Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight

August 17, 2015 5:18 AM

The Japanese women who married the enemy — "American GIs were told not to fraternise with Japanese women, but they did." Within a few years after Imperial Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945 and subsequent occupation, over 30,000 Japanese war brides married American troops and returned to the United States with them (BBC News documentary broadcast schedule).
posted by cenoxo (13 comments total)

It hadn't occurred to me until this that European war brides were more tolerated since they were white. Even when some of them were nazis.
posted by Badgermann at 6:00 AM on August 17, 2015

Great title.
posted by mrdaneri at 6:04 AM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

That's an incredible number. I wonder how many European women came back to the U.S. or whether the length of the Occupation played a significant role.
posted by Atreides at 7:01 AM on August 17, 2015

Badgermann: That's because there were numerous state anti-miscegenation laws, the last of which was not repealed until 1967. These prohibited interracial marriages between whites/hispanics and black, asians, Filipinos, etc. You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws_in_the_United_States#Anti-miscegenation_laws_repealed_1948.E2.80.931967
posted by enamon at 7:36 AM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

It hadn't occurred to me until this that European war brides were more tolerated since they were white

Color was part of it -- the Chinese laborers who built the western railroads and mines certainly had trouble, but not nearly as much as the Africans did. Fundamentally, though, this is Pearl Harbor Syndrome.

The US was, both before WW I and WW II, very isolationist and *VERY* much not interested in getting involved in European wars. WW I took a lot of provocation to finally push Wilson into asking for a declaration of war. Roosevelt, however, felt that the US was probably going to get dragged into the mess somehow and took steps to both make sure the US was in better shape* for military action and to support US allies like China and the United Kingdome. But Roosevelt also knew that between the effects of the Great Depression and the general isolationist feelings of the average US citizen, that was all he could do.

Then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and made 8 of the the 9 battleships** in the US Battle Force of the Pacific Fleet Unable to fight. The anger this raised in the US was massive, and it change the US attitude from isolationist to "let's fight!" quite literally overnight. Within 24 hours, the US had declared war against Japan.

Germany and Italy, by treaty, declared war on the US, the US formally declared war in return on December 11th, 1941, but there was no dramatic speech to Congress that time, that was a simple formality in response to a diplomatic telegram.

But because the Japanese war had started with what was perceived to the US public as a sneak attack, the US public was very angry, and this was an anger that was very much kept stoked up throughout the war by the US government -- because the decision that was rapidly made by Arcadia Conference was that the first priority was the defeat of Germany. The US would have to hold off Japan on its own. When Germany was defeated, then the allied arms would all turn to Japan.

Of course, we all know now that by the time Germany was defeated, the US Naval and Air forces had grown (and a project the US had been working on had come to fruition) to the point that by the time we'd defeated Germany, Japan was crumbling. But still, let's not ignore the Allied contributions. Operating as Task Force 57/37 of the 5th/3rd Fleet was the British Pacific Fleet, which operating nearly a quarter of the aircraft available to the allies. For the invasion of Japan, a Commonwealth Corps was planned, though MacArthur demanded they train and equip in the US with US gear to keep logistics simple, and after the defeat of Germany, RAF Bomber Command was heading to the Pacific as the commonwealth Tiger Force***

But Japan wouldn't last long after Germany fell. Between us seeing the actual state of Japan after the war, and the relief that the war was actually over, and the end of the "Kill the goddamn Jap!" propoganda!†



* Example, the Vinson Act to strengthen the US Navy and the formation of the US Army Air Force from the US Army Air Corp, which almost became a separate service before the war -- it was agreed, though, with the deterioating situation that this wasn't the time for that, so the USAAF stayed technically part of the US Army, with an agreement that it would separate and become a separate service after the war, which it did in 1947 as the US Air Force.

** Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia and California sunk; Nevada, Tennessee, Maryland and the flagship Pennsylvania damaged. Only the Colorado, coming off refit at Bremerton in Washington was fit to sail.

Of course, we we able to refloat and refit West Virginia and California and the damaged ships were later repaired and refitted, but Oklahoma was refloated only to clear the mooring, and later sunk on the way to the scrapyard after the war, and of course the shattered Arizona was stripped to the waterline, her hull remains where she sunk today as a memorial.

