese prostitutes meant severe punishment which could damage the sense of honor
and manhood. The commanders of the regiment, who were always apprehensive about
the unit’s prominent VD rate in the whole 25Lh Infantry Division, punished the soldiers
contracting VD more severely than for any other offense. According to Fred Thomas, the
soldiers found to be infected with VD for the first time were concentrated in a “VD
camp” in Gifu where they endured hard training of eight weeks. The second time they
had to talk with the chaplain and then a letter was sent home to their mothers, wives, or
other family members. Finally they received an “undesirable discharge” for their third
bout with VD infection.72 Meanwhile, the inspections of their genitals by a white doctor
proved to be a humiliating experience for many black soldiers in the regiment. Being
bent over with their pants around their ankles in the parade field, the racial and masculine
pride of black soldiers was violated through the sexualization of their black male bodies
by white military doctors.73

American Gls, regardless of race, solidified their militarized masculinity as well
as American manhood in their frequent sexual intercourses with prostitutes in occupied
Japan or other areas under US. military occupation. Such interracial sexual interactions

within the specific context of gendered colonial relations in Japan entailed misogynous

 

7' Interview, Bernard Muehlbauer with Houston McMurray, date unknown, 1988, CMH files.
72 Interview, John Cash with Fred Thomas, August 24, I989, CMH files.

73 Interview, John Cash with Gorham Black 111, June 28, I989, CMH files.

101

depreciation of native women only as sexual objects or whores on the part of African
American soldiers, while they were challenged by the danger of their racial manhood
being damaged by contraction of venereal diseases from sex with prostitutes.

*****

Afiican American soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment achieved their gendered
empowerment partly through the de-masculinization of the local Japanese men as well as
their interracial sexual relationships, either intimate or involuntary, with Japanese women
at Camp Gifu. For many Japanese men, their daily encounters with American soldiers,
either black or white, were humiliating and emasculating experiences which reminded
them of the defeat of their country at World War II and their status as the “occupied.”
Since the US. occupation troops entered the Gifu area in October 1945, many local
Japanese men in the surrounding communities worked for the US. Army at Camp Gifu,
either voluntarily or forcibly. One Japanese man recalled that these Japanese workers,
whose number reached about 2000, felt a sense of “resistance” (teikoukan) against
serving for the former enemy nation, but they had “no choice but to” (seni harawa
kaerarenakatta) work for the US. Army in the local base to compensate for their hard
social and economic conditions during that period.74 Another Japanese man, one of many
local young men who were mobilized by the US. Army for the construction of the camp,
expressed a sense of “misery” (mijime na kimochi) which he felt, when he saw a GI
eating canned beans with a spoon while he was watching them, in light of the want of

food which many Japanese people were experiencing during the period immediately after

 

74 Kagamigahara-shi senji kiroku henshfi iinkai, ed., Kagamigahara shimin no senji taiken, 270.

102

World War II.75 Facing the material abundance of American GIs as a reflection of the
power of the victorious nation at Camp Gifu, these Japanese male workers felt a
diminishment of their masculine sense of pride vis-a-vis American soldiers for their
failure to fulfill their gender role as breadwinners of their families under the
impoverished conditions of their life during that period.

The most shocking experience for Japanese men, which clearly reminded them of
the masculinized humiliation of the defeated nation, was the widespread intimate and
sexual relationships which occurred between Japanese women and American soldiers in
the local communities surrounding Camp Gifu. One Japanese man recalled that he often
encountered the “indecent” (midareta) behaviors between “big” (o'kina) American G15
and Japanese prostitutes, who were called “pom poms,” in his way to the elementary
school and that Japanese children played with the condoms which were carelessly
dropped on the roadsides.76 He revealed the sense of powerlessness vis-a-vis American
soldiers in their sexual control of the Japanese women among the local Japanese men:
“We deepened our sense of “misery” (mijimesa) as the defeated nation, when we found
the increase in sexual immorality in our community and saw the loudly-dressed Japanese
women walking in town with their arms crossed with American GIs.”77

Another Japanese man, named Minagawa, clearly drew on his racial prejudice

against blacks in his expression of the indignation against American soldiers. Minagawa

stated that he was “shocked speechlessly” (nantomo ienai kimochi) to encounter several

 

75 Ibid., 265.
76 Ibid., 269.

77 Ibid.

103

black soldiers walking around his community. He mentioned implicitly the deep
involvement of Afiican American soldiers in the frequent incidents of rape of Japanese
women.78 Several local Japanese men, as well as women, attested to the visibility of
African American soldiers in their memories of interracial fraternities between American
G15 and Japanese women and their biracial children as well as the popular association
between black G15 and sexual violence.79 The Japanese men in Gifu felt their national
and racial subjectivities feminized by their powerlessness against the sexual incursions of
Japanese women by Americans soldiers in their local communities, especially those
committed by African American GIs, who were the most highly racialized “others” of the
former enemy nation in the modern Japanese ideology.

The de-masculinization of Japanese men was essential to the social process of the
racialized and gendered empowerment of Afiican American soldiers in occupied Japan.
In light of the sociologist R. W. Connell’s model of the “relation ” constructions of
masculinity in dynamics between “masculinities,” the racialized masculinities of African
American soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment were not only defined in relation to the
“subordination” of women, but also in relation to the “multiple masculinities” in the
triadic racial dynamics between blacks, whites, and the Japanese in the specific historical
context of US. military occupation of Japan.80 On the one hand, Afiican American
soldiers, like white American Gls, claimed the “hegemonic” heterosexual American

masculinity as members of the US. occupation forces through the “subordination” of

 

78 Kagamigahara-shi, ed., Kagamigahara shimin no senji taiken [The Wartime Experience of the People in
Kagamigahara] (Kagamigahara: Kagamigahara-shi, 1996), 12.

79 Kagamigahara-shi senji kiroku henshfi iinkai, ed., Kagamigahara shimin no senji taiken, 266, 268, 277.

80 R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2“d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 76-81.

104

Japanese men in the international political context of disparity between the US. and
Japan during that period. Afiican American GIs were “complicit” in the assertion of the
“hegemonic” militarized heterosexual American masculinity when they developed the
widespread interracial sexual relationships with Japanese women, either intimate or
involuntary. On the other hand, black masculinity of the 24th Infantry Regiment was
“marginalized” in relation to the “hegemonic” white masculinity in the contestations
between the “hegemonic” American masculinities, when they were “subordinated” in the
persistent segregation and discrimination in the white-dominant US. Army in occupied
Japan. In the contestations between the “subordinated” masculinities in relation to the
“hegemonic” white American masculinity, African American GIs were able to achieve
some gendered empowerment when they “authorized” their national masculinity through
the “marginalization” of Japanese men in terms of the “hegemonic” American
masculinity in the specific political context of US. occupation of Japan. The multiple
class and sexual dynamics within the segregated troop would further complicate the
constructions of black masculinities of the 24th Infantry Regiment in relation to the
“hegemonic” white, elite, heterosexual, American masculinity in occupied Japan.

In addition, the masculine empowerment of African American soldiers in the 24th
Infantry Regiment was constructed upon the specific “gendered” relationships between
the United States and Japan, which were contingent on the historical encounters of the
two nations in war and peace across the Pacific Ocean. In Embracing Defeat: Japan in
the Wake of World War II (1999), historian John W. Dower argues that there was a
gendered relationship between the masculinized occupation force and the feminized

Japan in the American imagination of the defeated nation. Dower contends that Japan

105

was suddenly transformed from a “menacing, masculine threat” into a “compliant,
feminine body on which the white victors could impose their will” afier World War 11
(my italics).8| However, the “white victors” were not the only actors in the US.
occupation force who were influential in the formations of “ubiquitous sexuality linking
conqueror and conquered” in occupied Japan. For African American soldiers whose
racial subjectivity was feminized through the persistence of segregation and
discrimination in the US. Army, their encounter with the Japanese as members of the
US. occupation force was a masculinizing experience, through which they could revive
their sense of honor by employment of their American citizenship in the international
political context of the US. occupation of Japan. Moreover, the enhancement of racial
masculinity among African American soldiers through their interracial fraternizations
with Japanese women was achieved only through the de-masculation of the Japanese men.
Thus, African American soldiers’ encounter with Japanese women and men in the
context of the US. military occupation of Japan had special “gendered” implications for
their racial subjectivity formations at Camp Gifu.
*****

In summary, African American soldiers defined their racial masculinity and
American manhood in their relation to the Japanese as a racial “other” as well as the
“occupied,” when they broadened their world views through their everyday encounters
with the local Japanese or developed widespread interracial intimate or marital
relationships with Japanese women despite discouragement from the US. Army or

American consulate in Japan. Their interracial sexual interactions with Japanese

 

81 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 1999), 138-139.

106

prostitutes helped them to further assert or perform their militarized and sexualized
masculinity in occupied Japan. Moreover, the masculine empowerment of the black GIs
was achieved through the de-masculation of Japanese men in the international political
disparity in occupied Japan. Thus, African American soldiers’ encounter with the
Japanese within the specific historical juncture of the US. occupation of Japan, as well as
their investment in the intra-organizational racial and class dynamics within the US.
Army, was crucial in their identity formation and transformation process which
intersected among race, gender, class, sexuality, and international politics.

Some African American soldiers who experienced the overseas military service in
Japan, Okinawa, or Korea became major actors in the postwar black struggle for rights
when they returned to the United States.82 Ivory Perry of the 24th Infantry Regiment was
one of those African American veterans who joined in civil rights activism after his
discharge from military service in Japan. With a “strong desire to see more of the rest of
the world and less of his home state,” Perry joined the US. Army in November 1948,
afier having grown up in a sharecropper’s family in rural Arkansas in the 19305. 83
Stressing the connection between Perry’s military experience in East Asia and his later
involvement in the community activism in St. Louis, historian George Lipsitz argues:

For Perry, meeting Japanese and Korean citizens who seemed to him refreshingly
nonracist compared to the White Americans he had known helped him see that
White supremacy was a primarily historical national phenomenon and not human
nature. In addition, the contrast between the freedoms he was sent overseas to

 

82 For example, James Forman, a prominent civil rights activist of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), was stationed in occupied Okinawa as a member of the US. Air Force from 1948 to
1950. See James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1972; repr., Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1985), esp. chap. 9.

83 Lipsitz, A life in the Struggle, 39. See chap. 1 for Peny’s background in Arkansas beforejoining the US.
Army.

107

defend and the freedoms he could not realize at home made him more determined
than ever to bring about changes in his own country.84

As Lipsitz points out, his military experience in occupied Japan, as well as in the
battlefield in Korea, brought Perry a new sense of the world and contributed to reshaping
his racial perception in the broader international context of everyday interracial
encounters with the local Japanese in the garrison communities surrounding Camp Gifir
and other bases in occupied Japan.

The relative racial acceptance which Perry experienced in the broader occupation
societies of Japan, especially in their relationship with Japanese people, made him more
keenly aware of the persistent racial segregation and discrimination within the US. Army
in occupied Japan, which was supposed to have brought democracy into Japan, as
expressive manifestation of racial oppressions in the larger American society. Perry
attested to the centrality of race in the shaping of his military life in occupied Japan:
“Races play a big part because we really was [sic] not really integrated. We had white
officers and very few black officers in the 24th Infantry Regiment...We used to always
have some racial conflicts with them (other outfits like the 11th Airborne) when we were
in Yokohama or Tokyo.”85 After he was transferred to Camp Sendai as the only black in
the telephone and teletype communications company after the disbandment of the 24th
Infantry Regiment in the middle of the Korean War, he faced more direct forms of racism
in the white-dominant unit: he was called “boy” by white soldiers, branded as a

“troublemaker” by his superior officers, and his promotions were ofien passed for less

 

84 George Lipsitz, “Frantic to Join... the Japanese Army”: Black Soldiers and Civilians Confront the Asia-
Pacific War,” eds. T. Fujitani, Geoffiey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, Perilous Memories: The Asia-
Pacific War(s) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 367.

85 Interview, John Cash with Ivory Perry, September 8, 1988, CMH files.

108

qualified white soldiers than he.86 Moreover, Perry was court-martialed in February 1953
at Camp Sendai for two alleged violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice:
possession of heroin and disobeying a direct order. Although he denied both of these
allegations in his appeals, Perry was sentenced to two years’ service in prison and finally
received his “dishonorable” discharge in March 1954.87 Based on a “secure sense of
purpose” with which he returned to the United States as a black combat veteran, Perry
played critical roles as a local community organizer in the grassroots struggle for racial
and economic justice in St. Louis from the mid-19505 through the 19805.88

African American soldiers in and around the 24th Infantry Regimen stationed at
Camp Gifu, who achieved a sense of racial and masculine empowerment through their
military experience as occupation soldiers in Japan, gained new perspectives on the
problems of race and racism in a larger American society as well as within the US. Army.
When African American soldiers returned to their home country after being released from
their military service overseas, what they encountered in the civilian world of the United
States was the cruel everyday reality of racial injustice and oppression. The African
American veterans who had served their country as members of the US. Army often
experienced white violence and insult. The incidents of racial injustice and oppression
confronting the returning African American soldiers in postwar America included racial

hostility and violence against black GIs in uniform, few employment opportunities, and

 

86 Interview, John Cash with Ivory Peny, September 8, I988, CMH files; Lipsitz, A life in the Struggle, 57-
63.

87 Ibid.

88 Lipsitz, A life in the Struggle, 62. See especially chaps. 3-8, for Ivory Perry’s involvement in the local
civil rights activism in St. Louis.

109

persistent Jim Crow practices in transportation, education, restaurants, and other public
areas in the South. Facing the gap in racial reality between that which they experienced
while stationed in occupied Japan and that which they encountered in their own
communities, some Afiican American veterans, like Ivory Perry, might have joined the
grassroots struggle for racial equality, which led later to the development of the modern
Civil Rights Movement, with a heightened sense of racial justice and masculine militancy

which they nurtured during their overseas military experience in Japan and Korea.

110

Part III
Negotiating Race and Womanhood
among African American Women in Occupied Japan

111

Chapter 5
Racial and Feminine Empowerment and Resistance among
African American Women in Occupied Japan
In this chapter, I bring African American women, who were traditionally ignored
in both the popular and academic discourse of the US. occupation of Japan either in
Japan or in the U.S., to the center of analysis as major actors in shaping the gendered

9,

formation of the “Black Pacific. Regardless of their social backgrounds in the U.S.,
African American women, on the one hand, achieved the feminine sense of
empowerment by exploring alternative racial identities, gender roles, and class positions
in occupied Japan, while they enjoyed considerable political prerogatives and economic
advantages vis-a-vis Japanese citizens as members of the US. occupation forces. Some
black women, especially the civilian personnel who highly advanced their rank within the
US. Army, enjoyed the luxurious lifestyles attendant to their privileged position to hire
the Japanese maids as well as their access to extensive leisure and shopping activities.
They developed an appreciation for the sense of interracialism and intemationalism while
living, working, and fratemizing with the Japanese and white Americans in the integrated
and multiracial settings. On the other hand, African American women continued facing
racism and sexism within the US. military and from the patriarchal sector of the black
communities in Japan. Black Army nurses protested racial segregation and
discrimination within the US. Army Nurse Corps in various ways.

The African American women stationed in Japan during the period of US.
military occupation were diverse in their status and background, although the majority of

them were affiliated with the US. occupational forces in some way, whether their status

was military or civilian. These African American women can be divided into several

112

groups in relation to their social status in occupied Japan; such factors include their
military-civilian status, organizational affiliation, occupation and assignment, military
rank, and familial status.

The first group of African American women who served in occupied Japan was
the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) within the US. Eighth Army in Far East Command.
The Women’s Army Corps was established initially as the Women’s Army Auxiliary
Corps (WAAC) in 1942 and was converted to the WAC in 1943 due to the military and
political exigencies of World War II. Some of the African American WACS, like the
member of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, were assigned to overseas duties
as a segregated unit and played an important role as a postal service unit in the European
Theater of Operation (ETO) during WWII. ' However, the numerical strength of Afiican
American WACS drastically declined after WWII and remained at a low level until the
outbreak of the Korean War in July 1950. 2 Moreover, Afiican American WACS
remained racially segregated and discriminated in the postwar US. Army: black WACS

were recruited under a quota system, received basic trainings in segregated units, faced

 

1 For the creation and history of the Women’s Army Corps during World War II, see Bettie J. Morden, The
Women ’s Army Corps, 1 945-1978 (Washington DC: US. Army Center of Military History, 1990), chap.
1; Leisa D. Meyer, Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women 's Army Corps During World War
II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 1. On the 6888th central Postal Directory
Battalion, see Martha S. Putney, When the Nation Was in Need: Blacks in the Women ’3 Army Corps During
‘ World War II (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2001); Brenda L. Moore, To Serve My Country, To
Serve My Race: The Story of the Only African American WA Cs Stationed Overseas during World War II
(New York: New York University Press, 1996); Charity Adams Earley, One Woman ’s Army: A Black
Ofiicer Remembers the WAC (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1989).

2 The numerical strength of African American members of the Women’s Army Corps at the end of each
fiscal year during the period of US. military occupation of Japan, 1945-1952 is the following: 3,849 (117
officers and 3,732 enlisted) in 1945, 673 (15 officers and 658 enlisted) in 1946, 319 (9 officers and 310
enlisted) in 1947, 125 (4 officers and 121 enlisted) in 1948, 352 (12 officers and 340 enlisted) in 1949, 648
(18 officers, 1 warrant officers, 629 enlisted) in 1950, 1,046 (30 officers, 1 warrant officers, 1,015 enlisted)
in 1951, 1,332 (40 officers, 1 warrant officers, 1,291 enlisted) in 1952. Morden, The Women ’s Army Corps,
1945-1978, 415.

113

segregated work assignments until Executive Order 9981, which President Harry S.
Truman issued in July 1947 to officially declare the desegregation of the US. armed
forces, was finally executed. Racial quotas and segregation were eliminated in the WAC
with the Army directive issued in April 1950. Initially, few if any opportunities for
overseas assignment were open to Afiican American women in the postwar WAC,
although they were included in the WAC reenlistment program of 1946-1947.3 Some
black WAC detachments were assigned to the European Command in the late 19405.4
However, African American WACS were entirely excluded from the assignment to the
occupation duties in Japan until the Korean War occurred in July 1950, while two WAC
attachments (8000th WAC Battalion in Yokohama and the 8225th WAC Battalion in
Tokyo), which were exclusively white, were already activated in occupied Japan in
1946.5 Gertrude LaVigne, who had remained in the Army for eight years after serving as
a member of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion during WWII, testified that
many of the black WACS in the unit who were not discharged remained at Camp
Stoneman, California for postal, clerical, and hospital duties without being assigned to

Japan.6

 

3 Ibid., 85-86.

4 Twenty four black women were sent to the European Command before June 30, 1949, in response to the
requisition from the European Command for a detachment of 50 black WACs in February 1949. Putney,
When the Nation Was in Need, 145.

5 Morden, The Women ’3 Army Corps, 1945-1978, 47.

6 Moore, To Serve My Country, To Serve My Race, 166.

114

At the outbreak of the Korean War, the strength of the WAC in Far East
Command, especially in occupied Japan rapidly increased. 7 The WAC had six
detachments in Japan by the mid-1951, while there had only been two in July 1950.8 The
WAC personnel in occupied Japan were engaged primarily in the administrative,
communications, medical, and intelligence duties at the Far East Command headquarters
and other commands in Tokyo, the regional commands throughout Japan, and the general
and station hospitals in Japan and Okinawa. In comparison with the members of the
Army Nurse Corps who were assigned to the hospitals in Korea, the WAC detachments
remained on duty in Japan and Okinawa without any requisitions for their assignment to
Korea during the war, although individual WACS served in Korea on special
assignments. 9 African American WACS, who had been previously excluded from
overseas assignments, were included this time in the WAC detachments assigned to
occupied Japan. But, African American WACs continued facing segregation in residence
on the base in occupied Japan, although they were assigned as an integrated unit there.l0

Ralph Matthews, the Baltimore A fio-American war correspondent, observed in
September 1951 that there were several hundred WACS in the Yokohama area because of

their big encampment there, while there were few female personnel seen in Tokyo and

 

7 The strength of WAC in Far East Command rapidly increased from 626 in 1950 to 2,604 in 1951, then
gradually declined to 1,791 in 1952, 1,764 in 1953, and 976 in 1954. Morden, The Women ’s Army Corps,
1945-1978, 107.

8 Those WAC detachments assigned to Japan were located at Yokohama, Tokyo, Camp Sendai, Camp
Drew, Camp Zama, Camp Osaka, Camp Sagami, and Camp Schimmelpfenning as of June 1953. Ibid., 106.

91bid., 106-108.

10 Historian Martha Putney points out that “blacks who were stationed in Japan in 1954 likewise lived in
separate barracks.” Putney, When the Nation Was in Need, 149.

115

throughout Korea. ”

The rank, place of duty, and type of assignment of the African
American WACS stationed in occupied Japan varied depending on previous military
experience in the WAC and their special skills. For example, Sgt. Laura A. Bullock,
who had served for eight years in the WAC, was assigned to the US. Army Hospital at
Camp Yokohama in an administrative capacity since arriving there in June 1950. '2
Another sergeant, Emma V. Routh, who had enlisted in the WAC in October 1943 and
subsequently completed her assignment as a mess sergeant at Fort Knox, Kentucky, was
selected to serve at the Headquarters and Service Command in Tokyo.13 First Lt. Ossie
Rountree became the first civilian woman officer in the Far East Command to be selected
for a direct reserve commission in the WAC in 1952.l4

Another group of Afiican American military women who were assigned to duties
in occupied Japan was the US. Army Nurse Corps. Afiican American nurses were
officially admitted to the US. Army and then to the US. Navy in January 1945. During
World War 11, African American community successfully engaged in the struggle to
eliminate the quotas and discrimination against black nurses in the US. Army and Navy

Nurse Corps under the effective leadership of Mabel K. Staupers, the executive director

of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN).15 Afier the war

 

H Ralph Matthews, “Wacs and Pom Poms Wage War in Yokohama: Gls Counter-Attack in Battle of
Sexes,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 22, 1951.

u “Attends Service School In Japan,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, December 8, 1951.
‘3 “Wac Unpacks In Japan,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 28, 1952.
M “First Civilian Woman Officer For Far East Command,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, February. 2, 1952.

15 On the political process of the integration of the black nurses into the US. Army and Navy Nurse Corps
during World War 11, see Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in
the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), esp. chap. 8; and

116

African American women in the Army Nurse Corps, as military historian Mary Sarnecky
suggests, continued serving in a segregated unit in the postwar US. Army, until their
corps was racially integrated with President Truman’s issuance of Executive Order 9981
in 1948.16

Some members of the Army Nurse Corps were assigned to duties at the military
hospitals in Japan during the period of US. military occupation. According to Sarnecky,
most of the Army nurses who were on duty in occupied Japan in the postwar period
worked and lived in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, while they served in the occupation
hospitals throughout Japan. Those Army nurses served with the American civilian
nurses, who were employed by the military government in Japan for the purpose of
raising the standards of nursing and nursing education in Japan.‘7 There are records to-
indicate that some Afiican American nurses were assigned to duties in occupied Japan in
the late 19405 before the outbreak of the Korean War. African American Army nurses in
Japan joined the celebration of the 48‘h anniversary of the founding of the US. Army
Nurse Corps which was hosted by the 24‘” Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu in early 1949
(See Figure 5.1).'8 Lt. Millie Hooks and Lt. Britto were two black nurses who were
stationed at the 128‘h Station Hospital in Yokohama in the beginning of June 1949, while

several other black nurses served at the 155‘h Station Hospital in occupied Japan. Hooks

 

“Black Professional and Race Consciousness: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 1890-1950,” The
Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (March 2003): 1279-1294.

‘6 Mary T. Sarnecky, A History of the US. Army Nurse Corps (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1999), 316.

'7 Ibid., 284-286.

‘8 “Army Nurses of 155‘” Station Hospital, Japan, Feted as Corps Marks 48‘” Anniversary,” Baltimore Afro-

American, March 12, 1949; “Army Nurses in Japan Celebrating Founding,” Baltimore Afi'o—American,
March 26, 1949.

117

 

Figure 5.1. Army Nurses in Japan Celebrate Founding at Camp Gifu
Source: Baltimore Afi‘o-American, March 26, 1949

118

also revealed that ten of the approximately thirty five nurses, who were processed for
duty in Japan at Camp Stoneman in Pittsburgh, California in August 1949, were Afiican
American.‘9 As discussed later in detail, the practice of segregation and discrimination
within the Army Nurse Corps continued in some installations in occupied Japan even
after the issuance of Executive Order 9981. Hooks and other African American women
protested this by resorting to various means available in the trans-Pacific network of
African American struggle against racism in the US. military.

After the outbreak of the Korean War in July 1950, more African American
nurses were regularly assigned to the occupation hospitals in Japan to supplement the
shortage of American nurses to treat the casualties evacuated from the battlefield in
Korea. The Baltimore Afro-American highlighted the four African American women,
Capt. Rosalie H. Wiggins, Lt. Laurence Martin, Lt. Alice H. Dolphy, and Lt. Olga
Bearnan, who anived in Japan in mid-January 1951 as the first cadre of Afiican
American nurses to join the staff at the General Hospital in Tokyo.20 Historian Mary
Sarnecky points out the significant contributions of those Army nurses serving in Japan,
who “suffered many of the same deprivations, rose to meet similar relentless challenges,
and worked long, hard hours” in spite of their physical dislocation from the immediate

combat zone.21 In addition, some African American women served as a member of the

 

‘9 Millie Hooks to Franklin H. Williams, August 7, 1949; Millie Hooks to Franklin H. Williams, August 16,
1949, NAACP Papers. All the documents hereafter cited as the NAACP Papers can be found in the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C., microfilm edition, pt.9-B, reel 25.

20 Milton A. Smith, “Four Army Nurses at Tokyo Hospitals: Philly Captain Heads Ward Staff; 2 Other
Nurses in Korea Hospitals,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 10; “Nurse in Tokyo,” Baltimore Afro-
American, March 17; “Nurse in Tokyo,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 24, 1951.

2‘ Samecky, A History of the US. Army Nurse Corps, 318.

119

newly-independent US. Air Forces Nurse Corps in occupied Japan. After serving as a
chief nurse at the Tuskegee Air Force Base during World War II, Capt. Ruth Faulkner
Johnson reapplied for a commission to Japan to follow her husband, who had been
drafted and dispatched to Korea soon after their marriage.22

The next group of Afiican American women who were stationed in occupied
Japan were those who participated in the US. military occupation of Japan with civilian
status. Some civilian African American women were employed under the contract with
the US. Army in Japan under US. military occupation. Those uniformed civilian black
women, such as Elvira Turner, a graduate of Wilberforce University were assigned to
various positions within the US. occupational forces in Japan (See Figure 5.2). Turner
visited Japan with the US. occupational forces in August 1949 and was first employed as
a clerk stenographer there. She was soon promoted to the position of secretary and
administrative assistant in the Civil Property Custodian office of General Headquarters of
SCAP (Supreme Command of Allied Powers).23 Ethel Payne was assigned to the Tokyo
Quartermaster Depot to serve as director of the Special Services Seaview Club, the
“interracial” club which was established for the welfare of the US. servicemen by the
Red Cross worker Ocie Smith in 1947 (See Figure 5.3). Payne, a graduate of
Northwestern University had served with the US. Navy at Great Lakes, Illinois during
World War II, had been stationed in Japan for thirty months in November 1950. James L.
Hicks, the Baltimore Afro-American war correspondent, focused on the role of Payne and

her three assistants, Kathryn M. Davenport, Dorothy Mitchell, and June Wells, in the

 

22 Ralph Matthews, “Fate Provides Twisted Experience For AAF Nurse,” Norfolk Journal and Guide,
October 6, 1951.

23 James L. Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 18, 1950.

120

   
 
 

      

~ \
. {JN'M .-

 

it ;..I:.lr'1/llJ
filll '
lilllllr’TI 5T
Tfi’iia‘i nt LLAI E‘_

 

 

 

Figure 5.2. Elvira Turner, Civilian Personnel, General Headquarters of SCAP,
on the Streets of Tokyo Near Provost Marshall’s Headquarters
Source: Baltimore Afro-American, November 18, 1950

121

 

Figure 5.3. Ethel Payne, Director of the Seaview Special Service Club in Tokyo,
with Lt. Charles L. Gray of the 24‘h Infantry
Source: Baltimore Afro-American, November 11, 1950

122

successful management of the soldier’s club in Tokyo. He declared that the four stateside
women “make their program so appealing to the men that it simply outstrips the off-the-

base places in providing entertainment.” 24

In addition, Payne was active in the
journalistic commitment to the black press in occupied Japan, writing and speaking about
the interracial romance and marriage between African American soldiers and Japanese
women from a perspective of African American women in her articles and interviews
especially for Chicago Defender.25 When she resigned from her position in occupied
Japan and returned to the United States, Payne continued reporting on the lives of
Japanese brides of black soldiers in the US. in several published articles which she wrote
as a correspondent for the Chicago Defender.26

Other civilian Afiican American women stationed in occupied Japan were those

9,

who were employed for the US. Department of Army, who were called “DAC’s, or the
Department of Army Civilians by the US. civilian and military personnel there. Nan
Watson was one of the twelve African American women who were employed as DAC’s
in Japan during that time. Watson joined the Department of Army in occupied Japan in
early 1947, when she transferred from her former job as a correspondence clerk at the

New York Port of Embarkation. As she claimed that “we have some pretty smart people

among the Negroes here, all of them a credit to the race,” many of the Afiican American

 

24 James L. Hicks, “Fine Haven For Soldiers: GI’s Praise 4 Women Running Tokyo Club,” Baltimore Afro-
American, November 11, 1950.

