Both are remarkably alike in appearance: thin, with extremely pale skin and cold, patrician expressions bordering on severity. The purpose of the visit was to enquire if we could arrange for the sister to enter an army brothel. We explained that there was no such institution in the British Army. “A pity”, the prince said. Both of them speak excellent English, learned from an English governess. “Ah well, Luisa, I suppose if it can’t be, it can’t be.” They thanked us with polite calm and departed.28
In Japan, prostitution was institutionalized from the beginning. They had their reasons. Japanese authorities were terrified that Allied soldiers would do to the Japanese what Japanese troops had done to the Chinese and other Asians. When Nanking was sacked in 1937, and Manila more or less destroyed in a last-ditch battle in 1945, tens of thousands of women were raped, mutilated, and usually killed, if they hadn’t died of the ordeal already. These were two particularly bad instances. There were many more. In China, rape by Imperial Japanese soldiers was perpetrated on such a massive scale that it became a military problem, by provoking fiercer Chinese resistance. To cope with this difficulty girls were sometimes drafted, but mostly kidnapped, especially in Korea and other countries under Japanese control, to serve as so-called comfort women, meaning sex slaves, in Japanese army brothels.
Government and military propaganda had frightened Japanese citizens with constant predictions that, in the case of defeat, Japanese women would be raped, tortured, and murdered by foreign soldiers. To prevent this ghastly and dishonorable fate, Japanese were ordered to fight to the death, or kill themselves. Women and children in the Pacific islands and in Okinawa were ordered to blow themselves up with hand grenades or jump off cliffs. Many did.
And so, on August 18, three days after the Japanese surrender, the Home Ministry ordered local police officials to set up “comfort facilities” for the conquering Allies. Women were recruited to “sacrifice their bodies” in the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) as a patriotic duty. The former prime minister, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, who bore a large responsibility for starting the Pacific War, told the national police commissioner to “please defend the young women of Japan.”29 Perhaps the invading foreigners would be appeased by this measure, and so respectable Japanese women might be able to come out of their hiding places and walk the streets unmolested.
It must have been a sordid business. Recreation and Amusement facilities were set up in such haste that there were no beds to accommodate the soldiers and the sacrificial women. Sexual intercourse took place wherever space could be found, mostly on the floors, or in the halls and corridors of the improvised brothels. It took a few months for the Japanese to come up with more efficient arrangements. A huge, hangarlike brothel was built in Funabashi, outside Tokyo, known as the International Palace, or IP. The IP offered sex on a kind of assembly line, known as “the willow run” after the wartime bomber factory built by Ford near Detroit. Men would leave their shoes at the entrance of the long building, and pick them up polished to a sheen at the other end.
Army billets, such as the Nomura Hotel in Tokyo, were swarming with women, identified as clerks or cleaning ladies, who regularly spent the nights there. Some of them brought their families to escape from the winter cold. A big dance hall in the center of Tokyo had a sign in Japanese that read: “Patriotic Girls! Assist the Reconstruction of Japan by Serving as Dance Partners!”30 Condoms were sold at the army PXs (special stores selling food, clothing, and other supplies to members of the occupation forces).
In contrast to Germany, there was no strict ban on “fraternization with indigenous personnel” in Japan at first. General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for Allied Powers (SCAP), recognized the futility of this rule. He told one of his aides: “They keep trying to get me to stop all this Madame Butterflying around. I won’t do it . . . I wouldn’t issue a non-fraternization order for all the tea in China.”31
In the beginning of the occupation there were about six hundred thousand U.S. soldiers in Japan, in addition to Australians, British, and a sprinkling of other nationalities. So there was a great deal of fraternizing. A letter written by William Theodore de Bary, a U.S. Navy officer who later became a distinguished scholar of China and Japan, described what it was like in Sasebo, a large naval base on the island of Kyushu, in October 1945:
Fraternization itself has been a problem. The MPs, in fact, had to forbid any more congregating on the large bridge by our headquarters, so congested had it become with eager marines talking and using sign language to grinning and friendly Japanese. It has been that way from the first.32
This went on despite some extraordinarily racist propaganda back home. This, for example, from an article about the occupation of Japan in the Saturday Evening Post: “The flat-chested, button-nosed, splayfooted average Japanese woman is about as attractive to most Americans as a 1000-year-old stone idol. In fact, less so. They like to take pictures of the idols.”33
The author of this article, if we choose to be charitable, had no idea. Most of SCAP’s senior officers had secured Japanese mistresses already in 1945. Since there were very few Western women at first, this was to be expected. Things changed only when a new wave of military officers arrived, less tolerant men who often had had no direct experience of combat. Even as restrictions in Germany had been lifted, they decided to impose more discipline in Japan by declaring most public places, such as local restaurants, hot spring resorts, cinemas, or army hotels, “off-limits.”
