The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory (Asia's Transformations)

The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa

This book is an exploration of Japan’s experience of American military occupation. It provides textual analysis and discussions of postwar history, and juxtaposes literature by well-known and obscure writers from mainland Japan and Okinawa. The author examines whether Japanese women’s writing provides a “counterhistory” to predominantly male narratives of the occupation. He also explores how Okinawan writers represented their region’s distinct experience of American military occupation and what Okinawan literature teaches us about historical memory in Japan today. This helps to shed light on the difficult issues of war, violence, prostitution, race and colonialism in occupied Japan and Okinawa. American forces still remain in Okinawa and are a source of political controversy. Through careful analysis of acclaimed literary works coupled with attention to texts long excluded from Japan’s postwar literary canon, this book introduces fresh perspectives on the occupation era. Michael S.Molasky is Associate Professor of Japanese at Connecticut College and co-editor of Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa. He has spent over a dozen years in Japan, where he worked as a freelance translator and jazz musician before pursuing an academic career.

ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN ASIA’S TRANSFORMATIONS Edited by Mark Selden, Binghamton and Cornell Universities The books in this series explore the political, social, economic and cultural consequences of Asia’s twentieth century transformations and look toward their impact on the twenty first century. The series emphasizes the tumultuous interplay of local, national, regional and global forces as Asia bids to become the hub of the world economy. While focusing on the contemporary, it also looks back to analyse the antecedents of Asia’s contested rise. This series comprises two strands: Routledge Studies in Asia’s Transformations is a forum for innovative new research intended for a high-level specialist readership, and the titles will be available in hardback only. Titles include: 1. The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa Literature and Memory Michael Molasky Asia’s Transformations aims to address the needs of students and teachers as well as scholars, and the titles will be published in hardback and paperback. Titles include: 1. Debating Human Rights Critical Essays from the United States and Asia Edited by Peter Van Ness 2. Hong Kong’s History State and Society under Colonial Rule Edited by Tak-Wing Ngo

The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa Literature and Memory

Michael S.Molasky

London and New York

First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1999 Michael S.Molasky All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-98168-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-19194-7 (Print Edition)

For Sarah and Jack

I mean this in only the most abstract sense, but when we lost the war it might have been best had the victors raped every woman in Japan. (Kōno Taeko, “Jikai”)

Contents

1

2

3

4

Preface and acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Burned-out ruins and barbed-wire fences

1

The occupation of Japan as history

5

The occupation in mainland Japanese literature and criticism

9

Okinawa: From premodern kingdom to Japanese prefecture

12

The Battle of Okinawa and the American occupation (1945–72)

15

Chapter summaries

23

Roads to no-man’s land

26

Language, landscape, and gender in “The American School”

31

Gender, history, and the construction of victimhood in The Cocktail Party

40

Fact and fiction

50

A base town in the literary imagination

55

An Okinawan Boy

58

“The Town That Went Pale”

65

“Children of Mixed Blood” and the remaking of Koza

67

A darker shade of difference

73

Representing blacks in postwar Japan

75

Race and narrative ambivalence in “Prize Stock”

78

Reporting truth, imagining motives: “Painting on Black Canvas”

86

Poetry of protest: Arakawa Akira’s “The Colored Race”

97

Female floodwalls

107

The Recreation and Amusement Association

109

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5

6

Prostitution after the RAA

112

Prostitution and the Japanese publishing industry

114

The Chastity of Japan

120

Female Floodwall

129

Ambivalent allegories

136

The generational logic of “Guests From Afar”

139

Prostitution and other honest jobs: “The Only Ones”

149

Caste and outcasts: “Women of a Base Town”

152

Marriage, money, and desire in “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido”

156

The occupier within

164

Reproducing the occupation: “Human Sheep”

166

Style as story: Narrative technique and memory in “American Hijiki”

175

Epilogue: Occupation literature in the post-Vietnam era

186

Okinawan literature since the Vietnam War

186

Saegusa Kazuko’s A Winter’s Death

191

Notes

198

English-language works cited

235

Japanese-language works cited

242

Newspaper articles

253

Index

254

Preface

With enthusiasm bordering on bluster, I decided in 1990 to write a doctoral dissertation exploring how Okinawan as well as mainland Japanese writers have represented life under American military occupation. Until that time, my reading in Japanese literature and history had taught me virtually nothing about Okinawa, so I found myself embarking on a comparative study for which I was woefully unprepared. Nine years later, and considerably humbled, I have finally completed a semblance of the book I first envisioned. What I could not envision when I finished the dissertation in 1994 was that the following year, three American servicemen would abduct and rape a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl, sparking massive protests on the islands and catapulting Okinawa into the public consciousness on both sides of the Pacific. My dissertation examined how male authors use metaphors of rape and emasculation to represent their own sense of loss when confronted with the foreign occupiers; now a real act of rape was drawing widespread attention to Okinawa, where a massive U.S. military presence remained among the most visible yet overlooked legacies of the American occupation years. As someone studying the occupation’s mixed legacies, I was gratified at the public’s newfound interest in Okinawa. Yet I also shared the disappointment of the prefecture’s citizens at what it took to win public attention. Few of us wish to benefit from another person’s suffering, and I must confess to being ambivalent about this book’s potential “topicality.” At the same time, I must state for those readers expecting a work solely devoted to Okinawa that this is a comparative study concerned with writing from Japan’s main islands as well. In fact, most of this book is devoted to “mainland” Japanese literature—although it will quickly become apparent that my conception of literature extends well beyond canonical works, and that my interests spill over into social and cultural history. Despite my ambivalence, I do hope that this book will attract a wider range of readers than is usual for academic studies of Japanese literature, and I have tried to spare non-specialists the narrow theoretical debates likely to engage only a handful of literary scholars. I have also attempted to provide sufficient linguistic and historical information for those unfamiliar with Japan but interested in the book’s topic. To address the needs of these different readers, I have

x

relegated many discussions to endnotes, which are more copious and detailed than they would be otherwise. Readers conversant with modern Japanese literature will find that Okinawan writers offer fresh insights into a wide range of issues, such as race and ethnicity, collective memory, national identity, and Japanese colonialism. East Asian area specialists will discover that as early as the 1950s, writers from both mainland Japan and Okinawa anticipated questions about the war and Japanese imperialism that have only recently been raised in the nation’s mainstream discourse. Many of the questions raised by Okinawan writers will resonate with the concerns of intellectuals elsewhere in Asia, especially in South Korea, where Japanese military domination was also followed by American occupation, and where an ongoing U.S. military presence offers a constant reminder of the occupation’s varied legacies. Finally, I would hope that literary scholars interested in colonialism or foreign occupation in other regions of the world will find that Japanese and Okinawan literature offers new perspectives on familiar problems. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this book are my own. Japanese names are given in Japanese order, with surname first, unless they are listed as the author of an English-language scholarly study. Macrons have been placed over elongated Japanese vowels, except in the case of “Ryukyu” and of wellknown placenames, such as Tokyo, Osaka, Kyushu, and Hokkaido. Macrons are used in personal names, other than in bibliographical listings that omit them from the publication’s title (i.e. “Oe Kenzaburo” instead of “Ōe Kenzaburō”). Acknowledgements During the past eight years, I have benefited from the help of many people and organizations, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge them here. I must begin with my mentors at the University of Chicago, Bill Sibley and Norma Field, who offered support and guidance while allowing me to pursue my own, sometimes unfashionable, interests. Bill’s personal and intellectual generosity, combined with his infallible sense of literary style, continue to serve as a source of inspiration. And I am particularly grateful to Norma for her continuing interest in my work and for her insistence that I resist the appeal of ready-made theoretical positions. David Bunn of the University of the Western Cape (South Africa) also deserves special thanks. This project began in his course, “Colonial Discourse/ Metropolitan Theory,” which he taught while serving as a visiting professor in the English Department at Chicago. David has that rare gift which enables him to be acutely critical, intellectually empathetic, and indefatigably supportive at the same time. After David returned to South Africa, Chris Looby generously agreed to replace him on my dissertation committee and offered many constructive criticisms that I have incorporated into this book. Eizaburō Okuizumi, head of the Japanese collection at the university’s library, is also an authority on the occupation era and kindly introduced me to sources that I would have otherwise

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overlooked. Ikeda Kōichi, who was a visiting professor at Chicago, offered guidance during the incipient stages of this project. I am also blessed with many friends and colleagues who read portions of this book in one of its earlier incarnations and offered thoughtful suggestions for improvement. My gratitude goes to Linda Angst, Alan Christy, Noriko Aso Christy, David Kadlec, Tom LaMarre, Chris Nelson, Leslie Pincus, John Russell, Ellen Schattschneider, and Eric Shutt. Steve Rabson has shared with me his vast knowledge of Okinawa and his first-hand experience of military life on the island during the Vietnam War. I am grateful for his criticisms and unflagging support over the years. Sharalyn Orbaugh allowed me to read her own manuscript on Japanese literature of the occupation era and also provided helpful suggestions that led me to rethink the structure of this book. I appreciate her spirit of collegiality and hope that our studies are seen as complementary rather than as competing. Tom Havens and Kerry Smith kept me intellectually honest, ensuring that I didn’t play too fast and loose with Japanese history. Their incisive criticisms of the introductory chapter were particularly helpful. My department chair at Connecticut College, Tim Vance, encouraged me to take an extended research leave, even though it required him to assume additional burdens. Mark Auslander, with his usual intellectual voracity, read the entire manuscript and offered countless stimulating suggestions. Tom Looser read recent versions of Chapters Four and Five, and wrote several pages filled with ideas for improvement, most of which I have adopted. Mark and Tom deserve special thanks; their critical acumen is exceeded only by their personal generosity. In Tokyo, Fujimaki Shūichi of Kōseisha Publishers offered assistance in countless ways over the years, but I am particularly grateful for the nights of stimulating discussion that, more than once, caused me to miss the last train home. Dr. Nagata Mikio helped me overcome unexpected adversity and to resume work on this project after it suddenly diminished in significance. Nishida Masaru, Professor Emeritus at Hōsei University, and Igarashi Akio and Gotō Kazuhiko, both of Rikkyō University, provided guidance as well as helpful introductions. Fukushima Jurō generously shared rare materials from his vast collection of publications from the early postwar years. Seki Yōko of Chūō Kōron Publishers granted access to the company’s magazine archives. Saegusa Kazuko met with me and openly discussed her novels about the occupation. Mitani Kuniaki introduced me to the finer points of Japanese narratology and offered penetrating insights into the “premodern” elements of Nosaka Akiyuki’s writing style. The Mainichi newspapers granted permission to include in this book photographs from their fine collection. The Institute for Research on Okinawan Culture at Hōsei University admitted me as an affiliated scholar and provided open access to their collection of books and journals. I also enjoyed several evenings of stimulating conversation with the institute’s former director, Higa Minoru. Many people and institutions in Okinawa have been unstinting in their assistance over the years. At the University of the Ryukyus, I have learned much from Hiyane Teruo, Okamoto Keitoku, Nakahodo Masanori, Takara Kurayoshi,

xii

and Yamazato Katsunori. I am particularly indebted to Professors Okamoto and Nakahodo for their endless knowledge of Okinawan literature and for their constant support ever since I began this project. The writers Medoruma Shun, Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, and Takara Ben shared their insights into Okinawan literature and culture. Miyagi Etsujirō, head of the Okinawa Prefectural Archives and an authority on the occupation of Okinawa, has taught me much through conversation and through his many books on the subject. I am also indebted to his staff at the Prefectural Archives and to Naha Shuppansha for helping me to acquire several of the photographs included in this book. The Peace and Culture Promotion Section at Okinawa City Hall has also provided several photographs of occupation-era Koza and saved me countless hours of archival research. The staff members’ enthusiasm and good cheer disabused me of my long-held stereotype about Japan’s municipal bureaucracies. Permission to use the photographs of Koza included in this book was kindly granted by Okinawa City Hall, Ms. Tamaki Tsuneko, Ms. Matsumara Kumi, and Mr. Yoshioka Ko. Many journalists at Okinawa’s two leading newspapers, the Ryūkyū Shinpō and The Okinawa Times, have also helped me over the years and provided regular access to their archives. Special thanks must go to Moromizato Michihiro of The Okinawa Times. Mark Selden, the editor of Routledge’s Asia’s Transformations series, has been an empathetic reader, perspicacious critic, and long-distance mentor whose suggestions have been invaluable. I am also grateful to Victoria Smith and James Whiting at Routledge’s London office. They have patiently and pleasantly guided me through the intricacies of academic publishing as we brought this book to fruition. I could not have completed this project without the generous financial support from the following sources: a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, University of Chicago Dissertation Writing Fellowship in East Asian Studies; a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars; a Northeast Asia Council Travel Grant from the Association for Asian Studies; and an Advanced Research Grant from the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, with funds provided by the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Connecticut College provided a pre-tenure sabbatical and travel funds through the R.Frank Johnson Faculty Development Fund, the Provost’s Office, and the Sherman Fairchild Foundation. I would also like to thank the following Japanese sources for their generous financial assistance: the International Education Foundation, the Nomura Foundation, and the Bank of Okinawa’s Grant for the Promotion of Okinawan Studies. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to my wife, Kimiko, and to my children, Sarah and Jack. Kimiko has been unwavering in her support over the years, assuming the burden of a single parent for more nights, weekends, and summers than either of us cares to remember. As for my children, I shudder to

xiii

think that I have been working on this project for most of their lives. It is with love, gratitude, and more than a tinge of guilt that I dedicate this book to them.

Introduction Burned-out ruins and barbed-wire fences

World War II, the Korean War—both have become distant memories; but, somewhere, the history of the ruins is still being written. The boy from the burned-out ruins lives on. (Ishikawa Hiroshi 1980:179–80) Today Japan’s postwar ruins lie buried beneath the skyscrapers and mammoth department stores of the nation’s prosperity. Yet Japanese prosperity has proven fragile, and distant memories continue to lurk just beneath the brittle surface of everyday life. Literature can be a powerful catalyst for releasing memories—both personal and social—that have lain dormant for decades, thereby confronting us with, in Paul Fussell’s words, “our own buried lives.”1 Fussell coins this expression in his study of English literary accounts of World War I. Compared to that somber body of writing and to Japan’s own ponderous literature about the Pacific War, Japanese stories of the American occupation, while never eluding war’s shadow, are refreshingly lighthearted. Laced with humor and a bittersweet nostalgia, these narratives relish the unlikely contradictions and ironies of postwar life: hope and optimism amidst widespread suffering; new freedoms brought not by domestic leaders but by the foreign occupiers; fervent wartime xenophobes who suddenly embrace American fashion, the English language, and proclaim democracy to be the nation’s ideological savior. This book explores how the occupation has been remembered, recreated, and disseminated through a wide range of literary works written in Japanese. I examine stories by both women and men, by writers from Okinawa as well as from Japan’s main islands. I do not try to explicate what happened during the occupation or why, for historians and social scientists have already shed much light on these issues. Instead I address a different set of questions: How has Japan’s experience of the occupation been recreated when filtered through the literary imagination? Men have clearly dominated the nation’s literary record of the era; in what ways does Japanese women’s writing offer a “counter-history” to these dominant male narratives? Finally, but at the heart of this inquiry, how have Okinawan writers represented their region’s distinct experience of American military occupation, and what can Okinawan literature teach us about

2 INTRODUCTION

historical memory in postwar Japan? I pursue these questions through the literature of both well-known and obscure writers, and I discuss stories available in English translation while introducing other works culled from Japanese-language newspapers, popular magazines, and from publications deemed either too local or lowbrow for inclusion in standard literary studies. In addition, I draw on documents from U.S. military sources, Japanese municipal archives, and personal collections. In short, this book intersperses literary analysis with discussions of postwar history and juxtaposes writing by men and women, by mainland Japanese and Okinawans. The result is an interdisciplinary, comparative inquiry into the literature of two integrally related but separate instances of American military occupation in East Asia.2 Roughly half of this book is devoted to literature written by Japanese men; the remainder explores writing by Okinawans and by Japanese women. I begin with a simple assumption: literature participates in both the construction and preservation of a society’s memory of an era. This is accomplished not only by compiling narrative accounts but also by generating a finite set of tropes that will circulate through a wide range of discursive contexts.3 Japanese men’s writing on the occupation confirms this observation, for a predictable group of rhetorical figures and narrative strategies appears in works by otherwise dissimilar writers, thereby fostering among readers a common conceptual lexicon to articulate a shared sense of history. These male writers typically rely on metaphors of linguistic and sexual subordination, fusing them into ambivalent allegories of national humiliation. Men’s stories are often told from the perspective of an adolescent boy and suggest that the occupied society, like the narrator himself, has yet to attain, or has been stripped of, its masculinity. When poet Ishikawa Hiroshi pronounces that the boy (shōnen) from the burnedout ruins lives on, he could well be referring to the men who have dominated Japanese fictional accounts of the occupation era.4 After all, the best-known stories about life under American occupation are by men and adopt a distinctly male-centered perspective. Not surprisingly, women writers have eschewed such a perspective, but their stories about life under American occupation remain largely unknown to both scholars and general readers. Okinawan narratives of their occupation experience have also been overlooked and have failed to encroach on mainland Japanese memories of the occupation era. This book aims to reinsert these and other occluded perspectives into our understanding of both the occupation years and postwar Japanese literature. Many author-centered studies and literary histories written in Japanese tangentially discuss the occupation era, and a growing body of scholarship in both Japanese and English addresses the American censorship apparatus and its impact on cultural production at that time. Yet there remains a dearth of scholarship that examines Japanese literary accounts of the occupation, and only a few of these studies concentrate on works published after American censorship restrictions were lifted.5 I am mainly interested in how a diverse group of writers has represented life under foreign occupation when free to do so, and I have

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 3

therefore focused on literature published after the occupation ended in 1952.6 Whether a work’s narrated events are directly based on the author’s life or are largely conjured up in the authorial imagination is not central to my inquiry. More important is how these stories conceive of the experience of foreign occupation, how they relate to one another, how they fit in to broader discourses about the war and postwar, and how they clarify relationships between the occupiers and the occupied. Several works discussed in this book show the Japanese to be not merely passive recipients but active participants in the occupation. In the process, these stories reveal how the foreign occupiers brought to the surface latent conflicts among Japanese themselves—conflicts of gender, generation, class, and ethnicity that had been suppressed during the years of wartime militarism. Writers of fiction have thus highlighted the multi-faceted and contradictory nature of the era, and they have proven especially adept at representing Japan’s ambivalent response toward the American occupiers. To distinguish between narratives of postwar life in general and those specifically concerned with life under American occupation, I have selected only literary works that depict interaction between the American occupiers and the occupied populace, and I have coined the term “occupation literature” to signify this body of writing. My use of “occupation literature” must be distinguished from two widely used terms in Japanese literary criticism: 1) “literature under occupation” (senryōka no bungaku), which includes works written during but not necessarily about the occupation; and 2) “postwar literature” (sengo bungaku), which is a catch-all expression for a wide range of writing published after the war. “Occupation literature” as I use the term represents a relatively small portion of Japan’s postwar literature, and the majority of these works were published before 1960. In Okinawa, on the other hand, occupation literature dominated the region’s postwar literary tradition until after the Vietnam War and remains in the mainstream today. In fact, until the mid-1970s postwar Okinawan fiction consisted mainly of writing about the war or the American occupation because they loomed so large in everyday life. A more vexing terminological issue concerns how to discuss “Okinawa” in relation to “Japan.” Readers will notice that throughout this book I vacillate between using the terms “Ryukyu” and “Okinawa” on the one hand, and between “Japan” and alternatives such as “mainland Japan” or “Japan’s main islands” on the other. The difficulty derives from the ambiguous and often ambivalent historical relationship between these two sites, as discussed later in this chapter.7 In general, however, I have used “Ryukyu” to refer to: 1) the geographical entity (i.e., the Ryukyu archipelago), and 2) the region as a separate political and cultural entity before it was annexed by the Meiji government in 1879. I should add that “Ryukyu” continues to be preferred by Okinawan nationalists— including the tiny minority espousing complete independence from Japan—as well as by some anthropologists, historical linguists, and others investigating continuity between the region’s premodern and present-day forms. “Okinawa” is the name of both the prefecture and its main island. When confining my

4 INTRODUCTION

discussion to the occupation years (1945–72), I tend to use “Okinawa” in opposition to “Japan” (rather than to “mainland Japan”) since, during that time, the United States had placed the Ryukyu Islands under separate administrative control. When referring solely to the post-reversion era (1972present), I more frequently rely on the terms “mainland Japan” and “Japan’s main islands,” although I continue to emphasize Okinawan alterity, perhaps to a greater extent than many Okinawans themselves might. Of course, none of these terms can be neatly compartmentalized to fit a distinct historical period, and my vacillation is best understood as testimony to Okinawa’s complex historical relationship with Japan. Finally, I must briefly state my position on the thorny theoretical problem of the relationship between “history” and “memory,” and among different types of memory (personal, social, historical, etc.). This book is not intended to valorize memory over history, or to obliterate distinctions between them. On the contrary, I concur with Dominick LaCapra and other scholars who insist on the need to maintain the distinction between history and memory while nonetheless emphasizing their dialectical relation. LaCapra writes: Of course memory is not identical with history. But neither is it the opposite of history. Their relation over time may vary, but not as a function of a categorical opposition between “us” and “them.” And the problem of their actual and desirable interaction is oversimplified by a stark opposition between the two. Memory is a crucial source for history and has complicated relations to documentary sources…. Conversely, history serves to question and test memory in critical fashion and to specify what in it is empirically accurate or has a different, but still possibly significant, status.8 Both history and memory are thus contested, interdependent areas of inquiry. So, too, are personal and social memory, as James Fentress and Chris Wickham write in their book on the subject: Certain of our memories seem indeed to be more private and personal than others. Yet this distinction between personal memory and social memory is, at best, a relative one. Typically, our memories are mixed, possessing both a personal and social aspect. There seems little reason, therefore, to suppose that memory itself is divided into two compartments—one personal and the other social. Still less is there reason to suppose that one part of our memories is objective while the other is subjective…. Any attempt to use memory as a historical source in a sensitive way must confront the subjective, yet social, character of memory from the outset.9 I would add that literature helps to render personal memories (those of both author and reader) social—and that social memory, like literature, has its own history.

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 5

The literature I examine in this book represents life immediately after Japan was stripped of its colonial empire and subjected to foreign military occupation for the first time in its recorded history. In many respects it was a time of dramatic, even traumatic, social change. Not only did Japan undergo foreign military occupation for the first time, but it was a non-Western society occupied by a predominantly white military power, and in this regard postwar Japanese writers share many concerns with writers from Europe’s former colonies. Yet the position from which these Japanese write is unique, for their own nation was occupied immediately after it had occupied much of Asia under the promise of liberating “the Asian race” from European colonial rule. A brief historical overview of the occupation is essential for understanding the ambivalence that permeates this literature. Many fine historical studies about the occupation of mainland Japan already exist in English, so I have confined myself to a brief summary, with an emphasis on those scenes from everyday life commonly featured in literary works about the era. Comparable English-language sources on Okinawa are rare, however, and for readers unfamiliar with the region’s troubled historical relations with both Japan and the United States, I have offered a more wide-ranging and detailed overview. The occupation of Japan as history The Allied occupation of mainland Japan (1945–52) was predominantly an American affair and is, thus, usually referred to by Japanese as “the American occupation.”10 The U.S. General, Douglas MacArthur, reigned as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (or “SCAP,” which also signifies his administrative organization) until President Truman replaced him with General Matthew Ridgway in April 1951. Nearly all of MacArthur’s key staff members at General Headquarters (GHQ) were United States citizens. The occupation formally began with Japan’s signing of the surrender documents aboard the battleship Missouri on 2 September 1945 and ended when the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect on 28 April 1952. Unlike the postwar occupation of Germany, Japan’s main islands were not parceled up among the Allied powers or divided into separate zones, although the Soviet Union did take possession of Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands (north of Hokkaido), as agreed at Yalta in February 1945. And at the opposite end of Japan, the United States took control of the Ryukyu Islands and placed them under separate administration from the rest of the nation. SCAP’s two immediate goals for Japan were demilitarization and democratization. The former entailed disarming and demobilizing the nation’s armed forces, punishing war criminals, and impounding or destroying equipment and materiel used for the purposes of war. Ambitious reforms aimed at instilling democracy in Japan were carried out during the first two years of the occupation, when the influence of a small group of New Dealers within SCAP was at its peak, although no major policy changes were enacted without MacArthur’s

6 INTRODUCTION

approval. In some cases similar reforms had been proposed by Japanese during the prewar years, and SCAP occasionally sought the advice of Japanese experts before formulating its policies. Among those occupation policies considered most successful was a comprehensive land reform measure, which began in October 1946 with the passage of a bill that forced landlords to sell much of their tenanted land to the farmers who cultivated it, and helped former tenants to become independent, landed farmers. As John Dower notes, land reform was only one of many progressive facets of the early democratization program: On the economic front, in addition to the land reform, laws were enacted in support of labor unionization and the right to strike; the oligopolistic zaibatsu holding companies were dissolved; and policies were announced calling for economic deconcentration, industrial demilitarization, and severe reparations to Japan’s war victims. Politically, even the Communist Party was made legal, and “grass-roots” democracy was to be promoted through local autonomy. Under the new constitution, which went into effect in early 1947, the emperor became a “symbol” of the state, the country renounced the resort to war as a means of solving disputes, and the people of Japan were granted a broad array of rights that in some instances (such as explicit acknowledgment of the equality of women) went beyond U.S. constitutional guarantees.11 Roughly midway through the occupation, SCAP underwent a sharp ideological shift known as the “reverse course.” Critics charge that SCAP retreated from its original goals of democratization and demilitarization to ensure that Japan would become an anti-Communist ally in the region’s emerging Cold War geopolitics; for their part, American authorities claimed to have achieved the occupation’s initial goals and were now turning their attention to Japan’s economic recovery.12 Ultimately, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 ensured that remilitarization and economic recovery went hand-in-hand as America’s growing demand for war materiel boosted Japanese heavy industry and put the economy back on track. In spring 1952 the occupation of Japan was brought to an end. The San Francisco Peace Treaty stipulated the terms, and the Japan-United States Security Treaty defined the post-occupation relationship between the two countries. Both agreements were signed in San Francisco on 8 September 1951 and took effect on 28 April 1952. But whereas the Peace Treaty officially ended the occupation and was received favorably by most Japanese, the Security Treaty (Nichibei anzen hoshō jōyaku, usually abbreviated as Anpo) was more controversial, for it seemed in the eyes of some to perpetuate the occupation at the very moment that the Peace Treaty was declaring its end. The Security Treaty not only granted the United States ongoing control over Okinawa but gave it the right to maintain military bases in Japan and to assist the Japanese government (at its request) in quelling internal riots or disturbances. Yet the Security Treaty did not explicitly

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 7

require the United States to defend Japan if attacked, and it prohibited the Japanese government from providing bases to a third country without America’s prior consent. It further prevented Japan from signing a peace treaty with the Soviet Union and required it to recognize the Guomingdang government on Taiwan as the legitimate representatives of China. In 1960 a revised version of the Security Treaty was ratified despite strong opposition from Japan’s progressive parties, and hundreds of thousands of citizens took to the streets in protest. Over half a century since it began, the American occupation remains a touchstone for polarized political debates in Japan. Yet for most Japanese the occupation was not so much a political phenomenon as it was a time in their lives. And it was a particularly formative time for those born in the “Shōwa single-digit” years (1926–34), the generation too young to have been sent into battle but old enough to appreciate the ambiguity of the postwar situation.13 This ambiguity was rooted in the occupation’s central ironies: namely, that liberation from domestic militarism came at the hands of foreign soldiers and that the most profoundly democratic reforms were initiated by the occupiers themselves. The postwar years were filled with smaller ironies as well, beginning with the emperor’s radio announcement of Japan’s surrender. The nation’s reaction to the broadcast was mixed, ranging from shock, betrayal, and a sense of loss to relief and even jubilation. But perhaps the most common response was incomprehension since the poor quality of the radio transmission, combined with the emperor’s odd circumlocutions, rendered his speech nearly unintelligible. Japanese fictional accounts of this definitive historical moment relish the scene: a group gathered around an outdoor loud speaker listening to the imperial message; yet while everyone senses its great import, few are certain of its meaning, and a debate ensues in which the emperor’s momentous words must be deciphered and translated into the everyday speech of his subjects. In Japan’s popular memory, the imperial broadcast, made at noon on 15 August 1945, marks a break with the past and signals the beginning of a new era, known as “the postwar.” Yet among Japanese intellectuals it has become commonplace to emphasize continuities between wartime society and that of the postwar era, and a lively critical debate has centered on whether to stress “continuity” or “disjuncture” (renzokusei or danzokusei) when discussing twentieth-century Japan.14 Notwithstanding the popular consensus that 15 August inaugurated a new era, neither the war’s end nor the start of the postwar era can be pinpointed quite so precisely. Okinawans have long insisted that the 23 June 1945 suicide of Japanese Army Commander Ushijima in the Battle of Okinawa effectively ended the war for them, and Japanese scholars of the occupation such as Takemae Eiji have argued that the occupation of “the Japanese homeland” actually began with the Allied victories on Ogasawara Island (19 February 1945) and of Kerama Island in Okinawa Prefecture (26 March 1945).15 Many Japanese remaining in Manchuria in August 1945 were captured by the Soviets and placed in concentration camps. For these former subjects of the empire, the war did not

8 INTRODUCTION

end until their release from the camps—in some cases years after the signing of the Potsdam Declaration. And, of course, for residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dropping of the atomic bombs seemed to mark an end of history altogether. In fact, a new calendar was proposed beginning with 6 August 1945 as the first day of the nuclear era. Thus the tidy chronology that situates August 15 as both the end of the war and the beginning of the postwar era has itself been challenged. So has the periodization through which the very terms “war” and “postwar” derive their meaning. In short, if we remain attentive to the diverse realm of individual experience, we inevitably confront the question of how “the postwar era” relates to prewar Japanese colonialism and to Japan’s wartime occupation of Asia. This is not to insist on the substitution of personal memory for national history, but simply to acknowledge that a nation’s history includes the experiences of its people.16 Political historian Sodei Rinjirō is fond of reminding his readers of the need to reinsert both the war and the Japanese people into discussions of the occupation. He does so by stating two obvious but easily overlooked facts: 1) the occupation began with war, and 2) it entailed a two-way relationship between the occupiers and the occupied. The first, deceptively simple observation challenges the abovementioned propensity to view the occupation as a new beginning, bereft of any connection to the wartime past. This perspective is often expressed with the words “zero kara no shuppatsu,” which suggests that life in postwar Japan started anew, from zero.17 It is true that by the time Japan surrendered in August 1945 much of what had once been familiar was rendered unrecognizable. Robert Ward has outlined the extent of the destruction with a few stark statistics: The war resulted in about 1,800,000 military and civilian casualties. Twentyfive percent of the national wealth was destroyed. Forty percent of the built-up area of the 66 largest cities subjected to air attack was leveled, involving 20 percent of the nation’s residential housing. Thirty percent of industrial capacity was destroyed.18 In addition, two of Japan’s cities experienced the most powerful and gruesome weapon yet released on humanity, much of the nation’s population tottered on the brink of starvation, war orphans slept in the streets, unemployment and inflation surged out of control, and over six million Japanese soldiers and civilians had yet to be repatriated from overseas. Finally, with the arrival of Allied troops, Japan underwent foreign military occupation for the first time in its recorded history. It must indeed have seemed to many as if history was starting anew.

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 9

Kanda, downtown Tokyo, 1945. Mt. Fuji is faintly visible in the distance. (Courtesy of Mainichi shinbunsha.)

The occupation in mainland Japanese literature and criticism In mainland Japanese literature this sense of temporal disjuncture between the war and postwar, and the subsequent progression from the “zero point” of utter devastation to a thriving economy, is often represented through symbolic postwar landscapes. Invariably, the burned-out ruins serve as the pre-eminent image of the era’s start. What scene, after all, better dramatizes the “zero point” from which the postwar era is thought to have begun? The ruins soon gave birth to the black markets, which symbolize yet another side of the occupation—its chaos, creativity, and irrepressible vitality. As I argue throughout this book, postwar writers use landscape to articulate a vision of the past and to reveal how “the past” has become “the present.” Temporal disjuncture and continuity are thus represented through the transformation of physical and social space. The burned-out ruins and black markets are but one recurring site in Japanese literature of the era. Another popular image is of an occupation soldier tossing out chocolate or chewing gum to a crowd of children. So thoroughly is this scene embedded in Japan’s popular memory of the era that some Japanese who were children at the time describe themselves as being of the “Give me chocolate [or chewing gum] generation.”19 As I will discuss in Chapter Three, however, and as

10 INTRODUCTION

“Give me chewing gum!” Karuizawa, September 1945. (Courtesy of Mainichi shinbunsha.)

Nosaka Akiyuki’s story “American Hijiki” (Chapter Six) brilliantly articulates, such images of the friendly occupation soldier are often coupled with a sense of humiliation and envy at his overwhelming material and physical endowment. The occupation soldier is not only remembered as big and strong but as possessing an endless supply of material wealth—including the basics of food, clothing, and shelter, which were in short supply for several years following Japan’s defeat.20 Despite the material desperation and chaos that plagued so many Japanese during the occupation’s early years, this was also a time of unbridled energy, enthusiasm, and creativity. Fledgling entrepreneurs built economic fortunes from humble beginnings in the black markets; labor organizers found (for a brief time) unexpected supporters at GHQ; Japanese cultural consumers devoured American movies, jazz, and dancing; and the cultural producers—the writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers as well as journalists and intellectuals—thrived amidst the comparative freedom of the times (although, as discussed below, they also had to contend with SCAP’s censorship policy). With the lifting of Japanese wartime prohibitions against “frivolity,” live strip shows and topless revues filled the popular stages while erotic and lowbrow publications inundated the literary marketplace.21 Among the flood of publications that appeared at the time, the pre-eminent symbol of the occupation was the dregs magazine (kasutori zasshi). Literally hundreds of these pulp publications, with their erotic

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 11

titles and risqué cover illustrations, emerged during the early years of the occupation only to disappear after the first few issues hit the newsstands.22 In a more serious vein, the study of English, which had been banned during the war, was again officially encouraged and received a boost from the enormously popular “Come, Come English” radio program on NHK, Japan’s national broadcasting corporation. Beginning in February 1946, “Come, Come English” taught conversational English through the airwaves to more than one million eager listeners, and the accompanying textbook sold roughly 500,000 copies per month at a time when most Japanese were worrying about their next meal.23 This radio program is often mentioned in literary works about the era, including Nosaka’s “American Hijiki.” Like the upbeat “Apple Song” (Ringo no uta) and popular American movies, “Come, Come English” brought hope to early postwar life and helped a demoralized population to look toward the future. These early postwar years were marked by energy and optimism which, together with the critical infusion of Allied food rations, helped offset the desperation, uncertainty, and cynicism that threatened to engulf so many Japanese in the wake of the nation’s defeat. American authorities did more than draft a new constitution, carry out democratic reforms, distribute food rations, and toss out sweets to grateful children. They also instituted a dual policy of censorship and propaganda. In fact, among the occupation’s most often-cited contradictions was SCAP’s official encouragement of free expression while itself engaging in censorship through its Civil Censorship Detachment, and in propaganda activities through the Information Division of the Civil Education and Information Section. SCAP’s Press Code, issued in September 1945, prohibited criticism not only of the United States, but of the Allies, the occupation, and General MacArthur. Scholars generally agree that the American occupiers permitted more expressive freedom during the early postwar years than did Japanese officials between 1931 and 1945, but SCAP censors did impose severe restrictions on reports of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.24 Especially pertinent to literature about life under the occupation was SCAP’s prohibition against depictions of “fraternization”—that is, any form of intimacy between the American occupiers and Japanese women.25 Tamura Taijirō had already capitalized on the public’s interest in the new postwar streetwalkers known as “panpan” with his best-selling story, “Gates of Flesh” (Nikutai no mon, 1947), but writing under American censorship restrictions, Tamura avoided explicitly linking his fictional prostitutes with their GI customers. Like many works written during the occupation, Tamura’s story used placenames and material icons to signify that his characters were prostitutes catering to American, not Japanese men. From the Meiji era (1868–1912) onward, both readers and writers in Japan had developed methods of circumventing domestic censorship restrictions, and they quickly adapted to the new postwar code. After 1945 a writer merely had to refer to a woman’s brightly-colored dress, high heels, red lipstick, or Anglicized nickname to convey her line of work. A writer could

12 INTRODUCTION

make the same point by noting that a woman used the panpan’s argot or possessed a generous supply of chocolate, cigarettes, or chewing gum—luxury items acquired mainly through contact with occupation soldiers or the black market. Similarly, the expressions “huge man” or “tall man who nearly touched the clouds” were widely understood to connote an occupation soldier, and “a large man of dark complexion” usually referred to an African-American soldier in the occupation forces.26 The use of code language to signify race or “fraternization” between GIs and Japanese women was largely obviated after 1949 with the lifting of SCAP’s censorship restrictions, but it was not until after the occupation ended that explicit references to rape and prostitution involving the American forces began inundating mainstream Japanese publications during the 1950s. Japanese male writers—journalists as well as novelists—were especially quick to link individual instances of rape and prostitution to the fate of the entire nation under foreign rule (see Chapter Four). Women also wrote about rape and prostitution, of course, but rarely in such a facilely allegorical manner. With remarkable consistency, male writers from both mainland Japan and Okinawa have articulated their humiliating experience of the defeat and occupation in terms of the sexual violation of women. This propensity of male writers to appropriate rape’s symbolic dimensions while ignoring its violent reality may be what prompted Kōno Taeko, an acclaimed female writer, to sardonically state that “it might have been best had the victors raped every woman in Japan.”27 Only actual widespread rape, Kōno seems to imply, could have discouraged the nation’s men from appropriating women’s sexual violation for their own ends. Among male writers, differences in historical perspective often separate mainland Japanese from their Okinawan counterparts. Whereas mainland Japanese tend to distinguish sharply between the war and postwar years, Okinawans readily acknowledge continuities across the boundary of 15 August 1945. For many Okinawans there exists no reassuring historical buffer that cordons off the war from the ensuing occupation; from their perspective both Japan and the United States are (to different degrees) foreign powers intent on controlling their homeland. These narratives offer constant reminders that the American occupation and its legacy must be viewed against the background of Japan’s neocolonial control over the islands during the prewar era, and against the Japanese government’s continuing domination of Okinawa today. References to the Ryukyu Kingdom are not uncommon in Okinawa’s occupation literature, and the following two-part historical overview is intended to provide readers with the basic background needed to appreciate this literature. Okinawa: From premodern kingdom to Japanese prefecture From the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, the Ryukyu Kingdom maintained relative independence while pursuing an active commercial

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 13

relationship with China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. During this time, the Ryukyus developed a distinct culture, and its languages (or “dialects,” depending on one’s definition) were incomprehensible to both the Japanese and its other Asian neighbors.28 In the early seventeenth century, Tokugawa Ieyasu consolidated his power and established his military government, placing the Ryukyus under the domain of Kyushu’s Satsuma clan. For the next two and a half centuries, the Satsuma imposed harsh taxes on the Ryukyus. They also reaped profits from the kingdom’s ongoing trade with China. The Chinese, for their part, excised large payments in the form of tribute, and Okinawans remember this as the region’s first experience of dual subjugation to outside forces; the second began with the Battle of Okinawa and continues unabated today. In 1879 the new Meiji government abolished and annexed the Ryukyu Kingdom. This forced annexation is euphemistically known as the “Ryukyu dispensation” (Ryūkyū shobun), and established Okinawa as a Japanese prefecture just as the nation was pursuing a course of imperial expansion. After winning the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), Japan claimed territorial rights to Taiwan in 1895 and then took control of Korea in 1910, thereby forging a colonial empire in East Asia. The empire was further expanded, beginning in 1931 when Japan took control over Manchuria, followed by its 1935 incursion into Northern China, its all-out invasion of China in 1937, and its subsequent invasion and military occupation of much of Southeast Asia and the Pacific in 1942. Okinawa might thus be understood as modern Japan’s first foreign colony. Yet Okinawa’s status within the Japanese Empire was ambiguous. On the one hand, Ryukyuan culture was seen as deriving from Japan’s main islands, making Okinawa an intrinsic part of the ethnic nation-state rather than a mere imperial subject. This viewpoint adhered to a cultural evolutionary model that informed and justified Japan’s ideology of empire, and it drew on influential studies by Japanese folklorists and philologists begun early in this century.29 On the other hand, the Japanese government and its citizens often viewed Okinawans as second-class members of the empire, akin to the Taiwanese and Koreans. Indeed many mainland Japanese found the Ryukyuans to be so different from themselves as to challenge any assertions of a common identity. In this regard, it is tempting to suggest similarities between the Ryukyuans and the Ainu since both point to an internal coloniality in modern Japan that undercuts the nation’s claims of ethnic and cultural homogeneity. But Japanese colonialism affected these two groups differently. The Meiji government’s settlement and development of the northern island of Hokkaido in the latenineteenth century dispossessed the indigenous Ainu of their ancestral land. Unlike the Ryukyus, Hokkaido was spacious and thinly populated. It also contained an abundance of natural resources, such as land, timber, and minerals. Through large-scale Japanese immigration to the island, the Meiji government aimed to appropriate and exploit these resources. Japanese settlers displaced and soon outnumbered the Ainu who, at the end of the nineteenth century, numbered

14 INTRODUCTION

17,000 and accounted for a mere two percent of Hokkaido’s population. The Ryukyus, in contrast, had little land, were poor in natural resources, experienced limited immigration from the mainland, and never became a target for massive Japanese capital investment. On the contrary, many Ryukyuans emigrated to industrial cities in mainland Japan or to Hawaii and the Americas, where they worked primarily as laborers in factories or on plantations.30 In the eyes of mainland Japanese, Okinawa and its people appeared not only different but exotic. The region’s semi-tropical landscape, with its pastel waters and coral reefs, posed a stark contrast with that of Japan’s main islands. The “islanders”—and I intentionally use this word replete with colonial imagery — had darker skin and lived at a slower pace than did most Japanese. They seemed simple and uninhibited, their world lacking the ambiguous complexity of industrialized Japan. Women walked barefoot along white roads of crushed coral, balancing baskets of strange fruit and vegetables on their heads; men returned from fishing on the emerald seas and gathered together, singing, dancing, and playing the three-stringed, snakeskin jabisen. These, of course, are romantic and nostalgic projections of Okinawa as a premodern paradise, and they partake of a familiar exoticism infused with eroticism. The Japanese, replicating a colonial stance well established by Europe and the United States, assumed the position of the advanced, “northern culture” and looked with both longing and disdain to its exotic and less developed territory to the south. It was disdain more than longing that seemed to dominate Japanese government policy toward Okinawa from the Meiji era through the end of the war. The government viewed Okinawans as backward, lazy, and in special need of “education” if they were to achieve full status as citizens of Japan. Okinawans were thus subjected to a rigid cultural assimilation policy, much like that imposed on Taiwan and Korea. Children in Okinawan schools who inadvertently used dialect instead of standard Japanese were punished and forced to wear dialect placards (hōgen fuda), the equivalent of a dunce cap. As in colonial situations elsewhere in the world, it was local teachers and bureaucrats who enforced these policies, sometimes with excessive zeal.31 This cultural assimilation program coincided with the emigration of young laborers, both men and women, to Japan’s main islands. Okinawans seeking work in urban factories and textile mills routinely suffered discrimination due to their “substandard” Japanese language ability and their unfamiliarity with Japanese social mores. This led Okinawan workers to stick together which, in turn, only heightened public mistrust. Okinawans suffered discrimination when seeking housing, and real estate agencies in Japanese cities were known to post signs that warned, “No Koreans, Chinese, or Ryukyuans,” thus linking Okinawans to the two other foreign colonial subjects of the Japanese Empire.32 When it came to its political status within Japan during the Meiji era, Okinawa languished somewhere between being a colony and a full-fledged prefecture (hence my use of “neocolonial” in characterizing Japanese policy). It was not until 1920 that special restrictions were lifted and Okinawa was officially

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 15

recognized as being on equal footing with Japan’s other prefectures. Yet, as the Pacific War amply demonstrated and as Japan’s postwar policies further attest, the Japanese government has proven all-too-willing to sacrifice its southernmost prefecture for the benefit of hondo—the four “main islands” of Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido. Notwithstanding Japanese treatment of Okinawans during the prewar era, it would be inaccurate to describe them as mere colonial subjects, as being on the same subordinate level as Taiwan and Korea. Japanese often treated Okinawans as second-class citizens but nevertheless perceived them as being “more Japanese” than were the Taiwanese, Koreans, or other occupied peoples. Unlike these foreign colonies, Okinawa was eventually accorded full prefectural status, and it must not be forgotten that Okinawans were often eager participants in Japan’s growing Asian empire, dispatched to nearby Taiwan and later to occupied territories such as the Philippines or Saipan, where their own “tropical temperament” was deemed well-suited to work with the “natives.” A more pragmatic reason for sending Okinawans to tropical territories was their experience growing sugar cane and other agricultural products unfamiliar to mainland Japanese farmers. Okinawans were not mere victims of Japanese colonialism and imperialism, for many also aspired to be recognized as fully fledged Japanese citizens and to partake of the fruits of Japanese power and prosperity. This aspiration was grounded in the widespread belief among Okinawans that they were historically part of the Japanese cultural sphere. The Okinawan response to Japan’s policy of cultural assimilation was therefore far more ambivalent than that of Koreans or Taiwanese, who may have admired Japan’s military might but had little doubt about their distinct cultural identity. The Battle of Okinawa and the American Occupation (1945–72) Okinawans are painfully aware of Sodei Rinjirō’s insight that occupation begins with war, for those living on the main island of Okinawa in spring 1945 first experienced war and occupation as intense, overlapping processes. The fundamental difference between the occupations of Okinawa and mainland Japan begins with their starkly different experiences of war.33 Despite the tremendous devastation visited upon Japan’s main islands, the American assault was waged from the skies and the enemy was invisible, however tangible and deadly were his weapons. Few residents of Japan’s main islands actually saw U.S. troops in combat, and most never set eyes on an American soldier until after the nation surrendered in August 1945. Thus, their wartime experience of the American enemy was abstract and distant. Many heard the roar of American bombers and fled the flames from incendiary bombs, and some survived the atomic holocaust to relate the horrific scenes they witnessed, but for most mainland Japanese the enemy remained invisible until he arrived, transformed, as the occupation soldier.

16 INTRODUCTION

This point is crucial, although it is rarely if ever mentioned in comparisons of the two occupations. Scholars do invariably note that America’s occupation of mainland Japan was an “indirect occupation” in which SCAP operated through the Japanese government, whereas the occupation of Okinawa was an exercise in direct military rule, with less pretense of democracy. And they remind us that despite the reverse course, SCAP was far better organized, more carefully managed, and less imposing on the occupied populace than were their counterparts in Okinawa.34 Yet if military occupation begins with war and entails a mutual relationship between the occupiers and the occupied, then one must also consider the relationship between the two groups before the occupation officially began. In Okinawa the distinction is blurred between those American soldiers who waged war, those who occupied the islands between 1945 and 1972, and the tens of thousands who have been stationed there since reversion. The majority of civilians on Okinawa Island in spring 1945 were women, children, and old men. (I use the term “civilian” here to include women and children noncombatants since nearly everyone in Okinawa was in some way mobilized for the war effort.) Okinawans first encountered American GIs as flesh-and-blood soldiers immersed in the frenzy of war—as the enemy, pointing guns into the caves and ancestral tombs where civilians and soldiers alike had taken refuge. The Battle of Okinawa was so devastating that it is easy to forget that Naha, Okinawa’s largest city, experienced a heavy Allied air raid as early as 10 October 1944. In a single day, 90 percent of the city was destroyed, including approximately 12,000 buildings. Roughly 1,000 civilians were killed, and 50,000 residents were left homeless, most of whom took refuge in the northern part of the island.35 Six months later the Allied forces came ashore, beginning the deadliest battle of the Pacific War. The ensuing devastation took many forms, including group suicides of Okinawan civilians who had hidden in the island’s caves and tombs.36 In Okinawa, as on the mainland, women expected to be raped and then killed, and convinced that death was either more noble or less humiliating than surrender, many resorted to acts of desperation: strangling and suffocating their own children, stabbing one another in the throat, and, when a grenade was available to expedite the task, huddling around the device and pulling the pin. In mainland Japan the most famous victims of the Battle of Okinawa are the Himeyuritai, or “Maiden Lily Nurse Corps.” Many of these high-school girls conscripted for battlefield service were killed in the fighting, or they committed group suicide. The Maiden Lilies have subsequently been memorialized in countless books and movies, often through a mixture of sentimentality and eroticism.37 Okinawans were also forced by Japanese soldiers to commit suicide or were killed outright: crying babies were put to death so as to conceal a group’s whereabouts, Okinawans speaking in dialect were shot as suspected spies, civilians were lined up and shot out of sheer frustration by soldiers who saw defeat as inevitable. Still others, who refused to follow American orders to leave

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 17

the caves, were killed by grenades or flamethrowers. Those who did leave, who found themselves incapable of dying an honorable death for the emperor, were often surprised at the comparatively humane treatment they received from the American enemy.38 As the battle moved south from the island’s center, civilians who had not escaped to the relative safety of the north were caught in the crossfire. Casualty estimates vary, but roughly 150,000 residents (nearly one-third of the island’s prewar population) perished in the battle, with noncombatants outnumbering Okinawan combatants killed.39 In addition to the massive human casualties on all sides, much of the island was reduced to rubble in this battle that Okinawans have dubbed the “Typhoon of Steel.” Not only were cities and towns destroyed but also forests were burned to the ground and farmland was transformed into barren graveyards strewn with bloating corpses. Of the material damage, the example that most vividly encapsulates Okinawa’s sense of being trapped between two outside forces is the American bombardment of Shuri Castle, where the Japanese army had established its command headquarters. American naval ships fired thousands of tons of artillery at the castle, which was Okinawa’s pre-eminent cultural treasure and its most salient link to the independent Ryukyu Kingdom. After four days of constant barrage, the castle’s thick stone walls finally gave way and Okinawa’s most tangible link to its past was decimated. If the Japanese army’s appropriation of Shuri Castle symbolically re-enacts the nation’s historical domination of the Ryukyu Kingdom, their use of turtleback tombs as hiding places reinforces the image. Okinawa’s religious tradition centers on ancestor worship, and these large tombs scattered across the island are built into the ground and form a cave-like structure resembling a tortoiseshell. Thus the tombs, like the castle, represent a link to the past (albeit a more personal past), and they too proved unable to stave off the fury of modern warfare or the incursion of outside powers into Okinawan sacred space. As residents watched their island transformed into a bloody battleground, advancing American troops placed them all—civilians, noncombatants, and captured soldiers alike—into the burgeoning internment camps, where large numbers of Okinawans suddenly found themselves in daily contact with the American enemy. With the suicide of Japanese army commander Ushijima on 23 June 1945, Japan’s military resistance in Okinawa largely ceased, and an average of one thousand civilians and soldiers were placed into the camps each day. Separate facilities were established for civilians and soldiers, including roughly forty civilian internment camps in addition to those reserved for POWs.40 While life in the camps was not easy, the American enemy—who provided desperately needed food, clothing, and medicine—sometimes seemed more like an ally than did the Japanese soldiers on the island, who were known to have usurped provisions from Okinawan civilians during the battle. Internment camps are an integral part of Okinawan narratives of both the war and American occupation precisely because they mediate the transition between

18 INTRODUCTION

Ordering people out of a turtleback tomb. The Battle of Okinawa, spring 1945. (Courtesy of Naha shuppansha and Okinawa Prefectural Archives.)

the two. In fact, it is often remarked that the war ended for each individual Okinawan not on August 15 or June 23, but on arrival at a camp.41 By extension, the internment camps represent the start of America’s occupation of Okinawa, which for most residents began months before Japan surrendered. Yet if the war ended early for most Okinawans, the homelessness and near starvation it precipitated lasted far longer than in mainland Japan. While Japan’s cities were razed by two atomic bombs and thousands of American incendiary bombs, much of the Japanese countryside remained untouched and provided a haven for city dwellers. After the war, those left in the cities who managed to board the packed trains to nearby farming villages could buy potatoes, barley, vegetables —and, for the few who could afford it, rice. Those without money traded clothing for food. Japanese accounts of postwar life often describe these frenzied shopping expeditions to the countryside (known as kaidashi), which enabled residents of Japan’s cities to supplement American rations while avoiding the inflated black market prices.42 But kaidashi was not an option on the island of Okinawa, where most of the arable land had been razed and where much of the island’s population remained in internment camps for several years. For the first few years after the war Okinawans were almost wholly dependent on the American military for food, clothing, shelter, and work. Unlike the vast majority of postwar Japanese, whose principal contact with American soldiers had been restricted to public spaces, those on the island of Okinawa virtually

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 19

Survivors of the Battle of Okinawa. (Courtesy of Naha shuppansha and Okinawa Prefectural Archives.)

lived with the American occupiers until their release from the camps. They ate Spam, biscuits, dried ice cream and other food products contained in “K-rations,” and they drank powdered milk, smoked Lucky Strikes, and wore HBTs (herringbone twill military jackets distributed to those with no clothes). Children

20 INTRODUCTION

Kaidashi—traveling to the countryside to buy food, 1946. (Courtesy of Mainichi shinbunsha.)

attended school in quonset huts, which eventually replaced the “blue-sky classrooms” of the early occupation days. Provisions were not always sufficient, and Okinawans were restricted from moving freely about their island until March 1947, two years after American troops first set foot on Okinawa.43 Thus, while democratic reforms were being instituted in mainland Japan, many Okinawans were still living in internment camps under a state of martial law. Large numbers of Okinawans continued to return from the mainland and from overseas—an estimated fifty to sixty thousand in the year 1948 alone, and this caused severe food shortages and led to malnutrition and malaria. Although residents were permitted to leave the camps and return to their home villages as early as October 1945, the devastation was so extensive and the local economy so thoroughly dependent on the American military (no currency was implemented until May 1946) that many remained in the camps, some as late as spring 1950. Compared to the tightly organized yet liberal early years of SCAP’s “indirect occupation” of mainland Japan, the unabashed military character of American rule in Okinawa better fits the general image of foreign occupation.44 If mainland Japan was blessed with many talented and committed personnel at SCAP, it would appear that Okinawa was less fortunate, even after USCAR (the U.S. Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands) was established by the military

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 21

command in 1950 to carry out American occupation policy. Clearly, the occupiers of Okinawa were nowhere near as organized, as well-funded, or as willing to recognize the political autonomy of the occupied populace as were those who administered Japan’s main islands.45 During the first year following the surrender, for example, administrative authority was transferred back and forth between the U.S. Army and Navy, with the Army being given final authority in July 1946. In the course of America’s twenty-seven-year occupation of Okinawa, twenty-two different individuals were placed in charge, beginning with Admiral Chester Nimitz.46 As a Ōta Masahide (historian and former prefectural governor) notes: The military government came to be dominated by people who had neither sympathy for nor understanding of military government… Okinawa soon became notorious even among Americans as “the logistical end of the line,” “a Botany Bay for bad bureaucrats and colonels,” or “a ‘dumping ground’ or place of exile for American personnel unwanted at GHQ in Japan proper.”47 In 1947 General MacArthur proposed that the occupation of Japan be brought to an end since most of SCAP’s goals had been achieved, yet he insisted that the United States maintain control over Okinawa, claiming that Okinawans are not Japanese.48 In the same year, it is reported that Emperor Hirohito privately indicated to SCAP that he was willing to have Okinawa remain under American military authority, and by 1948 a plan was underway in Washington to enable the United States to retain indefinite control over the Ryukyus.49 John Dower has underscored the significance of these events: These secret Japanese proposals, which in many respects anticipated by roughly four years the broad contours of the San Francisco settlement of 1951, hinted at a bilateral military agreement with the United States and the development of Okinawa as a major U.S. military bastion. To scholars of the Occupation, these activities are of interest for a number of reasons. They call attention to the positive Japanese contribution to the policymaking process; offer an unusually vivid case study of politicking by the emperor through his personal advisers; and reveal that both the Japanese government and Imperial Household were willing from an early date to trade away true sovereignty for Okinawa in exchange for an early end to the Occupation in the rest of Japan.50 The day that Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty is known in Okinawa as the “Day of Shame.” Having struggled for decades to assimilate to Japan and to gain full acceptance as Japanese, many Okinawans who had already felt betrayed by the Japanese military at the war’s end were outraged at the nation’s agreement to cede Okinawa to the United States.