25 Ethel Payne, “Says Japanese Girls Playing G15 For Suckers: ‘Chocolate Joe’ Used, Amused, Confused,”
Chicago Defender, November 18, 1950; L. Alex Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls: Wilson
Reveals Story Behind Love Affairs Between Tan Yanks and Oriental Beauties,” Chicago Defender,
November 11, 1950.

26 Ethel Payne, “New Year’s Holds Sad Memories for Japanese Bride in Chicago,” Chicago Defender,
December 29, 1951; Ethel Payne, “Sgt. Japanese Wife Given Warm Welcome,” Chicago Defender, March
15, 1952.

123

DAC’s who were serving in occupied Japan, either women or men, had more advanced
professional and educational backgrounds than the average American occupational
personnel stationed there. Her friend Ann had worked as a secretary to the Dean of A
and T University in South Carolina before she accepted her appointment with the Far
East Command.27 As I will discuss in the next chapter in more detail, their advanced
professional and academic careers as well as their higher ranks in the military hierarchies
of the US. Army became a source of the intraracial gender conflicts which occurred
between the civilian black women and black male soldiers in occupied Japan.

In addition, there were some African American women in the Red Cross who
were stationed at the military installations throughout Japan during the US. occupation
period, whose service was deeply involved with the US. Army in spite of their civilian
status. As the 1947 Ebony magazine article titled “Red Cross Girl” reported, there were
100 African American girls who were serving as Red Cross workers in occupation areas,
including Japan, Germany, and Italy.28 Sylvia J. Rock was one of the African American
Red Cross workers, who served in Sasebo in Southwest Japan from October 1950.
According to Rock, there were eighteen Afiican AmericanRed Cross women in Japan
when she was serving there and then their number increased to fifty after she resigned in
September 1951. She was proud of her service as a Red Cross worker in occupied Japan,
when some African American men came up to tell her “how much better it made them

feel to see some of us girls getting the chance to do some of the more exciting things in

 

27 Nan Watson, “Letter from Japan,” Negro Digest 8, no. 9 (July 1950): 46-49.

28 “Red Cross Girl: Myrtle Gross Find Fun and Work in Germany,” Ebony 2, no. 6 (April 1947): 48.

124

life.”29 The service of other black Red Cross workers serving at Camp Gifu in Central
Japan was considered to be “effective” among the African American GIs of the all-black
24‘h Infantry Regiment who were stationed there. Mrs. Bobo, who was stationed with her
GI husband at Camp Gifu, observed that these female workers who were billeted in
barracks were complaining that their male supply officer did not understand that women
needed more tissues than males. The racial and intragender solidarity among the
American base women was forged when the wives at the camp looked out for women in
the Red Cross and supplied the tissues for them voluntarily.30 As shown in these cases,
African American Red Cross workers seem to have been scattered throughout the base
towns in occupied Japan, while other black female personnel, either military or civilian,
were relatively concentrated in Tokyo-Yokohama areas.

There were also some civilian Afiican American women who were stationed in
occupied Japan without any affiliation with the military or civilian branch of the US.
occupational forces in Japan. Daisy Tibbs, a home economics teacher in Athens,
Alabama was one of the four young Americans who visited Japan as a member of the
“interracial, inter-faith” team to construct a “House of Hiroshima” as a “symbolic shrine
of peace (See Figure 5.4).” The “House of Hiroshima” was a Quaker-oriented project
which would house four of the 4,000 still-homeless families whose houses had been
destroyed by the atomic bomb in 1945. She was selected by Quaker leader Floyd

Shomoe as a member of this international mission to Japan because of her previous

 

29 Sylvia J. Rock, “Nippon Girls Look Like Americans: Ex-Red Cross Worker Says Yokohama Is Like
Harlem,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 13, 1951.

30 Interview, John Cash with W. A. Bobo and Mrs. Bobo, undated, the US. Army Center of Military
History (CMH) files.

125

 

Figure 5.4. Daisy Tibbs, Quaker Missionary to Japan as Part of Interracial Team
Building “House of Hiroshima”
Source: Ebony, January 1950

126

experience with the Nisei evacuees at West Coast concentration camps during World War
11.“

Finally, there were other civilian African American women who were stationed in
Japan as family members of the African American occupational personnel. Some of the
African American women came to Japan to live with their GI sons, like the mother of
Richard L. Fields who was living as his dependant in married officer quarters at Camp
Gifu.32 However, the majority of the African American women in this group were the
spouses of African American male soldiers who were stationed in Japan for their military
service at Army bases located throughout Japan or fighting in Korea. Mrs. Bobo was one
of these wives of the African American soldiers in occupied Japan, and was stationed at
Camp Gifu with her senior officer husband, W. A. Bobo and teaching at the high school
on the base. Mrs. Bobo attested to the fact that the world of Afiican American soldiers’
wives was rigidly separated by race and rank at Camp Gifu, as was the male community
of African American soldiers there. According to her, there was no ofi‘icers’ wives clubs
at Camp Gifu because of race, where there were a relatively large number of black
officers since it was a host camp of the all-black 24‘” Infantry Regiment. African
American women organized a bridge club for field-grade officers’ wives on a segregated
basis. In addition, she explained that African American wives were not a “close unit
group” at Camp Gifu because of the rank differences among their husbands. Bobo
elaborated that a black officer’s wife like Mrs. Wright, who was married to Cap. Wright

and also a principle of the high school where she was on the faculty, could be a divisive

 

3‘ “Mission to Hiroshima: Interracial Team Rebuilds Homes as Shrine of Peace,” Ebony 5, no. 3 (January
1950): 46.

32 Interview, John Cash with Richard L. Fields, August 18, 1988, CMH files.

127

force which prevented the formation of the solid racial unity among African American
women there. Mrs. Wright behaved like the “self-appointed social arbiter” for African
American wives at Camp Gifu, because of her trusted relationship with the wife of
Colonel Halloran, the commanding officer of the 24‘” Infantry Regiment. Bobo was
embarrassed by Mrs. Wright’s interference with one of her personal relationships, when
Wright advised her not to socialize with one of her colleagues at the high school who was
a wife of a noncommissioned officer. 33 Although the above story about African
American officers’ wives at Camp Gifu was not representative of the lives of the African
American soldiers’ wives in occupied Japan, it clearly revealed that some black wives of
the US. servicemen experienced the intraracial tensions in terms of social status within
the black women’s community there because of the differences in rank of their husbands
in the class hierarchies within the US. Army.

During the Korean War, African American wives who were waiting in occupied
Japan for the return of their soldier husbands were as anxious as those stateside. Clovis
Snead, the wife of Sgt. Fred Snead who was then fighting in Korea, remained in her
- home on the air base in Tokyo, because she could feel geographically closer to her
husband there than in the United States. She confessed her worrisome and lonely life in
Japan while waiting for her husband to return from Korea: “At night I say the Lord’s
Prayer and another day is done. I always add a few words about Fred and think of what
to tell him in my next letter to him, but nothing ever happens to me that is interesting.”

Snead also engaged in some voluntary activities on the base by assisting at the service

 

33 Interview, John Cash with W. A. Bobo and Mrs. Bobo, undated, CMH files.

128

club or attending various evening meetings with white women while her husband was
absent.34

African American wives at Camp Gifu participated in voluntary work to “furnish
aid and comfort” to the G15 fighting in Korea under the direction of the Red Cross
workers. Some of these volunteer groups were organized on an interracial basis, as
shown in the picture, which appeared in the black newspaper in February 1951, of the
women of a mixed group who were preparing ditty bags, sweaters, and other goods to be
shipped for the troops in Korea (See Figure 5.5).35 These African American camp
women contributed to the US. war efforts in Korea in gender-specific ways when they
were actively involved in voluntary work to help their soldiers on the home front in the
diasporic US. military community in occupied Japan, waiting for their men to come back
from Korea.

*****

The diverse social positions and backgrounds of the African American women
stationed in Japan shaped the heterogeneous experiences among them, depending on their
status, occupation, and rank within or outside the US. Army in occupied Japan. In spite
of these social differences, their investment in American national identity as members of
the US. occupational forces, as well as their shared interest in the racial and gender
politics, created a common ground for the peculiar experience of Afiican American

women in Japan under US. military occupation. For African American women, most of

 

34 Milton A. Smith, “Life One Of Waiting In Tokyo: Neamess To Battle Area No Help To Anxious Wife,”
Norfolk Journal and Guide, January 6, 1951.

35 “Women Volunteers Furnish Aid and Comfort To Gl’s In Korea,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, February
3, 1951.

129

 

Figure 5.5. Women Volunteers Furnish Aid and Comfort to CPS in Korea
at Camp Gifu
Source: Norfolk Journal and Guide, February 3, 1951

I30

whom had never been abroad before World War 11, their overseas experiences in
occupied Japan fueled consciousness raising and was influential in fostering a
transformation of their racial, gender, and class identities. On the one hand, like their
male counterparts, African American women could achieve a racialized and gendered
sense of empowerment in occupied Japan, especially in their relationships with Japanese
citizens, for the elevated social status conferred upon by their American nationality. On
the other hand, African American women continued facing the double oppression of
racism and sexism in the diasporic community of militarized as well as racialized and
gendered American nationals in occupied Japan.

First, African American women were entitled to various political and economic
privileges which were conferred upon them for their membership in the US. occupational
forces regardless of their status in occupied Japan, however unequally their citizenship
was defined within the diasporic military community of the United States there. Among
them, Afiican American women of the civilian occupational personnel especially enjoyed
privileged lives, both economically and culturally, in their luxurious lifestyles, leisure
activities, and shopping excursions in occupied Japan. In contrast, the lives of military
black women in the WAC or the Army Nurse Corps were more regimented by the
military regulations than the civilian one. Nan Watson, a Department of the Army
civilian described succinctly the essence of the privileged life which was pursued by the
civilian Afiican American women in occupied Japan: “The expression, “You never had it

so good,” which is seen and heard everywhere, is not far wrong. I have luxuries I never

131

dreamed of—a private maid, masseuse, music teacher, art and sculptoring teacher, and
still I manage to save most of my pay check each month.”36

The additional personal narrative of African American women and their
journalistic coverage by African American newsmen further substantiate such a luxurious
life‘in occupied Japan as described by Watson. According to their accounts, African
American women of the civilian personnel and in the Red Cross who were stationed in
Tokyo were assigned to one of the several high-rise hotels which were reserved only for
American women. The highly qualified services at these hotels, especially the Japanese
maid service as well as various amenities in the hotels, including a snack bar, dining
room, cocktail lounge, Post Exchange (PX), flower shop, and telephones in individual
rooms, all enabled them to pursue a luxurious and comfortable life in occupied Japan
which had been unattainable for them in the stateside. These Afiican American women
enjoyed their leisure hours off work by joining with their friends to pursue various
entertainments available at the officer’s clubs, theaters, sports facilities, and the like in
their communities. They were entitled to inexpensively charter a jeep at the GHQ
carpool with a Japanese driver to enjoy the nightlife. Some of them spent weekends at a
Special Service Club which was located in any Japanese resort for just relaxing or
enjoying various seasonal sports at a reasonable rate.37

Moreover, shopping in the Japanese market or at the military PX attracted special
attention of the female personnel of the US. occupation forces, who could take advantage

of their consuming power under the economic strength of the American dollar over

 

36 Watson, “Letter from Japan,” Negro Digest 8, no. 9 (July 1950): 47.

37 Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 18, 1950; Rock, “Nippon Girls Look
Like Americans,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 13, 1951; Watson, “Letter from Japan”: 48-49.

132

Japanese currency during that period. Nan Watson attested to this gendered pattern of
exercising economic privileges by the US. occupational personnel in Japan with the
following remark: “Dear to a woman’s heart are the inexpensive values found in cultured
pearls, jade, coral, star sapphires, and other jewels... The newly-opened Export Bazaar
stores import the best quality goods from all over the world that sell here for amazingly
low prices?” African American civilian women exercised their economic and political
privileges attainable in occupied Japan for their own empowerment in gender specific
ways. Those Afiican American women pursued the gendered form of material desire in
their social life in Japan, which was evident especially in their behaviors of leisure and
consumption. Their access to luxurious social life, the release of their responsibility for
domestic service to the Japanese maids in particular, encouraged those African American
women to explore the alternative racial, class, and gender identities within the
possibilities of newly-attained social status in occupied Japan.

As a member of the US. occupational personnel, African American women, like
other Americans regardless of race, enjoyed their privileged position to employ the
Japanese men and women to serve them for various menial jobs in occupied Japan. In
the everyday situations in Japan under US. occupation, they saw many Japanese male
and female workers serving for Americans as maids, doorrnen, elevator girls, drivers, and
waitresses. Some African American women felt a sense of empowerment based on their
national membership in the US. occupational forces, when they saw the Japanese people
showing their respect for American personnel, regardless of race and gender, with their

traditional custom of “bowing” and “grinning.” Nan Watson, who just came back from

 

3“ Watson, “Letter from Japan,” Negro Digest 8, no. 9 (July 1950): 49.

133

the stateside after a month of vacation, experienced a “feeling of potency,” when she met
a Japanese doorman at the office building who opened the door, “grinning and bowing,”
for her. Watson also felt the same way at the bank when two Japanese girls offered the
way for her to enter the elevator, “bowing and grinning,” upon noticing that she was an
American. Sharing the same kind of experience as Watson in occupied Japan, her fiiend
Lisa claimed, “In America we are just women, over here we each are very definite
individuals.”39 For African American women who had been disempowered doubly by
racism and sexism in the U.S., their experiences of enjoying the privileged national status
over the native men and women in occupied Japan became a source of racial and gender
empowerment which was unattainable in their home country during that period.

Afiican American women, some of whom had experience as domestic workers in
the U.S., found that they were then entitled to receiving the domestic service of the
Japanese maids because of their elevated political and economic status in occupied Japan.
Afiican American civilian women who were staying at luxurious hotels were relieved of
the household chores, all of which they had been doing by themselves on the stateside, by
domestic service of the Japanese maids. The Japanese maids took care of various
housekeeping jobs for them, including cleaning rooms, making beds, and doing
laundry.40 The maid service was also available for the married Afiican American women
who accompanied their husbands to occupied Japan for their military service in the Far
East. Some of these African American wives took advantage of their economic

opportunity to hire the Japanese maids for the advancement of their educational and

 

3’ Ibid., 47.

40 Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 18, 1950; Rock, “Nippon Girls Look
Like Americans,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 13, 1951.

134

professional career as well as for the community service. Clovis Snead, the wife of Sgt.
Fred Snead, who was then fighting in Korea, could afford to hire several Japanese
servants in her four room bungalow on the airbase in Tokyo. Relieved of the burden of
household chores with the Japanese maids and houseboys, Mrs. Snead was then able to
teach two classes at the base school, take a course in flower arrangement, and was deeply
involved in the voluntary activities of the base community.41

However, there were some ambivalent feelings found among the Afiican
American women in occupied Japan who were suddenly placed in the privileged position
of being served by the Japanese workers for menial jobs, especially by the Japanese
maids. Some African American women revealed their condescending attitudes toward
the Japanese maids because of their complex feelings about them from their own
experience as domestic workers on the American side. Baltimore Afi'o-American war
correspondence Ralph Matthews reported from Tokyo that one African American wife,
about whom he found that she herself had been a maid in the U.S., was complaining to
him about the Japanese maid for whom she paid less than six dollars a week. This
woman grumbled to him, “I’m sorry the house is so untidy. You see, my maid did not

come in today. I don’t know what I am going to do with that girl.”42

When she joined
the privileged group of possessing a maid in occupied Japan, this woman projected her

superiority complex toward the subordinate Japanese within the specific political context

of dominance, colonialism, and occupation of Japan under US. Army, combined with her

 

4‘ Smith, “Life One or Waiting In Tokyo,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, January 6, 1951.

42 Ralph Matthews Sr., “Gl’s Ponder Peace Moves: Not All Anxious for War to Be Over,” Baltimore Afro-
American, September 22, 1951.

135

own racial, gender, and class oppressions which she had experienced as a black domestic
worker in the U.S., as evidenced by the distorted ways she treated the Japanese maid.
Other African American women, many of whom were placed in a position to hire
domestic workers for the first time in their lives, were confused as to how to treat their
Japanese maids in their house. Clovis Snead hired a college-educated Japanese girl
named Suki as her live-in maid. Snead complained that Suki annoyed her husband by

,9

calling him the “master” and “waited on him too zealously. The Sneads, who were
thinking of treating their Japanese maid in a “democratic” way, tried to stop Suki from
calling him the master, but in vain.43 Red Cross worker Sylvia Rock was another black
woman who was puzzled to suddenly find herself in a position of hiring a maid in
occupied Japan. For the first few weeks in her stay in the hotel in Tokyo, she had to
battle with her Japanese maid about the details of what domestic services Rock expected
from her. She frankly confessed her embarrassment about possessing a maid: “I was
embarrassed to have another human being doing the things for me that I was perfectly
capable of doing for my self... I did not treat them as if they were less than human. I did
not try to build up my own ego at the expense of theirs.”44 Rock insisted on considering
the maids as human beings, since the employment of the Japanese maids by Americans
was another case of exploitative labor relations based on power disparities. She was also

surprised to find that the menial jobs, including janitors, waitresses, chauffeurs, as well as

maids, were exclusively performed in occupied Japan by the Japanese people, most of

 

43 Smith, “Life One Of Waiting In Tokyo,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, January 6, 1951.

44 Rock, “Nippon Girls Look Like Americans,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 13, 195 l.

136

whom were university students or graduates.45 Reflecting the history of racialized as well
as gendered exploitation of black labor in the United States, the African American
women, who were placed in a privileged position of receiving, rather than performing,
the menial services for the first time in occupied Japan, were annoyed by the power
disparities in human relations which were clearly manifested in the labor exploitation of
the native men and women in occupied Japan. Moreover, the collective experience and
memory of black domestic workers in the stateside armed some African American
women with a heightened racial and gender consciousness and made them more sensitive
to the domestic service of the Japanese maids catering to themselves than were African
American men and white Americans.

Their overseas experiences gave some African American women the
opportunities to expand their world views, especially their racial perception beyond the
confinement of racially homogenous communities of African Americans as well as the
bipolar race relations between blacks and whites in the U.S., while they negotiated
various interracial and multiracial experiences in their residences, work, and social lives
in Japan under US. military occupation. First, Afi'ican American civilian women who
were serving in Tokyo were assigned to stay in several luxurious hotels which were
reserved only for the American female personnel. The testimonies of some black civilian
women who were stationed there in the early 19503 revealed that the residential space of
the civilian American personnel in Tokyo was segregated by gender and class, but
racially integrated in terms of room assignment. In those women-only hotels, male

visitors were strictly forbidden from going up higher than the main floor by the Japanese

 

45 Ibid.

137

guards, in addition to the “off-limits” signs posted at each stairway. The women in those
hotels were assigned according to their rank, but without regard to their race. Sharing the
hotel rooms with her fi'iends, both black and white, Nan Watson remarked excitedly, “it
is amazing how the color line is forgotten on this side of the ocean, although occasionally

”46 Those African American civilian

it rears its ugly head among some few individuals.
women were able to develop more cooperative and egalitarian relationships with white
American women. The sharing of rooms in the integrated residential space at the
women’s only hotels was only possible within the specific political context of the US.
military occupation of Japan.

In their work duties, some African American women were involved in various
projects or assignments, which were integrated and occasionally multiracial, within or
outside the institution of US. Army in occupied Japan. As a director of the Special
Services Seaview Club in Tokyo, civilian personnel Ethel Payne was instrumental in the
effective management of the interracial soldiers’ club, which had a history of some racial
contestations. The club was then officially declared by the Depot Commander to be “on
limits” to all personnel on the depot, after the racial tension surfaced in the unit when one
first sergeant ordered his white men not to patronize the club." Quaker missionary Daisy
Tibbs worked together and shared a room with Ruth Jenkins, a white American woman

from Arizona on an interracial team ordered to build the “House of Hiroshima.”48 Mrs.

Bobo, who had been a trained social worker with a master’s degree in the United States,

 

46 Watson, “Letter from Japan,” Negro Digest 8, no. 9 (July 1950): 46, 48; Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan,”
Baltimore Afro-American, November 18, 1950.

47 Hicks, “Five Have For Soldiers,” Baltimore Afro-American, November II, 1950.

48 “Mission to Hiroshima,” Ebony 5, no. 3 (January 1950): 46—48.

138

had an opportunity to teach social studies and math at the high school on the base at
Camp Gifu. This high school was an integrated institution, with a black woman as a head
(Mrs. Wright mentioned above), where she was teaching both black and white students,
all of whom were teenage children of field grade officers, without any problems (See
Figure 5.6).49 Moreover, African American Army nurses experienced more multiracial
situations beyond the bipolar interracialism between black and white at the Tokyo
General Hospital, where they encountered the United Nations soldiers of the numerous
racial, national, and religious groups who were evacuated there from the battlefield in
Korea. Capt. Rosalie Wiggins was impressed with the cultural diversity among the
patients of “all creeds” who were hospitalized in the ward under her direction, including
Turkish, Korean, and Greek soldiers as well as the “Americans of all the races and creeds
that make America.”50 These civilian and military African American women thoroughly
developed an understanding of and appreciation for interracialism or multiracialism
through their encounters with non-black colleagues, soldiers, students, and patients in the
racially heterogeneous work environment in occupied Japan.

Some African American women not only shared time and space with white
Americans in the desegregated environment in their workplaces and residential areas, but
they ofien got together with white American friends in their leisure time. In her account
of their social life in occupied Japan, Nan Watson indicated that she and her DAC’s

colleagues spent leisure time in “mixed groups” for various sports such as skating and

 

49 Interview, John Cash with W. A. Bobo and Mrs. Bobo, undated, CMH files.

50 Smith, “Four Army Nurses at Tokyo Hospitals,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 10, 195 l.

139

 

Figure 5.6. Teachers in the American School at Camp Gifu
Source: Baltimore Afio—American, December 18, 1948

140

horseback riding.51 Another civilian worker Elvira Turner accepted the invitations to the
homes of her Japanese friends in the company of both black and white Americans.52
However, other Afiican American women who preferred the company of their race and
who may have yearned for black culture in the US. congregated at the “colored” spots.
While she was stationed in occupied Japan as a Red Cross worker, Sylvia Rock often
visited Yokohama, the city with the largest population of Afiican Americans in Japan.
Rock felt as if she was “back in Harlem” at the “400 Club,” an “all-colored” spot where
African American GIs and some Japanese girls accompanied by them were dancing to the
music which was played by the Japanese bands catering to the tastes of black

53 Those African American women enjoyed leisure and entertainment off

Americans.
duty either in racially integrated or segregated groups by taking advantage of the
opportunities to alternate interracial companionship and racial camaraderie in their social
life in Japan.

More importantly, African American women expanded their sense of the world
and renegotiated their racial self-perception through their interracial interactions with
Japanese people. Some African American women became more conscious of their racial
difference as a consequence of daily encounters with Japanese men and women. Indeed,
many Japanese citizens showed special interest in the black American women who were,

after all, less visible than black male soldiers due to their small numbers in the racial

landscape of the US. military occupation of Japan. Red Cross worker Sylvia Rock often

 

51 Watson, “Letter from Japan,” Negro Digest 8, no. 9 (July 1950): 49.
52 Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 18, 1950.

53 Rock, “Nippon Girls Look Like Americans,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 13, 1951.

141

felt exposed to the curious gazes of the Japanese people who, she suspected, saw the
“first really brown American in Red Cross uniform” on the street: “When I walked down
the street I would be surrounded by crowds of people who would gingerly touch me to
feel my skin, my hair, and my clothes. People turned around while driving to watch me
on the street. I have never felt so conspicuous in all my life.”54 Unexpectedly, Rock
discovered the racial similarities between blacks and Asians as a member of the group of
darker races through her daily encounters with the Japanese while she was stationed in
Japan. Rock was embarrassed to find that she was racially mistaken for a Korean by the
Japanese, as she was sometimes asked by them if she was American or Korean. This
intriguing question of racial categorization which the Japanese posed based on their
observation of her skin color was personally comprehensible to Rock, because she herself
identified the Koreans as a “bit darker and taller than the Japanese” in the racialized
terms. Moreover, she felt a sense of interracial sisterhood, or the gendered racial affinity
for some young Japanese women in the clubs because of their appearance as well as their
appropriation of black American culture. Observing the Japanese girls who were dancing
in the black club in Yokohama, Rock stated that some of them were “rather brown, some
had their hair cut short, and almost all could ‘bop’ better than many of us in the States.”55
Her encounter with the Japanese, especially Japanese girls gave Rock the opportunities to
renegotiate both her racial and gender identities in terms of the broader racial dynamics
of the international world. She was forced to think beyond the dominant model of racial

dichotomy between black and white on the American side.

 

’4 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

142

Some African American women contributed to the development of mutual
understanding and respect between Americans and the Japanese while they actively
engaged in the various forms of exchanges with the Japanese across race, culture, and
nation in occupied Japan. Nan Watson attested to the wide range of international
fraternization in which African American occupational personnel were engaged in Japan.
She claimed that “Americans of both races are taking advantage of SCAP’s decision to
allow us to mingle with the masses of the Japanese people” after many establishments
became “on limits” to both nationals. Watson found one social gathering at the Japanese
YWCA as “highly entertaining and profitable,” where she mingled and conversed with
Japanese students over black coffee and dancing. The intercultural exchanges with
young Japanese students at this occasion of fratemization became an illuminating
experience for her to “become acquainted with the country, the people and their
customs,” while they seriously discussed various topics including religion, movies, FBI,
and the mutual perception of their countries. Watson was also teaching a part-time
English Composition class for the young Japanese students of the Business Men’s
Association, some of whom were expecting to go to America in the future.56

In addition to the black occupational personnel like Nan Watson, other civilian
African American women played a critical role, as personal ambassadors to occupied
Japan, for constructing a better international relationship between the Japanese and
Americans at the grass-roots level during the occupation period. Quaker missionary
Daisy Tibbs mingled actively among the local Japanese people either during her work

hours or leisure time, when she engaged in voluntary work at the Hiroshima Memorial

 

56 Watson, “Letter from Japan,” Negro Digest 8, no. 9 (July 1950): 47-49.

143

Hospital, attended the conference with the local Japanese leaders on the project, joined
the multiracial congregation in the Japanese church, and enjoyed folk dancing with the
volunteer Japanese students (See Figure 5.7). An Ebony magazine article in January
1950 featured her contributions to the interracial ideal of this mission, stating that “she
fitted well into the house-building routine and won the hearts of Japanese in Hiroshima,
many of whom had never before seen a black girl.”57 It is important to stress the
intellectual, cultural, and labor exchanges in which African American civilian women
like Watson and Tibbs engaged among the Japanese and the implications for the
development of mutual understanding and respect between Americans and the Japanese
during the occupation period, to balance the intimate and sexual aspects of fraternization
between American GIs and Japanese women which are highly focused in both the
academic and popular discourses of the U.S.-Japanese encounter in occupied Japan,
especially in the case of Afiican American male soldiers.