As a result, fraternization still took place, just more discreetly, and more and more with freelance prostitutes, which did nothing to keep the VD rates down. In the bombed-out streets and city parks prostitutes had their own territories, known as “islands.” Some could be had for as little as one dollar, which was roughly the price of half a pack of cigarettes on the black market. This type of business thrived, especially after the Allied administration decided, much against Japanese advice, to ban organized prostitution in 1946.
Japanese like to categorize things neatly. The freelance hookers, known as panpan girls, were divided into those who specialized in white foreign soldiers, black foreign soldiers, and Japanese only, even though some of the more enterprising ones refused to make such neat distinctions. Some prostitutes, the so-called onrii (as in “only one”), managed to latch on to one client. The more than usually promiscuous ones were batafurais (butterflies). Certain areas of central Tokyo, such as Hibiya Park, opposite General MacArthur’s headquarters, or nearby Yurakucho station, were typical panpan stamping grounds.34
The panpan, heavily lipsticked and high-heeled, was an object of Japanese scorn, as the symbol of national degradation, but also of fascination, tinged with envy. They were materially better off than most homeless, hungry, impoverished Japanese citizens. These working girls were also the first and most avid consumers of American goods, and more familiar than most Japanese with the popular culture of the victors. Using the peculiar argot of the panpan, Japanese slang mixed with broken GI English, they were also closer to speaking the language of the occupiers than most Japanese could manage.
In a sense, the panpan fits into a particular raffish Japanese tradition that combines low life with glamour. The prostitutes of premodern Tokyo, then still called Edo, were fashion plates of a kind, publicized in woodblock prints and the Kabuki theater. In the early years of the Allied occupation, the culture associated with the panpan was a great deal less refined. Military defeat and liberation from wartime censorship and militarist education revived a commercial sex culture with roots in the past, but with a great deal of American influence. Salacious pulp magazines with such titles as Lovely, Venus, Sex Bizarre, and Pin-Up flourished. Striptease parlors opened up in the old entertainment districts, often jerry-built shacks constructed around the bomb craters. Pimps, black marketers, and young hoodlums in Hawaiian shirts danced the mambo with their girlfriends in cheap dance halls. Japanese swing bands and jazz singers came alive again, after years of bans on such foreign decadence. There was a craze for boogie-woogie.
Many women turned to prostitution out of necessity. But not all. Surveys of the time show that a large number of women became panpan “out of curiosity.”35 And this, more than getting paid for sex, was what earned the panpan particular opprobrium. To “sacrifice” one’s body to keep a poor rural family going, or from patriotic duty, was all right, perhaps even laudable; to do it out of curiosity, or a desire for cash, cigarettes, or silk stockings, was a disgrace. Organized prostitution had a long tradition and was tolerated. But the panpan were condemned for their free enterprise. It made them dangerously independent.
Tawdry and desperate though much of it was, the commercial sex culture in 1945 was, like mambo dancing and boogie-woogie, liberation of a kind, welcomed by some people, and loathed by others. The roughly ninety thousand babies born in 1946 from unmarried women cannot all have resulted from purely commercial transactions.36 Having been fed with so much negative propaganda about the barbarian rapists and killers, many Japanese women were much relieved when they actually saw the less fearsome Americans. In the words of one woman writing in the utterly respectable women’s magazine Fujin Gaho: “I find them courteous, friendly, carefree and perfectly at ease. What a sharp and painful contrast to the haughty, mean and discourteous Japanese soldiers who used to live in the barracks near my home.”37
This is not to say that Allied soldiers were never abusive, particularly at the beginning of the Occupation. According to one estimate, forty women were raped every day in the latter half of 1945, which is probably an underestimation, since many cases would not have been reported, out of shame.38 Such figures would never have appeared in the censored Occupation press, of course. But most Japanese would still have recognized that the Americans were far more disciplined than they had feared, especially in comparison to the behavior of their own troops abroad.