22 INTRODUCTION

At this time, the United States began pouring money into the Ryukyu Islands, but the aim was not to encourage development of a diversified and thriving local economy but rather to expand and sustain U.S. military facilities. This resulted in an economic infrastructure largely dependent on American bases. Hokama Yoneko, one of the leading chroniclers of postwar Okinawan women’s history, has written about her surprise when visiting the Japanese mainland in March 1953. This was the first time that Hokama had left Okinawa since the war’s end, and she notes that a passport issued by American authorities was needed to enter Japan. The occupation of Japan’s main islands had already ended, and the desperation characterizing the years immediately following the war had long since faded. Japan’s comparative prosperity and the well-behaved soldiers that Hokama encountered in Tokyo presented a sharp contrast with her experience in Okinawa: My first shock occurred in early April, when I went to view the cherry blossoms at Murayama Water Reservoir. There were many families and groups that had come to see the blossoms, and when I looked at them and then thought of my family and of other Okinawans who were still struggling just to survive, I could not hold back my tears.51 Hokama went on to note her shock at the courteous behavior of American soldiers she encountered on Tokyo’s trains. In her eyes, these soldiers posed a sharp contrast to their counterparts stationed in Okinawa. When mainland Japanese critics such as Isoda Kōichi refer to “the dual structure of the occupation,” they typically point to America’s role as both liberator and occupier. In Okinawa, however, “dual structure” takes on added meaning, since 1) both the Japanese and American forces were perceived (to different degrees) as alien military powers, and 2) both the prewar and postwar eras represent foreign domination. Okinawans often summarize their modern history as beginning with Japanese neocolonial control in the prewar era, followed by Japanese military control during the war, which in turn succumbs to American military occupation and lasts until Okinawa’s “reversion” to Japan in 1972. This historical progression is encapsulated in Okinawan dialect as “Yamatu-yū kara Amerika-yū, Amerika-yū kara Yamatu-yū” (from Japanese rule to American rule, from American rule back to Japanese rule). Although it is tempting to emphasize Okinawa’s cultural and historical differences from mainland Japan, we must remember that most Okinawans— even after the war and again after the San Francisco Peace Treaty—still considered themselves to be Japanese and yearned to be recognized as such. In 1951, when Okinawan students began a massive petition drive advocating reversion, 72 percent of eligible voters signed on in support; by the mid-1960s, thanks in part to widespread opposition to the Vietnam War (for which U.S. bases in Okinawa were a key staging area), large numbers of Japanese citizens mobilized to demand Okinawa’s reversion to Japan.52 Finally, in December 1969

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 23

Prime Minister Satō and President Nixon reached an agreement for Okinawa’s return to Japanese prefectural status, which took place on 15 May 1972. Thereafter, Okinawans again began using yen instead of dollars (although the base towns continued operating largely on a dollar economy through the early 1980s); in July 1977 they started driving on the left-hand side of the road instead of the right (which caused numerous traffic accidents until drivers grew accustomed to the new order); and the local economy was slowly weaned from its heavy reliance on the American bases as Japanese investment poured in. Yet the results have been mixed. Today among Japan’s forty-seven prefectures, Okinawa has the nation’s lowest per capita income (70 percent of the national average), its lowest percentage of students entering college, and the highest unemployment rate (at 7. 8 percent, nearly twice the national average, with 20 percent of the prefecture’s young people unable to find work). For the past several years Okinawa has led Japan in the number of births per population and has claimed Japan’s highest divorce rate.53 The massive American military presence in Okinawa continues to impinge on the lives of the islands’ residents, and several times since the 1995 rape incident, intense local opposition to the American bases has threatened to develop into a full-blown political crisis for both Japan and the United States. At present (December 1998), approximately 75 percent of the land occupied by U.S. military installations throughout Japan remains concentrated on the island of Okinawa, which constitutes a mere 0.6 percent of the nation’s land mass and is home to only 1 percent of its population. These military facilities consume 24. 5 percent of the island’s land. Roughly 27,000 United States military personnel and 28,000 military dependents are stationed in Okinawa.54 Thus the bases themselves remain, as do the barbed-wire fences surrounding them. And if the burned-out ruins are the starting point for literary memories of the occupation in mainland Japan, then the barbed-wire fences that continue to transverse the Okinawan landscape serve as a reminder of the occupation’s legacy at century’s end. Chapter summaries The seven chapters that follow integrate close readings of literary texts with discussions of cultural and political issues from the 1940s through the present day. Chapter One examines the role of language, landscape, and gender in two highly acclaimed works of occupation fiction, Japanese writer Kojima Nobuo’s “The American School” (1954), and Okinawan writer Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s The Cocktail Party (1967). I discuss how both authors deploy Japanese orthography in much the same way that postcolonial writers use pidgins and Creoles in their literary texts. I also compare how the occupation is conceived in these two works and argue that their fundamental difference lies in the conflicting historical perspectives that so often separate postwar Okinawan and Japanese literature. The

24 INTRODUCTION

final section of this chapter explores the historical and theoretical implications of the September 1995 rape incident in Okinawa. Chapter Two is a literary and historical study of Okinawa’s pre-eminent base town, Koza (known today as “Okinawa City”). I examine how the town has been constructed in the literary imagination and document the efforts of municipal legislators and merchant’s associations to clean up the town’s image by changing the municipal name and by redesigning its architectural façades. My literary analysis centers on Higashi Mineo’s prize-winning novella, An Okinawan Boy (1971), followed by a brief discussion of two little-known stories set in Koza. Chapter Three examines the ambiguous figure of the black GI in postwar literature. I begin with a theoretical introduction to the question of race in occupied Japan, situating recent studies of race in Japanese society in relation to the occupation years. The chapter centers on the textual analysis of three literary works, including two Japanese works of fiction published in 1958—Ōe Kenzaburō’s “Prize Stock” (also translated as “The Catch”), the story that first brought the author critical acclaim; and Matsumoto Seichō’s “Painting on Black Canvas,” a work of journalistic fiction by Japan’s bestselling mystery writer. This is followed by a discussion of Arakawa Akira’s “The Colored Race” (1956), a fiery protest poem by one of Okinawa’s leading intellectuals. Chapters Four, Five, and Six are devoted to writing from mainland Japan. Chapter Four addresses the issue of prostitution, which was a staple topic throughout the 1950s in Japanese writing on the occupation era. I briefly review the shifting legal status of prostitution during the occupation of Japan, and survey 1950s journalistic treatment of the issue. I also discuss the postwar “comfort woman” system known as the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) and explore some of the philosophical, ideological, and ethical issues related to prostitution. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of two popular books that purport to be “shocking yet true” first-hand accounts of Japanese women raped by occupation soldiers, The Chastity of Japan (1953) and Female Floodwall (1957). Chapter Fiv e extends the inquiry begun in Chapter Four but concentrates on women’s fictional accounts of the occupation. I begin with a close reading of Sono Ayako’s well-known work, “Guests From Afar” (1954), and then discuss three lesser-known women’s stories about life near American military bases: Hiroike Akiko’s “The Only Ones” (1953), Nakamoto Takako’s “Women of a Base Town” (1953), and Hirabayashi Taiko’s “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido” (1952). Although few Japanese women dispute that they benefited from SCAP’s legal reforms, these three stories emphasize the ongoing struggle facing individual women, particularly those of the lower classes who served the American occupiers as maids, mistresses, and prostitutes. Chapter Six concentrates on the issues of resistance and divisiveness in two Japanese stories of the occupation, Ōe Kenzaburō’s “Human Sheep” (1958) and Nosaka Akiyuki’s parody, “American Hijiki” (1967). Both works show how the presence of the occupation forces exacerbates latent conflicts within the occupied

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 25

society itself. They also offer fresh perspectives on issues discussed in previous chapters: the symbolic role of language and landscape in mediating relations between the occupiers and the occupied; the deployment of women (especially prostitutes and hostesses) in men’s narratives to bring together the occupation soldier and Japanese male protagonist; the question of continuities between wartime and postwar Japan. The Epilogue discusses occupation literature from Okinawa and from mainland Japan published since the Vietnam War, which dealt a decisive blow to the image of American military invincibility. The first half of the chapter surveys Okinawan writing by both men and women, introducing a new generation of writers born after 1945 who spent most of their lives under American occupation. No such generation exists in mainland Japan, and the stories by these younger writers differ from that of their Okinawan predecessors as well as from works of mainland Japanese writers. I devote the remainder of this chapter to Saegusa Kazuko’s 1989 novel, A Winter’s Death. Saegusa draws on revelations about Japan’s wartime exploitation of “comfort women” (jūgun ianfu) and interrogates the often unsavory relationship between soldiers and sex, whether through legal prostitution or tacitly sanctioned rape. She also explores the contentious issues of war responsibility and historical memory in postwar Japan, issues that lie at the heart of literature on the occupation era. Several of the literary works discussed in this book have long been forgotten, and a few were scarcely read even while still in print. In particular, many of the works by women and Okinawan writers will be unfamiliar to all but the most voracious readers of Japan’s postwar literature. Yet when considered together, these narratives of life under American occupation alert us to the diversity of experiences, perspectives, and memories about an era that helped shape Japan as we know it today. At the same time, these stories recreate unsettling scenes that many Japanese have chosen to forget. And as Ernst Renan remarked over a century ago, what a nation forgets is every bit as important to its collective identity—its sense of nationhood and history—as are those events it chooses to remember.55

1 Roads to no-man’s land

If you take off walking in a straight line on this island, you’ll end up facing the barbed-wire fence of a military base. If you don’t run into a barbed-wire fence, you’ll go right through until you reach the sea. (Higashi Mineo 1972:67) To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. (Frantz Fanon 1952:38) The Okinawan historian, author, and playwright Ōshiro Masayasu begins his book Okinawa in the History of the Shōwa Era by discussing the symbolic role of National Highway 58 in modern Okinawan history.1 Although the road had existed for years, it was not designated a national highway until 15 May 1972, the day of Okinawa’s reversion to Japan after twenty-seven years of American military occupation. Ōshiro describes the road as viewed from his office window in Naha, at the southern end of Okinawa’s main island: Highway 58 runs north along the entire length of the island and traces an imaginary line across the water, passing through the islands of Amami Ōshima and Tanegashima before reaching Kagoshima City in Kyushu, roughly 450 miles to the north. During the occupation years, Highway 58 was commonly known as “Military Highway No. 1” and served as the island’s main artery for American military vehicles. Before the arrival of U.S. forces on the island of Okinawa in April 1945, portions of this route were used to transport Japanese troops. Thus the road known today as “National Highway 58” not only links post-reversion Okinawa to the rest of Japan but connects three phases of modern Okinawan history: the era of Japanese imperialism and war, the postwar American occupation, and the ensuing years since Okinawa regained Japanese prefectural status. If Benedict Anderson is correct and the modern nation is indeed an imagined community, then what better testament to this idea than an invisible highway connecting a nation’s peripheral archipelago to its main islands?2 Yet it may be the actual discontinuity of Highway 58 that best represents Okinawa’s relationship with Japan, which has been fraught with ambivalence ever since Japan first “annexed” the Ryukyus in 1879. This ambivalent historical

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 27

Okinawan children atop a fence surrounding an American military base. Early 1970s. (Photograph by Goya Eikōh, courtesy of Miyagi Etsujirō.)

relationship, together with the sheer length and intensity of America’s occupation of the islands, has provided postwar Okinawan writers with a distinctive perspective on both foreign occupation and Japanese imperialism. The fictional narrative that may best exemplify this perspective is Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s The Cocktail Party, which I discuss in this chapter together with Kojima Nobuo’s “The American School.” Both “The American School” and The Cocktail Party have received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for fiction. Yet I have selected these stories for discussion in this opening chapter not so much because they are enshrined within their respective literary canons but because they delineate several critical differences between Japanese and Okinawan occupation literature. At the same time, they feature many of the themes and narrative strategies commonly found

28 ROADS TO NO-MAN’S LAND

in men’s stories from the two regions. For example, both works reveal how American control over social space disrupts and transforms the natural landscape; they represent the authority of the occupiers through their control over the realms of language and sex; they use “native women” to mediate relationships between the male occupiers and men of the occupied populace; and both works situate the postwar occupation against prewar Japanese militarism. As I argue throughout this book, these are all common elements of men’s narratives on the occupation. I am especially interested in why male authors so often appropriate the female body to establish male victimhood. My readings are informed by the insights of feminist scholars Gayle Rubin, Luce Irigaray, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose writings reveal how men’s texts represent women as transactable commodities, as symbolic capital to be exchanged between men or to mediate relationships between men.3 I explore how, on the one hand, works such as The Cocktail Party condemn the sexual appropriation of local women by the foreign occupiers while these same texts appropriate the abstract figure of “woman” to construct the male protagonist’s sense of victimhood. These narratives construct victimhood by linking the female body to the nation, and those texts harboring a powerful allegorical impulse tend to represent the landscape as a gendered embodiment of the nation. My readings therefore focus on the interaction between the physical and social topography. In the excerpt from Higashi Mineo’s story quoted in the epigraph, landscape is used to depict America’s occupation forces as intruders who have forced their way into, and rooted themselves within, native territory. The barbed-wire fence in Higashi’s story transects the natural landscape and separates the narrator (an Okinawan youth) from the nearby sea, an intimate part of the boy’s sense of home. As we will see, many stories from both Japan and Okinawa depict the occupier as an alien presence that has been internalized—either transplanted into the landscape or physically consumed by it—revealing how “the occupier within” impinges on the occupied subject’s freedom and identity.4 The image of an internalized occupier links landscape and body through their shared susceptibility to foreign penetration, and heavy sexual overtones are apparent here and in other paradigmatic tropes of penetration. Such tropes are by no means limited to postwar Japan. Whether it be an 1880s Rider Haggard adventure depicting a British colonial hero piercing into the dark, virgin jungle or NBC News a century later denouncing “the rape of Kuwait,” these tropes of imperialist intervention project body onto landscape, which is endowed with gender (female) and subjected to sexual incursion by the advancing male. Colonial or military transgression of geographical territory is conjoined with sexual transgression of the individual body. These and related tropes thus rely on a logic that conflates individual body with national body and designates the transgressed body as female, emphasizing “her” subjugation and helplessness before the dominant male intruders.5 But as the organized rape camps of the Balkans remind us, and as the September 1995 abduction and rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl by American servicemen further attests, rape

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 29

by foreign soldiers cannot and should not be reduced to mere metaphor. On the contrary, the power of rape as a metaphor is contingent on our ability to imagine (or remember) the raw violence and terror of the act itself. In men’s writing on the occupation of Japan and Okinawa, it is not only women who are rendered defenseless before the foreign troops. Male characters are also depicted as powerless, especially when they prove incapable of protecting the women around them from unruly occupation soldiers. These literary depictions of powerless men commonly rely on sexual metaphors of castration and impotence, metaphors that present the men as “feminized” and thereby equate men’s social powerlessness under foreign occupation with that of women under supposedly normal social conditions. Narratives that depict native men as sexually impotent often represent these same subjects as silenced, deprived of the power of speech. These narratives thus combine two forms of impotence—sexual and linguistic—to convey the thorough incapacitation of native men under American occupation. But as we will see in Kojima’s “The American School,” and later in Ōe Kenzaburō’s “Human Sheep” and Nosaka Akiyuki’s “American Hijiki,” to be silent does not necessarily imply an inability to speak.6 Silence can also constitute a form of resistance, particularly when it signals a refusal to speak the occupier’s language. One must therefore distinguish between silence representing the absence of subjectivity under foreign occupation and silence signaling an assertion of subjectivity through its deployment as a strategy of resistance. In both instances silence raises the question of control over the means of communication and draws attention to whether the occupied subject has a space from which to speak.7 Language, as both a symbol of power and as a medium through which it is exercised, has consistently been a key ideological issue in literary representations of occupation and colonialism. As sociolinguist John Edwards has argued, language is neither a necessary nor an exclusive marker of national (or ethnic) identity;8 but language does often appear at the center of struggles by subjugated peoples to reclaim or reconstruct their sense of identity.9 When Frantz Fanon observes that speaking another language entails taking on a new world, he refers specifically to the colonized African’s attempt to assume the world of the white colonizer, to don a white mask that will cover the African’s black skin. In many postcolonial literatures of Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, language confronts ideology as soon as the writer takes pen in hand, since one of the first questions facing the writer is which language to use—the language of the former colonizers, that of the local populace, or a hybrid of the two. Any choice signals an ideological position and defines the readership. Language and its ideological dimensions are therefore at issue not only within the story but at the surface level of the text.10 Unlike bilingual or multilingual writers from Europe’s former colonies, Japanese and Okinawan writers lack the option of writing in a European language because America’s occupation of the Japanese archipelago failed to foster a class of bilingual subjects. There emerged no distinct pidgin or Creole

30 ROADS TO NO-MAN’S LAND

from which these writers might forge a new literary language to represent the experience of foreign occupation.11 What writers from Japan and Okinawa do have at their disposal is a flexible orthography capable of denoting difference on a tangible, visible plane: the katakana syllabary (rather than its counterpart, hiragana) is often employed to denote foreignness, and for readers sensitive to both the linguistic and social terrain, orthographic signs can point to real-world signs, joining the textual landscape with the natural landscape to highlight America’s pervasive influence on the occupied region. Japanese orthography also offers the writer several options in glossing individual words in the text, and the discriminating use of orthographic glosses can itself constitute a political position.12 Strategic deployment of orthographic combinations thereby enables Japanese and Okinawan writers to register both domination and difference at the very surface of the text. Orthographic choices also serve to highlight forms of linguistic hybridity and code-switching in Japanese narratives, and the attentive reader will be alert to both the aesthetic and the political implications of a text’s orthographic contours.13 Kojima Nobuo’s “The American School” and Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s The Cocktail Party devote special attention to the relationship between language and identity under American occupation. The main characters in these two stories are teachers or students of a foreign language. In “The American School,” a Japanese group of English teachers with sharply divergent linguistic aptitudes and attitudes struggle with the English language, a language that represents opportunity while at the same time mediating their subjugation to America during the early postwar years. The three central characters in The Cocktail Party —an Okinawan, Japanese, and Chinese—join a Chinese language circle at the invitation of an American. The Chinese circle holds forth the promise of neutral linguistic territory for the four men in occupied Okinawa, yet as the Okinawan protagonist eventually discovers, there is no escaping their memories of the past war or the reality of the current occupation. Both Kojima and Ōshiro had first-hand experience working in a foreign language during the war and occupation. Kojima was born in Gifu Prefecture and graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1941 with a degree in English literature. During World War II he was stationed in China and worked as a linguistic decoder and translator.14 After returning to Japan he taught English at a high school and later at Meiji University before establishing himself as a writer. Ōshiro spent his youth in Japanese-occupied China and later worked as a translator for the American occupiers of Okinawa. Both authors’ personal experience clearly informs their respective stories, but neither narrative should be construed as a “shishōsetsu,” for these stories are neither fiction posing as autobiography nor are they autobiography posing as thinly-veiled works of fiction.15

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF JAPAN AND OKINAWA 31

Language, landscape, and gender in “The American School” Kojima Nobuo’s “The American School” takes place on the outskirts of Tokyo one day in the late 1940s. The story opens with a group of Japanese teachers waiting to embark on a six-kilometer walk to an American school, where they are scheduled to observe classes. The excursion has been arranged at great trouble by Japanese education officials, presumably for the English teachers to bolster their skills through exposure to an authentic English-speaking environment. One might also assume, in view of the spirit of the occupation, that a lesson in American democracy was in the offing. Four of the story’s Japanese characters are presented by name: three of the English teachers—Yamada, Isa, and Michiko—and although he is featured less prominently, Shibamoto, the representative from the Office of Education. Only two of the Americans are named in the story: Mr. Williams, the principal of the American school, and Miss Emily, a teacher whose beauty purportedly rivals that of an American movie star (209; 132).16 Significantly, both the Japanese and American women are referred to by first name whereas the male characters are all referred to by surname. Naming is one technique for constructing and marking a character’s identity, and by assigning female characters with only first names, the women are rendered as subordinate to their male counterparts and as more “familiar” (which must be understood to be replete with sexual overtones).17 Women in this text function as symbolic capital exchanged between men, and both Michiko and Emily are evocative of the prostitute: Michiko because she circulates back and forth between groups of American and Japanese men, receiving and distributing commodities; and Emily due to her erotic encounter with Isa behind locked doors. The division of characters along gender lines, however, is subsumed under the category of nationality in the story. The names of the two Americans—Mr. Williams and Miss Emily—are always followed by suffixes (Uiriamu-shi and Emirii-jō) that accord the Americans respect and a lofty distance from the Japanese teachers. The naming of characters in “The American School” thus aids the story’s construction of a hierarchy in which Americans are placed above Japanese regardless of gender, and where men are placed above women within each national category. That the categories of gender and nationality articulate within a hierarchy is itself testimony to the difficulty of theorizing identity without reference to relations of power. It also serves as a reminder that identity is multi-faceted and that these facets often conflict. Of the three Japanese teachers, Yamada is a zealot who will speak English to anyone and who will stop at nothing in his effort to impress the occupation forces. Yamada’s zeal appears to outflank his actual proficiency in the language, although he is able to convey his thoughts in English without undue effort. Isa, on the contrary, is a shy but stubborn man whose fear of speaking English rivals Yamada’s desire to use the language at every turn. In his compulsion to

32 ROADS TO NO-MAN’S LAND

avoid speaking English, Isa has, in the past, even feigned illness a full two days in advance of his scheduled encounter with the spoken language. “The American School” often pits Isa against Yamada, presenting Yamada as the dauntless opportunist and Isa as the recalcitrant subversive. Yet both characters are defined in part by their awkward relationship to the English language. Michiko, the only woman in the group, is distinguished by her natural command of English. Her chameleon-like ability to switch back and forth between Japanese and English makes Michiko a liminal character. Her attitude toward the English language is ambivalent: she shares Yamada’s enthusiasm for English while disdaining his motives; she sympathizes with Isa’s distrust of fluency in a foreign tongue but finds her own fluency exhilarating. Unable to fully embrace either position, Michiko moves back and forth between Yamada and Isa. Her fluency, combined with her status as a woman, situates her as a mediator between the two men and between the Japanese and Americans, a mediator who is ultimately incapable of belonging fully to either group. Michiko’s liminality is announced in the text through the mixed orthography used to write her name: “Michi” is written in katakana while “ko” is written in kanji (Chinese characters). Since no kanji are used to write the first two syllables of her name, the reader is left to speculate about the many possibilities. One choice (though perhaps not the most common) would be to write “Michi” with the single character signifying “road.” Much of the story occurs on a road connecting the world of Japan (the prefectural office, where the story begins) with that of America (the school). This road does not in itself constitute a specific place; rather, it is depicted as a cultural no-man’s land. Pointing outward from Japan’s postwar deprivation toward the idyllic world of the American school, the road serves as both a spatial and temporal metaphor bridging the wartime past to the postwar future.18 Those Japanese best equipped to travel this road will, presumably, flourish in the American-dominated postwar era. The road is designed for motor vehicles, not pedestrians, yet the Japanese teachers are required to make the four-mile trip on foot. Comfortable walking shoes are therefore essential, and the story’s detailed descriptions of each teacher’s footwear bespeaks their preparedness to travel this road to the postwar future. Yamada, ever the unscrupulous opportunist, already possesses a comfortable pair of leather shoes; Isa has reluctantly forsaken his well-worn army boots—which appear to be his only footwear—and has borrowed some illfitting leather dress shoes that are as painful as they are incongruous with his shabby attire; Michiko, true to her portrayal as a chameleon character, has brought high heels for the school and sneakers for the road. Footwear corresponds here to English facility, which in turn is equated with gender and national identity. Michiko’s ability to switch effortlessly and naturally between the two languages is represented as a “feminine” talent, one that does not compromise her Japanese identity—only because women’s claims to Japanese identity is inherently tenuous despite their newfound legal rights.19 Isa’s illfitting shoes match his linguistic unpreparedness to cope with the American

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world that lies ahead, yet when he later removes his shoes, Isa discovers that bare feet are as suited to the smooth road as are the tires of passing vehicles.20 By baring his feet, Isa not only transgresses social protocol but exposes the unsuitability of prewar Japanese social mores to the demands of a new era. As the teachers make their way toward the school, GIs passing by in jeeps occasionally stop to flirt with Michiko, favoring her with snacks of chocolate and canned cheese. The sole woman in the group and the most proficient speaker of English, Michiko receives goods from the Americans and distributes them to her Japanese colleagues. As a woman who moves from one man to the next with her “goods,” circulating among the traffic of men, Michiko evokes the image of the prostitute.21 This liminal space linking the prefectural office to the American school is in every sense of the word a no-man’s land: with her ample supply of food from the passing GIs, only Michiko prospers on the road. Michiko’s exceptional English proficiency, her status as the only woman among the Japanese teachers, and her mediating role between the male teachers and GIs all suggest the analogy between michi glossed as “road” and her ambiguous cultural/ national status. The irony awaiting Michiko is that, despite her superior English skills, she ultimately fares better on the road itself than in the American world to which it leads. As the teachers approach the school confines, the stark disparity of the two worlds comes into focus. Japanese maids are seen caring for American babies in the surrounding houses (215; 136), and the school facilities are so impressive as to make the Japanese visitors feel like a “pathetic race” (aware na minzoku) not qualified to set foot in such a place (208; 132). Although the figure of the maid appears only briefly in “The American School,” like the prostitute she is a familiar yet unsettling figure in many works of occupation literature. The maid embodies the subjugation of the occupied society while highlighting class differences within that society; she is an unenviable example of one of “us” who has crossed over into “their” world and is now fully accepted in neither realm. Having arrived at the American school, the teachers are further humiliated when the principal, Mr. Williams, matter-of-factly informs them that the school was built with Japanese taxes at one-fifth the cost of a comparable school in America. Adding insult to injury, Williams apologizes for the “unsatisfactory” results, explaining that the Americans were required to employ Japanese architects (218; 138). After he glibly reports that “even” the youngest female teacher at the American school earns approximately ten times as much as well-paid Japanese teachers (219; 138), the principal displays a rare moment of circumspection and assures the observers that the American teachers’ salaries are paid by the United States government, explaining that their comparatively generous salaries are necessary to maintain the higher standard of living to which the Americans are accustomed. (Michiko is particularly upset at learning of the American teachers’ vastly superior salaries, although she does not seem bothered by the principal’s implication that female teachers are paid less than their male counterparts in the American system as well.) For the Japanese teachers-cum-students, the day’s

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real lesson turns out to be a familiar one, that of the vast disparity in living standards between America and Japan. As one teacher says, the only lesson to be learned from the excursion is that “Japan lost the war” (216; 137). “The American School” is not, however, a simple indictment of the inequities and contradictions of occupation rule; rather, it is primarily concerned with Japanese responses to the fresh demands of the postwar era, and it is through the politics of language that the story explores both American dominance and Japanese strategies of assimilation or resistance. The four Japanese characters who are introduced by name embody four different approaches to coping with the English language. English on the one hand represents the means to power, opportunity, and liberation; yet it also serves to estrange the Japanese from one another. It is only the story’s monolingual characters—Shibamoto, Williams, and Emily—who escape the conflict that plagues the three teachers of the occupier’s language. Shibamoto resembles his American counterpart, Williams, in that both men are untouched by the destabilizing effects of studying a foreign language. Shibamoto is a prewar figure whose adaptation to postwar society has required only minor adjustments, and in the authority wielded by these two patriarchal bureaucrats we can discern an ideology that equates a stable and unitary identity with a xenophobic mono-culturalism. Unlike Shibamoto, the three principle Japanese characters are plagued by conflicts deriving from their position as teachers of the occupier’s language, and although they bring different degrees of awareness to their respective struggles, each must contend with this dilemma. Yamada, in his blustering eagerness, is least aware among the three teachers of the contradictions he embodies. For all his pro-American postwar fervor, Yamada reveals himself to have been a rabid militarist in wartime. He boasts to Shibamoto about having cut down nearly twenty Americans (half of them POWs) and comments on the superior “Oriental spirit” displayed by his Chinese victims (200; 127–28). In his relations with both Isa and Michiko, Yamada reveals how he has channeled his warrior’s impulses to meet the demands of the postwar years. He insists, for example, on demonstrating his teaching ability through a duel with Isa, whom he refers to as “a subversive” (kiritsu hakaisha); and when Yamada discovers that his English ability is no match for Michiko’s, he tries to “conquer her” (seifuku suru) by other means. Even the American schoolchildren notice Yamada’s bellicosity. When he visits their art class they caricature him in their painting as a shark. (Isa is portrayed in the painting as a flying fish and Michiko as a goldfish.) Nor is Yamada’s zeal lost on the principal, who offers him a backhanded compliment on his “kamikaze spirit” (227; 143). Kojima suggests through his droll references to war that the relationship between wartime and postwar Japan is one of continuity as well as of disjuncture.22 Herein lies one of the bolder insights of “The American School,” which might otherwise be viewed as a well-crafted but politically unadventurous work: instead of re-presenting the occupation as a discrete historical period, this story situates me occupation through references to

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war and militarism, thereby highlighting the continuity between wartime and postwar society and hinting that a suppressed violence lies just beneath the ostensibly peaceful surface of postwar life. The story thus can be seen as a critique of the dominant historical narrative at that time, which posits an impermeable boundary between the war and the postwar years. Although today such a critique may seem passe, it was by no means common in 1954, when “The American School” was published. Yamada’s attempt to conquer Michiko by wielding a weapon other than English serves as an example of how domination operates not only in encounters between the occupiers and the occupied but in relations among the Japanese themselves. Having recognized that he cannot dominate Michiko through his English skills, Yamada tries another tack and offers to help her to obtain rice and to find piecework that she could perform at home in the evenings. Michiko, instantly pacified by the offer, reverts to a distinctly feminine and humble level of speech in Japanese (214–15). This sparring match between Yamada and Michiko entails several instances of linguistic code-switching, first between languages and then from one social register to another in Japanese. Michiko controls the contest when English is the topic and language of discussion, but Yamada gains the upper hand when, speaking Japanese, he shrewdly steers the conversation to the domestic realm. Both Yamada and Michiko view the domestic realm as female yet recognize that men ultimately control the acquisition of food and piecework (214–15; 135–36). By switching the topic of conversation, Yamada succeeds in domesticating Michiko—he puts her in her proper (women’s) place. It is at precisely this point in their encounter that Michiko sprinkles her speech with the final sentence particles -wa and -ne, which explicitly mark the speaker as female and, by extension, submissive. Although Michiko distributes chocolate, cheese, and other emblematic foreign foods, it is Yamada—a man—who exerts control over the key native commodity, rice. Commodities themselves are thus implicated in a symbolic economy constituted by the intersecting binarisms “native/foreign” and “male/female.” Among the four Japanese characters in “The American School,” it is Yamada who most clearly embodies wartime militarism amidst the new postwar democracy, but Shibamoto should not be overlooked for his own militarist affiliations. While Shibamoto denies any link between judo and militarism, he is a high-ranking judo instructor whose students, ironically, consist of the Japanese police and U.S. occupation forces. The image of a civil bureaucrat teaching judo to both the local police and the foreign occupiers is humorous and yet unsettling, for it implies cooperation between civilian and military authority, and between local and foreign power in pursuit of common goals. Shibamoto’s activities blur the boundary not only between the war and postwar eras; they abolish any clearcut distinction between Japan’s militarists and America’s (military) enforcers of democracy. Shibamoto and Yamada represent the wartime militarists who, in postwar Japan, managed to disguise themselves as advocates of democracy, and Kojima suggests that these are the characters who benefited from SCAP’s

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reverse course. Cooperation between Japanese police and American soldiers was also envisioned by the 1951 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and this scene in “The American School” can thus also be read as an oblique criticism of the treaty. The relationships between Yamada, Isa, and Michiko are delineated through constant movement across the historical boundary of the defeat (haisen). During both war and occupation, Yamada directs his aggression not at authorities but at less threatening targets. His wartime victims were Chinese civilians and American POWs; during the occupation years Yamada seeks out other powerless Japanese, such as his fellow teachers. Yamada may be militant but he is clearly not subversive, and in this sense his modus operandi is remarkably consistent regardless of the historical circumstances. The war left Michiko a widow, and this informs her musings about Isa. At one point in the story, her attempt to understand Isa leads to thoughts about her dead husband (206; 129–30) and, although no information on Isa’s wartime activities is provided, Michiko wonders if Isa’s extreme reaction to Americans and to their language might not derive from guilt related to his actions in the war (206; 131). But it is each teacher’s relationship to the English language that most clearly articulates their similarities and differences. Yamada and Michiko are avid students of English who are compromised by their attempts to identify with the language and culture of America. Michiko is transformed in the manner of Cinderella: she becomes animated when speaking English and feels liberated from the drudgery of daily life. If Michiko seems liberated when she speaks English and dons a fresh persona in the American-dominated world of postwar Japan, her transformation is nevertheless temporary. Like Cinderella, whose fate is also linked to changes of footwear, and who is transformed on a road connecting domestic squalor to exotic opulence, Michiko faces the threat of reverting to her original identity at the day’s end. In her case, though, no Prince Charming waits in the wings. Yamada, too, undergoes a transformation of sorts when speaking English, but he becomes a clown—at once comic, grotesque, and thoroughly oblivious to the impressions he makes on others. Insofar as English symbolizes the language of democracy, Yamada’s unnatural pronunciation and awkward gestures, combined with his frequent reliance on military terminology, exposes not only his hypocrisy but SCAP’s failure to replace Japanese militarism with American democracy. The more Yamada tries to “go American,” the more his latent militarism and xenophobia come to the fore.23 Yamada’s English facility is contrasted in the text with that of Michiko not only through description but through careful deployment of Japanese orthographic possibilities. Romanization is eschewed throughout “The American School,” which instead relies on kanji and kana to convey the naturalness of the teachers’ spoken English. Natural spoken English—that spoken by the Americans and by Michiko—is generally represented in ratios of kanji to hiragana comparable to that used for Japanese speech. In contrast, the awkwardness of Yamada’s English is denoted by the disproportionate use of katakana in recording his utterances. When a jeepload of GIs approach Yamada, for example, he greets them with, “Harō, boizu, anata-

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tachi wa nani o shite iru no desu?” (195), which William Sibley translates as, “Haro boys! What are you doing?”24 The first two words appear in katakana while the remainder of the line is written in a combination of kanji and hiragana. Although the entire sentence is to be read as a Japanese translation of Yamada’s English greeting, the mixed orthography conveys a sense of his heavily accented pronunciation. Yamada’s English utterances are sometimes written in katakana and glossed in a standard kanji-hiragana combination, as if to imply that his spoken English would otherwise be incomprehensible. Michiko’s English, in contrast, is written in standard orthographic combination and is occasionally glossed in katakana, thereby presenting her speech as “transparent” in the sense that her English speech is represented with the orthographic mix generally reserved for Japanese dialogues. Among the three teachers named in the story, Isa’s stance toward the English language embodies the most blatant contradictions. He is an English teacher who refuses to speak English; he maintains his resistance to speaking the occupier’s language through a vow of silence that deprives him of his native language and cuts him off from both Americans and Japanese. Isa’s resistance is ostensibly rooted in the fear that speaking English could change him into a foreigner. His attitude toward English derives in part from an experience, presented in the text through flashbacks, where he is asked to accompany a black GI as he travels through remote villages, monitoring elections.25 Until this time Isa had never engaged in an English conversation, and when he finally attempts to speak to the soldier he utters a statement in such ornate diction that it escapes the American’s comprehension. Isa’s utterance is presented in the text “translated” into ceremonial Japanese and is written in a combination of hiragana and kanji rather than in English or katakana. The awkwardness of Isa’s statement is therefore represented primarily through Japanese diction rather than through orthography. Having thoroughly embarrassed himself using English, Isa decides that it is futile to speak the language and thereafter resorts to a minimalist approach to communication, employing only two words for the rest of the day—“stop” and “go”—both of which are written in katakana as if to graphically represent his heavily accented English pronunciation. Later in this episode, Isa escapes from the soldier by leaping out of the jeep and taking refuge in the woods. When the GI comes after him, Isa suddenly switches to Japanese, taunting the American. This brief subversive moment is announced by a marked shift in diction from the ornate English of Isa’s earlier apology to a rough, condescending level of Japanese speech that clearly challenges the soldier’s authority in both message and tone.26 In colonial discourse theory, this rejection of the foreign dominator’s language is known as “abrogation” and is considered by some to be a key step in moving beyond a “colonized consciousness.” But in works such as “The American School,” abrogation often relies on an essentialist and mystical conception of language in which agency is attributed to language, allowing it to empower and thereby transform the speaker.27 Isa’s brief act of abrogation and his later attempts at resistance through silence are both ways of rejecting English as the

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language of power. Behind this rejection of English is Isa’s fear of being transformed through speaking the language. Yet, when overhearing a conversation between several girls at the American school, the English language itself seems to have undergone a transformation in Isa’s mind, for it now impresses him as “sweet and clear as a mountain stream.” Isa is left puzzled as how to reconcile his conflicting attitudes toward the English language: Listening to these mellifluous English voices, he could not account for the fear and horror which the language had always inspired in him. At the same time his own inner voice whispered: It is foolish for Japanese to speak this language like foreigners. If they do, it makes them foreigners, too. And that is a real disgrace. (208; 132) In this scene, Isa perceives the English language in metaphors of unsullied landscape, as if to project his image of the speakers’ youth, purity, and femininity onto a distant topography, worlds away from the bombed-out ruins of urban Japan. The speech of the schoolteacher, Emily, also evokes for Isa a pastoral image. Significantly, though, “the cascade of soothing words that poured from her lips like melting snow” (210; 133) is not to be found in descriptions of English as spoken by men. English as a benign aesthetic object is accessible to Isa only through female voices, for part of his resistance to speaking English derives from its status as the occupier’s language, and both the war and occupation are associated with men. Nevertheless, intimations of Isa’s sexual subjugation to Emily (210–13; 133–34) serve as reminders that American women can also play the dominator’s role, a role normally monopolized by men in Japanese occupation literature. Isa seems incapable of recognizing that the fear and loathing which the English language evokes for him derive not from the language itself but rather from the relations of domination signified by English. Michiko clearly does not evoke for Isa the aesthetic (and erotic) qualities of English that he perceives through the speech of American females. Although the text does not explicitly compare Michiko’s English facility with that of the Americans, it seems fair to assume that even were her pronunciation indistinguishable from that of Emily or the American schoolgirls, Michiko would still be incapable of eliciting the same response from Isa, for she is not native. The slippage between Isa’s concepts of “native speaker” and “native” derives from his tautological conception of the former term: only foreigners are considered native speakers of English because native speakers are necessarily viewed as foreign. That is, native bilingualism is precluded; a person can only be a native speaker of one language because, in Isa’s eyes, language determines identity and identity is fixed and unitary. Isa can acknowledge that English spoken by American men may differ from that spoken by women, but for a Japanese (man) to speak the language would constitute a

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threat to his identity. Isa’s assumption that “I am what I speak” would not seem to apply to women: When Michiko was back at Isa’s side again she startled herself by blurting out, “If you hate speaking English so much, you must hate me too.” “It’s different with women,” said Isa. “Women make good mimics. Is that what you mean?” Maybe that was what he had meant, Isa could not be sure. (224; 141) What Isa does mean, it would seem, is that a Japanese subject is assumed to be monolingual and male. Women are at best marginal Japanese and can therefore speak a foreign language at less risk. Michiko’s fluent and natural English, combined with her status as a woman, situates her as a literal embodiment of successful assimilation to the occupier’s language and culture. For it is precisely the relation between this woman’s body and the normative (male) Japanese subject that prompts both Isa and Michiko to struggle against the double bind of being an English teacher in occupied Japan. Michiko acknowledges her own ambivalence toward the English language and toward Isa’s resistance in the following dialogue with Yamada: “You were right about him—he really does hate English,” said Michiko, switching languages as she again changed the subject. “I know all that. I am also aware that he harbors some marice toward me.” Michiko acknowledged to herself that in referring to Isa as “him” and making her remark in English she had stilled the pangs of guilt which she would normally have felt in this betrayal of trust. And that, she reflected, was no doubt one reason for Isa’s hatred of the foreign language: when you spoke it you stopped being yourself. It was too easy to be carried away by the titillation of the words, words not exactly your own. She knew she ought to get away from Yamada, the sooner the better.28 (223–34; 141) Despite her superior English ability, Michiko shares Isa’s assumptions about the transformative power of the language. She agrees that speaking a foreign language can seduce one into becoming another person, although, as we have seen, for Michiko this transformation is often liberating. Her predicament is complicated because this same liberation seems to entail relinquishing her Japanese cultural identity, which—as a woman—she is not fully permitted in the first place. Yamada, too, indulges in this ideology of language and identity, but he embraces the transformative potential of English because he sees it as the most expedient path to success in postwar Japan. Thus, all three teachers ultimately believe that speaking English makes one less “authentically Japanese,” which

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only exacerbates their predicament as teachers of a foreign language. This belief situates us in the realm of nihonjinron, which is to say, in the ideology of Japanese cultural authenticity. In his or her own way, each teacher succumbs to the allure of this ideology that sees language exclusively as a determinant of identity, and that reduces identity to a series of ahistorical equivalences linking language, individual, culture, and nation. Any notion of multiplicity is dismissed as implausible and abnormal. Bilingualism, therefore, becomes a burden rather than an asset, and in Isa’s view “the outlandish gestures that Yamada affected when he spoke English” are symptomatic of the disease that awaits any man foolish enough to speak a foreign language (208; 132). Only women would seem capable of achieving a truly natural facility in English. In “The American School,” both the English teachers who struggle against the implications of this ideology and their dominant monolingual counterparts exist within a world of fixed binarisms. In contrast, the social setting of occupied Okinawa as depicted in The Cocktail Party precludes a comparable conception of language and identity, and herein may lie one of the definitive differences between Japanese and Okinawan responses to the U.S. military occupation. Gender, history, and the construction of victimhood in The Cocktail Party In “The American School,” Kojima offers oblique reminders that to confront the American occupation entails consideration of the war and Japanese militarism. The Cocktail Party locates the American occupation of Okinawa against the background of Japanese imperialism through flashbacks by the main characters to their younger days spent in China. Both stories thereby transgress the boundary that cordons off “the postwar” as a distinct historical period to be considered only in contrast with war and Japanese imperialism. In doing so, these works refuse to acknowledge the victimhood of postwar subjects of American occupation without first implicating them as complicit in Japan’s violent prewar and wartime domination of Asia. The Cocktail Party is particularly effective in delineating the complex relationship between aggressor and victim (kagaisha and higaisha), and this aspect of the work has been discussed by numerous critics and by the author himself.29 Yet these critics have overlooked the role gender plays in the story’s construction of victimhood, and my reading of the story therefore devotes particular attention to this issue. References to Japanese atrocities in Asia are limited in “The American School,” for this work relies primarily on a Japan/America binarism to represent the threat posed by the occupation to a stable Japanese identity. In The Cocktail Party, however, the Japan/America opposition is extended with the inclusion of Okinawa and China to form a quadrangular configuration through which postwar Okinawan identity is explored. Each point of the quadrangle is represented by a bilingual or multilingual male character whose native language corresponds to the culture with which he most closely identifies. The four men who form the

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Chinese language circle are: 1) the nameless Okinawan protagonist-narrator, a government worker who spent part of his youth in China; 2) Ogawa, a young Japanese reporter born in China who writes for a leading Japanese newspaper and is based in Okinawa; 3) Sun, an English-speaking Chinese lawyer who lives and works in Okinawa but speaks neither Japanese nor Okinawan; 4) Miller, a Chinese-speaking American military officer who formed the Chinese language circle through which the four characters are associated. All four men are fluent speakers of Chinese, which serves as “neutral” linguistic territory for the group. The narrator, Ogawa, and Sun all speak English to some degree, but Sun is the only native speaker of Chinese. In the complex linguistic setting of The Cocktail Party, with its four languages (including Ryukyuan) and its multilingual characters, the category of “native speaker” itself is less stable than it is in “The American School.” As with “The American School,” linguistic code-switching in the story is often marked by means of orthography in the text. Code-switching in The Cocktail Party, however, often signals shifting identifications and alliances among four national/ regional subject positions: the United States, China, Japan, and Okinawa. Whereas “The American School” is limited to the Japan/America binarism, the story is complicated primarily through the issue of gender. We have seen how Michiko’s identity is compromised by her status as a woman and by her fluency in English. Isa’s attitude toward English was confounded by hearing the English speech of Emily and the American schoolgirls. The Cocktail Party, conversely, establishes its complexity through its multilingual, multinational context but focuses almost exclusively on men. The Cocktail Party opens with the protagonist standing at a security gate to a military base on the island of Okinawa. He is on his way to a cocktail party at Miller’s home, located within a housing complex on the base. The members of the Chinese language circle and several of Miller’s American acquaintances have been invited to the party, which begins as a self-conscious celebration of international amity. Yet the presumptions underlying the party are quickly unmasked by two events which occur that very night: the son of Mr. and Mrs. Morgan (who are present at the party) has apparently been kidnapped by the family’s Okinawan maid; at nearly the same time, on a distant cliff, the protagonist’s daughter is raped by Robert Harris, a GI who has been a tenant and neighbor of her family. These two events suggest that within the neocolonial setting of occupied Okinawa, friendship between the occupiers and occupied is but an illusion. From the story’s opening scene, this neocolonial social dynamic is embodied in the landscape. A barbed-wire fence surrounding the base separates two irreconcilable worlds—one intimately familiar to local residents, the other so thoroughly transformed by the American occupiers that it confounds even the most sure-footed Okinawan. The foreign face of the world “within the fence” (kanaami no uchigawa) is accentuated in the opening sentence of The Cocktail Party through a disproportionate use of katakana:

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Shuei [GĀDO] ni MISUTĀ MIRĀ no na to HAUSU NANBĀ o iu to, ichiō denwa de tashikameta ue de, GEETO kara no michisuji o oshiete kureta (183) I gave Mr. Miller’s name and house number to the guard. After telephoning to make sure I was expected, he showed me the route from the guard shack to the house. (Rabson, 35) In the romanized version of the passage, words written in capitals signify katakana, and the word within brackets, “gādo” (guard), is a gloss of the preceding word. Such prolific use of katakana is generally limited to the opening pages, but unlike “The American School,” Ōshiro’s text uses katakana to represent speech by both non-native English speakers and Americans (188, 196) as well as to represent Chinese words (185, 193, 200). Furthermore, English words and acronyms are sometimes written in romanized form (185, 213–14, 218, 255). Thus katakana in The Cocktail Party is still employed to denote foreignness, but the concept of “foreign” is expanded to include China, and by extension, Asia at large. In the opening scene, as the protagonist stands at the gate of the military base gazing out on the occupied landscape, he is reminded of a frightening experience at the same site ten years earlier. On that day he had been running errands when he passed by the base and noticed that the guard was away from his post. To save time and to satisfy his curiosity, he decided to cut through the base grounds, calculating that fifteen or twenty minutes would suffice to reach the gate at the opposite end. But in this foreign landscape with its labyrinthine streets, his years of experience at exploring unfamiliar roads were to no avail, and he thoroughly lost his bearings. Panic had begun to seize him when he found an Okinawan maid who impassively pointed him in the right direction. As in “The American School,” the native male subject is alienated from what should be a familiar landscape, and only local women and the foreign occupiers seem capable of negotiating these roads to (and within) this alien world. In both stories the maid is a fleeting yet significant figure who appears at home within this segregated, alien landscape. She seems to have been transformed by living with the foreign occupiers in their separate world. The protagonist of The Cocktail Party comments that the maid he encountered within the military housing unit “gave the impression she was someone who belonged here and made me feel a vast distance between us” (184:36). The maid’s impassive response no doubt contributes to the narrator’s perception of distance; yet her lower social class is also crucial, for this difference is partly a difference of class, which explains the narrator’s humiliation at being rescued by the uneducated servant. When he returns to the base ten years later holding the invitation to Mr. Miller’s cocktail party, the protagonist feels secure with this pass in hand. Not only does the invitation authorize his admission to the base grounds, it also certifies his membership in the elite circle represented by the cocktail party (185:

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36–37). The cocktail party is a bourgeois institution with cosmopolitan pretensions, and the protagonist clearly savors the privilege of belonging to this elite group. Orality is the featured mode of consumption, and food, drink, and talk are the chief items on display.30 At Mr. Miller’s cocktail party, conversations exude the air of democracy, and Okinawans converse on equal footing with Americans, creating the impression that everyone has transcended the relationship between occupier and occupied. A decade ago the protagonist had been forced to solicit the help of a lowly maid; now he enjoys privileged status within the American compound. But the fragility of his new-found status is evident in the surrounding landscape: Mr. Miller’s amicable cocktail party takes place within a housing complex where peaceful domesticity is maintained by armed guards and barbed-wire fences. This landscape speaks louder than voices at the party, and the foreign face of the land—like the impassive face of the maid—attests to America’s power to transform both the physical and social terrain. Okinawa, conceived in the story as both geographical and social space, suffers the divisive effects of foreign occupation, and this leads to the central question in The Cocktail Party: Who are the real victims? With the exception of the Americans and Ogawa, nearly everyone in some way “qualifies” for victimhood in the story. But as noted earlier, victimhood is a complicated issue in The Cocktail Party, for it is conceived through the category of gender and against the history of Japanese aggression in Asia. One facet of The Cocktail Party that has been largely overlooked by critics is that the central victims are all female while the main characters are male. So thoroughly does this story concentrate on men that the rape of the protagonist’s daughter appears almost incidental compared with the resulting tribulations visited upon her father. Yet however slight the active role of female characters in the story, they do play a crucial symbolic role in defining victimhood, which is conceived through the intersecting categories of “woman” and “native.”31 Perhaps the notion of victim in The Cocktail Party is best understood as consisting of “primary” and “derivative” victims, the former being native women and the latter being native men. One of the story’s primary victims is the Morgan family’s naive Okinawan maid. It turns out that the maid did not kidnap the Morgan boy but had simply decided to take him home with her during a visit, and for her negligence in failing properly to inform the boy’s parents she finds herself facing criminal charges brought by her employers. Although the Morgans’ decision to prosecute is presented in the story as merely one of many egregious instances of occupation injustice, it must also be understood as a peremptory move that acknowledges their own vulnerability: the maid has access to her employers’ most intimate spaces and to their most vulnerable “possession”—their children. For those Americans living on the base, an Okinawan maid represents an ever-present (albeit repressed) threat from the local populace. The Morgans’ decision to prosecute the maid draws the reader’s attention to the criminal statute, referred to several times in the story, that