Some African American women were often invited by their Japanese friends to
home parties to enjoy the Japanese style of hospitality and develop more familiarity with
Japanese culture. Elvira Turner, a civilian oCcupation worker, sometimes attended
Sukiyaki parties at the homes of their Japanese friends with her American friends, both
black and white. At the party, she was treated with a series of Japanese dishes and drinks
at the dinner table, with sukiyaki, a Japanese dish of thinly sliced beef cooked with sauce
in a pot as a main dish, which was accompanied by rice and tempura and served with hot
sake, the Japanese alcoholic liquor. On these occasions, Turner tried to expose herself as

much as possible to the traditional customs of the Japanese by wearing a native Japanese

 

’7 “Mission to Hiroshima,” Ebony 5, no. 3 (January 1950): 46-48.

144

 

Figure 5.7. Interracial Social Activities of Daisy Tibbs in Hiroshima
Above left, in Volunteer Work at Hiroshima Memorial Hospital;
above right, in Japanese Church; below, Folk Dancing
Source: Ebony, January 1950

145

dress, taking off her shoes upon entering the house, and sitting on cushions on the floor.58

These special occasions of intercultural exchange in the intimate atmospheres at private
Japanese homes provided Turner, who continued her American lifestyle while stationed
in Japan by taking American meals in a dining room at the hotel, with a chance to expand
her cultural horizons by developing the level of her appropriation of the Japanese culture
and life styles as well as constructing a more intimate personal relationship with Japanese
citizens.

Moreover, some African American women, especially the military personnel were
still segregated and discriminated against because of the institutional racism within the
US. Army, while they achieved some sense of racial and gendered empowerment in their
relationship with Japanese citizens, for certain periods during the US. military
occupation of Japan. The following story of one African American woman in the Army
Nurse Corps in occupied Japan shows how African American women suffered from
racial discrimination within the US. Army and at the same time resisted it by soliciting
the trans-Pacific assistance from a black civil rights organization in the US. as well as by
exchanging information through the intraracial professional network among the black
Army nurses in occupied Japan.

Lt. Millie Susan Hooks was serving as one of two black Army nurses in the 128th
Station Hospital in Yokohama in the late 19403. On June 6, 1949, Hooks suddenly
received the notice requesting her “separation” from the Army Nurse Corps from the

hospital commander.59 Suspecting that this request was related to prejudicial judgment

 

58 Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 18, 1950.

59 Millie S. Hooks, “Request for Retention in Service,” June 18, 1949, NAACP Papers.

146

on the part of her supervisor, Hooks filed a formal complaint with the Inspector General
of the Headquarters of the Eighth Army on June 10, which stated that “since my
assignment at the above installation (128‘h Sta Hosp), I have performed my duties
efficiently in spite of the personal antagonism of the chief nurse, Capt. Johnson.”(’0
Hooks strongly protested the hospital commander’s request for her “separation” in her
complaint, claiming that Capt. Johnson ignored her “excellence of performance” and
instead reported her “disqualifying inefficiency.” According to her complaint, Cap.
Johnson prevented Hooks from executing satisfactory performance at her duties by
withholding the necessary personnel assistance from her, often reprimanding her for the
insufficiency of her colleagues in the ward, and even intervening in her off duty
activities.“ On June 17, she submitted to the Headquarters of the 128th Station Hospital
the certificate which indicated her “desire to remain in an active duty.” In addition,
Hooks filed a formal request for retention in service with the Adjutant General in
‘ Washington, DC. on June 18‘“, after sensing a racially-motivated organizational plot
which was targeting her beneath the internal exchanges regarding her complaint. 62
However, the Inspector General of the Headquarters of Eighth Army concluded that the

“investigation did not develop facts which would warrant intervention in connection with

the current action to relieve you from active duty.” As soon as the investigation

 

60 Millie S. Hooks, “Formal Complaint,” June 10, 1949, NAACP Papers.
6' Ibid.

62 Millie S. Hooks to Headquarters, 128th Station Hospital, June 17, 1949; Millie S. Hooks, “Request for
Retention in Service,” June 18, 1949; Millie S. Hooks to Franklin H. Williams, June 19, 1949, NAACP
Papers.

147

concerning her complaint was concluded, Hooks received orders to return to the United
States for “separation” sailing on July 1.63

Lt. Millie Hooks remained for another month in Yokohama, because her
separation orders were suspended pending the outcome of the investigation.64 However,
Hooks found that she was involved in a more difficult situation than she had expected at
the time of filing her complaint, while she testified in a series of inquiries conducted by
the high commanders of the Headquarters, the Eight Army, including Maj. Hoag, the
Inspector General and Maj. Clark, the Chief Nurse. These high commanders suspected
Hooks’ involvement in the heightened racial tensions within the Army Nurse Corps in
their command, especially her complicity in the racial turmoil among some African
American nurses at the 155th Station Hospital. According to Hooks, several African
American nurses at the 155th Station Hospital were “aware of some conflicts and pressing
for information” about her situation. There was some resistance to being transferred to
the 128‘h Station Hospital among the black nurses at the 155th Station Hospital as
replacements for Hooks and Lt. Britto, another black nurse at the 128m. Lt. Britto had
already requested her transfer to the 8th Station Hospital in Kobe, when Lt. Lewis was
transferred from the 155th to the 128“1 Station as a replacement for Hooks on June 13.
The rumor about Britto’s request for transfer created “furor” among the black nurses at
the 155th Station Hospital, since “none of them wanted to go to the 128th.” Lt. Jenkins, at

first, strongly protested the order of her transfer to the 128th Station Hospital by

threatening to resign from her commission when she was selected as a replacement for

 

63 Headquarters Eighth Army, Letter Concerning Formal Complaints, June 29, 1949; “Special Order,” June
30, 1949, NAACP Papers.

6“ Millie s. Hooks to Franklin H. Williams, July 8, 1949, NAACP Papers.

148

Britto, although she “went placidly as a lamb to the 128th” in the end after Lt. Britto left
there on June 17. In her letter to Franklin Williams of the National Association for the
Advancement of the Colored People (NAACP), Hooks clearly denied her involvement in
the racial animosity among the black nurses at the 155‘h Station Hospital by claiming that
she “gave them no information” concerning her complaint. 65 The charge of racial
discrimination as practiced by the Chief Nurse at the 128th Station Hospital by Hooks
heightened racial consciousness and created a chain of resistance among the African
American Army nurses, including her colleague Lt. Britto and those at the 155‘“, who
resisted serving under the prejudiced chief nurse at the 128th by various means.

In addition to the persistent inquiries about her attitudes toward army nursing and
her social attitudes and relations by her commanders of the Headquarters, Eighth Army,
the psychiatric evaluation which she received as a part of inquiry in the investigation
regarding of her complaint was the most humiliating experience for her. She was treated
by a military psychiatrist as if she was mentally disturbed for her action of complaint:
“Shortly thereafter I was called in for a psychiatric evaluation, since I had been charged
with being over critical, anti-social, aloof, eccentric, and possessed with an
overwhelming superiority complex. Our discussion was informal, and I do not know
what “expert” testimony he gave.”66 In the investigation which was ordered in response
to her complaint, her commanders interrogated Hooks as if she was a racial instigator
among the black Army nurses in Japan, rather than examined carefully the actual

conditions of racial discrimination at the 128th Station Hospital. As a conclusion of the

 

65 Millie S. Hooks to Franklin H. Williams, June 19, 1949, NAACP Papers.

66 Ibid.

149

investigation, Hooks was returned to the United States as “surplus” and for discharge
under “honorable” conditions by the orders of the Commander-in-Chief, Far East
Command on July 30. When Hooks arrived in the US. in August 11 and proceeded for
“separation” to Camp Stoneman in Pittsburgh, California, her status in the US. Army
was still suspended pending the outcome of a Board of Inquiry in the Department of
Army in Washington, DC. to determine whether she should be retained in the service or
not, until her “separation” was finally instituted effective on August 24.67

Lt. Mille Hooks kept in contact with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund in New York. She solicited legal advice from the office about her charge of
discrimination in the Army Nurse Corps in occupied Japan. During the period from June
through August, 1949, several correspondences were exchanged across the Pacific by
wire or by airmail between Hooks and Franklin H. Williams, Assistant Special Counsel
who was in charge of her case. After a brief review of her charge, Williams promised
Hooks that he would be “doing all possible to assist” and instructed her to keep him fully
informed of the developments by wire on June 16.68 Being “convicted of the just nature
of her cause,” Williams contacted James C. Evans, Civilian Assistants to the Secretary of
Defense in Washington, DC, on her behalf in order to determine the status of the
investigation of her complaint.69 Williams also pressured the Secretary of Defense to

improve the racial conditions of the Army Nurse Corps in occupied Japan by raising

 

67 James H. Robinson to Franklin H. Williams, August 10, 1949; Millie S. Hooks to Franklin H. Williams,
August 13, 1949, R. P. Ovenshine to Franklin H. Williams, August 19, 1949; Millie Hooks to Franklin H.
Williams, August 23, 1949, NAACP Papers.

68 Franklin H. Williams to Millie S. Hooks, June 16, 1949, NAACP Papers.

69 Franklin H. Williams to James C. Evans, July 1 1, 1949, NAACP Papers.

150

another nonofficial complaint of the “only other colored nurse” who was stationed at the
128th Station Hospital, who seems to be Lt. Britto mentioned above. Expounding on her
charge that she was assigned to an entire wing of the nurses’ quarters for housing,
Williams argued that this status of residential segregation within the Army hospital
constituted the evidence to support the charge of discrimination which Hooks had raised
against the chief nurse of that installation.70

The trans-Pacific battle of Lt. Millie Hooks against racial discrimination within
the Army Nurse Corps in occupied Japan, with legal assistance of the NAACP, especially
Franklin Williams, reached its climax in August 1949, when it became clear that her
victory depended on the availability of the record of the investigation by the Far East
Command. On August 15, Williams officially requested from the Office of the Inspector
General of the US. Army in Washington, D.C., permission to review the entire record of
her investigation before the final action could be taken for Hooks. But, Williams’s
request for disclosure of the record of her investigation was soon declined by the War
Department which claimed that it was a “confidential” one.71 The confidentiality of the
record, which Williams thought was crucial for him to win this battle, prevented him
from further assisting Hooks. On August 30, Robert Carter regrettably wrote to Hooks,
in behalf of Williams who was out of the office during that time, that “in view of the fact
we have been advised that the report of the investigation is confidential and cannot be

disclosed except to an individual performing a governmental function, there does not

 

70 Franklin H. Williams to James C. Evans, July '18, 1949, NAACP Papers.

71 Franklin H. Williams to Office of the Inspector General, US. Army, August 15, 1949; R. P. Ovenshine
to Franklin H. Williams, August 19, 1949, NAACP Papers.

151

appear to be anything further we can do in the matter.”72 It seems from the records of
their final correspondence that Hooks gave up her battle and accepted the decision of the
Army authorities without further advice from Williams.73

The story of Lt. Millie Hooks reveals a transnational as well as gendered
dimension of the African American struggle against racial exclusion and discrimination
within the US. armed forces which continued after World War II in the 19403, led by
such black organizations as the NAACP and the League for Non-Violent Civil
Disobedience Against Military Segregation, the organization which A. Philip Randolph
formed in June, 1948 in response to the President Truman who reinstated the draft act
without banning segregation in the military.74 African American Army nurses who were
stationed at the military hospitals in occupied Japan forged a diasporic racial
consciousness in their trans-Pacific battle against the US. military authorities both in the
Far East Command and Washington, DC. Those African American women in the
military diaspora linked their resistance against discrimination in Japan to the larger
African American struggle for rights which was rising on the American side through their
engagement with the trans-Pacific exchanges with the NAACP. Moreover, African
American women’s struggle against racism within the Army Nurse Corps in occupied
Japan was configured by their gendered professionalism as Army nurses as well as their

racial identities as black women. African American Army Nurses protested against

serving under a prejudiced supervisor or in a segregated environment evident in some

 

72 Robert Carter to Millicent S. Hooks, August 30, 1949, NAACP Papers.
73 Franklin H. Williams to Millie Hooks, December 29, 1949, NAACP Papers.

74 Paula F. Pfeffer, A Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1990), 142.

152

hospital installations in occupied Japan, so that they could perform their duties as
efficiently as possible as professional nurses.
*****

The experiences of African American women who were stationed in Japan with
various statuses and backgrounds were crucial in the reconfigurations of their racial
identities and womanhood on the basis of their American nationality in the specific
historical context of US. military occupation of Japan. Regardless of social backgrounds
in the U.S., Afiican American women enhanced their social status in Japan as members
of the US. occupational forces and could exercise various political and economic
privileges conferred upon them for their American nationality in relation to Japanese men
and women in occupied Japan. Some African American women, especially the civilian
personnel, highly elevated their social status while they advanced their rank within the
class hierarchies of the US. occupational forces and enjoyed such luxurious lifestyles,
leisure activities, and shopping excursions which may have been unattainable on the
American side. African American women could attain a broader perception of the world
and themselves as racialized and gendered beings through their encounters with various
international, intercultural, and interracial experiences in another world across the Pacific,
especially by constructing friendly relationships with Japanese citizens in various settings.
The enhanced social status and transformed self-perception among African American
women in Japan became crucial conditions of possibility for engendering the New Black
Womanhood as an alternative to the racial identities, gender roles, and class positions

which they had been assuming in the US.

153

Afiican American women still experienced racism and sexism and resisted
discrimination in the white and male dominant world of the diasporic American military
community in occupied Japan, while they achieved some racial and gender empowerment
in the larger occupation society in Japan. African American Army nurses protested
segregation and discrimination within the US. Army Nurse Corps in occupied Japan, so
that they could fully perform their professional duties without any racial constraints from
their prejudiced supervisors and commanders. As I discuss in the next chapter, Afiican
American women, either civilian or military, also experienced the black masculinist
backlash against their feminine empowerment in Japan within the boundaries of

conservative gender and sexual norms in the larger American society during the early

Cold War period.

154

Chapter 6
Black Masculinist Backlash against Feminine Empowerment
in Occupied Japan

African American women developed their experiences in occupied Japan for their
own empowerment in terms of race, gender, class, and nation in various ways, while
some of them continued to face exclusion and discrimination within the US. Army in
occupied Japan. For some African American women, especially those of the civilian
personnel who had come to Japan with more advanced academic and professional careers
than others, their political and economic privileges gave them more opportunities to
negotiate the alternative identities and lifestyles within the new possibilities attainable in
the specific context of the US. occupation of Japan. While they enjoyed luxurious social
lives, and lived and worked in integrated environments, they gained or acquired an
enhanced a sense of the world and themselves in their relationships with Japanese
citizens. However, those elite civilian black women, who were relatively free from racial
discrimination within the bureaucratic organization of the US. Army in occupied Japan,
faced the backlash from the highly masculinized Afiican American men stationed in
Japan, who tried to regulate their gender roles and behaviors by employing the idealized
representations of Japanese femininity based on their patriarchal gender ideology. Some
African American military women, who were enjoying relative freedom and privileges in
their overseas duties in occupied Japan, also encountered gender conflicts with the
Afiican American soldiers who preferred dating Japanese women instead of black
women.

One news article focusing on the interracial intimacies between African American

soldiers and Japanese women in Japan under US. military occupation, which appeared in

155

Baltimore Afio-American on September 2, 1950, attracted a wide range of critical
reactions from the African American communities across the Pacific, especially from the
African American men and women who were then stationed in occupied Japan.l Under
the sensational title, “GI’s in Tokyo Lavish Gifts on Jap Girls, Shun Own Clubs,” James
L. Hicks, Afro-American war correspondent reported that gender conflicts existed
between African American male soldiers and the civilian African American women, who
were called “DACS” by the GIs as the abbreviation for Department of Army Civilians,
over the black men’s intimate relationships with Japanese women in occupied Japan. By
showing his sympathy toward the African American women who were serving in Japan,
Hicks reported from Tokyo the following story which he hated to write but felt obligated
to report the “facts”: “Colored women in civilian duty in occupied Japan are being
ignored by colored soldiers stationed here to the point that many of the women swear that
once they get ‘stateside’ again, they will never so much as speak to a colored soldier who
has been stationed in Japan.”2 Hicks revealed to the Afro-American readers on both sides
of the Pacific the existence of the heightened intraracial ' gender tensions within the
African American community in occupied Japan and suggested the possible future
negative impact of the widespread interracial romance in Japan on the gender relations in

the larger U.S. black community.

 

I For the recent major studies on interracial intimacy, see, for example, Renee C. Romano, Race Mixing:
Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (2003; repr, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006);
Alex Lubin, Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, I 945-1954 (Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 2005); Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2003); Rachel F. Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and
Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing
Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

2 James L. Hicks, “GI’s in Tokyo Lavish Gifts on Jap Girls, Shun Own Clubs,” Baltimore Afro-American,
September 2, 1950.

156

James Hicks, in this article, critically examined the interracial romance between
African American soldiers and Japanese women as an uneven relationship which was
constructed upon the asymmetrical power relations between the US. soldiers and the
Japanese in the US. military occupation of Japan. In his observation, African American
soldiers who got “out on the loose in Japan” found that it was much easier for them to
have a “good time” by dating Japanese women than hanging around with their own
women, because of the “morals” of the Japanese women combined with black soldiers’
position as a “conqueror of the Japanese people.” Hicks questioned the sexual behaviors
of Japanese women who were dating black GIs in terms of their morality by contrasting
them with the civilian African American women in occupied Japan, who were there
“under government regulations and subjected to rigid moral discipline.”3

However, Hicks’ criticism targeted mainly the Afiican American men who
“virtually own the Japanese girls” by wielding power from their overwhelming political
and economic ascendancy over the subjugated Japanese. Those African American GIs
not only lavished Japanese girls with the gifts which they purchased from the Army PX,
but also bought homes in Japan to “shack up”. with their Japanese girls. Such Japanese
women who were dating the GIs were referred to as “Mooses,” the GIs’ slang for
“Musume” which meant “girl” in Japanese. In his interview with the civilian African
American women, they told Hicks straight, “No place to go. No escorts,” when they
were asked about their plan on a Sunday night. Those civilian black women, most of

whom were single and considered “attractive” in Hicks’ standards of beauty as well as

“interesting” company, were reported to have remained in their hotel rooms and banded

 

3 Ibid.

157

together for their own fun, while black men were chasing the “Mooses.” In his opinion,
it was the African American men chasing the Japanese women that were responsible for
the intraracial gender conflicts over the black-Japanese interracial intimacy which were
developing between African American soldiers and civilian African American women in
Japan under US. military occupation.4

James Hick’s controversial statement that African American GIs favored Japanese
women over African American women in his coverage of visible black-Japanese
interracial romance in occupied Japan attracted a variety of critical responses from his
readers. First, Hicks was “sharply” criticized by the African American women, who had
served as critical informants for his story, with the accusation that it made them “look
like a group of women who could not get and hold their men.” He also encountered the
African American GIs, who got “hot” about his story because it “touched on a subject
which might put them in an unfavorable light with the folks back home.”5 But he
stressed that “no soldier was found who denied the truth of the article” in spite of the
opinion that the article should not have been written.6 Hicks’ article opened a Pandora’s
Box which discovered the sensitive issue of gender and sexual conflicts within the
African American community in occupied Japan. The disclosure of the intraracial gender
and sexual confrontations among Afiican Americans in occupied Japan to the larger

black community on the American side, in his article, might have damaged the

 

4 Ibid.

5 James L. Hicks, “Officer Says Our Girls in Japan Not Attractive: Defends Morals of Native Women,”
Baltimore Afro-American, November 25, 1950.

6 James L. Hicks, “Japanese or American Girls: Which? Why?: Soldiers Say They Prefer Type Which
Ackowledges [sic] Man as Head of the House,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 7, 1950.

158

respectability and pride of both African American soldiers and civilian African American
women in gender-specific ways.

A year after the appearance of James Hick’s sensational article on the African
American soldiers who were favoring the Japanese women over the civilian African
American women, the Baltimore Afio-American published in September 1951 another
piece which, this time, highlighted the intraracial gender conflicts between African
American soldiers and the military African American women in Japan under US.
military occupation. Under the title of “Wacs and Porn Poms Wage War in Yokohama,”
A fro-American war correspondent Ralph Matthews reported the African American
soldiers’ association with the Japanese “Porn Poms,” or street walkers, and the increased
gender tensions between African American GIs and WACS as well as the racial tensions
between African American WACs and Japanese prostitutes in Yokohama. Matthews
explained that this racial and gendered confrontation around Afiican American soldiers
occurred most acutely in Yokohama where “several hundreds” of WACS were stationed.7

Reporter Ralph Matthews, like James Hicks, argued that African American
soldiers were ignoring African American women in the military in favor of Japanese
prostitutes. He interviewed dozens of complaining WACS in Japan. With his vivid
illustrations of this three-sided racial and gendered battle in Yokohama, he suggested that
African American WACs were “boiling mad” because of the African American Gls on
duty who were escorting their Japanese girl friends around in their jeeps instead of
picking up the WACs for their official duties (See Figure 6.1, above left). He also

described the racially contrasted intimate situations between an African American WAC

 

7 Matthews, “Wacs and Pom Poms Wage War in Yokohama,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 22,
1951.

i 159

and a Japanese woman in Yokohama, in which an African American G1 was seen dating
a Japanese woman who was wearing Westem-style clothes and lavishing her with many
goods on the .shopping arcade, while an Afiican American WAC was seen shopping
alone there (See Figure 6.1, above right). In addition, Matthews clearly impressed his
readers with the interracial antagonism between African American WACS and Japanese
women, when he portrayed WACS laughing at the “heartbroken” Japanese girls who were
left lonely with a “little brown baby to rear” by their African American GIs, who
“promise faithfully they’re coming back, but they seldom do (See Figure 6.1, below)?8
In addition to their coverage in black newspapers, a popular black magazine also took up
the gendered interracial tensions between African American women and Japanese women
in occupied Japan. The Ebony magazine article of March 1952 reported that there was
“more than a suspicion of distaste between many Negro women in Japan and the
Japanese brides of Negro soldiers,” as well as some intraracial friction between Japanese
brides and Japanese personnel working in the US. establishments, in its coverage of the
responses to the interracial marriage between African American soldiers and Japanese
women in occupied Japan.9

In response to the assertion that African American men were ignoring black

women in occupied Japan in favor of Japanese women, made by African American

newsmen, Afiican American soldiers defended their behaviors regarding their intimate

 

8 Ibid.

9 “The Truth about Japanese War Brides: Negro Soldiers Learn to Admire Legendary Qualities of
Attractive Nippon Women,” Ebony 7, no. 5 (March 1952): 23. On Asian warbrides, see, for example, Ji-
Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York: New York
University Press, 2002); Regina Frances Lark, “They Challenged Two Nations: Marriages between
Japanese Women and American G13, 1945 to Present” (PhD. diss. University of Southern California,
1999); Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood
Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

160

 

. :1“), . ’2 ‘ha‘;

" "im"“‘ "“ l’A‘lt .

1““.-_ 5.2““- 3;.
\\- .fi . E‘uv...

 

Figure 6.1. ‘Battle’ Between Wac’s and Native Girls Rages in Japan
Source: Baltimore Afro-American, September 22, 1951

161

relationship with Japanese women by attacking the African American women whose
gender attitudes and roles, they considered, were deviant because of their elevated social
status in occupied Japan. Initially, the most critical reaction to Hicks’ article came from
incensed African American soldiers, whom he had accused of ignoring African American
women in favor of Japanese women since they found that the morals of Japanese women
were more tailored to the kind of life which they wished to pursue in Japan. These
African American Gls, most of whom never denied the truth of his report but complained
about his unfair treatment of the issue in favor of civilian African American women,
defended their interracial sexual behaviors in Japan by blaming the civilian black women
for various reasons.

First of all, some African American soldiers attributed the gender and sexual
deviancy among the African American women, either civilian or military, to their
miserable romantic situation in which they had difficulty in getting dates in occupied
Japan. Lieutenant Clinton Moorman, who was then serving as a public information
officer for the 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea, was one of the harshest critics of James
Hick’s “distasteful” article, claiming that it “contained very, very little truth.” “To be
brutally frank,” Moorman stated, “I have been highly disappointed in colored DAC’s here
in the Far East as to looks, personality, general appearance and over-all conduct.”
Challenging the Hick’s standards of “attractiveness” in his evaluation of the civilian
African American women whom he had met in Tokyo, Moorman continued: “Now think
yourself! A young girl 8,000 miles away from home and unmarried. Why? The average

girl that is attractive would never go so far without marrying. That is nowadays. Oh, yes,

162

you may run across one but then she is not interested in men anyway (my italics)?IO

Another black officer of the 24th Infantry Regiment in South Korea shared a similar
sentiment toward civilian black women in occupied Japan, claiming that “most of the
girls who are willing ‘to venture that far from home’ are girls who have had some
maladjustment and were looking for an escape (my italic)? He also characterized these
civilian African American women, most of whom had held some degrees in social work,
as “one-sided book worms.”ll African American officers in occupied Japan pathologized
the African American single women who were engaged in the unfeminine military
project of the US. occupation of Japan in peacetime, even if they served as civilian
workers, as deviance from the traditional female gender roles and sexual standard in the
United States.

African American WACS were more explicitly associated with gender and sexual
deviancy for their unquestionably professional military background in occupied Japan by
Afiican American men, than were the civilian black women serving in the Department of
Army there. Ralph Matthews’ Afro-American article introduced the voice of one African
American officer of high intelligence as the “consensus of male opinion” about the
WACs in Yokohama. This black officer observed that his soldiers did not call the
African American women in the US. military WACS but “SSRS,” which in GI’s parlance
meant “Stateside Rejects.” He explained the gendered motives of the “disillusioned”
and/or “frustrated” African American WACs for joining the Army in “peacetime” as

follows: “Most of them could not land a man back home where they could pretty

 

'0 Hicks, “Officer Says Our Girls in Japan Not Attractive,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 25, 1950.

H Hicks, “Japanese or American Girls: Which? Why?” Baltimore Afro-American, October 7, 1950.

163

themselves up with all the frills the fashion experts could conjur [sic] up. So what makes
them think of a GI, afier a tough tour at the front, could go hunting somebody who looks

as drab in a khaki uniform as he does.”12

This officer reinforced the pervasive gender
assumption among African American soldiers in Japan that those women came all the
way to join the US. military occupation of Japan, because they could not sexually appeal
to black men on the American side.

These Afiican American officers’ critical remarks about the femininity of African
American women in occupied Japan reflected the gender and sexual ideology of the
larger American society in the early 19503. The contemporary conservative African
American gender and sexual norms were constructed within the anti-communist political
and ideological context of Cold War domesticity. In Homeward Bound: American
Families in the Cold War Era (1999), historian Elaine Tyler May argues that the cold war
ideology of “domestic containment,” which aimed at regulating gender and sexuality
within the confines of the heterosexual marriage and nuclear family, was pervasive
beyond the racial and class boundaries during the 19403 and 19503 in the postwar
American society.'3 Historian Megan Taylor Shockley suggests, in her case study of
African American women in Detroit and Richmond during and after World War II, that

the politics of domesticity and their emphasis on traditional gender norms were

influential in the shaping of postwar racial activism among middle-class African

 

'2 Matthews, “Wacs and Porn Poms Wage War in Yokohama,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 22,
1951.

[3 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Rev. ed. (Basic Books,
1999), esp. introduction and chap. 1.

164

American women.'4 The suspicion about the motives of African American women for
joining the US. military occupation of Japan on the part of African American officers
reveals that they embraced, like the middle-class black women in the U.S., the
conservative gender norms about femininity in the dominant domestic ideology. For
them, women’s participation in the US. military engagement overseas was no longer
tolerated in peace time in light of gender normativity of the period. This pathological
view of the “unfeminine” African American woman owing to their military association
was pervasive among African American enlisted men and officers, within the African
American military community in occupied Japan.