In an odd way, changing sexual mores fitted into the propagandistic effort by the Americans to “reeducate” the Japanese. To become democratic, so the Japanese were told, women should be treated more equally. Panpan girls may not have been quite what the educators had in mind. But Japanese were encouraged to show physical affection more openly, just like Americans. So it was that the first screen kiss, after much American prompting, was shown for Japanese edification in 1946, in a movie entitled Young Hearts (Hatachi no Seishun). It proved to be highly popular with young audiences.
Of course there is a broad spectrum between streetwalkers picking up GIs in Hibiya Park and the first cinematic kiss, but the public hunger for erotic entertainment and highly sexed popular music suggests that the gap between the liberated and the defeated peoples was actually not as great as one might think. For the Japanese, too, a new sense of liberty came with the sound of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”
It was the same story in the Western zones of Germany. In areas occupied by Soviet troops, things were rather different, certainly as far as sex was concerned. If “fratting” came to define relations with foreign troops in the West, rape was one of the curses of being defeated by the Soviet Red Army. Of course, rape happened in the Western zones too, especially, but by no means exclusively, under French occupation. In Stuttgart, for example, about 3,000 women were said to have been raped by French troops, many from Algeria.39 In the American occupation zone, by far the largest, the number of recorded rapes by American troops in the whole of 1945 did not exceed 1,500.40
There are several reasons why rape was less common under Western occupation than in the Soviet zone. Allied troops, with the possible exception of the French, were not as vengeful as the Soviets. Nor were they encouraged by their superiors to do as they liked with German women. (Stalin himself notoriously stated that soldiers who had crossed thousands of miles through blood and fire were entitled to “have some fun with women.”) Besides, the willingness of German women to “frat” with Allied soldiers was such that rape was hardly necessary. A popular quip among GIs in the summer of 1945 was that German women were the loosest “this side of Tahiti.”41
This was no doubt an exaggeration, promoted not just by grateful GIs, but by Germans who were outraged by actions they regarded as a further insult to their already shattered sense of national pride. Still, many soldiers claimed that German women, known variously as “frauleins,” “furlines,” or “fratkernazis,” were even more willing to have sexual relations with them than the French women were. One rather brutal, but perhaps not wholly inaccurate, analysis of this phenomenon was given by a GI after he had just returned to the U.S. “At the risk of letting the cat out of the bag,” he wrote, “it must be admitted that all the GI wants in Europe is a ‘good deal,’” which included “a chance to fraternize as often as possible.” He continued: “In Germany, naturally, the GI finds the best deal . . . In France the deal is different. The GI doesn’t find the all-out bootlicking of Germany. He can’t make France the plaything he heard it was from his Dad and from the liberators in 1944.”42
And there were of course far more women than men in Germany by about a 16 to 10 ratio, and the men who were left were often old, crippled, or despised. As the young German says in Rossellini’s brilliant film Germany Year Zero, shot in the ruins of Berlin: “We were men before, National Socialists, now we are just Nazis.”
Beno?te Groult in her literary memoir of liberated France could not resist comparing the “beauty of Americans” to “the Frenchmen who all look gnarled, swarthy, and undernourished to me.”43 The demoralization of German and Japanese men was of course worse. Typical was the attitude of a German waitress interviewed by Carl Zuckmayer, the German playwright and screenwriter (The Blue Angel) who returned to his native land as a U.S. cultural attaché in 1946. This waitress wouldn’t touch German men, she said: “They are too soft, they are not men any more. In the past they showed off too much.”44
For me, the most memorable account of masculine humiliation is by Nosaka Akiyuki, a novelist who was himself a teenager in 1945, hanging around the black markets of Osaka. His brilliant novella, American Hijiki (Amerika Hijiki, 1967), concerns masculinity as well as race. The main character is a Japanese of his own age. At school during the war he was told that Western men were taller than Japanese but weaker, especially around the hips, due to their soft habit of sitting on chairs, instead of Japanese tatami floors. They could be physically bested by any tough little Japanese with muscular thighs. The schoolboys were frequently reminded of the squat, bullnecked General Yamashita, “The Tiger of Malaya,” who accepted the surrender of Singapore from the British general Percival, whose rather absurd-looking spindly legs were not flattered by his khaki shorts.