Colorado ended up being the last battleship to be refitted. As the only one left, she had strict orders that she had to remain ready to sail at 48 hours notice for the next three years. Only after the North Carolinas and South Dakotas were commissioned, as well as the easily fixed Pearl Harbor survivors were back, was she allowed to refit.


*** Here's another side to the argument of "did we need the atomic bomb or not?" XXI Bomber Command, now the 20th Air Force, was already destroying Japanese cites via fire bombing, and it was going to get much worse for Japan. With Germany defeated and Okinawa taken, more was on the way. First was the Lancasters, Lincolns, and Liberators of the Tiger Force, second was the USAAF 8th Air Force, which were transitioning from their B-17s and B-24s to the B-29 and moving to Saipan and Okinawa. By October, 1945, the size of the bomber force attacking Japan was going to triple. Indeed, the USAAF and USN argued that invading Japan was a waste of time and lives. Between the naval blockade and the air force bombings, Japan would either surrender or die -- there was simply no other option for them.

And, again, this is an argument that we can *never* truly answer.

† Even Bugs Bunny got into the act with that propaganda, that started to fade. There was, and is, doubtless still some -- racists gonna racist, but there were a lot of people in the US who were actually German, and far more importantly, Germany didn't attack us.

Japan did -- and by pushing the propaganda knob up to 11, the US government could keep everybody working and fighting and not asking "Hey, why aren't we going full out against those Jap bastards? Why don't we get them first?"

Why is more complicated, but one factor was a letter written by Leó Szilárd and signed by Albert Einstein that explained that a nation with a particular element, top notch physicists, and strong engineering skills would be able to make "extremely power bombs of a new type." And Germany, having taken over Czechoslovakia, had all three.
posted by eriko at 7:54 AM on August 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

Generally speaking, the Japanese women that married black Americans settled more easily, Spickard says. "Black families knew what it was like to be on the losing side. They were welcomed by the sisterhood of black women."

I imagine there are some fascinating stories here, I wish it merited more than an offhand mention in the article.
posted by bjrubble at 9:27 AM on August 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

Technically, my grandmother was one of these war brides. She and my grandfather met when she was working as a shop clerk in a record store and he was stationed in Tokyo during the occupation. However, my grandfather was also one of the very few Japanese-American servicemen in Japan, so I suspect they were able to sidestep many of the usual stigmas associated with these unions, and there was much less cultural baggage to overcome.

Even so, I still think my grandmother must have been very lonely after they moved to the U.S. I can't imagine how hard it must have been, trying to raise three small children in and around a series of unfamiliar military bases in an foreign environment. To give just one example of how isolated they were, my dad and ended up solely integrating his elementary school in Texas. Even today, the Japanese community in the U.S. is miniscule, but my grandmother still does not really speak English. Until they managed to get to California, I suspect she didn't have any other people to speak with outside of her husband and children. Even after moving to a predominantly Japanese-American neighborhood, it's never been clear that she's had many local friends to speak of.

My grandfather is gone now, and, regretfully, I never learned Japanese, so I'll probably never know their whole story, but I'm still grateful for their risks and sacrifices, without which, I wouldn't be here today.
posted by Diagonalize at 10:40 AM on August 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

You might ask your grandmother to write that story out, in Japanese, and either A) give yourself time to read it or B) ask someone to translate it for you. That way, at least, you would have her story in her native language. (Plan C: Give her a cassette player that records and ask her to hit record and talk about her life).
posted by Atreides at 11:18 AM on August 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

I think part of the problem is that this isn't the kind of thing I could really get out of her with zero prompts, and it's unclear if I could communicate with her well enough to convey what I was looking for. We've never been close, and now I live on the other side of the country from her. In theory, I could see if my dad, who does speak Japanese, would ever sit down with her and try to get the full story, but she's generally very shy, and there are a lot of potentially sensitive family and cultural dynamics at play. Additionally, based on some vague comments we've heard from my Japanese relations, I suspect her language skills may have atrophied and evolved in peculiar ways over decades of being in the U.S. with my increasingly deaf grandfather as her primary company. My brother has marginally better Japanese than I do, so maybe we can all sit down over the holidays and see if we get anywhere.

