Social Fraternization. During the Occupation years, it is important to distinguish between social fraternization and sexual fraternization. In the first instance, socialization or social contact of American and Allied troops with Japanese nationals was not a taboo of the Occupation. Interaction with friendly, curious, or sympathetic Japanese was seen as a way for Americans to spread the gospel of democracy and assist the Japanese in reconstruction. This in turn was based on the assumption that military and civilian occupation personnel would be well-behaved, courteous, and constructive models of Western civilization for Japanese to emulate.

There were restrictions, however. U.S. occupiers, both military and civilian, were ordered not to eat in Japanese restaurants or Japanese homes; this was not because of a bias against Japanese cuisine but rather a way to conserve Japanese food resources. Except on special occasions, they were not to attend Japanese film houses and theaters (they did so anyway). They were, of course, not to engage in black market activities. The military and their families had commodities readily available at base Post Exchange (PX) shops. They enjoyed other privileges, such as riding in segregated areas on trains and buses. Americans never had to worry about seats. Within these constraints, many of the occupiers were eager to tour Japan, see the sights, and make friends if possible with ordinary as well as important Japanese. Even then, they tended to stay in special hotels designated for Occupation personnel. GIs found ways to make presents of cigarettes, medicine, and food to close friends, such as providing them with letters indicating that these rare goods were gifts and not obtained on the black market. As they did elsewhere in the world where there were American bases, GIs tossed candy and gum to local children. Occasionally, they adopted a Japanese child as a mascot to help with his or her education, or they raised money for orphanages. In billets, offices, and homes, foreign military and civilian families had Japanese maids, cooks, janitors, and chauffeurs. Those who wanted to know more about Japan signed up for language lessons or studied Japanese arts and crafts.

Sexual Fraternization. For GIs or foreign civilian males to date Japanese women or engage in sexual relations was a far different matter. At first, General MacArthur did not explicitly ban fraternization between officers and GIs with local women (as was the case in the American occupied zone of Germany), but he did try to discourage it. Strict guidelines were issued governing the behavior of the Occupation troops in Japan. They were, for example, not to desecrate Japanese temples and shrines. They were to observe Japanese conventions by removing their shoes when stepping onto wooden floors or straw mats called tatami. Responding to complaints, General Robert Eichelberger, one of MacArthur's commanders in the field during the Pacific War and head of the Eighth Army in Japan, issued guidelines in early 1946, making officers responsible for urging their men not to embarrass Japanese women in public places by whistling at them or making loud catcalls or lewd remarks. Military chaplains reminded the troops of their families back home and their ethical and moral responsibilities. Red Cross workers and the United Service Organization (USO) set up recreations centers and libraries to take up leisure time. Special shows were arranged for occupation audiences, such as Kabuki performances. Dances were held to American film, music, and sports stars made stops in Japan to entertain the troops. As for the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, as soon as troops arrived in February 1946, strict non-fraternization orders were issued.

Recreation and Amusement Association. The military occupiers, many of them young unmarried men, had their own perceived sexual needs. Japanese leaders, too, having dealt with masculinity in various ways themselves, including the institution of military sexual slaves (euphemistically called comfort women), assumed the worst of the invading Americans. In August and September, 1945, Japanese officials, including the cabinet level, warned Japanese women to dress in drab clothing and behave with circumspection and wasting no time, they turned to the entertainment industry for help. With government backing, the hastily created Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) set up segregated cabarets, in effect brothels, for exclusive use by foreign military personnel in and near Tokyo, Yokohama, and Osaka and began to advertise. U.S. base commanders looked the other way and provided prophylactic stations. Sex policies during the Occupation were therefore mutually racist and sexist.

Over the first six months, there was no lack of military customers for the bars, casinos, and dance halls set up by RAA. The women ranged from professional prostitutes to lower class novices in desperate need of income. They were available as dance, drinking, and, in many cases, as sex partners. In fact, and this is not an original point, the Japanese government was asking these women to sacrifice their bodies to protect the decent women of Japan from assault and to preserve the racialized blood line. They were to be female sexual shields (onna no bohatei). Ironically, women who were seen as base or not quite respectable were expected to be patriotic heroes.