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stipulates the death penalty for either rape or “assault with the intent to rape” committed against any American woman affiliated with the occupation forces (221:59). This is contrasted with the legal immunity accorded Robert Harris through the occupation government’s ordinances, which prevent Okinawan authorities from pursuing him as a suspect. The maid is threatening precisely because—uneducated, female, and of the lower class—she appears so harmless. That this innocuous figure could sabotage an American family from within the safe confines of the military base points to the occupiers’ vulnerability and to the potential for Okinawan subversion. Yet this threat constitutes a fleeting moment in the story; the actual aggressors in The Cocktail Party are without exception men of the occupying forces whose primary victims are native women. The central victim in The Cocktail Party is the protagonist’s daughter, a highschool student. After being raped by her American neighbor, Robert Harris, the girl pushes her assailant over a small cliff, and his leg is broken in the fall. While Harris is recovering in a hospital bed, the girl is taken into custody for having “assaulted” him. The absurd charges against her are based on the legal technicality that her action, having occurred after the rape, did not constitute legitimate self-defense. The repeated victimization of the girl must be attributed not only to the injustices of occupation rule, but also to her father, who insists on prosecuting the case. The girl is thus situated within overlapping spheres of domination that find their common ground in the structures of patriarchy. It is no small irony that the protagonist, in his determination to challenge occupation authorities and to seek redress for the abuse of his daughter, convinces her to go through with the trial, which requires her to re-enact the rape before a group of men including her father, the judge, and several other witnesses. The protagonist thereby unwittingly places himself in an ambiguous position, empathizing with his daughter yet looking on with other men as she reenacts the rape scene alone. I emphasize the presence of men because not only the perpetrator but the occupation authority that shields him are presented in this work as male. Innocence, purity, and victimhood are associated with women; domination and violence (including that codified in law) are located in the realm of men. Patriarchal domination is inscribed in the occupation legal system at more than an abstract level, for when the protagonist brings his daughter’s case to court, the trial will be conducted in English, putting the Okinawan girl and her lawyers at a clear disadvantage. Furmermore, the judge and lawyers for both sides will invariably be men. When relations of domination between individuals are used metonymically to represent relations between regions or nations, we approach the threshold of allegory. Frederic Jameson has written about national allegory in his controversial article, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”:

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All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel. Let me try to state this distinction in a grossly oversimplified way: one of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist and modernist novel, is a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of cases, of the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud versus Marx.32 (Emphasis in original text) Not surprisingly, critics such as Aijaz Ahmad have taken Jameson to task for being deterministic, Eurocentric, and even orientalist. Yet for the present study of Japanese and Okinawan occupation literature, I wish to adopt one of Jameson’s most productive insights without invoking this article’s problematic teleology. That is, I wish to borrow his distinction between public and private, political and poetic, to refine my own use of “national allegory” in the context of America’s occupation of Japan and Okinawa. In the following passage from Jameson’s article, one need only substitute “occupied” for “third-world” and “usually” for “always” to describe the allegorical qualities that distinguish Japanese and Okinawan occupation literature from other literary works written in Japanese at the time. [These] texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic—necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always [usually] an allegory of the embattled situation of the public thirdworld [occupied] culture and society. Need I add that it is precisely this very different ratio of the political to the personal which makes such texts alien to us at first approach, and consequently, resistant to our conventional western habits of reading? (69; Emphasis in original text) In The Cocktail Party, a similar distinction between public and private becomes the subject of debate between Miller and the protagonist, and this disagreement has direct implications for whether the narrative itself should be read allegorically. Miller, like Jameson’s “Western” reader, wants to avoid interpreting the rape as symbolic of, or structurally inherent to, the relationship between the United States and occupied Okinawa. In other words, he resists an allegorical interpretation and insists on confining the rape to the private realm:

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This is something that occurred between one young man and one young woman. You are also a victim, insofar as you are the girl’s father. In other words, this could have happened anywhere. By considering yourself victimized as an Okinawan, you only complicate matters.33 (219: Emphasis in original text) Miller attempts to reduce the incident to a personal problem while asserting its universality, thereby denying its relation to immediate political conditions. Yet Miller’s argument is unconvincing. The Cocktail Party’s status as allegory is underscored by the author’s decision to keep the story’s primary victims nameless. Five victims of foreign occupation can be identified: 1) the Okinawan protagonist, 2) his daughter, 3) the Morgan family’s Okinawan maid, 4) Sun, 5) Sun’s wife, who was raped by Japanese soldiers during Japan’s wartime occupation of China. The protagonist and Sun are indirect victims by virtue of identification with a wife or daughter; the remaining victims are all nameless females.34 Herein lies the fundamental ambivalence of the two men as victims: since victimhood is constructed in the story as female, if the men are to view themselves as victims they must distance themselves from the male world represented by Ogawa and Miller, who in turn signify Japan and America, the occupying powers. Masculinity and nation are conceived in terms of sexual dominance, rendering the idea of a “male victim” an oxymoron. Male victimhood entails a man’s symbolic assumption of the sexually subjugated female body. The contradiction of male victimhood plagues the Okinawan protagonist most acutely when his patriarchal impulse to defend his daughter threatens to sever him from his circle of men. Sun, a lawyer committed to upholding the legal system, also finds himself caught between female victimhood and patriarchal authority. These two men are thus linked as victims of foreign domination, since both suffered the rape of a wife or daughter by occupation soldiers. (The unlikely coincidence that each man was searching for a boy thought to be kidnapped when his wife or daughter was raped forces readers to link Sun and the protagonist.) The rape of his daughter especially shocks the protagonist because he had considered himself on friendly terms with Robert Harris. Not only had Harris seemed an amicable neighbor, but he rented the apartment from the protagonist’s family explicitly to rendezvous with his Okinawan girlfriend, which made Harris seem an unlikely threat. When the protagonist attempts to enlist Miller to extract a confession from the rapist Harris, Miller refuses, claiming that the incident had nothing to do with him and arguing that his cooperation would compromise his efforts to foster friendly relations between Americans and Okinawans (and among the four men). More than the rape itself, it is Harris’s betrayal of trust and Miller’s refusal to cooperate that heralds the dissolution of international amity as symbolized by the Chinese language circle and the cocktail party. The protagonist feels further betrayed after learning that Miller works for C.I.C. (Counter-Intelligence Corps) and has concealed the true nature of his work. It is

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Miller, after all, who organized the Chinese language circle and the cocktail party, purportedly to foster intercultural communication. The revelation of Miller’s duplicity undermines what little credibility he has left. In the protagonist’s eyes, both Miller and the occupation authority he represents have hidden behind a mask, a mask as opaque as the foreign acronyms C.I.C. and C.I.D.: Still, at least you knew what an Okinawan police officer looked like and could feel some familiarity with the local police station and police headquarters. In contrast, everything about the C.I.D. and the C.I.C. was an enigma. Once you and a friend had speculated casually about where their headquarters might be, but even this remained a mystery. (214; 54) The terms C.I.C. and C.I.D. (Criminal Investigation Division) appear in the Japanese text unglossed and in roman letters, thereby underscoring the protagonist’s perception of occupation authority as abstract and secretive. Stung by Miller’s betrayal, the protagonist decides to unmask the American and all that he represents. Miller’s refusal to aid the protagonist in bringing charges against Robert Harris constitutes the first broken link in the chain connecting the members of the Chinese-language circle. With each additional break a new alliance is formed, revealing a different facet of postwar Okinawan male identity as embodied in the protagonist. When Miller drops out, a somewhat reluctant Ogawa and Sun join the protagonist in what becomes an Asian alliance against the American occupiers. The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere is briefly resuscitated in the triumvirate’s challenge to Western domination, but this mini coprosperity sphere is doomed to the fate of its prewar predecessor, for the three characters’ disparate wartime experiences—kept alive in their private memories —together attest that foreign domination is more than simply a confrontation between “the West” and a united Asia. The protagonist and Sun both identify with occupied regions recently subjugated by Japan. But from Sun’s viewpoint, America’s occupation of Okinawa must be distinguished from Japan’s occupation of China: he refuses the impulse to conflate the two and thereby prevents the Asian group from indulging in the fantasy of shared victimhood (240–42:70–71). Nevertheless, when Ogawa accuses Sun of cowardice and hypocrisy for his waning support in the narrator’s present challenge to foreign domination, Sun counters that anyone who failed to resist Japanese wartime militarism would be hypocritical to challenge America’s occupation of Okinawa. This causes the protagonist to lose confidence in his own convictions, and his sense of camaraderie with Sun and Ogawa begins to wane. Ogawa attempts to mollify the protagonist by urging him to keep their war experiences separate from the present situation, but the protagonist finds himself

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recalling Japanese atrocities committed against Okinawans toward the war’s end (243:72). Significantly, it is Ogawa, the sole Japanese character, who offers the suggestion that the war and postwar eras be kept separate. The Okinawan protagonist’s failure to succumb to this temptation—his refusal to exonerate himself—signals a victory of conscience yet points to an irreconcilable schism between Japanese and Okinawan historical experience. The final link in the chain, that between Ogawa and the protagonist, is thus severed, and the Okinawan is left alone to fight his battle against the American authorities, relying only on the support of his daughter. The protagonist constitutes the last secure link in the battered chain, but the use of a split narrative voice in the story suggests a division within the protagonist himself. Although the transition from the first-person (watakushi) to second-person (omae) could be read as constituting two separate narrators, the word “omae” in this context carries an accusatory tone best attributed to the protagonist addressing himself. The multilingual, multinational setting of The Cocktail Party, represented in part through varied use of orthography in the text, transforms the foreign/native dichotomy typical of Japanese occupation fiction into an economy of shifting binarisms within the story’s quadrangular configuration. The Cocktail Party constantly recombines its four points of cultural identity, moving from a presumed unity to utter fragmentation. It begins with an idyllic internationalism represented by the Chinese language circle; it shifts to a postwar pan-Asianism; this is briefly replaced by an identity of victimized Asians (Okinawans and Chinese); from there it shifts to a Japanese identity which includes Okinawa; this is followed by an Okinawan identity defined in opposition to Japan; finally even the Okinawan self is fractured, as represented by the split narrative voice in the story and by the protagonist’s acknowledged distance from his daughter. The preservation of binarisms in The Cocktail Party can be understood as an effort to maintain the sense of difference through which identity is defined, but at the same time the shift between different sets of binarisms in the story signals the fragility of postwar Okinawan male identity. The Cocktail Party explores the issue of identity under American occupation from the vantage point of a man. Yet as we have seen, the category of “victim” is established exclusively through tropes of male sexual violence against women. Victimhood requires the body of “Woman” (in the abstract) and is accessible to men only through close identification with this female body, an identification that inevitably cuts off the male protagonist from the world of men. (The text offers ample support for a psychoanalytic interpretation that views as castration the protagonist’s exclusion from the symbolic male realm of law.) Nevertheless, victimhood holds forth the promise of exoneration, and when the reassuring boundary that separates the war from the postwar era threatens to crumble — bringing down with it the weight of war guilt—even this “female” realm of victimhood may appear inviting to men.

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The Cocktail Party begins with the protagonist standing at the entrance to a military base, surveying the foreign world within the barbed-wire fence. At the story’s end he stands atop a cliff, gazing out on the open sea. The alien, artificial, and enclosed world of the base seems far removed from the natural landscape that spreads infinitely forth beyond the cliff, yet this is where the rape occurred. Both sites attest to America’s thorough domination of Okinawa and suggest that no space, and no person, will remain untouched until an end is brought to the foreign occupation. The story maintains a meticulous structural symmetry between its two parts. The first-person narrative of the Prologue contrasts with the second-person voice used throughout the Aftermath; the amiable atmosphere of the cocktail party is offset by the violent act of rape; the enclosed, man-made landscape of the American base is counterbalanced by the boundless view of the sea from the cliffs. The incongruity between event and setting is also carefully balanced. The cocktail party, dedicated to the spirit of international friendship, is held within the oppressive confines of the military base, whereas the rape of the protagonist’s daughter takes place amidst the tranquil setting of the shoreline. Toward the end of the story, the protagonist himself comments on this jarring incompatibility between setting and event: Cape M. was entirely too peaceful. The four or five tourists who usually came with their fishing rods were nowhere in sight that day. The area was deserted except for a single bonito fishing boat that drifted far out on the open sea. The melancholy splashing of waves against the coral reef below the cliff was the only sound. To reconstruct in this landscape an event so peculiarly human seemed ludicrous. (256:79) For all its rigid structural symmetry, The Cocktail Party does convey a clear sense of progression—from the charade of the cocktail party to the rape that unmasks it; from the enfenced, artificial environment of the base to the natural and limitless vista of the cape; from the protagonist’s eagerness to partake in the spoils of complicity to his decision to challenge the injustices of occupation rule. At the story’s outset the protagonist celebrates the promise of international amity. In the end he stands stripped of his friendships, but free of his illusions. Critics have accused The Cocktail Party of being a contrived work of fiction, although few dispute the importance of its historical vision.35 Ōshiro himself has repeatedly stated that he considers an earlier novella, “Turtleback Tombs” (“Kikkōbaka”), to be a better piece of literature.36 Yet Ōshiro has also insisted that The Cocktail Party was far ahead of its time in the work’s unblinking scrutiny of the complex relations between aggressor and victim, and he was indeed among the first Okinawans to publicly examine the American occupation against Okinawa’s wartime cooperation with Japanese imperialism. These were not easy issues to address in the highly-charged atmosphere of the mid-1960s.

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Okinawa was still under occupation when The Cocktail Party was published. The United States was becoming mired in the Vietnam War, and Okinawa’s bases emerged as a key staging area for American military operations.37 With large numbers of American troops constantly passing through (including those returning from the jungles desperate for “R & R”), the war brought a surge in GI business and an increase in crime to the towns surrounding Okinawa’s many American military bases. In addition to violent crime were the frequent traffic accidents committed by U.S. military personnel and their dependents. These included fatal accidents in which the American drivers returned to the confines of their military base and received such lenient treatment that it sparked large protests.38 More than two decades of occupation rule in Okinawa had left the U.S. forces arrogant and accustomed to special legal privileges. American military authorities perpetuated this attitude among the ranks when they hindered investigations of crimes committed against the local population. Yet The Cocktail Party is as much an indictment of Japanese complicity with American rule as it is a criticism of occupation injustice. The story demands that those who would condemn the American occupation first face their own complicity with Japan’s wartime occupation of Asia, and not all Okinawans at the time were receptive to Ōshiro’s admonition. America’s actions in the Vietnam War had galvanized support for the growing reversion movement in Okinawa.39 The reversion movement was premised on claims of commonality—cultural, ethnic, and historical—between Okinawa and mainland Japan, and in this respect, too, The Cocktail Party went against contemporary trends. Yet when The Cocktail Party became the region’s first literary work to receive the Akutagawa Prize, Okinawans responded with enormous pride, coupled with the hope that this newfound cultural recognition would lead the Japanese government to acknowledge Okinawa’s political plight as well and negotiate an end to America’s occupation of the islands. In short, while responses to The Cocktail Party were mixed, the work’s critics and fans alike agreed that it addressed important issues of the day and, for this reason alone, deserved recognition. Fact and fiction At the century’s end, Kojima Nobuo’s “The American School” may seem like a period piece, a story about a rapidly receding era. In contrast, The Cocktail Party appears even more timely in the late 1990s than when it was first published over three decades ago. Unfortunately, today’s readers will be unable to dismiss the story as either artificial or anachronistic—not after the September 1995 abduction, beating, and rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl by three American servicemen stationed on the island. In an eerie example of fact imitating fiction, the 1995 rape occurred only shortly before a formal “friendship dinner” was held for members of the U.S. Forces Japan and the Japan Self Defense Forces. In his September 19 New York Times article on the rape case,

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Andrew Pollack reports that Lieutenant General Richard B.Myers issued an apology on behalf of the U.S. Forces, and Pollack hints at the ironic setting in which Myers made his remarks: “He spoke in an American military hotel in Tokyo where top military officers from the United States and Japan and their wives gathered for a previously scheduled ‘friendship dinner,’ celebrating fifty years of military cooperation since the end of World War II.”40 Yet the irony goes even deeper than Pollack suggests, for the dinner in question was held at Tokyo’s New Sanno Hotel. The New Sanno Hotel is the current incarnation of the Sanno Hotel, which has the distinction of having been expropriated by both Japanese militarists during the prewar years and by the American occupiers after the war. The original Sanno was built in 1932 by a Japanese family and was considered among the nation’s top hotels, but on 26 February 1936, Japanese military officers leading more than 1,400 troops descended into the streets of central Tokyo, attacking government buildings and killing cabinet ministers and members of the Imperial Household Ministry. The Japanese Army officers who staged this notorious rebellion (known as “the February 26 Incident,” or “ni-ni-roku jiken”) used the Sanno for encampment. After the war, in 1946, SCAP “procured” the Sanno for use as family housing of U.S. Forces, and until a new facility was opened in 1983 the building continued to serve the U.S. military and their guests (although it admitted different sectors of the military population over the years). In December 1975, the Japanese government made an out-of-court settlement to return the Sanno to the Japanese owners within five years. Construction on the New Sanno did not begin, however, until June 1981; the hotel opened for business in October 1983. Not only is the New Sanno Hotel named after the original, but it has exactly the same number of guest rooms (149), parking stalls (74), and overall square footage (150,000) as the old facility.41 It is clear that the new building is a conscious attempt by the U.S. military to maintain the structure and spirit of the original Sanno Hotel. To the extent that the New Sanno embodies the history of the original building, it is an apt yet ironic choice for a celebration of U.S.-Japan military cooperation, since both prewar Japanese militarists and the postwar American occupiers expropriated the private hotel for their own respective purposes. The friendship dinner bridges disparate histories with an irony reminiscent of Kojima Nobuo’s “The American School.” Like Kojima’s fictional character, Shibamoto (the unreconstructed militarist who teaches judo to the occupation forces), the dinner brings together former enemies in a spirit of cooperation at a site evocative of their commonality. Yet it is The Cocktail Party that most comes to mind when considering the friendship dinner held at the New Sanno Hotel, for the resemblance between these fictional and factual events is almost overwhelming. Ōshiro’s cocktail party and the 1995 dinner party both take place within an American military enclave, both social gatherings are intended to celebrate friendly ties between the U.S. and Japan (or Okinawa), and both events are compromised by an American

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soldier’s rape of an Okinawan girl. Ōshiro’s juxtaposition of the cocktail party and the rape may have seemed contrived and clumsy to readers at the time, but how should one respond when real-life events unfold as if following a fictional storyline? And as if these coincidences were not enough, one need only remember that on 4 September 1955—exactly forty years to the day before the 1995 rape case—a six-year-old Okinawan girl was raped and killed by an American occupation soldier.42 Fact imitates fiction imitates fact. But the dizzying relationship between fact and fiction should not blind us to the fundamental difference between them. For, however uncanny the resemblances between the events in Ōshiro’s story and those of the 1995 incident, we commit a profound injustice against the real victim by treating her as the mere embodiment of a prevalent literary trope. On the contrary, the parallels between the actual rape of 1995 and its fictional precursor compel us, in the words of feminist scholars, to “take rape literally” and to “read the violence back into texts.”43 The sheer viciousness of the September 1995 rape incident provides today’s readers of The Cocktail Party with the opportunity—and obligation—to restore the violence so noticeably absent from Ōshiro’s story. Like many men’s narratives of the occupation, The Cocktail Party revolves around rape yet relegates the act and its victim to the margins of the text. The rape appears as a lacunae, as an absence that primarily serves to establish the victimhood of the male protagonist. Descriptions of the event, for example, are peculiarly bereft of men: the victim’s father only learns of the rape after the fact and must describe it as hearsay; and when his daughter re-enacts it for the authorities and her father, the perpetrator himself is absent. In The Cocktail Party the bodily act of rape thus becomes disembodied, reduced to a symbolic and structural role that conveys none of the violence and violation inherent in the act itself. In her study of bodily pain and the limits of linguistic representation, Elaine Scarry insists that pain (especially at its extreme, such as that encountered under torture) is irreducible and ultimately inexpressible.44 No one can truly experience another person’s suffering, she reminds us, although there are good reasons for trying. If an approximate empathy is the closest we can come, then writers of fiction—despite the limits of language—may be among our most reliable guides to the inaccessible world of another human being’s corporeal and psychological pain. Yet by September 1995, judging from Okinawans’ visceral response to the actual rape incident, the public needed neither Ōshiro Tatsuhiro nor other writers of fiction to alert them to the violence of rape. No doubt other factors contributed to their response as well, including the ongoing spate of GI crimes and accidents since the occupation ended, the widespread frustration over Governor Ōta’s failure at that time to obtain agreements from the Japanese and American governments to reduce the U.S. military presence, the resistance encountered by Okinawan landholders (now joined by the governor) who refused to renew their leases to the U.S. military, and concern about perpetuating the inequities of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) through the official affirmation of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty planned for President Clinton’s

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impending visit.45 But it seems clear that the September 1995 incident struck a chord in Okinawa’s social imaginary primarily because the victim was young, innocent, and female— and because the crime was rape. No single act, not even murder, surpasses rape in its ability to dramatize the fear and humiliation of life under foreign occupation. And no victim better symbolizes the vulnerability of the social body than does a young girl. The girl who was raped on 4 September 1995 comes as close to embodying pure victimhood as any figure, real or imagined, in Okinawa’s postwar collective memory. And the fact that she remains unknown by name while her fate is known to everyone only heightens her allegorical value. On the one hand, the crime was undeniably real, in that it occurred at a specific place and time as verified by the testimony of both the girl and her flesh-and-blood assailants. On the other hand, as The Cocktail Party and other works of occupation literature demonstrate, this incident fits into the ready-made discursive category through which Okinawa has constructed its sense of victimhood during the past halfcentury. Within this logic that requires the virginal female body to symbolize victimhood, the 1995 rape victim is pure and innocent beyond reproach. Unlike the Maiden Lily Nurse Corps, the pre-pubescent victim of 1995 is too young to be eroticized by the mainstream media and had no connection to Japanese militarism.46 She is both a real and archetypal victim, born more than a decade after the occupation ended yet serving as a reminder of the era at its worst. Many members of the U.S. military personally and collectively expressed remorse for this crime and emphasized that the perpetrators did not represent the vast majority of Americans stationed in Okinawa.47 This is no doubt true. But if the Tailhook Scandal failed to raise questions about whether America’s armed forces suffer from a propensity toward the sexual harassment and exploitation of women (not to mention the outright rejection of gays and lesbians), then little doubt remained when reports began appearing in 1996 about U.S. (male) military officers engaging in rape and sexual coercion of American servicewomen under their command on domestic military bases. Not surprisingly, the behavior of American servicemen is even less tightly controlled overseas in areas such as Okinawa, where for decades military authorities have treated criminal behavior against local civilians as misdemeanors and have shielded the American assailants from civilian criminal investigations. From the perspective of Okinawans, however, the problem is not limited to malicious crimes. When only four months after the rape incident, an American servicewoman lost control of her car and drove onto a sidewalk, killing an Okinawan mother and her two children, it became difficult to dismiss the rape as an isolated tragedy unrelated to the presence of American troops on the island. This fatal accident took place at approximately one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon as the Okinawan woman and her children (ages ten and one) were walking home on a designated walkway. The incident had nothing to do with sex or intended violence. It involved an American servicewoman driving in broad daylight, not a car full of drunken GIs driving back to their military base

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after a night of revelry. In the past, such fatal traffic accidents have led to islandwide protests, particularly during the occupation when the perpetrators were returned to American military custody and either acquitted or given light sentences by U.S. military authorities.48 Then again in May 1996, less than one month after Prime Minister Hashimoto received a tentative commitment from U.S. negotiators to return land from Futenma Air Base, an American serviceman hit and killed an Okinawan pedestrian crossing a street.49 One especially eventful week in December 1996 included the following incidents: a U.S. Marine convoy truck overturned, killing one passenger and injuring several; an American military jet accidentally dropped a bomb off the coast of Okinawa in local fishing waters (it did not explode, however); a Japanese Self Defense Forces jet nearly collided with a passenger plane over Naha Airport; a Marine helicopter made an emergency landing on civilian land; and a U.S. Marine amphibious craft sunk off the Northern coast of Okinawa during practice maneuvers.50 On 11 February 1997, the Asahi newspaper, reported, “U.S. Military Planes Fire Depleted Uranium Shells in Okinawa.”51 These rounds were fired between December 1995 and January 1996, just as the September 1995 rape trial got underway, and the event was kept from the public for over one year. Uranium-encased shells are not to be fired in drills overseas at all, and even within the United States their use is restricted to special facilities. Then on 7 October 1998, a Marine corporal who was allegedly driving back to his military base after a night of heavy drinking, hit an Okinawan college student, knocking her off her motorbike. She fell into a coma and died one week later. The driver was stopped at the entrance to his military base when the guard noticed a large dent in the car, but the Marine was not turned over to local authorities for nearly a week.52 Incidents such as these serve as a reminder, if anyone still needs it, that “the postwar” has yet to end in Okinawa. This is a site where history and fiction enact each other in an ongoing dialectic, and to those Okinawans who lived through the occupation, the events of the 1990s surely make it seem as though the era continues to this day, not just in works of literature or in other records of cultural memory, but in everyday life—and death.

2 A base town in the literary imagination

On 1 April 1974, nearly two years after Okinawa’s reversion to Japan and exactly twenty-nine years after American troops first landed on the island of Okinawa, the town of Koza merged with the village of Misato and renounced its distinctive name to become “Okinawa City.” For most of the preceding two decades, Koza had been the only township in either Okinawa or Japan where the municipal name was officially recorded in katakana. This orthographic distinction seemed particularly fitting for Koza, a military town inextricably linked—from its inception through its present incarnation—to the American troops. How Koza first acquired its appellation remains uncertain, but competing theories concur that the name should be attributed to the American forces. Shortly after landing on Okinawa in April 1945, the Americans established civilian internment camps in the region. According to the thousand-page History of Koza City, one such camp was set up in a district of Misato Village known as “Kujaa,” which the Americans mispronounced as “Koza.”1 Other sources claim that the Americans mistakenly derived “Koza” from the town’s main crossroads, known as “Goya.”2 Regardless of the precise circumstances surrounding Koza’s nominal origins, in Okinawa’s historical memory the town is intimately linked to the American occupiers, and its bastardized name—highlighted in katakana— attests to Koza’s hybrid roots. In 1973, when the Koza City Council was preparing to merge with Misato Village, a joint steering committee solicited nominations from the general public for a new municipal name. By this time Koza was a city of nearly 100,000 residents, and members of the Misato City Council, afraid that the merger would leave them powerless, insisted on an organizational structure that would assure them an equal voice in the resulting municipality. The Misato Council members also pushed for the selection of a new city name, one that they deemed more suitable to the post-occupation era. From among the 161 different names proposed by local citizens, the steering committee agreed to appropriate the prefectural name in exchange for Koza’s conspicuously hybrid one—even though “Koza” (written in katakana) received the most votes.3 “Koza” was thus transformed into “Okinawa City” and underwent an orthographic reinscription, its fresh identity validated by the kanji used to record its new name. Had the

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Children in the doorway of a bar in Koza, Okinawa. December, 1970. The ‘A-sign’ above the entrance signifies ‘approved for U.S. forces’. (Photograph by Tamaki Tetsuo, courtesy of Tamaki Tsuneko.)

Misato City Council been concerned primarily with Koza’s orthographic representation, they could have substituted kanji for katakana while preserving

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the pronunciation “Koza.” A precedent even existed, albeit briefly: when Koza was first officially established as a municipality in September 1945, the name was recorded using kanji, purportedly devised by Japanese-American interpreters.4 But Koza’s orthographic respectability was short-lived, for within three months administrative lines were redrawn and Koza City reverted to Goeku Village. It was not until 1956 that Koza City was officially re-established, its name this time written in katakana. By 1973 Okinawa was establishing a new post-occupation identity, and the Misato City Council determined that Koza needed more than a mere orthographic facelift if the town was to eradicate its image of illegitimacy.5 The perception of Koza’s illegitimacy derives not just from the town’s occupation origins and hybrid name but also from its intimate relationship with the nearby military bases. “Intimate” must be understood in both its economic and erotic sense, since it is the fusion of these two realms that underlies Koza’s complex relations with the American occupiers. The economic fuses with the erotic most dramatically in Koza’s thriving sex business, and for the writer intent on representing foreign occupation in terms of sexual subjugation, Koza provides a convenient metonym of occupied Okinawa. America’s military and economic dominance was flaunted nightly in Koza’s infamous bars and brothels, which present a landscape rife with allegorical possibilities. To the foreign occupiers, Koza’s bars and brothels provide the bodies of native women; to the writer of fiction, they offer the metaphorical body of “woman”. It is the potential for discursive play between these geographical and corporeal topographies that makes Koza’s bar districts such an inviting domain to writers of fiction. Koza’s GI bar districts also made for rich literary material because throughout much of the occupation the American forces pursued leisure in racially segregated districts. During the height of the Vietnam War, when racial tensions were especially high, any GI who ventured across these boundaries did so at his own peril. Gang battles between white and black GIs were not uncommon, and the “combatants” were sometimes killed. One Koza taxi driver claimed that when he encountered an unwary white customer who was particularly arrogant, he would drop the soldier off in Teruya (the black GI district known by Americans as “Four Corners” or “The Bush”), confident that the white man’s countrymen would deal with him. Such stories (legends?) are commonly heard in Koza, and the issue of race relations between black and white GIs is treated in several works of Okinawan fiction, including Tanaka Kōkei’s “Children of Mixed Blood” (“Konketsuji,” 1972), discussed briefly at the end of this chapter.6 I begin, however, with an extended analysis of Higashi Mineo’s acclaimed novella, An Okinawan Boy (Okinawa no shōnen, 1971). Higashi Mineo is the pen name of Higashionna Tsuneo. He was born in the Philippines in 1938 and, like his fictional protagonist Tsuneyoshi, moved to Misato Village after the war and then to Koza before leaving Okinawa. Higashi dropped out of Koza High School and left for Tokyo, where he worked as a day laborer. In a 1972 interview published in the Okinawan monthly magazine, Aoi umi, Higashi jokes that “too much Tolstoy” prompted him to drop out of

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school, and he remarks that An Okinawan Boy is based largely on his own childhood experiences growing up in Koza.7 This interview took place after Higashi had won the Bungakukai New Writer’s Prize in December 1971 for An Okinawan Boy and before the novella was awarded the Akutagawa Prize in March 1972. At the time of the interview, Higashi was living in the base town of Tachikawa on the outskirts of Tokyo in a one-room apartment, and he sardonically notes that only readers from mainland Japan seemed to respond to his work. But when he received the Akutagawa Prize one month after this interview was published, Higashi was catapulted to stardom in Okinawa.8 In contrast to Higashi’s acclaimed novella, the other two Koza stories I discuss (albeit briefly) in this chapter are known only to Okinawa’s most avid readers of fiction. Genga Asayoshi’s “The Town That Went Pale” (“Aozameta machi,” 1975) appeared in the Ryūkyū shinpō newspaper as a runner-up for the annual short story award; Tanaka’s “Children of Mixed Blood” was published in ShinOkinawa bungaku, Okinawa’s leading literary and critical journal.9 Neither story has re-appeared since its original publication, and although few readers would consider either to be of the literary caliber of An Okinawan Boy, all three works do have more in common than their setting. First, they all explore the temptation posed by Koza, with its rampant sexuality and hybrid culture. These three narratives also draw on Koza’s allegorical potential without reducing the relationship between the occupiers and the occupied to a tidy set of binary equivalencies among the pairs foreign/native, male/female, and subjugator/ subjugated. Higashi is especially successful in fusing Okinawan dialect with standard Japanese in An Okinawan Boy, and the narrative’s use of regional dialect serves as a reminder that linguistic differences—and the struggle for power in which they are invariably implicated—occur not only between the foreign occupiers and the local populace but within the occupied society itself. An Okinawan Boy An Okinawan Boy takes place in Koza during the early 1950s and is narrated in the voice of Tsuneyoshi, an adolescent boy whose tiny home serves as a GI bar and brothel.10 The story represents Tsuneyoshi’s futile search for purity amidst the degradation of everyday life in Koza and is especially effective in revealing how Tsuneyoshi’s entry into manhood complicates his struggle to achieve a clear sense of identity in occupied Okinawa. Tsuneyoshi’s awakening to sexual desire implicates him in a triangle where men from both the occupying forces and the occupied populace become accomplices in the exploitation of local women. Serving as the economic pivot between the foreign men and local women are the male proprietors of Koza’s bars and brothels—men such as Tsuneyoshi’s father, who, although they may never meet face-to-face with their American customers, provide them with the bodies of his female neighbors and relatives. The sex trade thus represents not merely the intrusion of the economic into the erotic, but

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patriarchy itself, if patriarchy is understood as the promotion and perpetuation of men’s interests through their control over women. An Okinawan Boy begins on a jarringly conversational note, as if the young narrator had already been chatting with the reader for some time: Boku ga nete iru to ne, “Tsune, Tsuneyoshi, ukire, ukiran na!” to, okkaa ga yusuri-okosun da yo. (9) I’m sound asleep and next thing I know Mom is shaking me, trying to wake me up, “Tsune, Tsuneyoshi…Git up! Come on, now. Git yourself out of bed!”11 Although I have used Steve Rabson’s fine translation of Okinawa no shōnen throughout the rest of this chapter, I have re-translated this opening line to suggest how the dialect might be rendered. Writers of Japanese generally avoid using final sentence particles such as ne and yo in descriptive passages. Their inclusion in the above passage, combined with the use of regional dialect in the dialogue, calls attention to the narrator as a guileless storyteller and to the author as an avid experimenter. Tsuneyoshi’s preference for the first-person pronoun boku and his reference to his illiterate mother as okkaa further establish him as an innocent country boy, but the story quickly reveals the difficulty of retaining his innocence in the debased world of Koza, Tsuneyoshi’s newest home. Tsuneyoshi was born on Saipan, where he lived with his family until the end of the war. After returning to the island of Okinawa, the boy and his family stayed with his grandfather, scratching out a meager existence on their tiny plot of land in Misato Village. When Tsuneyoshi’s grandfather died, the family moved to the nearby burgeoning town of Koza in search of greater opportunity. The story’s events occur approximately one year since their relocation to Koza. During the intervening months, Tsuneyoshi’s father had tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to establish himself in “respectable” businesses, opening first a noodleprocessing shop and then a small grocery before finally deciding to open a bar that catered exclusively to the local GIs. In Koza at that time (and for many years afterwards), the GI bar business was closely linked to prostitution, as Tsuneyoshi implies when he refers to his father’s new undertaking as “fūzoku eigyō,” or “the entertainment business.”12 These bars were often located near residential districts, and occasionally, as in An Okinawan Boy, the bar was actually part of the family home. The narrative account of Tsuneyoshi’s stay on Saipan includes several gruesome scenes, but despite the boy’s unpleasant wartime memories of the island and despite the poverty that plagued his family after their return to the farming village of Misato, both places remain for Tsuneyoshi romantic sites of purity and community—qualities he finds starkly absent from Koza. Tsuneyoshi remembers Saipan as an island paradise where he played amicably with the “native” children. Misato (written with the characters meaning “beautiful

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village”) was for the boy a simple, bucolic world where the family’s poverty was offset by the intimate bond they shared. When the family leaves the village for Koza, they travel by means of an American military road, which also serves as a metaphor that connects a familiar world to a foreign one, while linking the past to the present. Upon approaching Koza for the first time, Tsuneyoshi remembers being struck by the American music and English-language signs that seemed to inundate the town. The movement of Tsuneyoshi’s family across space (from Saipan to a small Okinawan village to Koza) suggests as well an allegorical journey through Ryukyuan history, in which Saipan corresponds to an idyllic Ryukyu of the distant past; the farming village represents prewar Okinawa, where people maintained a strong sense of community and a clear sense of identity; while Koza stands for the corrupt and contaminated world of occupied Okinawa, where women sell their bodies to GIs and where used condoms float in the gullies. This same allegorical journey suggests a progression through three separate economies: in Tsuneyoshi’s imaginary Saipan, fruit ripened and fell from the trees, and everyone lived effortlessly off the bounties of nature. In the agricultural economy of the village, the community worked together to achieve sustenance. In Koza, however, people exploit their neighbors; and female flesh, as well as human labor, is supplied at the behest of the marketplace. “Progress” (as it is conceived in this crude model of economic evolution) culminates in the alienation and exploitation that attends modern capitalism as represented by Koza. Tsuneyoshi eventually finds life in Koza intolerable and decides to run away—not only from Koza but from Okinawa itself, from the modern world as he knows it. Yearning for a distant past long gone from Okinawa, and his imagination sparked from reading The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Tsuneyoshi sets out in a typhoon and sneaks onto a yacht, planning to take off for the open sea as soon as the eye of the typhoon passes. The story ends with Tsuneyoshi eagerly waiting to cut the rope that ties his boat to the island. Tsuneyoshi’s romantic recollections of Saipan and Misato are of course highly selective and ironic. He fails to recognize that his own presence on Saipan was due to Japan’s occupation of the island. An additional irony (accessible to the post-occupation reader but not to the narrator) is that the boy’s romanticized image of Saipan closely resembles the impressions of Okinawa held by many American GIs and their families during the latter part of the American occupation and continuing to the present day.13 His idealized recollections of village life overlook the complicated issue of Okinawan identity in the prewar years, when Japan’s imperialist cultural policy aimed to assimilate the islanders (together with Taiwanese and Koreans) into the nation’s rapidly-expanding economic sphere while regarding them as second-class citizens. Perhaps the story’s sharpest irony, however, lies in Tsuneyoshi’s plan to run away from Okinawa. Inspired by DeFoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (which is interlaced with Saipan in the boy’s imagination), Tsuneyoshi unwittingly models his escape from the American occupation on a classic European colonial fantasy.

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And he does much of his “research” on sailing, tides, and other practical matters at the library of the Ryukyu-America Friendship Center. Tsuneyoshi’s desire to sail away to a distant land is inspired not only by his fanciful recreation of Saipan and Misato but by the oppressive reality of daily life in Koza, which is presented from the story’s opening passage (quoted below as it appears in the published English translation). I was asleep when Mom started shaking me. “Tsune. Tsuneyoshi, wake up!” Rubbing my eyes, I poked my head out from under the covers and looked up at her. She brought her smiling face down close and spoke coaxingly. “Michiko and Yōko picked up a couple of soldiers, but there aren’t enough beds. Won’t you let them use yours, Tsuneyoshi? It will only take about fifteen minutes.” I was startled at first, then revulsion welled up inside me. “Not that again!” When Dad opened a bar for American soldiers at our place, I never thought I’d have to lend them my bed. Michiko and Yōko had made the alcove next to the bar into a bedroom. It was nearly filled with a double bed where they took turns sleeping with their customers. But if they both had customers at the same time, Mom would come into my room. This didn’t happen very often, but when she woke me I was supposed to cooperate. “Let them all use one bed together,” I said, sitting up. “Don’t be silly! Now hurry or we’ll lose this chance to make some money.” Mom unfolded a starched sheet as she rushed me out of bed. “This sure is a lousy business you’re in.” “There’s no use complaining. It’s how we eat, you know.” “It’s still lousy.” It made me want to cry, thinking people would probably do anything to eat. I took my school cap and satchel off my desk and pushed them under my bed out of sight. “Excuse us,” said Michiko. She came into my room leading a soldier by the hand. As she put her arm around his waist, she glanced at me with a faint smile. (9; 83) In view of this passage, any claim that An Okinawan Boy concerns Tsuneyoshi’s “sexual awakening” will perhaps seem like a feeble pun. Yet Tsuneyoshi’s desire to break away from his father and from the vulgar world he represents is in fact closely linked to the boy’s growing awareness of his own sexuality. Tsuneyoshi’s sexual awakening is prompted by the sex business in Koza, which is an inescapable facet of life at home as well as in town. Having vacated his bed

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for Michiko and her customer, Tsuneyoshi bolts from the house only to run into Chiiko, a young woman who works at a bar down the street (11; 84). Chiiko treats Tsuneyoshi affectionately, as if he were a younger brother, but Tsuneyoshi has grown attracted to her in a manner that is distinctly less than fraternal. After his unexpected encounter with Chiiko, Tsuneyoshi takes off running again but suddenly stops to look back: Above the hill I could see the whole sky, lit up by the pale glow of neon. Chiiko’s skirt spread like a parachute, and her slender legs poking out under it reminded me of a hopping sparrow. Suddenly, to my surprise, a soldier standing on one side of the street stepped toward her. She grabbed his arm, and, walking together, they turned a corner out of sight. (11; 84) The figure of the woman, walking away from the narrator and then suddenly fusing with an American soldier who appears out of nowhere, is strikingly reminiscent of the final scene in Ishikawa Jun’s “The Legend of Gold” (Ōgon densetsu, 1946), one of the earliest works of Japanese literature published during the occupation that features “fraternization” between a black GI and a Japanese woman.14 While Ishikawa’s work evokes a sense of loss, the above passage from An Okinawan Boy is concerned more with the oppressiveness of Koza’s ubiquitous sex business and its impact on Tsuneyoshi, who runs out of the house thinking, “And now they were in my bed, doing it like a couple of dogs. If I stayed in the house, I would still hear the moans and squeaking bedsprings, so I dashed outside” (10; 84). As we have seen, however, his escape into the open air offers little relief, since he is then confronted with Chiiko latching onto another GI. Signs of sex are so pervasive in Koza that even after returning to his room hours later, Tsuneyoshi is overwhelmed by “a strong, woman’s odor” (12; 85). These encounters with sex occur within the story’s opening pages and quickly establish for the reader the environment in which Tsuneyoshi confronts his own emerging sexuality. The American troops come between him and his own bed, and the presence of these foreign soldiers disrupts his relationships with family and neighbors. But it is also through the sexual activities of anonymous GIs that the boy becomes aware of his own emerging adult male identity and his quest for purity. Despite the physical proximity and omnipresence of the GIs, for Tsuneyoshi they remain distant, abstract figures. None of the GIs, for example, is named in the story, and even their physical appearance is rarely described; the American soldiers remain for Tsuneyoshi nameless, faceless intruders. In contrast, the young women who work in the bars are depicted with familiarity and warmth. Each is referred to by name, often with the suffix “-nee” (literally, “elder sister”), which in the regional dialect is a sign of affection. While An Okinawan Boy portrays these women with warmth, it never resorts to sentimental or patronizing characterizations. Chiiko, Michiko, and Yōko are presented as neither

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inveterate hussies nor pathetic victims but rather as neighbors who happen to be prostitutes.15 The women’s role as prostitutes appears incidental to Tsuneyoshi precisely because prostitution is such a common facet of everyday life in Koza. In Tsuneyoshi’s world, the young men engaged in sexual activity are all foreign troops, and among Okinawans the only sexual beings appear to be women. Access to an adult male sexuality seems precluded by Tsuneyoshi’s Okinawan identity, particularly since he empathizes with the women and views the GIs with such distaste. Tsuneyoshi’s world appears to contain no young Okinawan men who could serve as counterparts to the GIs. As for his father, Tsuneyoshi views him with revulsion for his crass exploitation of the young women he employs, and at one point the boy even equates his father with the soldiers. I realized now that Dad was just like the soldiers. All he’d wanted was to get into a woman. Then after he climbed on, something extra had come along. Me. To him I was just a nuisance, a piece of baggage. (49; 110) Although Tsuneyoshi empathizes with the young women and defines himself in opposition to both the GIs and his father, once the boy discovers his own capacity for sexual pleasure he finds himself not only revolted but aroused by the sexual activity that surrounds him. Upon “discovering” masturbation, for example, he seems to wonder, “Why don’t the GIs do it this way…then they wouldn’t need to bother with the girls” (24).16 But when he overhears a GI having sex in the next room with one of those “girls,” he himself becomes aroused and masturbates, thereby voyeuristically participating in the very act he decries. As Tsuneyoshi finds his own emerging masculine identity overlapping with that of the soldiers, he begins to sense that Koza offers no escape from the structure of domination that permeates both the social and natural landscape. On his newspaper route in town and in his explorations of the surrounding countryside, Tsuneyoshi discovers traces of sex everywhere in the landscape. At one point in the story he happens upon “countless used condoms swollen with air” that were “floating in the slush like huge maggots” (25–26; 94). On the street he finds a brightly-colored handkerchief that on closer inspection turns out to be a pair of panties (17–18; 88–89); and a friend points out that the leaves of a local species of tree smell like semen (20; 90). Tsuneyoshi responds to these objects with both disgust and fascination, finding them repugnant yet erotic. Finally, the town and the surrounding natural landscape seem to be imbued with sexuality: All around me was evidence of Okinawa’s birth in a violent earthquake that had pushed the island up through a prehistoric sea. Waves once washed over the rocks jutting out of the hillside, and now long, jagged cracks remained at the ancient water level. I climbed to the top of the highest rock

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— battered by wind and spray so long ago—and looked far below to where the prehistoric ocean floor had been. Down there was Koza where I lived today. From here I commanded a view of the whole town, a jumble of houses clustered along that one military highway. Facing the street were large signboards put up to decorate all the storefronts and to hide everything behind them that was now fully revealed before my eyes. Clotheslines, outhouses, chimneys, and water tanks seemed to be strewn haphazardly among rooftops of rusted tin and soot-stained tile. Piles of trash from “Summer Cleaning Week” lay here and there on the street. Looking down, I wanted to jeer at Koza’s shameful side. Then all at once, I thought I heard someone laughing at me. I looked around, but could see only one man lying face down in the little graveyard I’d passed earlier. Hollows in the rock where I stood were filled with crumbling white seashells, and I wondered if they might have been there since prehistoric times. After stuffing my pockets with the quartzlike stones I had come for, I made my way back down the hill. I passed an American soldier who stood in the little graveyard, watching his Okinawan girl friend as she picked pieces of dead grass from her hair. (46; 108) The depiction of the island’s prehistoric birth, juxtaposed with “graveyard sex” between an American soldier and his Okinawan girlfriend (who picks dead grass —karekusa—from her hair), highlights the unbridgeable gap between the pure world of nature sought by Tsuneyoshi and daily life in Koza. The sublime heights of nature are both temporally and topographically opposed to the lowly world of Koza. Yet even from this remote perch, Tsuneyoshi is unable to escape either America’s pervasive presence or Koza’s sprawling vulgarity. On the contrary, Tsuneyoshi’s distant perspective from the hill reveals even more clearly the town’s thorough dependence on the Americans: Koza is not only “clustered around” the military highway; it “clings” to the road—as we are left to imagine the Okinawan woman clinging to her GI boyfriend in the graveyard.”17 The trope of landscape-as-woman is deployed more directly in a scene toward the story’s end where Tsuneyoshi, caught in the typhoon, tries to embrace a tree to avoid being blown away. The tree’s branches are compared to “the hair of an insane woman,” and Tsuneyoshi, unable to reach completely around the tree, comments: “Like all women, she was too big for me” (62; 118). The tree, her roots firmly planted in the Okinawan soil, can better withstand the violence visited upon the island than he. Unable to embrace this arboreal woman (as the GIs presumably could), and unable to withstand the abuse (as the rooted Okinawan women can), Tsuneyoshi crawls on toward the dock where he finds a boat that he hopes will take him away from the island forever. The story represents occupied Okinawa as female not only by endowing the landscape with gender, but through the discriminating use of katakana. In

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addition to its standard function of signifying loan words and onomatopoeic terms, katakana is deployed in this text to link a select body of proper nouns, beginning with the word “Okinawa” in the title. Among place names, only “Okinawa,” “Koza,” and the names of foreign lands are written in katakana. Among personal names, katakana is used solely to write the names of women who sleep with the foreign soldiers; Tsuneyoshi’s name and those of his friends are written in either hiragana or kanji, as are those of the adults. An Okinawan Boy thus features an orthographic economy that links the geographic bodies of Koza and Okinawa with the female bodies of the prostitutes through their shared penetration by the American occupiers. As he grows into manhood, Tsuneyoshi feels torn between his “feminized” native Okinawa and the male world of the foreign occupiers. His sexual awakening has already opened his eyes to the difficulty of maintaining innocence, purity, and a clear sense of identity in Koza. Tsuneyoshi’s move from the village to Koza abolishes the spatial boundaries between himself and the soldier. Similarly, his entry into sexual adulthood leads to the breakdown of those imaginary boundaries by which he had maintained a safe psychological distance from the Americans. Tsuneyoshi thus finds himself pursuing his new sexual urges through the bodies of these soldiers that he has defined himself against, thereby aligning himself with the American GIs in their sexual conquest of young Okinawan women. Sex, as it is represented throughout the story, fosters in Tsuneyoshi an ambivalence that threatens the state of purity he so desperately seeks. For Tsuneyoshi, sex is the object of both fear and desire, of revulsion and fascination. In his eyes, sex and its traces defile the surrounding landscape and inhibit his return to the pure and uncorrupted space of Okinawa’s imaginary past. Moreover, his own sexual desire confounds the binary logic that had enabled Tsuneyoshi to maintain a safe distance between himself and the American occupiers. He begins to feel trapped on the island of Okinawa, where the occupied body politic overlaps with the occupied female body, where no space is left untouched in either the social or natural landscape. Unwilling to exploit those around him and unable to retain his boyhood innocence, Tsuneyoshi chooses to leave the island forever. After struggling through a typhoon, he sneaks onto a yacht where he waits for the winds to carry him to a pure and distant world. “The Town That Went Pale” Tsuneyoshi’s quest for purity can be understood as a fear of contamination, a fear that in Koza the boundaries separating the occupiers from the occupied will collapse. This same apprehension is evident in the work of another Koza writer, Genga Asayoshi. His short story, “The Town That Went Pale” (“Aozameta machi”), is set in Koza shortly after Okinawa’s reversion to Japan. Although Koza at that time was no longer officially under American occupation, the vast

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U.S. military presence—combined with the relatively strong dollar—ensured that many of the town’s less respectable establishments remained profitable. As of Okinawa’s reversion on 15 May 1972, the local economy shifted its official currency from U.S. dollars to Japanese yen, although the dollar continued to be used in Koza (and is still accepted in some Koza establishments today). Several different official currencies existed over the course of America’s twentyseven-year occupation.18 Another immediate change that accompanied reversion was the elimination of the “A-sign system,” in which the U.S. military designated certain establishments suitable for occupation personnel and marked other places as off-limits. Although the system was not always effective in controlling the destination of occupation troops, it is the elimination of the Asign system that enable Ryōhei and Eikichi, in the post-reversion era, to enter the pornographic theater in Koza that catered to GIs. “The Town That Went Pale” is a brief story about these two men, Ryōhei and Eikichi, who go bar hopping one night in Koza. Despite their differences, Ryōhei and Eikichi, who are in their twenties or early thirties, have been close friends since childhood. Ryōhei is described as reserved and serious, his experience with “nightlife” limited; Eikichi, who works for a broadcasting company, is outgoing, gregarious, and well-acquainted with Koza’s shadier side. It is he who, after reaching the third bar that night, asks Ryōhei whether he recalls a recent incident in which several black soldiers (kokujin-hei) kidnapped a hostess after work late one night and brought her into the military base compound, where they raped her. Eikichi whispers that he recently learned from a reporter that just before the incident, the soldiers had been to a pornographic theater featuring uncensored, illegal “blue” films. Eikichi adds that he had heard such a place existed in Koza but only recently learned of its exact location. Ryōhei agrees to go with him to the theater, and the two men leave the bar. When they enter the large dimly-lit room, Ryōhei discovers it packed with American servicemen sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on rows of benches. He and Eikichi are the only Okinawan customers. Then Ryōhei looks up at the screen and is instantly mesmerized at the sight of a blond woman, fully exposed and in the grips of sexual passion. Although the soldiers who raped the Okinawan hostess are explicitly identified in the story as “black,” and although the woman on the screen is described as “blond,” the GIs in the theater are not identified by race and are barely described at all, which further contributes to the room’s anonymous, voyeuristic dynamic. In the theater, Ryōhei finds himself becoming aroused yet feels disgusted with himself for being there. The following passage relates Ryōhei’s thoughts just after he and Eikichi have left the theater: This was the town where Ryōhei had lived since he was a boy, the town that he had known so well. But when, out of curiosity, he glimpsed behind the facades, he was overwhelmed by the filth and stench that threatened to engulf him. Ryōhei realized that if he weren’t careful, he might find

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himself reeking of that same foul odor. The town now seemed to him utterly repulsive. He shuddered, as if to fend off the encroaching filth. Ryōhei’s vicarious sexual encounter with anonymous American soldiers in the dark, sweltering theater leads him to recognize that, in given circumstances (circumstances that abound in Koza), he has more in common with these male soldiers from halfway around the world than he does with women from around the block. Ryōhei finds this thought alarming, for he had always viewed the American soldiers as irrevocably foreign. He now realizes that behind Koza’s most unassuming façades lurks a contaminated and contaminating world, a world where the common denominator of male sexual desire obliterates any possibility of a cohesive and unitary “Okinawan identity.” Ryōhei has discovered in postoccupation Koza what Tsuneyoshi learned two decades earlier: the sex business in Koza is implicated in an economy of desire where sex not only mediates, but disrupts, the simple binary opposition between the occupiers and the occupied. These two stories highlight the difficulty encountered by Koza’s residents in their efforts to accept their town’s occupation legacy. Tsuneyoshi responds to this legacy by running away in search of a world free of corruption; Ryōhei decides to remain in Koza but to avoid the town’s shady establishments. As both characters recognize, however, neither the town’s sex business nor the desire it fosters is easily contained, for sex and its traces abound in Koza—whether in back alleys or on main streets, whether in the gullies or in the graveyards. And as the hybrid language of An Okinawan Boy reminds us, purity is an ideal that will always remain unattainable. In the intervening four years between the publication of An Okinawan Boy and “The Town That Went Pale,” the Koza City Council, urged by their counterparts from Misato Village, embarked on its plan to redefine the town’s identity. The “Koza Incident” of 1970, which was Okinawa’s only fully fledged riot against the American occupiers, served to strengthen the town’s image as the preeminent symbol of occupied Okinawa.19 Yet even after Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972, Koza was still a long way from effecting its self-transformation. In An Okinawan Boy and “The Town That Went Pale,” Koza is perceived not just as Okinawa’s embodiment, but specifically as the sexualized body of occupied Okinawa. If in the early 1970s, local politicians viewed the municipal body of Koza as a mixed-blood bastard in need of purification and redemption, then these two stories equate the town with the local whore who gave birth to that illegitimate child. In both cases, Koza’s intimate relationship with the American occupiers is responsible for the town’s image of impurity. “Children of Mixed Blood” and the remaking of Koza Another story published during the year of Okinawa’s reversion, “Children of Mixed Blood,” takes the theme of miscegenation more literally in its exploration of life in Koza. Narrated from the perspective of the town’s most outcast progeny

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B.C. Street in Koza, Okinawa, during the 1950s. (Courtesy of Okinawa City Hall.)