I do know my grandfather sat down before his passing with some folks from the Go For Broke Foundation to give an oral history of his experiences during WWII, something he never ever ever talked about with his family, so at least I can try getting a hold of that someday.
posted by Diagonalize at 12:32 PM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

At age twenty my grandfather was part of the occupation force. He put together photo albums of his time there complete with captions and (if i remember correctly) even some cartoon-y illustrations on the paper the photos are glued to. Some are touristy photos of Japan, but many are of him and his army buddies — young Japanese women are often in the group photos. From the style of the album and the captions/illustrations you can tell he put together the albums within a few years at the most from when he was in Japan. It’s possible he made these while still in Japan.

I don’t have the albums (one of my cousins does, in a far-away state from me), but what i did get on my last trip to my grandparents’ house was the contents of a small box of photos that my grandfather had kept squirreled away. Some of the photos were him and his army buddies, outtakes of photos he put in his albums. But, this box also contained photos of a type not found in his albums or in boxes of family photos — portraits of young women not taken by him, but given to him, some with inscriptions on the back written by these women. A few were American women from his home state, possibly girl friends from high school or when he was at an army base in that state before getting shipped off to the Pacific. The others are pictures of Japanese women; one in particular shows up several times, a few are inscribed by her (in English), and it seems he had the start of a real relationship with her. It is known in our family that my grandfather had a “special friend” while in Japan.

My grandfather and grandmother grew up in the same small farming community and had dated in high school. He was young enough that he only caught the tail end of the war, fresh out of school, so they were only apart for a few years. They married about a year after he was back home. Their first child was born in 1949, they had four total, and were married for over fifty years (until his death at the end of the 1990s).

I can’t imagine what his life would have been like had he married that woman in Japan, and perhaps the reason he didn’t was because he couldn’t either. It would have been exceedingly difficult for her to move to small-town farming America soon after the war, both due to cultural differences and racism. I suspect, though, knowing my grandfather’s reputation as a partier when he was young, that it was all about sex for him and he probably never considered marrying any Japanese woman.
posted by D.C. at 12:42 PM on August 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

That's an incredible number. I wonder how many European women came back to the U.S. or whether the length of the Occupation played a significant role

Approximately 70,000 British women and 20,000 other Europeans according to the LA Times. There were also some 12,000 Australian war brides and over a much longer period there were many women admitted from the Philipines. I found one source that claims 300,000 women in total, including 51,747 Filipinos by the late 60s.

I've always been interested in the occupation of Japan. My grandfather was a civil engineer with the Corps of Engineers who had a role in the reconstruction of Japanese infrastructure and my dad lived on an Army post in Japan during those years. My father and grandfather continued to see the Japanese very much as the enemy long, long after they came home. Ironically, my grandmother was born to German immigrants, but no one seemed to see them as a threat during or after the war, nor have the slightest indication of cognitive dissonance in the disparity between the treatment of Japanese-Americans and German-Americans. In fact, a German POW camp was built on their land in Mississippi precisely because there were many immigrants living there who spoke fluent German.
posted by Lame_username at 12:52 PM on August 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I've always been interested in the occupation of Japan.

John W. Dower's excellent book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999) mentions how difficult 14 years of Imperial war efforts resulting in utter defeat, sudden occupation (and imposition of new democratic mores) was for young Japanese women. From Chapter Three, Kyodatsu: Exhaustion and Despair:

In the confusion of the time, such [traditional] matchmaking arrangements proved difficult due to the disruption of families and communities as well as a shortage of the individuals who customarily had served as intermediaries or marriage brokers. It was young women of marriageable age who found themselves in the most desperate circumstances, for the demography of death in the recent war had removed a huge aggregation of prospective husbands. In 1940, there had been more men than women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine: seven years later, women in this age group outnumbered men by more than one million. A large cohort of women, most of them born between 1916 and 1926, confronted the prospect not merely of coping with postwar hardships without a marriage partner, but of never marrying at all.

Under these circumstances, leaving Japan as an American war bride was an attractive (although socially wrenching) proposition.
posted by cenoxo at 9:16 PM on August 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

Thank you for the story, and the awesome photo, Jamaro.
posted by Atreides at 7:22 AM on August 18, 2015 [2 favorites]