When African American soldiers pathologized both civilian and military Afiican
American women who were serving in the US. military occupation of Japan as deviant
from the gender and sexual norms of the period, they reproduced in some ways the
negative popular discourse concerning the WAC during World War II. In her study of
the Women’s Army Corps during World War II, historian Leisa D. Meyer argues that a
series of sexual images of American female soldiers, which were consolidated and
resisted through the slander campaign targeting the women’s corps during WWII were
influential in shaping popular perceptions of the WAC during and after the war. The
pervasive suspicion on the part of African American soldiers about black women’s sexual
motives for joining the Army or the Department of Army was established upon the

popular representation of the WAC as the “morale booster” to male soldiers as well as

 

M Megan Taylor Shockley, “We, Too, Are Americans”: Afi'ican American Women in Detroit and
Richmond, [940-54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), chap. 3. Shockley argues that the middle-
class African American women in Detroit and Richmond embraced the dominant ideology of “domestic
womanhood” as well as “traditional respectability” in their rearticulation of the discourse of “responsible
patriotism,” so that they could make claims on the postwar state for equal citizenship and economic
opportunities within the Cold War context.

165

their alleged “sexual independence” or “sexual immorality.”15 In addition, Lt. Clinton
Moorman rearticulated the popular discourse of the WAC which associated mannishness
and lesbianism among female soldiers with his explicit reference to the lack of sexual
interest in men among the civilian Afiican American women in occupied Japan. He
reinforced the African American masculine discourse about sexual deviancy among the
civilian Afiican American women, who were engaged in the manly military project of
occupation in Japan, by invoking the popular association between women’s sexual
independence, female masculinity, and lesbians within the WAC.16

Second, some African American soldiers pointed out the existence of the
gendered intraracial class hierarchy within the US. Army which prevented the African
American enlisted men from asking out the civilian Afiican American women in
occupied Japan. According to the African American officer mentioned above, the
African American women who were serving in a civilian branch of the US. Army in
occupied Japan were not supposed to socialize with enlisted personnel as “equals,”
because they believed that they held the “simulated rank of an officer in the Army” by the
briefing of the Department of Army which was given to them when they arrived in Japan.
He claimed that “this little talk goes to many of the girls heads and they go around
demanding that enlisted men, years their senior, reply to them with ‘Yes mam’ and refuse
to talk with them if they do not.”'7 Another African American officer stationed at Camp

Gifu resented the overbearing attitudes of some Afiican American women workers in

 

15 Leisa D. Meyer, Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women ’3 Army Corps During World War
II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 2.

'6 Ibid.

'7 Hicks, “Japanese or American Girls: Which? Why?” Baltimore Afro-American, October 7, 1950.

166

charge of running a service club, refusing to allow the enlisted men to having their
Japanese girls in the club. According to him, these civilian African American women
“threatened to quit if they were allowed,” although there were only several women to
entertain a battalion of soldiers in the service club.18

Challenging the James Hick’s report that African American GIs were ignoring the
civilian Afiican American women in favor of the Japanese women, Lt. Clinton Moorman
stated that it was the “GI’s being ignored by the colored DAC’s” for their class difference
within the US. military:

Then there were well over 3000 soldiers. I have yet to see the young (or what
have you) ladies spend much time with the enlisted men. And none with any
below sergeant. Why?? Because they would much rather associate with the
officers and take advantage of the numerous privileges that we are fortunate
enough to have. Many enlisted men have asked for dates, but have been
promptly turned down.19

During the Christmas season, those African American enlisted men sent many gifts to the
civilian women in an attempt to “crack the ice,” but in vain.20 By stressing the class
dimension of this intraracial gender conflicts within the African American community in
occupied Japan, Moorman, like other black officers, blamed the civilian black women in
the Department of Army for their sense of superiority and class privilege over the African
American enlisted men, whose chances of promotion were limited due to the persistence
of racial discrimination within the US. Army in occupied Japan during this period.2| The

attitudes of the civilian African American women, who demanded respect and even

 

‘8 Ibid.
'9 Hicks, “Officer Says Our Girls in Japan Not Attractive,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 25, 1950.
20 Ibid.

2‘ See Chapter 3 of this dissertation for the persistence in racial segregation and discrimination within the
US. Army during the US. military occupation of Japan.

167

obedience from the African American enlisted men by claiming their superior class status
within the US. Army, violated the masculine pride of African American soldiers which
had been supported by their sense of patriarchal privileges in the contemporary gender
and sexual politics within Afiican American communities.

Clinton Moorman further criticized the enhanced class consciousness among the
civilian African American women in relation to enlisted men in occupied Japan in terms
of their morality. Moorman claimed that “rigid moral discipline my eyeball!” when he
observed the sexual behaviors of the civilian African American women, who frequented a
Japanese hotel “for a night with their man of interest” or brought them to the DAC
quarters overnight. He tried to confront Hick’s assumption of the moral superiority of
African American women who, Hicks argued, were morally disciplined under the rigid
U.S. governmental control, over the Japanese women. Moorman ironically stated that
“oftentimes money has been known to change the DAC’s morals quite contrary to the
description.” In contrast, he argued, “there are Japanese girls from very good families
who would stop [sic] no lower than the better young ladies of any other country.”22
Moorman suggested that morals were not racial but class matter, when he criticized the
sexual morals and attitudes of the civilian Afiican American women, who caused serious
class tensions with a sense of superiority over black enlisted men in the intimate affairs
within the African American community in occupied Japan. Moorman, on the one hand,

employed the discourse of “respectability,” which was historically influential among the

middle-class African American men and women, in his judgment of the sexual morals

 

22 Hicks, “Officer Says Our Girls in Japan Not Attractive,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 25, 1950.

I68

and attitudes among the civilian African American women and the Japanese women.23
On the other hand, he left unquestioned the sexual behaviors of African American
soldiers in occupied Japan in light of his sexual double standard, whether they were
dating African American women or Japanese women.

Next, African American soldiers tried to defend their sexual behaviors and morals
in their relationship with Japanese women, which took both intimate and exploitative
forms, in terms of their masculinized as well as militarized sexual norms which were
nurtured within the US. occupation Army. In his defense against Ralph Matthew’s
allegation that African American soldiers were not asking African American WACs for
dates in favor of the “porn poms,” an Afiican American officer stationed in Yokohama
claimed that the WACs who “invariably travel in pairs” were inconvenient for an easy
pick up, because a “guy on short-term leave hasn’t got a lot of time to waste jockeying
for position.” He also admitted that African American WACS, who “expect to be
pampered just as if they were at home under their mama’s apron strings,” were not
suitable for a more casual sexual life which some African American soldiers expected to
pursue in Japan. In contrast, the Japanese women, more specifically the street walkers,
who were not only wandering alone but also not begging for dates, long courtships, or

promise to marry, were more appropriate companions for African American GIs to

 

23 For the politics of respectability in the middle-class African American community, see Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifiing the Race: Black Leadership,
Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);
Deborah Gray White, T 00 Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 1999); Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: Afiican American
Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Shockley, “We, Too,
Are Americans. ”

169

“make a fast play.”24

This officer’s explanation about the African American GIs’ sexual
preference for Japanese prostitutes over African American WACS reveals a highly
exploitative dimension of the militarized masculinity and sexuality among African
American soldiers, who degraded the bodies and womanhood of native women only as
sexual objects in Japan under US. military occupation.

Most importantly, African American soldiers often drew on the patriarchal
representation of Japanese femininity in their criticism of black womanhood in occupied
Japan. One Afiican American soldier in South Korea praised the Japanese women’s
traditionally-nurtured obedient attitude toward their men as their major charming point.
He stated that “the whole thing is that the women of the Eastern world have been
conditioned to the fact that a man is head of the house and when one falls in love with a
guy she simply gets behind him and lets him lead the way.”25 Another African American
soldier deployed the image of subordinate Japanese femininity as a point of reference for
criticizing the gender behaviors among the civilian African American women in occupied
Japan, with the following highly challenging remark: “They never saw the day they could
hold a light to a Japanese girl when it comes to treating a man like he should be treated.
Let them howl. Maybe it will wake them up and they will stop taking men for granted.”26
Revealing clearly the self-serving defensive rationale for male privilege within the

contemporary patriarchal black gender politics, he attacked the femininity of the civilian

African American women who, with their enhanced social status in occupied Japan,

 

24 Matthews, “Wacs and Porn Poms Wage War in Yokohama,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 22,
1951.

25 Hicks, “Japanese or American Girls: Which? Why?” Baltimore Afro-American, October 7, 1950.

26 Ibid.

170

seemed to be less subordinate and even more domineering than the Japanese women in
their attitude toward African American men, especially toward the black enlisted men
who were lacking any rank.

In response to the discursive denigration of their womanhood in the African
American masculinist constructions of “submissive” Japanese women, some civilian and
military African American women in occupied Japan confronted the charge of their
gender deviancy by criticizing Japanese women as well as African American soldiers in
both racial and gendered terms. Ethel Payne, who had been stationed for thirty months in
occupied Japan and then served as a director of Army Services Club in Yokohama, was
the civilian Afiican American woman who most vocally opposed the interracial dating
and marriage between African American soldiers and Japanese women. She especially
focused on the “submissiveness” of the female Japanese. Payne rearticulated the
dominant American Orientalist view of Japanese women as the victims of the Japanese
patriarchy, when she stressed the emancipation of the Japanese women, who “even at
best, had been virtually a slave,” by a special Women’s Division under the US. military
occupation. Drawing on the contemporary Orientalist American discourse about
Japanese women, she reconfigured a racially and class-based exotic representation of
Japanese women as poor peasants on the rice paddies:

The poorer class (Japanese women)... long-used to the straight-lined simplicity
and full sleeves of the kumono [sic]. The awkwardness of hooks and eyes,
buttons and the intricacies of Western dress proved to be very confining.
Moreover, the peculiar Japanese physique of the average peasant is short torsoed
and high waisted, was not easily adaptable to the long-limbed, long torsoed style
of European and Americans.27

 

27 Ethel Payne, “Says Japanese Girls Playing Gls For Suckers: ‘Chocolate Joe’ Used, Amused, Confused,”
Chicago Defender, November 18, I950.

171

Payne invested in the highly Orientalist representation of the Japanese women as “exotic”
beings who were naturally incongruent with Westernization for racial as well as cultural
reasons. According to Payne, it was an “Emancipation Proclamation” for a Japanese
woman who had suffered from sexist oppression for long years to encounter the “GI Joe,”
who rescued her out of the rice paddies and the “centuries of submissiveness” in the
specific political context of the US. occupation of Japan.28

Ethel Payne critically challenged the Japanese women’s submissiveness toward
their men, the gender characteristic which African American men admired so greatly.
From a historical perspective of the patriarchal oppression of women in Japan, Payne
regarded the Japanese women’s obedient attitude in their gender relations just as a
conventional cultural pattern of behavior. She declared, “By tradition, the Japanese
woman is submissive. To the man of her choice or the one who wins her attention she
presents a convincing superficial respectfulness and affection.”29 Payne also charged
Japanese women for exploiting “coolly” their “very helplessness” as a “powerful weapon
and asset” to them, so that they could win the hearts of African American soldiers. As
the article featuring Payne concluded, the “Nipponese girls are playing GI’s for suckers.30

In the discursive construction of Japanese femininity among African Americans in
Japan under US. military occupation, both African American women and men drew on
the contemporary American Orientalist discourse of the Japanese women as victims who

were recently liberated from the Japanese patriarchal constraints by the US. occupation

 

2" Ibid.

29 L. Alex Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls: Wilson Reveals Story Behind Love Affairs
Between Tan Yanks and Oriental Beauties,” Chicago Defender, November 11, 1950.

30 Payne, “Says Japanese Girls Playing Gls For Suckers,” Chicago Defender, November 18, 1950.

172

army, but they did it in gender-specific ways. African American soldiers and newsmen
embraced the image of “subservient” Japanese femininity as a virtue catering to their
gendered needs, without considering the historical context of patriarchal social structure
and ideology in traditional Japanese society. In contrast, Afiican American women, like
Payne, problematized the submissive gender attitudes among Japanese women as a
cultural manifestation of the uneven power relations'between men and women in Japan,
while they examined them in the historical context of sexist and patriarchal oppression in
Japan.

Next, African American women in occupied Japan directed the brunt of their
criticism against the gender and sexual behaviors among African American male soldiers
in their interracial engagement with Japanese women in occupied Japan. Ethel Payne
blamed African American men for their exploitation of Japanese women’s
submissiveness to satisfy their masculine pride and needs in their intimate relationships.
She indicated, by quoting the Gallup P011 in 1946 and 1947, that what American GIs
found most satisfactory about Japanese women was their “meekness” and their
“willingness to serve,” compared with “too independent” American women. According
to Payne, African American Gls, like white American GIs, found their masculine egos
more satisfied by the subservient attitude of Japanese women than less obedient
American women: “Suziko San (Payne called Japanese women)——now shes [sic]
different. Fetch your shoes, wash, cook, iron, and sew. ‘Keep quiet’ when you want her

”3|

to. Never talk back, laugh when you want her to. Thelma Scott, another civilian

African American woman, agreed with her on Japanese women’s subservience by

 

3‘ Ibid.

173

insisting that it was “not unusual... for the Japanese girl to shut up when ordered to do so
and to voluntarily look afler every whim of her mate while he is with her,” while the
“American woman won’t keep her mouth shut and resents bending to a man.”32 Their
consolidated image of “submissive” Japanese femininity, combined with their apparent
competition and rivalry with Japanese women, became a focal point among the Afiican
American women in Japan for opposing the interracial intimacies between Afiican
American men and Japanese women.

African American women also criticized the sexual behaviors of African
American men in their interactions with Japanese women. Some of them were further
shocked to find that Afiican American soldiers were sexually pursuing the “porn poms,”
or the Japanese professional prostitutes who were walking the streets, looking for
customers. One African American WAC who was stationed in Yokohama admitted that
she was “ashamed” and “disgusted” by the African American soldiers, who were
“burning the town catering their Pom Poms around” in their jeeps instead of picking up
the WACs for their official duties, even while they were on duty. This Afiican American
WAC showed disdain for the “porn poms” for their degraded womanhood: “They get
away with murder, because, to a girl who never had but one kimono in her life, even a $2

dress is a windfall?”

However, she expressed more bitter contempt against those
African American soldiers for their disrespectable sexualized masculine behavior: “Some
of these fools from the backwoods, who perhaps never had a girl in their lives, think they

are living great with a little straight-haired girl fawning all over them. Some of them

 

32 Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls,” Chicago Defender, November 11, 1950.

33 Matthews, “Wacs and Porn Poms Wage War in Yokohama,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 22,
1951.

I74

spend all their earnings on their girls and their families while their own relatives back
home are suffering.”34 In her eyes, these soldiers, who could not sexually attract women
in the U.S., approached the professional Japanese prostitutes with an enhanced economic
power which they attained through power disparities in the colonial relations between
Americans and Japanese in Japan under US. military occupation. They also violated the
familial ideal in the era of Cold War domesticity by lavishing money and gifts on .
Japanese prostitutes for sexual favors at the expense of the economic well-being of their
families in the United States.35

Moreover, the exchanges between African American women and men over the
latter’s intimate relationships in occupied Japan revealed a complex politics of color,
beauty, and femininity which was embedded in the triadic relationship between black
men, black women, and Japanese women. The WAC’s statement quoted above indicates
clearly the importance of physical feature of race and its implication for the definition of
femininity in the African American women’s discourse against the black-Japanese
intimacies. This African American WAC’s explicit reference to the “straight-hair” of
Japanese women suggests that hair texture served significantly in the contemporary black
gender politics which defined the sexual norms concerning black femininity. Ethel Payne
also argued that the skin color mattered in shaping of the interracial romance between
African American men and Japanese women. Drawing partly on the historical myth of

black men sexually seeking after white women, Payne claimed, “the hue of the girls

 

3“ Ibid.

35 On the endorsement of the traditional familial values in Cold War America and their pervasiveness
within African American communities, especially among the middle-class black women during this period,
see May, Homeward Bound; Shockley, “We, Too, Are Americans,” esp. chap. 3.

I75

range from very fair to a nut brown. Hence it can be easily understood why our boys fall

for them.”36

The relationship between African American men and the Japanese women,
who assumed an ambiguous position in the bipolar racial spectrum between black and
white in the politics of interracial intimacy, complicated the gendered problem of racial
loyalty in occupied Japan.

The intraracial gender conflicts which developed between African American
women and men in the US. military engagement overseas, as discussed above in the case
of occupied Japan, was already manifest in the experience of the black WACS who were
serving in the European Theater of Operations during World War II. In her investigation
of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion which was assigned to Britain and France
during WWII, historian Brenda Moore argues that members of the 6888‘” encountered
“gender discrimination” in their relationship with black male soldiers stationed there
unless they adhered to the “typical gender roles” in American society which their men
expected of them. She suggests that African American male soldiers were vigilant
especially about the sexual behaviors of the black WACS, as they felt their masculinity
threatened when they were rejected by black women for dates or saw black women dating
British or French men.37

There were also some tensions in terms of gender roles found between black
WACS and black male soldiers in the area other than black women’s sexuality. Maj.

Charity Adams Earley, who served as the first black commissioned officer within the

WAC in the 6888‘”, observed that some African American male soldiers, who had been

 

36 Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls,” Chicago Defender, November 1 l, 1950.

37 Brenda L. Moore, To Serve My Country, To Serve My Race: The Story of the Only African American
WA Cs Stationed Overseas during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 133-137.

176

discriminated against within the military during the war, resented the presence of
“successfully performing Negro women” in the military and mistook their supportive

”38 Whether stationed in the

attitude toward their men as “competition” and “patronage.
wartime Europe or occupied Japan, African American soldiers, who con3idered the
participation of African American women in the traditionally male sphere of the military
and their subsequent racial and gender empowerment in the context of the US. military
engagement overseas as transgression of their gender roles, attempted to police their
behaviors overseas in light of the gender and sexual norms of the larger American society
during that period.

Moreover, there was a clearly gendered difference between African American
women and men in their engagement with interracial heterosexual intimacies in Japan
under US. military occupation. As widely reported in the major black newspapers, a
large number of African American soldiers developed intimate relationships with
Japanese women and their romance caused a large-scale spectrum of intraracial gender
conflicts between African American men and women in occupied Japan. However, there
were few stories found in the contemporary black newspapers and magazines about the
interracial romances between African American women and Japanese men in occupied
Japan. The skewed sexual ratio in the African American population in occupied Japan
partly explains the higher visibility of African American soldiers and their relationship
with the native women than those of African American women in Japan during the period

of US. military occupation. But, African American sexual politics of interracial intimacy

 

38 Charity Adams Earley, One Woman’s Army: A Black Oflicer Remembers the WAC (College Station:
Texas A & M University Press, 1989), 187.

177

was more complexly arranged in the specific historical context of the US. military
occupation of Japan.

Some African American women dated Japanese men, like civilian Elvira Turner,
who dated “on alternative nights” men of diverse racial backgrounds, including a black
soldier, a white American officer, and a Japanese man.39 However, L. Alex Wilson of the
Chicago Defender observed the African American women were not sexually attracted to
the native men in occupied Japan:

An extensive check on the love affairs of American Negro women in Japan
revealed they spum the Japanese men. Two very attractive women told me in a
convincing manner that any thought of having Japanese as a boy friend causes
cold chills. Gls now in Japan confirmed this. There was an exception or so, of
course, but not worthy of detailed mention.40

Wilson additionally suggested that white American women, in contrast with black
women, found Japanese men “quite attractive” in reference to the article in the New York
Daily News, although he did not discuss this racial difference in American women’s
relationship with Japanese men in more details.“

This gendered difference between black women and men in their interracial
sexual behaviors in occupied Japan was deeply related to the gender asymmetry in their
sexual subjectivity formations in African American sexual politics and the masculinized
sexual culture of the larger American society. The double standards in African American
sexual politics of interracial intimacy discouraged most African American women from

actively pursuit of sexual intimacy with the native men of the occupied nation. In this

 

3'9 Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 18, 1950.
40 Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls,” Chicago Defender, November 11, 1950.

4‘ Ibid.

178

regard they differed from many American men regardless of race and some white women
in the occupation Army. Some of the sexual double standards in which Afiican
American women were socialized to embrace were informed by the masculinized sexual
culture of the larger American society. In her examination of the interracial intimacies in
the ETO during World War II, Brenda Moore observed that sexual double standards in
American society were influential in the gendered sexual behaviors of African American
soldiers stationed there: “Because it was commonly believed that women belonged to
men of their own race, black men were upset when they saw black women socializing
with British and French men. The women, on the other hand, could not make the same
claim on the men because of the differences in the social standards and because of the
traditional belief that what was good for the gander was not good for the goose.”42
Regardless of race, American men could make claims on this double standard in
American sexual culture, when they policed their women’s interracial sexual behaviors as
a gender transgression while they actively pursued their intimate sexual relationships
with Japanese women, or sometimes with American women of different races in
occupied Japan.43

In addition to the double standards in the larger American sexual culture, there

was a specific racialized history of interracial intimacy in the United States which was

influential in shaping the gendered attitudes toward interracial sexual relations between

 

42 Moore, T 0 Serve My Country, To Serve My Race, 136.

43 There were some cases reported on the interracial intimacies which were developed among the American
nationals between white men and black women or those between black men and white women. Observing
the sight of American couples of different races in Old Kaijo Hotel in Tokyo, a Baltimore Afro-American
war correspondent wrote, “The matter of race appears for the moment forgotten.” Hicks, “G-Girl in
Japan,” Baltimore Afi'o-American, November 18, 1950.

179

African American women and men. Feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins argues that
double standards in the Afiican American sexual politics of interracial intimacy,
especially interracial marriage, operated differently for black men and women. Collins
writes:

Any expansion of the pool of female sexual partners enhances African American
men’s standing within the existing system of hierarchical masculinities. Thus,
within Black civil society, African American women in interracial love
relationships face the stigma of being accused of being race traitors and whores,
where African American men engaged in similar relationships can find their
status as men raised.44

Although Collins discusses mainly the case of black-white interracial intimacies by
referring to the different histories of African American women and men in the racial and
sexual politics of miscegenation in the United States, her theoretical view of a sexual
double standard in African American sexual politics can be applied to the explanation of
the black-Japanese interracial intimacies, but with careful attention to the specificity of
the interracial relationships between Afiican Americans and the Japanese in the historical
context of the US. military occupation of Japan. In occupied Japan, African American
men felt their racial and masculine pride enhanced in developing interracial relationships
with Japanese women through the diminishment of the masculinity of the Japanese men,
who remained powerless against the sexual conquest of their women by the men of the
former enemy nation. African American women were positioned in the place of sexual
competition with Japanese women for the sexual intimacy of Afiican American men
rather than sexually associating with Japanese men, because of the double standards in

African American sexual politics of interracial intimacy.

 

44 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New
York: Routledge, 2004), 262.

180

Some factors, other than sexual double standards, also prevented African
American women from constructing a wide range of interracial sexual relationships with
the native men in occupied Japan. As historian Darlene Clark Hine points out, African
American women, especially those living in the South, developed a “culture of
dissemblance” so that they could protect themselves from sexual exploitation and
violence by their male oppressors. African American women were traditionally
socialized in a culture to dissemble their true sexual selves for their sexual autonomy in
the masculinized American racial-sexual culture. The pursuit of their sexual association
with the native men was not a desirable form of achieving a feminine sense of

5 African American women who were stationed in

empowerment in occupied Japan.4
Japan, especially the black WACs whose sexual agency was already defined as
dangerous in the sexual double standards of the US. military, shared little with the
militarized as well as masculinized sexual cultures within the US. Army in their attitudes
toward the native men and women in occupied Japan.46 Moreover, the Japanese men

were refeminized in the gendered imagination of Americans through Japan’s defeat at

World War II and her military occupation by the US. Army.“7 Such feminized men,

 

45 Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women: Thoughts on the Culture of

Dissemblance,” in Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994), 37-47.

46 By invoking the sexual double standards in its regulation of sexuality during World War II, the US.
Army officials encouraged sexual “abstinence” and “chastity” among female soldiers to protect the
reputation of the WAC, on the one had. On the other hand, they encouraged male soldiers’ heterosexual
activity as a sign of “virility” and discouraged men’s responsibility for the consequences of their
heterosexual behavior, including venereal diseases and fatherhood, by blaming the women with whom they
had sexually involved. See Meyer, Creating GI Jane, esp. chap. 5.

47 Naoko Shibusawa, America ’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006), 5; John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New
York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999), 138.

181

either in reality or imaginary, were far from sexually attractive for African American
women, who were themselves involved in some ways with the military project of
emasculating the Japanese as members of the hyper-masculinized U.S. occupational
forces.48

In this gender asymmetry within the African American sexual politics of
interracial intimacy in occupied Japan, African American men could enhance a sense of
racial masculinity through their interracial sexual encounters with Japanese women,
while African American women rivaled or competed with Japanese women for their men
instead of sexually associating with Japanese men. This gendered reality made the
intraracial gender and sexual antagonism between African American women and men
more complex and explosive in occupied Japan.

*****

In summary, African American women confronted the gender backlash from
some African American male soldiers stationed there, who tried to police the gender roles
and behaviors of their women by employing the patriarchal representation of Japanese
women. African American women defended their womanhood against the black
masculinist construction of their gender and sexual subjectivities by criticizing the
subservient femininity of Japanese women as well as the sexual behaviors of black
soldiers. The race and gender oppression which African American women experienced

in occupied Japan contributed to the development of their political consciousness about

racism and sexism in the larger American and African American community, while they

 

48 See Chapter 4 for the de-masculinized experience of Japanese men under US. military occupation.

182

achieved a sense of racial and gender empowerment from their broader opportunities,

enhanced social status, and fiiendly relationship with the Japanese.

183

Part IV
Trans-Pacific Debates over Interracial Relationships
between African American GIS and Japanese Women

184

Chapter 7
Black Representation of Japanese Femininity and the Politics of
Interracial Intimacy in Occupied Japan

In Japan under US. military occupation during the period from 1945 to 1952,
African American soldiers, like white American soldiers, developed intimate interracial
and international relationships with Japanese women, despite the “non-fraternization”
policy of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). Some Afiican
American GIs casually dated Japanese woman to temporarily replace their American
girlfriends, with whom they could enjoy their overseas military life together only while
they were stationed in occupied Japan. Other Afiican American GIs, who were engaged
more seriously in their intimate relationships with a Japanese woman, married them and
produced biracial children. The various contours of interracial intimacies which African
American soldiers shared with Japanese women became one of the crucial factors
important to their gendered, as well as racialized and nationalized, subjectivity
formations and transformations while stationed in Japan. The news about the interracial
romance and sexual relations between African American GIS and Japanese women in
Japan reached the African American communities in the US. and provoked considerable
debate among them. African American newsmen began reporting on the intimate
relationships between African American soldiers and Japanese women since the outbreak
of the Korean War in July 1950.

In this chapter, I examine the gendered representations of Japanese women in the
transnational controversy on black-Japanese intimacies in African American communities
across the Pacific in the early 19503. The trans-Pacific debates over the interracial

intimacy and sexuality between African American soldiers and Japanese women became

185

a transnational site of identity formations and contestations, through which African
American men and women in both sides of the Pacific reconfigured race relation, gender
convention, and sexual practice in the changing domestic and international political
dynamics in the postwar period. Afiican American soldiers stationed in Japan, on the one
hand, consolidated their masculine, as well as racial and national, identities by claiming
right to patriarchal privileges in their intimate relationships with Japanese women. On
the other hand, their masculinist representations of “submissive” Japanese women in the
black newspapers and magazines functioned as a disciplinary discourse to police the
gender behaviors of African American women stationed there, who were exploring
alternative gender identities and roles within the boundaries of their elevated social status
and nationalized privileges in occupied Japan. The controversy on the black-Japanese
intimacies served as a transnational site of African American gender politics thorough
which African American men and women in both sides of the Pacific contested gender
and sexual identities and ideologies concerning black masculinity, black femininity, and
black gender relations in the political and ideological context of the US. engagement
with the world during the early Cold War period. The Orientalist representations of
“submissive” Japanese women were central to the black press coverage of the interracial
intimacy and sexuality between Afiican American men and women in occupied Japan.
African American men and women who were stationed in Japan employed the image of
Japanese women in gender-specific ways, so that they could reconfigure the tension-filled
intraracial gender relations there either by conforming to or subverting the gender and
sexual norms in the larger American society or in African American communities during

that period.