—children born of African-American fathers and Okinawan mothers—this story is a melodramatic tragedy of a young man (Kōhei) and a woman (Chiyo) who are abandoned by their black fathers, rejected by their Okinawan mothers, and ignored by the town whose uncontrolled sexuality they embody. Chiyo is portrayed as a selfless and noble surrogate mother to her two younger brothers, one of whom has developed a life-threatening heart ailment. The local doctor informs her that a trip to a university hospital on the Japanese mainland (“hondo”) is the boy’s only hope, but Chiyo—despite her valiant efforts—is unable to collect the money to cover the expenses and ultimately kills her brothers and herself to put an end to their misery. While this story is bound to disappoint readers seeking literary subtlety or profound insights, it does raise the difficult issue of Koza’s rejection of those “mixed-blood” children of African-American fathers who most dramatically represent the town’s hybrid heritage.20 And by dramatizing the plight of these children, the story provides a sober reminder not only of the widespread Japanese preference for those of white/Japanese mixed parentage to black/ Japanese, but it exposes the postmodern celebration of hybridity to be irrelevant to whose lives are constrained by the stigma of “racial impurity.” “Children of Mixed Blood” also demonstrates how American racism and segregation have been reproduced in a town known for close contact between the foreign troops and local residents. It depicts, for example, the segregation of white and black “entertainment districts” in Koza during the Vietnam War and features a scene in which the male protagonist, Kōhei, cuts across B.C. Street (in

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B.C. Street, 1970. (Photograph by Yoshioka Kō, reprinted with permission of the photographer.)

the “white district”) and is beaten up by a group of soldiers who mistake him for a black GI. When Kōhei’s mixed-blood girlfriend, Chiyo, comes to his rescue, the white soldiers stare at the two and in a moment of revelation comment, “They’re hybrids.” To lend authenticity to this crucial moment of recognition, the text records their remark in katakana (“zeia haiburizzu,” p. 18). This is clearly intended to be read as “authentic English,” although it sounds remarkably contrived for a group of soldiers who have just brutally beaten someone. Perhaps the author has mistaken the expression “half-breed” for “hybrid.” Robert Young has noted in his book, Colonial Desire, that the English word “hybrid” developed from biological and botanical origins and that it was scarcely in use until the nineteenth century, when it referred almost solely to physiological phenomena.21 It is precisely this physiological mixing of different types that is represented by the word “hybrid” as it appears in the story “Children of Mixed Blood.” The words used for racial mixing in the text—“haiburiddo” (hybrid) and “konketsuji” (mixed-blood child)—carry a stigma derived from a perceived lack of purity. As Young argues, the concept of hybridity is part of a dialectic whose antithesis is purity, and to the extent that race and racial purity are nebulous concepts, so too must hybridity be viewed as a problematic category. In “Children of Mixed Blood,” hybrid refers to race as opposed to culture, since the “mixed-blood” characters are represented as unambiguously Okinawan in terms

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of their cultural identity: they speak no English, have no regular contact with Americans, and seem to have spent their entire lives on the island. Japanese words such as “mixed-blood child” or “half” (as in “half-Japanese/ half-foreigner”) explicitly refer to children of bi-racial unions and contain what Young has called “an implicit politics of heterosexuality.” Norma Field makes this point in her book, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor, when she refers to biracial children as “nothing if not the embodiment of sex itself.”22 The expression “chanpuruu bunka” (“hybrid culture”) has a far more positive connotation and has been proudly used in the past few years to tout Koza’s mixed cultural origins. “Chanpuruu” is Okinawan dialect and refers most commonly to stirfried vegetable dishes that incorporate a wide range of ingredients, ranging from tofu to Spam (which has become a culinary staple since it was introduced to Okinawa by the American forces in 1945).23 The second half of the term, “bunka,” is the Sino-Japanese word for “culture,” and the mixture of dialect and standard Japanese in the word itself mimetically represents the concept of hybridity. Over the past few decades, there has been a transformation in the popular perception of Koza, both from within and without the municipality. During the occupation, Koza’s physical proximity and economic dependence on the American military was considered by many to be a necessary evil that should eventually be overcome after reversion. In the years following reversion, Koza’s citizens who wanted to “clean up the town’s image” lent their support to local government and to the merchant associations as they began to remake the municipality. The merchants’ association of B.C. Street has been among the most energetic in attempting to brighten the town’s image. B.C. Street is mentioned in all three works of fiction noted above: the bar owned by Tsuneyoshi’s father (in An Okinawan Boy) is located just behind B.C. Street, and it is where Kōhei, the character from the story “Children of Mixed Blood,” gets beaten up by a group of white soldiers. B.C. Street (also referred to as “Sentaa dōri,” or “Center Street”) began as “Business Center Street” in the early 1950s but was soon filled with pawn shops and souvenir shops as well as with bars, strip clubs, and other disreputable establishments catering to the occupation troops.24 Together with Gate Street, which runs parallel to it and which leads to the front gate of Kadena Air Force Base (now the largest U.S. Air Force base in Asia), B.C. Street was one of Koza’s main roads catering to the occupation troops. The merchants’ association attempted to follow the lead of municipal authorities in remaking the city’s image.25 All storefronts on B.C. Street were joined by a white façade and a covered walkway, creating an outdoor mall and a sense of architectural unity. Some view the white façade as a successful attempt to brighten the town’s image and to construct a cosmopolitan but distinctly postoccupation architectural space, reflecting the new sense of municipal identity and pride.26 Not surprisingly, others have criticized the entire project as a crass and unsuccessful attempt to literally whitewash the street’s occupation legacy.

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Today B.C. Street is lined with restaurants and clothing stores that primarily serve Japanese tourists and the local populace. At the same time, it remains the home of souvenir shops and still houses a few less reputable clubs that primarily cater to the American military. The most notable difference between today’s clubs and those of the occupation era is that today’s establishments employ almost solely women from the Philippines and must struggle to bring just a few soldiers through their doors. Okinawan women working in the “water trade” have moved up to more respectable establishments, which usually means that they serve Okinawan or Japanese men.27 In addition to the architectural facelift they received, B.C.Street and Gate Street have also been renamed. Gate Street has been euphemistically rendered “Kūkō dōri” (“Airport Road”), and B.C. Street has been christened “Chūō paaku abenyū” (“Central Park Avenue”)—with Chūō or “Central” written in kanji and Park Avenue in katakana. The streets and the town of Koza itself were renamed in an attempt to transform these hybrid sites into symbolic centers, be it the prefectural center of Okinawa City or the municipal center vaguely suggested by “Central Park Avenue.” While the new street names are, together with the name “Okinawa City,” clearly intended to invoke the spirit of the post-occupation era, “Central Park Avenue” orthographically and semantically replicates the very admixture of neo-native and foreign elements that has, in Okinawa’s popular imagination, always distinguished Koza. Thus the new street names, for all their bourgeoise pretensions, appear to be nothing more than a fashionable variation on the town’s historical origins, which were most memorably embodied in the katakana name “Koza.” Officially, the town of Koza no longer exists today. Nevertheless, it is still preferred in daily use by the majority of Okinawans when referring to the prefecture’s second-largest city.28 Even the public buses that depart regularly from the capital city of Naha head not for “Okinawa City” but for “Koza,” and the destination is marked clearly—in katakana—on the front of every bus. The Misato Council members of 1972 could hardly have foreseen that within two decades Koza and its “hybrid culture” would become an object of nostalgia, touted for spawning postwar Okinawa’s most vibrant musical and theatrical movements.29 By the early 1990s, Koza’s advocates included not only artists and intellectuals but many “ordinary citizens” who decried the municipal name change. These citizens do not dispute that their town served as the embodiment of occupied Okinawa; on the contrary, they proudly affirm this history and argue that it was precisely the resulting hybrid culture that accounted for the social and cultural dynamism of Okinawa today. Whereas municipal authorities and local merchants felt compelled to redefine their city shortly after Okinawa’s reversion in 1972, today people seem more inclined to view Koza as embodying the true spirit of postwar Okinawa. This perspective is no doubt more agreeable to the young Japanese tourists who, inspired by Okinawa’s vibrant pop music scene, visit the town in search of a foreign yet familiar ethnic cultural mecca.30 These young travellers look toward

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Okinawa as an exotic locale safely contained within their national borders. Yet in the wake of the 1995 rape case and the ensuing political struggles, one must wonder whether this bright new municipal image will undergo yet another transformation. For if Koza’s brief history has anything to teach us, it is that borders are destined to change and that official maps often omit those sites which flourish in the popular imagination.

3 A darker shade of difference

Indeed it is at present virtually impossible to write or say anything on the topic of race that is not in some way objectionable or embarrassing. (Dominick LaCapra 1991:2) A young GI on a street corner, towering over a crowd of children and playfully tossing out treats of chocolate and chewing gum. Few images appear more often in Japanese literary accounts of the occupation era, and none better captures that historical moment in Japan’s social memory when apprehension dissolved into cautious relief, when the nation’s worst fears about the American occupiers were belied. This image also evokes the ambivalence and bittersweet nostalgia with which so many Japanese remember the occupation years. The soldier’s intimidating size attests to his supremacy, yet his spontaneous goodwill and boundless supply of sweets allays the children’s fears and begins to assuage the suspicions of Japan’s war-weary adults. Of course, the GI’s magnanimity also reinforces the occupied subject’s recognition of his authority. Gift-giving is an act of exchange, a tacit contract defining the hierarchical relationship between giver and receiver, and chocolate and chewing gum serve as humiliating reminders of Japan’s material deprivation following the nation’s defeat. The occupation soldier’s authority derives not only from his physical size and military might but from his material endowment and conspicuous displays of generosity. Yet there is another component to the authority of this soldier-cum-Santa Claus occupying Japan’s postwar street corner: he is, invariably, white. While it seems likely that nisei and black GIs also availed themselves of the local PX (military base store) and tossed out their share of chocolate and chewing gum to eager Japanese children, non-white members of the occupation forces seldom appear in these canonical scenes of postwar life. Despite the predominance of white GIs in Japan’s social memory of the occupation era, African-American soldiers have held a special fascination for postwar Japanese writers and are featured in numerous works of literature, three of which I discuss in this chapter. The first two are works of fiction, Ōe Kenzaburō’s “Prize Stock” (“Shiiku”) and Matsumoto Seichō’s “Painting on Black Canvas” (“Kuroji no e”), which

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Bar 777 in the Teruya (also known as “Four Corners” or “The Bush”) district, Koza, Okinawa. May 1970. (Photograph by Matsumura Kumi, reprinted with permission of the photographer.)

appeared in respected Japanese literary magazines early in 1958.1 Although “Prize Stock” is vaguely set at the war’s end rather than during the occupation, its thematic concerns overlap with those of Ōe’s occupation literature, and I have therefore included it in this chapter. The third work I discuss is a protest poem from occupied Okinawa, Arakawa Akira’s “The Colored Race” (“Yūshoku jinshu”). These three works differ strikingly in form, style, and tone, yet share 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. Without an appreciation of the political and intellectual context in which this literature was produced, it is easy to overlook the writers’ ideological empathy for their black subjects. The response of Okinawan writers to African-American soldiers is especially complicated because Japan’s discourse on Okinawan alterity has historically focused on their darker skin in addition to cultural differences. My reading of “Prize Stock,” “Painting on Black Canvas,” and “The Colored Race” underscores the conflicting impulses common to many works featuring black GIs and published during the 1950s. I also discuss the salient differences among these three works, for a literary analysis that reduces all representations of blacks to a single mold risks replicating the totalizing gesture that it presumably strives to critique.

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Representing blacks in postwar Japan Two books published in the mid-1980s sparked a full-scale “black boom” in the Japanese media: Yamada Eimi’s 1985 novel Bedtime Eyes depicts a Japanese woman’s sensuous relationship with her African-American lover, and Ieda Shōko’s The Women Who Flocked to My Black Skin (1984–85) is a journalistic expose of the young women who canvas Japan’s discos, visit clubs surrounding U.S. military bases, or even travel abroad in search of black men capable of providing them with a transcendent sexual experience.2 Japanese journalism and television quickly jumped on the bandwagon, and the nation’s media was soon filled with images that commodified African-American culture and fetishized the black body, especially the male body. Blacks themselves have been given practically no voice in shaping this racial discourse, other than by providing soundbites or stereotypical, disembodied images. This discourse on blackness is a monologue, not a dialogue, and is concerned above all with interrogating Japanese identity, achieving a personal transformation through the phallic power of the racial other, and using this power to establish control over one’s fellow Japanese. Despite the media’s prurient interest in the size of the black penis, they seem mainly concerned with the symbolic dimensions of the black phallus and its transformative powers, which can be internalized and mobilized within Japanese society. American feminist scholars have argued that despite appearances, the young women featured in these accounts are in fact engaging a form of passiveaggressive resistance against the ongoing hegemony of Japanese men in their own society.3 John Russell, an African-American anthropologist living in Japan, has long insisted that modern Japanese discourses on blackness are primarily a means for resolving ambivalent attitudes toward whites and, by extension, for redefining Japanese identity in a white-dominated world.4 Yet it was during the occupation era that large numbers of black men first set foot on Japanese soil and, as Russell has argued, the post-1980s discourse on blackness is best understood in a broader historical context: Unfortunately, by focusing almost exclusively on the current reception of commodified African American culture forms, this discourse has obscured the ways in which the image of the Black Other has been previously employed in Japan and how its manifestations have changed in response to changes in the Japanese social and political-economic landscape…the Japanese contemporary discourse on blackness not only decontextualizes blackness but depoliticizes it. This contrasts sharply to the postwar generation of Japanese leftist writers and intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s who were familiar with the works of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, supported the U.S. civil rights movement, black nationalism, and African independence movements, and for whom blackness helped to add definition to their own ambivalent attitudes toward white America,

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their identity as Japanese, and their struggles against racism directed at Japan’s internal minorities at a time when Japanese popular images of blacks were decidedly negative and public sympathies were with beleaguered whites.5 Russell’s frustration with the ahistorical bent of much current research is understandable, for as one of the first scholars to study Japanese representations of blacks, he has had to lay much of the historical and theoretical groundwork himself. But in all fairness to those studying Japan’s recent commodification of black bodies and African-American culture, the problem is not so much that these scholars are oblivious to earlier Japanese discourses on blackness, but rather that too few studies of postwar Japanese culture have addressed discursive constructions of race.6 Those interested in cultural production in late capitalist Japan are thus left with little research on which to build, and it is no surprise that the resulting publications fail to situate their subject more broadly within postwar cultural and intellectual history. Clearly, the novels of Yamada Eimi must be distinguished from stories published during the 1950s about Japanese women under American occupation. Whereas these earlier stories tend to focus on women compelled by economic desperation to consort with occupation soldiers, Yamada writes about assertive female consumers exploring the sexual marketplace with a degree of social and economic freedom almost unimaginable during the early postwar years.7 And unlike early postwar writers whose personal contact with black GIs was limited, Yamada has been married to an African-American, and her experience with black lovers has been seized upon by the Japanese media. This publicity, in turn, has influenced the reception of her work, boosting its popularity and helping to imbue it with a purported authenticity and documentary value that for many readers elevates her novels beyond the realm of fiction. Yamada’s own response to her public persona has been ambivalent. At times she seems to stoke the fires by elaborating on her sexual experiences, but she has also been known to bristle at the salacious questions posed by interviewers.8 Whatever one may think of her literary merit (the reviews are mixed), the propensity of her readers to value Yamada’s work for both its “documentary” and fictional qualities situates it squarely within Japan’s 1980s discourse on blackness. Yamada, like the magazine exposés and television “infotainment” programs so central to this discourse, has assumed the role of interpreter and tour guide, leading her uninitiated readers through the exotic, erotic, and threatening world of black male sexuality while ensuring them the safe distance necessary for all voyeuristic activity. Any inquiry into representations of blacks in Japan must begin by recognizing that whites as well as blacks constitute racial others for the Japanese. To acknowledge the racial alterity of whites is not to deny that since the Meiji era Japan has often looked toward the “white civilizations” of Europe and America as the embodiment of modernity and, therefore, as subjects worthy of emulation.

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Nor is it to dispute that Japanese society continues to accord whites greater respect and opportunity than it does blacks and other non-whites among the nation’s burgeoning foreign population. But recognizing whites as racial others (together with, yet in counterpoint to, blacks) lays the groundwork for a more nuanced understanding of race in Japan, one that begins to account for differences within the realm of difference. It would be a gross misrepresentation to suggest a conceptual parity between whites and blacks as racial others, for it is clear that in Japan blackness represents a more radical alterity—a darker shade of difference. This was true during the occupation era and remains true today, despite the plethora of black images that have saturated the nation’s cultural marketplace in the ensuing decades. What has changed in Japan since the arrival of U.S. occupation forces is the degree to which whiteness has been “naturalized” and effectively “deracialized,” while blackness continues to function as an abstract (yet always corporeal) signifier of racial difference. Russell has remarked that “in contemporary Japanese discourse the White Other is defined primarily in terms of westernness and western culture” rather than in terms of skin color or phenotypical characteristics, which continue to distinguish representations of blacks.9 Although I would not go quite as far as Russell when he suggests that in Japan today whiteness has been rendered nearly “transparent,” I do agree that conceptions of whiteness increasingly emphasize cultural affinity over physical characteristics, and it is undeniable that whites are perceived as less foreign in Japan today than they were during the early postwar years. This emphasis on culture over phenotype returns us to the postwar nativist (if not nationalist) ideology of nihonjinron. I noted in Chapter One that nihonjinron posits a homology linking language, culture, and nation to create a timeless “Japanese identity.” This discourse makes few references to skin color or phenotypical characteristics, yet its relentless focus on Japanese uniqueness and homogeneity attests to a deterministic interpretation of identity that bears many resemblances to nineteenth-century European notions of race. In short, nihonjinron is an adamantly racial ideology that refuses to acknowledge its concern with race. It uncritically blends racial and cultural categories, which is reflected in its overlapping use of the terms “jinshu” (race) and “minzoku” (“folk” or “ethnos”) in both popular and social scientific writing.10 As Russell argues, it is critical to remember that blackness serves to mediate Japanese identity in relation to whiteness. This explains why postwar narratives of Japanese encounters with blacks, real or imagined, so often call forth the referential figure of the white (or “Western”) other, whereas accounts of Japanese encounters with whites only occasionally make reference to blacks. The relationship between the two polarities of whiteness and blackness, in other words, is dialectical and not merely reciprocal since whiteness is normative, serving as a transcendental (if not transparent) signifier within the hierarchical world of racial representation. The binary relation between people deemed “black” and “white” in English is preserved in the Japanese words kokujin and

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hakujin. In Japanese as well as in English, whiteness is posited as the normative and privileged polarity. Whiteness can stand alone in Japanese discourse, it is able to exist without blackness while still representing alterity for the Japanese subject. Whether a Japanese chooses to identify with white authority or to reject it by declaring an affinity with blacks, this binary conception of race leaves the subject in “a liminal state—a gray area.”11 Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to label this “a yellow area,” since models of race, even those that downplay color or phenotype, seem to require that everyone be situated on the color spectrum, however arbitrary or bizarre the resulting characterization may seem. “Yellow race” is a case in point. The terms ōshoku jinshu (yellow race) and yūshoku jinshu (colored races, people of color) have been used intermittently in Japan at least as far back as the Meiji era, when the rhetoric calling for an alliance among Asians (or “the colored races”) supported an incipient policy of imperialist expansion. In general, however, during the past century Japanese have not viewed themselves as “yellow.”12 But, as Weiner argues, these essentialist notions of “Japaneseness” assume consanguinity, and it should come as no surprise that both the prewar discourse on the Japanese folk (minzoku) and the postwar nihonjinron literature regularly refer to “blood” as a salient element of Japanese identity.13 “Blood” is also commonly invoked to explain the behavior of black GIs in occupation literature, especially when this behavior transgresses Japanese social norms. In contrast, the actions of white GIs are rarely explained through a simple biological determinism, which lends further credence to the observation that the postwar Japanese discourse on blacks devotes more attention to physiological, or “racial,” elements (with an overwhelmingly emphasis on sexuality) than it does when depicting whites, who are primarily viewed as cultural beings. For example, literary accounts of the occupation era often endow white characters with names and distinctive personalities. Even when whites are portrayed as abstract, two-dimensional figures, they are still allowed to symbolize the occupation forces, the United States, or “Western civilization.” The black soldier is rarely permitted to represent anything but his race. His blackness excludes him from the “high civilizations” of the West and casts a shadow over any distinguishing personal qualities. Race and narrative ambivalence in “Prize Stock” Ōe Kenzaburō’s “Prize Stock” takes place toward the end of the war in a remote Japanese mountain village.14 Seen through the eyes of an innocent village boy, the story surrounds a black soldier, the lone survivor from a crashed military airplane, who parachutes to safety and is taken captive by the villagers.15 Until they hear from the authorities, the villagers agree to keep their “catch” in the cellar of the warehouse where the boy lives with his father and younger brother. The boy gradually befriends the soldier, who throughout the story is depicted as an animal to be “kept” (227; 126).16 But in the end, when the black man realizes

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that the villagers plan to hand him over to the authorities, he desperately tries to save his own life by taking the boy hostage. The boy’s father, “eyes blazing with rage and feverish as a dog’s” (241; 161), breaks into the cellar with a hatchet. As the father raises the hatchet over his head, the soldier quickly shields himself using the boy’s hand, which is crushed as the hatchet sinks into the soldier’s skull. The boy, his hand deformed and his affection for the soldier shattered, is left physically and psychologically scarred from his contact with the black man. The soldier’s violent death marks an abrupt end of childhood for the narrator, as he notes with remorse (136; 165). Translator John Nathan and several critics have remarked that the landscape depicted in this story “exists nowhere in actual Japan.”17 Inhabited by weasels, wild dogs, and other creatures not commonly found in the Japanese countryside, this imaginary landscape evokes a pastoral, almost mythical, world far removed from modern Japan and the harsh reality of war. Ōe himself has acknowledged the “pastoral” nature of his early stories, and Susan Napier has persuasively argued its relevance for reading much of Ōe’s literary corpus.18 In “Prize Stock,” Ōe creates this idyllic world by narrating the story through the innocent eyes of a boy who lives far from the cities and towns of modern Japan.19 The boy’s naive interpretation of the events that befall him underscores the fragility of his remote world. The story is at one level a tale of lost innocence, but to the extent that it can be read allegorically, “Prize Stock” relates the incursion of modernity into the nation’s most remote enclaves and suggests that no one can avoid the consequences of war. Although it is set during the war rather than during the postwar occupation, “Prize Stock” has much in common with Ōe’s occupation literature written at the same time, and with works on the occupation by other authors. In particular, “Prize Stock” bears many resemblances to Higashi Mineo’s An Okinawan Boy: both stories share a nostalgia for a remote and pure landscape; they are written in a fresh and lyrical style; they are seen through the eyes of a boy whose contact with American soldiers initiates his loss of innocence; the narrators in both stories are afraid of their fathers, who demonstrate a threatening capacity for violence; finally, both stories imply that “true community” is a remnant of a premodern, pre-capitalist world incapable of withstanding the violent intrusion of modernity.20 In “Prize Stock” and An Okinawan Boy, the American soldiers not only bring about the end of childhood for the boy-narrators, the foreign men are internalized by the boys, which leaves them with an irrevocable sense of difference from those around them. Their contact with the GIs separates these boys not only from the surrounding community but from the realm of childhood itself, and both stories end with the young male protagonist standing at a geographical threshold, about to enter an unfamiliar world. Despite these resemblances, however, several crucial differences distinguish “Prize Stock” from Higashi’s story. Unlike An Okinawan Boy, where Tsuneyoshi identifies with numerous nameless, faceless GIs primarily through their common sexual desire, the narrator of “Prize Stock” feels an erotic

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attraction for the foreign soldier himself (who at the same time remains nameless and serves as an archetype of racial difference).21 And while An Okinawan Boy features erotic and nurturing women who are arguably the most powerful characters in the social landscape, “Prize Stock” contains no prominent female characters whatsoever. In fact, the narrator seems to have neither mother nor sisters. Another key difference lies in the attention each narrative devotes to race when representing the foreign soldiers. While Higashi’s narrator seems uninterested in his story’s white GIs and describes them in only the most cursory way, Ōe’s narrator is fascinated with the captive black soldier and lavishly depicts his physical qualities through a reservoir of stereotypical images. Among the many critical studies of “Prize Stock,” relatively few have focused on race or on the story’s ambivalent representation of the black soldier.22 Susan Napier has argued that the captured soldier in “Prize Stock” is depicted as “half god, half animal,” and several elements in the text (in addition to its muchvaunted “pantheism”) corroborate the ambivalent representation of a figure who is at once sub-human and divine.23 This ambivalent representation is inherent in stereotype itself, which draws on a flexible economy of images, making it possible to construct alterity through seemingly contradictory attributes. As Homi Bhabha points out in his theory of the stereotype in colonial discourse, this has important implications not only for our understanding of stereotypes but for our assumptions about “point of view” and the act of interpretation in general.24 Bhabha elaborates on this insight in his critique of Robert Stam and Louise Spence’s article, “Colonialism, Racism and Representation” (published in Screen, January/February 1983). Despite the shift in political objectives and critical methods, there remains in their essay a limiting and traditional reliance on the stereotype as offering, at any one time, a secure point of identification. This is not compensated for (or contradicted by) their view that, at other times and places, the same stereotype may be read in a contradictory way or, indeed, be misread. What is, therefore, a simplification in the process of stereotypical representation has a knock-on effect on their central point about the politics of point-of-view. They operate a passive and unitary notion of suture which simplifies the politics and ‘aesthetics’ of spectatorpositioning by ignoring the ambivalent, psychical process of identification which is crucial to the argument. In contrast I suggest, in a very preliminary way, that the colonial stereotype is a complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation, as anxious as it is assertive, and demands not only that we extend our critical and political objectives but that we change the object of analysis itself.25 (Emphasis in original text) Although Bhabha is specifically concerned with the stereotype in colonial discourse, his insights are useful in making sense of the narrative ambivalence

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that permeates “Prize Stock.” Napier rightly notes that the text is replete with material that elevates as well as denigrates the black soldier: his appearance from the sky, the worshipful descriptions of his body, and his role in the ritualistic bathing scene at the spring all associate him with an exalted realm—which, it should be remembered, is consistent with his radical alterity. Yet the text’s relentless use of animal tropes and racial stereotypes competes with these worshipful portraits of the black pilot. To cite but a few examples, the pilot is compared to a “wolf (117; 136), “domestic animal” (119; 139), “black beast” (122; 145), “black horse” (127; 152), “rare and wonderful domestic animal, an animal of genius” (128; 153) and at one point is alluded to as “like a person!” (123; 146). “Prize Stock” draws on familiar stereotypes of black men, which emphasize the soldier’s physicality at the expense of his intellectual capacities. His pungent body odor, likened by the boy’s father to the smell of an ox (110; 127), is mentioned repeatedly, and the boy admires with awe the soldier’s “magnificent, heroic and unbelievably beautiful penis” (127–28; 152). The animal nature of the soldier’s sexuality could hardly be represented more dramatically than when one of the village boys brings him a nanny-goat for his sexual release (and for the children’s entertainment). Confronted with his animal partner, the soldier exhibits no compunction but simply lets out a sporting yell and “labored mightily, his black, rugged penis glistening in the sun, but it simply would not work the way it did with a billy-goat” (128; 153).26 Through the stereotypical representation of the black man, “Prize Stock” acknowledges his power (which derives in part from his otherness) while employing these same stereotypes to delimit or contain that power. As Bhabha implies, stereotypes are flexible; “Prize Stock” both constructs and contains the black man’s power by emphasizing his animality and primitive nature. The narrative emphasizes his physical and sexual power over any intellectual or cultural attributes (although his talent at repairing objects is mentioned several times), and by depriving him of a name, it accentuates his alterity and denies him an individual identity. “Prize Stock” further underscores the soldier’s animality by denying him the power of speech and by limiting his efforts at communication to grunts and gestures. I have argued in Chapters One and Two that control over language is a key issue in literary works set during the occupation. In most cases these struggles center on whose language is dominant, that of the occupiers or the occupied. “Prize Stock,” in contrast to these works set during the occupation, features Japanese rather than English as the dominant language. Because this work presents a GI at the mercy of his Japanese captors, it is the American who emerges as linguistically deficient, and this serves to reinforce the text’s emphasis on his animality. The narrative construction of his animality draws heavily on racial stereotypes, specifically on that vast reservoir of images that defines black men as primitive or sub-human. As Russell has noted, it is precisely this primitivism that accounts for the affinity between black characters and children in many works of literature, including “Prize Stock.”27

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The story’s plethora of crude stereotypes may strike today’s reader (at least the English-language reader) as merely offensive. But a careful reading of “Prize Stock,” and familiarity with Ōe’s early political convictions, suggests that his deployment of racial stereotype in this work is more complicated than it first appears. Most of the descriptions of the black soldier must be attributed to the naive, young narrator, for it is through his eyes that the story is seen. In narratological terms, one might claim that Ōe has constructed the narrative so as to preserve the distance between text and story, and between author and narrator. He strives to maintain these distinctions through several strategies, one of which is by positing an endearing yet unreliable narrator, and by asserting his authorial distance from this narrator through the ironic title. To construct a story around such a narrator is always a complicated exercise, and perhaps in spite of himself Ōe has created in “Prize Stock” an imaginative world so compelling as to be impervious to the text’s own ironical gestures. Further offsetting the narrative’s stereotypical representation of the black soldier is its democratic use of animal tropes to depict nearly every character, including the narrator himself.28 Yet Ōe reserves the most vivid animal tropes to represent the boy’s father, thereby singling him out for comparison with the soldier. In counterpoint to the black soldier, whom the narrator comes to view “as a gentle animal, an obedient animal” (120; 142), the father’s animality is foreboding: he looked “like a beast lurking in the forest night about to spring upon his prey, his eyes bright with desire and his body tense” (104; 118). The father is a hunter and trapper, the American a captive animal. What complicates their relationship (and what makes it so engaging) is that the hunter seems more dangerous than his prey. Both men ultimately pose a threat to the boy, which is borne out in the violent confrontation between them. When the black man’s fingers tighten around the boy’s neck, he imagines that the villagers will “find me with my neck wrung like a weasel’s, my hands and feet stiffened” (131; 160). The analogy is telling, since the father traps and skins weasels, and it underscores the boy’s feelings of vulnerability to both men. The text offers no indication that the narrator consciously associates this image with his father’s work, making this passage another instance where the ingenuous narrator reveals more than he knows—which is to say that the author noticeably asserts his authority over the narrator. When this pair of beastlike men confronts one another in battle, the boy is caught in the middle, creating once again a triangle. But instead of featuring a male protagonist whose relationship with the foreign (male) occupier is mediated through the body of native women, Ōe’s wartime myth features a boy confronted with two adult men. The triangle is a popular configuration in literature, perhaps because it is able to encompass binary understandings of identity without reducing a relationship to a single and fixed opposition between self and other.29 The binary oppositions that structure relationships in “Prize Stock”—animal/ human, village/town, children/adults, friend/foe—shift with the narrator’s perceptions and are resolved only through the boy’s estrangement from both

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realms. The battle constitutes the final and irreversible incursion of war into the boy’s carefree, mythical world. It marks the end of summer, the end of childhood innocence and forever transforms his relationship to the social and natural environment. Throughout the narrative, the boy and the other village children are represented as inhabiting a social space distinct from that of the adults. Even after his traumatic injury, the boy continues to distinguish himself from the adults, for whom he has developed a powerful aversion: All adults were unbearable to me, including my father. Adults who bore down on me with teeth bared, brandishing a hatchet, they were uncanny, beyond my understanding, provoking nausea. (134; 162) Every so often adults would hurry down toward the valley in silence, chests thrown out. Every time they appeared I sensed them making me feel nauseous and afraid and withdrew inside the window. It was as if while I had been in bed the adults had been transformed into entirely inhuman monsters. (135; 165) Yet if he is not part of the adult world, neither is he able to return to the pastoral realm inhabited by the children: I was no longer a child—the thought filled me like a revelation. Bloody fights with Harelip, hunting small birds by moonlight, sledding, wild puppies, these things were for children. And that variety of connection to the world had nothing to do with me.30 (136; 165) It is only after the boy’s injury that he realizes the extent of his isolation from the village community and, conversely, awakens to the village’s connectedness to the violent world outside. As he grows aware of his distance from the other villagers, the boy notices the black man’s pungent odor putrefying in his wounded hand and appears to resign himself to, in effect, being “occupied” by the soldier, even after his body has been cremated and all other physical traces have disappeared (136; 165). Compared with most Japanese narratives featuring black GIs, “Prize Stock” represents the black man with an ambivalence that is provocative, if not fully convincing. In her discussion of the story, Norma Field argues that the stereotypical representation of the black soldier must be viewed in the context of the story’s mythical setting, and that myths aspire to a transcendence that resist simple reductionism. She further suggests that the soldier’s ambivalent role as both a domestic animal and as a godlike figure is related to the ambivalence of power itself.31 I have suggested that Ōe has structured “Prize Stock” so as to attribute

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its stereotypical descriptions of the black man primarily to the naive narrator. Yet these tenuous narratological distinctions collapse at several points in “Prize Stock,” most notably in the strangely beautiful scene where the children and the soldier frolic together at the spring. Suddenly we discovered that the black soldier possessed a magnificent, heroic, unbelievably beautiful penis. We crowded around him bumping naked hips, pointing and teasing, and the black soldier gripped his penis and planted his feet apart fiercely like a goat about to copulate and bellowed. We laughed until we cried and splashed the black soldier’s penis. Then Harelip dashed off naked as he was, and when he returned leading a large nanny-goat from the courtyard at the general store we applauded his idea. The black soldier opened his pink mouth and shouted, then danced out of the water and bore down upon the frightened, bleating goat. We laughed as though mad, Harelip strained to keep the goat’s head down, and the black soldier labored mightily, his black, rugged penis glistening in the sun, but it simply would not work the way it did with a billy-goat. We laughed until we could no longer support ourselves on our legs, so hard that when finally we fell exhausted to the ground, sadness stole into our soft heads. To us the black soldier was a rare and wonderful domestic animal, an animal of genius. How can I describe how much we loved him, or the blazing sun above our wet, heavy skin that distant, splendid summer afternoon, the deep shadows on the cobblestones, the smell of the children and the black soldier, the voices hoarse with happiness, how can I convey the repletion and rhythm of it all? To us it seemed that the summer that bared those tough, resplendent muscles, the summer that suddenly and unexpectedly geysered like an oil well, spewing happiness and drenching us in black, heavy oil, would continue forever and never end. (127–28; 153) In such a rich and complex passage, narratological distinctions alone cannot fully account for the ambivalent representation of the black man. Indeed, what makes the passage so moving is not only the imminent collapse of an otherwise neatly preserved dichotomy between author and narrator, but the sheer lyrical force of its language, for Ōe has created a narrator whose beguiling innocence mitigates even the most offensive stereotypical observations. Although this passage plays on well-established stereotypes of black animality and of the black male’s unrestrained and undiscriminating sexual appetite, it does “Prize Stock” an injustice to dismiss the story for these reasons.32 The retrospective tone as well as the specific reference to “that distant, splendid summer afternoon” contribute to the narrative’s temporal displacement of events into the realm of myth. The sentence following the above passage mentions “our archaic bathing in the spring,” thereby further removing the events from wartime

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Japan and situating them in an historically and culturally ambiguous realm. The unfamiliar landscape underscores the story’s geographical ambiguity, and the use of nicknames avoids identifying the characters as Japanese and emphasizes their amorphous identity. This temporal and cultural displacement calls into question the function of racial stereotype in “Prize Stock.” On the one hand, as Field points out, the black soldier’s sheer alterity facilitates the narrative construction of the other-worldly realm of myth. Yet the use of racial stereotypes to represent the soldier imparts him with a specificity and familiarity that also militates against his radical difference. Stereotypes, as Bhabha notes, impose fixity on the unfamiliar and thereby “contain” it. They also accomodate constantly shifting identities, transforming the unfamiliar into objects of knowledge (and thus of mastery) while serving to confirm the subject’s alterity and to legitimize the subject as an object of desire. This ambivalent desire is evident in the boy’s vacillation between his responsibility to act as warden of the animal-like prisoner and his desire to submit to the black man’s erotic power. He gradually approaches the man, moving closer and closer until they cavort naked in the spring, and the days “suddenly and unexpectedly geysered like an oil well, spewing happiness and drenching us in black, heavy oil.” The sexual overtones here need little elaboration. “Prize Stock” is organized around a series of oppositions: village/town, children/adults, human/animal, father/soldier, captive/captor. These oppositions are subsumed under the narrative’s central conflict, which pits the fragile pastoral realm of the village against the harsh reality of modernity as embodied in war. As war makes its inevitable incursion into the boy’s life, it destroys all oppositions that have structured his world. Most tenuous among these is the boy’s distinction between himself and the soldier, who in his blackness embodies alterity at its most extreme. Yet as we have seen, the boy’s sense of difference from the soldier vacillates in response to both his shifting perceptions of his father and his growing attraction to the black man. The flexible nature of the triangle enables the boy to mediate his relationship to each man through the other, but his tenuous relationship to each is resolved with the fatal blow of the father’s hatchet. This blow instantly and definitively separates the boy from the village community and at the same time links him forever to the soldier, for even after the black man’s death his distinctive odor oozes forth from the boy’s wounded hand. Many works of occupation literature contain corporeal metaphors signifying the native subject’s internalization of the foreign male body, but “Prize Stock” differs from most, not only because of its mythical, wartime setting but because of its worshipful description of the black man’s powerful body. Matsumoto Seichō’s “Painting on Black Canvas” also depicts a Japanese male whose close contact with a black soldier causes him to absorb his “distinctive odor” and to carry it within him even after the man has died. That two works of fiction as different as “Prize Stock” and “Painting on Black Canvas” would use identical tropes to represent the corporeal internalization of the black male body

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underscores the inherent flexibility of stereotypes, which present a narrowly circumscribed set of images that is broadly sanctioned across discourses, resulting in remarkable similarities between otherwise dissimilar texts. Reporting truth, imagining motives: “Painting on Black Canvas” When he died in 1992 at the age of eighty-four, Matsumoto Seichō was the undisputed dean of Japanese mystery writers. He is said to have routinely cranked out seven hundred hand-written pages per month during his prolific career, and at one time his books occupied the top five positions on Japan’s bestseller lists.33 Matsumoto began his writing career as a newspaper reporter in his home town of Kokura City, Kyushu, and he initially achieved literary acclaim in the early 1950s for works of historical fiction. Journalism, historical fiction, and mysteries share a concern with factual detail and with uncovering a “verifiable truth,” even when framed within a patently fictional narrative. This concern with verifiability is evident throughout “Painting on Black Canvas,” which, as its title suggests, represents the darker side of postwar life. Children, chocolate, and chewing gum are nowhere to be found in this 1958 work that exposes the gang rape of a Japanese woman by a group of African-American soldiers. The narrative depicts these black GIs not through the mixture of gratitude and resentment normally accorded their white counterparts, but through a relentless series of racial stereotypes partially offset by a grudging sympathy. “Painting on Black Canvas” is a fictionalized reconstruction of an actual incident that occurred in Kokura (Kita Kyushu City), where Matsumoto worked in the advertising division of the Asahi newspaper’s regional office. The narrative is perhaps best characterized as “documentary fiction” since it incorporates news briefs and alternates between a dispassionate, journalistic voice and a semi-omniscient fictional one.34 It is divided into two parts, each beginning with a series of news reports on the escalating war in Korea and each centering on an act of violence. Part One begins on the night of 12 July 1950, when an entire platoon of black GIs sneaks out of Camp Jōno, a nearby American military base from which troops are being sent to the Korean peninsula. After crawling through a large drainage pipe and escaping the base confines, the platoon splits up into small groups. The narrative describes a group of five men who had been drinking earlier that night and who find their way to the tiny two-room house of Maeno Ryūkichi and his wife Fusako, which they mistake for a bar. Referring to Fusako as “Mama-san,” they demand some beer but Ryūkichi tells them to leave. The group then barges into the house and finds an open bottle of shōchū, a strong local liquor, which they quickly finish off.35 Their thirst still not quenched, the armed men grow violent. One man pulls a knife on Ryūkichi and ties him up, and the soldiers then take turns raping his wife. Ryūkichi is helpless to resist as his wife is brutalized. Both the rape and its

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aftermath are described in sickening detail, and the narrative’s use of a quasiobjective voice makes the scene all the more repulsive. Part Two takes place approximately six months after the rape and focuses on Ryūkichi, who is now separated from his wife and is driven by a desire for revenge against the rapists. Ryūkichi has found a job at Camp Jōno’s “Corpse Treatment Section” so that he can search among the bodies of American servicemen killed in Korea for the leader of the group that raped his wife. The man is easily identifiable by the distinctive tattoo of an eagle, wings spread, spanning his massive chest. This tattoo is the eponymous painting on black canvas. The story ends with Ryūkichi finding the corpse and tearing into it with a scalpel. Below is a selection of the thirteen news briefs that open “Painting on Black Canvas,” followed by the first line of the story itself: (AP Special: Washington June 28, 1950) The United States Department of Defense confirmed that Seoul, the capital of Korea, fell on June 28. (UP: Taejon, July 1) U.S. forces dispatched to Korea reached Taejon today. Reinforcements are expected to be on the way. (AP: General Headquarters, July 4) On the night of July 3rd, U.S. forces on the front lines engaged in combat for the first time with North Korean troops. (GHQ: July 12) American forces withdrew to the southern shore of the Kumgang River. (UP: Military base in Korea, July 17) After breaking through the North Korean front lines on July 16, American troops were forced to retreat beyond their previous position on the southern shore of the Kumgang River. With a massive number of troops, North Korean forces released a barrage of fire and stormed Taejon, preventing the Americans from holding their front lines. (UP: July 17) American forces abandoned Taijon Airport. (AP: Washington, July 24) President Truman announced that he would increase troops by approximately 600,000 men and added that he submitted a proposal to Congress today asking that military spending be increased to a total of 15.2 billion so that the United States will be prepared to cope with any and all new military conflicts that might emerge.36 The sound of the drums had been throbbing through every corner of the city for several days leading up to the festival. (169) This opening passage introduces the two main voices in the narrative: an objective journalistic voice and a semi-omniscient fictional one, which are offset by a space in the text. The journalistic voice locates the story’s events within a specific temporal and political context, lending it an air of objectivity and hinting

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at the “truth” of the account that follows. The fictional voice, in contrast, examines the impulses and instincts that propel the soldiers to their criminal act. Revealed by subtle shifts in modality and informed by a philosophy of racial determinism, it is reserved for those facets of the narrative for which there is no objective documentation. Matsumoto’s reference to both individual motives and broader social conditions is a familiar element in his work and is a distinctive feature of his many mystery novels.37 Following the above passage, the narrative describes neighborhoods throughout the city as they prepare for the annual Gion Festival, to be held the following day. In the sultry evening air young men practice on the festival drums, everyone pounding out the same redundant rhythm. The opening paragraph emphasizes the ritualistic and anachronistic character of the drums for Kokura’s residents by using expressions such as “customs,” “traditional,” and “Kokura’s annual Gion Festival.” For modern Japanese, the narrative implies, the drumming is restricted to the realm of ritual; for the black GIs, however, the echo of the drums resonates deep within the soul: The sound of these percussion instruments had little effect on the Japanese but unsettled the group of black soldiers and left them trembling and agitated. It penetrated through their skin, moving straight through the flesh until reaching their blood. For two days their ears filled with these hypnotic sounds. (172) This explicit comparison of the black GIs with the Japanese serves to locate the two groups in different temporalities. The Japanese reside in the modern world where the drumming exists only as a reified annual ritual, while the black soldiers occupy a primitive, pre-modern space filled with darkness, where the sound of the drums reaches deep into their blood. Throughout the narrative, descriptions of the black soldiers center on references to blood and to images of primitivism as seen in the following words and phrases, each of which appears at least twice in the course of a few pages: “instinct,” “primitive,” “blood of the hunter,” “magical spell,” “intoxication,” and “savages.”38 By deploying these images, the narrative depicts the black soldiers as irrational beings at the mercy of their savage instincts, and it is the sound of the drums that activates their latent primitivism. As if to validate this causal relationship between the drums and the black men’s primitivism, the narrative notes the prescient concerns of Colonel Morgan, the (white) head of Kokura’s military police, and whose experience commanding black GIs has apparently given him profound insights into this primitive race: After the last group left the camp, yet another surge of troops arrived on July 10 to replace them. There were so many men that five or six trains

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were required to transport them. They all had jet black skin. Unfortunately, they were to be sent to the front lines in Korea, and they were only passing through the camp. Unluckily, this unit consisted of black soldiers, and their arrival coincided with the first day of the drumming, which echoed throughout the city. The Japanese did not understand why the timing of the troops’ arrival was “unlucky”—or dangerous—but to his credit, Colonel Morgan, Commander of the Military Police of Kokura, comprehended the danger. He contacted the city government and asked that they refrain from using drums as much as possible during the upcoming festival. (170–71) For several sentences, the paragraph describes the objections offered by municipal authorities to Colonel Morgan’s request, and it ends with the following remark: “It was only later that they understood…why the Colonel couldn’t explain the source of the danger” (171). This heavy-handed use of foreshadowing relies on the white officer’s authority to corroborate the narrative linkage (established later) between the drums and the rape. The sentences in the passage that begin with “unfortunately” and “unluckily” (fukō wa, fuun wa) emphasize this proleptic gesture. They stand out from the surrounding text because they offer an explicitly personal judgement and signal a disruption of the “objective” narrative voice maintained throughout most of the story. Linked by parallel structure and proximity in the text, these sentences present once again the two factors motivating the rape—the war and the drums: unfortunately for the black GIs, they are destined for the front lines in Korea; and unluckily for the residents of Kokura, they too will suffer because the arrival of the black soldiers coincides with the beating of the festival drums. On the surface, the narrative displays an empathy toward both the black soldiers and the local residents. But the narrative’s representation of the soldiers as victims must be viewed against its stereotypical depiction of these men as primitive savages. The idea that the black men are especially susceptible to the sound of the drums relies on an utterly stereotypical and deterministic understanding of race. Hopeless fear and suppressed desire smoldered deep within the black soldiers. The beating of the drums blended these into an odd mixture that began to ferment. Such was the stimulating effect of the sounds on the soldiers. The drums heard in the distance stirred the blood of their ancient ancestors, who had once beat their own cylindrical and conical drums at rituals and during the hunt. (171–72) The power of the drums over the black soldiers derives from its role in their primitive past, which lives on inside them. In “Prize Stock,” the black man’s primitivism made him a safe playmate for the children. It was when he was

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suddenly “transformed into the enemy”— when the boy recognized him as an adult and as a soldier—that he became allied with the forces of modernity which threatened to destroy the pastoral world of the village. In “Painting on Black Canvas,” however, it is the latent primitivism of the black soldiers that threatens the welfare of a modern community. This work displays little nostalgia; rather, it implies that remnants of a pre-modern world, such as “the redundant and primitive sound of the festival drums” (172), are best contained and controlled, as in the Gion Festival. “Painting on Black Canvas” represents the soldier’s savagery not only through references to the drums, but through a wide range of familiar stereotypes and tropes: it notes their “dance instinct” (172) and pungent “odor” (176), which is internalized by all who come in close contact with them (181, 189, 193), and it compares the soldiers to animals (175, 176) and specifically to monkeys (176, 179, 181). Unlike “Prize Stock,” however, “Painting on Black Canvas” uses animal terms to describe only the black characters—except, significantly, when it describes Fusako after being raped (184–85). The following passage conveys the narrative’s awkward style and overt use of stereotypes when depicting the black men. The black soldiers must surely have trembled with uneasiness as they listened to the sounds of the drums. Boom-boom, boom, boom. Boomboom, boom, boom. The repetition of this simple pattern contained a spelllike quality. They must have listened, mesmerized, with their thick lips parted and their bulging eyes rolling. The sound resembled the drums that echoed deep from the jungles when savages performed their ritual dance. Indeed, the long strip of shadow that stretches forth between the town and the camp is reminiscent of those dark jungles. (171) This is one of the few passages where the narrator’s factual, declarative tone (datta, de atta) gives way to speculative inflections (ni chigai nakatta, de arō) and to casual afterthoughts (sō ieba). The speculative modality serves to accentuate the narrator’s emotional distance from the black men and is primarily employed in those passages describing their thoughts and feelings; rarely is it used to depict Japanese characters. “Painting on Black Canvas” underscores this emotional distance by associating the men with darkness: they occupy the jungles and shadows, mysterious places with no distinct identity. Readers are led to view the dark, empty stretch of land between the military base and the town as a liminal space naturally suited to the black men. Its darkness matches their own, and its isolation from civilization—the world of light—harks back to their original habitat. The black soldiers are a part of neither the white-controlled military base nor the Japanese town. Their association with darkness defines them as the anthithesis of modernity and civilization. When they sneak out of the base, the black GIs first emerge in “the long strip of shadow that stretches forth

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between the town and the camp,” (171). On the outskirts of town are tiny farming villages, clusters of houses, and a few isolated homes, all of them lit up in the night. As the following passage describes, the black soldiers move instinctively and ominously from darkness toward the lights: The black soldiers walked on, heading for the lights. They had absolutely no knowledge of the terrain, just as they had no knowledge of the fate that awaited them in a few days. But they were sensitive to new developments in the war across the sea, and even without being told, they knew that each step of retreat by the American forces would further endanger their lives. They would be thrown between their retreating allies and the approaching enemy. No doubt, they pictured themselves on the battlefield, arms and legs writhing in pain as trees burned around them and shells exploded overhead. But several days, and an even greater distance, still separated them from that impending reality. They were determined to put those images out of their minds for an hour, or for even just a minute. In its intensity this determination resembled prayer. At one time, the drums of savages echoed out from the backwoods of America in a ritualistic form of prayer. When the ancestors of those people were brought to the American colonies as laborers and the whites taught them about the blessings of God, they were profoundly moved. To free themselves from the shackles of slavery and to find a glimmer of light in their daily lives, they created Negro spirituals, which were based on the primitive rhythms of Africa. Flowing deep within these songs were the incantatory rhythms of prayers, prayers offered to a different god… The drums continued to ring out from the distance. It was a dull, hypnotic sound. Perhaps the black soldiers offered a prayer for their hopeless lives. They walked, paying no attention to the path. They walked toward the lights of private homes, boots trampling the overgrown grass and crushing the rice growing in paddies. The blood of the hunters was revived within them. This dark forest was a place for hunters. (173) The passage paints a foreboding (albeit ludicrous) picture of the black men, virtually hypnotized by the drums and walking like zombies toward the lights of innocent homes—dark men passing through the dark forest and heading for the lights of civilization, where they are destined to wreak havoc. Note, too, that they crush rice beneath their feet, thereby destroying a salient symbol of Japanese civilization and one that further distinguishes an agricultural people—those capable of cultivation—from primitive hunters. This crude portrait of the black soldiers is partially offset by the narrative’s sympathetic portrayal of the men as victims of a greater destructive force. As the above passage notes, their ancestors were slaves, and these men are subject to a discriminatory military policy that segregates blacks within the American forces