But then the Japanese teenager sees the real thing up close, the unforgettable sight of an American soldier, “his arms like logs, his waist like a mortar . . . the manliness of his buttocks encased in shiny uniform pants . . . Ah, no wonder Japan lost the war.”45 Clearly, not all Allied soldiers were so big and brawny, and many Japanese men were far from puny. But the perception, that first impression of a hungry teenage boy, would last as the melancholy memory of a war that had been presented to the Japanese as a racial contest between noble Asian warriors and the arrogant white race. This made the first confrontation after the war between victors and the defeated more shocking in Japan than in Germany.
In Germany, the Western (but not the Soviet) authorities did their best to enforce a nonfraternization policy at first. “Pretty girls can sabotage an Allied victory,” announced the American Forces Network. “Soldiers wise don’t fraternize,” warned Stars and Stripes, the military paper, or “Don’t play Samson to her Delilah—she’d like to cut your hair off—at the neck.”46 Lifting the ban, said the Times of London, “would probably distress a large number of women at home.”47 But none of this was convincing to men on the spot. The “Mistress Army” was a popular expression for the Western Allies at the time. This referred to the many German mistresses attached to American officers (more than to British officers, for some reason; the British appear to have preferred drinking). This, in turn, led to jealousy in the lower ranks, a feeling expressed in bitter jokes such as, “The policy is just to give the brass the first crack at all the good-looking women.”48
General George Patton, like General MacArthur, saw no merit in the ban. Should well-fed American soldiers really refuse to give candy to hungry kids? Were all Germans truly Nazis? (It should be said that Patton was a great deal more indulgent to Germans, even if they were Nazis, than towards the communist allies, or indeed to Jews.) Even the New York Times, not always in the vanguard of public opinion, was critical in its reports from the occupied zones. Their local correspondent reported in June that he had “yet to meet a soldier, whether he comes from London, the Mississippi Valley or the Alberta wheatfields, who wants the ban continued.” The same reporter revealed the absurdity of measures taken to tighten the ban. In one village in the U.S. zone, a counterintelligence detachment was sent out to watch a security guard who was monitoring a military policeman who had been “flirting with a German girl.”49
On June 8, General Eisenhower lifted the ban on fraternizing with children, whereupon the common greeting from GIs or Tommies to a young woman was “Good Day, Child!” In August, Allied soldiers were allowed to speak to adults, and even, as long as they were safely out in the open air, to hold hands with grown women. On October 1, finally, the Allied Control Council, the governing body of the four powers’ military occupation, lifted the ban entirely. One of the events that nailed it was the arrival of British and U.S. troops in Berlin, where the Soviets were fraternizing quite freely. This divide became intolerable to Western troops, so in a sense the license to frat with Germans was an early consequence of Big Power rivalry. But lifting the ban came with a condition: marriage with Germans, or putting Germans up in army billets, would still be forbidden. This, too, in time became a dead letter, and tens of thousands of German women left with their new husbands to the promised good life of the United States.
Germany had its version of the panpan women, the lowest and most desperate being the Ruinenm?uschen, the “mice in the ruins.” But, as was true in all countries under military occupation, the borderlines between romance, desire, and prostitution were not always clear. Even in the Soviet zone of Berlin, where few women, including the very young and very old, had managed to avoid sexual assault, and where raping was still a common occurrence for months after the war, sexual relations with foreign troops were not always a straightforward matter. The best and most harrowing account is A Woman in Berlin, a diary kept by a journalist in her early thirties who finally escaped being serially raped by anonymous soldiers by soliciting the protection of one Russian officer. The gentle Lieutenant Anatole became her regular lover. After all, she wrote, “he’s looking more for human, feminine sympathy than for mere sexual satisfaction. And this I’m willing to offer him, even with pleasure . . .”50
In the Western zones, women who accepted material goods from their American boyfriends, as most of them would have, were quickly branded as prostitutes, a reputation they would not have acquired so easily by taking gifts from German men. Of course, access to goods from the PX was a matter of survival for many. In the winter months, even the warmth of a well-heated nightclub was a welcome refuge from icy rooms, shared with many strangers, in bombed-out buildings. But those Lucky Strikes, chocolates, and silk stockings, along with the swing music and the easygoing GI manners, also represented a culture to women, and many young men, which was all the more desirable for having been forbidden in the oppressive Third Reich. People hungered for the trappings of the New World, however crude, because the Old World had collapsed in such disgrace, not just physically, but culturally, intellectually, spiritually. This was true of liberated countries, like France and Holland. It was even more true of Germany and Japan, where the postwar Americanization of culture, beginning with “fratting,” would go further than anywhere else.