186

It was not until the outbreak of the Korean War that news of the interracial
intimacies between African American soldiers and Japanese women in occupied Japan
were disclosed to stateside African American communities. Soon after the Korean War
occurred in July 1950, the major black newspapers, including the Baltimore Afro-
American, Pittsburgh Courier, and Chicago Defender, dispatched their own war
correspondents, exclusively black men, to report on the US. war efforts against the North
Korean Army in Korean Peninsula. Their racial journalistic mission as black newsmen
was to provide extensive coverage of the military activities of African American soldiers
in the war. The mainstream US. media tended to offer report only partially and
sometimes with a deep-rooted racial bias against black military performance. The major
assignment of these black war correspondents was to cover the military performance of
African American soldiers and document their contributions, to the US. military
operations, especially those in the all-black unit like 24th Infantry Regiment, which
remained segregated until its deactivation in October 1951.1 Along with the constant
coverage and interview of black soldiers on the battlefields of Korea, the black war
correspondents often reported on the camp life of African American soldiers in Japan
under US. military occupation, where the US. bases served as host camps for the US.
soldiers under the intensive preparations for the combat missions, and for the furloughed
GIs returning from the battlefields in Korea, during the entire period of the Korean War.
It was the contingency of the outbreak of war in Korea that caused the exposure of

interracial intimacies between African American soldiers and Japanese women in

 

I For the revisionist interpretation of the role of African American soldiers, especially those in the 24m
Infantry Regiment in the Korean War, see William Bowers, William M. Hammond, and George L.
MacGariggle, Black Soldier, White Army: The 24'” Infantry Regiment in Korea (Washington, DC: US.
Army Center of Military History, 1996).

187

occupied Japan. This coverage inspired the scrutiny of African American communities
across the Pacific. The transnational circulation of the black newspapers and magazines
fueled controversy and interest in black/Asian intimacies.

It was one newspaper article which appeared in the Baltimore Afro-American in
September 1950, that ignited heated debate over black-Japanese intimacies in African
American communities across the Pacific. Under the sensational title, “GI’s in Tokyo
Lavish Gifts on Jap Girls, Shun Own Clubs,” James Hicks, its war correspondent
reported that African American civilian women, called “DAC’s,” were ignored by
African American soldiers in occupied Japan because of the Japanese women.2 As
discussed in Chapter 6, Hick’s article solicited a chain of critical responses from both
African American men and women stationed in Japan, who confronted his report on the
heightened intraracial conflicts in the African American gender relations there in gender-
specific ways. Here, more focus is placed on the examination of the gendered differences
in the discursive construction of Japanese women found in the black press representations
of black-Japanese intimacy and sexuality in Japan. How did African American men and
women employ the dominant Orientalist representations of Japanese women in the
racialized and gendered forms so that they could negotiate intraracial gender tensions in
occupied Japan?

Initially, the most critical reactions to Hicks’ article came from the incensed
African American soldiers, whom he had accused of ignoring black women in favor of
the Japanese women because they found that the morals of Japanese women were more

tailored to the realities of garrison life in occupied Japan. Most of those black G13 never

 

2 James L. Hicks, “GI’s in Tokyo Lavish Gifts on Jap Girls, Shun Own Clubs,” Baltimore Afio-American,
September 2, 1950.

188

denied the truth of his report, but complained about his unfair treatment of the issue to
appeal to civilian African American women. Those Afiican American soldiers defended
their interracial sexual behaviors in Japan by blaming the civilian black women for
various reasons, as discussed in Chapter 6. The black press coverage of the black-
Japanese intimacies in Japan indicated that African American men often drew on the
masculinist representations of Japanese women as exemplars of domestic womanhood for
their women. Thus, they implicitly criticized the Afiican American women, who
achieved a sense of gender empowerment in occupied Japan, as being deviant from the
gender and sexual normativity of the period. Some of the gender characteristics which
African American men assigned to the idealized Japanese womanhood, including
“submissiveness” and “subservience,” reflected the traditional gender roles and
ideologies in the patriarchal societies, including their own black communities either in
Japan or in the United States.

The black press coverage of the black-Japanese intimate relationships in occupied
Japan illuminated the masculinized dimensions of sexual morals and behaviors among
African American soldiers which were manifested in their sexual relationships with
Japanese women. In their interviews with black newsmen, some African American
soldiers claimed their patriarchal privileges vis-a-vis Japanese women in order to justify
their interracial sexual relationships with Japanese women in Japan. They explained their
own sexual behaviors there as male sexual nature, driving men across racial, class, and
national boundaries to pursue heterosexual relationships with native women in the areas
of their military occupation. One African American soldier in South Korea defended his

intimate relationship with Japanese women as the universalized sexual phenomenon

189

shared by all men in the military without considering its political or social implications:
“This is both flattering and extremely well linked by all men and whether it is good or not,
the GI’s in Japan have simply been doing what other men do everywhere else—going for
the women who appeal to them most... And boy, do these Japanese girls have appeal?”
Another black soldier claimed that “it’s not just us” and even suggested that Hicks should
have pointed out in his article that the “whites soldiers are doing the same thing.”4 Those
African American soldiers unwittingly invested in the hegemonic discourse of the
“militarized” heterosexual masculinity, which supported the “sexualization of military
life” as well as the “militarization of male soldiers’ sexuality” at the expense of the native
women in the areas under the foreign military domination, when they shared a Victor’s
sense of patriarchy privileges with white American GIs and other male soldiers in the
world history.5

More modestly than those black soldiers, Lt. Clinton Moorman of the 24‘h
Infantry Regiment claimed that the situation in which a “guy likes a girl and gives her
presents” could be observed at least in several countries where he had been stationed so
far, including England, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hawaii, the Philippines,
Korea and “most of the United States.” However, Moorman stressed the sincerity of the
relationship between some Afiican American GIs and their Japanese women by

distinguishing it from the militarized sexual relationships which could be widely found in

 

3 James L. Hicks, “Japanese or American Girls: Which? Why?” Baltimore Afro-American, October 7, 1950.
4 Ibid.

5 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Rev. ed.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 74. For the concept and process of “gendered
militarization,” see also Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women '3 Lives
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the
Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

190

other countries. He defended the legitimacy of these interracial couples by relating the
fact that “many” African American GIs married Japanese women by “Shinto fashion” in
Japan and that they were in the status of “common law marriages” in the American sense.
He further stated that “any number of the fellows would be married to Japanese girls if it

were not for the present law.”6

Moreover, Moorman, who himself became engaged to
marry a Japanese woman, resorted to the prevalent ideology of “domesticity” in this
period, when he defended the intimate relationships between African American soldiers
and Japanese women.7 By containing their intimate relationships within the institution of
marriage, even if they were sanctioned only by religion in Japan, he tried to demonstrate
the sincerity of their relationships in occupied Japan and appealed for their legal approval
by the US. government.

The patriarchal sense of privileges vis-a-vis Japanese women among some
African American soldiers could be found in their sexual relationships with Japanese
prostitutes, too. In his defense against the allegation of Ralph Matthews, the Baltimore
Afro-American war correspondent, that African American soldiers were not asking
Afiican American WACs for dates in favor of the “porn poms,” an Afiican American
officer stationed in Yokohama claimed that the WACs who “invariably travel in pairs”
were inconvenient for an easy pick up, because a “guy on short-term leave hasn’t got a

lot of time to waste jockeying for position.” He also admitted that African American

WACS, who “expect to be pampered just as if they were at home under their mama’s

 

6 James L. Hicks, “Officer Says Our Girls in Japan Not Attractive: Defend Morals of Native Women,”
Baltimore Afro-American, November 25, 1950.

7 For the politics of “domesticity” in the larger American society during the early Cold War period, see
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Rev. ed. (New York: Basic
Books, 1999).

191

apron strings,” were not suitable for a more casual sexual life which some African
American soldiers expected to pursue in occupied Japan. In contrast, the Japanese
women, more specifically the street walkers, who were not only wandering alone but also
not begging for dates, long courtships, or promise to marry, were more appropriate

”8 This officer’s explanation

companions for African American GIs to “make a fast play.
about the African American Gls’ sexual preference for Japanese prostitutes over African
American WACs revealed a highly exploitative dimension of the militarized masculinity
and sexuality among African American soldiers, who degraded the bodies and
womanhood of native women only as sexual objects.

The patriarchal sense of privileges which African American soldiers claimed in
their sexual relationships with Japanese women was influential in shaping the black
masculinist discourse of Japanese femininity. The black press coverage of the black-
Japanese intimacies, which focused on “submissive” Japanese women, illuminated the
masculinized gender consciousness on the part of African American newsmen, as well as
African American male soldiers, who constructed Japanese femininity as ideal for
domestic womanhood in contrast to African American women at large, especially those

who were stationed in occupied Japan.9 Franklin Whisonant, the war correspondent for

the Pittsburgh Courier who joined the coverage of interracial romances in occupied

 

8 Ralph Matthews, “Wacs and Porn Poms Wage War in Yokohama: GIs Counter-Attack in Battle of
Sexes,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 22, 1951.

9 Historian Naoko Shibusawa points out that “Japanese women were held up as exemplars of femininity” in
the shifting gender roles of American women during and afier World War II in her examination of the
mainstream American public discourses of the Japanese in the postwar period. But, Shibusawa does not
pay attention to the racialized representations of Japanese women in black newspapers and magazines.
Naoko Shibusawa, America ’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006), 42.

I92

Japan later than other major black newspapers, explained why the “moosey mac,” or the
“Japanese for girl friend” captured the hearts of African American soldier:

The woman, since time immemorial has been taught to be submissive and servile
to the men folk. She is supposed to cater to his every whim, be at his beck and
call at all times and forever be ready, willing and able to work as much, if not
more, than the man in any project undertaken by them.lo

According to Whisonant, the African American soldiers who were fighting in Korea were
so attracted by the “submissive” and “servile” conduct of the Japanese women that he
never heard them talking of “going back to the United States,” instead of “going back to

Japan 99”

Ralph Matthews of the Baltimore Afro-American pointed out, too, the long
history of Japanese patriarchy behind the gendered submissiveness among Japanese
women, stating that Japanese women “have been taught for centuries that the man is boss
and they accept this without question.” Matthews indicated with his illustration how
attentively Japanese women were catering to the various wishes and needs of her Afiican
American man by cooking his favorite dishes, sewing his clothes, and washing his body
in a steaming bath every night (see Figure 7.1).12 The African American newsmen who
were stationed in occupied Japan played a critical role in shaping the African American
masculinist discourse of “submissive” Japanese women and disseminating it within

African American communities on both sides of the Pacific through the transnational

circulation of their articles in black newspapers.

 

'0 Frank Whisonant, “‘Moosey Mae’ Wins Hearts of Negro Gls,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 9, 1950.

” Ibid.

'2 Matthews, “Wacs and Porn Poms Wage War in Yokohama,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 22,
1951.

193

 

 

Figure 7.1. Japanese Women Attending to African American Men at Home
Source: Baltimore Afio—American, September 22, 1951

194

Together with the role of the black press, African American soldiers whose voices
were ofien quoted in black newspapers and magazines were central to the production of
African American masculinist discourses of Japanese femininity in contrast to black
womanhood. One African American soldier who was stationed in South Korea praised
the Japanese women’s traditionally-nurtured obedient attitude toward their male partner
as their major charming point. He stated that “the whole thing is that the women of the
Eastern world have been conditioned to the fact that a man is head of the house and when
one falls in love with a guy she simply gets behind him and lets him lead the way.”'3
Another African American soldier deployed the image of “subordinate” Japanese women
as a point of reference for criticizing the gender behaviors among the civilian African
American women in occupied Japan with the challenging remarks: “They never saw the
day they could hold a light to a Japanese girl when it comes to treating a man like he
should be treated. Let them howl. Maybe it will wake them up and they will stop taking
men for granted.”14 Revealing clearly the patriarchal sense of privileges among African
American men and the tensions in black gender relationships, he tried to contain the
enhanced sense of femininity among some African American women, who seemed to be
less subordinate and even more domineering than Japanese women.

Lt. Clinton Moorman of the 24th Infantry Regiment joined, too, the patriarchal
brotherhood of male dominance with other African American soldiers when he described

his favorite type of women. Moorman believed in race-blindness in his choice of a date

or more intimate partner, claiming that “if a young lady is attractive, is cultured, has nice

 

'3 Hicks, “Japanese or American Girls,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 7, 1950.

'4 Ibid.

195

manners, who cares what color she is? Let her be pink, green, yellow, brown, white or
blue.”15 However, he favored a specific type of woman when he fell in love with the
Japanese woman: “That type of Japanese girl is loyal, devoted, thrifty and a good home-
maker. Always YOU come first in her life.” According to Moorman, in a relationship
with such a type of woman, a man did “not have to spend a large sum of money on
entertainment to win the appreciation of the girl.” In the evening at a movie theater, she
would be “thrilled by maybe a second or third rate picture” with him, while she let him
know that she was “grateful for the attention given her.”16 In spite of his personal politics
of race-blindness in his love affairs, Moorman racially as well as culturally preferred a
specific type of femininity as ideal for his intimate companionship. He associated such
characteristics as loyalty, devotion, thriftiness, and domesticity with Japanese women.
Another African American soldier, like Moorman, found some of the feminine
characteristics of the Japanese women intriguing. He praised the economic sense and
skill of the Japanese woman as a consumer. Not only would she not be cheated by a
merchant “within her power,” she was also thrifty. He noted, “When you give a musurne
say 200 yen to make a purchase for you, she’ll come back every time with more money
than you could.”17 Being a thrifty housewife was one of the distinctively traditional
gender roles which were attributed to the ideal femininity in patriarchal societies. He was
also impressed with the devotion of a Japanese woman for him in her intimate

relationship. He did not have to worry about “wolves” or if she cared for him when he

 

15 Hicks, “Officer Says Our Girls in Japan Not Attractive,” Baltimore Afi-o-American, November 25, 1950.

'6 L. Alex Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls: Wilson Reveals Story Behind Love Affairs
Between Tan Yanks and Oriental Beauties,” Chicago Defender, November 11, 1950.

'7 Ibid.

196

took a Japanese girl to a dance. According to this soldier, “she’ll sit the evening out
beside you voluntarily unless you urge her to leave her seat and dance with someone.”18
He admired passivity as well as loyalty in her attitude toward him as an ideal feminine
character, so that he could adhere to the traditional gender ideology which normalized the
gender relations between “active” men and “passive” women.

Another African American soldier stressed the maternal nature of the Japanese
women as a distinctive character of their sexual appeal. One black sergeant noted,
“When my Japanese girl friend embraces me, I feel that nothing in the world can harm
me—she makes me feel just that secure.” '9 Frank Whisonant, the Courier War
correspondent, explained this feminine nature of his Japanese girl fiiend as the “soothing
quality” which he had been seeking “unconsciously for many years” and finally found in
Japan. According to Whisonant, this sergeant, who had “never been quite so made over
ever since the day he was born and his mother held him close to her until he was old
enough to run in the streets,” found a sense of relief in the maternal love of his Japanese
girl friend.20 Like other Afiican American soldiers, Whisonant racially constituted the
black masculinist discourse of Japanese femininity in contrast to the representations of
black femininity in the larger African American community in the US. as well as in
occupied Japan, when he attributed essentially the nature of maternity to the Japanese
women with admiration.

Moreover, the black masculinist discourse of Japanese femininity was also

racially constructed in relation to the Korean women among the Afiican American

 

18Ibid.
‘9 Whisonant, “‘Moosey Mae’ Wins Hearts of Negro Gls,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 9, 1950.

20 Ibid.

197

soldiers stationed in East Asia. Under the title of “GIS Spurn Korean Gals, Wait For Jap
Lassies,” Milton A. Smith, the National Negro Press Association (NNPA) war
correspondent, reported from Northern Korea that three fourths of his responding black
GIs were opposed to fraternization with the Korean women. Smith examined several
social factors which prevented African American GIs from fratemizing with Korean
women, including unsanitary conditions of the “Native” Korean restaurants, the absence
of attractive “on-limits” recreational facilities in Korean, deteriorated security or law and
order in the wartime Korean streets, and high rate of venereal diseases. However, Smith
suggested that other cultural differences, especially the Korean dietary life and their
fashion style mattered more significantly in inhibiting the formation of the black-Korean
intimacies. In response to his interview, Cpl. Charles W stated that Korean women “try
to wear stateside clothes but they look like hell in ’em.” But, he confessed that garlic was
the real reason which he did not like Korean women, claiming that “I would not kiss one
of these dirty mouthed women.” Another GI also responded, “I don’t like the way they
look and I hate the way they smell. They don’t wash often enough for me...” Smith
concluded in his article that “stateside girls don’t have to worry about girls—in Korea,
anyhow” because they could not attract African American soldiers.21 Smith reinforced
the African American masculinist discourse of Japanese femininity, when he implicitly
compared the cultural components of Korean and Japanese femininity in terms of their
attractiveness to black American GIs in East Asia.

African American men in occupied Japan articulated the masculinist

representations of “submissive” Japanese women by drawing on the dominant American

 

2] Milton A. Smith, “GIs Spurn Korean Gals, Wait For Jap Lassies,” Chicago Defender, December 16,
1950.

198

Orientalist discourse which hyper-feminized as well as exoticized the Japanese women
through the refeminization of masculine Japan after World War II. As historian Naoko
Shibusawa notes, the feminization, as well as infantilization, of the Japanese was key to
“reimagining” of the former “hated racial enemy” as “valuable ally” in the overlapping
ideologies of race, gender, and maturity in the postwar American public images of
J apan.22 Anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns
of Japanese Culture (1946) was influential in shaping of America’s “gendered” discourse
about Japan and the Japanese national character in contemporary America. Cultural
historian Mari Yoshihara suggests that Benedict “feminized” Japanese culture through
the “emasculation” of Japanese men and masculine renditions of social order, including
patriarchy and gender relations, by characterizing them as “deviant from the Western
norms of masculinity.”23 More importantly, the US. occupation authorities and the US.
media, as cultural critic Lisa Yoneyama argues, actively promoted the representation of
Japanese women as victims of the male-dominant militarism and traditional gender
norms so that they could emphasize “women’s liberation,” especially Japanese women’s
enfranchisement under the US. occupation in their cold war propaganda.24 Drawing on
this mainstream U.S. Orientalist views of Japanese women as victims of Japanese sexism
and patriarchal oppression during the occupation period, Afiican American men in Japan

constructed their masculinist discourse of “submissive” Japanese femininity to claim their

 

22 Shibusawa, America ’s Geisha Ally, esp. chaps. 1-2.

23 Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003), chap. 7.

24 Lisa Yoneyama, “Liberation under Siege: US. Military Occupation and Japanese Women’s
Enfranchisement,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September 2005): 885-910.

199

patriarchal privileges through their intimate relationships with Japanese women, without
scrutinizing the historical context and the material reality of male dominance over women
in the patriarchal social structure of Japan.

Moreover, the black masculinist discourse of Japanese femininity also drew on
the preexisting sexualized images of Japanese women in the long tradition of Western
Orientalist representations of Japan.25 James Hicks of the Baltimore Afio-American, in
his first sensational article, pointed out the sexual availability of Japanese women for
African American soldiers because of their loose sexual morals and the institutionalized
sexual culture in Japan like the “off limits” clubs where “Geisha gals court their favor.”26
Pvt. Frank A. Topsail, an Ebony reader from Numberg, Germany, questioned the sexual
morals and behaviors on the part of the Japanese women: “If you will check on the birth
and sex rate in Japan, you will find that most of the girls of Japan are very sexually over-
trained. The birth rate is one of the highest in the world. I really cannot believe that most
of those rape cases, if so, are on the soldiers’ part.”27 Topsail articulated the dominant
sexualized, Orientalist racial representations of “lewd” Japanese women, when he blamed
the widespread interracial sexual relations, either intimate or violent, in occupied Japan
on the alleged sexual promiscuity of Japanese women and Japanese culture, without

considering the masculinized sexual behaviors among African American GIS in Japan.

Other articles reported on the Japanese sexual businesses catering to American GIs,

 

25 For the sexualization of Japanese women in the traditional Orientalist representations of Japan, see, for
example, Ian Littlewood, The Idea of Japan: Western Images, Western Myths (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996),
chap. 13; Jean-Pierre Lehmann, The Image of Japan: From Feudal Isolation to World Power, 1850-1905
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978), chap. 3.

26 James L. Hicks, “Gl’s in Tokyo Lavish Gifis on Jap Girls, Shun Own Clubs,” Baltimore Afi'o-American,
September 2, 1950.

27 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 7, no. 1 (December 1951): 8.

200

including cabarets, brothels, and geisha houses, and their implications for the morals of

28 The black masculinist

African American soldiers stationed in occupied Japan.
representations of GI interracial intimacies reproduced the dominant Orientalist discourse
of “lewd” Japanese femininity in its re-sexualization of Japanese women, whether they
were professional sex workers or not, under the historical circumstances of the
widespread sexual relationships between American GIs and Japanese women in Japan
under US. military occupation.

To be sure, not every African American soldier in occupied Japan shared the view
that Japanese women were preferable to the African American women stationed there in
terms of the dominant American gender and sexual norms in the early 19503. As the
controversy on the intimate relationships between African American soldiers and
Japanese women intensified, some African American GIs began to worry about the
influence of the articles appearing in the black newspapers on their women in the US.
Seven Afiican American soldiers, who consisted of four corporals and three private first
classes, sent a co-authored letter from Fohxole, Korea to the Baltimore Afi'o-American,
which had carried an article about black GIs marrying Japanese girls. Arguing against
some women who were “squawking that many of us have no intention of marrying over

here,” these soldiers strongly solicited the intimate responses from single young women

in the U3?"

 

28 “Second D. C. Unit Alerted: 715th Truck Co. Called to Active Army Duty,” Baltimore Afi'o-American,
August 5, 1951; Ralph Matthews, “Gls Sing ‘lnflation Blues’: Spiraling Cost of Love is Joe’s Biggest
Gripe,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 8, 1951; “13 Vice Menacing Our GI’s?” Jet 2, no. 2 (May 8,
1952): 14-17.

29 Baltimore Afro-American, January 13, 1951.

201

In his defense, one African American soldier in the Eighth US. Army in Korea
wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier and claimed that most black GIs still preferred their
“lovelies” to Japanese women. However, this Afiican American GI, who identified
himself as “Andy Ammos Boys,” did not deploy the negative representation of Japanese
women as a focal point for his construction of respectable black womanhood. On the
contrary, he criticized the Courier’s Orientalist representation of Japanese women as a
middle-aged peasant type as being “prejudiced” and having done them an “injustice.”
According to him, the picture of a “middle-aged ‘rice paddy’ Mama-san,” which the
Courier published with an article on black-Japanese intimacies three months before,
contradicted a typical GI’s “Koibita (Moosey-Mae),” most of whom were younger and
dressed like “most occidental women of her age and class.” He argues that most of the
Japanese women with whom black GIs were dating were not the “peasant, rice-paddy”
type as the majority of black women were not “Aunt Jemima” or “Night Fighter” types.
Embracing the respectable womanhood of the Japanese as well as African Americans, he
pointed out that “as another race, we need them as our Far East allies.” In addition, the
“Aunt Jemima” type impression of black women was so pervasive among the Japanese,
especially the “Moosey Mae,” that he tried to correct that stereotypical racial image by
showing the pictures of their “lovelies” who ranged from “lovely bronze to lighter hues.30
His comment suggested that African American masculinist negative representations of
Afiican American women in occupied Japan were influential in producing and
disseminating the stereotypical racial and gender image of black women among the

Japanese women.

 

3'0 Pittsburgh Courier, February 24, 1951-

202

The transnational circulation of such articles on both sides of the Pacific was
more serious for the African American soldier who had left his sweetheart, wife, or fiance'
behind in the United Sates. In his correspondence to the Pittsburgh Courier and
Baltimore Afro-American, Elmer Neely in Yokohama expressed his concern that those
stories would mislead many American women, including his fiancé, to believe that “they
have nothing to wait for?“ Challenging the numerous articles in the black newspapers
which admired Japanese women for their submissive gender attitude, Neely argued, in
some ways, for the superiority of African American womanhood over the Japanese. He
claimed that “I have nothing against any of these nationals personally, but their personal
standards are just far off from those of our better women.” He was also suspicious about
their motives for dating African American soldiers, stating that “those Japanese women
who take advantage of what they see in the GI do it at a fluctuating price that has nothing
to do with genuine affection.” 32 However, neither did Neely defend the black
womanhood of those who were stationed in occupied Japan in spite of his negative
comments about Japanese women. Rather, he rejected both African American women
and native women in occupied Japan on moral grounds, when he compared the
womanhood of these two groups with that of their “better” women in the US. Neely
fully drew upon the dominant African American masculinist discourses about them in
occupied Japan in his criticism of the African American women serving there:

Whatever colored women we have here in the personnel are mostly below the
average of our standards at home, and too, they have mostly eyes only for “rank.”

 

3' Baltimore Afro-American, March 24, 1951.

32 Pittsburgh Courier, February 24, 1951.

203

By far and large the better thinking G1 has little to do with either the native
women or those in the Army personnel.33

His comment suggests that some African American soldiers negotiated their negative
gendered attitude toward the Afiican American women who were serving for the US.
military in occupied Japan without employing the respectable representations of Japanese
women as a reference. Such a negative comment about black women from an African
American GI, who was not engaged in an intimate relationship with a Japanese woman,
indicated how pervasively the African American masculinist discourse of African
American women spread within the black community in occupied Japan as well as the
serious nature of the intraracial gender conflicts between African American men and
women.

African American soldiers and newsmen stationed in occupied Japan employed
the masculinist discourse of “submissive” Japanese women to regulate the imagined
deviant black femininity of the civilian and military African American women who were
stationed in Japan. However, these African American men were largely unaware of their
own patriarchal privileges and their complicity in sexual oppression within Afiican
American communities, when they comparatively evaluated the femininity of both
African American and Japanese women in occupied Japan in light of their masculinist or

patriarchal sense of gender ideology.34 The masculinist construction of gender and

 

33 Ibid.

34 For traditional black feminist critique of black patriarchy and intraracial gender conflicts, see bell hooks,
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Michel Wallace, Black
Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978; repr., New York: Verso, 1990). More recent black
feminist scholarship of black masculinity includes the following: Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-
Sheftall, eds., Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2001); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: A fi'ican Americans, Gender, and the New Racism
(New York: Routledge, 2004); bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York:

204

sexual identities among African American men in occupied Japan reflected the
contradictions in the anti-racist politics in the larger African American community in the
early 19503. The problem of intraracial gender conflicts within black communities,
especially the patriarchal privileges, misogyny, and sexism on the part of African
American men, had been marginalized for a long time in the African American struggle
for racial equality. In Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-
1994 (1999), historian Deborah Gray White suggests that racial solidarity was privileged
over gender identity in their struggle for defending black womanhood in the Afiican
American women’s national associations in the mid-twentieth century. White argues that
“for women to put gender consciousness ahead of race' consciousness was judged
inherently selfish, divisive, and inimical to the race.”35 As historian Megan Shockley
points out, middle-class African American women in the 19503 even accepted, rather
than confronted, the “patriarchal” nuclear family structure which they did not believe “fit
with the reality of most wage-earning African American women,” within the confinement
of the anticommunist politics during the Cold War period?“5 Afiican American men in

occupied Japan, who were embracing the dominant masculinized racial consciousness

 

Routledge, 2004); and The Will to Challenge: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Washington Square
Press, 2004); Mark Anthony Neal, New Black Man (New York: Routledge, 2006).

35 Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 174. According to White, African American women in the
National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) and the Ladies Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters did not challenge “black patriarchy” or “black male leadership” for the cause of “black female
autonomy,” in spite of the persistence of the gender tensions in the life of African Americans, during the
period from the 19303 through the 19603. It was in the early 19703 that Afi'ican American women in the
National Black Feminist Organization (N BFO) began to confront sexism and misogyny within the Afiican
American community in their anti-racist agendas, in response to the emergence of chauvinistic black
nationalism as well as the rise of the national feminist movement in the late 19603 through the early 19703.
See esp. chaps. 4-7.

36 Megan Taylor Shockley, “We, Too, Are Americans”: Afiican American Women in Detroit and
Richmond, [940-54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 104.

205

and gender ideology of the larger African American community, took their male
privileges for granted and did not hesitate to impose their patriarchal ideology on their
women, whether they were black or Japanese.