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and then sends them to the most treacherous battle zones.39 But these sympathetic gestures are compromised not only through the textual shifts in modality discussed earlier, but through sudden changes in point of view, as in the passage below which follows the rape scene. The narrative clearly identifies with Ryūkichi, and readers should also note the shift in diction marking a return to the objective, documentary voice: Ryūkichi pushed aside the robe that covered his wife’s body. Her legs tried to get away from him. He used his own legs to restrain her. Is this my way of sharing in her humiliation? Although he was overcome with emotion, Ryūkichi was aware of his effort to get close to his wife. Sweat rolled down his chest. But even if he managed to get close to her on a physical plane, his state of mind remained at a distant remove. No one knows the exact details concerning the escape of the group of black GIs from the base in Kokura on the night of 11 July 1950. Nearly all of the records have been destroyed. One thing is certain, however: they were black soldiers from the 24th Infantry Regiment of the 25th Division. The number is estimated at 250 men. At approximately 8:00 p.m., the soldiers slipped out of the camp and scattered into the shadows. The men were fully armed, carrying handgrenades and machine guns. They assaulted the homes of private citizens. Since it was a summer night, the doors and windows were left open at many houses, and entry was easy. As the armed troops raped and pillaged, they encountered no resistance. The Japanese police learned of the incident at approximately 9:00. But they were helpless before the foreign troops. (185)40 Both voice and perspective in the first section of the passage attests to the close narrative identification with Ryūkichi. For example, Ryūkichi’s question “Is this my way of sharing in her humiliation?” is not set off by quotation marks in the text, and throughout the first two paragraphs his wife is referred to as “tsuma” which is best understood in English as “my wife.” Although the passage retains the pretense of a “third-person” narrative voice, the perspective is essentially Ryūkichi’s. In contrast to this close narrative identification with Ryūkichi, the black soldiers remain nameless throughout the narrative and are treated as an aggregate with no individual identities. Perhaps less remarkable than the stereotypical treatment of the black GIs is the absence of any narrative identification with Fusako. Although she is the primary victim in the story, her thoughts and feelings remain inaccessible to Ryūkichi both during and after the rape. Her futile efforts to cry out for help, her groans of pain and resignation, and finally, her bloody and brutalized body are described in repulsive detail from the

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perspective of either Ryūkichi or the narrator (who, although never identified, is safely assumed to be male). As in The Cocktail Party, “Painting on Black Canvas” relates the sexual victimization of a native woman at the hands of the foreign soldiers but denies the victim a voice. These works are uninterested in their female characters except for their potential symbolic value as victims. Yet, unlike the relationship between the male protagonist and the occupation soldiers in other works discussed thus far, Ryūkichi’s response to the soldiers is suffused with neither desire nor a private sense of male camaraderie.41 Only for a fleeting moment in the above passage is there any hint at a parallel between the soldiers and Ryūkichi, who, in his effort to share his wife’s suffering, forcibly restrains her and attempts to pull her toward him. This symbolic re-enactment of the rape recalls the scene in The Cocktail Party when the narrator forces his daughter to recreate the crime for the benefit of the prosecutor and several other men. The second part of the above passage is set off by an extra space in the text and by a clear shift in voice and point of view. Here the narrative returns to the realm of objective reporting and is concerned only with “facts.” The style eschews an individual narrative voice to convey greater objectivity, yet it is at the same time highly reflexive and occasionally devolves into meta-discourse, commenting on the veracity of certain data and the inaccessibility of other information. The sentences in this section are short, almost telegraphic, and abound with specific times, names, and numbers. Once again, the narrative has abandoned the murky realm of fiction for the hard and clear world of journalism. In the first section of the passage, a fictional narrative stance provides access to Ryūkichi’s inner thoughts without distinguishing his voice from that of the narrator. The second section begins with “No one knows the exact details,” which emphasizes the fictionalized, speculative character of the events narrated thus far and implies that a completely factual account would be preferable, if only the data were available. This very admission of the narrative’s limitations (to be understood as its reliance on fictional techniques) makes it appear all the more veracious and believable, since readers are likely to assume that only the most forthright narrator would bother to note which passages are true and which are imagined reconstructions. But of course these two modes of discourse—journalism and fiction—are not mutually exclusive, and in many passages of “Painting on Black Canvas” they are less clearly delineated than they are in the passage above.42 Matsumoto’s narrative revolves around the pretext that it deploys fictional methods only to “fill in” those gaps that the veracious genre of journalism is unable to address due to the lack of hard facts. This is unconvincing at best and deceptive at worst. It serves to frame the fictional musings within the extra-textual realm of fact, thereby lending veracity to those egregiously racist reconstructions of the motives behind the rape. Yet the narrative also deploys journalistic material to expose racial discrimination within American society and to reveal its fatal implications for black soldiers in the context of war. Toward the end of Part One, the narrator remarks that the night of their rampage, the renegade 24th

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Regiment was surrounded by MPs and surrendered without a fight, adding that “the following day, no one knew what punishment they received. They probably weren’t punished at all. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary: they vanished from Camp Jōno within two days” (186). This passage hints once again at the plight of the black soldiers, which is fully revealed in Part Two. The second half of “Painting on Black Canvas” takes place in January 1951 and focuses on the operation of the “Corpse Disposal Plant,” where Ryūkichi now works. In this part of the story Ryūkichi is a minor figure, described by the semi-omniscient narrator or through the eyes of Dr. Kasaka, a dentist who is employed at the plant to identify corpses. Part Two begins with another series of news briefs which cover developments in the Korean War between September and late December, 1950. They relate an increasingly desperate struggle by the American and South Korean forces to hold off the communists, and in the final news brief U.S. military authorities confirm that Chinese communist forces have successfully broken through the lines at the 38th Parallel. The use of news reports to open Part Two again authorizes the events that follow by situating them within the world of fact. Much of Part Two is concerned with describing, in minute detail, the operations of the Corpse Disposal Plant and is of little relevance to the present discussion. But a few issues raised in the first half of the story are presented more thoroughly in the second. Part Two devotes more attention to the exploitation of the black soldiers by their own countrymen, and this partly offsets the stereotypical description of the soldiers throughout the narrative’s first half. While the first half of the story hints repeatedly that these soldiers will meet a harsher fate than their white counterparts, the second half produces the corpses to prove it. In the following passage, Dr. Kasaka is discussing the disparity in pay between Japanese dentists like himself and his American counterparts, when he raises the issue of race: “Just because I’m Japanese, my salary is lower than that of the other dentists. I won’t say the pay is bad, but even the dentists from Australia or Hungary make a lot more money than me, just because they are American citizens. I consider myself more technically proficient than they are, but it doesn’t matter. Actually, it’s not really a question of nationality, it’s that they look down on the colored races.” The dentist lowered his voice and continued. “How about it? You noticed, didn’t you? There are a lot more corpses of black soldiers than white ones, aren’t there?” Ryūkichi raised his eyes instead of answering. “According to my estimate, about two-thirds of all the corpses are black and only one-third white. The black soldiers far outnumber the whites, which means that they are being singled out for the front lines.” (197; Emphasis in original text)

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This conversation continues, with the dentist doing most of the talking, until he asks a question that finally seems to engage Ryūkichi: “Do you think the black soldiers knew?” Several moments had passed with no response, so the dentist pressed Ryūkichi for an answer. “In other words, do you think they knew the position they were being placed in?” “That they would be killed?” Ryūkichi had rephrased the question so bluntly that it irritated the dentist, who intentionally replied with a vague comment that seemed to contradict his earlier remark: “All you can really say is that it’s a case of bad luck. After all, white soldiers are getting killed, too.” “That may be so, but…” Ryūkichi stubbornly persisted, “They probably knew they would be killed. When they left for Korea, the war was a lost cause.” (197–98) The conversation ends with Ryūkichi offering a grudging expression of sympathy for the black soldiers: “I guess you have to feel sorry for the niggers, too. It’s too bad about them, in a sense.”43 The dentist’s comment about discrimination against “the colored races” and Ryūkichi’s grudging expression of sympathy for black soldiers elaborates on the hints about racial inequality presented in Part One of “Painting on Black Canvas.” Although the narrative fails to explore these issues in any depth or with much sophistication, it does acknowledge the presence of racism within American society, provides a concrete example of how it is manifested in military policy, and asks how this affects those Japanese who have been victimized by black soldiers. The story’s ending provides an ambiguous answer to this final question. Ryūkichi at last succeeds in carrying out his act of revenge as he tears into the corpse of the tattooed soldier. “Killing” a dead man is a hollow and desperate form of revenge, particularly in view of the loss incurred by Ryūkichi and Fusako, but since neither the Japanese police nor the American authorities will bring them to justice, this appears to be Ryūkichi’s only recourse. The absence of an effective channel for resistance is given an ironical twist in “Painting on Black Canvas”: the rapists are brought to justice only through America’s system of racial injustice. Another irony revolves around the story’s title. The narrative is fundamentally didactic, in that it interprets its own symbols (which it endlessly repeats), thereby ensuring that the reader “gets the point.” Yet this meta-discursive propensity is abandoned with respect to the tattoo of the eagle, despite its role as a central symbol in the story. Why does the narrative provide no interpretive gloss for this image, which is significant enough to serve as the title? If “Painting on Black Canvas” contains a compelling mystery, then this is it, for in view of Matsumoto’s didacticism and desire for narrative closure (essential to the

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mystery genre, for which the author is famous) it is difficult to understand why he would squander the chance to elaborate on an image so replete with irony. After all, here is an African-American, subjected to segregation and discrimination in the Land of the Free, who chooses—from all of the possible images to have permanently etched into his skin—an eagle in flight, America’s national symbol and its dominant image of liberty. The only interpretation of the tattoo offered in the narrative is couched in the thoughts of Dr. Kasaka as he views the tattoo on the corpse: Eagles aren’t at all unusual, thought the dentist. Americans like tattoos of birds. I wonder if it stems from some childlike psychology or perhaps from a superstitious belief of some kind. The design is childlike and the execution coarse, but because the canvas consists of black rather than white skin, the painting exudes a peculiar and forceful primitivism. (199) This passage not only provides an impoverished interpretation of the tattoo’s symbolic dimensions, but it attributes to the dentist the same stereotypical perceptions featured throughout Part One, perceptions that contradict the spirit of his earlier remarks about racial discrimination. The dentist’s references to primitivism and superstition echo the racial inflections of the semi-omniscient narrator and embody the narrative’s own ambivalent stance on race. “Painting on Black Canvas” is not nearly as persuasive in its assumed ambivalence toward the black soldiers as is “Prize Stock,” in part because the narrative’s surfeit of stereotypical images serves only to dehumanize the black soldiers, and the effect vastly outweighs the narrative’s gestures of sympathy for the soldiers. Ōe’s use of a vague, mythical setting in “Prize Stock” allows him latitude in representing his characters. As we have seen, “Prize Stock” achieves this ambiguity in various ways: neither the village nor the town is given a name or geographical location; the characters remain nameless or are referred to only by nickname; no one, including the soldier, is explicitly identified in terms of nationality; the reader is able to infer that the events take place during summer 1945, but no dates are provided; and the unfamiliar landscape and unusual characters suggest a setting far removed from modern Japan. In contrast, Matsumoto’s insistence on temporal and geographical specificity, and the attendant presumption of narrative veracity, makes him seem more accountable for his representations of the black GIs. Yet to dismiss “Painting on Black Canvas” as just another racist work by a Japanese writer ignores the narrative’s insistent assertion that the black soldiers are victims of racism within their own society. It also denies Matsumoto credit for drawing attention to a social issue that was still largely unrecognized in Japan at that time. Within two years after the publication of “Painting on Black Canvas,” however, nationwide protests against the revised Japan-U.S. Security Treaty brought on renewed criticism of the United States in general, and books soon began appearing that

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sympathetically documented the plight of African-Americans in their struggles against segregation and discrimination at home.44 Poetry of protest: Arakawa Akira’s “The Colored Race” Arakawa Akira’s poem, “The Colored Race” (“Yūshoku jinshu”) created a minor sensation when it first appeared in the March 1956 edition of Ryūdai bungaku, the University of the Ryukyus’ student literary magazine.45 This was not Arakawa’s first controversial submission to the magazine: an earlier poem, “An Orphan’s Song” (“Minashigo no uta”), had already attracted the attention of both readers and the American censors for its unrestrained call to resist the occupation. These were lively times in Okinawan politics, and both Arakawa’s protest poetry and the radical student magazine in which it appeared are best appreciated in their historical context.46 The United States first began establishing military facilities on Okinawa shortly after landing on the island in 1945, when they took over Japanese air bases built only a few years earlier. With the outbreak of the Korean War, the U.S. embarked on a policy of building permanent bases in Okinawa as part of their strategy to contain the spread of communism in Asia. While the base expansion program created welcome new jobs, it entailed taking land from local farmers. Okinawan construction workers soon began to protest against poor labor conditions, and local property owners mobilized against the land seizures. In early 1953 protests by local landholders and their supporters grew intense, threatening to end in violent confrontations with the occupation forces, and in March 1953 the American authorities responded by issuing an ordinance enabling them to appropriate land at their discretion.47 In November of that year, Vice President Nixon visited Okinawa and declared that as long as the threat of communism remained, the United States would keep possession of Okinawa. At least once a year for the following three years, President Eisenhower announced his intention to hold Okinawa indefinitely as a strategic base for American military operations in Asia.48 Many of the landholders whose property was appropriated under the 1953 policy were farmers who owned small plots and eked out a meager living, and the U.S. military began using heavy-handed tactics to confiscate land, in what came to be known as the “bulldozer and bayonet” era: On 5 December [1953] at 8:15 a.m. the American military bulldozers suddenly arrived. 1,200 residents hurried to the scene, surrounded the bulldozers, and demanded that the bulldozers leave. Then, about one hour later, fourteen or fifteen armored vehicles arrived with four or five light machine guns and more than a dozen heavy machine guns with live ammunition. The residents were surrounded by 350 armed soldiers in full battle gear. The somewhat surreal atmosphere at first gave the impression that it was all being done just for show, but as the circle tightened and the

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bayonet points began to touch flesh, many began to fear the day would end in a bloody massacre. Irritated at the obstinate resistance tactics of the residents, the U.S. soldiers finally began attacking the people with their rifle butts, kicking them with their combat boots, and throwing them into drainage ditches, among other things.49 By 1956 anger over the land appropriations had spread, culminating in postwar Okinawa’s first major citizen’s movement, known as “shimagurumi tōsō” (The Struggle Linking the Islands). This movement consisted of a broad coalition of citizens, and while their protests targeted the land appropriation policy, they drew on a general discontent that had been simmering for several years. The shimagurumi tōsō marks the first time in their postwar history that such a diverse group of Okinawans united in resistance against occupation policy, and some view this movement as having been even more significant for Okinawa than were the 1960 anti-Security Treaty protests for mainland Japanese society.50 This broad-based movement also lent impetus to the nascent reversion movement. It is amidst this active period in local politics that Ryūdai bungaku made the bold decision to publish Arakawa’s “The Colored Race.” Several editors of the student magazine had served as key organizers in the growing protest movement, and because they had already experienced the forced recall of the issue containing Arakawa’s “The Orphan’s Song,” in 1956 the editors—recognizing the explosive potential of Arakawa’s new piece— decided to circumvent censorship by releasing this issue containing “The Colored Race” without submitting it for the requisite pre-publication clearance.51 The magazine issue contained several other incendiary works that alarmed occupation authorities, who were already concerned about “the communist threat” and were now facing a growing citizen’s movement in Okinawa. The bellicose tone and “anti-American” subject matter (meaning “anti-white subject matter”) of Arakawa’s poem did little to allay their fears, and USCAR cracked down on the student magazine through the university administration. They recalled copies already distributed, banned publication of the magazine for six months, and expelled from the university four of the editors who had been active in the incipient citizens’ movement. As a result, Ryūdai bungaku was effectively shut down for one year.52 Although “The Colored Race” is briefly mentioned in Okinawa’s postwar literary histories in relation to the censorship of Ryūdai bungaku, the poem itself has received scant attention from Okinawan critics, presumably because they are unimpressed by its strident tone, technical inadequacies, and its facile call for unity among the racially oppressed.53 But Ryūdai bungaku has attracted wider attention, no doubt because this small student magazine has played a disproportionately large role in postwar Okinawan intellectual and cultural history, particularly when one considers the magazine’s limited circulation

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(approximately five hundred copies per issue) and its irregular publication between the first issue in 1953 and the last in 1967. As Kano Masanao notes in his respected study of postwar Okinawan intellectual history, Ryūdai bungaku occupies a “legendary” position among postwar Okinawan intellectuals. Ōe Kenzaburō, who has also written about Ryūdai bungaku, claims that by 1956 the magazine was expanding its readership beyond the university, and by this time local writers such as Ōshiro Tatsuhiro and Funagoshi Gishō were regularly engaged in critical debates with the magazine’s editors, which further broadened interest among Okinawan intellectuals.54 Ironically, the historical significance of Ryūdai bungaku had little to do with its original purpose, which was to offer a forum for student fiction and poetry, and it is widely agreed that as a literary magazine Ryūdai bungaku failed to produce much literature of lasting interest. Rather, as Kano argues, the magazine’s significance and reputation derive more from its essays, unbridled debates, and sheer diatribe than from the literary works that appeared in its pages.55 Kano is also careful to point out, however, that Ryūdai bungaku offered spirited attacks not just against occupation policy but against prominent figures in contemporary Okinawan literature, and this heightened the intensity of the debates with local writers.56 The magazine went beyond mere polemics and offered a lively forum for exploring Okinawan history and culture in relation to contemporary political developments, and this was perhaps its most important contribution to Okinawan intellectual life.57 Ryūdai bungaku is also noteworthy for having launched the careers of many Okinawans who went on to assume leading roles in the vibrant cultural and political milieu of the 1960s and 1970s. Among the most influential of these figures is the magazine’s founder, Arakawa Akira. Born in 1931 to an Okinawan father and Japanese mother, Arakawa grew up in Okinawa when Japan was expanding its colonial empire throughout Asia, and he once characterized himself as “a militaristic youth.”58 Toward the war’s end he was living in the Yaeyama islands, which had been spared the violence that devastated the main island of Okinawa, but in 1946 he moved to the main island and entered Koza High School. Arakawa, who recalls having been distraught at Japan’s defeat and burning with a desire for revenge against the American enemy, suddenly found himself in close proximity to the American troops.59 He could hardly have chosen an environment more removed from the leisurely (if destitute) life of the Yaeyamas, and his years in Koza did little to mollify his fiery spirit.60 It is this impassioned young man who in 1953 formed Ryūdai bungaku and soon began publishing some of the magazine’s most polemical poetry. By the time Arakawa submitted “The Colored Race” to Ryūdai bungaku, he had already graduated from the university and was working as a reporter for The Okinawa Times. But this poem confirmed that Arakawa had lost none of his fire since leaving the university. Throughout his poem, Arakawa uses the word “jinshu” to signify “race,” and his use of the Japanese term closely resembles contemporary (1950s) American

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conceptions of the English word: in both contexts race is conceived primarily in terms of skin color and defines subjects through two polarities—“white/colored,” or alternately, “white/black.” As Arakawa’s poem suggests, however, this binary and color-centered conception of race fails to adequately address any subject positions, be they those of the “white” and “black” occupation soldiers or the “yellow” members of the occupied populace. Arakawa reveals the derivative category “yellow” to be especially problematic, and (although he would not have recognized the word) his poem can be read as an attempt to deconstruct the ideology of race. “The Colored Race” is structured as a series of five poems with the following titles: “Our Skin”; “The Yellow Race, Part I”; “Black and Yellow (A Poem for the Black Troops)”; “The Yellow Race, Part II”; and “Black Soldiers in a Foreign Land, or A Lament for Black People (A Poem for the Black Troops, Part 2).”61 Below are the first poem (which I have translated in its entirety), and selections from the second and third poems. Our Skin

Our skin is not white. Not white, with baby flab and fluff. Scorched by the sun, Battered by typhoons, Exposed to the salty ocean winds of tropical lands, Our skin, full of luster, is the color of wheat.62 Yet the white race, with their baby flab and fluff, The white race brought to this island of ours Honest John.63 They stride about the island As if they were our masters, The white race. They call us “Yellow.” They call us “Yellow.” The Yellow Race (Part I) We are the Yellow Race— The Yellow Fellow. In your eyes

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We are weak, sickly “Yellow bastards.” In your eyes, To you Who are as white as Louis XVI, As white as Hitler and Mussolini, We are weak. ... As for “Yellow,” If you want to call us “Yellow”— Go right ahead! We don’t mind being the Yellow Race. We are the unadulterated Yellow Race. Go right ahead! Call us your “Yellow Fellow.” Black and Yellow, Part 1 (A Poem for the Black Troops) Your skin, like ours, is not white. A rugged dark brown, it is The color of iron. Covering ineradicable welts from the whip, Your brown skin is Strong, like stone. ... You who are Black and we who are Yellow, Together, we are the Colored Race.64 Arakawa’s poem effectively represents skin color as an ambiguous and arbitrary criterion of racial identity. It begins with the Okinawan narrator showing how, in Althusser’s words, he is “interpellated” as yellow by the white occupiers. The series of poems moves from the initial encounter, where the subject is identified as yellow (“They call us ‘Yellow’”), to the affirmation of this characterization (“If you want to call us yellow/Go right ahead!”), to its deployment as the ground for resistance (“You who are Black/and we who are Yellow/Together, we are the Colored Race”). This final appeal for solidarity with other “people of color” draws on the speaker’s racial identity as it is defined by whites. Throughout this progression—and this is what complicates the poem at a philosophical if not formalistic level—“The Colored Race” consistently points to skin color as an unreliable marker of race while, at the same time, using it to forge new alliances.

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The poem plays on this contradiction, first by mocking “yellow” as a meaningful racial category while calling for solidarity between so-called “black” and “yellow” people. It reveals the arbitrary nature of color appellations by describing “yellow” and “black” skin in terms of other hues, such as wheat and iron, evoking natural images of sustenance and power. This strategy contributes to the poem’s central rhetorical aim: to undercut the grounds of white domination over “the colored races.” To effect this unity and to transform the “colored races” into a united “colored race,” the poem calls for solidarity between Okinawans and African-Americans. While the first two poems make no mention of blacks, they do suggest that the racial identity of non-whites is a product of white discursive authority: “They call us ‘Yellow’” (hence, we are yellow). After exposing this racial appellation as arbitrary in these two poems, the third poem attempts to redefine yellow in affirmative terms and links it to blackness, which it also renders as a positive attribute (and this is long before the phrase “Black is Beautiful” attained currency in the United States). The final poem calls on black soldiers to recall their history of slavery, to awaken to their plight, and to “burn to the ground all that tries to oppress you!”65 “The Colored Race” is hardly a subtle work of poetry, but for all its bludgeoning directness, the poem does hint at a political—more specifically, a strategic—sophistication often lacking in mainland Japanese discussions of race, including those from the 1960s and 1970s when politically “progressive” accounts of blacks claimed a large readership. “The Colored Race” suggests that oppressed peoples perpetuate their own subjugation by internalizing the subjugator’s discourse, and the poem attempts to usurp authority from the white occupiers by redefining the language of race. This struggle is conducted not only on semantic grounds but, also, as is so often seen in occupation literature, by orthographic means. Throughout the poem, for example, “yellow” is written in kanji, katakana, English, and various orthographic combinations; it also appears in bold as well as normal typeface. These orthographic strategies reinforce the poem’s semantic “content” by highlighting the arbitrary and changeable nature of racial taxonomies. But what most lends this poem its complexity is its willingness to embrace apparent contradictions and to build on conceptual categories, such as skin color, that it has already revealed to be unstable. Through irony and sarcasm, the poem glorifies “yellow” and “black” while showing them to be neither yellow nor black. It excoriates whites, describing their tender skin as childlike and vulnerable, while asserting the essential meaninglessness of skin color. Other ambiguities and aporia in “The Colored Race” pose questions that it fails to address. Most notably, the poem is ambiguous about Okinawa’s relationship to Japan. When the opening lines describe “our skin” as the rugged product of a distinctly tropical landscape, it seems to assert a difference not only from the racial appellation “yellow,” but also from the Japanese to the north. Are we to interpret the call for unity between black and yellow as including the Japanese? If so, what does this imply about Okinawa’s wartime relationship to

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Japan? The Japanese, after all, were allies of Hitler and Mussolini, who are singled out in the poem to mock white presumptions of racial superiority. If Okinawans are seen as not having contributed to Japan’s war effort, does the poem then imply that the relationship between Japanese and Okinawans mirrors that between white and black Americans—in other words, as peoples subjugated within their own society and conscripted to fight for the forces that oppress them? Finally, “The Colored Race” describes the skin of both Okinawans and African-Americans in shades of brown. Does this imply that Okinawans can claim a greater affinity with blacks than can Japanese? Are there, in other words, different shades of yellow? Perhaps it is unfair to ask so much from a poem. Yet leaving these questions aside, there remain the disturbing references to “racial purity” in the fourth poem, “The Yellow Race (II),” translated below in its entirety. The Yellow Race (Part II)

Within the Yellow Race Are various types of people. There are those Who guard the purity of our blood, Who believe in the purity of our blood, Who stand by one another, unfailing, and march forth in unison. And there are those who Betray our blood, Who sell our blood, Who hide their ugly simian face behind a clever mask. Opportunists, shameless sycophants. We will be watching, to tear away their masks and lay them beneath the bright sunlight. We will be watching, to expose the traps set by those Who pollute our blood. Our eyes wide open, always, We will be watching. We, the Yellow Race, Take pride in being the Yellow Race. Our eyes wide open, We will march, Watching for those apes within the Yellow Race, Watching, ready to slit open the fat bellies

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of those white wolves who threaten our blood. Our eyes wide open, We will march. We have already seen how the first three poems reveal the instability of the concept of race, and the opening lines of “The Yellow Race (Part II)” appear to continue this strategy by revealing diversity within the rubric, “Yellow Race.” Yet as this fourth poem unfolds, the reader can hardly help but feel confused and even betrayed by the insistent references to blood and purity, references that lack any hint of irony. In the second and third stanzas the poem begins to backpedal ideologically: “various types of people within the Yellow Race” simply refers to racial loyalists and traitors, those who protect their blood versus those who betray it. Several passages within the five-part poem express a concern with purity, but only “The Yellow Race (Part II)” suggests a conception of race that is constituted and compromised through blood. “The Yellow Race (Part II)” succumbs to those baleful assumptions about race that the earlier poems so effectively discredited. The condemnation of “those who sell our blood,” “those who betray our blood,” and “those who violate our blood” seems to warn against contact between American soldiers and Okinawan women. But the poem’s objections to miscegenation are concerned less with questions of economic and sexual exploitation than with the threat it poses to racial purity. Theories of race that subscribe to the myth of purity are, of course, fragile because purity is so easily imperiled. In spite of these criticisms, it is worth emphasizing that in its commitment to political resistance, this poem differs from all other works of Japanese and Okinawan literature discussed in this book. In contrast to those stories treating life under the occupation that were written after the fact, Arakawa’s poem was written during the occupation just as a burgeoning protest movement offered hope. On the island of Okinawa in 1956, active opposition seemed for many people a meaningful and viable response to the occupation, and this accounts for the poem’s optimism (not to be lost amidst the angry rhetoric). Unlike “The American School” Arakawa’s poem employs parody without using it to foreclose on the potential efficacy of resistance; unlike An Okinawan Boy and “The Town That Went Pale,” it refuses to consider retreat or flight as the only responses to foreign occupation; and unlike The Cocktail Party, “The Colored Race” seems uninterested in legalistic solutions that channel opposition through the occupier’s system of government.66 “The Colored Race” consistently calls for an active and direct resistance, but its vision of a coalition among the racially oppressed is compromised by its advocacy of racial purity. For all its shortcomings, Arakawa’s 1956 poem is sophisticated in its own right, particularly when one considers the date and context of its publication. The editors of Ryūdai bungaku were aware that they faced prospects of censorship

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and retribution by the American authorities. That the American censors chose to respond harshly to magazine issues containing “The Colored Race” is hardly surprising. More puzzling is the poem’s subsequent exclusion from major collections of Okinawan literature and from books on postwar Okinawan literary history written by local scholars. After all, “The Colored Race” marks an important turning point in postwar Okinawan intellectual history: it is among the first public attempts to discuss the occupation in terms of racism, and it explicitly links racial discrimination within American society to that directed at Okinawa’s occupied populace; it calls for a coalition based on skin color that overrides national affiliations; it points to ways in which the subjugated populace perpetuates its condition by internalizing and circulating the subjugator’s discourse; Arakawa’s poem was among the first literary works in Okinawa to elicit a strong response from the occupation’s censorship authorities (thereby validating its status as a piece of literary resistance); finally, it remains among the earliest writings of Arakawa, who has played a key role in subsequent intellectual and political developments in Okinawa. He has also exerted a tangible influence on mainland Japanese social criticism during the years leading up to Okinawa’s reversion.67 “The Colored Race” also provides valuable material for exploring theoretical implications of race in Japan. While it is essentially an angry poem and not a theoretical treatise, it nevertheless exposes race to be an ideological rather than a biological category, and it is especially effective in showing how Asians are interpellated as “yellow” by white societies. While pointing to the difficulties posed by color-centered models of race, this poem hints at the specific complexities of Okinawan racial identity during the American occupation. Lastly, in its unabashed challenge to white America’s racial arrogance, Arakawa’s poem reveals the concept of race to be fraught with ambiguity—and suggests that this very ambiguity offers the grounds for resisting foreign oppression. If the three works discussed in this chapter appear confusing and confused, it is because they seem to offer a politically progressive empathy for their subjects, but one that is informed by a hermeneutically reactionary position. They express a salutary concern for those social injustices engendered by racial hierarchies while embracing the validity of these same hierarchies. With the benefit of hindsight it is always easy to dismiss works such as “Painting on Black Canvas” as being patently racist, but this ignores the intellectual and political conditions in which they were produced. It also overlooks each work’s narrative ambivalence and the ideological conflict this implies. For it is only through an appreciation of this ambivalence—as manifested in textual contradictions and aporia, in conflicting voices and sudden silences—that we can discern each writer’s struggle to confront the complex issue of race at a time when few contemporaries were prepared to do so. Despite their reliance on offensive racial stereotypes, in at least one way these 1950s narratives of black GIs are more sensitive to their subjects than are many of the works produced three decades later during the “black boom.” Admittedly,

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the black GIs in these three postwar works are nameless stereotypes, devoid of individual personalities. And “Painting on Black Canvas” is especially egregious in depicting the soldiers as savages who are at the mercy of their primitive instincts, as a lowly but powerful species that has failed to evolve over time. (Thus Matsumoto invokes the ostensibly historical idea of social evolution to sustain a distinctly ahistorical depiction of black men.) But at the same time, and in contrast to Japan’s recent discourse on blackness, these 1950s narratives strive to locate their black characters in a specific society with a particular history, thereby revealing that they are shaped not only by “blood” but by actual relations of power that extend beyond the individual. And it need hardly be added that these relations of power are products of the modern “civilized” world —the very same world that developed the idea of “race” itself.

4 Female floodwalls

The greater the role of private ownership, the more the emphasis laid on the chastity of wives and on the organization of prostitution at the same time. (Khalid Kishtainy 1982:16) A given culture is only as strong as its power to convince its least dedicated member that its fictions are truths. (Hayden White 1978:153) The prostitute, together with the war orphan and black market merchant, was an icon of early postwar life. Tamura Taijirō’s “literature of the flesh” (nikutai no bungaku) and the films of Naruse Mikio and Mizoguchi Kenji helped memorialize her, as did popular songs such as “Following the Stars” (“Hoshi no nagare,” 1946).1 Even today one can hear older patrons at Japanese bars crooning this occupation-era tune and pulling out all stops for the poignant refrain, “Who made me into this kind of woman?” The public seemed especially intrigued by the brash, iconoclastic streetwalkers known as panpan, many of whom catered to the occupation soldiers. These women embraced not only the occupiers themselves but American mannerisms and fashion. Decked out in brightly colored dresses, strutting around in high heels and puffing on Lucky Strikes, the panpan elicited ambivalent responses: admiration and disdain, pity and envy, fear and desire. Prurience no doubt contributed to the public’s fascination as well. Yet the panpan was above all a survivor of the postwar chaos, and in this regard nearly every Japanese who lived through the war could identify with her. After the occupation ended, Japanese journalists and activists began writing works of non-fiction aimed at increasing public awareness of prostitution as a social problem. These publications ranged from academic studies and investigative journalism to dubious first-hand confessions by former panpan. While few of these books and articles are remembered today, they commanded a large readership at the time and exerted a tangible influence on Japanese social discourse throughout the 1950s. The present chapter examines several such works

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Panpan waiting for customers under the train tracks at Yūrakuchō, Tokyo. Circa 1945. (Courtesy of Mainichi shinbunsha.)

and discerns a common but often overlooked subtext: namely, the desire to contain —through both policy and narrative itself—the threat these women posed to Japan’s social body. On the one hand, the panpan is depicted as a vulnerable and

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tragic figure worthy of public sympathy. Yet she also represents free-flowing female desire and uncontrolled sexuality, which threaten middle-class, patriarchal values such as propriety, domesticity, and chastity. Overshadowing this subtext of dangerous female sexuality is the hyberbolic rhetoric concerning the foreign occupiers, whose torrent of sexual desire was expected to be released upon the nation’s women as soon as the soldiers arrived on Japanese shores. To stave off this impending deluge, Japanese police and government officials organized a prostitution system known as the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA). The RAA was to serve as a “female floodwall” (onna no bōhatei), channeling this foreign male desire into designated (lower-class) female bodies, thereby protecting the pure women of Japan’s middle- and upper-classes. Of course, the RAA and its rhetoric were the products of men, not women. And as we have already seen in men’s fictional accounts of rape, Japan’s rhetoric of sexual violation often teaches us less about female victimhood than it does about men’s fears and desires. The Recreation and Amusement Association Organized prostitution in postwar Japan began with the Recreation and Amusement Association—a euphemism for the better-known but equally euphemistic term, “postwar comfort woman system.” The RAA was established within days after Japan’s surrender. Japanese government and police officials began planning for it at least as early as August 18, when the Chief of the Home Ministry’s Security Bureau issued a secret message by wireless radio to lawenforcement authorities throughout the country.2 The message stressed the urgent need to establish a system capable of “handling” (shori suru) the sexual demands of the thousands of occupation soldiers soon expected to arrive on Japanese soil. That same day, the Superintendent-General of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department assembled leaders from prostitution-related enterprises to work out details. Women who “volunteered” their services to the RAA were solemnly assembled before the moat of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and thanked for their spirit of self-sacrifice. Thus the RAA was, from the outset, steeped in an ideology of nationalism and pursued through the systematic exploitation of women left destitute after the war. The first RAA brothel, Komachi Garden (Komachi-en, in Ōmori), opened for business on August 28, the day that American occupation troops reached Japanese shores.3 Eager soldiers rushed to the brothel, where they formed lines that extended outside the building and halfway down the block. Within a few months the number of RAA districts had burgeoned to over two dozen, most of which were concentrated in the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area. The typical district contained brothels and dance halls, although some included RAAoperated restaurants, beer gardens, and even pool halls.4 Alarmed by the rapid rise in venereal disease among occupation personnel, SCAP declared all RAA establishments off-limits as of 27 March 1946.

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Despite its brief existence, the RAA has been the subject of many books since the occupation ended, and although one recent study claims that few Japanese today have heard of the organization, it is not for lack of information: by the early 1950s, critics and journalists had written about the RAA, and new studies continued to appear in the following decades.5 Recent publications have relied heavily on this earlier research but have expanded the geographical area under discussion and drawn on fresh revelations about Japan’s wartime “comfort woman system” to situate the RAA within a broader historical context. Some studies have suggested that the wartime and postwar “comfort women systems” should be considered together with Japan’s exploitation of karayuki-san earlier in this century. Often tricked by brokers or sold into indentured sexual servitude by their own impoverished families, these young Japanese women were sent to work in brothels throughout Asia, where Japan sought raw materials for its growing industrial empire. Other studies of the RAA claim that the organization should be viewed within an older national tradition of offering women to foreign emissaries, a practice which began over one thousand years ago when prominent men from China and Korea visited Japan, and which continued over the centuries as men from Europe and North America began arriving on Japanese shores.6 A famous example is “O-Kichi,” the Japanese woman who is rumored to have been “offered” to American Consul Townsend Harris during his stay in Japan in nearly a century before the RAA came into being. In fact, RAA organizers wishing to dramatize the postwar comfort women’s spirit of heroic sacrifice referred to them as “O-Kichi of the Shōwa Era.” Although studies of the RAA differ in how they situate the organization within Japanese history, recent scholarship tends to emphasize continuity between wartime and postwar prostitution. And nearly all accounts of the RAA—whether published during the 1950s or 1990s, whether couched as personal testimony or as journalistic investigations—concur that two aspects of “the RAA story” are especially noteworthy: 1) the close involvement of Japanese government and police officials in establishing this prostitution system for the American occupiers, and 2) the sacrifices made by countless, anonymous women who worked in the RAA’s brothels. These sacrifices are rendered especially melodramatic in books such as Female Floodwall (discussed at the end of this chapter), which capitalize on the image of unsuspecting women who fall victim to the RAA’s unscrupulous recruiting practices. The involvement of government officials and police has been amply documented in studies by Kobayashi and Murase and by Masayo Duus. While it is difficult to ascertain precise data, it seems that most women hired by the RAA had prior experience working as prostitutes, geisha, bar hostesses or in another capacity within Japan’s vast service industry known as “the water trade.”7 This sector of the economy tended to employ women from the lower classes, and the Metropolitan Police targeted these women in its August 18 directive calling for the establishment of a “comfort woman system”: “Among the women required for this undertaking, priority should be given to geisha, licensed

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and unlicensed prostitutes, bargirls and waitresses, and any women who have repeatedly engaged in sexual acts for financial gain.”8 This list of preferred candidates for RAA service accords with the Japanese government’s declared goal of building a “female floodwall” in order to “preserve the pure blood of onehundred million.” Stated more bluntly, their policy aimed to sacrifice the “unchaste” female population (most of whom were assumed to be from the lower classes) in order to protect the “girls of good homes” from the hordes of rapacious foreign soldiers expected to occupy the nation.9 This policy and its rhetoric clearly aimed to protect Japan’s middle-class women from the American occupiers. Yet I wish to suggest that Japan’s (male) public officials were also intent on stemming the potentially contaminating flows of female sexual desire, a desire they associated with women from the lower classes.10 The notion of purity must therefore be understood in relation to class as well as to sexuality and desire. Yamada Meiko observes in her book on the RAA that once Japan had lost its colonies in Korea and Taiwan, the government decided to recruit military sexworkers from among the nation’s own lower classes. Lower-class Japanese women were thus consigned to a status akin to that of Okinawans and Japan’s prewar colonial subjects. Yamada further asserts that the Japanese government’s real motive behind establishing the RAA was not so much protecting middleclass chastity as it was to curry favor with the foreign occupiers, thereby encouraging SCAP to preserve Japan’s body politic (kokutai) and the emperor system.11 Whatever the government’s motives, the RAA did, in fact, concentrate on recruiting women from the water trade. Once the brothels opened, however, it became apparent that the demand far outweighed the supply of women deemed “suitable” for the job, and RAA organizers decided to modify their approach in hope of attracting a larger applicant pool. They relied on unscrupulous recruiting strategies, including posters with advertisements such as that translated below, which appeared throughout Tokyo and Yokohama during the weeks after the war: TO THE NEW WOMEN OF JAPAN We seek pioneers from the new women of Japan to help establish and participate in a major undertaking related to the well-being of the occupation troops. Our organization has been established to resolve matters of national urgency presented by the postwar situation. Wanted: Female office workers. Ages 18–25. Room, board, clothing and other amenities provided.12 Advertisements such as this succeeded in luring many naive and desperate young women through the RAA’s doors and into its beds. Of course, today we know that the organization had little need for office workers, but this was far from obvious to all applicants at the time.

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In establishing the RAA, Japanese officials were operating under the same assumptions that led them to create the wartime military brothel system— namely, that occupation soldiers (regardless of nationality) are destined to commit rape unless provided with prostitutes for their “bodily needs.” SCAP tacitly supported the RAA’s system of regulated prostitution, believing that it would control the spread of venereal disease among American soldiers. Yet it was precisely the spread of VD among the occupation troops that led to the RAA’s demise in early 1946.13 Prostitution after the RAA The demise of the RAA by no means marked the end of widespread prostitution in Japan. The war had left tens of thousands of Japanese impoverished, homeless, and on the brink of starvation. American soldiers, on the other hand, received an ample stipend that rendered commercial sex (be it with a prostitute or mistress) easily affordable. In early 1946, around the time that SCAP banned the RAA, MacArthur issued a memorandum that led to the abolishment of Japan’s system of registered prostitution, stating that the system was contrary to the spirit of democratization.14 Registered prostitution dated back hundreds of years in Japan (in various forms) and encouraged poor families to sell their daughters to unscrupulous brokers, who in turn sold them to licensed brothels. In place of the RAA and licensed brothels emerged the newest form of legal prostitution, known as “special eating and drinking shops” (tokushu inshokuten). These establishments offered food or drink downstairs and sex upstairs, and were legal as long as they remained within the designated districts, which were marked on police maps with a red line and were thus referred to as “red line districts” (akasen chitai).15 Conversion to a “special eating and drinking shop” allowed many existing brothels to legally continue their activities, often in the same location. In contrast to the legal prostitution in red line districts were the less tightly organized forms of illegal prostitution emerging in “blue line districts” (aosen chitai). The close regulation of prostitution discouraged most would-be streetwalkers during the prewar era, but during the desperate years following the war, prostitution became decentralized, and once SCAP banned the licensed brothels and the RAA, legions of anonymous panpan—not a few of whom were RAA veterans —began appearing on streetcorners in the blue line districts as well as in base towns throughout the country.16 Police in Tokyo regularly engaged in what came to be known as “panpan-gari” (panpan hunting), rounding up suspected streetwalkers and taking them to Yoshiwara Hospital, where they were detained and subjected to VD tests. The famous Yoshiwara pleasure quarters dating back to the Edo era thus continued to be associated with prostitution during the early postwar years, not only through its designation as a red line district but, ironically, as the namesake of an infamous hospital where this new breed of freelance prostitute was

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incarcerated for medical inspection and enforced treatment. Thus during the American occupation, Japan’s unregulated panpan were herded into a symbolic space that for centuries had been associated with regulated prostitution. The Japanese government’s patriarchal interest in retaining control over female sexuality was perhaps especially keen at the time because it had lost control over so many other aspects of social and economic life. The phenomenon of panpangari also reveals the central role of physicians in enforcing state discipline of unruly streetwalkers, ostensibly to preserve public hygiene. The prominent role of the medical establishment in regulating prostitution is by no means limited to postwar Japan. This is a common theme in the modern history of prostitution elsewhere in the world, and in occupied Japan (as in other countries) it was primarily lower-class women and not their male customers who were detained and inspected.17 Regulation serves to normalize government control over women’s bodies through forced medical inspections and other means. It thereby reinforces women’s economic and social subordination to men. Paradoxically, the best testament to the power of regulation is that it extends even more forcefully to those, such as the panpan, who operate outside the system. The panpan were thus particularly vulnerable to both official and unofficial persecution, and at any time they might be arrested by police, forceably examined by (male) physicians, beaten by pimps, or even murdered by customers. They were also routinely raped, although the rape of a prostitute was rarely taken seriously. Despite their vulnerability, the panpan were perceived as threatening. Their association with free-flowing sexual desire and especially their control over male desire encroached on Japanese men’s social hegemony. So did their apparent rejection of traditional female domesticity (monogamy and childbearing). Sympathetic narratives about the panpan frequently emphasize their inability to get married and to bear children. By emphasizing these women’s exclusion from blissful domesticity, such narratives strive to contain the prostitute’s subversive potential, which derives in part from this rejection of domestic life. Even more potentially subversive was the panpan’s intimate contact with the male occupiers, which not only challenged the sexual authority of Japanese men but enabled the panpan (like the black market merchants) to simultaneously operate outside the economic system while participating in an illicit enterprise that was recognized as central to it. She circulated goods through the underground economy while she herself, as a sexual commodity, circulated among men. These men included Japanese as well as the foreign occupiers—a point that is crucial for understanding the fear of miscegenation and the attendant rhetoric of purity seen in so many accounts of the panpan from this time. “Mixed-blood children” (konketsuji) borne by GI prostitutes were seen as a particularly alarming social problem during the early 1950s, no doubt in part because they were living embodiments of sexual liaisons that threatened the purity of Japan’s body politic. As a frequent carrier of venereal disease, the panpan also threatened men’s health and sexuality, hence the emphasis on hygiene in contemporary public

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policy on prostitution. Finally, these women posed a moral threat as well. Many had formerly worked for the RAA, and some had also served as wartime “comfort women.” In theory, this gave them moral authority (as patriots who had offered their bodies for their nation) to challenge the government’s hypocritical stance toward prostitution. But the panpan were rarely allowed to represent themselves in public forums and were left to rely on women’s groups and Christian organizations to advocate on their behalf, and these groups called for the immediate abolition of prostitution altogether, which alone did not serve the needs of many prostitutes who had few other sources of viable employment. Public opposition to organized prostitution dates back to the nineteenth century in Japan, and it resumed early in the postwar era. In January 1946, Christian groups and women’s associations formed a coalition, requesting that the Japanese Home Ministry abolish prostitution. They could not have known that the Home Ministry had recently helped establish the RAA and thereby lent its active support to a new form of state-organized prostitution. Not surprisingly, this anti-prostitution coalition’s request fell on deaf ears in the Home Ministry. In 1952, as the occupation was ending, more than thirty such groups and Christian organizations formed The Committee to Promote Anti-Prostitution Laws. Japan’s Socialist Party split over how to respond to the proposed legislation. Some party members felt that the coalition of Christians and women’s groups was excessively moralistic and elitist. This faction of the Socialist Party argued (correctly, in retrospect) that the proposed anti-prostitution law would only throw the women back into poverty while providing no alternative source of income.18 In 1956, however, despite staunch resistance from brothel owners and others who profited from legal prostitution, the Diet finally passed the Prostitution Prevention Law, which took effect in 1958.19 Prostitution and the Japanese publishing industry During the mid-1950s, while Japanese feminists and anti-prostitution activists continued lobbying for a total ban on prostitution, the publishing industry (and, presumably, many readers) found the figure of the panpan irresistible, which led to countless books and articles on the subject. These publications can be roughly divided into three categories: 1) documentary studies that convey a sense of objectivity through interviews, surveys, and statistics; 2) first-hand accounts by the prostitutes themselves; and 3) fictional recreations of the everyday life of GI prostitutes. Not surprisingly, all three types of writing—documentary, confessional, and fictional—tend to overlap in narrative approach, but as I show in my discussion of The Chastity of Japan and Female Floodwall below, first-hand accounts by GI prostitutes are not always the personal confessions they purport to be.