Although the occupiers had access to prophylactic stations and to penicillin, which was said to be a “magic bullet,” VD rates soared to alarming heights. MacArthur attempted to handle this problem by banning the RAA and decreeing an end to licensed prostitution in January 1946; the women, he declared, were in bondage. He also encouraged greater efforts to provide wholesome amenities or diversions for the soldiers. The Military Police assisted the Japanese police in rounding up prostitutes, sometimes violating the rights of women who happened to be in public at the wrong place or time. The staff of the Public Health and Welfare Section in MacArthur's Headquarters, headed by medical doctor Colonel Crawford Sams, set up rehabilitation centers to help prostitutes find alternate employment. A VD campaign was inaugurated to assist Japanese medical professionals in educating the Japanese people. In the process of seeking out Japanese women, GIs were often confused about the institution and person of geisha and tended to lump them together with prostitutes. In this sector of life under foreign occupation, Japanese women were obviously debased rather than liberated.

Pan-Pan Girls. If MacArthur meant to do away the RAA sponsored centers, he did not fully succeed. Sexual fraternization continued. Ads with the RAA logo appeared in the Nippon Times, for example, as late as April 1947. Occupation military and civilian officers had affairs with Japanese women of so-called good families. GIs found sexual outlets in a new type of prostitute: amateur street walkers, sometimes referred to as “angels of the night.” Among them were younger women, even teenagers, called pan-pan girls. They were unlicensed, and their origin—and the term--is in dispute. They may have been homeless women. They came to include daughters of lower class families in economic distress or of marginalized Japanese, such as burakumin, people of the segregated wards or villages who had in the past been outcastes. GIs were meal tickets. If a woman or girl of the street were successful, she might become “an only one,” a kept woman by a particular GI, and could temporarily leave the streets. Some of the Japanese women were also sexually adventurous or genuinely attracted to the foreign men; some hoped to marry them. Moreover, by the end of 1946, licensed prostitution had returned in the form of special red-line districts (outlined on maps by red lines). Bars and brothels catering to foreign customers were centralized in certain designated spots; others exclusively for Japanese were located elsewhere. In the meantime, MacArthur's headquarters began issuing more explicit guidelines against fraternization. The extent to which Japanese women were victims of rape or sexual assault by GIs is another part of the story and underreported. The world of prostitution, night life, and erotic and pornographic entertainment was very broad and diversified in Occupied Japan. But the point needs to be reinforced: the main customers, the oglers, the exploiters and profiteers remained Japanese men. For various reasons, the popular works of Tamura Taijirō, branded as literature of the flesh, addressed exclusively the sexual liaisons of Japanese men and women. The same was true of novelists Sakaguchi Ango and Hayashi Fumiko, following a slap from censors who deleted their reference to fraternization during a roundtable discussion for a Japanese magazine, 1946.

Occupation Brides. Difficulties were encountered on both the American and Japanese sides for those who fell in love and wished to marry. This included Japanese American GIs who wanted Japanese brides, sometimes in preference to Nisei women back home. Though families on both sides might disapprove of the relationship, the rules—and the law—were gradually relaxed. Under the Military Brides Act, over 760 Japanese war brides entered the United States by 1950. Thousands more would arrive in the 1950s as international marriages became acceptable. The Red Cross and other groups tried to ease the transition for these women by setting up brides' schools to teach them how to make hamburgers, walk in high heels, or dress in Western styles. Stereotypes abounded on all sides and probably still do in researching the subject. Did GIs believe that they were marrying demure young women who would attend to their needs in a loving and docile manner—or is this demeaning to them? Japanese women perhaps thought they were marrying men of affluence who would take them to the States and make their lives easier (this was a common dream among English, Australian, and German war brides too). There were disappointments, disillusion, ruptures and divorces, but also lasting relationships. The children of unmarried unions of GIs and Japanese women—in those days called mixed blood children (konketsujin), a pejorative term replaced much later by “doubles”were all too often abandoned by their fathers and left for the mother to raise in poverty and a hostile environment.

Media Controls. Sexual fraternization is a subject which perhaps has received an inordinate amount of attention, both at the time and later—and on this site. Observers, scholars, and journalists seem to believe that they have dealt properly with the subject of Japanese women in these years by focusing on this topic. It was and remains an essential topic for explorations of sexuality, power, agency and dominance, but preoccupation with it has skewed our understanding of the full range of Japanese women's lives in the Occupation period. There is a large body of Western and Japanese photographs of Japanese prostitutes, some possessing qualities of high art. All, so far as is known, were framed and taken by male photographers. There are references to prostitutes (and geisha) in Western journalism of the period, written mostly but not exclusively by men and published outside of Japan. In the United States, Life or Time and Newsweek magazines might carry pictures or comment on fraternization, but in Occupied Japan it was almost impossible for the Japanese to publish photographs, drawings, or cartoons of GIs together with Japanese women. In similar fashion, it was difficult for Japanese to give vent to their feelings on the subject in print, on stage, or in film. Occupation censors banned words, lines, and passages of fiction, poetry, or non-fiction which alluded to fraternization or hinted at GI involvement in the black market. GI protagonists did not appear in Occupation movies. It was almost as though the outsiders were invisible to the creative artists of Occupied Japan.