Some African American women in occupied Japan confronted the charge of their
gender deviancy by attacking Japanese women as well as black soldiers in response to the
black masculinist discursive denigration of their womanhood, as I discussed in Chapter 6.
Ethel Payne, who was serving as a director of Army Services Club in Yokohama in
November 1950, was the civilian black woman who most vocally opposed interracial
dating and marriage in Japan. Payne critically challenged the Japanese women’s
subservient attitude, the gender characteristic which black men admired so greatly, just as
a conventional cultural pattern of behavior in Japanese patriarchy. She declared, “By
tradition, the Japanese woman is submissive. To the man of her choice or the one who
wins her attention she presents a convincing superficial respectfulness and affection.”37
Payne charged Japanese women with exploiting their “helplessness” as a “powerful
weapon and asset” to them so that they could win the hearts of black GIs.38 It is worth
noting that black women, like Payne, rearticulated the contemporary U.S. Orientalist
discourse of Japanese women as patriarchal victims in their criticism of Japanese
femininity as black men did, but they were more attentive to the historical context of their
sexist and patriarchal oppressions in the traditional Japanese society. Payne also claimed

that black GIs found their masculine pride and ego more satisfied by Japanese than

American women. Compared with “too independent” American women, Payne claimed,

 

37 Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls,” Chicago Defender, November 1 1, 1950.

33 Ibid.

206

Japanese women “fetch your shoes, wash, cook, iron, and sew. ‘Keep quiet’ when you

want her to. Never talk back, laugh when you want her to.”39

Their gendered criticism of
“submissive” Japanese femininity, combined with their apparent competition and rivalry
with Japanese women, became a focal point among the African American women in
Japan for opposing interracial romance and marriage between black men and Japanese
women.

In summary, the representations of “submissive” Japanese women were central to
the black press coverage of the interracial intimacy and sexuality between African
American soldiers and Japanese women in occupied Japan. In Romance and Rights,
historian Alex Lubin argues that the politics of black/Japanese interracial intimacy in the
black press only confirmed the status of black men as “deserving patriarchs” of Asian
female submissiveness, while the same politics in Europe posited white women as the
judges of “black male desirability.”40 As Lubin points out the interrelation between
“female submissiveness” and “male patriarch” in the black-Japanese intimacies in
occupied Japan, African American soldiers claimed their right to patriarchal privileges
vis-a-vis submissive Japanese women. Thus, they aspired to achieve a masculinized and
sexualized sense of empowerment based on their national membership in the US.
occupational forces in Japan. However, the black press representation of black/Japanese
intimacies reflected more complicated, than Rubin mentions, dynamics of intraracial and

interracial gender and sexual politics in the triadic relationship between black men, black

women, and Japanese women. The trans-Pacific controversy on the black—Japanese

 

39 Ethel Payne, “Says Japanese Girls Playing Gls For Suckers: ‘Chocolate Joe’ Used, Amused, Confused,”
Chicago Defender, November 18, I950.

40 Alex Lubin, Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, I 945—1954 (Jackson: University
of Mississippi Press, 2005), 115-1 16.

207

intimacies became a transnational site of identity contestations over race, gender,
sexuality, and nation through which African American men and women on both sides of
the Pacific negotiated appropriate gender roles and behaviors in relation to Japanese
femininity. They appropriated or challenged the dominant gender and sexual norms of
the larger American society during this period. In Japan under US. military occupation,
African American men and women both employed the representations of “submissive”
Japanese women in gender-specific ways, so that they could reconfigure African
American gender politics and ideology for their own empowerment in the specific
context of the volatile intraracial gender relations between black men and women there.
Alex Lubin also contends that nonwhite women, including black women, were
excluded from the black newspaper and magazine representations of black GIs’ intimate
relationships with occupied women in Europe and Asia. He explains that the
masculinized black politics of GI interracial intimacy privileged European women over
nonwhite women and black men over black women.41 As he notes, African American
women were marginalized in the black press representations of interracial intimacies in
occupied Japan in that there was little coverage of their intimate relationships with
Japanese men in the black newspapers and magazines. However, Afiican American
women were not passive objects in the black press’s exclusive coverage of the interracial
intimacies between African American soldiers and Japanese women. Rather, African
American women who were stationed in Japan participated in the counter-hegemonic
discursive formations, when they defended their womanhood by resisting the negative

representations of black women in the black masculinist discourse of “submissive”

 

4' Ibid, 113.

208

Japanese women. African American women, especially those living in the US. played
more critical roles in shaping the trans-Pacific discourses of the black-Japanese intimate
relationships, as more Japanese brides of African American soldiers immigrated to the
US. and the controversy on the interracial intimacy and sexuality between Afiican
American GIS and Japanese women focused more on the issues of interracial marriage

and mixed-blood children than their romance outside the institution of marriage in Japan.

209

Chapter 8
Debating the Black-Japanese Intermarriage and Occupation Babies
in Trans-Pacific Black Communities

The trans-Pacific controversy on the intimate relationships between black GIs and
Japanese women attracted more attention from stateside African Americans especially
when issues of interracial marriage and mixed-blood, or half-black, half-Japanese
children were concerned.l While African American male soldiers and women who were
then stationed in occupied Japan or in Korea were major actors in the discursive
formations of the debate over the black-Japanese intimate relationships in black
newspapers and magazines, the black press more often highlighted the African American
men and women in the United States, especially the middle-class African American
discourse of intermarriage in their coverage of the marital dimension of interracial
intimacy and sexuality. The black newspaper and magazine coverage of black-Japanese
interracial marriage and occupation babies functioned as a discursive strategy for African
Americans to negotiate racial acceptance and national integration of the Japanese brides
of black G13 and their half-black, half-Japanese children into Afiican American
communities in the US. by reimagining the former “enemy” race and “unassimilable”
aliens as their national and racial allies in the postwar relationship between black
America and Japan.

In contrast to the strong oppositions against the interracial romance and marriage

between AfiiCan American soldiers and Japanese women widely found among the black

 

1 For the recent studies on Asian warbrides, see, for example, Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of
Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Regina
Frances Lark, “They Challenged Two Nations: Marriages between Japanese Women and American G13,
1945 to Present” (PhD. diss. University of Southern California, 1999); Gina Marchetti, Romance and the
‘Yellow Peril’: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993).

210

women who were stationed in occupied Japan, the news on the black-Japanese interracial
couples generally received more positive reactions from the larger African American
community in the U.S., especially from the stateside African American women. For
example, Mrs. Carey Noaldin in Philadelphia, in her letter to the Chicago Defender,
expressed her total approval of the black-Japanese interrnaniage as the “only solution” to
most of the problems of misunderstanding between races at the domestic and
international levels. Noaldin stated, “How else can a real understanding of peoples be
obtained except through so intimate a thing as marriage?” She also considered this case
of interracial marriage as less controversial because the “color” perspective was
subordinated in the intermarriage between the groups of “dark” people.2 Racial tolerance
toward the interracial marriage between black soldiers and Japanese women, like Noaldin,
was more typical than opposition in their coverage of the black newspapers and
magazines in the early 19503.

The stateside African American women and men, especially those with middle-
class backgrounds, debated the issue of black-Japanese intermarriage in light of the
dominant conservative gender and sexual norms of that period as well as in the historical
circumstances of the African American racial and sexual politics of interracial marriage
in the postwar America. In November 1950, the Pittsburgh Courier reported the
reactions of African American women in the US. to the issue of interracial marriage
between African American soldiers and Japanese women by drawing on its interviews of
scores of women nationwide. The article highlighted the generally tolerant attitude

toward the black-Japanese intermarriage among their interviewees, mostly women,

 

2 Chicago Defender, November 1 l, 1950.

211

arguing that “if our boys find love and romance in far off Japan, let them have it, is the
consensus.” There was some regional variation in their responses, however. In terms of
these differences, it suggested that the strongest opposition to the black-Japanese
intermarriage was found among black women in Atlanta, where the majority of them
thought it was “terrible! and awful” that African American men wanted permission to
marry Japanese girls. The article also highlighted the ambivalence among Afiican
American women in their expression of racial tolerance toward such interracial marriage:
“tolerance is rapidly taking the place of the former resentful attitude toward overseas girls,
even though the foreign girls are taking away the scarcest commodity in the US. market,
MEN.”3 African American women considered the interracial marriage between African
American men and Japanese women from a more gendered perspective as the problem of
interracial competition with Japanese women over black men as romantic partners, while
they reacted to the black-white interracial marriage in more racialized terms in light of
the long history of social taboos against their miscegenation in the United States.4

In the same article, the Pittsburgh Courier featured Nannie Helen Burroughs, the
president of the Women’s Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention, as a
representative view of the black-Japanese intermarriage among Afiican American women
in Washington DC. Born in Culpepper, Virginia in 1879, Burroughs assumed a
leadership role in the Women’s Auxiliary since its foundation in 1900 and raised gender

issues within the male-dominated black denomination. In Righteous Discontent: The

 

3 “Most American Women Say: ‘Let Gls Wed Japanese Girls?” Pittsburgh Courier, November 18, 1950.

4 For the Afiican American discourse of black-white interracial marriage in postwar America, see Renee C.
Romano, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (2003: repr., Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2006), esp. prologue and chap. 3; Alex Lubin, Romance and Rights: The Politics of
Interracial Intimacy, 1 945-1954 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), esp. chaps. 3-5.

212

Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (1993), historian Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham argues that “Burroughs, more than anyone else, embodied the
Baptist women’s independent spirit. Determined to maintain women’s autonomy, she led
the convention over a number of symbolic and real obstacles during the first two decades
of its existence.”5 Burroughs’ comments were representative of the gendered discourse
about interracial marriage that occurred among middle-class African American women in
the nation’s capital, while they reflected her sensitivity to gender and women’s issues in
the black politics of interracial intimacy. I

In the interview for the Pittsburgh Courier, Nannie Burroughs expressed her
opinion about the interracial marriage between black GIs and Japanese women in the
following way:

What would be the objection? It’s up to the couple; marriage is a personal
matter. If it is not forbidden by law in Japan, and the soldiers entered the Army
without knowledge of any restrictions on marriages of this kind, then the
question should not be raised at all. The world’s on fire... better that that fire be
put out first; then the race question will settle itself (my italics).6

Burroughs’ remark about the black-Japanese intermarriage was noteworthy, because
Burroughs was more critical of black-white interracial marriage. She elaborated by
suggesting that blacks “should pitch in and make the race worth belonging to instead of

”7 In her examination of black-white marriage

escaping into a race that is already made.
in postwar America, historian Renee C. Romano argues that many Afiican Americans

were “ambivalent” about their acceptance of interracial marriage in practice, while most

 

5 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women ’s Movement in the Black Baptist
Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 158-159.

6 “Most American Women Say: ‘Let Gls Wed Japanese Girls,” Pittsburgh Courier, November 18, 1950.

7 Nannie Burroughs, “Church Leader Argues against Mixed Marriage,” Ebony 6, no. 1 (November 1950):
51.

213

of them supported the right to intermarry in principle in the 1940s and 19505 in postwar
America. She also suggests that middle-class African Americans were most critical of
interracial marriage within black communities because of their class-specific investment
in the politics of respectability and the discourse of racial unity. On the one hand, as
Romano notes, Burroughs criticized the black-white intermarriage as a form of
assimilation into the dominant white American society and a lack of racial pride.8 On
the other hand, Burroughs was more tolerant of the black-Japanese intermarriage,
because she saw it less problematic and explosive than black-white one in terms of the
history of social taboos and legal prohibition/regulation of interracial sex and marriage in
the United States as well as the legality of their marriage in Japan.9 Burroughs did not
associate black-Japanese intimacies with the black-white interracial relationships which
evoked memories of the long history of sexual exploitation of black women by white

men.10 Moreover, she did not consider the African American GIs who married Japanese

 

8 Renee C. Romano argues that African American reactions to the interracial maniage between black and
white took class- and gender-specific forms in the 19405 and 19505 in postwar America. According to
Romano, interracial marriage was frowned upon especially among the black middle class. Blacks in the
middle class saw in light the politics of respectability the interracial relationships, especially black female-
white male relationships, as “disrespectful” or “immoral” for their historically sexualized connotations, or
perceived such relationships as a lack of black racial pride, while they cautioned themselves not to
reproduce the racist thinking in the whites’ intolerance of interracial marriage in their oppositions. Romano,
Race Mixing, chap. 3.

9 Anti-miscegenation statues which were originally enacted for targeting the white-black sexual relations
were eventually expanded to prohibit the interracial marriage between whites and “Mongolians,” which
included the people of Japanese descendants, in various states of the United States. Susan Koshy, Sexual
Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 3-12.

For the U.S. history of anti-miscegenation laws, see Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex,
Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003); Rachel F. Moran, Interracial
Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

'0 On the rape of black women by white men, see, for example, Deborah Gray White, Ar’n ’t I a Woman?:
Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999): Darlene
Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women: Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in
Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of A merican History (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994), 37-47: Nell lrvin Painter, “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost

214

women across a racial line as racial betrayal, because their marriage with the Japanese
did not promise them upward social mobility within the racial hierarchies in the dominant
white American society during that period.

Nannie Burroughs also drew on the middle-class racial and gender discourses of
the African American community in her public expression of approval of interracial
marriage between black soldiers and Japanese women. It is important to note that
Burroughs privatized the issue of black-Japanese intermarriage instead of politicizing,
when she considered marriage as a “personal matter,” or the problem of the individual’s
choice of partner. As Renee Romano points out, this was the major strategy of African
American civil rights leaders in their treatment of the issue of interracial marriage,
especially between blacks and whites during the period. Romano argues that prominent
African American leaders, by the late 19405, took a public position to “divorce the issue
of interracial marriage from the larger civil rights agenda,” so that they could reconcile
their interest to support the individual’s right to interrnarry with their need to refute their
opponent’s charges that they were advocating intermarriage. ‘1 Burroughs tried to
diminish the provocative racial and sexual implications of interracial marriage between
black soldiers and Japanese women with their privatization, especially for the African
American women who were concerned about their own marital prospects and
opportunities, in the larger racial political context of the black civil rights struggle in
postwar America. In addition, Burroughs invoked the middle-class politics of

“respectability” as well as the Cold War ideology of “domesticity” in her articulation to

 

Accounting,” in Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., U.S. History as
Women 's History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 125-146.

“ Romano, Race Mixing, 95-96.

215

contain the interracial couples within the institution of heterosexual marriage. As
Romano suggests, interracial relationships were frowned upon especially among the
middle-class African Americans, since “most took place outside the confines of
marriage.”12 Burroughs approved of interracial marriage as a more respectable form of
interracial relationships between black GIs and Japanese women than interracial intimacy
and sexuality formed outside the institution of marriage which clashed much the
dominant class and sexual standards of morality during the period.

African American newspapers and magazines sometimes highlighted the
instability of the international mixed-race unions that did not receive official approval
from the U.S. Army and the U.S. Consulate. Some articles reported that many of the GI-
Japanese marriages were religiously sanctioned in the Shinto services in occupied Japan
and they were not recognized by the American government. 0 Ralph Matthews, the
Baltimore Afio-American correspondent, stressed the “risky” status of these Shinto
marriages which were “little more than common law arrangements” in spite of their
social acceptance among the brides and families in Japan. Matthews pointed out that
these unions would be automatically terminated as American soldiers were returned to
the U.S., while their Japanese brides were left behind with their babies.” The Ebony
magazine article of March 1952 reported that most of the 6,000 American 615 who
married Japanese women since the relaxation of the U.S. prohibitions against occupation
marriage in Japan had “already been married in Shinto services,” because of the “honor-

conscious” Japanese families insisting on the Shinto wedding ceremony which “legalized

 

‘2 Ibid., 83.

'3 Ralph Matthews Sr., “Shinto Ceremony Very Popular: Mixed Marriages Thrive in Gl-Occupied Japan,”
Baltimore Afio—American, August 25, 1951.

216

the unions in Japanese eyes even when the Americans refused to recognize them.”14 It is
important to note that any reference to the racial composition in the figures about the
occupation marriage in Japan was missing from the reports in the black press, because the
U.S. Consulate did not keep such figures according to racial categorization any more.15

The African American press appealed for the U.S. legal sanction of the marriage
between African American GIS and Japanese women. It occasionally covered the
Japanese brides who were not permitted to enter the United States. In the article titled,
“Japanese Bride, GI Win Home,” Pittsburgh Courier reported the story of the former
Miyo Matsumoto, who was permitted temporarily to stay in the United States to visit her
husband Sgt. Alex Porche in Detroit with Mayumi, their daughter. According to the
article, Porche won his battle to have Mayumi recognized as an American citizen after
four years of struggle to have their marital status approved by the American Consul at
Yokohama. Unfortunately, Miyo failed to gain a U.S. citizenship and she was then
admitted to the U.S. only on a six-months visa.l6 Some black newspapers carried a story
about Mrs. Latonia Dickerson, the mother of Sergeant First Class Robert Dickerson who
was missing in action with the 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea. Mrs. Dickerson was
seeking assistance from several institutes to bring to the U.S. the former Mieko Oishi, her
daughter in law, and her two grandchildren, who was financially desperate after being

disowned by her family in Japan. The papers published the following letter which

Dickerson wrote in response to her “daughter,” who had expressed her desire to visit the

 

'4 “The Truth about Japanese War Brides: Negro Soldiers Learn to Admire Legendary Qualities of
Attractive Nippon Women,” Ebony 7, no. 5 (March 1952): 20.

'5 Matthews, “Shinto Ceremony Very Popular,” Baltimore Afro-American, August 25, 1951.

'6 “With Little Daughter: Japanese Bride, GI Win Home,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 8, I952.

217

United States with her children: “You and the children are the only ties I have left with
my son. I want you to come to America. I will do everything in my power to help you
get here.”17 The black press appealed to its readers for their support of the cause of those
troubled Japanese brides of African American soldiers. Such appeal attracted interest and
sympathy for those couples and shed light on the precarious situations concerning the
occupation marriage in Japan and the battle for legal sanction of the international unions
between American GIs and Japanese women.

In the early 19503, major black newspapers and magazines published follow-up
articles on the lives of Japanese brides of African American soldiers after more were
admitted into the United States. The press stories focused on the ethnic identity of the
Japanese brides and their acculturation into the American way of life. Under the
subheading titled, “Japanese War Brides Adjust Very Easily to Western Civilization,” an
Ebony article in March 1952 explained that “in a wedding involving so many vastly
different cultures, a great number of adjustments have to be made and the Japanese bride
does most of the adjusting.” The article reported the contested process in which Japanese
brides were accommodating their own cultural differences from their African American
husbands so that they could adjust themselves into the American way of life ranging from
sleeping styles, table manners to courtships in their interracial marital lives in occupied
J apan.18 The black newspapers and magazines reported on the continuing process of their

acculturation in the U.S., as Japanese brides negotiated their ethnic identities in their

 

'7 Lois Austin, “Missing Yank’s Mother Begs U.S. For His Children, Japanese Wife,” Chicago Defender,
December 2, I950; “Gl’s Mother Wants Tots, Japanese Wife in America,” Baltimore Afro-American,
December 9, I950.

18 “The Truth About Japanese War Brides,” Ebony 7, no. 5 (March 1952): 24.

218

daily encounters with the material and cultural life of the American civilization. They
mastered English, learned American cooking in a modernized kitchen, and enjoyed
American popular entertainment such as movies and dancing.”

The African American press paid close attention to the reactions to the coming of
the Japanese brides of black soldiers within Afiican American communities. Moreover,
the African American press sometimes shed light on racial prejudice among the Japanese
which was shown in their attitude toward the Japanese women who married African
American soldiers either in Japan or in the U.S. Some articles referred to the conflicts,
ruptures, and tensions that occurred between Japanese brides and their families who
opposed marriage with American GIs in general, and with black soldiers in particular.20
An Ebony article in January 1953 attested to the existence of racial distance between
Japanese brides living in the U.S. according to the race of their American husbands. It
reported that there was “no mixing” between the Japanese brides who married black
. soldiers and those who married white soldiers in Indianapolis, Indiana in accordance with
the existing color line.21

There were several positive articles that highlighted the cordial welcomes which

Japanese brides of Afiican American soldiers received from black families and relatives.

 

19 W. A. Reed Jr., “WO, Japanese Bride Spend Yule in U.S.: lntemational Nuptial Knot Sparks Nashville,
Tenn., Family Reunion,” Baltimore Afro-American, January 5, 1952; “3-Year Courtship in Japan:
Baltimore GI, Tokyo Bride Find Love Is All Languages,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 26, 1952; “The
Loneliest Brides in America: Japanese Brides of Negro Soldiers Find Friendships Hard to Make in New,
Strange World in U. S., ” Ebony 8, no. 3 (January 1953): 20.

20 For example, Baltimore Afro-American reported that the father of Etsuko Yonamoto, who had visited the
United States as a Japanese merchant marine before World War II, at first “refused to consent to his
daughter’s marriage to a colored man,” although Sgt. First Class Emanuel Lewis, her husband, successfully
won his heart by the time of their marriage. “3-Year Courtship in Japan,” Baltimore Afio—American, April
26, I952.

2' “The Loneliest Brides in America,” Ebony 8, no. 3 (January 1953): 17-18.

219

For example, Ethel Payne, who was then working as a Chicago Defender correspondent
in the U.S., reported the story of Michiko Hashimoto who was “warmly welcomed” into
their home by her husband Sgt. Solomon Douglas’s uncle and his wife in Chicago, who
had “spared no effort to make the bride feel at home in a new land.22 Still, adjustment for
the Japanese brides could prove to be difficult, such as the social isolation they
experienced within African American communities as well as in the larger American
society. Under the dramatic title, “The Loneliest Brides in America,” an Ebony article in
January 1953 revealed that the Japanese war brides of African American soldiers living
in Indianapolis, Indiana found it hard to make friendships in a “new, strange world in
U.S.” where they had “not yet been freely accepted in Negro communities” and were also
avoided in white communities as the “wives of Negroes.” It reported that those Japanese
brides socialized only in a small world of Japanese girls married to black Americans and
had few social interactions with the Japanese girls married to white Americans living
there. Many factors contributed to the social isolation of Japanese brides within African
American communities. The article pointed out that “one of the most baffling barriers
between the Japanese wives and the Negro women of America is that of language. Few
of these most lonesome brides have become glib in English. Most speak a soft-voiced
but weird, omelette of basic English peppered with G1 slang.”23 In its treatment of the

isolation problem of the Japanese brides in black communities, the Ebony magazine

 

22 Ethel Payne, “New Year’s Holds Sad Memories for Japanese Bride in Chicago,” Chicago Defender,
December 29, 1951. Other articles which focused on the cordial reception of Japanese brides within
African American communities include the following: Ethel Payne, “Sgt. Japanese Wife Given Warm
Welcome,” Chicago Defender, March 15, 1952; W. A. Reed Jr., “Wo, Japanese Bride Spend Yule in U.S.,”
Baltimore Afro-American, January 5, I952.

23 “The Loneliest Brides in America,” Ebony 8, no. 3 (January I953): 19.

220

stressed cultural barriers, rather than racial difference, as the major factor which
prevented the formation of interracial friendships between Japanese brides and Afiican
American women.

The Ebony magazine article elicited many reactions from readers throughout the
nation, most of whom were sympathetic to the loneliness of the Japanese brides in the
United States from a more racialized perspective. Some African American women
expressed their sympathetic view toward the Japanese brides and even suggested making
friends with them as pen pals, by drawing on the shared experience of social isolation
which they experienced in their relationships with their neighbors or as wives of army
career man.24 Gladys Durham, a reader from Augusta, Georgia wrote as her advice to the
Japanese warbrides: “Keep your chin up and face this thing bravely for we often are
shunned by in-laws and friends of our husbands and we are of the same race (my
italics).”25 Durham expressed her acceptance of the racial membership of the Japanese
brides in black communities as wives of African American men, whom she found
commonality with them in their racial and gendered experience in the U.S.

In comparison with the deracialized treatment of the issue in the article, some
readers were more critical of the racial attitude toward the Japanese brides on the part of
African Americans. R. D. Pitrnan, Jr., a reader from Altoona, Pennsylvania called for
Afiican Americans to be “patient” and “understanding” toward the Japanese brides who

were learning American ways. He bluntly declared that the “Negroes should be the last

 

24 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 5 (March 1953): 6-7; Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 6 (April
1953): 9.

25 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 6 (April 1953): 9.

221

persons to look down on anyone.” 26

Edward A. Coble, who had been previously
stationed for two and a half years in Japan as a member of the U.S. Navy, harshly
criticized the “intolerant” and “unfriendly” treatment of the Japanese brides by African
Americans as “un-American.” Coble was concerned about the effect of their “cool
reception” from the African Americans in the U.S. on the relationship between black
soldiers and Japanese women in Japan, where many people believed that “Negroes would

”27 The diverse opinions shown in

be the last to discriminate against Japanese warbrides.
these letters to the editor revealed that Afiican Americans responded to the issue of
Japanese brides in highly racialized as well gendered terms. In contrast, the Ebony
magazine editor tried to downplay the racial dimension of the black-Japanese marriage by
stressing the ethnicity of the Japanese brides.

The African American press continued focusing on the gender attitudes of the
Japanese brides toward their black husbands in its coverage of their interracial marital
relations during and immediately after the U.S. military occupation of Japan. Ebony
magazine’s 1952 article, “The Truth About Japanese War Brides,” highlighted the
“legendary qualities of attractive Nippon women,” by quoting the following remark as
representative of the African American soldiers in occupied Japan: “Man, try to find a
girl on Seventh Avenue that is as kind and sweet and appreciative as these little mooses.

They appreciate the least little thing you do for them.”28 In response to this article which

implicitly critiqued black womanhood in comparison with the more “appreciative”

 

26 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 5 (March 1953): 6.
27 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 6 (April 1953): 8-9.

28 “The Truth About Japanese War Brides,” Ebony 7, no. 5 (March 1952): I7.

222

Japanese women, some African American women, like Nellie Hand, a married reader
from Milwaukee, agreed and wrote that she considered it as a “plain admission of guilt on
the part of the Negro women neglecting to be good wives and companions to their
husbands.”29 Other African American women, especially single ones, rejected the black
masculinist bias in its idealized representation of Japanese women. Ethel Jones, a reader
from Vallejo, California countered that “there are some of us that are more kind and
considerate than those Japanese girls... a lot of American girls that could make good
wives to service men, but you’ll only know by giving them a chance.”30 Sara A. Trower,
another black single woman from Pittsburgh, blamed Afiican American GIs, instead of
Japanese women, for their preference for interracial marriage in Japan: “I have nothing
against the Japanese girls. But I do think that our fellows should give us a chance... try
looking around you with your eyes open and respect and decency in your heart.”31 In
contrast with the African American women stationed in Japan who. targeted the
submissive Japanese women in their opposition to interracial romance and marriage there,
the stateside Afiican American women questioned the gender attitudes on the part of
African American men, who idealized Japanese women just for their appreciative
characters while they devalued black women without any sincere concern about the virtue
of black womanhood.

For the African American women living in the U.S., who were less critical and
more tolerant of the gender attitudes of Japanese women than those stationed in Japan,

their participation in the debate over the Japanese brides gave them a chance to negotiate

 

29 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 7, no. 9 (July 1952): l 1.
30 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 7, no. 7 (May 1952): 6-7.

3] Letters to the Editor, Ebony 7, no. 8 (June I952): 8.

223

their own gender consciousness in relation to the much lauded Japanese femininity and
superior womanhood. As black newspapers had done in their coverage of interracial
intimacies between black soldiers and Japanese women in occupied Japan, Ebony
magazine highlighted the antagonism between African American women and Japanese
brides over the latter’s subservient attitudes toward African American men in the United
States. Under the subheading titled, “Japanese Girls Treat Husbands like Their ‘Masters’
in Home,” the Ebony article in January 1953 argued that “some U.S. Negro women
accuse the Japanese brides of ‘spoiling our men’ and are hostile to them.” It reported that
one Japanese bride, who was discovered in sight of her neighbors greeting her husband
on “bended knees” to welcome him home just as her mother had been doing to her father
in Japan, “embarrassed her husband and made her Negro women neighbors accuse her of
‘spoiling our men.’”32 Over the issue of whether Japanese brides were “spoiling” their
black men through their excessive show of deference and devotion to their husbands,
some African American female readers of Ebony magazine emphasized the cultural
difference. One reader from Columbus, South Carolina, whose pen name was Mrs. E. B.
B., stated that “as for the customs towards their husband—these women were taught this
just as we were taught many American customs. If more of our women would try
‘spoiling’ their husbands, they, too, will be happy as these women are.”33 Even more
positively, Letha M. Wade, a reader from Philadelphia confessed, “I felt neither envy nor

hostility toward these young women—rather I envied their husbands!”34 Other African

 

32 “The Loneliest Brides in America,” Ebony 8, no. 3 (January 1953): 23.
33 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 5 (March 1953): 6.