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An example of a serious sociological study is the 1953 report entitled “Streetwalkers and Children: An Analysis of the Current Situation in the Base City of Yokosuka” by Keio University’s Social Enterprise Research Group.20 Each of its eight chapters was written by a different investigator, including two female students at a time when elite universities such as Keio were overwhelmingly populated by men. Of the eight chapters, the first defines the subject, the second surveys the history of prostitution in prewar and postwar Japan, the third provides an analysis (heavy on statistics) of prostitution in contemporary Yokosuka, and other chapters explore the base town’s economic structure, discuss the impact of prostitution on neighborhood children, and introduce the town’s organizations and policies to redress the problem. This report is marked by its studious objectivity and copious statistics. Through its attention to historical detail and to differences between Yokosuka and other base towns, the Keio report reminds its readers that GI prostitution is far from monolithic. For example, it notes that prostitutes in Chitose, Hokkaido, formed a union whereas those in Yokosuka had no such organization to advocate on their behalf. As the authors demonstrate, this had far-reaching implications for both the women themselves and for the town’s efforts to control their activities, the most damaging of which were deemed by local authorities to be the adverse impact on neighborhood children. The base town of Chitose, (the setting of Hirabayashi Taiko’s story discussed in Chapter Five) is unusual in that the prostitutes managed to organize and represent themselves to municipal authorities. In most cases, however, the prostitutes did not, or could not, speak for themselves, and on those rare exceptions when they did, the written record of their activities was usually composed by others. The circumspect approach to prostitution offered by the Keio University report ultimately remained in the staid realm of academic discourse. In contrast, anti-prostitution advocates published books and articles that reached a wide readership. The most prolific such writer was Kanzaki Kiyoshi, a literary critic who shifted his attention after the war to contemporary social issues, particularly those related to U.S. military bases in Japan. Kanzaki’s writing on prostitution shares the Keio group’s commitment to on-site study and statistical analysis, but makes no pretense of being dispassionate. In addition to his own voluminous publications, Kanzaki chaired a subcommittee on prostitution that advised the Labor Department’s Bureau on Women and Children. He also moderated a published roundtable discussion among four female Diet representatives debating anti-prostitution legislation, and he participated in another discussion about “military bases and the threat to chastity” with male novelist Abe Tomoji, and Ishigaki Ayako, who was among Japan’s most visible female critics at the time. Beginning in 1952, Kanzaki and others published investigative reports on American base towns in the women’s monthly journal, Fujin kōron (Women’s Forum).21 Dissatisfaction over the Security Treaty was high at this time, and the magazine was running a series on issues such as prostitution and “the problem of mixed-blood children.” These issues were seen as endemic to American base

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towns throughout mainland Japan.22 Writers of the investigative reports included women as well as men, and ranged from anti-prostitution activists such as Kanzaki, to local civic leaders, to novelists such as Hino Ashihei and Nakamoto Takako.23 At this time, journalistic writing about prostitution focused on overt description, statistical analysis, and political advocacy. For example, Fujin kōron’s article on the base town of Chitose notes that most prostitutes working in this Hokkaido town hail from Kyushu, referring to the southern island’s purported tradition of raising women who leave home to “use their bodies as capital.”24 The same article points out (as does the Keio report) that Chitose’s prostitutes formed a labor union. Yet while referring to capital, the article skirts the role of capitalism, and while mentioning the labor union it avoids the question of whether and under what conditions prostitution can be construed as a form of labor. Today such questions are central to feminist debates about prostitution in Japan as well as in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in Asia. Questions about the nature of prostitution are not merely academic, as the Socialist Party recognized when its competing factions were forced to decide whether prostitutes should be protected under the new Labor Standards Law.25 Yet such questions rarely affected discussions of prostitution that swept through the Japanese media at the time. The Socialist Party was confronted with a question that has long engaged philosophers and continues to incite disagreement among feminists: “Is prostitution merely a form of labor and, if so, does it differ fundamentally from other types of work?” Marx claimed that the prostitute is not a worker so much as the worker (under capitalism) is a prostitute.26 And even if one rejects this contention, based on the premise that the act of prostitution is contingent on an agreement between the sexual consumer and provider, what does such a contractual arrangement presuppose about the relationship between the two parties? Does it not presume a degree of parity, each with the freedom to choose whether to engage in the transaction? Political theorist Carole Pateman has criticized the assumption that prostitution is based on a contractual arrangement, and she rejects the view (implicit in the term “sex worker”) that prostitution is “merely a job of work and the prostitute is a worker, like any other wage labourer.” She insists that this “contractarian” idea is contingent on an untenable claim that the prostitute sells sexual services and not her body or her sexual parts, and Pateman disputes the assertion that “the prostitute, like other ‘individuals’, stands in an external relation to her person.”27 Pateman has been criticized by prostitute’s rights advocates, who see her as being in a long line of feminists unwilling to envision the possibility that sex work might not entail exploitation or subordination. Shannon Bell, for example, offers the following critique: Pateman’s rereading of the social contract and writing of the sexual contract turn out to be premised on the time-honored value judgment which perpetuates the division of the female body into the two traditional female

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bodies, the wife and the prostitute, neither of which is in control of her body, though one has more potential for ownership, due to the love, commitment, and mutual responsibility, which Pateman assumes is inherently present in the marriage contract and absent in the prostitution contract.28 Notwithstanding Bell’s critique, Pateman does offer a persuasive argument that prostitution—at least as currently practiced in most societies, and certainly as practiced in 1950s Japan—cannot be reduced to a simple contractual agreement between sexual provider and consumer. In recent years, sweeping philosophical claims about prostitution have come under fire from feminists as being excessively universalistic, ahistorical, and, in the final analysis, patriarchal. Critics instead argue that any definition of prostitution as well as one’s ideological position must take cognizance of the specific cultural, historical, and economic circumstances in which prostitution is practiced.29 For example, several participants in the 1980s Euro-American debates over prostitution waged in the journal Ethics have insisted that theoretical inquiry be circumspect and ask, “Which form of prostitution is under discussion, and what is its historical and cultural context?” This question seems equally pertinent when comparing GI prostitution in Japan today with that of the occupation era. Today there are few outright brothels catering solely to American servicemen in mainland Japan or Okinawa. In their place are bars and clubs, some of which allow GIs to arrange for sex, usually to be conducted elsewhere after closing hours. These establishments are concentrated in base towns throughout the country, such as Kin in Okinawa, which is located across from Camp Hansen, a large Marine base. In contrast to the boom years of the Vietnam War, these days Kin’s dwindling number of clubs struggle to stay in business. Besides the lack of customers, the most notable change is that since the 1980s “dancers” from the Philippines have replaced local women in the sexual labor pool servicing the American military. Yet “sexual labor” will seem a misnomer to anyone familiar with the prison-like living quarters and oppressive curfews to which these women are routinely subjected.30 In 1993 I interviewed the most notorious club owner in Kin. The man, a native of Miyako Island, agreed to speak with me only because I was accompanied by a newspaper reporter from his home island whom he had met before. After climbing the stairs from the first-floor club to his family home on the third floor, I caught a glimpse of the dancers’ living quarters. The rooms were located near the roof, which was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence topped with rows of barbed-wire, similar to that surrounding American military bases on the island. When I asked him why the fence was placed atop the roof of the three-story building, he replied that it was “to keep the GIs from climbing into the girls’ quarters.” Perhaps he hoped I wouldn’t notice that the rows of barbed-wire were angled inward. The newspaper reporter accompanying me later explained that

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the fence had gained notoriety when one of the women died in a fire on the premises because she was unable to escape. No one was prosecuted in the case. Surely, this fence is among the most convoluted legacies of the occupation era: a barbed-wire fence—the most salient symbol of America’s continuing control over Okinawa’s social and physical landscape—placed atop a three-story concrete building by an Okinawan man in order to enclose foreign women brought to serve the former occupiers two decades after the region’s reversion to Japan. Kin also happens to be the town where the September 1995 rape incident occurred. The changing face of the sex industry in Okinawan base towns underscores the point that prostitution is by no means monolithic, and a stroll through Tokyo’s Kabuki-chō district alone reveals the astounding range of commercial sexual services in Japan today. In short, it seems misguided to conflate the “sex work” of impoverished women from the Philippines with that of, say, middle-class Japanese office workers or university students who occasionally sell their bodies, if only to clothe them in European designer fashions. In the world of transnational capital, where goods and bodies move freely (but always with a price) across national borders, what may constitute “labor” for one group of women might best be described as “indentured sexual servitude” for another group that ostensibly performs the same activities in the same neighborhood at the same time. Thus, rather than adhering to a fixed view of prostitution, it seems wise to inquire into the specific conditions in which it is practiced. And while it entails fresh heuristic problems, to make such distinctions we also need to understand, to the extent possible, the “seller’s” motivations, which demands that we listen to the voices of prostitutes themselves. Although philosophical questions about the nature of prostitution rarely found their way into Japanese writing about the panpan during the 1950s, magazine editors and investigators did, to their credit, recognize the value of offering an “insider’s” perspective and routinely included voices of prostitutes. Of course, even when prostitutes did speak for themselves, their voices were invariably mediated by the male cultural elite who controlled the publishing industry.31 As a result, these forums often appear somewhat contrived. How else can one describe a 1953 roundtable discussion, published in the respected monthly journal, Kaizō, in which three university professors, a journalist, and two novelists pose questions to five prostitutes?32 This crew of intellectual interviewers appears especially odd, given that the featured novelists are the leftist woman writer, Sata Ineko, and the young novelist, Mishima Yukio—strange bedfellows even then. The interviewers assume a relentlessly respectful tone that only adds to the artificiality of the setting. Mishima, who later in his career demonstrated a sharp eye for the absurd and a willingness to embody it, was actually among the more reticent interviewers, but the others freely fired questions at their captive subjects: How does the postwar panpan’s job differ from that of prewar prostitutes who worked in registered brothels? Unlike the prewar licensed prostitutes who were generally sold to a brothel by their impoverished families, a

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panpan is ostensibly free to choose her occupation; why did you end up where you are today? What type of informal organizations and rules have you established, and how do you treat group members who decide to wash their hands of the business and “go straight”? This latter two-part question alludes to the popular image of a tightly knit group of postwar streetwalkers who mercilessly torment any member that tries to quit prostitution. This image was widespread at the time and can be directly traced back to the climactic scene of Tamura Taijiro’s 1947 best-selling story, “Gates of Flesh.” It is also a perfect example of how fiction can shape social knowledge and acquire the status of truth. The Kaizō article, entitled “The World of the Panpan: A Roundtable Discussion and Survey of the Situation,” while ostensibly inquiring about the circumstances of the women’s lives, seems determined to find a single explanation for their collective “fall” into disrepute. The popularity of books such as The Chastity of Japan (discussed below) suggests that readers, too, favored a unitary and, whenever possible, tragic explanation for the women’s fall. That prostitution entails a fall from respectability goes unquestioned in nearly all accounts from the 1950s, although as I show in the following chapter, a few works of women’s fiction challenge this assumption while confronting thorny questions about the relationship between prostitution, marriage, and money. By 1952, journalism and popular narratives were collectively answering the question, “Who made me into this kind of woman?” posed in the refrain of “Following the Stars.” (It is worth noting that both the music and lyrics were written by men.33) When this panpan’s song first appeared in 1946, any number of abstract causes—war, poverty, fate—might have seemed plausible explanations, but after 1952 Japanese publications concurred that it was the American soldiers who were responsible for the fall into disrepute of the nation’s panpan. Especially popular were accounts relating the rape of an innocent virgin by a brutish American soldier. Rape was represented as both a personal and shared national trauma brought from outside Japan. These accounts thereby reassure readers that the women’s tragedies are unrelated to domestic social or economic conditions. The narratives, in other words, introduce and then swiftly “contain” the tragic fate of their subjects. Noticeably missing from most documentary treatments of the occupation is an effort to interrogate the commonalities underlying separate realms of prostitution, be it prostitution conducted in red line versus blue line districts or commercial sex directed at Japanese as well as at American men. When given the opportunity to speak, the prostitutes themselves raise these issues, but the interviewers and editors typically fail to pursue them. At several points in the above Kaizō roundtable discussion, for example, the prostitutes refer to the self-segregation of streetwalkers who cater to Japanese and foreign customers, but none of the interviewers appears to find the topic worth pursuing. Nor do they seem interested in the role of Japanese pimps, brothel-owners, or the

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unsavory figures—often women—who first “recruited” the prostitutes into the trade. Uncomfortable issues lurk just below the surface in these documentary studies, issues that expose social taboos related to class, gender, and national identity. These issues emerge more clearly in first-hand “confessions” such as The Chastity of Japan and Female Floodwall, although neither book is what it purports to be. The Chastity of Japan The Chastity of Japan had all the makings of a best seller from the moment it hit Japan’s bookstores in 1953: it contained sex, confessions, fallen women and foreign men, even a dose of political intrigue. Above all, the book claimed that everything described within its pages was true. With its catchy title and striking cover illustration, this collection of four personal testimonies by pseudonymous panpan went through at least seventeen editions and spawned a sequel volume during its first year in print.34 The sequel edition is simply entitled The Chastity of Japan, A Sequel and is edited by Gotō Tsutomu, now best known as author of the popular book series, Nostradamus, The Great Prophet. Unlike the popular original volume, with its shocking revelations framed as tragic first-hand narratives by the prostitutes themselves, the sequel assumes a more circumspect approach to its subject, relying not only on interviews and testimonies but on data, which it presents in graphs, charts, and tables. Thus, while the two volumes share a title and employ identical cover illustrations, they differ in their treatment of prostitution for GIs. The sequel generally conforms to the “documentary approach” discussed above, so I will confine my discussion below to the original volume, which I view as a melodramatic national allegory. Besides drawing attention to the rape of Japanese women by occupation soldiers, The Chastity of Japan (Nikon no teisō) helped shape the nation’s discourse on prostitution throughout the decade by demonstrating the power of personal testimony. This book also revived the word “chastity” (teisō), which appears to have faded from the Japanese lexicon during the occupation years. In fact, the publisher’s advertisement contained on the back of the sequel volume asserts that these two books created a new expression, “Nikon no teisō” to be incorporated into the Japanese language. Bombastic though this claim might seem, the phrase “Chastity of Japan” did begin cropping up in contemporary publications. For example, the December 1953 edition of the popular magazine, Liberal (Riberaru), contains an article entitled “Court Decision on The Chastity of Japan” concerning the trial of an occupation soldier accused of rape. And the concluding line of the book, Harlot Hotel (Baishun hoteru, 1957), also refers to “the vanishing ‘Chastity of Japan.’”35 Books such as The Chastity of Fapan were marketed for their shock value. Indeed, several readers have described their shock after completing The Chastity of Japan, but surely none had a more visceral response than novelist Hagiwara Yōko, who claims to have been so overwhelmed by the book’s revelations that

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she vomited.36 I, too, must confess to having experienced nausea while reading The Chastity of Japan. My own symptoms, however, were brought on not by the book’s shocking stories but rather by its unpalatable prose and the nasty aftertaste left by its unrelenting, transparent attempts to manipulate the reader. Yet judging from the book’s commercial success, it appears that most who read Chastity responded with empathy rather than ennui. The success of a book such as The Chastity of Japan begins with effective marketing, since in this case both its editor, “Mizuno Hiroshi,” and the authors of the four confessional accounts were unknown. Chastity’s publishers were savvy marketers, and they attracted a readership in part through their skillful use of three elements often viewed as being external to narrative itself: the book’s title, cover illustration, and jacket sleeve. While literary scholars traditionally devote little attention to these “surface phenomena,” Japanese publishers and booksellers know that they can significantly influence a book’s commercial success. Scholars of publishing and journalistic history also acknowledge the importance of these three elements in shaping public reception of a book.37 Since I am interested in Chastity as part of a broader discourse about prostitution and the American occupation, I consider the book not only as a text but as a product, wrapped and primed for widespread consumption. Not every consumer who enters a bookstore is swayed by the elements found on a book’s surface; some book-buyers know precisely what they want and leave as soon as they find it. Yet many others engage in leisurely browsing, which is widely accepted in Japanese bookstores, and these customers tend to make their choice only after submitting the book to a cursory inspection. This is when the three surface elements come into play: the consumer’s eyes are first drawn to the title and quickly peruse the cover; but often, it is only after the eyes rest on a book’s jacket sleeve, or “obi,” that the browser becomes a buyer. The obi must be distinguished from the cover (“hyōshi”) when discussing books marketed in Japan. The obi is a strip of paper about one-third the height of the book cover, around which it is folded. It is a feature of nearly every Japanese volume sold and is the most explicit form of advertising appended to Japanese books. Disposable and often disposed of shortly after a book is purchased, some obi provide nothing but a list of chapter titles and a brief summary of the contents, particularly for those works marketed as “serious writing.”38 But the obi also offers a chance to grab the consumer’s attention, and publishers will cram the jacket sleeve with tantalizing snippets from the text and with bombastic blurbs, usually written by an in-house editor. The obi also provides one of the most tangible indicators of a publisher’s intended audience. Together, the three elements found on the “outside” of Japanese books—the title, cover design, and jacket sleeve—prepare readers for what to expect from the pages within, and skillful deployment of these elements not only boosts sales but helps influence how a book is read. The title “The Chastity of Japan” casts the nation as a woman whose purity is threatened by foreign male occupiers. Printed just beneath the title on the book’s

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cover is a subtitle that elucidates the gendered metaphor: “Journals of Women Raped by the Foreign Troops.”39 The title and subtitle combine, in what will by now seem a numbingly familiar trope, to represent postwar Japan as a woman raped by the foreign occupiers. The sketch on Chastity’s front cover depicts two naked women sitting dejectedly on the ground, one with her legs extended in front, the other with legs tucked under her. The women’s faces are covered by their long, disheveled hair, and each sits with hands on the ground to support her sagging torso. Their placement on the book’s cover, just beneath the subtitle, makes it clear that these sketches represent “women raped by the foreign troops,” women whose stories are contained within the book. No words are printed on the back cover, which contains only a drawing of a naked woman shown from the rear. Crouching on the ground, her arm is outstretched, warding off invisible assailants. These arresting images convey the sense of vulnerability and humiliation which, the title reminds us, confronted the entire nation of Japan under foreign occupation. By appropriating the specter of violence against innocent women, and representing their suffering as shared national experience, the title and cover illustration mask a distinctively “male” sense of humiliation at Japan’s defeat. The sensational description printed on the jacket sleeve of Chastity’s sequel volume provides an even more explicit example of the publisher’s attempt to frame these women’s stories as melodramatic allegories of national crisis and shared victimhood.40 Below is my translation of the advertisement on the sequel edition’s front jacket sleeve. The sequel, it must be remembered, is mainly a journalistic investigation, albeit one that is marketed as a shocking exposé of the Japanese government’s complicity in the RAA: TOTAL OCCUPATION OF CHASTITY BY FOREIGN TROOPS The Truth Behind the Japanese Government’s Sexual Unconditional Surrender A shocking account, brought to light for the first time! Unspeakably brutal gang rapes The Japanese government’s provision of countless women to the occupiers Stalking and abduction by groups of American soldiers The dual strategy of rape and seduction The life of GI prostitutes and changes affecting them, etc. etc. ¥220 The back of the sequel edition’s jacket sleeve advertises the original version of Chastity as follows: Mizuno Hiroshi, ed.

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The Chastity of Japan (original version) Journals of Women Raped by the Foreign Troops Now being made into a movie by Shin’ei Productions! Bestseller! Seventeen editions currently in print! Four women, victims of wartime lust, have written the naked truth in these tragic journals. Here is the book, avidly read even today, that unleashed a torrent of shock and anger throughout the nation. ¥25041 Judging from the jacket cover, the original version of Chastity had made quite a splash by the time the sequel appeared, and the publisher apparently decided that gendered metaphors of national humiliation make effective advertising copy. For the sequel edition they retained the original title while presenting variations on its successful trope, promising readers a book that would not only expose “the total occupation of [Japanese] chastity by the foreign troops” but reveal the Japanese government’s “sexual unconditional surrender,” thereby implicating the government itself in this crime against its people.42 This critique is brought out far more forcefully in Female Floodwall than in Chastity, but it is worth noting that both books link the two governments in their abuse of Japan’s populace. Chastity’s double-edged political critique is easily overshadowed by the jacket cover’s hyperbolic rhetoric promising salacious details and hinting at the book’s eroticization of rape. Rape is rarely eroticized in contemporary Japanese women’s writing, and even a cursory reading of Chastity’s four narratives reveals the intrusive presence of the male editor. First, each journal is given a title and divided into sections assigned catchy headings, none of which is likely to be the product of a young prostitute with limited literary skills. The observant reader will further notice sudden shifts in style, voice, and diction throughout the four narratives. Readers who begin to doubt the integrity of the journals as firsthand accounts will find their skepticism grow with each assurance, repeated throughout the four accounts, that “everything mentioned here is true.” The line from Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much” might come to mind when reading Chastity. Not far into my own reading, I soon began to suspect that “the lady” was in fact a man, and that the entire book must be a work of fiction. The GI crimes described are so egregious and numerous, and the string of tragedies befalling the four young narrators so incredible, that it is difficult to accept these accounts as unembellished journals. Furthermore, the narrative perspective throughout the four accounts, while ostensibly from the viewpoint of the female victims, seemed to accord more closely with men’s writing on the occupation than with that by women. Chastity’s centerpiece is the first narrative, “Facing Death, I Offer My Testament.” It is notable not so much for its length (three times longer than any of the others) but rather for its melodramatic tone and shocking, increasingly unbelievable, turn of events. Dying of cancer at age twenty-three, the narrator writes from her deathbed. Before revealing her story, she repeatedly and

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teasingly hints at “that fateful day” about which she “remembers every single detail, no matter how small—even now, four years after the fact” (10). From the outset, rape is established as me narrative’s dramatic and ontological focus: the emotional impact of the events and their full meaning can be grasped only in reference to this originary trauma. The opening pages of this narrative, together with the material on Chastity’s cover, sets the tone for all four testimonies and offers the most convincing evidence (in other words, the most artful deception) that the book is indeed a collection of first-hand accounts by real-life prostitutes. The narrator of “Facing Death…” assumes the name “Ono Toshiko” and begins her story by describing “six torn and worn-out notebooks placed by my pillow,” which are the source of her account. This opening reference to an external material source, to a mundane set of old notebooks existing beyond Chastity’s textual boundaries, implicitly attests to the narrative’s veracity. In the hands of a masterful writer of fiction such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, such an opening might serve as the first in a complex web of lies that the author exposes, ever playfully, as revelations of “deeper truths”; but Chastity offers its readers few such convoluted pleasures, demanding instead a direct and literal-minded loyalty that accepts the book’s stories at face value. Chastity’s subtlety lies not within the purported women’s narratives but rather in the clever ways that they are framed and marketed by the publisher. After referring to her notebooks, Toshiko returns to the true aim of her story, which is to identify the cause of her “fall.” In the process, she seeks the reader’s empathy for her indictment of the American occupiers: In other words, I want people to know that even among “women” like me are those who have suffered, those who have their own troubles. You are free to despise us if you wish, but as my final request I ask you to look back and recognize the original cause of our plight. Only then can you can understand why we became panpan. Please consider my plea this one time, for it plagues me with greater intensity than even my hatred toward the GIs. (9) The word “women” (onnatachi) is placed within quotation marks in the text, thereby distinguishing prostitutes such as Toshiko from the average Japanese woman, who has not undergone this fall from respectability. Indeed, this distinction suggests that Toshiko and other panpan no longer fully qualify as women; instead, they constitute a separate class altogether. As we have seen, class is a key element informing Japan’s rhetoric of “female floodwalls” and state-organized prostitution during the early postwar years. After Toshiko’s prelude in the passage above, she begins telling her life story in earnest. Since losing her parents in the Tokyo firebombings of March 1945, she has been living with her aunt’s family in Kyoto. On 10 August 1948, a

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Japanese policeman suddenly appears at the door with a summons, notifying Toshiko that she has been accused of illegally possessing property of the occupation forces. Although she remembers buying a pair of stockings for herself and a package of cigarettes for her aunt six months earlier on the black market, this was common practice at the time and Toshiko never considered her actions a crime. The policeman leads her out of the house, where she notices an American jeep and three GIs waiting in the shadows. The policeman hands Toshiko over to the soldiers, who put her into the jeep and drive her to a deserted area, where they take turns raping her. Afterward they offer her a cigarette and she refuses. Her lack of gratitude angers the soldiers, who then embark on a fresh round of abuse, burning her with cigarettes and taking sadistic pleasure in her pain. This scene, in which a Japanese policeman helps the American occupiers to abduct their victim, evokes in microcosm the critical role played by the Metropolitan Police in establishing the RAA just after Japan’s surrender. As we will see in the following chapter and in the Epilogue, Japanese women writers have used similar events to reveal how the nation’s men were complicit in the sexual exploitation of women both during and after the war. But The Chastity of Japan cannot afford to emphasize the complicity of Japanese men without undercutting the book’s central motif as embodied in its title. The gender-bound phrase “Chastity of Japan” demands a less complicated view of the relationship between occupiers and occupied, and the narrative strives to deflect any historical resonances between wartime (or prewar) Japan and the postwar occupation. Yet in spite of itself, Toshiko’s story continues to introduce events that call for a subtler understanding of her plight. The day after she is raped, for example, Toshiko finds her way home but feels uncomfortable living with her aunt, who has surmised what happened but utters not a word about it. Toshiko soon leaves, seeking refuge with a friend until deciding to set out for Tokyo. Unable to find work in the capital, she is standing on a corner when mistakenly picked up by the police during a routine round-up of streetwalkers. Despite her protests that she has been mistakenly apprehended, Toshiko is subjected to the mandatory V.D. exam and tests positive, a result of the rape. She is forced to remain in the hospital’s V.D. ward for nearly three weeks, where she overhears the bawdy “shop talk” of the prostitutes and gets to know a few of the women. She later refers to this stay in the hospital as akin to attending “a panpan training school” (32). Since she has no place to go after leaving the hospital, Toshiko accepts a job in a dance hall catering to the occupation forces. Although the job provides lodging, she is forced to pay for her clothes, bedding, and other amenities through a system which exacerbates her dependence on her employer. During an all-night party she is abducted from the dance floor by her American partner and forced to have sex with him. This experience seals her fate as a prostitute. Up until this point, the narrative’s events are plausible. American soldiers stationed abroad did (and still do) commit abduction, rape, and even murder,

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although such incidents were not widespread in mainland Japan during the occupation. Japanese police records and journalistic studies indicate that most violent crimes committed by GIs occurred in naval ports such as Yokosuka during the first few weeks after the Americans arrived in 1945, and that the number declined sharply thereafter.43 The above passage from Chastity also points to issues which are central to a serious consideration of prostitution in postwar Japan: for example, the collaboration between police and medical authorities in enforcing a regime of discipline against women working outside the domestic sphere, the economic exploitation of female labor through regulated prostitution, and the patriarchal valorization of chastity to an extent that rape victims are left few alternatives but prostitution or suicide. Toshiko’s account soon takes a fantastic turn, however, as she begins to introduce characters from her past, one after another, only to describe their premature and tragic deaths—all of which were caused by occupation soldiers. First, a pair of her panpan friends the, one from injuries incurred during a soldier’s “perverted sexual games,” another from injuries incurred when she was raped six months earlier (43). Then we are introduced to a ten-year-old Japanese boy, nicknamed “Monkey,” who plays the role of a clown for the American officers, singing popular songs, dancing, and willingly serving as the butt of their jokes. When one of the officers “trades” his girlfriend to another American for a real monkey, the boy kills the animal and, fleeing from the angry soldiers, is hit by a truck and killed (56–63). The implications of this passage are clear enough: the arrogant foreign occupiers treat the Japanese as animals and the women as chattel. It is probably no coincidence that American wartime propaganda frequently depicted the Japanese as monkeys.44 This episode in Chastity also alludes to an American officer who repeatedly rapes his secretary until she grows accustomed to it and, inevitably, becomes his lover (58). This is yet another example of how the narrative eroticizes rape in a manner far more typical of contemporary men’s pornography than of Japanese women’s writing. Toshiko, in the meantime, becomes the mistress of a man named Emerson but soon moves in with his friend, Rogers, instead. Rogers throws out his old girlfriend to make room for Toshiko, but when Toshiko opens the door to her new home, she finds the ex-girlfriend hanging by a rope in the entranceway. The woman, it seems, was so distraught at being abandoned by Rogers that she committed suicide, adding yet another death to the growing toll of those who fall victim to the heartless American occupiers.45 One night not long after Toshiko settles into this inauspicious new abode, she gets into bed with Rogers, who notices someone peering through the window. Rogers takes out his pistol, fires two shots, and kills the suspected peeping Tom. Upon discovering that the culprit was only a young boy from the neighborhood, Toshiko turns to Rogers and both burst out laughing. In case the reader feels perplexed by this behavior or begins to doubt the veracity of her account, Toshiko interjects: “At that time I had become so hardened that I could laugh at a boy’s death. It’s difficult now to

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look back and see myself like that, but what I’ve told you is the absolute truth” (81). Toshiko confesses to having fallen so low that she even began helping Rogers and his friends abduct innocent young women off the street to rape them. This “game,” referred to as “onna-gari” (literally, “woman hunting”), entails driving around in a jeep to find a desirable victim.46 Toshiko calls out to the young woman, offering her a ride to the nearest train station. Instead, the victim is taken to an isolated area, where she meets the same cruel fate that transformed Toshiko and (we are to believe) so many young Japanese women into GI prostitutes. Toshiko implies that onna-gari was regularly practiced by the occupation troops, and she offers herself as an eyewitness, claiming that she even helped tie up the victims. She then recounts a particularly memorable outing in which Rogers and his pals happen upon a young victim who, quite literally, bites off more than either can chew: the woman bites off Rogers’ tongue and then her own, killing them both instantly (84–87). Toshiko admires this stoic act of resistance and, like other narrators from this genre of prostitutes’ confessions, wonders why she herself lacked the courage to take her own life and thereby preserve her dignity. She also reflects on her contemptible role in the abduction of innocent women, and writes, “At the time I was blind to my own beastliness, which is why I have decided to confess everything now, down to the last detail” (87). Toshiko rarely misses an opportunity to remind the reader that she is indeed telling the whole truth. The above events occur within roughly the first half of the narrative; more rape and death awaits any reader willing to slog through the final sixty pages. And of course, three additional accounts are available for those possessing patience, lurid curiosity and, above all, a strong constitution. It is tempting to dismiss Chastity as a work of pulp fiction cloaked in a veil too transparent to serve its purpose. Indeed, the more carefully one reads this book (cover material and all) the less worthy of attention it seems as documentary. Yet Chastity was read widely during the 1950s and exerted a tangible influence on public discussions of prostitution. Long after it was published, this book continued to be cited in studies of women’s history.47 Why have readers, including historians and writers of fiction, ostensibly accepted the book for what it claims to be rather than as a work of fiction? After all, The Chastity of Japan is no more a collection of “true confessions” than professional wrestling is an ancient martial art intended to foster spiritual enlightenment. That Chastity managed to attract a large and diverse crowd to ringside is no surprise; what is remarkable, however, is its ability to convince nearly everyone in attendance that the blood spilled is real. It was not until several years after first reading Chastity that I was able to confirm my original suspicions that the book was in fact written by a man. In May 1997 I managed to track down an editor in Tokyo who had worked at Chastity’s long-defunct publishing house, Sōjusha, when the book first appeared in 1953. He readily admitted that the four accounts had been ghostwritten by a man who assumed the name “Mizuno Hiroshi,” but whose real identity remains

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unknown. The man was apparently affiliated with the Japan Communist Party (JCP), had been living in the base town of Yokosuka, and claims to have been familiar with “the panpan situation,” which he wanted to expose as part of a broader indictment of American imperialism. According to the editor with whom I spoke, Sōjusha reached its decision to publish Chastity only after a contentious internal debate.48 The leftist editors at Sōjusha were concerned about the book’s impact on their company’s reputation. They were also concerned about how the JCP would react, since fictional potboilers seemed a far cry from the party’s serious image. Several editors reportedly visited JCP headquarters in Tokyo, and Sōjusha went ahead with the project only after receiving the party’s approval. This is not to suggest that Sōjusha was a propaganda arm of the JCP, only to point out some less obvious issues involved in the book’s production. The relationship between Chastity’s production and reception is even more complicated. As Tamura Taijiro’s influential story about panpan demonstrates, fictional events sometimes manage to insinuate themselves into the social imaginary, acquiring the status of “fact.” Still, we can assume that Chastity would not have created such a sensation had its “fiction” been exposed in Japan. (To my knowledge, the present study is the first published exposure of Chastity as a work of fiction.) For Sōjusha to have advertised Chastity as consisting of four short works of fiction written by a man would have denied the book that ontological authority normally accorded “real-life” confessions. Ultimately, it would seem that readers were determined to accept Chastity as an authentic collection of first-hand testimonies, and perhaps we should treat the book as we would treat a nation’s myths: it is less meaningful to “prove” a myth “false” than to seek the reasons for its popular appeal, the functions it serves, and the ways it is represented. I have speculated briefly about Chastity’s appeal and have discussed a few of the narrative and marketing strategies that contributed to its success. In considering the book’s function within the milieu of mid-1950s Japan, however, it might be helpful to focus on how it differs from (self-proclaimed) works of fiction about the occupation era. First, it purports to consist of true accounts written by actual prostitutes. Both the book’s shock value and its voyeuristic appeal hinge on this assertion of narrative transparency. Second, The Chastity of Japan pursues the chastising of America with impeccable timing. The book flaunted the newfound freedom that attended the complete lifting of SCAP’s censorship restrictions, and its publication fortuitously coincided with a rise of anti-Americanism in the wake of the 1952 Security Treaty and the Korean War. These factors combined to make The Chastity of Japan among the most successful national allegories linking the American occupation to prostitution and female victimhood. Inevitably, it led to countless variations, perhaps the best-known of which is Tanaka Kimiko’s 1957 autobiography, Female Floodwall.

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Female Floodwall If The Chastity of Japan headed a long line of titillating panpan publications during the 1950s, then Tanaka Kimiko’s Female Floodwall brought up the rear of this pulp procession.49 A book-length memoir supposedly written by a former RAA prostitute, Female Floodwall adheres to the successful narrative approach established by its predecessor. It boasts a catchy title, provocative advertising on the jacket sleeve, and the sketch of a naked woman (albeit on the title page rather than on the book’s cover, which contains a nondescript abstract design). The title metaphorically links women’s sexuality to the postwar nation in a slightly more cryptic manner than does the phrase “Chastity of Japan.” But the publishers of Female Floodwall could afford to be less direct since, by the time this book appeared on the market, its title was already in currency from earlier exposes of the RAA. For consumers who still found the book’s title opaque, the jacket sleeve explains: “A girl tells the naked truth in this account of her life in the RAA, a semi-governmental prostitution company, where she offered her body to help form a sexual floodwall!” The back of the jacket sleeve elaborates: “The ‘RAA’ (Recreation and Amusement Association) is a prostitution company serving the occupation forces and was begun immediately after the war with a joint investment totaling one-hundred million yen, half contributed by the Japanese government and half by the private sector. Only after surmounting countless difficulties could Female Floodwall be published. A record of indignity to the female sex, this book should be read by every woman in Japan. It is an indictment of Japanese government authorities and a ‘going-away present’ to the American forces as they withdraw from Japan!”50 This blurb borrows from Chastity the pun, “bare account” (“sekirara na shuki,” which I have translated as “telling the naked truth”). The illustration of a nude woman on the book’s title page also recalls the sketch on Chastity’s cover. Above all, however, Female Floodwall remains true to the genre by purporting to be a firsthand testimony by a former prostitute to GIs. Yet while Female Floodwall adheres to the formula established by Chastity, it differs from its predecessor in two ways. First, the book’s jacket sleeve suggests that the publishers of Female Floodwall were less interested in criticizing the American occupiers than in pushing the book’s image as a political expose of Japanese government support for the RAA. In fact, Japanese bad guys outnumber evil Americans in Female Floodwall. While Chastity also introduces a few minor Japanese villains (such as the policeman who hands Toshiko over to her American assailants), these pale in comparison with the malevolent foreign occupiers who fill the book’s pages. Female Floodwall, in contrast, is relatively even-handed in its indictment of iniquity and even includes a few unscrupulous Japanese women in its cast of characters. This is not to claim that the book is any

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less nationalistic than is The Chastity of Japan, only that it takes a more circuitous route to reach its inevitable destination. The second difference between the two books is that Female Floodwall appeals more blatantly to the reader’s voyeuristic curiosity through pornographic passages. Although the blurb on the jacket sleeve is ostensibly addressed to women, the narrative itself is filled with sexually explicit passages clearly written to titillate male readers. More often than Chastity, the book eroticizes rape and other forms of sexual violence against women.51 This is familiar fodder in Japanese comics and pornography, but Female Floodwall is advertised as being not only a potentially titillating confession of a former prostitute, but as a political expose. Thus it is a conflicted and complicated book that seems undecided as to how to mesh its political and pornographic agendas. As with Chastity, attentive readers will wonder whether Female Floodwall is actually written by its purported narrator, a high-school graduate who spent most of her adult years working as a prostitute. The pornographic descriptions are written from a perspective far more commonly encountered in Japanese men’s pulp fiction than in women’s writing, and the style and organization of the narrative, while by no means inspired, seems just a bit too polished to be the first publication by a woman with a limited education and no literary background. As with Chastity, I was eventually able to confirm that this book was indeed written by a man posing as a woman. The publisher of Female Floodwall, Dai-ni shobō, is still in business and is best known for producing the gay men’s magazine, Barazoku (Tribe of the Rose). Dai-ni shobō was run by a respected editor named Itō Tōichi, who also operated a more staid publishing house, Dai-ichi shobō. Although Itō died several years ago, his son Itō Bungaku now runs Dai-ni shobō and informed me that Female Floodwall was in fact a work of fiction written by a man who worked at the time as a newspaper reporter. When I inquired about the book’s pornographic bent, he confirmed that (notwithstanding the blurb urging women to read the book) the editors at Dai-ni shobō were aiming for male readers who wished to be titillated. He cryptically added, however, that the book ended up generating more controversy than the publisher had bargained for, so the company stopped production after an initial run of three thousand copies. Female Floodwall consists of a single narrative which, at over two hundred pages, resists easy summary. The story takes place immediately after the war and begins, as usual, with rape. But unlike most accounts of GI prostitutes, Kimiko is first raped by a trusted Japanese man from her neighborhood, not by American soldiers. This man had been looking after Kimiko since her parents died in the March 1945 fire bombing of Tokyo. She wakes up one night to discover the man drunk and on top of her, so she throws him off and escapes into the night, never to return. This passage occurs within the first chapter of the book. The salacious and graphic description serves to eroticize rape (14). As Kimiko wanders, half-starving, through Tokyo’s burned-out ruins, a baker offers her some bread, and she follows him home. Kimiko confesses her plight to the baker, who assures her that he is nothing like her unscrupulous neighbor.

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Nevertheless, she wakes up in the middle of the night to discover her new protector on top of her. This time, though, she doesn’t resist. Instead, following a hackneyed theme in pornographic narratives, she falls in love with her assailant and immediately discovers her own capacity for carnal pleasure. But the honeymoon doesn’t last, and Kimiko soon deserts the baker. Wandering the streets of Tokyo again, she runs into an old school friend named Yoshiko, whose occupation is apparent from her “red skirt, thin scarf, nails painted red like a chicken’s claws, and lips so crimson they seemed freshly licked with blood” (32). Yoshiko brings Kimiko to her apartment and looks after her until they happen on an RAA advertisement seeking “geisha, dancers, and companions for the occupation troops.” The promise of food, clothing, and shelter leads Yoshiko to inquire about the job, and Kimiko follows, realizing that she would be left homeless if Yoshiko entered the RAA. Besides, she thinks, “I’ve already been tricked by men and my body is sullied, so it’s not the kind of job I’m incapable of performing” (35). After undergoing an interview where the job requirements are made clear, Kimiko decides to accept the offer because “I’ll never be able to have a decent marriage anyway” (37). This passage suggests that Kimiko’s plight must be understood not only in relation to her American assailants but also as deriving from the patriarchal values that pervade her own society. Yet Female Floodwall is less interested in interrogating Japanese patriarchy than in pursuing the book’s own pornographic agenda. In this regard and in its eroticization of rape, the book differs sharply from 1950s stories about GI prostitutes and mistresses written by Japanese women. Female Floodwall’s incorporation of journalistic material into what is essentially a fictional narrative will remind readers of Matsumoto Seichō’s mixing of genres in “Painting on Black Canvas,” published the following year. If one recalls that both Matsumoto and the actual author of Female Floodwall were newspaper reporters, this incorporation of journalistic material should come as no surprise. Female Floodwall intersperses factual titbits about the RAA to infuse the book with a documentary air and bolster its assertions of veracity. At one point, for example, it lists the names and affiliations of RAA organizers, explains the origins of the association, and even provides details about funding. It also notes the amounts charged for sexual services (¥100 for “short time” and ¥300 for “all night,” to be split evenly between the woman and the brothel owner). The passage below relates an inspirational speech given by Miyazawa Hamajirō, the real-life director of the RAA, to the future “comfort women” assembled before him: As we face the aftermath of military defeat, a situation previously unknown to our nation, the authorities have asked us to establish a special comfort woman system, namely, the “RAA,” in order to do everything in our power to protect the chastity of Japan’s women from the occupation forces. Fortunately, we believe that it will be possible, with the benefit of your cooperation, to achieve this grave mission which has been entrusted

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to us. We realize that those of you assembled here today have volunteered to help us fulfill this mission only after preparing to sacrifice your bodies, to become the Shōwa Era’s version of “O-Kichi,” your predecessor from an earlier time. We wish to express our most profound gratitude for your sacrificial spirit. This work will no doubt entail many disagreeable experiences, but we ask you strengthen your resolve once again so that our nation can move beyond the crisis that now confronts us. We ask you to think of yourselves as a female floodwall which protects the women of Japan, and we hope that this thought will enable you to overcome all obstacles that lie in your way. (38–39) Kimiko informs her readers that the director’s sincere words brought a solemnity over the assembled women, who had been boisterous only moments earlier. No criticism of the speech itself is offered at this point in the narrative, for this would diminish its dramatic impact (39). Later, however, as the tragic nature of her life becomes apparent, Kimiko lambastes the RAA and Japanese authorities for their hypocritical treatment of the women: Using impressive words they told us it was “for the women of Japan,” and we allowed ourselves to be manipulated and we danced to their tune, forming a “female floodwall.” But now we have been exposed to the blood of all sorts of men and have slowly begun to rot, to decay unto oblivion. Yet as we face our plight, no hands are extended to help us…we are left nothing at all. (190) Indeed, Kimiko must consort with all types of customers—MPs (who demand free service), black GIs (who are akin to aliens in the eyes of most of the women), and at least one soldier who “made me feel absolutely ecstatic… I’d never experienced such pleasure before in my life… I grabbed him, screaming something or other…” (49–51). Eventually, one of the Japanese managers of the RAA becomes attracted to Kimiko, who now finds herself juggling sexual obligations toward both foreign customers and her Japanese employer. She describes her life during this period as follows: America during the day, Japan at night—they say that a woman’s body is truly demonic, but this seems completely beyond control. Gradually, my body became incapable of shielding only one man. Perhaps the blood from various men that has coursed through my body has made me this way. (66).

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This passage includes familiar elements of men’s writing on the occupation: the prostitute who circulates between American and Japanese men; the equation of the sexual body with the nation; deterministic references to “blood” and miscegenation. It also highlights the irrepressible sexual urges commonly attributed to women in pornographic writing. Kimiko not only sleeps with the Japanese manager of Komachi Garden but soon falls in love with him, only to be abandoned for another woman and transferred to The Palace, a “comfort station” (ian shisetsu) in Fussa, on the outskirts of Tokyo near Tachikawa Airforce Base. She describes The Palace as “a cabaret in name only, with a tiny dance floor and a few stools near a bar that can barely manage to serve a couple of beers. When the soldiers come in they rush straight to the beds.” Kimiko’s beauty quickly makes her the most popular woman at The Palace, and it is not long before she meets a dashing lieutenant named Brown who “looked stern and handsome, not unlike James Cagney” (75). She instantly falls for the lieutenant and, thanks to one night of unbridled passion, finds herself pregnant with his child. Never questioning whether the child is actually his, Brown is overjoyed at the news and rushes out to rent an apartment in Tachikawa for the happy couple, where they live together in what she refers to as “our blissful married life” (although they are only engaged at this time). Brown is described as so loving, caring, and decent that the reader might well imagine him wearing a white hat—especially when he flies off into the sunset to serve in the Korean War, never to return for the birth of his baby boy. The delineation of time in the narrative up to this point is unclear. On the one hand, it seems that Kimiko becomes pregnant with Brown’s child while the RAA is still in operation; yet he is killed in the Korean War—before the baby is born. Readers are left to conclude that either Kimiko experienced an abnormally prolonged gestation, or that she is genetically related to the mastodon. Despite the hype on the jacket sleeve and the interspersed journalistic passages, this is hardly documentary material. Within a mere eight pages Kimiko is transferred from Komachi Garden to Fussa, where she meets Lt. Brown, falls in love with him, gets pregnant, is engaged to be married, moves in with him, and then learns that he has been killed in the Korean War. Those who wish to learn about Kimiko’s countless travails in the ensuing 130 pages must read the entire book, but her life can be summarized as follows. After Brown’s death she continues working as a prostitute in the Fussa cabaret, then becomes an “onrii,” (“only one,” or GI mistress), and finally ends up as a streetwalker whose troubles are compounded by sleazy boyfriends (mainly Japanese), drugs, and what would seem to be a sleeping disorder, since she keeps waking up in the morning to discover that yet another man has removed her underwear and “had his way with her” the previous night. At one point she gets married to a Japanese doctor, but when he discovers her tarnished past he divorces her. Lt. Brown’s son ends up at the Elizabeth Sanders Home, a well-known Christian orphanage established in 1948 for “mixed-blood children.” Although Kimiko seeks out her son years later, no heartwarming mother-child

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reunion awaits them. At the story’s end (which can not arrive too soon) Kimiko has promised her new Japanese boyfriend, a former yakuza now working in construction, that she too would “go straight” and try to live a respectable life. When she arrives at her boyfriend’s isolated construction site, however, she learns that he has been transferred to another prefecture, so she stays on and works in the kitchen to save enough money to visit him. Unfortunately, Kimiko’s noble intentions and devotion to her absent lover are of no interest to the unscrupulous men at the construction site, and they make her into a virtual sexual prisoner. Corrupted by this experience and her resolve rapidly diminishing, Kimiko gives up all hope of turning her life around and reuniting with her boyfriend. The book ends on a nihilistic note: There are no laws in this world. I have known every nook and cranny of the underside of society and have lost all hope, relinquished all desire to resist. How far will this woman—will I—fall? I have decided to entrust this entirely to the god of fate. (217) Female Floodwall ends as it begins, with Kimiko’s personal story. Despite the book’s pretensions of offering a political expose, it ultimately occludes history and politics except as excuses for heightening the melodrama. Scholars such as Peter Brooks have argued that the genre of melodrama has, in other settings, functioned to subvert dominant social values. Brooks views melodrama as a distinctly modern and ideological form emerging from nineteenth-century Europe and capable of manifesting radical political possibilities.51 Yet while Female Floodwalls can be considered a postwar Japanese melodrama, its subversive possibilities are foreclosed because its political critique (of both the American occupiers and Japanese government authorities) are buried beneath the reassuring veneer of personal history. Readers are not encouraged to contemplate Kimiko’s status as a sexual slave at the story’s end in relation to the RAA’s exploitation of women —which, after all, the book purports to expose. Nor, despite pointing to the role of Japanese men in perpetuating Kimiko’s suffering, does this book attempt to challenge their hegemony over the nation’s women. Nor does it link Kimiko’s individual fate to that of a broader group of citizens, such as lower-class women. Although Female Floodwall and The Chastity of Japan masquerade as firsthand confessions by women, both books should be read as classic works of men’s occupation fiction written by, and mainly for, (heterosexual) male readers. They draw on a familiar structure of male fantasy when they use rape to attract and titillate their readers. At the same time, as with so many men’s stories, they deploy women’s sexual subjugation to construct a gendered national allegory of the occupation era, thereby ensuring that Japanese men are included among those victimized by the foreign occupiers. As we see in the following chapter,

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women’s stories about the occupation largely eschew such nationalistic perspectives on the era.

5 Ambivalent allegories

During the past seven years, it is clearly the women of Japan who have benefited most. I say this in all seriousness, without any sense of irony. (Ōya Sōichi 1952:199) Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house… (John Stuart Mill 1989:80) When a well-known male critic such as Ōya Sōichi pronounces that Japan’s women were the main beneficiaries of the American occupation, one wonders precisely what he has in mind. At a superficial level, he was no doubt referring to Article 24 of the postwar constitution and to the many legal rights accorded Japanese women through SCAP’s reforms. Article 24, in particular, represents a dramatic departure from women’s legal status in prewar Japan: Marriage shall be based on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual co-operation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis. With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family, laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes.1 Article 24 also led to the thorough revision of the civil code in 1947. Japan’s prewar civil code sanctioned a range of patriarchal practices, including legal restrictions on a women’s right to choose a marriage partner, to divorce her husband, and to independently engage in contractual agreements; it also included inheritance laws that favored eldest sons over other children, and “blood relatives” over wives; it further stipulated prison sentences of up to two years for women found guilty of adultery. (Men were not legally culpable for this offense, known as kantsūzai).2

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Thus, only a few years after the nation’s surrender, Japanese women had gained what their feminist predecessors had been demanding for nearly half a century.3 They had acquired the right to vote, and in a general election held in April 1946 they exercised that prerogative by electing thirty-nine women to public office. It was not long before Japan saw the nation’s first female student admitted to Tokyo University, the first policewoman on the streets, and a group of female mountain climbers ascending a sacred peak that had long been prohibited to women.4 Of course, the mere existence of legislation does not guarantee that the ideals it espouses will be put into practice, and feminist historians have been quick to point out that it is one thing for occupation authorities to decree a whole range of political, social, and economic reforms affecting Japanese women, but quite another for the Japanese people themselves to overcome entrenched patriarchal practices and to ensure that the spirit of the reforms is realized in everyday life.5 In the same vein, it is easy for a male critic such as Ōya Sōichi to pronounce Japanese women the main beneficiaries of the American occupation; but we must also ask what his female contemporaries thought. Unfortunately, only a handful of women critics were active during the 1950s, and they tended to avoid offering broad assessments of the occupation. Women have, however, written fictional accounts of the era, and if one scours the archives it is possible to uncover stories that, while long-forgotten by general readers and scholars alike, offer provocative views of the occupation. As will become apparent in this chapter, women’s occupation literature is far from monolithic, and I do not wish to reify gendered literary categories and perpetuate the “ghettoization” of women’s writing in Japan. Nevertheless, the distinctions among women’s writing on the occupation pale in comparison with their collective difference from men’s literary accounts of the era. The most obvious difference between occupation literature by men and women is that few male authors have produced fictional accounts of the era from a woman’s perspective.6 In part, this is due to the lingering influence of the shishōsetsu tradition. Variously referred to as the “I-novel” or “autobiographical fiction,” the shishōsetsu valorizes authorial sincerity and authenticity while purporting to eschew fictional artifice. Of course, as we saw in Chapters Three and Four, the formalistic boundaries separating fiction, journalism, and personal confession are often blurred. And as Edward Fowler has argued in his study of the shishōsetsu, the most dedicated autobiographical writers invariably rely on fictional techniques, whether they acknowledge it or not.7 Even those male authors who stray far from personal experience into worlds more “imagined” than they are “remembered” (admittedly, a tenuous distinction) write from the perspective of their male protagonists when representing the occupation era. As a result, readers of Japanese occupation literature have little exposure to the imagined inner worlds of women. At issue is not that men’s stories lack female characters altogether, but rather that male authors tend to view these characters from a distance, to represent them as either anonymous figures or to reduce them to

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mediators for the principal actors, who are almost always men. Books such as The Chastity of Japan and Female Floodwall clearly challenge this generalization, since they explore the occupation experience from women’s perspectives, however unconvincing and contrived these perspectives may now seem. Yet both books rely on a female authorial persona and on contemporary readers’ desire for firsthand, true confessions, without which their impact would undoubtedly have been diminished. It is, in fact, questionable whether either book would even have been published without this authorial guise. The present chapter explores how real-life Japanese women have written about the occupation. I argue that, regardless of generational and ideological differences, women writers have eschewed the particular form of allegory typical of men’s stories about the era. Judging from their literature, women writers did not experience the occupation primarily as a humiliating experience, and here they differ from their male counterparts. While women clearly suffered and struggled through the early postwar years, rarely have they blamed their travails on the occupiers. One would be hard-pressed to find a woman’s story about the occupation that contains Chastity’s pent-up nationalism or the simmering ambivalence often found in other men’s stories. Japanese men found the occupation to be humiliating, in part, because they felt a loss of control over women’s bodies—and, by extension, over their own sexuality. Here, again, we find a key explanation for the “female floodwall” rhetoric that captured the male imagination in the early postwar years. Ōya Sōichi’s remark about Japanese women being the occupation’s main beneficiaries is also worth reconsidering from this perspective. In other words, women benefited from the occupation not merely because of their newly acquired legal rights, but because they were less deeply invested in the gendered rhetoric of Japanese national identity. For men, the simultaneous loss of Japan’s empire and the commencement of foreign occupation signified a loss of control over both national and bodily boundaries. But women in wartime Japan were from the outset denied recognition as full-fledged imperial subjects. They were not permitted to the for the emperor, and as feminist scholar Ueno Chizuko argues, this was both a manifestation of, and justification for, women’s lack of subjectivity. Rather than sacrificing their lives for the national patriarch, women were relegated to the protective space “behind the gun” and were exhorted to reproduce male subjects, thereby ensuring the continuity of the patriarchal national family.8 Consequently, for most women the defeat—even when accompanied by the loss of home, children, and husband—did not signify a threat to their identity as women or as Japanese. It entailed a profound sense of loss, to be sure, but women tended to associate their loss with the war and rarely attributed it to the occupation per se. I do not wish to suggest that women avoided writing allegories about the occupation altogether, but rather that their allegories, like those of Okinawan writers, focus less exclusively on a binary relationship between Japan and the United States, and more on the myriad forms of domestic oppression continuing from an earlier era.

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While exploring the above issues, this chapter aims to introduce two different trends discernible in women’s fictional accounts of the occupation, neither of which has been adequately addressed by scholars or critics: 1) the comparatively apolitical work of writers such as Sono Ayako, Koyama Itoko, and Akagi Keiko; 2) the self-consciously ideological stories by leftist writers such as Nakamoto Takako, Hirabayashi Taiko and, to a lesser degree, Hiroike Akiko. As an example of the former, I offer a close reading of Sono’s debut work, “Guests From Afar” (1954).9 This story draws attention to relationships between the occupiers and the occupied that transcend the divide of national identity. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to three stories about Japanese women living in American base towns: Hiroike’s “The Only Ones” (1953), Nakamoto’s “Women of a Base Town” (1953) and Hirabayashi’s “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido” (1952).10 While ostensibly depicting Japanese women who have sexual relationships with the occupiers, all three of these works interrogate how marriage, money, and sex are implicated in perpetuating women’s oppression within Japanese society. None of the above works is available in English translation except Nakamoto’s, so I have translated passages from each for the benefit of readers without access to the Japanese texts. Among the four women writers discussed in this chapter, only Sono and Hirabayashi are routinely mentioned in Japanese postwar literary histories and only their works are likely to be included in Japan’s major anthologies of modern literature. Readers wishing to read those stories by Hiroike, Nakamoto, Koyama, and Akagi must seek out the original magazines in which they were published, or must consult special anthologies of “female literature” (joryū bungaku), such as the one in which “The Only Ones” is reprinted. The generational logic of “Guests From Afar” Sono Ayako was barely twenty-three years old and had just graduated from the English Department of Sacred Heart Women’s College when “Guests From Afar” was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize in 1954. Although the prize was awarded to Yoshiyuki Junnosuke for his work, “Sudden Shower,” the sponsoring magazine, Bungei shunjū, reprinted “Guests From Afar” in the September edition, and the story garnered enough praise to launch Sono’s literary career. Sono’s style and dispassionate tone caught the eyes of many critics, who recognized in her work a distinctive atmosphere and narrative stance they described as “light” and “refreshing” while at the same time “detached,” “cool,” “intellectual,” and even “nihilistic.”11 Readers were particularly struck by the unlikely yet effective union of these qualities in “Guests From Afar,” although not everyone was so sympathetic: Mishima Yukio disparaged Sono’s literature as “evocative of Reader’s Digest,” and another male critic referred to it as being “little more than a writing composition.”12 In retrospect, the literary establishment’s response to “Guests From Afar” is not unlike the critics’ reaction to Yoshimoto Banana’s debut over three decades

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later, when her novel, Kitchen, became an instant best-seller. Banana’s 1987 debut seemed to confirm that modern Japanese literature had again entered a new era. Her works were noted for their postmodern quality and for their conceptual debt to girls’ comic books.13 Although Sono never achieved Banana’s popculture status (a phallic name would never have suited her), both authors were alternately celebrated and excoriated for their light touch and for what appeared to be their blithe disregard for contemporary Japanese literary conventions.14 (In “Guests From Afar,” for example, Sono’s narrator employs the “desu/masu” form of polite speech throughout.) Sono and Banana, together with most Japanese women writers, have been categorized as “joryū sakka,” or “female writers” (literally translated as “femalestyle writers”). This patronizing category diminishes the value of their work.15 Unlike the term “josei sakka” (“women writers”), which is comparatively neutral and which has an ostensible counterpart in the term “dansei sakka” (“men writers”), the belittling term joiyū sakka has as its binary referent only the general word for “author” (sakka). Thus there are “authors,” whose literary appeal is potentially universal, and then there are “female writers,” whose work is expected to attract only women.16 In short, Sono’s reputation was established through patronizing accolades that simultaneously affirmed and refuted her literary potential. These gender-based categories remind us that despite the large number of women who read and write fiction in Japan, men retain control over the nation’s literary establishment, and unless a woman writer manages to attract a large male readership (which few achieve), she has little hope of achieving critical recognition as a full-fledged author. Sono’s work was eventually included in major Japanese anthologies of modern literature, securing her place within the postwar canon. Although Sono was initially pegged as a joryū sakka, her work attracted attention precisely because it differed from that of many established women writers at the time. For instance, unlike Hayashi Fumiko (1903–51), Sata Ineko (1904–), Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951), and the three writers discussed later in this chapter, Sono was never attracted to communism or anarchism, nor did she write about sexually uninhibited women who flaunted their “lack of chastity.” Rather, Sono’s early stories are restrained and even prudish, although we should not overlook her humor—a quality not usually associated with women’s writing in the decade after the war. In some ways, “Guests From Afar” resembles Kojima Nobuo’s “The American School” as much as it does other works of Japanese women’s literature about the occupation. “Guests From Afar” appeared five months before “The American School,” and the two stories share structural qualities, a humorous tone, and maintain a narrative distance from the characters that critics found refreshing. In both works, the road is a central motif and the characters compete over their English ability. As we will see, Sono maintains a distinctive perspective on the occupation, and this is best appreciated through a close reading of the text. Unfortunately, while “Guests From Afar” is the most well-known work of occupation literature written by a woman and is readily

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available in Japanese, it has yet to be published in English translation. In my discussion below, therefore, I include several lengthy passages from the narrative in hope of providing English-language readers with a sense of the story. “Guests From Afar” is set in summer 1948 at an American military hotel near Mount Fuji and is narrated by an innocent yet perspicacious eighteen-year-old woman named Namiko, who works at the information desk. This fictional hotel, (like the Sanno Hotel discussed in Chapter One) was expropriated by SCAP shortly after the war and served as a temporary home for American military officers and their families. Sono herself worked at such a hotel for a while, and this experience helps explain her ability to represent the American occupiers with a familiarity rarely found in mainland Japanese literature at the time. “Guests From Afar” contains three principal American characters and, as in “The American School,” four main Japanese characters who, in this case, work as telephone operators at the hotel’s information desk: Namiko: the young narrator, whose dry, dispassionate observations of the people around her bespeak a postwar sensibility. Her name means “child of the waves.” Mr. Sakaguchi: a former navy officer whose servile position in postwar Japan only heightens his militarist ardor. Fun-chan: an equivocal, twenty-seven-year-old man whose main passions are directing the choir, drawing cartoon characters, and changing clothes. He is described as “mildly effeminate” and is married. Jun-chan served in the army during the war but only halfheartedly. His name means “to follow” or “to conform,” and indeed he seems willing to go along with any suggestion, rarely offering his own opinion unless pressed. The young female narrator’s use of the diminutive suffix “-chan” to refer to this older man underscores his lack of authority. The choir he directs is preparing for a visit to the hotel by Helen Keller, which renders Jun-chan’s obsession with his appearance and the choir’s performance all the more absurd. Mrs. Kibe: a middle-aged war widow infatuated with her younger coworker, Jun-chan. A comical yet pathetic figure desperately trying to adjust to postwar life. Her name literally means “part of a tree” and symbolizes her familial status, having lost both husband and children in the war. Captain Lynch —a tough, stubborn, bulldog-like figure who places an American flag over the bed he shares with his wife. Despite Lynch’s disagreeable qualities, Sakaguchi and Namiko secretly admire his uncompromising “masculine virtues.” His name speaks for itself. Sergeant Rose —a nineteen-year-old in charge of the four Japanese employees who work at the hotel information desk. Rose, like Namiko,

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Dr. Diorio:

belongs to a postwar generation undaunted by authority figures. His name, referring to a natural object of beauty, further links him to Namiko and underscores his ill-suitedness for military service. a silver-haired army officer and hotel physician who has formed an innocent, platonic friendship with Namiko. He is a thoughtful but weak man who is merely passing time in Japan during a yearlong sinecure at the hotel.