Values or Racism? Japanese men, ranging from casual observer to returning veteran, resented and indeed hated, the sight of Japanese women with American or other Western men, especially GI interaction with young women of good or respectable middle-class families. They mocked and disparaged women who solicited or were solicited by well-fed GIs, riding around in their jeeps or roaming confidently through the streets. They cared less about the plight or special circumstances of these women than the contest between themselves and foreign men for sex partners. Japanese women, too, those who considered themselves respectable and upholders of family values, were upset by sightings of pan-pan girls or women of the night. They could not, however, under the media controls of the Occupation freely express their emotions on the subject or on crimes of rape and assault, at least not in print or a public venue. Foreign writers, too, had trouble getting their observations on the subject translated for publication in Occupied Japan. The Gordon W. Prange Collection at Maryland is a treasure trove of censored documents, illustrating the emotions, disgust, and disdain of Japanese men and some women on this subject.

Literary Censorship: Fiction. To give some examples from the Prange Collection, one of the best sellers of the period was a novel called Tokyo Romance. It was written in English by an American newspaperman, Ernest Horberecht, chief of the United Press Bureau in Japan, and translated into Japanese in 1947. In it, a journalist very much like himself (a civilian, not at GI) has a secret romance with a Japanese actress (not a prostitute, which made the subject somewhat more palatable). Censors removed a few of the lines but let the story through since there was no disparagement of GIs. Along with spies and murder it featured “quivering” kisses and love scenes. The novel hit a nerve among the Japanese, especially women, and sold in high numbers, making Hoberecht a minor celebrity with his own fan club. He took advantage of the attention and once said in an interview that “the Japanese women were crazy to find out how American men made love.” A copy of the novel in Japanese exists in the Prange Collection, and in the original English at the Library of Congress. Life magazine was so intrigued by this interracial romance and the success of the novel that it recruited a group of American journalists in Japan, a Japanese dressmaker, and the army's provost marshal in Tokyo to pose for scenes in a lavish photo spread, April 7, 1947.

By far more numerous were allusions to fraternization by Japanese writers, ordinary and famous, which ended up on the censors' cutting room floor, in most cases never to be published. Famous writers who tried to work in the theme of fraternization—novelists such as Kawabata Yasunari, Sakaguchi Ango, or Hayashi Fumiko—were generally caught. Here are deleted lines from a short story by Kawabata, intended for publication in a major magazine, January 1946 (keep in mind that this and later examples are unprofessional translations into English by Japanese nationals working for the Publications, Pictorial, and Broadcasting Division (PPB) of the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD).

Two ladies [Japanese] came in accompanying the aged officers [foreign military men]. Their appearance, sophisticated and not bashful, suggested that they had stayed in foreign countries for a long time. Yuzo [Kawabata's protagonist] wondered whether or not such women as they, who are suitable for foreigners, are attached to the high officers as interpreters or guides. He could not figure out their births. He was surprised when he heard nearby people whisper they were members of some minister's [high official's] family.

Nagai Kafu, another famous author and well-known for writing about courtesans, prostitutes, and café women of the demi-monde, was stopped from letting one of his male characters make the following resentful observations to his friends in a July 1946 story:
Among many office girls around Marunouchi business district, there are not a few who fraternize with GIs of the Occupation Forces in Hibiya Park. And I see that most of the dancers and waitresses in the cafes along the Ginza Street will not even throw a glance at Japanese customers.” He continued: “But they have a good reason to behave that way, as not only money but cigarettes, chocolates and all other things they want are at their command, if they are partners to GIs.

Surprisingly, writer Ishikawa Jun, in his 1946 story, “The Legend of Gold,” was able to get a reference to a red-light district in Yokohama frequented by GIs and another one to an African American soldier safely through the censorship process. Possibly, nobody noticed. Despite the paper shortage, there was such a flow of materials that censors had to rely heavily on Japanese nationals—who were supplied with strict guidelines—as their first line of examination. Nevertheless the story was not reproduced in a later collection of Ishikawa's short stories, ironically bearing the same title, probably a reflection of self-censorship by the publisher. The evidence for this particular piece of censorship has been re-discovered in the Prange Collection.