At least one woman saw all this for what it was, a dream, which was bound to disappoint in the end—but not without leaving a few traces. After Beno?te Groult has turned down her American lover Kurt’s marriage proposal for the last time, she decides to abandon her game of “hunting for Americans.” Now, she writes, “old Europe is all alone. I feel like Europe, very old and desperate. I have just said goodbye to the whole of America this evening. And to you too, Steve, Don, Tex, Wolf, Ian, who came into my life with such a comforting smile, I’ll be closing my door . . . It no longer amuses me to fool around with all of you from the Far West: you came from too far away, and you will go back. You have liberated me. Now it is up to me to remake my own freedom.”
? ? ?
NAGAI KAFU, A JAPANESE NOVELIST best known for nostalgic fictions of the seamy side of his beloved Tokyo, wrote the following diary entry on October 9, more than two months after the Japanese defeat: “Had an evening meal at the Sanno Hotel. Observed seven or eight young Americans, who looked like officers. They did not seem to lack a certain refinement. After supper, I saw them sitting at the bar, practicing their Japanese on the young woman serving them. Compared to Japanese soldiers, their behaviour was remarkably humble.”51
A month before, Kafu noted in his diary that according to the newspapers American soldiers were shamelessly fooling around with Japanese women. Well, he said, “if true, that is payback for what Japanese soldiers did in occupied China.”52
Kafu was a highly sophisticated eccentric, a Francophile who cared little for conventional opinion. His reaction was, in fact, rare. The more usual view on American fraternization with Japanese women, even among highly educated writers and intellectuals, was a great deal more censorious. Takami Jun, a relatively liberal writer, younger than Kafu, who felt ashamed that he had ever supported, however ambivalently, the militant nationalism of the wartime regime, recalled in his diary something he had seen at the main Tokyo railway station one October evening. Loud American soldiers were flirting with two female station attendants, trying to get them to sit down with them. The girls were giggling, and seemed anything but unwilling. In Takami’s words: “They looked as if being flirted with in this way was unbearably pleasurable. Another station attendant came up. Everything about her suggested that she also wanted to be teased. What an indescribably shameful sight!”53
This must have been quite typical, both the scene and the reaction to it. But whose shame was Takami really talking about? Was it the flirting he found shameful, or the fact that Japanese girls were flirting with foreigners? Or was it his own shame, as a Japanese male? Disapproval of this type of fraternization was expressed in more violent ways too. Japanese girls hired to work for the U.S. Army in Hokkaido complained that they got beaten up regularly by Japanese men because of their association with foreign troops. Henceforth the army had to escort them home in armed trucks.
Envy no doubt played an important role in male resentment. And there was a great deal of envy to go around: defeated men were envious of the victors, American soldiers of Soviet soldiers (when the U.S. ban was still in force), soldiers of officers, and so on. In American Hijiki, Nosaka Akiyuki describes how long this feeling could linger. The teenager in the story grows up and has a family. His wife makes friends with a middle-aged American couple on holiday in Hawaii. They come to visit Japan, a country that brings back fond memories to Mr. Higgins, who served there in the occupation army. Obliged by his wife to be a good host, the Japanese husband decides to entertain Mr. Higgins by taking him to a live sex show in Tokyo. A virile performer, known as Japan’s “Number One,” promises to show the audience what Japanese manhood can do. Alas, that night, Number One’s powers fail him, and once again, the Japanese husband, feeling a vicarious shame, thinks back to that GI he first encountered in the ruins of Osaka, those loglike arms, those tough buttocks encased in shiny gabardine.