In short, Lynch is associated with violence and military authority; Sakaguchi is cut from the same cloth but, as a citizen of a defeated nation, is forced to repress his militarist urges; Rose and Namiko belong to the postwar generation too young to have directly participated in the war and are both nonplussed by military authority; as a former soldier, but one seeming to lack all nationalist and militaristic passions, Jun-chan is situated as somewhere in between Lynch/ Sakaguchi and Namiko/Rose; finally, Dr. Diorio and Mrs. Kibe are superfluous figures in occupied Japan. This schematic organization of the characters, while resembling that of “The American School,” differs from Kojima’s story in that it links the Americans and Japanese, placing greater emphasis on generational affiliation than on gender or nationality. In fact, it is this generational logic that distinguishes “Guests From Afar” from nearly all other writing on the occupation: unlike men’s narratives, Sono downplays the issue of nationality, and even wartime defeat seems less important than generation and “personality” in shaping a character’s response to the occupation. Conversely, Sono’s willingness to recognize shared characteristics across gender lines and her lack of interest in socio-economic class distinguishes “Guests From Afar” from those women’s stories discussed later in this chapter. “Guests From Afar” centers on several incidents that serve as fodder for the narrator’s keen observations of life under American occupation. The first occurs when Namiko and Dr. Diorio, during one of their friendly chats, overhear a fight down the hall. Diorio opens the door to Captain Lynch’s room and discovers a bloodied Sergeant Rose prostrate on the floor. Namiko stands off to the side, peeking into the room, at first unnoticed by Lynch and Rose. Lynch explains that the sergeant, in yet another drunken spree, has broken one of the hotel’s expensive showroom windows; he also accuses Rose of regularly sneaking women into the hotel. The Captain adds that such habits must be corrected before it is too late and, as if punctuating the remark, administers a sharp kick to the young man’s elbow, ordering him to stand up. Rose struggles to his feet but has trouble keeping his balance and reaches out to Namiko for support. Only now does Lynch notice Namiko and suddenly changes tone, embarking on a patriotic speech about the importance of America’s democratic mission in Japan. The speech is clearly intended for Namiko’s benefit, although Lynch ostensibly directs his remarks at Rose, whom he commands to “reflect carefully on your actions, before our history, before our national flag” as he gestures

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toward the Stars and Stripes hanging on his wall (14). The description of the flag and the ensuing events are worth quoting at length to convey a sense of the author’s humor: On the wall, in the direction the Captain was pointing, was a large American flag. Hanging there flaccidly, it seemed as thoroughly decadent as a window curtain on a day without a breeze. But then an even stranger sight came into view. Beneath the Stars and Stripes, in the Captain’s bed, Mrs. Lynch slowly sat up. She was wearing a lavender silk bathrobe and seemed to have been awakened from her nap by the disturbance. Lighting a cigarette, she glared at the four of us from beneath her mussed-up, golden curly hair. The metallic glint of her crimson lips and fingernails shone all the more beautifully under the flag. I quickly stole a glance at the three Americans. Unperturbed, Captain Lynch stood there proudly, looking up at the Stars and Stripes that hung above his wife’s head. Dr. Diorio tried at first to subtly avert his eyes from the scene, but noticing that Captain Lynch chose to ignore the bed altogether, the Doctor apparently decided that he must follow suit. In a frank (or so it seemed to me) and well-mannered way, he too set his head at an angle so that it focused exclusively on the flag. But Sergeant Rose was different. He made no attempt whatsoever to look at the flag. Like a total scoundrel, he stood there, staring at the woman in the bed. Rocking back and forth on his heels, his bloodied chin jutting out sideways, he appeared as if he had just discovered the most fascinating sight in the world. Then he began to leer. Captain Lynch suddenly glanced back and, upon discovering Sergeant Rose’s private pleasure, slapped the young man with such force that sparks seemed to fly from his cheek. Not ten seconds had elapsed before the Sergeant again looked as if he might collapse, and Dr. Diorio ordered me to take him to the Infirmary. The Doctor stayed behind and quietly shut the door to Captain Lynch’s room. (14) It should be apparent, even from this single passage, that “Guests From Afar” devotes far more attention to personal differences among the occupiers than does any work of fiction discussed thus far. When depicting the Americans in her story, Sono moves beyond mere physical and typological description to provide readers with a sense of each character as an individual. “Guests From Afar” represents its characters on the one hand as individualized, private citizens and, on the other, as embodiments of an entire population (defined both in terms of generational and national affiliation). This vacillation between the private and public spheres —rather than the subordination of private to public—raises the question of whether “Guests From Afar” should be read as a national allegory (in

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the circumscribed version of Jameson’s use of the term, discussed in Chapter One). The above passage, for example, shows Lynch vacillating between his official role as a patriotic representative of the occupation forces and his private persona as a jealous husband. Identity, of course, is ineluctably multifaceted, so there should be nothing remarkable about this depiction of Lynch’s private life—until we realize how rare such scenes are in Japanese literature about the occupation. When Lynch stands before Japanese observers such as Namiko, he is compelled to perform his role of the American officer whose eyes never waver from the Stars and Stripes; in his private capacity, however, Lynch is concerned less with protecting this symbolic body of the nation than with shielding the physical body of his wife from Rose’s denuding gaze. The contiguity of these two bodies, national and personal, highlights the duality that pervades “Guests From Afar” and renders it at best an ambivalent allegory. The narrative’s schematic elements are reminiscent of men’s fictional accounts of the occupation encountered thus far. These include the grouping of Japanese characters according to their attitude toward the occupiers; the use of symbolic sites to distinguish occupied territory from domestic spaces; and the deployment of English (see below) not only as an arena for power struggles between the occupiers and the occupied but also to interrogate problems of cultural identity among the Japanese themselves. Whereas most occupation literature limits its exploration of private lives to those of the occupied populace, “Guests From Afar” is equally interested in the occupier’s inner world while showing it to be inextricably linked to the public realm. And nothing could better demonstrate this intersection of public and private spheres than a national flag displayed in a bedroom. Sono’s attention to individual differences among both the occupiers and the occupied sets the groundwork for the narrative’s generational logic, as seen in the comments below by Sakaguchi and Jun-chan. Sakaguchi, like Yamada of “The American School,” is described as having “a kamikaze spirit” (15), and he is Lynch’s generational counterpart among the Japanese hotel employees. Although Namiko professes never to have uttered a word about the scuffle between Lynch and Rose, news of the incident soon reaches the information desk, where it quickly becomes the gossip of the day. Sakaguchi, the former Japanese Navy officer and a tenacious two-fingered typist who barks out expletives with each error, is the first to offer his opinion: “These days everyone talks about how terrible it is to hit somebody, but when it actually happens it’s like taking a crap: you don’t think about whether it’s good or bad, whether it makes sense or not. The same goes for the military in any country.” (15) When Namiko asks Jun-chan if he had ever punched anyone while in the army, he responds, “In fact, I was always the one getting hit. Anyway, things are easier

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that way.” Sakaguchi, who has been typing at breakneck speed throughout the conversation, ignores the younger man’s comment and continues with his own thoughts: “This problem of hitting people happens after the war is over, and it’s only a problem on the defeated side. I’m a military man myself. Do you think that if we’d won the war I’d be working at a place like this, carrying the Yankees’ bags and saying ‘Thank you, Sir!’ every time they tip me for getting them a pack of Lucky Strikes? You bet I wouldn’t!” (15) When Namiko presses Jun-chan for his response, he merely mumbles, “I was resigned from the start” (15). Namiko then goes on to interpret this dialogue: Although Mr. Sakaguchi went off on a strange tangent in the middle of his talk, I began to notice something intriguing at just that moment: while he professes to be irritated by the Americans, I am convinced that Mr. Sakaguchi is, in fact, Captain Lynch’s biggest fan. He points out the many problems of being a defeated nation, yet once something has been destroyed —be it morality or a system—to the extent that it is merely the temporary creation of human beings, there is no telling whether it was good or bad. As the victor, Captain Lynch is naturally oblivious to what goes on around him. But to tell the truth, it seems to me that Mr. Sakaguchi vehemently defends the Captain because it allows him to savor a vicarious feeling of victory. (15–16) Sakaguchi, as a fellow soldier and patriot, feels an affinity for Lynch not unlike that described in some of Ōe Kenzaburō’s early stories about the occupation or in Nosaka Akiyuki’s “American Hijiki.” Sono is the only woman writer to draw attention to this homosocial dynamic in Japanese occupation literature and, unlike her male counterparts, she does so without ignoring her female characters. The author is equally adept at exposing how her characters differ in their responses to the occupation. If Sakaguchi’s private identification with Lynch is grounded in their generational affinity and military devotion, then Sakaguchi’s derision of Jun-chan focuses on the younger man’s thoroughgoing lack of interest in martial matters. As Kojima would later attempt in “The American School,” Sono dramatizes the gap separating Sakaguchi from Jun-chan through their respective responses to the English language. At one point in the story, for example, the workers at the information desk must answer English inquiries from the American guests concerning the train schedule to Shinagawa Station in Tokyo. The Americans mispronounce the name so badly that, at first, none of the Japanese even recognizes it. Yet once Jun-chan realizes that what sounds like an English word,

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“Shine-a-gay-wa,” in fact refers to Shinagawa Station, he immediately adopts the American pronunciation to facilitate communication. Sakaguchi, however, insists on correcting his American interlocutors every time they mispronounce the Japanese place name. As in so many works of men’s occupation literature, language in “Guests From Afar” becomes a cultural battleground for Japan’s conflicting responses to the occupation. Sono suggests that Jun-chan’s pragmatic approach to life under foreign occupation is less that of a wily opportunist (such as Yamada in “The American School”) than of a young man disillusioned with war and nationalism but endowed with a gleeful anarchic spirit capable of deflating the pretensions of both Sakaguchi and the American occupiers. At one point in the story, for example, Jun-chan and Namiko are asked to serve as interpreters on a tour bus for the American hotel guests. Namiko invites Dr. Diorio to join them, and he sits passively in the back of the bus throughout the tour. When the group stops at a Shinto shrine, Jun-chan and Namiko are asked by their American passengers to translate the contents of the written oracles they have purchased. Namiko notices that Jun-chan, with perfect aplomb, would read each oracle and then concoct a bogus English “translation” that ensured the passenger a promising fortune. Namiko soon adopts this same strategy, and the two begin spinning out endless variations on good fortunes, telling the Americans precisely what they want to hear. Isa in “The American School” and the protagonist in Ōe’s “Human Sheep” (Chapter Six) reject language altogether in a passive-aggressive form of resistance against both the occupiers and Japanese who persecute them. In “Guests From Afar,” however, Namiko and Jun-chan masterfully deploy English to dupe the occupiers, yet neither is intent on avenging wartime defeat nor propelled by a lingering sense of nationalism; they are simply getting through a day’s work with the least possible exertion. In the process, the Americans are made to look like children, easily manipulated by their Japanese subjects. This infantilization of the occupiers is not uncommon in women’s writing but is rarely, if ever, encountered in men’s narratives about the era. The tour bus scene in “Guests From Afar” reveals the occupiers’ power as well as their gullibility. It is raining when Namiko’s group leaves the shrine and boards the bus, and she soon notices a military jeep behind them, honking its horn incessantly and trying to pass. At last finding an opportunity to pass the bus, the jeep pulls out in front and suddenly stops, forcing the bus and all the traffic behind it to come to a halt. A man in a military uniform leans out of the jeep and shouts at the bus driver, who in turn whispers to Namiko and Jun-chan that the man appears to be Captain Lynch. Just then the Captain’s furious voice “rumbles forth like thunder”: “Careless bastard! Tell the driver to pay attention to the cars behind him!” Tiny droplets of rainwater sparkled on the bulldog-like fur of the Captain’s brow.

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Looking directly at him, I answered, “I’m very sorry. But due to the downpour, we were unable to hear the horn.” “Idiot! That’s why I’m telling you to be more careful!” “From now on, to the extent that it is possible to be careful, we will. But…” Suddenly, I felt my cheek twitching into an expression of glee. “Are you laughing?” “No, not at all.” (24) As an interpreter, Namiko is expected to relate Lynch’s tirade to the bus driver; instead, she replies directly, leaving the American more incensed than ever. The Captain then returns to the jeep and parks it in the middle of the road, stopping traffic in both directions. In “The American School,” the occupiers controlled the road linking Japan’s impoverished postwar present to the material abundance of the American future. “Guests From Afar” similarly represents the road as an interstitial domain, in this case linking the ancient, native, and sacred space of the Shinto shrine with the modern, American world of the hotel. The occupiers control the road in “Guests From Afar” as well, and once again a Japanese woman is expected to serve as interpreter for the American occupiers and Japanese men. Yet in the above passage, Namiko, rather than accepting the role of female mediator, confronts the American man directly, rendering the Japanese male bus driver and Jun-chan superfluous. Lynch merely sits in the rain “for an interminably long three minutes” until Namiko, regretting her impertinence, ventures out to offer an apology: “Captain, I’m terribly sorry.” The rain pelted my face so hard that I could barely keep my eyes open, yet Captain Lynch sat stolidly, his hands atop the steering wheel, staring at me and moving not a muscle. “Please forgive me. Traffic has backed up on both sides of the road.” Using both hands to wipe away the rain that dripped down my forehead, I nearly shouted out the words. Yet even then, he remained perfectly still. Amidst the utterly irrational violence of that moment, I suddenly felt that I had confronted Captain Lynch’s enormous, untamed energy. Whether this energy is good or bad, it seemed to me the same American-style energy of the Western pioneers, the atomic bomb, the Chicago slaughterhouses, or a Ford auto factory. (24–25) Without a word, Lynch then starts the engine and takes off at full speed toward the hotel. The bus follows and, after the other passengers return to the hotel, Namiko is left alone with Dr. Diorio, who has been a silent witness to her

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encounter with Captain Lynch. Her discovery of Lynch’s overwhelming energy leads Namiko to reassess her friend, the doctor: “Captain Lynch is a hero.” This time I tried to speak in a way that would not be construed as ironic. “I understand why your country won the war. He is American. That’s right, isn’t it? In a very concrete way, he is truly American.” The Doctor rested both hands on my shoulders and said quietly, “You’re excited. You must be tired.” “Only a little,” I answered brusquely. It seemed as if the Doctor wanted to avoid the real subject of the conversation. His response had something in common with my own Japanese bashfulness. I was surprised to discover this resemblance, and it made me lose respect for the Doctor. From the perspective of the United States of America, this was a man who was useless. I now realized that the Doctor combined the timidity of a bystander with the passivity of a cynic. When such a person comes to a defeated country, we are apt to confuse his weakness with sensitivity, with a sensibility much like our own, yet this is but a sweet delusion. In my heart, I took a devious pleasure in deciding that Captain Lynch was the more impressive of the two men. (25: emphasis in original text) The author adroitly leaves it to Sergeant Rose to deflate Namiko’s heroic image of the captain, just as she uses Jun-chan to expose Sakaguchi’s prewar morality and devoted patriotism as being anachronistic qualities in postwar Japan. Sono suggests that Lynch may seem like a hero to the occupied Japanese, but back home he is just another working stiff. In the story’s most deliciously laconic dialogue, Rose nonchalantly reveals to Namiko the Captain’s true occupation: “When you return to America, will you go to school?” I asked. “School? Nah, I’m a barber.” For someone speaking in English, he answered in a tone terribly devoid of emotion. “What does Captain Lynch do in America?” “I’m a barber, he’s a barber. And in the same town, Austin. Being a barber’s actually kinda’ fun.” He smiled. Perhaps I had better describe it as a “grin” since, even though he seemed naive, he had a mischievous air about him. “Weren’t you humiliated, getting beaten up like that by Captain Lynch?” “Nah, not really. I’m a barber, he’s a barber.” Rose, like Jun-chan, undercuts the authority of his military superiors, in this case by pointing to the captain’s true occupation. Yet every character in Sono’s fictional world is subject to ridicule, and Rose himself becomes the butt of a practical joke when he asks one of the waiters in the hotel restaurant how to say

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the word “I” in Japanese. From among the many available first-person pronouns, the waiter chooses “Chin,” which is reserved for use by the Emperor alone. Rose becomes a laughing-stock as he unwittingly uses the imperial pronoun to show off his favorite Japanese sentence, “I like sushi” (Chin wa o-sushi ga suki desu). Sono gives this scene a light touch, whereas other authors might dwell on the subversive implications of a lowly waiter appropriating the imperial pronoun to make a fool of the American occupiers. It is easy to glorify the waiter’s prank, viewing it as what James C.Scott has dubbed “resistance of the weak,” but Sono is less interested in minute acts of subterfuge than in situating the occupiers’ fallibility within a humanistic vision of postwar life. For Sono, everyone at the hotel—Japanese employees, American “guests,” and the occupation authorities in charge—exist on the same plane simply because they are all human beings. Hers is not a cynical vision (as some literary critics would have it) but rather a bourgeois, humanistic one in which individual foibles are elevated above social power and class difference, where “personality” and generation carry as much weight as gender or nation. Herein lies the narrative’s ambiguous status as allegory: like “The American School,” this work asks how different “types” of Japanese citizens responded to the occupation, but Sono’s revelation of how generational identity intersects with (and sometimes overrides) national identity demands that the story be read as an ambiguous national allegory, one which—like Okinawan authors would later do— interrogates the hegemony of both the occupiers and the idea of the nation itself. Sono deftly deploys humor in “Guests From Afar” to level the postwar playing field and to insist that “occupier/occupied” is a false dichotomy that conceals more than it reveals about postwar life. In 1954, amidst the rhetoric decrying America’s “ongoing occupation of Japan,” Sono’s lighthearted story must indeed have seemed innocuous to leftist critics and cultural nationalists alike. Yet it may also be the first Japanese story that scrutinizes the American occupiers and finds them to be as unimpressively human as are their Japanese subjects. Prostitution and other honest jobs: “The Only Ones” Few readers in Japan today remember the author Hiroike Akiko (1919–), but those who do are likely to associate her with “The Only Ones,” which was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize in 1954. Set in the base town of Tachikawa during the Korean War, this work depicts the lives of several GI mistresses living in a rooming house. Hiroike herself lived in the base town of Tachikawa from 1948 through the end of the Korean War, and her portrait of the everyday lives of GI mistresses offered a fictional counterpart to contemporary journalistic treatments of the topic.17 Judging from the articles inundating magazines such as Fujin Kōron, women readers were especially eager to read about relationships between American soldiers and Japanese women, the progeny of these liaisons, and the everyday lives of GI mistresses (“onrii”) and panpan. Hiroike Akiko’s

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story, “The Only Ones,” was among the first works of fiction to address this demand. “The Only Ones” is filled with familiar images of life in a postwar base town: Japanese women with English nicknames and blazing red fingernails; a seedy roominghouse where American soldiers come and go at all hours; pimps, alcoholics, and drug addicts; tough whores impervious to any threat; and pitiful women who sacrifice their bodies to support their fatherless families. The story centers on three mistresses (the eponymous “only ones”) and on the naive “mama-san” who runs the roominghouse where they live. All three mistresses are referred to by their newly adopted English names—Kelly, Susie, and Mary— as if their Japanese identity had been erased the moment they first had sex with an American soldier. While it is common in colonial contexts for the “native” subject to assume a new name in the colonizer’s language, this practice was rare in occupied Japan except when the person was a mistress, prostitute, or popular entertainer.18 The idea that sex with foreign men threatens Japanese identity reaches a ludicrous extreme in “The Only Ones” when the narrative describes Kelly’s cheeks as “so dark that people rumored she must have had a black boyfriend at one time” (195). Readers are left to conclude that not only is Japanese identity at risk, but that even skin color can be transformed through sexual contact with the occupiers. As we saw in Chapter One, the English language is also deemed capable of transforming the occupied subject. Speaking English liberates female characters such as Michiko in “The American School.” while it humiliates and renders mute male characters such as Isa (“The American School”), Toshio (“American Hijiki”), and the protagonists of Ōe’s “Human Sheep” and “Dumbstruck” (Fui no oshi, 1958).19 Sono’s “Guests From Afar” also uses English as a cultural battleground. Hiroike Akiko, in contrast, has surprisingly little to reveal about language and identity under foreign occupation, except that Japanese mistresses assume English names and speak “panglish” (a Japanese-English pidgin spoken by panpans). “The Only Ones” also informs readers that, unlike Japanese or French, “English basically lacks nuance” (204). Yet unlike men’s stories that include GI mistresses and prostitutes as ancillary characters, “The Only Ones” centers on the lives of the mistresses themselves, depicting the women’s thorough dependence on their American patrons. Part of this dependency derives from their isolation from mainstream Japanese society. Everyone but other social outcasts shuns the mistresses, who are visibly “marked” by their gaudy (American-style) clothes and make-up. Especially revealing is Susie’s secret relationship with her good-for-nothing Japanese boyfriend, Kawamura. Although Kawamura relentlessly sponges off her and boasts few redeeming values, his status as a Japanese man enables Susie to participate in a domestic (in both senses of the word) relationship. At the end of the story she gathers all of her worldly possessions, which were bought for her by “Papa-san,” her American patron, and runs off with Kawamura without paying the rent or informing her neighbors at the roominghouse. Her decision

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initially seems understandable, but the narrative’s final scene renders it ambiguous when several neighborhood housewives gossiping about Susie remark, “Why in the world would she run off with a Japanese man? What a fool! She’s better off working an honest job as a panpan…” (212). Critic Isoda Kōichi rightly identifies this as the definitive moment in “The Only Ones.”20 As Isoda notes, the neighborhood women view marriage purely in pragmatic, economic terms, reasoning that if a woman is to be financially dependent on a man, she might as well be a GI prostitute or mistress and achieve a modicum of financial comfort. In their view, little separates a “respectable” housewife from a GI mistress or prostitute. This viewpoint has a long genealogy, as suggested by John Stuart Mill’s epigraph to the present chapter. Friedrich Engels also raised the question of how to distinguish prostitution from what he referred to as “monogamous marriage,” and Emma Goldman has explicitly equated prostitution and marriage.21 In her provocative 1910 essay, “The Traffic in Women,” Goldman observes: Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men. Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution.22 And in The Second Sex, de Beauvoir would later make essentially the same point: For both [the wife and prostitute] the sexual act is a service; the one is hired for life by one man; the other has several clients who pay her by the piece. The one is protected by one male against all others; the other is defended by all against the exclusive tyranny of each.23 Hiroike Akiko and especially leftist writers Nakamoto Takako and Hirabayashi Taiko suggest that marriage and prostitution are implicated in wider patterns of oppression. Despite the long lineage of this viewpoint among European leftists and feminists, it remained a radical insight in Japan during the decade following the war since, as we have seen, women were considered to be special beneficiaries of the American occupation. Whether the underlying causes of women’s ongoing oppression should be viewed as primarily economic, political, or moral (and whether such distinctions are even tenable) is subject to debate, but one would be hard-pressed to find this viewpoint expressed anywhere in Japanese men’s writing on the occupation. Hiroike gives the critique added punch in her story by presenting it as an offhand comment by a group of housewives, who themselves embody domesticity. Yet her depiction of the financial and emotional insecurity plaguing GI mistresses undercuts the

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housewives’ claim and renders the story’s denouement ambiguous. Readers who desire a more thorough exploration of the relationship between bourgeois respectability and the life of a GI mistress must turn to other women’s stories. Caste and outcasts: “Women of a Base Town” Communist writer Nakamoto Takako (1903–91) might be better remembered today for her radicalism than for her literary works. Indeed, if her fiction fails to impress itself on the reader’s memory, her intrepid spirit in the face of political repression is less easily forgotten. During the 1930s Nakamoto wrote proletarian literature and worked as a labor organizer, concentrating her efforts on female textile workers. Her political activities led to repeated arrests throughout the decade, and Nakamoto spent several years in prison where she was tortured and, consequently, developed chronic health problems. Like Hiroike, Nakamoto lived in Tachikawa during the Korean War. At this time she became involved in the “anti-base movement”—a coalition of women, farmers, labor unions, teachers’ unions and students that opposed America’s expansion of military bases in Japan, and during the mid-1950s Nakamoto wrote a novel that drew on her experiences in this citizen’s movement. Runway (Kasōro) concerns a group opposed to the expropriation of private land to extend a runway on an American Air Force base, and it was serialized in the Japan Communist Party newspaper, Akahata, in 1957. Earlier in her Tachikawa years, Nakamoto published an essay about daily life in the town and followed this with her little-known story, “Women of a Base Town.” The essay, entitled “A Profile of the Base Town, Tachikawa,” is yet another example of the nonfictional accounts of life near American military bases that appeared in the years immediately following the occupation.24 Nakamoto has never been acclaimed as a particularly accomplished writer of fiction, even by leftist critics sympathetic to her ideological positions, so perhaps it is not surprising that her nonfictional essay on Tachikawa seems more skillfully written than her 1953 short story on the same topic, “Women of a Base Town.” This story about GI mistresses in Tachikawa is virtually unknown in Japan today, not only because it failed to impress itself on contemporary readers (and was therefore never reprinted) but because it was published anonymously as part of a regular feature in the literary magazine, Gunzō. Those who saw or read the story in the July 1953 edition of Gunzō never learned the author’s identity unless they looked for the information, printed inconspicuously, in the following month’s edition.25 As one might expect from a story by a rather inept yet adamantly political writer of fiction, “Women of a Base Town” addresses more than its share of social issues. The San Francisco Peace Treaty, the Korean War, capitalism, patriarchy, and Japanese discrimination against the outcast burakumin all come under fire. But if this work fails to engage the imagination of readers, it does pursue questions that Hiroike Akiko raises only at the end of her story about GI

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mistresses in Tachikawa. In fact, “Women of a Base Town” begins where “The Only Ones” left off: with the question of how GI mistresses differ from married women. The narrative opens with two mistresses, Seiko and Sumiko, gossiping about their friend “Rose,” who recently married her American patron and moved to the United States. Seiko and Sumiko disagree on the status of a GI mistress. “We’re ‘only ones’ and that’s the same as being married, right?” “No, it isn’t. Being married and being an ‘only one’ are completely different.” Seiko was incensed. Her fingers, with their poison-red nails, stubbed out her cigarette and then she lashed out at Sumiko. “You’re really a fool, aren’t you? What do we have to look forward to besides marriage? We can’t stay like this forever…” (102–03) While the mistresses in “Women of a Base Town” do seem destined to go on with their insecure lives indefinitely, the above passage should not be construed as affirming the conventional view that marriage ensures a woman lifelong security. The women are, after all, referring to marriage with an American soldier, which is understood to entail spending the rest of one’s life in a foreign country. Besides, Sumiko has already been married once. During the war, she married a Japanese college student named Wakabayashi Kazuo. Kazuo was involved in a leftist literary group and asked Sumiko to marry him three days before he was scheduled to leave for the war on the Asian continent. (The narrative makes no mention of whether he felt that his political commitment conflicted with his participation in Japan’s imperialist war.) Kazuo’s mother had hoped that he would find a wife from a prestigious family, but convinced that her son would not survive the war, she approved his hurried marriage arrangements. In a scenario milked repeatedly in Japanese melodramas, Sumiko is then left to suffer under the iron fist of her mother-in-law while awaiting the uncertain return of her new husband. Yet Nakamoto’s narrative differs from standard sentimental accounts of wifely forbearance in the face of a heartless mother-in-law, for the family’s post-marital investigations into Sumiko’s family background reveal her to be an outcast burakumin, and this prompts her mother-in-law to torment her ever more relentlessly. At one point the woman remarks, in a voice loud enough for Sumiko to overhear, “At least they didn’t have a child. After all, our blood is important. To contaminate our bloodline would be an insult to our ancestors” (110). By emphasizing that Sumiko’s suffering results not just from the cruel whims of an evil matriarch but from discriminatory practices long entrenched in Japanese society, “Women of a Base Town” brings an added dimension to the familiar scenario of the pitiable daughter-in-law. References to racial purity are common in Japanese accounts of the occupation era—particularly, as we have seen, in stories depicting “interracial” sex (whether forced or consensual) between

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Japanese women and black GIs. But Nakamoto’s narrative exposes the logic of racial purity to underpin both domestic and intranational forms of miscegenation. Unable to tolerate life with her mother-in-law, Sumiko soon returns to her village but finds it equally unbearable since here too she is unable to forget the stigma of being a burakumin. She then sets out for Tokyo, where she can bury her past while awaiting her husband’s return. Partly out of spite for her motherin-law, Sumiko accepts a job as a waitress in a café, an establishment viewed as too risqué for “respectable” women. The narrative explains, “Encouraged by the chaos and freedom of postwar society, there were waitresses working in cafes at that time who would, for a price, make available her most valuable female asset to customers who showed even the slightest interest in her” (111).26 The other waitresses, noting that Sumiko has remained faithful to her husband, tease her about adhering to such old-fashioned notions of chastity. After all, they remind her, more than two years have passed since her husband left Japan, and there is no indication that he is even alive. After much chiding, they finally persuade her to go out and join them for some fun, where one of the women, Machiko, suddenly foists on Sumiko an enormous GI. Oblivious to Sumiko’s protests, the soldier drags her to bed, and this incident leads to her undoing—not only because she is raped by a foreigner but because afterward the man tosses her a wad of money and she finds herself helpless before its magical spell. (Machiko later takes half the cash for having provided the introduction.) In what is supposed to be a decisive moment in the narrative, Sumiko returns to her apartment that night and in a fit of self-disparaging rage burns her husband’s photograph, realizing that “I will never be able to face him again,” after which “Sumiko rapidly slides down the slope of dissipation” and becomes a prostitute (112). Unlike Hiroike’s “The Only Ones,” which provides little information about the private histories of its characters, “Women of a Base Town” devotes several pages to the events leading up to Sumiko’s “fall” and further notes that Seiko and Machiko had also been raped by occupation soldiers, thereby implying that similar events precipitated their decline as well. Nakamoto’s story does not, however, represent rape as the sole reason for the women’s “fall” into prostitution, and in this regard it differs from The Chastity of Japan and Female Floodwall. “Women of a Base Town” highlights domestic discrimination in shaping Sumiko’s life, as does her own inability to resist financial temptation. Yet for all its self-conscious radicalism, in the final analysis this story presents a remarkably conventional view of prostitutes as fallen women and passive victims of a heartless society. Dispirited and corrupted after the rape, they become tempted by money and grow accustomed to a life without the toil of cooking and housework. One might expect the author to applaud these women’s rejection of domestic labor and reproductive sexuality, or at least to challenge the assumption that rape is the victim’s fault. Yet Nakamoto does neither. Equally surprising, given her own stalwart resistance to Japanese militarism, is Nakamoto’s treatment of the war, which appears in the narrative as an aporia. Kazuo, for

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example, is a political activist who leaves for the war and resumes his radical activities after returning, as if the war had no effect on his life or ideology. “Women of a Base Town” condemns a host of social evils, including the mother-in-law’s regressive ideas about blood, purity, and marriage. But in its need to evoke sympathy for its tragic protagonist, the narrative unwittingly lends credence to those assumptions about blood and purity that its indictment of antiburakumin discrimination clearly aims to refute. For example, the text orthographically equates interracial sex with impurity by recording the names of “Seiko,” “Sumiko,” and “Machiko” (a woman introduced later) in a combination of katakana and kanji. As we have seen, this orthographic combination would later become a common textual strategy for signifying women who have been transformed through intimate contact with the foreign occupiers. Admittedly, the use of katakana in women’s names was by no means unusual at the time. (In fact, “Taka” of Nakamoto’s given name was itself originally written in katakana, although the author wrote it in hiragana when her name appeared on publications.) Yet to use this same mixture of katakana and kanji for all three GI mistresses hints not only at their social marginality but at their physical impurity. The above contradictions would be less obvious were the story itself more engaging as a work of fiction—or at least more compelling as melodrama. Full of adulatory references to a host of left-wing organizations and activities, it comes as little surprise that “Women of a Base Town” failed to attract the attention of either literary critics or general readers. Its description of a youth group in a farming village is reminiscent of what readers have come to expect from the “boy meets tractor” genre of fiction that briefly reigned in the People’s Republic of China; and the portrayal of Sumiko’s brother and husband, both of whom are active in leftist political movements, all but cries out for the reader’s admiration of such selfless and noble young men. In short, “Women of a Base Town” is a pedantic work that pronounces its positions rather than insinuates them into the readers’ imagination through the power of fiction. The story’s melodramatic ending does, however, offer a provocative view of the occupation. Sumiko has become addicted to alcohol and drugs. She survives a suicide attempt, but the massive dose of drugs has dulled her senses, and venereal disease now ravages her mind and body. She has become relentlessly mercenary in her dealings with men and impervious to the daily abuse they bring. One day on the street she encounters a GI who is notorious for refusing to pay the prostitutes he hires. Sumiko insults and humiliates the soldier, who grabs her around the throat and begins choking her. Still, Sumiko continues to berate the American and a crowd soon gathers, prompting him to leave. As the soldier walks away, he shouts a final insult—“Jap!”—which pierces the tough veneer Sumiko has cultivated and echoes through her consciousness, where it blends with the sound of “eta!,” the pejorative that she heard so often growing up in the segregated burakumin village of her childhood. The final scene shows Sumiko picking up a jackknife, licking it, and “waiting once again for the Devil’s

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mocking laugh to ring out, prepared to take the blade and thrust it into her throat” (127). The narrative’s conflation of “Jap!” and “eta!” suggests that under the postwar occupation, all Japanese are subordinated to the status of prewar burakumin. By extension, the occupation is understood to constitute not a break with the prewar past but rather a variation on long-established forms of oppression. Nakamoto hammers home the point that Sumiko’s marriage falls apart not only because she was raped by an American soldier or because the war separated her from her husband, but also because Kazuo’s elite family spurns her lower-class, burakumin origins. Sumiko’s fate is determined by gender as well. One need only compare her life with that of the narrative’s male characters: her brother, Noboru, is also a burakumin, and her husband, Kazuo, is repatriated to Japan only to learn that she has abandoned him. Yet despite Noboru’s background and Kazuo’s broken marriage, both men ultimately find meaning and fulfillment in postwar society. “Women of a Base Town” contests the view that the occupation benefited Japan’s women and instead implies that while the new postwar freedoms extended to all men regardless of class background, lowerclass women saw little change in their everyday lives. The story further suggests that for those women of the base towns, even the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty marking the official end of American occupation brought no benefits (127). Readers are thus left with a work of occupation literature that reveals the occupation’s very insignificance in the lives of Japan’s lower-class women. Marriage, money, and desire in “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido” Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–72) was active in literary circles during the prewar era, when she wrote mysteries and children’s books in addition to the proletarian literature for which she became known at the time. But she established her literary reputation during the postwar years with more ambitious works of fiction often based on her rich life experience. As Japanese accounts of Hirabayashi’s life insistently remind us, this “life experience” includes many lovers. Shortly after graduating from a girls’ high school, which she was able to attend only after overcoming family opposition, Hirabayashi left her conservative rural home for the big city of Tokyo, partly in hope of meeting anarchist Sakai Toshihiko. After arriving in Tokyo, she found work as a telephone operator but was fired after her employer learned of her radical political leanings. She quickly became involved in anarchist circles, and in 1923, shortly after the Great Kantō Earthquake, Hirabayashi was arrested in a police roundup of anarchists and communists. Japanese authorities feared that radicals would sow public discontent amidst the chaos caused by the earthquake and ensuing fires. Released on the condition that she leave Tokyo, Hirabayashi set off with her lover for the Japanese colony of Korea and to Manchuria, where they traveled for nearly one

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year. Her experiences in Manchuria included imprisonment and the birth of her only child, a baby girl who died of malnutrition within one week. Hirabayashi returned to Japan in 1924 and in rapid succession went through a string of men, most of whom were anarchist writers and artists. By the time she was twenty-one, she had already lived with several different men. Needless to say, both her personal life and her politics were bold and iconoclastic for a young woman at the time. In 1927 Hirabayashi settled down with Kobori Jinji, a leftist writer and critic whom she eventually married. Although she became disillusioned with anarchism, communism, and leftist literary groups in the ensuing decade, Hirabayashi maintained a personal (if vaguely defined) commitment to radical ideology and continued to oppose militarism. She and Kobori were arrested in 1937 following the “China Incident,” and during her nine months in detention she developed pleurisy. For four years she lay on the verge of death and did not fully recover until after the war.27 Hirabayashi’s short story, “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido,” does not appear in any of the major Japanese literary anthologies, nor can it found in single-volume collections of her writing. Journal articles and literary references on Hirabayashi rarely mention this story, and in his afterword to Volume Five of The Complete Works of Hirabayashi Taiko, novelist Niwa Fumio allocates only three sentences to “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido.” Niwa describes the story as a “comedy” (kigeki), and suggests that its saving grace is the author’s treatment of a wealthy housewife as being no different from the GI prostitutes in the base town of Chitose.28 “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido” is shorter than Hiroike’s “The Only Ones” and Nakamoto’s “Women of a Base Town,” yet it offers a more thoughtful and refreshingly humorous exploration of class and gender during the occupation. Hirabayashi’s story addresses class difference by linking the activities of GI prostitutes, an upper-class housewife, and a former bar hostess who marries into a “good family” and eventually begins charging her husband for the privilege of her sexual favors. Chitose, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, was home to a large U.S. Air Force base during the occupation, and Hirabayashi begins her story by describing a landscape common to American base towns throughout Japan: shops, hotels, and restaurants with English signs such as “Hotel Chitose” or “Restaurant Mama”; loud, swaggering GIs driving around in khaki-colored military vehicles; and of course, the gaudy Japanese women who answer to English names, puff incessantly on cigarettes and adorn themselves in red. This parodic narrative centers on the life of a couple, Hayazō and Tsumako, who met two years ago in the town of Beppu, Kyushu, on the other end of Japan before moving to Chitose. Twenty-five years old, Hayazō is a dissolute, middleschool dropout from a well-known aristocratic family. The kanji used in his name can be translated to mean “manufactured quickly,” as if Hayazō’s parents (who died when he was young) wished to remind their son that his conception had been precipitous. Hayazō’s older brother, Yōichi, is more than twice his age. A successful agricultural and forestry engineer, he has assumed the mantel of

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family patriarch. When he learns that his younger brother has fallen head over heels for a bar hostess in Beppu and wishes to marry the woman, Yōichi’s first thought is “Here we go again!” (428). A bar hostess is bad enough; at twentyseven-years-old, Tsumako’s matrimonial qualifications are further diminished by her advanced age and seniority to Hayazō. Resigned to the worst, Yōichi travels all the way to Beppu to meet Tsumako (whose name can be translated to mean “wifely child”). He is pleasantly surprised to find that she seems to retain an air of innocence and is not yet the hardened veteran of the water trade he had expected. Within three days, Tsumako is referring to Yōichi as “Elder Brother” (o-niisama) and manages to soften him up sufficiently so that he approves the marriage. He still insists, however, that the wedding be conducted in Kyushu, away from his family. Noting the new freedoms accorded women by Japan’s postwar constitution, Yōichi acknowledges his lack of authority over the couple in his remarks to Tsumako: “You’re already living together, so nothing can be done at this point. Since the Constitution guarantees you the freedom to choose your marriage partner, I’ll withhold my opinion. But I have one request: as of today I’d like you to forget your past. And while it may seem unreasonable, I would also like you to quit smoking as of this very day. What do you think? Can you do it? Or is that too much to ask?” (428–29) Tsumako agrees to quit smoking, although in fact she only abstains when around her brother-in-law. The narrative makes no mention of Tsumako’s family or her past, other than noting that she once had an unsuccessful relationship with a man before meeting Hayazō, but her conversation with Yōichi does lead Tsumako to refine her appearance so that she better fits her new “wifely” role, thereby living up to her name. Tsumako discovers that being married gives her tremendous control over Hayazō, and she wields her “invisible charm like a leash, leading him around every which way and leaving him like a man floundering in water, with only his head keeping above the surface as he desperately gulps for air…” (429). Hayazō and Tsumako remain in Beppu for nearly one year, where they run a souvenir shop that caters to American servicemen stationed at a nearby military base. Hayazō realizes, however, that the only thing keeping his business alive is his wife’s ability to titillate the soldiers. This makes him uneasy, so he decides to move with Tsumako to Chitose, near his brother’s home. These events in Beppu serve as a prelude to the story’s main developments, which take place after the couple moves to Chitose. The narrative at this point assumes the tone of unabashed parody.29 In Chitose, Hayazō and Tsumako open a souvenir shop much like the one they had operated in Beppu. Yōichi is eager to introduce Tsumako to the young wife of an acquaintance, Mr. Tomokawa, who was recently transferred to Hokkaido to manage the local branch of a major Tokyo bank. Tomokawa is a balding, middle-

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aged man who always seems to have his nose in the English magazine, The Economist. His pretty wife, Ruriko, is fifteen years younger than Tomokawa and desires more emotional and sexual attention than her husband provides, but since Ruriko is the daughter of a wealthy financier and Tomokawa’s ticket to success, he “grants” her unusual freedom in pursuing her desires. Ruriko proves to be surprisingly open-minded despite her privileged upbringing, and she soon adopts Tsumako as her confidante, acknowledging but quickly dismissing their class differences: “There’s something a bit different about you. Let me guess. I bet you used to work in the water trade. Am I right?” Tsumako was astonished. “You saw right through me, didn’t you? It’s that obvious, is it? How depressing…” “Don’t worry about it. People will do anything to survive—sometimes they even have to steal.” Then she used an odd expression: “I won’t rat on ya.” Ruriko continued, “To tell the truth, since coming to this town I don’t look down on the panpan girls so much anymore. Once you get to know them, they’re just regular people like you and me. Besides, with so many of them around, it’s impossible to be looking down on everyone. And I must confess, in a sense I’m even a bit envious of them.” Tsumako was surprised to be hearing this from Ruriko, but she shared her sentiment. “You’re right about that. After moving to this place, you see those women everywhere, even at the public bath. And running a shop like ours, we’ve got to keep them happy since they bring us GI customers.” (430) This scene links Ruriko (the wealthy young woman who has everything except an attractive husband) and Tsumako (the former bar hostess who, with Hayazō, has assumed a more respectable lifestyle), to the prostitutes who dominate Chitose’s female landscape. Hirabayashi does not gloss over class differences but rather points to commonalities among women of different social and economic status. The issue of race soon comes into play as well. Ruriko becomes a regular visitor to the souvenir shop owned by Hayazō and Tsumako. One day a prostitute named Fanny enters the shop when Ruriko is present. Fanny is known to “specialize” in black GIs, and Ruriko corners her: “Fanny, tell me. What is love like with those men? Tell me in detail. I really want to know. I’m a naughty woman, aren’t I?” “Ha, ha! Rather than asking other people, why don’t you try it yourself? If you want, I’ll introduce you. Ma’am, a beautiful woman like you… they’d be on their knees begging!” “O.K., then, introduce me.” “Really, ma’am? Are you joking?” Fanny responded dryly. “I’m serious.”

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“Alright, then. Now, you’re not pulling my leg, are you?” “Not at all.” “O.K. Wait a while and I’ll get in touch with you.” Tsumako, who had been eavesdropping on the conversation, was stunned. “Ruriko, are you out of your mind? And with a Negro! I sure wouldn’t go through with it.” “Well, if you’re going to have an adventure, why not try something really different? Besides, it’ll make for good conversation later.” After this, Ruriko visits Tsumako’s shop less frequently and when she does, she seems uncomfortable around Hayazō. Fanny drops in one day, however, and Tsumako quickly takes her aside and asks what has become of Ruriko. Fanny replies, “She’s at it, alright. And she’s a bold one, too. Puts professionals like me to shame. Those amateurs are scary!” Not long afterwards, noting that Hayazō is away from the shop, Ruriko ventures in and confesses to Tsumako that she is completely hooked and claims that “there is no turning back now” (432). Ruriko has taken to wearing such dynamic outfits that even the local panpan gape when she passes them on the street. Having witnessed her friend’s transformation, Tsumako is left feeling ambivalent about her own situation. Business at the souvenir shop has been slow, and she bemoans having to wear the same blouse as the year before. Her relationship with Hayazō has grown dull, and she even considers asking Fanny to introduce her to a GI as a potential customer. “I’m not like Ruriko,” she thinks, “so I would never do it for free…I’m not that stupid” (433). Yet Tsumako discovers that she is more tightly bound by middle-class morality than she had thought, and is unable to act on her fantasies. She does, however, come up with a creative solution to her predicament. First she suggests to Hayazō that he occasionally go out and “have a good time with a different woman,” assuring him that “it would be alright once in a while” (433). But Hayazō sees right through this ruse, accusing her of “wanting to be just like Ruriko…I know what you’re up to” (433). Tsumako counters, “A wife doesn’t cost a penny. That’s quite a bargain. Go out and try buying a woman for just one night; it’ll cost you ¥5000” (433). Hayazō becomes incensed and hits Tsumako. Frustrated that he no longer seems to understand his wife’s feelings, Hayazō offers to divorce her: “Are you tired of being with me? Tell me the truth. If you are, I’ll give you a divorce.” “That’s not it. How can I explain…in other words, I just want you to recognize my value, that’s all.” “What do you mean by that? You want me to pay you? ¥5000 per night? I suppose that would do it, huh? Goddamn whore!” (434)

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For several days the couple lives in silence until Tsumako offers a deal: “Hayazō, I’ve come up with a good idea. I’d like you to pay me.” “For what?” “You know, for each time. Let’s conduct our transactions with cash. Think of it as if you were buying another woman, and it shouldn’t be that hard.” “Hm. So that’s what you’ve been thinking, huh?” (434) From this point on, Tsumako, “like a clerk,” never forgets to ask for payment up front, except on special occasions when she grants Hayazō her services for free. For his part, Hayazō feels compelled to ask whether “tonight is for a charge or on the house” (435). He is usually disappointed at the answer; Tsumako, however, prudently saves all of her earnings and finds herself in much improved spirits. The story’s final parodic twist comes when Ruriko becomes pregnant with her black lover’s child. Her maid, a former veteran of the water trade, comes to Tsumako asking if she knows of a nurse who would agree to switch the infant for a Japanese baby. The maid claims to have heard of such a case before. Immediately after the birth, the nurse in question made the switch, undetected by everyone but the mother who arranged it. Not only did the switch go undetected, but the father reportedly picked up the baby and proudly announced, “he looks just like me!” (436). Men are consistently duped and manipulated in “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido,” and Ruriko also succeeds in fooling her husband about his paternity. The narrative ends with Tsumako rushing to the Tomokawa home to see the newborn baby boy: “How darling! He looks just like Mr. Tomokawa!” gushed Tsumako, without thinking. Mr. Tomokawa, holding a business magazine in one hand, stood by the window, brimming with pride. When a man reaches middle age, it would appear that the birth of his first son brings on emotions even more intense than one might imagine. Ruriko lay in bed, with her back to her husband, winking at Tsumako knowingly. “Damn her!” thought Tsumako, realizing that Ruriko must have learned this foreign gesture from the black man. At that moment she cursed Ruriko’s infidelity.30 (436) Despite the narrative’s omniscient perspective throughout, “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido” clearly identifies with its female protagonist, as evident in the above passage by the speculative modality used to represent Mr. Tomokawa’s emotional state but not that of Tsumako. Throughout the story, men are represented as suckers, duped and manipulated by their wives and lovers:

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Tomokawa is fooled about his own paternity by Ruriko (with Tsumako’s help); Hayazō is forced to pay his wife for the privilege of her sexual attentions; and even Ruriko’s black lovers, although never named or described in the story, are clearly objects of her desire and not the initiators of their relationship. Like Yamada Eimi’s assertive heroines three decades later, Ruriko initiates the relationships in pursuit of her own sexual desire. This is precisely, one might argue, what the RAA’s “female floodwalls” were ultimately intended to prevent: lustful liaisons between the foreign occupiers and the “good women” of Japan’s middle and upper classes, relationships that fling open the floodgates, releasing a torrent of female desire that threatens Japanese male hegemony over both the social and economic realms. Significantly, Ruriko lusts after not white but black men, for they are seen as the embodiment of unbridled sexuality and alterity. Unlike Tsumako and Fanny, Ruriko’s relationships with the black men are unsullied by financial transactions; her desire is free in every sense of the word. In contrast, Tomokawa is so intent on career advancement that he remains oblivious to his young wife’s sexual dalliances. As a banker, he embodies capitalism itself, and his life revolves around money. “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido” is a brief story that refuses to take itself too seriously, yet it nonetheless explores the relationship between money, marriage, and prostitution in a droll and disarmingly insightful manner. Unlike other women’s stories set in base towns, Hirabayashi’s work focuses not on prostitutes or mistresses but rather on women married to Japanese men. In the process, this narrative breaks down the barrier separating Chitose’s GI prostitutes from “respectable” married women. Each of the three female characters represents a different social class, yet all are involved in sexual relationships defined in terms of money. We can safely assume that Ruriko’s marriage was arranged by her wealthy family. It is a marriage of financial convenience for her parents and Tomokawa, so when Ruriko pursues her own desire, she refuses to be encumbered by money. In contrast, Fanny, whose name speaks for itself and who metonymically represents all of Chitose’s panpan, seems unmoved by desire and views sex with the soldiers as a matter-of-fact business transaction. Of the three women, Tsumako’s relationship to money and desire is the most complicated. She renounces her past and marries a small-time merchant (albeit one from an aristocratic family), thereby gaining entry to the petite bourgeoisie and acquiring social respectability. But she insists on confirming her wifely value through a conjugal contract evocative of Fanny’s relations with her GI customers. On those nights when Tsumako offers her services to Hayazō for free, she is actually flaunting her newfound power over her husband in a most conventional way. At the story’s end, Tsumako is bound by middle-class morality (although her own behavior toward Hayazō hardly adheres to traditional notions of wifely virtue), and she is envious of Ruriko’s ability to enjoy both the financial security of marriage and the freedom to pursue her own desires. Yet even Ruriko is constrained by the shackles of marriage. Despite her unfaithfulness to Tomokawa and her boasts about being willing to leave him at

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any time, she ultimately chooses deceit over divorce and a Japanese infant over her own “mixed blood” child.31 In fact, every married character in “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido”—including the financially successful men, Yōichi and Tomokawa—are shown to be bound and blinded by money, desire, and by the institution of marriage itself. All three of these women’s stories set in base towns offer a jaded view of marriage even in the wake of SCAP’s postwar reforms. Hiroike and Nakamoto suggest that these reforms have had little impact on women from the lower classes, and Hirabayashi goes further by implying that men as well as women from all social classes are shackled by the institution of marriage. She insists that despite the new freedoms accorded Japanese women, marriage retains its fundamental economic character, in which sex is exchanged for money. Hirabayashi challenges the commonsensical distinction between the upper-class housewife and the “common prostitute,” and in a remarkably progressive feminist insight, she insists that upper-class men are also (but not equally) constrained by the very patriarchal, capitalist institutions from which their authority derives. These three women’s stories about life in a base town differ from men’s writing on the occupation in several critical ways. First, they examine the occupation through a focus on entrenched forms of class- and gender-based oppression rooted in prewar society. Second, even stories such as “The Only Ones” and “Women in a Base Town,” which focus on Japanese women raped by the American occupiers, avoid using metaphors of sexual humiliation to create a national allegory of Japan under foreign occupation. In this respect, these narratives are the antithesis of men’s allegories such as The Chastity of Japan and Female Floodwall, which purport to be true accounts by women. It is not that Japanese women writers eschew national allegory altogether; rather, like Hirabayashi in “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido,” they twist the metonymical logic of national allegory to their own purposes. Instead of using the American occupiers’ sexual domination over Japanese women to dramatize the humiliation of the nation’s men, Hirabayashi uses “interracial sex” with the occupiers to expose how Japanese capitalism and patriarchy connive within bourgeois marriage to oppress the nation’s men as well as women. Together, these three works of occupation literature thus reveal domestic conditions such as poverty, prejudice, and patriarchy to be the main source of women’s oppression. The American occupiers merely put a new face on old problems.