34 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 6 (April 1953): 8.

224

American women praised the Japanese brides’ devotion to their black husbands as an
exemplar of womanhood which black wives, too, could emulate in their marital
relationships. Janie C. Butts, a reader from Philadelphia claimed: “1 am a Negro woman
myself, and I have a deep feeling of admiration for these women who have the spirit and
courage to defy the world in letting it know of their deep love and devotion they have for
their husbands.”35 These generally positive responses of black women to the reported
subservient attitudes of the Japanese brides toward their black husbands indicated how
African American women employed the dominant representation of the Japanese brides
in gender-specific ways so that they could negotiate their gender identity and roles within
the parameters, boundaries, and confinements of the domestic imperatives during the
early Cold War period. But, those African American women were unwittingly complicit
in the maintenance of patriarchal privileges among their men, when they praised the
submissive femininity of Japanese brides as an exemplary womanhood. They did so
leaving the history of Japanese patriarchy unexamined as a critical pretext for this
submissive gender attitude.

In addition to the interracial marriage between African American soldiers and
Japanese women, African American newspapers and magazines paid attention to the
problem of the mixed-blood occupation babies, especially the fates of the half-black,
half-Japanese children in Japan. On the one hand, the African American press tended to
stress their illegitimacy and the miserable conditions which children of mixed parentage
faced in occupied Japan. Observing the foundling children of Japanese mothers and

American GI fathers at the Elizabeth Saunders Home in Oiso, Japan, the Ebony article in

 

35 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 5 (March 1953): 7.

225

September 1951 stated: “The tragedy of the forlorn tots in these homes is one of the most
woeful and deplorable in the world today. It is a story of wholesale abandonment of
children not only by their mothers but by an entire nation as well as by the occupying
army which created the problem.”36 Some article in the black press focused on the racist
attitudes on the part of Japanese society toward the mixed-blood children, whether they
were half-black or half-white. The same Ebony magazine article highlighted the
prejudice against race-mixing among the “full-blooded” Japanese, regardless of color in
miscegenation: “Because the Japanese people are as race-minded as Georgia whites, the
children of the conquerors are already feeling the cruelty of race prejudice.”37 The article
was pessimistic about the future of those mixed-blood youngsters in Japan because of
racism against them, claiming that “all of the children unconsciously absorb some hope
of coming to America” at the Saunders Home.38 Another article, published in the Norfolk
Journal and Guide in January 1951, stated that there was “no place in Japan for ‘super-
colored’ babies,” where the child of mixed parents would be teased by other Japanese
whether he was blonde or his hair was “too curly or his skin too dark.” The article also
reported a shocking news story that some Japanese mothers of half-black children
switched their babies: “At a public bath house a mother placed her baby in a sunny place

and went back to finish her bath. She returned in five minutes and found a colored baby

 

36 “War Babies of Japan: Shunned and Deserted, More Than 2,000 Racially-Mixed Youngsters Face Tragic
Future,” Ebony 7, no. 10 (September 1951): 15.

37 Ibid., 17.

38 Ibid., 18.

226

in its place.”39 These articles impressed onto the consciousness of African American
readers across the Pacific the strong nationalist racial stigma which was attached to the
mixed—blood occupation children and their mothers, while they downplayed the racial
hierarchies in the Japanese racist attitude toward those children in order to stress the
Japanese abhorrence of miscegenation in the context of the U.S. military occupation of
Japan.

The African American press also blamed the U.S. government and American
society for the problem of the mixed-blood children in occupied Japan, while it criticized
the lack of policy on the part of the Japanese government and the racist attitudes among
the Japanese toward them. Milton A. Smith, the National Negro Press Association
correspondent, asserted that the “Japanese government makes little if any provision for
the care of these Occupation born youngsters and the Americans would rather think they

did not exist.”40

The unwillingness on the part of the U.S. government to intervene in the
problem of these occupation babies in Japan was revealed by the Norfolk Journal and
Guide, which reported that some American families were not allowed to bring the half-
Japanese children whom they had adopted in Japan to the U.S., because of the
immigration regulation which required the consent of both of their parents in the
admission of the intemationally-adopted children. The Guide articles took up the case of

Clinton and Gwendolyn Coles, who were seeking congressional relief for Gregory, a

half-black, half-Japanese three-year-old son whom they had adopted from an orphanage

 

3‘9 Milton A. Smith, “Countless ‘Brown Babies’ Face Gloomy Future In Japan: Both Parents Ofien Forsake
Illegitimates: Government Makes Little Provisions For GI Offspring,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, January
6, I951.

40 Ibid.

227

in Kobe. But their appeal for the special Act of Congress concerning the relief for
Gregory was blocked by Mississippi Representative John M. Rankin, who protested that
such bills would cause a flood of “um-American elements” and would be “destroying our
immigration laws.”4| In response to the article on the “war babies” in Japan which was
published in Ebony, Catherine Daniels, a reader from Miami, appealed to the national
responsibility on the part of Americans for the problem of the mixed-blood babies in
Japan:

Why doesn’t our government do something about their situation? After all, our
soldiers were the direct cause of the tragedy. Then why, when we spend billions
of dollars helping our so-called allied nation, can’t we provide some type of
institution for these children whereby they may grow up with the feeling that
they ‘belong,’ instead of being frustrated human beings?

The African American press played an important role in raising national as well as racial
consciousness among its readers about the problem of half-American, half-Japanese
children in Japan by intemationalizing as well as racializing the issue, when it
underscored the burden of responsibility which Americans, regardless of race, shared
with the Japanese for those mixed-blood children who resulted fi'om the miscegenation in
the context of the U.S. military occupation of Japan.

On the other hand, the Afiican American press extensively reported the trans-
Pacific commitments, both in the U.S. and Japan, to the problems of the mixed-blood
children in occupied Japan. The coverage of the half-black, half-Japanese children in the

black press suggests that some of those orphans were adopted or in the process of

 

4' Ralph Matthews, “Future of Brown Baby in Japan Depends on An Act of Congress: Adopted Son
Problem For Army Couple: Returning Sergeant And Wife May Not Be Allowed Baby,” Norfolk Journal
and Guide, September 22, I951; “Rankin Blocks Bill To Admit Japanese Child,” Norfolk Journal and
Guide, October 6, I951.

42 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 7, no. 12 (November 1951): 6.

228

adoption by some African American soldiers in Japan, in addition to the case of the Coles
discussed above.43 Some readers in the U.S. expressed their interest in adoption of these
occupation babies, like Mrs. W. V. Inctaw from Richmond, Virginia who wrote to the
editor of Afro-American that “I would love to have a little colored Japanese girl in my
home to care for.”44 Lora D. James, an Ebony reader from Dallas, Texas proposed the
international adoption of those babies by Americans as a possible solution to the problem
of mixed-blood children in occupied Japan: “I wish it was so they (mixed children in
Japan) could be over here. I would love to adopt one and I feel that if anyone feels as I
do, there would be lots of the babies adopted. I hope some day all of the children will be
able to come to America.”45 In response to the lack of policy toward them on the parts of
both the U.S. and Japanese governments, these black readers suggested the possibility of
national integration of these half-black, half-Japanese children into American society by
adopting and raising them as Americans.

The black newspapers and magazines highlighted various interracial and
international social activities which were developing at the grassroots level for the
welfare of the mixed-blood children in occupied Japan. Several articles published by the
black press focused on the critical role of Miki Sawada, who established in Oiso in 1947
an orphanage named the Elizabeth Saunders Home to foster the half-American, half-

Japanese children abandoned by their mothers, in the internationalization of the problem

 

43 “Babies Of Colored Veterans In Japan Face Bleak Future,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, January 13,
I951; “He’s Going to Be Adopted,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 3, 1951; “Aids Japanese Orphans,”
Pittsburgh Courier, April 19, 1952.

44 Baltimore Afro—American, February 17, I951.

45 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 7, no. 1 (December 195 l ): 8.

229

of mixed-blood children in occupied Japan.46 The black press also reported on some
African American individuals and groups which supported the activities or management
of the orphanages caring for the mixed-blood children in Japan in various forms.
According to the article published in the Pittsburgh Courier in December 1950, the
Golden Dragon Club, the black enlisted men’s club through which Afiican American
soldiers made a monthly monetary contribution to the home, was the “biggest and most
consistent donor” to the Lourdes Baby Home in Yokohama. The same article suggested
that the Elizabeth Saunders Home had been “practically adopted by the Twentieth-fourth
Regiment,” whose members frequently visited there to play with the children when they
were in camp near the home and they continued sending money to it monthly while
fighting in Korea.47 In their coverage of black philanthropy for the half-black children in
Japan, Joe Louis, the former heavyweight champion, was the most featured person in the
black newspapers and magazines for his charitable activities during his stay in Japan in
December 1951. Louis donated 54,000 yen, which he had earned in his exhibition bouts
there, to the orphanages in Tokyo area, split evenly between the Elizabeth Saunders

48

Home and the Lourdes Baby Home. The Jet magazine article highlighted Lewis

 

46 “War Babies of Japan,” Ebony 7, no. 10 (September 1951): 15-18, 21-22; Smith, “Countless ‘Brown
Babies’ Face Gloomy Future In Japan,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, January 6, 1951; Frank Whisonant,
“Brown Babies OK in Japan,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 2, 1950; “Japanese ‘Foster Mother’ Arrives
In U.S.,” Jet 2, no. 22 (September 25, I952): 15. On Miki Sawada and the Elizabeth Saunders Home, see
Robert A. Fish, “The Heiress and the Love Children: Sawada Miki and the Elizabeth Saunders Home for
Mixed-Blood Orphans in Postwar Japan” (PhD. diss. University of Hawaii, 2002).

47 Whisonant, “Brown Babies OK in Japan,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 2, 1950.

48 “Japanese Welcome Warms Joe’s Heart,” Baltimore Afro-American, December I, 1951; Ralph
Matthews, “Louis Presents 54,000 Yen To Tokyo Orphanage,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, December 22,
195]; Ralph Matthews, “Louis On Way Back To U.S.: Still No Decision About Ring Future,” Baltimore
Afro-American, December 22, 1951; “Children In Japan Cheered By Joe Louis,” Norfolk Journal and
Guide, January 5, I952.

230

meeting with four half-black, half-Japanese orphans of the Elizabeth Saunders Home,
who visited his hotel in Tokyo, accompanied by Miki Sawada, their foster mother to
thank him for his donation to the home (See Figure 8.1).49 Featuring the transnational
dimensions in the issue of occupation babies in Japan, the coverage in the black press
gave Afiican American readers the opportunities to imagine and forge the trans-Pacific
community of interracial and international collaborations between African Americans
and some Japanese people based on their shared humanitarian and egalitarian interest in
the welfare of the half-black, half-Japanese children.

In summary, the black press representations of the interracial marriage between
African American men and Japanese women and their mixed blood children became an
international site of identity contestations through which African American men and
women renegotiated national identity, race consciousness, and gender and sexual norms.
They grappled with the terms of racial acceptance and national integration of the
Japanese brides and their half-black, half-Japanese children into the African American
communities in the U.S. The controversy on the black-Japanese interracial marriage
functioned in some ways as a touchstone for the African Americans to test their racial
tolerance in the larger context of the postwar African American struggle for the right to
interrnarry, especially with white Americans. The black press representations of
“submissive” Japanese brides of African American soldiers gave the stateside African
American women the opportunities to reconfigure the gender relations with their black

husbands within the boundaries of a conservative gender and sexual norm which was

 

‘9 “A Visit of Thanks,” Jet 1, no. 12 (January '7» 1952)‘ 35-

231

 

and Four Black-Japanese

iki Sawada,

rs,

Joe Lou'

“A Visit of Thanks”:

1.

8

Figure

the Elizabeth Saunders Home

Orphans

1952

3

, January 17

Jet

Source'

232

pervasive both in the larger American society and in African American communities in
the early 19503.

The African American press invested in the discursive practice which historian
Christina Klein calls the “Cold War Orientalism” in its representations of the Japanese
brides of African American soldiers and their biracial children. The black newspapers
and magazines were instrumental in the production of the racialized discourse of U.S.-
Japanese “integration,” both in domestic and international context, by featuring the
potential Americanization of the Japanese women and their half-Japanese children, those
who belonged to the race which had been discursively and legally constructed as
“unassimilable aliens” ineligible for U.S. citizenship.50 Historian Mae M. Ngai contends
that the Immigration Act of 1924 was instrumental in the legal constitution of “Asian” as
a distinct racial category upon which Japanese, as well as Chinese and Asian Indians,
were excluded from immigration as aliens who were racially ineligible for U.S.
citizenship.“ Placing more focus on the possibility of the national integration and
cultural assimilation of Japanese brides and their half-Japanese children into American
society than the racist dimension of Japanese society in their coverage of the black-
Japanese intermarriage and mixed-blood children, the black newspapers and magazines

played critical roles. In the word of Naoko Shibusawa, the black press was crucial in

 

50 Christina Klein argues that middlebrow intellectuals and Washington policymakers produced a
“sentimental discourse of integration that imagined the forging of bonds between Asians and Americans
both at home and abroad” in their discursive strategy which she calls the “Cold War Orientalism.”
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, I945-I961 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 16.

51 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 1. For the legal construction of the racial “unassimilability”
of the Japanese, see also Ian F. Haney L6pez, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York:
New York University Press, 1996).

233

“reimagining the Japanese enemy” among the stateside Afiican American men and
women.52 The discursive constructions of the “assimilable” Japanese brides and their
half-Japanese children in the black press functioned as an ideological vehicle for African
Americans to globally renegotiate national, racial, and gender identities in the postwar
transformations of international relationship between the U.S. and Japan during the early

Cold War period.

 

52 Naoko Shibusawa examines the “remarkable reversal from hated racial enemy to valuable ally” in the
postwar images of the Japanese in American public discourse in the broader political and ideological
context of the domestic changes in race and gender relations as well as the emergence of the U.S. as a
“global power” confronting the Communism afier World War II. Shibusawa, America ’s Geisha Ally, 4.

234

Chapter 9
Race, Blackness, and Miscegenation in Japanese Culture
during the U.S. Military Occupation

A substantial amount of interracial sexual interactions between American male
soldiers and Japanese women occurred in various situations in occupied Japan, despite
the Super Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP)’s nonfraterrrization policies.1 The
sexual relationships between American GIs and Japanese women, which took both
intimate and exploitive forms, were always perceived by the Japanese as well as
American occupiers as a tri-racial phenomenon among whites, blacks, and the Japanese.
The Japanese experience of everyday, direct interactions with a large number of
American soldiers, either black or white, in the specific historical context of the U.S.
military occupation of Japan was influential in the process in which the Japanese
reinforced, reconfigured, and complicated their racial perception of blackness, as well as
whiteness, within the boundaries of modern Japanese racial ideology and practice.

As anthropologist John G. Russell points out, Japan has a long tradition of the
derogatory representation of the “black Other” since its early contact with Afiican and

East Indian servants who came to Japanese ports accompanied by Portuguese and Dutch

 

I The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) initially adopted the non-fratemization policy
between American GIS and the Japanese in its military occupation of Japan. The SCAP prohibited all
mention of interracial fraternization between the Japanese and Americans in the Japanese media under the
November 26, I946, directive. Historian Yukiko Koshiro suggests that the SCAP banned any discussion of
the interracial interaction between American GIS and Japanese women, which could be interpreted as
“having sexual connotations,” because “such liaisons could both provoke Japanese racial hatred against
whites and ridicule American authority.” SCAP had already launched the policy to prohibit any mention of
race and racism in the Japanese media, particularly Japanese criticism of American racism, so that it could
contain Japanese racial identity as the “colored” and maintain American authority as an occupation force.
The SCAP’s nonfratemization policies continued in occupied Japan until it began to remove them to
nurture a more fiiendly relationship between Americans and Japanese in a series of cultural programs in the
historical context of the growing danger of Communism since around the year of 1948. Yukiko Koshiro,
T rans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999),
62-66, 70-81.

235

traders in the 16th and 17th centuries. Russell argues that “Euro-American supremacy”
was central to the modern construction of the racial hierarchy in the Japanese ideology.
According to him, the Japanese tended to employ the “black Other” as a “reflexive
symbol,” through which they attempted to negotiate their own ambiguous racial and
cultural identity in the Eurocentric world. The Japanese as Asians occupied a “liminal”
state in the Western racio-cultural dichotomy between “European Culture and
Civilization” and “Afiican Barbarity and Savagery.”2

This chapter examines how the postwar Japanese reconstructed their racial
perception of blackness in highly sexualized terms thorough their experience of the
widespread interracial sexual interactions between blacks soldiers and Japanese women
during the occupation period, combined with their encounter with the stateside racism
which white American soldiers brought there, as well as the preexisting Japanese racial
images of blacks. It argues that Japanese men and women articulated the gendered sense
of national honor, racial homogeneity, and the sexual anxiety over the presence of the
U.S. occupation force in their reactions to the widespread intimate and sexual
relationships between black GIs and Japanese women. The interracial relationships
between black men and Japanese women developed through various circumstances of the
sexual encounters and interactions in occupied Japan, which included the sexual violence,
either in real or imaginary, against Japanese women by GIs, Japan’s comfort women
system, interracial marriage, and mixed-blood children.

The historical memories of the Japanese encounters with Afiican American

soldiers in their local communities during the U.S. military occupation took gendered

 

2 John G. Russell, “Race and Reflexivity: The Black Other in Contemporary Japanese Mass Culture,”
Cultural Anthropology 6, no. l (1991): 5-6.

236

forms in some ways. Several local Japanese men in Gifu revealed their vivid sense of
fear and panic when they heard the news of the invasions of the occupation troops into
their communities. The rumors of the possible occurrences of physical or sexual violence
by GIs encouraged them to make the local women and children escape as far way as
possible into mountainous areas for their safety.3 Some local Japanese attested to the
tendency to criminalize African American soldiers in the popular memories of their
encounter with American GIs in their communities. One of them recalled that his father
frankly expressed his racial prejudice against black soldiers when the father instructed his
mother to hide in the attic by saying, “Niggers (kurombo) are coming. Women will be all
raped by them.”4

The most shocking experience for Japanese men, which clearly reminded them of
the masculinized humiliation of the defeated nation, was the widespread intimate and
sexual relationships which occurred between Japanese women and American soldiers in
the local communities surrounding Camp Gifu. One Japanese man recalled that he often
encountered the “indecent” (midareta) behaviors between “big” (okina) American GIs
and Japanese prostitutes, who were called “pan pans,” in his way to the elementary
school and that Japanese children played with the condoms which were carelessly
dropped on the roadsides.5 He revealed the sense of powerlessness vis-a-vis American

soldiers in their sexual control of the Japanese women among the local Japanese men:

 

3 Kagamigahara-shi senji kiroku henshr’r iinkai, ed., Kagamigahara shimin no senji taiken: heiwa na 21seiki
wo mezashite [Wartime Experience of the People in Kagamigahara: Toward the Peaceful 21" Century]
(Kagamigahara: Kagamigahara-shi kyoiku iinkai, 1996), 243-244, 264, 266.

4 Ibid., 266.

5 Ibid., 269.

237

“We deepened our sense of “misery” (mijimesa) as the defeated nation, when we found
the increase in sexual immorality in our community and saw the loudly-dressed Japanese
women walking in town with their arms crossed with American GIs.”6
Another Japanese man, named Minagawa, clearly drew on his racial prejudice
against blacks in his expression of the indignation against American soldiers. Minagawa
stated that he was “shocked speechlessly” (nantomo ienai kimochi) to encounter several
black soldiers walking around his community. He mentioned implicitly the deep
involvement of Afiican American soldiers in the frequent incidents of rape of Japanese
women.7 Several local Japanese men, as well as women, attested to the visibility of
African American soldiers in their memories of interracial fraternities between American
GIs and Japanese women and their biracial children as well as the popular association
between black GIs and sexual violence.8 The Japanese men in Gifu felt their national and
racial subjectivities feminized by their powerlessness against the sexual incursions of
Japanese women by Americans soldiers in their local communities. The visibility of
black soldiers, the most highly racialized “others” of the former enemy nation, in the
landscape of interracial fraternization in occupied Japan reinforced the sense of national
humiliation and emasculation among the Japanese men, because of their powerlessness
vis-a-vis American soldiers in terms of their sexual control of the Japanese women.

At the end of World War 11, before the influx of the U.S. occupation troops into

Japan, comfort stations for American GIs were set up to protect Japanese women and

 

6 Ibid.

7 Kagamigahara-shi, ed., Kagamigahara shimin no senji taiken [The Wartime Experience of People in
Kagamigahara] (Kagamigahara: Kagamigahara-shi, I996), 12.

8 Kagamigahara-shi senji kiroku henshfi i inkai, ed., Kagamigahara shimin no senji taiken, 266, 268, 277.

238

girls from their sexual violence, at the initiative of the Japanese government. The Special
Comfort Facilities Association, which was soon renamed as the Recreation and
Amusement Association (RAA), was founded as an organization to provide sexual and
other recreational services for occupation soldiers on August 23, 1945. From the time
that Komachi Garden, the first RAA brothel opened for business on August 28, Japan’s
comfort women system continued its operation for about seven months, until the SCAP
declared all RAA facilities off-limits as of March 27, 1946 because of the rapid rise in
venereal disease among the occupation force. The comfort women system was
established to serve as a “female floodwall” to protect “respectable” women from rape or
other sexual crimes committed by occupation soldiers. The RAA recruited comfort
women primarily from a group of Japanese women who had been engaged in the sex
industry or the amusement and entertainment trades, including geishas, licensed and
unlicensed prostitutes, waitresses, barrnaids, and illicit prostitutes.9 In addition to the
protection of the “virtue” of Japanese women, the protection of the “purity” of the
Yarnato race (Japanese race) was another crucial cause of the establishment of Japan’s
comfort women system. Historian Yukiko Koshiro explains this plan of creating
“segregated” comfort facilities exclusively for foreign occupation troops as an
“antifratemization project” on the part of the Japanese government. 10 The Japanese
participants in the RAA, including prostitutes and male staff, perceived this comfort
women system for the occupiers from a racial perspective, and they paid special attention

to the racial differences between white and black soldiers whom they served.

 

9 Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US
Occupation (New York: Routledge, 2002), 133-166; Michael S. Molasky, The American Occupation of
Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1999), IOI-l 15.

lo Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 69.

239

Race and racism characterized the construction of Japan’s comfort women system
for occupation soldiers through the interplay of RAA and the American General
Headquarters (GHQ). Mitsuru Yosano, the head of Tokyo MetrOpolitan government’s
hygiene department, was summoned by GHQ in the latter part of September 1945.
Yosano was asked to help it allocate the prostitutes into districts to be separately reserved
for white and black soldiers. Colonel surgeon Bruce Gordon, who was in charge of VD
prevention among the occupation forces, anticipated the racial conflicts which would
occur by racially mixing white and black soldiers at the comfort facilities. It was decided
that in Tokyo, the comfort facilities in the districts of licensed prostitution (Yoshiwara,
Senju, and Shinagawa etc.) were designated for use only by white soldiers and those in
the areas of unlicensed prostitution (Mukojima, Kameido, and Suzaki etc.) were reserved
exclusively for black enlisted men. The rumor about the Japanese prostitutes who had
served black soldiers at RAA brothels spread so widely and quickly among the white
enlisted men that they could never access the patronage of white soldiers. ”

The comfort facilities for the U.S. troops were racially segregated in local cities
surrounding the U.S. military and navy bases, too. According to the testimony of Ms. K
(anonymous), who was a comfort woman at the RAA brothel in Shintenchi, Yokohama,
the facility was divided across the corridor into the rooms for use only by white soldiers
and the ones only for black soldiers. In her memory, white soldiers did not want to have

sex with the Japanese prostitutes who had slept with black soldiers, so there were two

 

H John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 1999), 130; Masayo Duus, Makkasa no futatsu no boshi: tokushu shisetsu RAA wo meguru

senryé-shi no sokumen [Two Hats of MacArthur: One Facet of Occupation History Concerning the RAA
Special Comfort Station] (Tokyo: Kodansha, I985), 19, I92.

240

groups of Japanese comfort women at the RAA brothels: those who specialized in the sex
with white men and those with black men. The former was called “shiro (white) pan”
and the latter was “kuro (black) pan,” when “panpan” or “panpan girl” became a familiar
name to indicate the female prostitutes who catered to the occupation soldiers in
contemporary Japan. '2 The former manager of the brothel in Honmoku, Yokohama
testified that the black soldiers, who were angry about the policy of racial separation at
the RAA brothels, ofien attacked the white-only comfort facilities. As this manager
suggested, the ideology and practice of anti-black racism in the U.S. society was brought
to Japan by the occupation force and was translated into its comfort women system in
occupied J apan.13

In addition to the racism within the U.S. occupational force, the testimonies by the
Japanese men and women who were involved in the RAA reveal their racial stereotypes
about black soldiers, especially their sexuality. The prostitutes shaped their own racial
stereotypes about black soldiers with whom they had had sexual intercourse at the RAA
brothels. Ms. M, a former prostitute at RAA brothel in Mukojima, Yokohama, in an oral
history interview with Setsuko Inoue, strongly rejected the popularity of black soldiers
among the Japanese prostitutes at that time. According to her, there were some racist
rumors about black soldiers, which were spread among the Japanese comfort women, that

venereal disease which was transmitted from blacks was incurable or that the pigment of

blacks could not be deleted from their body for a thousand years. She also testified to the

 

'2 Setsuko Inoue, Senryogun ianjo: kokka ni yoru baishun shisetsu [Comfort Stations for the Occupation
Troops: Houses of Prostitution Operated by the State] (Tokyo: Shinhyoron, 1995), 67, 75.

'3 Meiko Yamada, Senryogun ianfu: kokusaku baishun no onnatachi no higeki [Comfort Women of the
Occupation Troops: The Tragedy of Women Subjected to the National Prostitution Policy] (Tokyo:
Kojinsha, 1992), 223-224.

241

existence among comfort women of bias against the members who sexually served black
American soldiers.” In her study of military prostitution in U.S.-Korea relations,
historian Katherine H. S. Moon contends that Korean camptown prostitutes, despite their
powerlessness, played a role of “personal ambassadors” for improvement in the U.S.-

ROK civilian-military relations in the early 19703. '5

Japanese prostitutes, who
experienced the most frequent sexual and intimate encounters with the occupation troops,
like Korean prostitutes, were influential in shaping the postwar black-Japanese
relationship, although their sexualized view of blackness, combined with white American
racism, contributed to the stereotypical formations of black male sexuality among the
Japanese.

Not only did the Japanese women who participated in the comfort women system
for the occupiers, but also the Japanese men who held staff jobs in the RAA and its
opponents viewed the sexual behaviors of black soldiers in the racial or even racist terms
by distinguishing them from white soldiers. Seiichi Kaburagi, who was a public relations
officer for the RAA, stressed the appeal of the bodies of black soldiers and their sexual

virility as well as their kindness to the Japanese prostitutes in his memoir of the RAA:

The Japanese women at the RAA brothels were first honified by the
grotesqueness of black skin and red tongue of black soldiers. But, they were
captivated by the appeal of their blackness and welcomed black soldiers, as soon
as the prostitutes encountered their gentle and kind attitude, their careful way of
treating women, and their sexual technique. We were surprised by the strong
sexual power of black soldiers. Some of them made it twenty times a night and
made women faint the next morning.16

 

'4 Inoue, Senryogun ianjo: kokka ni yoru baishun shisetsu, 76.

'5 Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997), esp. chap. 4.

'6 Seiichi Kaburagi, Hiroku shinchrigun ian sakusen [Secret Record Concerning Comfort Stations for the
Occupation Troops] (Tokyo: Akita Shoten, 1972), 45—46.