Mr. Higgins is white. Wartime Japanese propaganda did not talk about blacks, except as another example of American racism to discredit the enemy further. But occupation by multiracial troops introduced something more disturbing than mere sexual rivalry. A letter from a Japanese woman, intercepted by U.S. military censors, mentions the rumor that there were “twenty thousand women in Yokohama who had intimate relations with Allied soldiers. It has also been brought to the attention of the prefectural office that thirteen thousand halfbreeds are to be born in Kansai. It is enough to make one shudder when one hears that there are three thousand Japanese women with Negro children in Yokohama.”54 The real source of anger here is not immoral behavior per se, or even prostitution, but the pollution of racial purity.
Similar sentiments were voiced in Germany, especially towards the end of 1945, after the fraternization ban was lifted, just as many young German men were beginning to be released from POW camps. As was true in Japan, young army veterans were especially sensitive on the “fratting” issue. Here, a pamphlet circulated in Nuremberg, denouncing “Niggerwomen” (Negerweibern): “Painted and tarted up in colors, with red-lacquered nails, a hole in their stockings and a wild, fat Chesterfield stuck in their beaks, strutting around with their black cavaliers.”55 Another word for fraternizing German girls was “chocolate women” (Chokoladeweibern), referring both to material greed and a shameless penchant for those colored cavaliers.
It is surely no coincidence that so many Japanese and German films about the occupation period show black American soldiers ravishing native women, as though their race made the humiliation of the defeated even worse. A German pamphlet warned: “We’ll tell you right now, we’ll shave off your hair, the blacklist is ready, waiting for when times will have changed.”56 In fact, some women received this treatment already in 1945. There was a case, in Bayreuth, of a woman who was set on fire. In Würzburg, three men were arrested for organizing a terror group called the “Black Panthers,” who threatened to cut the hair off “all German girls who go walking with colored soldiers.”57 A twenty-year-old former Nazi wrote about the fraternizing women: “Have the German people no honor left? . . . One can lose a war, one can be humiliated, but one need not dirty one’s honor oneself!”58
Again, like Takami Jun’s use of the word “shame,” this reference to honor is revealing. The honor of women (let alone their right to decide for themselves whom to consort with) is beside the point. It is the honor of men that is at stake here. They are the ones who feel humiliated. This was, of course, common to all societies traditionally dominated by men. Postwar conditions upset the old order. Women were no longer under male control. Perhaps that was their greatest sin.
One way of looking at these resentments is to link them directly to reactionary political views which the Allies wished to stamp out, if not necessarily in their own countries, then at least in the nations they had just defeated. An American army lieutenant named Julian Sebastian Bach, who later worked as an editor for Life magazine, wrote an account of the occupation of Germany. He believed that “The extent to which German men accept ‘fratting’ is the thermometer which registers the degree to which they accept defeat, contain their national pride and look forward to a new and more congenial way of life. Obviously the sight of a German woman with an American conqueror enrages an ‘unreconstructed’ German more than a German who is anxious to cooperate with us.”59
Takami Jun expressed a very similar opinion in his diary, only a few days after his initial reaction to the shameful behavior of those giggling station attendants. The scene is again at a railway station. He watches a Japanese woman, leaning out of the train window, saying “baibai!” to her American soldier friend, seemingly oblivious to the hateful stares of other Japanese passengers. Takami sees a special pathos in the situation. In the eyes of the bystanders, including himself, the girl, as he puts it, “came to look like a woman at a ‘special comfort facility.’” But the girl, in fact not a hooker at all, doesn’t seem to care. Indeed, she looks “proud to behave shockingly with an American soldier.” This, Takami predicts, will become a normal sight in Japan. What’s more, he says, “It would actually be a good thing . . . Best of all would be a deluge of such sights. It would be good training for the Japanese. For then, in time, more natural, even beautiful social relations will come into being.”60
What strikes me as humane and even sensible in the case of Takami seems na?ve and self-serving in Julian Bach, the U.S. lieutenant in an occupation army. For the jealousies and resentments felt by men, and also women, towards the fraternizers among their own people were hardly confined to unreconstructed fascists. Humiliation was no doubt felt more keenly by the defeated. But it was a common sentiment among the liberated, too, even those who had greeted the young Allied soldiers with flowers when they first arrived as saintly victors.
A popular Dutch song after the war was called Girl, Watch Out for Yourself.