The next example indicates how sharp-eyed censors could be. Shibaki Yoshiko, then a radio scriptwriter and more famous for her fiction, lost the following words, italicized, in a June 1946 short story, words that significantly altered her observation:

Among the many deleted fragments written by unknowns are the following passages intended for a small literary magazine, June 1946—the first for reasons of fraternization and the second for destructive criticism of Occupation forces:

Literary Censorship: Poetry. Poetry in free verse and traditional formats was an especially good vehicle in Japan for the expression of deeply felt emotions. It was written by all classes and people and had many local and national outlets. Here too the censors were alert. “Handshake,” a free verse poem by local poet Kurihara Sadako and apparently intended as a friendly gesture, was deleted from her collection of wartime and early postwar poems, Black Eggs, in July 1946:

Intent until yesterday on playing war,
the little militarists
throw away their toy weapons and call out:
“Hello, Mr. American soldier!”
Their small breasts
swell with vague curiosity
about this unknown race:
“Hello, Mr. American Soldier!”

Can it have been you who until yesterday
our fathers were fighting?
“Hello, Mr. American Soldier!”
You open your large mouth, smile cheerfully,
not a bit like the devils
the grown-ups taught us about:
Mr. American Soldier!
We'd like to shake
your large hand.

Among the poems which openly alluded to fraternization, the image of red or painted lips appears frequently as does that of jeeps—and on occasion blue-eyed or golden haired infants. The following tanka (31 syllable poem) did not make it into print, 1946: “A Japanese girl with red lips was triumphantly sitting in a jeep, running full speed, raising dust.” Neither did this one, full of anger: “I am jealous of those girls who follow the American soldiers at Ginza on a rainy evening.” In December 1947, a poem was briefly suspended as much too provocative but in the end was passed, perhaps in reaction to criticism from Japanese and foreigners about interference with free expression. The lines, written as a set of haiku (17 syllable poems), provide social commentary and tell us that discourse on race, sex, gender was part of daily conversation and at times, even possible to get into print.

Our country is defeated and night-girls strut
       on the street
Erotic books and erotic dramas are flooding, and
       Night-girls know nothing of starvation.
A night-girl is lighting her lighter for a man beside a
       street tree in the gloaming.
Are stray dogs being rounded up? No, it's night-girls
       in the dark under the girder-bridge.
Flashing of lightning reflects on white faces of girls
       who are being arrested.
Among those women there would be some widows who curse
       war.

A Touch of the Sensational. Censorship controls over Japan's mass media (with the exception of films or extreme left and right wing publications) were relaxed in late 1947 and ended in late 1949. But Japanese remained wary of featuring fraternization. The Korean War, 1950-53, brought a recurrence of problems with an influx of GIs on rest leave in Japan and in search of women and entertainment. Women in Okinawa, then under direct American control, were also victims of sexual harassment. When the Occupation of Japan ended in April 1952 (but not of Okinawa), famous writers moved quickly to rescue and publish unexpurgated versions of their stories. A small body of new fiction by male and female writers (and in one notorious case a man masking as a woman author) appeared on prostitution with allusions to fraternization. For a time, sensationalized films were made about prostitutes, some including the topic of mixed race children. Amateur American actors, often former GIs still on the scene, were tapped to play GI roles. Exposés in magazines addressed the bar and brothel culture surrounding American bases. The existence of fraternization remained distasteful to Japanese—and to many Americans observers. No longer in control but still stationed on Japanese soil, base commanders were unable simply to look the other way or play it down.

Selected Stories. Great literature on sexual or social fraternization during the Occupation is slim, at least in translation. An evocative work which was written by female activist Nakamoto Takako in 1953 and translated the following year is “The Only One” (the title in Japanese is “Camp Woman”). We know of other, possibly very good stories, which were penned by Hirabayashi Taiko and Kawabata Yasunari. They are tantalizingly discussed by Michael Molasky in a book about occupied Japan and Okinawa but have not been translated. A story by respected author Kojima Nobuo “The American School,” has become well-known in part because it is so rare. Set a little later, in 1954, but harkening back to the Occupation, it tells about the visit of Japanese teachers of English to a school on an American military base. A serious film, Street of Shame, directed by Mizoguchi Kenji in 1956, was used in a successful campaign which was organized and driven by Japanese women to persuade the Diet to ban licensed prostitution, 1955-1956. The story of sex work in Japan did not, however, suddenly end. The role of the licensed Japanese prostitute was taken over by marginalized Japanese women in the massage parlor or nude photography trade, or by recruitment of Asian sex workers. In pursuit of exoticized pleasure, Japanese men would join overseas sex tours, especially to Thailand, or at home frequent bars and clubs featuring imported Western as well as Japanese hostesses.