242

This exaggerated and stereotypical comment of Kaburagi on black male soldiers reflected
the discursive expansion of black male sexuality which was contingent on the
institutionalized black-Japanese sexual interactions in the specific historical context of
Japan’s comfort women system under U.S. military occupation.

One can also find racialized or racist remarks about black soldiers in a series of
works on the RAA which were written by journalists and activists after the end of the
occupation. Kiyoshi Kanzaki, a literary critic who was tackling the social problem of
prostitution and those related to the U.S. military base in Japan, stated in an essay
published in 1953, that black soldiers were generous and some of them never received
their change because “they had less sense of economics than white soldiers and they were
probably satisfied with controlling Japanese women by money.” '7 Kanzaki also
expressed his romanticized view of the sexual relationships between black soldiers and
the prostitutes at the RAA brothels: “There developed a more humane bond between
those who had been oppressed and subjugated, than mere economic transaction of the
sex, in the intimate interactions between black soldiers and the women in Yoshiwara.”18
Kanzaki, as a leftist critic, showed his interest in the issue of race and racism in the U.S.
and recognized its implications on the social problems of discrimination and prejudice in
Japan, including prostitution. But, he analyzed the behaviors of black soldiers and their

sexual relationships with Japanese comfort women within the dominant framework of

racial stereotypes about blackness in contemporary Japan.

 

17 Kiyoshi Kanzaki, Baishun: ketteiban kanzaki repoto [Prostitutionz Definite Report of Kanzaki] (Tokyo:
Gendaishi Shuppankai, 1974), 147.

'8 Ibid., 150.

243

The GHQ adopted the race-based policy against fraternization between GIS and
the Japanese during the U.S. occupation of Japan, which barred the approval of interracial
marriage between U.S. servicemen and Japanese women by the American consulate.
American servicemen encountered various military and civilian barriers against
international marriage when they decided to take their wives and half-American, half-
Japanese dependants to the United States, because the 1924 Immigration Act barred the
immigration of Japanese war brides to the U.S. either as citizens or permanent residents,
until the enactment of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952.19 Conversely, there was an
aversion to the interracial fraternization between Japanese women and American GIs
among the Japanese people. Japanese men and women were intolerant of any sexual or
physical contact between Japanese women and American GIs, whether it took the form of
dating, marriage, or childbearing, despite their rising interest in American culture and life
styles in the postwar period. The stigma by Japanese society was attached to the
Japanese women who fratemized with GIs, regardless of their race.20 Kaori Hayashi, the
nonfiction writer whose work extensively covers the problems of the war brides, points
out that Japanese war brides during the occupation era were associated with prostitutes
and a discriminatory attitude was held against them among the contemporaneous
Japanese. She explains that the equation of war brides with prostitutes in the Japanese

imagination can be attributed to the existence of the comfort women system for

 

19 For the U.S. policies on the immigration of Japanese warbrides, see Chapter 4.

20 Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U. S. Occupation of Japan, 69-70.

244

21 Whether they developed intimate or marital relationships with

occupation soldiers.
black or white GIs, Japanese women suffered from the prejudice and discrimination
against interracial intimacy, sexuality, and miscegenation in Japanese society for their
fraternization with American GIS.

However, the racial background of their American husbands was a crucial factor
in shaping the ways Japanese war brides were regarded in Japan as well as in the U.S.
during that period. The Japanese war brides who married black GIs faced more hostile
attitudes against their interracial marriage from the larger society both in Japan and the
United States than those who married white GIs. Some Japanese parents of the war
brides opposed their daughters’ marriage with black GIs because of their racial prejudices
against black men. Misako Nowry got married in 1951 to Thomas, a black serviceman in
the antiaircraft gun unit whom she met in 1948 when she was working at the U.S. Navy
hospital in Yokosuka. In the oral history interview for photojournalist Tsuneo Enari,
Misako told him that she had never seen her father for more than thirty years since he
disowned her for having married a “Nigger (kurombo')?22 Some Japanese war brides of
black U.S. servicemen, who emigrated to the U.S. with their husbands, experienced
racism in American society for being black men’s wives. Misako remembers that when

she lived in the base housing in Fort Knox, Kentucky, she had a fight with a white

woman who said to her, “I haven’t time to talk to a Nigger Bitch.”23 Other war brides

 

2' Hayashi Kaori, Keiko Tamura, and Fumiko Takatsu, Senso hanayome: kokkyo wo koeta onnatachi no
hanséki [War Brides: Half-Century Record of the Women Who Crossed the National Border] (Tokyo: Fuyo
Shobo Shuppan, 2002), 33-35.

22 Tsuneo Enari, Hanayome no amerika [America of the Brides]. (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1984), 49-53.

23 Ibid.

245

testified to the existence of the discrimination among the Japanese war brides based on
the races of their husbands: the Japanese women who married white GIs discriminated
against those who married black Gls. T. C., who met a black serviceman in the
information unit of the U.S. Air force in 1952 and married him in 1957, remembers that
when she was working as a waitress in a Japanese restaurant, the Japanese wives of white
husbands became fiiends with each other, but they treated her coldly because her husband
was a black man.24 The Japanese women who married white or black Gls shared the
common experience as a war bride by facing the hostility directed against interracial
marriage in Japanese society. But, those who breached doubly the racial barriers by
marrying black servicemen, experienced a more oppressive social stigma than those who
married white men within the community of Japanese war brides as well as in the larger
Japanese and American societies.

Miscegenation was discouraged by the regulations of the American occupation
authorities as well as by Japanese social attitude toward race matters. It was in the debate
over mixed-blood children that the problem of race and sexuality was manifested most
clearly in the U.S. occupation of Japan. The presence of “occupation babies,” or the
racially mixed children born to American GIS and Japanese women, became a taboo
subject which was avoided by both the Japanese government and SCAP during the U.S.
occupation of Japan. SCAP prohibited the Japanese government from officially
gathering the statistics of the mixed-blood children and pressured the Japanese press not
to publish the stories about them by its censorship policy. Yukiko Koshiro argues that

both Americans and the Japanese demonstrated their abhorrence toward miscegenation

 

2" Ibid., 81-83.

246

and desire for exclusion of the hybrid offspring from their societies in the debate over the
problem of mixed-race babies. She explains this “mutual racism” or “mutual hatred of
miscegenation” as the American and Japanese obsession with “racial purity” as a national
ideology. According to Koshiro, the preservation of “white purity” was essential to the
anti-miscegenation policy of SCAP, which prohibited the fraternization between GIs and
Japanese and never acknowledged the mixed-race children as legitimate. Conversely, the
Japanese believed that racial purity was a source of uniqueness of their national identity
and their hybridization with white, black, or other Asians would “produce racial groups
inferior to the pure Japanese.” Moreover, the Japanese took different attitudes toward
half-white and half-black children because of their inferiority complex toward white
Americans combined with their condescension toward black Americans.25 The problem
of racially mixed half-Japanese, half-American children was a transnational, tri-racial
phenomenon, in which racial identities of whiteness, blackness, and the Japaneseness
were complexly contested in the overlapping racial, sexual, and national ideologies and
practices on both sides of the Pacific.

In response to the miserable conditions facing the mixed blood children who were
deserted by their parents in Japan, Miki Sawada, an international philanthropist and a
granddaughter of Iwasaki Yataro, the founder of the Mistubishi zaibatsu (combine),
established in January, 1948 the Elizabeth Saunders Home as an orphanage which was

exclusively reserved for racially mixed children.26 Sawada had a special concern with the

 

25 Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation ofJapan, 159-168. Also see Yukiko Koshiro,
“Race as lntemational Identity?: ‘Miscegenation’ in the U.S. Occupation of Japan and Beyond,”
Amerikastudien 48, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 6l-67.

26 For the institutional development of the Elizabeth Saunders Home and the socialization and identity
formation process of the mixed-blood children in the Home, see Robert A. Fish, “The Heiress and the Love

247

half-black children, who suffered from more discrimination than half-white children in
Japanese society because of the color of their skin. In her autobiography, Sawada
remembered that some “heartless” visitors to the Home curiously stared at the half-black
children and called them “Nigger (kurombo)?27 Japanese children in the Home’s
neighborhood often entered the Home through the crack in the fence and played some
pranks on the grounds of the Home. When they were scolded by Sawada or other staff
members at the Home, they escaped beyond the fence shouting “Nigger.” They also
teased half-black children in the Home by calling them “Nigger” and hurt their feelings.28
These impressionable Japanese children might have learned racial prejudice in a social
context by observing the discriminatory attitudes which adult Japanese around them took
against blacks and mixed-blood children.

Miki Sawada advocated separation of mixed-blood children in public education in
the national controversy over the education program for these children in the early 19505,
when they reached the age to enter elementary school. She believed that the separate
educational facility would protect the children’s “mental and physical handicaps” from

the hostile outside world.29 Sawada promoted the adoption of the racially mixed children

 

Children: Sawada Miki and the Elizabeth Saunders Home for Mixed-Blood Orphans in Postwar Japan”
(PhD. diss. University of Hawaii, 2002). Fish points out that racism tended to be exaggerated and
dramatized in the dominant discourse of the mixed-blood children in postwar Japan, especially in the
American media for fundraising appeals. He argues that the lives of those biracial children were defined by
more complex social interactions between ideology, policy, and individuals, and caretakers and children
rather than racism and oppression.

27 Miki Sawada, Sawada Miki: k‘uroi hada to shiroi kokoro [Sawada Miki: Black Skin and White Heart]
(1963; repr., Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Senta, 2001), 243-247.

28 Miki Sawada, Konketsuji no haha: erizabesu sandasu homu [Mother of the Mixed-Blood Children:
Elizabeth Saunders Home] (Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbun Shuppansha, 1953), 196-199.

29 Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 178.

248

in the Home by American families during a lecture tour in the U.S. She informed
Americans of the problem of mixed-blood children in Japan in order to solicit their
financial support for the Home. Especially, she tried to contact prominent Afiican
American leaders to ask their assistance with finding adoptive families for half-black,
half-Japanese children within African American communities.30 She relied on the help of
William L. Dawson, the black congressman in Chicago who was always willing to
sponsor special bills authorizing the issuing of visas for mixed-race children in the

r
Home.3

Moreover, black dancer Josephine Baker, with whom Sawada had a long close
friendship, visited Japan in 1954 to give a series of concerts for the benefit of the
Elizabeth Saunders Home.32 Being aware of the oppressive discrimination in Japanese
society against the racially mixed children, especially against the half-black, half-
Japanese children, Sawada believed that a bright future for them would lie in the black
American community rather than in Japan and made a special effort to find ways to
secure their adoption by black American families.

Moreover, black soldiers were featured in some of the literary works written by
Japanese novelists after the end of the U.S. occupation of mainland Japan. According to
Hiromi and Tetsushi Furukawa, it was in the postwar period that black people appeared

as main characters or major themes in numerous works of Japanese literature, although

some works dealt with them in prewar Japan. Furukawas suggest that black soldiers

 

30 Ibid., 189. The African American leaders whom Sawada paid a courtesy visit included Rev. Mordecai
Johnson (president of Howard University), Roy Wilkins (NAACP), and Hubert T. Delany (justice of the
Domestic Relations Court of the City of New York). .

31 Elizabeth Anne Hemphill, The Least of These: Miki Sawada and Her Children (New York: Weatherhill,
1980), 119.

32 Ibid., 97-93.

249

attracted special attention to the postwar Japanese writers, because of their visibility, or
racial “strangeness” in contemporary Japan, the problem of mixed-blood children in
Japanese society, the escalated racial tensions, and the development of the black
liberation movement in the U.S. 33 In addition to these factors, I argue that the
development of the interracial sexual encounters and interactions between Japanese
women and African American GIs was central to the reconfiguration of the racialized and
sexualized image of black men in the postwar Japanese literary and cultural
representations.

In “Prize Stock” (“Shiiku,” 1958), Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel Prize Winner
for Literature, wrote the story of the initiation of one Japanese boy into adulthood
through an encounter with a black soldier, who was taken captive and “kept like an
animal” by the villagers during World War II. Oe’s description of the black soldier drew
on the traditional association of blacks with animality in Japanese racial imagination. Oe
contributed to the sexualization of black men in Japanese imagination with his attentive
description of the black soldier’s bodies, especially his penis, and his vital sexuality}4

In “Painting on Black Canvas (“Koroji No E,” 1958), Seicho Matsumoto, who
was famed as mystery novelist, fictionally reconstructed the actual incident of the gang
rape of a Japanese woman by a group of African American soldiers who deserted the
U.S. military base in Kokura in Southwest Japan during the Korean War. In his highly

racialized description of their sexual behaviors during this incident, Matsurnoto conveyed

 

33 Hiromi Furukawa and Tetsushi Furukawa, Nihonjin to Afitrika-kei amerikajin: nichi-bei kankeishi ni
okeru sono shoso [Japanese and African Americans: Historical Aspects of Their Relations] (Tokyo: Akashi
Shoten, 2004), 353.

34 Kenzaburo Oe, Shisha no ogori, shiiku [Arrogance of the Dead, Prize Stock] (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1959).

250

the black soldiers’ primitivism and hypersexuality, although he showed some sympathy
for the destiny of a large number of black soldiers, who were forced into the frontline in
the battle field and killed by the racist American military policy during the war.35

Sawako Ariyoshi dealt fictionally with the problem of interracial marriage and of
mixed-blood children in a story of a Japanese woman and a black G1 in Not Because of
Colour (Hishoku), which was originally published in the 'Chfiokoron magazine from 1963
to 1964. Ariyoshi shed light on the social reality of the complex racial dynamics inherent
in interracial intimacy and its implications for both Japanese and American society. But
her view of blacks reflected the racial prejudice which was shared among the
contemporaneous J apanese.3 6

As literary critic Michael Molasky suggests, the postwar Japanese writers, who
featured black soldiers in their works, showed a “political empathy with the plight of
African Americans while indulging in a stereotypical treatment of black men that may
seem perplexing at best and racist at worst.”37 Witnessing the widespread interracial
sexual interactions between Japanese women and black GIs in Japan under U.S. military
occupation, these Japanese male and female writers played a critical role in the discursive
formations of the postwar Japanese views of African Americans, especially those of

black men. The gendered representations of African Americans in postwar Japanese

culture were constructed based on highly sexualized images of black male bodies,

 

35 Matsumoto Seicho, Kuroji no e [Painting on Black Canvas] (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1958). This work was
originally published in the Shincho' magazine in 1958.

36 Sawako Ariyoshi, Hishoku [Not Because of Color] (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1967).

37 Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory, 7 l.

251

potency, and behaviors, combined with the preexisting negative racial perception of
blackness in modern Japanese ideology and practice.

The social and cultural formations of the interracial sexual interactions between
African American male soldiers and Japanese women during the U.S. occupation of
Japan were crucial in reinforcing, reshaping, and complicating the cultural
representations of blackness in postwar Japan, dealing with black soldiers, the Japanese
war brides who married black GIs, and their half-black, half-Japanese mixed-blood
children. Japanese‘ men and women articulated the sense of national honor, racial
homogeneity, and the sexual anxiety over the presence of the U.S. occupation force in
gendered ways in their reactions to the widespread intimate and sexual relationships
between black GIs and Japanese women. The images of black soldiers were constructed
through the tri-racial dynamics of interracial encounters between whites, blacks, and the
Japanese, which occurred through various circumstances of the interracial sexuality and
intimacy in occupied Japan, including military prostitution, and interracial marriage and
reproduction.

The Japanese women’s sexual relationships with black GIs meant the double
transgression of the color line in the Japanese racial ideology. The Japanese people, who
believed in racial and ethnic purity as a source of the uniqueness of their national identity,
abhorred the Japanese women’s sexual contact with American GIs, whether white or
black, and opposed their interracial fraternization. Combined with their encounter with
the stateside racism against black GIs among the occupation troops, Japanese men and
women reasserted the modern Japanese discourse of racial hierarchy in their responses to

the black-Japanese relationships. They attached more oppressive social stigmas to the

252

Japanese women who dated, married, or sexually served for black servicemen than those
who fratemized with white GIs. Their observations of the widespread interracial sexual
interactions between Japanese women and black men, which took both exploitive and
intimate forms in occupied Japan, stimulated the imagination of a number of Japanese
writers and became a dominant motif in the fictional representation of black men and

their intimate relationships with Japanese women in postwar Japanese literature.

253

Conclusion

In Japan under U.S. military occupation, African American men and women
asserted and performed their racialized and nationalized sense of empowerment in
gender-specific ways through their face-to-face or discursive encounters with the
Japanese, as well as their investment in racial, gender, and class dynamics within the U.S.
Army, in the larger American society, and in the black communities on both sides of the
Pacific.

African American male soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment transformed their
isolated and segregated lives at Camp Gifu into the contested site of their racial and
masculine empowerment. The geographical and social isolation of Camp Gifu allowed
African American GIs to fully pursue their racial manhood, relatively free from the
emasculating racist oppression from white GIs. Black soldiers took advantage of the
segregation within the U.S. Army for fostering a sense of racial solidarity and
brotherhood among themselves. They developed leadership skills as commissioned
officers, created their own social institutions and cultural world, and derived racial and
masculine pride from their athletic prowess and famed parades. African American
soldiers experienced greater racial acceptance among the local Japanese people and
reconfigured their racial perception beyond the social context of racial oppression and the
narrow black-white dichotomy in the U.S. Some Afiican American GIs developed their
intimate relationships with Japanese women into marriage and childbearing by
challenging the civilian and military barriers against international marriage as well as the

social stigma against miscegenation in Japanese society. Others asserted their

254

conqueror’s sense of militarized masculinity through their sexual interactions with
Japanese prostitutes within the gendered colonial relations in occupied Japan.

Regardless of their social backgrounds in the U.S., Afiican American women, on
the one hand, achieved the feminine sense of empowerment by exploring alternative
racial identities, gender roles, and class positions in occupied Japan, while they enjoyed
considerable political prerogatives and economic advantages vis-a-vis Japanese citizens
as members of the U.S. occupation forces. Some black women, especially the civilian
personnel who highly advanced their rank within the U.S. Army, enjoyed the luxurious
lifestyles attendant to their privileged position to hire the Japanese maids as well as their
access to extensive leisure and shopping activities. They developed an appreciation for
the sense of interracialism and intemationalism while living, working, and fratemizing
with the Japanese and white Americans in the integrated and multiracial settings. On the
other hand, African American women continued facing racism and sexism within the U.S.
military and from the patriarchal sector of the black communities in Japan. Black Army
nurses protested racial segregation and discrimination within the U.S. Army Nurse Corps
in various ways. African American women, either civilian or military, experienced the
black masculinist backlash against their feminine empowerment in Japan within the
boundaries of conservative gender and sexual norms in the larger American society
during the early Cold War period.

The trans-Pacific debates over the interracial intimacy, sexuality, and marriage
between African American soldiers and Japanese women became a transnational and
international site of identity formations and contestations, through which both African

Americans and Japanese reconfigured race consciousness, national identity, and gender

255

and sexual norms in the shifting U.S.-Japanese relationship as well as changing domestic
race and gender relations in the postwar period. African American men and women who
were stationed in occupied Japan employed the dominant Orientalist discourse of
“submissive” Japanese women in gender-specific ways so that they could renegotiate the
tension-filled intraracial gender relations in Japan for their own gendered empowerment.
The black newspaper and magazine coverage of black-Japanese interracial marriage and
occupation babies functioned as a discursive strategy for Afiican Americans to negotiate
racial acceptance and national integration of the Japanese brides of black G15 and their
half-black, half-Japanese children into black communities in the U.S. by reimagining the
former “enemy” race and “unassimilable” aliens as their national and racial allies in the
postwar relationship between black America and Japan. Moreover, the postwar Japanese
experience of the widespread interracial sexual interactions between Afiican American
soldiers and Japanese women in the context of the U.S. military occupation of Japan,
combined with their encounter with the stateside racism which white American soldiers
brought there as well as the preexisting Japanese racial images of blackness, was
influential in reshaping their racial perception of African American men in highly
sexualized terms.

The discursive formations of the interracial intimacy, sexuality, and marriage
between African American soldiers and Japanese women both in the U.S. and occupied
Japan were instrumental in forging the trans-Pacific interracial and international
communities between Japan and Afiican American societies in the U.S., whether
imagined or materialized, in the complexly intersecting ideologies of race, gender, sex,

and nation on both sides of the Pacific. In the postwar relationship between the Japanese

256

and African Americans, either living in the U.S. or Japan, Japanese brides of Afiican
American soldiers and their half-Japanese, half-black children played a critical role as
transnational mediators for their liminal status in terms of their racial and national
belonging in the triad among Japan, black, and America.

After World War II, the “Black Pacific” reemerged and expanded as the crucial
transnational site of the real, face-to-face encounter and interaction between African
Americans and the Japanese beyond the imaginary or discursive formations of their
interracial identification and solidarity in the prewar period, as the United States
deepened its political, economic, and military engagement in the Asian and Pacific areas
in the global context of the Cold War politics. Military service and its attendant civilian
duty became a major, although not exclusive, vehicle for African American men and
women to forge the trans-Pacific, diasporic encounters with Japanese people, including
Okinawans, within the parameter of the specific militarized international relations,
shaped by the U.S. occupation of mainland Japan and Okinawa as well as the Japan-US
Security Treaty. As this dissertation reveals, the “Black Pacific” was a highly gendered
sphere and process of interracial, international, and intercultural interaction and
signification, through which African American, as well as Japanese, men and women
negotiated and contested race consciousness, national identity, gender convention, and
sexual practice within the boundaries of racial, gender, and international hierarchies of
the tri-racial dynamics between blacks, the Japanese, and whites.

The gender and sexual matrix in the postwar “Black Pacific” was instrumental in
the transformation of the traditional black-Japanese solidarity within the nexus of race

and nation into the more complicated trans-Pacific formations of interracial and

257

international understanding and identification as well as tensions and conflicts among
blacks, whites, and the Japanese along gendered lines. The Victor’s sense of militarized
masculinity and patriarchal privilege vis—a-vis Japanese women, which American soldiers,
regardless of race, asserted through the diminishment of the Japanese manhood,
ironically promoted the interracial formation of the homosocial bond between black and
white men, despite their interracial competitions for access to women in Japan. The
presence of the African American women, who were traditionally invisible in the
masculinized discursive world of the “Black Pacific” in the prewar period, as well as in
the militarized sphere of the postwar black-Japanese encounters, was central to the
reconfiguration of power alignment within the intersections of race, gender, nation, sex,
and intimacy in occupied Japan. Despite the interracial rivalry between black and
Japanese women over black men, some African American women developed a sense of
racial affinity and interracial sisterhood with Japanese women based on their common
experience as domestic workers and of patriarchal oppression or feminine isolation, either
in Japan or in the U.S. As some black WACs critiqued the black GI’s pursuit of Japanese
prostitutes, the subjugation of the native women by American male soldiers in the areas
of the U.S. military presence might have created the conditions of possibilities for the
transnational and interracial formation of the women’s alliance against not only the
militarized masculine sexual behaviors but the globalized patriarchal institution and
sexist regime beyond the U.S. military occupation of Japan.

The gendered narrative and analysis of the Afiican American experience in

occupied Japan offers an alternative discourse to the dominant stereotypical

representation of blackness in the Japanese media, literature, and popular culture and its

258

implications for the postwar black-Japanese relationship. Their obsession with black
male sexuality was influential in shaping the postwar Japanese views of blackness from
the traditional hyper-sexualized representations of black male soldiers and their
interracial relationships with Japanese women by Japanese writers and the media, to the
more contemporary commodified appropriation of black culture among the young
Japanese in the Hip-Hop generation.l Instead of avoiding discussion of the sexualized
dimension of African American male experience in occupied Japan, I reconstituted the
problem of their sexual behaviors as the nationalized, rather than racial, and militarized
sense of masculinity and patriarchal privilege which American GIs, regardless of race,
shared and exercised in relation to Japanese women within the specific gendered colonial
relations in Japan under U.S. military occupation. As I revealed in Chapter 4, some
Afiican American men expressed their sincere decisions and efforts to consummate their
intimate relationships with Japanese women in the marital and familial formations with
their biracial children in the U.S. They challenged various institutional, ideological, and
sentimental opposition against their interracial/international marriage or miscegenation
both in Japan and the U.S. Moreover, the integration of African American women into
the larger narrative of the U.S. occupation of Japan contributes to the valorization of the

gender-skewed discourses, both academic and popular, of the postwar black-Japanese

 

I For the contemporary Japanese view of blackness, see the multiple work of anthropologist John G.
Russell, including “Consuming Passions: Spectacle, Self-Transformation, and the Commodification of
Blackness in Japan,” positions 6, no. 1 (1998): 113-177; “Race and Reflexivity: The Black Other in
Contemporary Japanese Mass Culture,” Cultural Anthropology 6, no. I (1991): 3-25; Henken to sabetsu wa
dono yo ni tsukurareru ka: kokujin sabetsu, han-yudaya ishiki wo chushin ni [How Are Prejudice and
Discrimination Shaped?: With 3 Focus on Anti-Black Discrimination and and Anti-Semitism] (Tokyo:
Akashi Shoten, 1995); Nihonjin no kokujin-kan: mondai wa “chibikuro sambo" dake dewa nai [Japanese
Views of Blacks: Beyond the Problem of “Little Black Sambo”] (Tokyo: Shinhyoron, 1991). See also,
Karen Kelsky, Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Durham: Duke University Press,
2001), esp. chap. 3; Nina Comyetz, “Fetishized Blackness: Hip Hop and Racial Desire in Contemporary
Japan,” Social Text4l (Winter 1994): 113-139.

259

encounters which focus highly on the sexualized relationships between black men and
Japanese women, either in intimate or violent terms. African American women, as well
as men, on both sides of the Pacific participated as active agents in the transnational
racial formations of the “Black Pacific,” when they negotiated power, identity, intimacy,
and respect in gendered terms through their encounters and interactions with the Japanese

in the formative period of the postwar black-Japanese relationships.

260

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Lark, Regina Frances. “They Challenged Two Nations: Marriages between Japanese
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(Japanese Language)
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na 21-seki wo mezashite [Wartime Record of the People in Kagamigahara: Toward
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1964.

Russell, John G. Henken to sabetsu wa dono yo ni tsukurareru ka: kokujin sabetsu, han-
yudaya ishiki wo chrishin ni [How Are Prejudice and Discrimination Shaped?: With a
Focus on Anti-Black Discrimination and Anti-Semitism]. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten,
1995.

. Nihonjin no kokujin kan: mondai wa “chibikuro sambo ” dake dewa nai
[Japanese Views of Blacks: Beyond the Problem of “Little Black Sambo”]. Tokyo:
Shinhyoron, 1991.

Yamada, Meiko. Senryogun ianfu: kokusaku baishun no onnatachi no higeki [Comfort
Women of the Occupation Troops: The Tragedy of Women Subjected to the National
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272

Articles

Araki, Keiko. “Daiichiji sekaitaisen-go ni okeru beikoku kokujin no nihonjinkan: Gavi
undo wo chfishin ni [Black Americans’ View of Japan after World War I: Focusing
on Garvey Movement]? Hogaku seijigaku ronkyu 66 (September 2005): 69-95.

Hayashi, Hirofumi. “Amerikagun no sei-taisaku no rekishi: 1950 nendai made [A
Historical Study of the US Military’s Policy toward Prostitution: Through the
19505]? Josei, Senso, Jinken 7 (March 2005): 94-118.

. “Higashi ajia no beigun kichi to seibaibai/seihanzai [U.S. Military Base in East
Asia and Prostitution/Sexual Crime]? Amerika-shi kenkyii 29 (August 2006): 18-35.

Sato, Masaharu. “Senji-ka nihon no taigai senden ni okeru ‘kokujin kosaku’ [Japan’s
Wartime Propaganda against Blacks]? Masukomunike'shon Kenkyfi 46 (1995): 157-
170.

Shimizu, Sayuri Guthrie. “Sei no kokka kanri wo meguru senryo-ki nichibei kankei:
Amerika no kaigai gunji shinshutsu to jenda [Sexual Control by the State in the
J apanese-U.S. Relationship during the Occupation Period: the U.S. Military
Engagement Overseas and Gender]? Gunji Shigaku 41, no. 4 (2006): 26-49.

Takeuchi, Yuko. “W. E. B. Duboisu to nihon [W. E. B. Du Bois and Japan]? Shien 54,
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