6 The occupier within

The Japanese, in a sense, have been castrated. In the face of our terrorist politics, we have become as passive as sheep. (Takami Jun, diary entry for 5 October 1945) Japanese women writers such as Nakamoto Takako and Hirabayashi Taiko suggest that the American occupation, despite the many changes it brought, exerted comparatively little effect on the nation’s women. Yes, they imply, women gained new legal freedoms, but familiar forms of oppression continued at home and in the workplace. The two male authors discussed in the present chapter, Ōe Kenzaburō and Nosaka Akiyuki, have consistently emphasized the occupation’s impact and the dramatic changes it brought. At the same time, however, both men reveal how the occupation served to exacerbate divisiveness already present within Japanese society. Ōe’s “Human Sheep” (“Ningen no hitsuji,” 1958) shows how relationships of domination between the occupiers and the occupied are replicated among the Japanese, while Nosaka’s “American Hijiki” (“Amerika hijiki,” 1967) insists that an entire generation of Japanese men continues to be plagued by memories of the occupation era, memories that isolate them from relatives and co-workers.1 Both stories also deploy many of the literary approaches to the occupation typically found in men’s writing and discussed in earlier chapters. For example, they represent the experience of foreign occupation in terms of linguistic and sexual impotence, employ symbolic landscapes that frame the narrative as an allegory of occupied Japan, and use the figure of a prostitute to mediate relationships between Japanese men and the occupation soldiers. Readers familiar with the reputations of Ōe and Nosaka might find it odd to discuss these two writers together. Ōe has always been treated as a serious author by Japan’s literary establishment, even by those critics who berate his distinctive literary style as “Japanese literature that reads as if directly translated from a European language.” But Ōe’s early stories such as “Prize Stock” and “Human Sheep” show the author capable of writing with great beauty and power. Ōe has also been among the nation’s leading intellectuals since the early 1960s. Born in a village on the island of Shikoku in 1935, he graduated from the Department of

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French Literature at Tokyo University (Japan’s most elite university), and at age twenty-three he was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for “Prize Stock.” One need hardly add that in 1994 he became the second Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Despite these accolades and his established position within the nation’s intellectual circles, Ōe has not assumed the air of a staid literary patriarch. Even when treating the most weighty issues he can be extremely funny, and he has never shied away from sexually provocative material. (Early in his career, he noted his fondness for Henry Miller and, more recently, for Milan Kundera.) Ōe has also been an outspoken advocate for leftist political causes. In 1960 he traveled to the People’s Republic of China and called for greater cultural contact between China and Japan; throughout the 1960s and 1970s he wrote nonfiction about the ongoing impact of the atomic bombings, America’s occupation of Okinawa, and the Vietnam War. After receiving the Nobel Prize, he canceled a much-publicized trip to Paris at the invitation of the French government in order to protest the nation’s nuclear tests in the South Pacific. He also rejected a prestigious cultural award that was to be presented by Emperor Akihito. Nosaka Akiyuki is similarly known for his humor, his fondness for sexually explicit material, and a distinctive writing style, which is invariably compared to the seventeenth-century Japanese writer of comic prose, Ihara Saikaku. Like, Ōe, Nosaka wrote several stories set during the occupation early in his literary career, and these remain among his most acclaimed works. But Nosaka is generally considered a “popular writer” who is as noteworthy for his colorful biography and bombastic behavior as for his stories. In fact, Nosaka has even been accused of possessing a biography that is more interesting than his literature. His eclectic professional Background began shortly after he dropped out of Waseda University where, like Ōe, he majored in French literature. Subsequent jobs include stints as: a lyricist for television commercials, a hack writer for magazines, a producer of television commercials, a singer, who appeared on television in white suit and sunglasses, the editor of a popular book entitled How to be a Playboy, a political candidate (he ran against Tanaka Kakuei, the don of Japan’s conservative party, in his home district), and allaround provocateur who once created an uproar by referring to women as “subhuman.”2 In his spare time, Nosaka practiced kickboxing and drank heavily—so heavily that as a college student he briefly checked into a psychiatric hospital and later entered a zen monastery for a few weeks, although he soon resumed drinking. Nosaka’s childhood was equally colorful, although often tragic. He was born in Kamakura to an affluent family, but his mother died three months after giving birth to Akiyuki. He was then sent to Kobe, where he was raised by his aunt and uncle, not knowing that they had adopted him or that he had an older biological brother and sister. By the end of the war, his foster father had been killed, his foster mother was seriously ill, and fourteen-year-old Akiyuki was left wandering through the burned-out ruins and black markets in search of food,

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carrying his younger sister on his back. While Nosaka managed to survive, his sister died of malnutrition. This experience has been memorialized (and mythified by Nosaka, according to one critic) in his poignant story “Grave of the Fireflies,” (“Hotaru no haka” 1967).3 Published one month after “American Hijiki” this story (later made into a popular anime film), shows a pensive, sentimental side to Nosaka that is less evident in later works. After his sister died, Nosaka lived as a war orphan, sleeping in train stations, shining shoes, pimping for the occupation troops, and getting into enough trouble to be placed in an institution for juvenile delinquents, which eventually contacted Nosaka’s biological father, who brought Akiyuki home to live with his brother and sister. Many of the events from Nosaka’s youth are fleetingly described in “American Hijiki.” Like “Grave of the Fireflies,” this story is based largely on the author’s personal experience.4 Despite the obvious differences between the writers’ personal backgrounds, however, the early writings of Nosaka and Ōe may have more in common than literary critics have acknowledged. Reproducing the occupation: “Human Sheep” Postwar Japanese writers have often employed the symbol of the sheep to represent the nation’s passive response to both Japanese militarists and the American occupiers. Takami Jun’s famous postwar diary entry and Ōe Kenzaburō’s 1958 story, “Human Sheep,” offer but two examples. In 1958 Ōe published several works that explore the humiliating conditions of life under foreign occupation, and he himself has noted that in these stories he wanted to explore the occupation through the motif of “life within walls.” Published in February 1958, only one month after “Prize Stock,” “Human Sheep” has received comparatively little attention from critics, although Ōe has professed a fondness for the story.5 “Human Sheep” takes place in an unspecified year during the American occupation, and is narrated by a college student who boards a bus and is directed to sit at the back, which is “occupied” by a group of drunk and rowdy white soldiers.6 With the exception of the student, and a prostitute sitting on a GI’s lap, Japanese passengers and American troops sit segregated, creating an allegorical setting in which the bus represents occupied Japan. The Japanese driver and bus attendant are ostensibly in charge, but all Japanese—passengers and driver alike —are at the mercy of the soldiers. Ōe uses the restricted social and linguistic space of the bus not so much to condemn the abuses of occupation rule as to examine the responses of the occupied populace. In the story’s opening scene, when the narrator is directed by the bus attendant to take a seat at the back (the occupied territory), he squeezes in next to a window, creating as much distance between himself and the troops as possible. Still, the bus is so crowded that the student’s thigh “touches the plump, firm buttocks of an American soldier” (141). The soldiers are all described as “young, with small foreheads and large, moist eyes like those of a cow” (141). One of the

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soldiers with a “thick, fatty red neck,” is whispering what appear to be unwelcome suggestions into the ear of the prostitute who sits on his lap. The woman, like the soldier, is drunk and is described as “short, with a broad face” (141). The soldier’s innuendos irritate the woman, but her irritation only serves to entertain the other soldiers and goad them on to greater levels of raucousness. The woman becomes angry and gets up, flings herself at the student, then proceeds to pelt the soldiers with insults in Japanese, which they do not understand. The rest of the Japanese passengers sit lined up against the windows intently ignoring the fracas in the back of the bus. The woman’s insults begin with the proclamation of racial difference and end with a challenge grounded in that difference: “I’m an Oriental, so…hey, what is it with you? You’re obnoxious! You better not try to fool with me!” The soldier, his lap now empty, opened his long legs like a monkey and stared quizzically at the woman and me. “Damn it! What the hell are you trying to do to me?! And in front of all these people…” The woman kept shouting and shaking her head in exasperation at the dumbfounded soldiers. “And what are you doing to my throat?! You’re repulsive!” The frightened bus attendant turned away. “You and your disgusting bodies—even your backs are hairy!” The woman continued hysterically, “I’d rather screw this kid here!” (142) Following this audacious challenge to the soldiers, everyone in the bus, including the GIs, turns to the student, who is unwittingly inducted into this act of subversion. Although he tries to separate himself from the woman, she clings to him tenaciously and continues her tirade: “You jerks…why don’t you go hump a cow! I’d rather do it with this kid!” (142) This opening scene, through delineation of the symbolic space of the bus, points to the complexity of both domination and resistance under occupation, and this complexity is embodied in the ambiguous figure of the prostitute. Like Michiko from “The American School,” she is a liminal figure capable of functioning in both English and Japanese, which allows her to mediate between the world of the Japanese passengers and that of the foreign troops, although, also like Michiko, she is excluded from both. Her liminality is represented spatially as well, for she moves from the soldier’s lap to a position of intimacy with the unresponsive Japanese student. More than any of the other Japanese passengers on the bus, this woman knows the occupiers’ strengths and weaknesses. By removing herself to the periphery of the space they occupy, she poses a tentative challenge to their authority. Shouting at the soldiers in Japanese allows her directly to evoke her own authority through the power of her native language. As we saw in “The American School” and The Cocktail Party, language often serves as both a

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symbol of power and as an object of struggle, and by displacing English as the language of authority, the prostitute temporarily silences her dominators. This moment of empowerment represents a significant reversal, a challenge to the hegemony of the soldiers and their language. But it is a lonely and fragile moment, for the Japanese passengers are also incapable of speech, and with their loss of language the possibility of resistance crumbles. As in “Prize Stock” and his other early stories, Ōe represents the foreign soldiers in “Human Sheep” through animal metaphors (they are hairy, with simian legs and bovine eyes) and suggests that an animal would serve as an appropriate sexual partner. Yet there are meaningful differences between the portrayal of the white soldiers in “Human Sheep” and that of the black prisoner in “Prize Stock.” Most obvious is that the description of the white soldiers relies far less on stereotypes. The “fatty necks” and “bovine eyes” of these white soldiers are products of Ōe’s fertile imagination, not cliches drawn from a reservoir of ready-made images. Unlike their black counterparts, the white soldiers’ power derives not only from their physical strength and virility, but from their authority as representatives of the occupation forces. And although both stories refer repeatedly to the animality of the soldiers, the white man’s body is presented as grotesque, a far cry from the captivating beauty of the black soldier in “Prize Stock.” Even the soldiers’ copulation with an animal—real or imaginary—must be distinguished in the two stories. In “Prize Stock,” there is clearly a displacement of desire (projection) on the part of the boys in their vicarious enjoyment of the black GI’s actions. In “Human Sheep,” on the other hand, the woman’s suggestion that the hairy white soldiers mount a cow attests to her disgust with their bodies, and she says as much by announcing her preference for the Japanese student, who was until this point an innocent bystander. As we will see, however, this story insists that there are no innocent bystanders in the face of abusive power, and it exposes any presumption of innocence to be a form of complicity. Just when the narrator attempts to free himself from the woman by knocking away her arms, the bus swerves sharply and she is thrown to the floor, as if flung down by the student. The soldiers, not having understood a word of the woman’s harangue, become indignant at what they see as the student’s callousness, and they transform themselves into her protectors. This transformation hints at the Janus-faced role of the American occupiers: on the one hand, they avail themselves of the bodies of Japan’s women, either through physical force or economic might; on the other hand, they assume the role of protector and guarantor of women’s rights, extending opportunities to Japanese women not previously accorded by their own government. That this protective impulse of the soldiers is triggered by their complete misunderstanding of the situation only heightens the scene’s irony and suggests that the occupation itself was forged from a host of misperceptions. The soldiers are briefly silenced during the woman’s outburst, but they soon reclaim the power of speech as she is spatially and figuratively returned to a

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position of subordination: flung away from the student, she lies on her back, at the feet of the GI she has insulted. Throughout the story Ōe reinforces depictions of linguistic authority in terms of spatial relations and posture. He also links linguistic and sexual impotence, bringing together two of the most common tropes used to represent the male sense of helplessness before the occupation soldiers. While the prostitute’s attempt to resist the authority of the soldiers is ultimately unsuccessful, it is worth noting that she is the only Japanese who offers any resistance at all, perhaps because, as a “fallen woman” scorned by her own society, the prostitute has so little to lose. Once the soldiers are transformed into the woman’s protectors, the student feels threatened and “searched for words of apology, but under the gaze of all those foreign troops, the words got stuck in my throat and wouldn’t come out” (142–43). The occupier’s gaze instantly renders the Japanese male subject impotent, both linguistically and sexually. Conversely, the soldier who had been rejected and silenced by the prostitute is again empowered with language and assumes the role of the woman’s protector, shouting out orders to the passengers on the bus (although the student-narrator confesses that he could not understand a single word that was said.) The soldier then resorts to force and draws a knife, ordering the student—and some of the Japanese men on the bus, including the driver—to drop their pants, line up, and bend over as the soldiers run up and down the aisle, spanking them and chanting a verse resembling a children’s rhyme: Shoot the sheep, shoot the sheep, Bam! Bam! Bam! Shoot the sheep, shoot the sheep, Bam! Bam! Bam! (145) As the soldiers revel in this outlet for their drunken energy, their indignation reverts to mere raucousness, and the threatening moment of subversion presented earlier by the prostitute has passed. The power of speech is returned to the domain of the soldiers, who also maintain control over the spatial world of the bus as they freely dance about, spanking the naked buttocks of the Japanese male passengers. In contrast, the passengers remain mute, their bodies exposed, crouched and frozen into a humiliating imitation of a passive animal. The narrator describes his naked exposure through what can be read as a metaphor for castration, since he notes that his penis has “withdrawn into him” from contact with the winter air (144). The soldiers, in contrast, remain fully dressed in their military uniforms, protected and empowered by these emblems of male authority. This depiction of the Japanese passengers’ humiliation relies heavily on animal metaphors, likening the passengers to “tiny animals,” “a dog,” and finally, “sheep” (143–45). As we saw in “Prize Stock,” Ōe has a penchant for such metaphors but does not assign them indiscriminately, and readers must examine

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the specific type of animality he attributes to a given character. The prostitute is the one character who does have the courage to stand up to the occupiers, yet she feels embarrassed by the cowardly behavior of her fellow Japanese: The soldiers’ woman placed her hand on my back and said to me quietly, “Please, stop.” Down on all fours, like a dog, I shook my head back and forth, glanced up to see her disappointed expression, and then let my head drop again as I resumed my position in the line of ‘sheep’ which stretched out before me. At that point, as if completely abandoning herself, the woman let out a shriek and joined the foreign soldiers singing in chorus, “Shoot the sheep, shoot the sheep, Bam! Bam! Bam!” (145) From her earlier tirade, it would seem that the woman has been carousing with the troops more out of need than desire, and by asking the student to reclaim his dignity she is clearly hoping to regain some of her own. With this final hope extinguished, she abandons herself to the world of the soldiers and is left to resume a life of degradation. Despite her marginal social status, the prostitute still identifies with the Japanese passengers, and her return to the world of the soldiers is thus all the more pathetic. While the story represents her in the cliched terms of the “fallen woman,” rejected by her own society and used as a sexual plaything by the occupiers, “Human Sheep” also shows her pitying her fellow Japanese, who are as passive as sheep. The woman’s mere presence and her social marginality thus serves to highlight the failure of “respectable” citizens to resist abuses of power by the American occupiers. Both class and gender play a central role in this scene, for it is a lower-class woman who stands up against the male occupiers, only to find that middle-class men (as embodied by the student) lack the courage to join her. Neither do the bus driver nor the female passengers display any solidarity with the woman during this critical subversive moment. The soldiers eventually tire of their prank and get off the bus, taking the prostitute with them and leaving the “sheep” behind, bent down “like bare trees blown over in a storm” (145). During the soldiers’ escapade, not all of the passengers are subjected to the humiliation of exposing themselves, and those spared the indignation simply look on, snickering among themselves (144). The scene with the soldiers and prostitute sets the stage for the central struggle in “Human Sheep,” which occurs among the Japanese passengers, and the remainder of the narrative explores the relationship between resistance and complicity under foreign occupation. Domination, as Ōe reminds us in this story, is established and maintained through relationships that require the mutual participation—be it active or passive—of its subjects. Although he begins by

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depicting the relationship between the occupiers and the occupied, in “Human Sheep” Ōe is particularly intent on exploring how this relationship is replicated within the domestic sphere. This new conflict is centered on the narrator and a middle-aged male teacher, one of the passengers who was not directly victimized but who fervently attempts to persuade the victims to report the incident to the police. It gradually becomes clear that the teacher, as a self-appointed representative of the unvictimized passengers who huddle around him, is so determined to achieve justice on behalf of the victims that he is willing to outdo the soldiers in humiliating them. When the narrator of “Human Sheep” first boards the bus it is segregated into two groups, Japanese and Americans; after the soldiers disembark, it is again segregated—this time into Japanese victims and witnesses. The two groups of Japanese passengers are referred to as either “sheep” or as “those who weren’t victimized,” but they are further distinguished through their spatial separation, their access to speech, and through their relationship to those who witness, and thereby aggravate, the indignation: Nearly all of the “sheep” were huddled together in the back few rows. The teacher and his group—those who had not been victimized—sat in the front half of the bus, their excited faces pressed together, staring at us. The driver was sitting with the rest of us in the back rows. […] Then the driver put on his gloves, returned to the wheel, and as the bus took off again, the front rows came to life. Those people, the passengers in the front of the bus, began to whisper and stare at us victims. I was aware especially of the teacher, who gazed at us intently, his lips quivering. I slid down in my seat, and trying to escape their gaze I let my head drop, averting my eyes. The humiliation hardened like stone inside me, and I felt tiny, poisonous buds begin to sprout forth throughout my body. (146) In this passage, the two groups are spatially separated, and those in the front of the bus regain the power of speech as the bus takes off. They stare at the “sheep,” who, as if unable to shake off their degrading role, sit silently huddled together, passive subjects of the debilitating gaze. The “poisonous buds” that the narrator feels growing inside him are in part a response to his earlier humiliation by the GIs. But his venomous feelings are also directed at those passengers sitting in the front of the bus—those who, through their gaze, have metaphorically unclothed him much as the soldiers stripped away his pants. The Japanese witnesses replace the American soldiers (as is reflected in the spatial reorganization of the passengers in terms of speaking/mute and seeing/seen), and the structure of domination remains in place. The real crime committed by the soldiers is revealed to be their divisive impact on the Japanese passengers.

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The relationship between these two groups of passengers is ambiguous because the Japanese witnesses claim to be advocates for the victims—just as SCAP purported to advocate on behalf of Japan’s citizens whose rights had been violated by their own government. The teacher eventually tries to bridge the gap between the groups when he walks to the back of the bus and demonstrates his “camaraderie” with the victims: “I can’t understand why they became so involved in the whole thing,” said the teacher. “It can’t be normal to receive that much pleasure from treating Japanese like common animals.” One of those passengers from the front of the bus who hadn’t been victimized came and stood next to the teacher, and then boldly glanced at us with great feeling. After that, men from all the front rows came and lined up next to the teacher, their cheeks flushed with excitement. They clustered around, jousting for position, and looked down at us “sheep.” “…It’s no good keeping quiet and letting them get away with this kind of thing,” said a man who appeared to be a construction worker. “They’ll just keep it up until it becomes a habit.” They surrounded us like hunting dogs sniffing out a rabbit. The voices of these passengers standing around us were filled with indignation as they talked amongst themselves. And we “sheep” sat there, heads drooping meekly, listening silently as they showered us with words. (147) Although the spatial distance between the two groups has been closed, they are clearly marked by posture. The victims are seated, drooping, static; the others are animated and standing, looking down on the passive “sheep.” Again, the dominant group is in command of language, showering words upon the heads of the mute victims while berating them for their silence. Silence as an obstacle to political resistance is taken up more directly in the following passage: “I’ll be a witness for you,” said one of the other men. “Let’s do it,” the teacher chimed in. “C’mon folks, don’t just sit there with your mouths shut tight like a bunch of mutes…please, stand up.” Mutes. We “sheep” had somehow become “mutes.” Not one of us even tried to open his mouth in response. “…I think it’s wrong to bear this in silence.” The teacher was becoming irritated as he looked at our drooping heads. He continued, “it was inexcusable for the rest of us to sit and watch without saying anything. It’s time for us all to get rid of this passive attitude.” Another passenger, nodding in agreement at the teacher’s comments, added, “we need to let those soldiers know that they can’t get away with this! We’ll support you.”

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But not one of the “sheep” tried to respond to the encouraging words. We stared silently at the floor, as if their words were inaudible, shut off from us by some invisible wall. “Those of you who underwent that embarrassment, those of you who suffered that humiliation—you must band together!” (148) With the teacher’s final exhortation, one of the “sheep” stands, grabs him by the collar, and “shooting spittle from his thinly parted lips, glares at the teacher but is unable to utter a word” (148). Like the soldier who could not make his orders understood through language, the angry “sheep” resorts to brute force and punches the teacher squarely in the face, knocking him down. Several of the bystanders restrain the man, who soon calms down, and the witnesses return to their seats. Any hope for uniting against the Americans is shattered. After their moment of resistance, the “sheep” again sit drooping, “like small animals,” having remained mute throughout the skirmish (148). The above passage highlights the spatial and linguistic dimensions of power that are so salient throughout this work: the ability to speak versus muteness, standing versus sitting, seeing versus being seen. During the moment of subversion, there is again a reversal in two of these dimensions, for the angry “sheep” stares at the teacher, and after knocking him down the man stands over him. But the man never regains the power of speech, nor do any of the other “sheep,” and they soon exit the bus having uttered not a word. The student gets off the bus not long afterwards and discovers that he has been followed by the teacher, who insists that they go to the police and report the incident. Too exhausted to resist, the student meekly allows himself to be dragged to the nearby police box, where two neighborhood patrolmen are on duty. The teacher ardently relates the incident to the policemen, and when he describes the spanking of the naked passengers, the policemen stare curiously at the student. Exposed to the denuding gaze once more, the narrator “felt as if I was again stripped of my pants and forced to crouch, my naked butt protruding…” (152). The police find the whole story amusing, and when they ask the student for his account, he refuses to talk. Silence has now become a form of resistance for the student, and without his cooperation, the police insist that they cannot investigate the incident. Besides, as the policemen have already noted, “problems involving the military base must be handled delicately” (151). In “Human Sheep,” as in “Painting on Black Canvas,” the police mock rather than empathize with the victims of the occupiers. Powerless to carry out their duties, they take refuge in a cynical voyeurism that situates them on the side of the occupiers. The police resemble teachers in that both are officials who had so enthusiastically supported the militarists only a few years earlier, and they are, therefore, represented in these works as unsympathetic and untrustworthy. The student leaves the police box, only to be further dogged by the teacher. After several unsuccessful attempts to elude his pursuer, the student shoves him

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into the bushes, and “with a sound resembling a shriek escaping from his throat,” takes off running, only to find the relentless teacher soon at his heels again. The teacher calls out from behind, “just tell me your name and address…” (155), but the student has long lost both the ability and the will to speak. The distinction between tormentor, witness, and victim thoroughly dissolves in the final paragraph of the story: Then suddenly, those eyes full of anger began overflowing with tears. “I’m going to make everything public—your name, the humiliation you suffered — everything! And I’m going to make both the soldiers and you people so embarrassed you’ll want to die! Until I find out your name, I’m not going to let you out of my sight…” (156) The teacher has completed his transformation from sympathetic witness to tormentor, yet he also feels victimized (as his tears suggest) by the student’s refusal to communicate. In “Human Sheep,” distinctions between perpetrator, witness, and victim are tenuous, yet any questions regarding the prerogative and responsibility for resistance depend on precisely such distinctions. The Japanese witnesses can be viewed as both victims and collaborators. They are victims in that they have experienced vicariously the abuse of their fellow Japanese at the hands of the Americans; yet through their silent gaze, they have participated in the abusive game and have become an audience for the soldiers, thereby betraying those who directly suffered the humiliation. If anyone can be viewed as a victim in “Human Sheep,” it is the prostitute, for she has suffered more thorough abuse at the hands of the soldiers than any of the passengers on the bus. She is victimized by the occupiers and is the only person to have directly resisted them, yet is ultimately rejected by her fellow Japanese. The soldiers, for their part, appear as unambiguous perpetrators who create divisiveness among the passengers. To dissolve all distinctions by conflating perpetrator, witness, and victim risks not only subjecting the original victims to further abuse, it effectively absolves both the perpetrators of their actions and the witnesses of their obligation to intervene. But, unlike many works of occupation literature, “Human Sheep” is concerned less with issues of victimhood than with the passivity of the Japanese and their refusal to confront social injustice, be it from within or without. Ōe takes his readers beyond the realm of the occupiers and the occupied to examine more subtle forms of domination within the occupied society itself. In “Human Sheep” he implies that Japan’s failure to offer direct resistance to the occupiers’ abuse of power invites the internalization and reproduction of those same power relations. While the soldiers are destined to get off the bus, the “sheep” and their fellow passengers ensure that the divisive game begun by the occupiers will continue.

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Style as story: Narrative technique and memory in “American Hijiki” Nosaka Akiyuki is known for his humor, his fondness for ribald material, and his strikingly idiosyncratic style. He is also unrivalled among writers of occupation literature in his ability to mix hilarity and pathos while representing the ambivalence fostered by life during the early postwar years. “American Hijiki” shows Nosaka at his best, displaying his literary trademarks yet presenting the whole gamut of issues commonly encountered in men’s occupation literature. Toshio, the story’s protagonist, is in many ways an amalgam of many characters discussed in the present study. His attitude toward the English language combines Isa’s staunch resistance with Yamada’s shameless opportunism. Toshio resembles Mr. Sun and the narrator of The Cocktail Party in his propensity for viewing the occupation against the war that preceded it. And like Tsuneyoshi, Toshio experienced the occupation as an adolescent boy whose relationship to the American troops was mediated by the sex business. In An Okinawan Boy and “The Town That Went Pale,” the protagonists found themselves channelling their heterosexual desire through a homosocial continuum, such that their sexual access to local women entailed their identification with foreign men. Tsuneyoshi responded to this predicament by running away from Koza; Ryōhei chose to shut himself off from the town’s seamier side. Both characters believed that avoiding the source of temptation would enable them to escape the implications of their desire. Toshio, in contrast, alternately resists and revels in the powerful homosocial bond that ties him to the American occupiers, and he knows that he will never be free of the imaginary occupier who resides within. Stories such as “The American School” and The Cocktail Party present the occupation against the backdrop of the war, thereby transgressing this historicgraphical boundary to explore common ground between “wartime” and the “postwar” era. “American Hijiki” takes the transgression a step further by situating the protagonist at a temporal remove from both periods while at the same time eliminating his psychological distance from the war and occupation. The main narrative takes place in 1967, fifteen years after the occupation ended. At least half of the story, however, consists of a sub-narrative relating Toshio’s memories of life during the war and the ensuing occupation. The unimpeded movement between these two narrative levels, and the constant shift within the sub-narrative between scenes of wartime Japan and those of the early postwar years, establishes a broad and seamless conception of history that is more fully developed than in other works of occupation literature discussed thus far. This historical continuum is extended in “American Hijiki” to include Japan’s period of economic high growth during the post-occupation 1950s and 1960s. “American Hijiki” takes one of the key insights of “The American School” and The Cocktail Party—that the occupation must be viewed within the context of war and not as a separate historical era—and thoroughly integrates it into the text

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through fluid and frequent shifts in voice and point of view as well as through the narrative’s constant movement between different historical and geographical settings. “American Hijiki” thus reinforces and elaborates “story” through “style,” and to fully appreciate this work requires an examination of its multi-layered textuality.7 Japanese critics routinely compare Nosaka’s style to that of the seventeenth-century popular writer, Ihara Saikaku.8 The superficial resemblances are readily apparent, and the comparison is tempting—if only to give readers a handle with which to grasp Nosaka’s eclectic and idiosyncratic narrative technique. Both Saikaku and Nosaka are comic writers who favor ribald material and write in Kansai dialect. Saikaku mixed the literary and colloquial languages in a manner that was fresh and yet approachable, for he catered to a newly literate class of readers, most of them merchants from the Kansai region’s urban center, Osaka. Nosaka intersperses Kansai dialect with modern, standard Japanese. He uses dialect in part to heighten the comic effect of his narratives. More importantly, however, he deploys dialect in his texts to signal the protagonist’s increased engagement with the events being narrated. Nosaka’s style is perhaps most evocative of Saikaku’s in his preference for serpentine sentences and an unfixed narrative point of view that entails frequent shifts in voice and focalization.9 An in-depth comparative study of these two writers would reveal additional, more substantial congruencies but would ultimately have to conclude that Nosaka’s narrative technique is by no means anachronistic, however inspired it may have been by Saikaku and the later gesaku (comic prose) tradition. The following discussion of “American Hijiki” aims not to provide a comparative analysis of Nosaka and Saikaku but rather to reveal the salient narrative elements in Nosaka’s writing, elements that might appear as “pre-modern” to a reader of the Japanese text and as “modernist” to a reader of the English translation. “American Hijiki” takes place in Tokyo when Japan was regaining pride and confidence in its rapid economic growth. The story relates the visit of a retired American couple, Mr. and Mrs. Higgins, to the home of Toshio and his wife, Kyoko. Kyoko had met the American couple when she was vacationing in Hawaii, and because Mr. and Mrs. Higgins had wined and dined her, she views their impending visit as a chance to repay their kindness and is eager that everything should be perfect. Toshio, in contrast, wants to avoid the entire ordeal and believes that his wife’s eagerness to please Mr. and Mrs. Higgins includes a dubious dose of calculated self-interest. Toshio grew up in the Kansai region and spent his adolescence wandering through Osaka’s postwar ruins and black markets. Although he now owns a successful company that produces television commercials, neither Toshio’s professional achievements nor the passage of time has enabled him to overcome his sense of inadequacy toward the American occupiers. For Toshio, the Higgins’ impending visit brings on a deluge of memories, and he anticipates their arrival with a combination of anxiety and resentment. Among these

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memories is the parodic event that informs the story’s title and its final scene. One day shortly after the war when American planes were dropping care packages to prevent mass starvation, young Toshio proudly brings home a box of exotic food products, including what appears to be an American type of hijiki. A modest dish made of seaweed and tofu, hijiki is usually associated with Japanese home cooking. When Toshio, his mother, and sister eagerly launch into this foreign food, they find it inedible, no matter how it is cooked or how long they persist in chewing it. The American hijiki turns out to be black tea, and Toshio’s awkward relationship with America is reflected both semantically and orthographically in the story’s Japanese title, which records “Amerika” in katakana and “hijiki” in hiragana. To modify such a homely Japanese dish as hijiki with the foreign world of America implies a ludicrous combination, which is accentuated by this orthographic juxtaposition. In the story’s final scene, Toshio and his wife, living in financial comfort and sitting before an enormous serving of expensive beef that Kyoko has prepared for the absent American couple, are left miserably chewing on their extravagant meal with the same futility that Toshio associates with his postwar meal of “American hijiki.” Early in the story, however, Toshio’s misgivings about the visit of Mr. and Mrs. Higgins seem unwarranted, for when he takes the Mr. Higgins out drinking the night of his arrival, the two men hit it off surprisingly well—particularly when Toshio discovers that, as he puts it, “this old dog likes the girls.”10 Higgins was a member of the occupation forces for six months during 1946, but when he returns to Japan two decades later as a civilian and as a household guest, he bears little resemblance to the typical occupation soldier: Higgins is a thin, aging man and not a brawny young GI, and he demonstrates a surprising dexterity with chopsticks, professes a fondness for sushi, and displays a rudimentary but passable grasp of the Japanese language (as opposed to Toshio’s English, which is described as “strictly GI whore style”). Nevertheless, in the course of their nocturnal jaunts through Tokyo, Toshio finds himself catering to Higgins as he catered to the occupation soldiers during his youth, bending over backward to please and eagerly assuming the role of a pimp. Toshio is humiliated by his own subservient and anachronistic behavior yet enjoys a perverse nostalgia in reliving those youthful days, unpleasant though they often were. In Toshio’s world personal memory overshadows rationality, and “all Americans [are] occupation soldiers” (84; 464). The sheer textual space allotted to flashbacks in “American Hijiki” attests to the central role of memory as an organizational motif in the story. Memories of the war and of the occupation mediate everyday life for Toshio, and from the story’s opening paragraph his dreams of the past reveal his apprehension over the Higgins’ impending visit: A white spot out of nowhere in the burning sky and look! it puffs out round and in the middle of the round a kernel swinging slightly like a pendulum aimed straight at me. It has to be a parachute, but in the sky no sight no sound no nothing of a plane and before there’s time to think how weird this

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is the chute glides down into the yard’s crazy glut of loquat, birch, persimmon, beech myrtle, hydrangea, never catching on a branch, never tearing off a leaf. “Hello, how are you?” grins this skinny foreigner wait a minute, he looks just like General Percival. The white chute falls around his shoulders like a cape, slips down and covers theyard in a blanket of snow. All right, the man said hello, you’ve got to answer him. “I am very glad to see you”? No, that would be funny for an unexpected guest if that’s what this foreigner is. “Who are you?” would sound like I was grilling him. “Look, you son of a bitch, who are you? Who are you? Who are you?” Three times and if he doesn’t answer, bang! let him have it. Wait, don’t get carried away, first you’ve got to talk to him. “How …how…how…” comes crawling up from my belly to get hopelessly stuck in my mouth. This has happened to me before, this desperate, cornered feeling. When could it have been now, let me see… And searching for the answer, Toshio woke from his dream pressed flat against the wall by the buttocks of his wife, Kyoko, curled up, shrimplike, beside him. A mean push sent her back to her side of the bed and knocked something to the floor. Aha, the English conversation book Kyoko was mumbling over before they fell asleep. That explained to Toshio where his weird dream had come from. (40–41; 436–37) The “narrated content” of this passage is so intricately enmeshed with the “narrating style” that a brief technical discussion is required. First, the English reader must be aware that any translation of “American Hijiki” can offer only a mild taste of the piquant Japanese original. Nosaka’s writing poses immense obstacles for even the most skillful of translators, and Jay Rubin’s spirited English translation is surprisingly effective at capturing Nosaka’s ironic and selfdeprecating humor while managing to convey a sense of the writer’s fertile imagination and unbridled energy. Nevertheless, Rubin’s translation only hints at the extraordinary length of Nosaka’s sentences and at the text’s richly chaotic blurring of voices.11 In the above English translation, the first two paragraphs comprise sixteen separate sentences and two different typefaces; the same passage in the Japanese text consists of two sentences embedded in a single paragraph. Moreover, in the Japanese version 1) no distinction in typeface sets off Toshio’s dream from the rest of the text, 2) internal monologue and imaginary dialogues are not highlighted by quotation marks (kagi kakkō) or by comparable signifiers, and 3) no textual markers foreshadow the shift in focalization and voice during the course of the sentence. At the beginning of the first paragraph in the Japanese text, Toshio serves as the perceiving and speaking narrator; at the end of the paragraph he has been replaced by a third-person “omniscient” voice.12 Whereas Rubin prepares the English reader for this transition by using a different typeface

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and by beginning a new paragraph, the reader of the Japanese text is offered no such warning. In addition to these obstacles, the translator must convey the distinctive pace of Nosaka’s prose, which is long-winded yet brisk. Rubin may have come as close as possible to capturing Nosaka’s pace and rhythm in the first two sentences of the above translation, but the English reader must realize that this dizzying pace continues throughout the entire narrative. Nosaka relies on several techniques to infuse his prolix sentences with their breathless, urgent quality. First, he eschews conventional signifiers for denoting parenthetical information and direct quotations: he routinely omits quotation marks, and makes sparing use of the sentence particle “to,” which normally follows a direct quotation in Japanese texts. These omissions serve to blur what would generally be treated as discrete discursive units, and they thereby allow the reader to pass unimpeded through different textual terrains. Nosaka is also stingy with conjunctives (soshite, sore hard) and with topic markers (wa, ga). By omitting these he provides the reader added speed with which to weave through the narrative’s serpentine sentences. Further facilitating this rapid pace are the abrupt shifts in focalization and voice noted earlier. In summary, much occurs in the course of a single Nosaka sentence, and the transition from dreaming to wakefulness in the opening passage is far more subtle than the reader of the English translation might suspect. Toshio’s dream represents the intrusion of war and the occupation into his present-day consciousness, and Nosaka’s narrative strategy reinforces the depiction of a man imprisoned by his own memories. This opening scene achieves a powerful cinematic effect through two techniques. First, it employs “synchronous internal focalization” (the simulated narration of events “as they are perceived”) to create the illusion of a narrative play-by-play.13 Second, the symbol-laden images presented through this focalization are arranged in a syntactic order that suggests movement from wartime to the postwar occupation. The very first word in the story, “enten” (burning sky), is often used by writers to describe the skies above Japan’s cities after an air raid. The passage begins “enten ni, itten no shiro ga wakiide,” which a Japanese reader would likely parse into three sections, pausing briefly after commas and key sentence particles (in this case, after the directional particle “ni” and the topic marker “ga”). Although a literal rendering of the Japanese syntax makes for an ungrammatical and awkward English translation, it does offer a sense of the passage’s cinematic effect, which is evocative of haiku poetry: “Burning sky from, speck of white— bursts open.” The progression from burning sky to the (white) soldier’s white parachute, which covers the native landscape, suggests a temporal movement from wartime to the ensuing peace, with the white man appearing as a god from the heavens. Yet this apparent instance of prolepsis soon deteriorates as the orderly progression gives way to a chaotic overlapping of images more typical of Nosaka’s writing: superimposed on symbols of the war (the burning sky, the parachute, General Percival) are symbols of the immediate postwar years (the

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silent skies, the parachute’s color, and the friendly foreign soldier on Japanese soil). This superimposition of images contributes to the narrative’s rich texture and to its anti-linear structure. The story’s frequent historical detours and U-turns force the reader to simulate, through the very process of reading, Toshio’s own highly reflexive experience of everyday life. In “American Hijiki,” history’s unidirectional march is abandoned in favor of the erratic leaps of personal memory. This brief discussion of formalistic issues in “American Hijiki” is intended to highlight the complexity of Nosaka’s narrative technique and to suggest how his narratological strategies reinforce, albeit obliquely, issues that are raised directly in the story itself. The most prominent of these issues is Toshio’s ambivalence with respect to the American occupiers. Toshio’s ambivalence is manifested first through his attitude toward the English language, for it is the prospect of speaking English that leads to Toshio’s awakening from his dream in the opening passage. Like Isa of “The American School,” Toshio relishes the idea of turning the tables on the occupier by demanding that he speak Japanese, but Toshio also resembles Isa in his pathetic and parodic attempts at resistance:14 There was still time until the plane arrived. Toshio took the escalator upstairs. “Straight whiskey, double.” He gulped it down like an alcoholic. “I will not speak to him in English” had been his first firm resolve on waking this morning, not that he could have done so had he wanted to, but the fragments of conversation he had used back then in Naka-no-shima might suddenly come to life again and start pouring out under pressure to use English. “No, right from the start I’ll give him the old standard ‘Yaa, irasshai’ or ‘Konnichi wa,’ and if he doesn’t understand me, to hell with him. You come to Japan, speak Japanese. I won’t even say ‘goon-nighto’ to him.” As he drank, the fluttering in the chest that had been with him since lunch gradually subsided and he began to sense the thrill of striking back at the enemy. (455–56) After venturing out of the airport bar and reaching the arrival gate, Toshio discovers that even a stiff drink cannot prepare him for linguistic warfare with Higgins: Toshio threw out his chest, extended his hand, and said, “Yaa, irasshai” somewhat hoarsely, to which Higgins responded in faltering but correct Japanese, “Konnichi wa, hajimemashite.” So utterly unprepared for this was Toshio that whatever composure he had mustered up gave way to a hurried scraping together of vocabulary fragments that would enable him to answer in English, which he felt he must by all means do. “Werucome, berry good-do.” Higgins received these disconnected bits with a smile and

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said in his shaky Japanese: “We could come Japan, I am very glad.” Toshio could think of nothing for this but a few polite groans. (456) Toshio’s ambivalence toward Higgins is partly grounded in his desire to humble the American by whatever means possible—language, drink, or sex—and his defeat on the linguistic battleground constitutes the first in a series of humiliations before his unflappable American adversary. Higgins has come to Japan for pleasure and does not realize that, in Toshio’s mind, each round of drinks represents a fresh round of ammunition. The American appears oblivious to the battles waged by his host, which only exacerbates Toshio’s frustration since Higgins nevertheless comes out on top in both bar and brothel. For example, Higgins survives their night of heavy drinking without a hangover, he enjoys himself immensely with the bargirls, and at the brothel Toshio relinquishes to his American guest “a slender beauty who could pass for a fashion model” and settles valiantly for “the graduate GI whore—sitting slouchy and sullen—a tough-looking woman with a square jaw.” Toshio’s abjection is further reflected in the mementos each man takes from his evening with the prostitutes: Higgins boasts a camera filled with nude photos of his beautiful young partner; Toshio is left with countless “sickening red hickeys” (80; 461– 62). Despite Toshio’s wish to avenge himself for the hardships and humiliations he suffered during the occupation, his adversarial attitude toward Higgins is offset by the powerful homosocial desire he feels toward the American. This desire is especially apparent when the two men leave their wives each night in search of lustier companionship, for it is through alcohol—and particularly through their shared dealings in women—that Toshio establishes his distinctly “male” rapport with Higgins. At the brothel, Toshio finds his partner so unappealing that in order to ejaculate he resorts to fantasizing about the beautiful woman with Higgins in the adjoining room. Toshio, like Tsuneyoshi of “An Okinawan Boy,” finds himself implicated in a sexual triangle where access to the woman he desires entails identifying with her American customer. As we have seen in so many works of men’s occupation literature, this (unrequited) homosocial dynamic points to the complicated attitude of Japanese men, not only toward the American occupiers but toward the nation’s women as well. It also offsets the nationalistic sentiments discernible in some men’s stories about the occupation. Finally, Toshio’s voyeuristic experience in the brothel points to how economic conditions complicate the triangular relationship between the male occupiers and men and women of the occupied populace. Toshio’s motivation for treating Higgins to lavish and lascivious nights on the town derives partly from his desire to please the American and partly from his desire to humble Higgins by flaunting Japan’s newfound economic clout. Yet Toshio is also aware that his response to Higgins goes beyond these motivations and comprises a jumble of emotions:

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Aware of the fatigue that follows a binge, that sensation of being dragged into darkness, Toshio was still wide awake in another part of his mind. What is it that makes me perform such service for this old man? When I’m around him, what makes me feel that I have to give everything I’ve got to make him happy? He comes from the country that killed my father, but I don’t resent him at all. Far from it, I feel nostalgically close to him. What am I doing when I buy him drinks and women? Trying to cancel out a fourteen-year-old’s terror at the sight of those huge Occupation soldiers? Paying him back for the food they sent when we were so hungry we couldn’t stand it—the parachuted special rations, the allotments of soybean residue that was nothing but animal feed to the Americans? Maybe it’s true they were just getting rid of their agricultural surplus on us, but how many thousands and thousands of people would have starved to death if the Americans hadn’t sent corn when they did? Still, this doesn’t explain why I feel so close to Higgins. Maybe he feels that same nostalgia, recalling the days when he was here with the Occupation. Considering his age, the time he spent in Japan might have been the fullest period of his life, something he had been missing and reverted to the minute he came back here. That might explain his almost insulting behavior, his serene willingness to let me go on buying him drinks. That’s not hard to understand. But the question is why should I go along with it? Why should I be so happy to play the pimp the way the grown-ups did back then? Nothing holy rubs off on me for drinking booze with some lousy Yankee. Could it be that I’m feeling nostalgic for those days, too? No, that shouldn’t be. Those were miserable times, when you were so hungry you learned to chew your cud like a cow, bringing the food back for a second, a third taste. Swimming out from the beach at Koroen and being chased by an American boat and almost drowning; getting beaten up in Naka-noshima by an angry American soldier whose girl had run out on him: no, any way you looked at it, there were no happy memories. It was the bombing, after all, that ruined my mother’s health and finally killed her; it was America, you could say, that put my sister’s life in my hands and caused us so much suffering. Why, then, should the sight of Higgins make me want to do such service? Is this like the virgin who can never forget the repulsive man who raped her? (463–64) The empathy Toshio displays toward Higgins is notably absent from his relations with Kyoko. As the above passage suggests, one reason for this disparity lies in Toshio’s perception that Higgins, like himself, feels strong ties to the occupation era. More importantly, Higgins is a man, and although the two men experienced the occupation from opposite sides of the national divide, they nevertheless share a “male perspective” on the world. Toshio’s ambivalence toward Higgins must therefore be understood in terms of overlapping and often conflicting facets of

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his identity: as a Japanese he is separated from Higgins by culture and nationality, yet as a (heterosexual) man he finds a common ground with Higgins in the realm of sex. Sex underlies Toshio’s affinity for Higgins and is central to his understanding of their relationship. The bond between them develops during their visits to hostess bars, a brothel, and to other establishments that specialize in providing sexual titillation for men. The two men thus build a transnational rapport across the bodies of women. Paradoxically, however, sex presents Toshio with not only the means for bridging the national divide, it also provides the metaphors through which he interprets his distance from and subjugation to his American guest. When Toshio identifies with a rape victim in the above passage, he appropriates the female realm of victimhood to articulate his sense of impotence before Higgins. (He also indulges in a popular erotic fantasy about rape victims.) Toshio’s bond with Higgins is based on a common male sexual identity, an identity that comprises the overlapping realms of heterosexual and homosocial desire. By comparing himself to a woman who was raped, Toshio temporarily rejects this common identity to underscore his feelings of subjugation to Higgins. Despite Toshio’s strong ambivalence toward the American, Higgins appears impervious to his host’s travails and to the efforts to humble him.15 This of course only exacerbates Toshio’s feelings of frustration and impotence. After arriving at the private sex show he has arranged for Higgins, Toshio realizes that all of his hospitality toward his guest has been aimed at “somehow bringing Higgins to his knees.” The live sex show represents an explicit attempt to humiliate Higgins through a display of Japanese male sexual virility. A symbolic battle of sexual prowess, this private show pits Toshio’s surrogate—a middleaged Japanese stud named “Yot-chan”—against the foreign spectator, Higgins. Yot-chan’s female partner remains nameless in the narrative and is a mere vehicle for the stud’s performance and for Toshio’s competitive spirit. Toshio’s impassioned support for Yot-chan bespeaks his strong identification with the man, and when Yot-chan and his “amazing thing” fail to live up to their top billing Toshio becomes exasperated with this unexpected fit of impotence. From the sidelines he mutters to himself, “What the hell are you doing? You’re numbah one, aren’t you? Come on, show this American. That huge thing of yours is the pride of Japan. Knock him out with it! Scare the shit out of him!” It is, we are informed, “a matter of pecker nationalism” (86; 465–66). Yot-chan’s inability to climax serves as the story’s structural climax and leads Toshio to reflect on the probable reasons for the stud’s inability to perform: This man they call Yot-chan must be in his mid-thirties, and if so, Higgins might well have been the cause of his sudden impotence. If Yot-chan had the same sort of experience that I did in the Occupation—and he must have, whatever the differences between Tokyo and Osaka-Kobe—if he has memories of ‘Gibu me chewingam,’ if he can recall being frightened by

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the soldiers’ huge builds, then it’s no wonder he shriveled up like that. Yotchan might have been in a state of perfect professional detachment, but when Higgins sat down over him like a ton of bricks, inside his head the jeeps started rolling, the strains of ‘Comu, comu, eburybody’ began to echo again, and he recalled, as clearly as if it were yesterday, the hopeless feeling when there was no more fleet, no more Zero fighters, recalled the emptiness of the blinding, burning sky above the burnt-out ruins, and in that instant the impotence overtook him. Higgins could never understand that. No Japanese can understand it, probably, if he’s not my age. No Japanese who can have an ordinary conversation with an American, who can go to America and have Americans all around him without going crazy, who can see an American enter his field of vision and feel no need to brace himself, who can speak English without embarrassment, who condemns Americans, who applauds Americans, no Japanese like this can understand the American inside Yot-chan—inside me.”16 (466–67) The sound of jeeps, the echoes of a popular English radio program, visions of the silent skies and devastated landscape—these are just a few of the memories capable of creeping out of the shadows to incapacitate men like Yot-chan and Toshio. The above passage appears in the original as a single sentence, in the course of which the past seeps into the present, Yot-chan blurs into the narrator, and the Japanese male is rendered impotent. This blurring of subjects is effected by several narratological elements commonly found in Nosaka’s writing, notably the omission of topic markers and shifts in focalization, voice, and dialect. In “American Hijiki,” Nosaka’s idiosyncratic style blends with the story to achieve an exceptionally effective union. The result is a narrative that leads the reader back and forth through the interstices of the protagonist’s consciousness, moving breathlessly from dream to waking world, from dialogue to interior monologue, from standard Japanese to a slangy and intimate Kansai dialect. With prolix sentences and grammatical elements evocative of a distant era, this work reveals an authorial sensibility forged by the chaos and energy of the early postwar years. By breaking up his sentences and paragraphs into smaller units or, as in the English translation, by employing a different typeface to indicate a transition in time, space, or point of view, Nosaka would no doubt achieve a more “clear” and “readable” style, but his rejection of this brand of clarity enables him more subtly and effectively to articulate the everyday reality of his protagonist, for whom the Gordian knot tying Japan to America can never be completely undone. “American Hijiki” relates the incursion of memory into everyday experience. Toshio’s memories are, on the one hand, intensely private: they are inaccessible to those around him due to differences of nationality (Higgins), age (the employees at Toshio’s company), or gender (Kyoko), yet his memories also situate him in a broader social sphere, a sphere that includes other Japanese men (such as Yot-chan) who experienced the occupation as adolescents.17 Toshio

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stands at this crossroads of personal and social memory, preoccupied with a slice of history that those around him are content to forget. He lives in a world where the past seeps ineluctably into the present, where the war and the occupation form a single historical continuum. Written in a hybrid language embodying the discourse of disparate eras, “American Hijiki” explores the relationship between personal memory and national history through a fortuitous blend of story and style. The two works discussed in this chapter rely on several narrative strategies, familiar from men’s literature, to represent life under the American occupation. “Human Sheep” and “American Hijiki” both deploy metaphors of sexual and linguistic impotence to establish the subordination of Japanese men in the face of the foreign occupiers, both stories use the sexualized female body to mediate relationships between men of the occupation forces and those of the occupied populace, and both reveal the power of the occupier’s gaze to debilitate the occupied male subject. These works also include familiar characters featured in Japanese occupation literature: hypocritical teachers, feckless policemen, and apathetic passers by. By portraying such characters as unreliable and lacking integrity, these and other works of Japanese occupation literature imply that to survive the early postwar years one could rely on neither government officials nor sympathetic strangers. But despite the many qualities that “Human Sheep” and “American Hijiki” share with other works of occupation literature from mainland Japan, I do not wish to suggest that these two stories are stereotypical or unimaginative, for they both represent the occupation in strikingly fresh language and offer new insights as they explore the many dimensions and implications of resistance under foreign occupation. In the process, they raise difficult questions about the legacies of the war and Japanese imperialism: How does Japan’s response to the American occupation relate to the structures of domination within Japanese society itself? To what extent are these structures inherited from prewar days? Finally, whose responsibility is it to rectify those injustices that remain? In a nation that has often viewed its militarist past as an aberration, these questions retain their urgency today and demand that the reader consider the present through the past—and seek the occupier within.

Epilogue Occupation literature in the post-Vietnam era

More than a half-century has passed since General MacArthur stepped off his plane at Atsugi Airforce Base to commence the occupation of Japan. While controversies over Japanese wartime aggression continue to crop up today within Japan and throughout Asia, the American occupation years have largely receded from the nation’s consciousness, and few mainland Japanese writers have produced works of fiction about the era during the past two decades. In contrast, twenty-seven years have elapsed since Okinawa reclaimed its ambiguous position as Japan’s most marginal prefecture, yet despite significant social, political, and economic changes, the massive deployment of American troops in Okinawa prevents residents from relegating the occupation era to a remote corner of history. The American occupation, in either its official embodiment or its modern-day incarnation, remains a persistent theme in Okinawan literature. The sheer length of the occupation of Okinawa spawned a second generation of writers who were born after the war yet spent their entire childhood under American rule. From the mid-1970s, writers from this “occupied generation” began producing a fresh body of literature that represents the foreign occupiers with an intimacy rarely encountered in works by their Okinawan predecessors, not to mention in stories by Japanese authors, most of whom had limited contact with the occupation forces. In this final chapter, I present an overview of new trends in occupation literature from Okinawa, before concluding with a close reading of Japanese novelist Saegusa Kazuko’s recent work, which reconfigures the occupation from the perspective of contemporary feminist debates about sex, gender, and militarism.1 Okinawan literature since the Vietnam War Among the new generation of Okinawan writers are men such Matayoshi Eiki (1949–) and Uehara Noboru 1959–), who experienced neither the Battle of Okinawa nor the internment camps. Instead, these writers spent their entire childhood under American occupation. Raised near military housing units in Urasoe and Koza, Matayoshi and Uehara were exposed daily to GIs and their families, which gave them a rare degree of familiarity with the occupiers. As Uehara explains, “my generation grew up throwing rocks back and forth with

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the American kids.”2 The literature of this “occupied generation” of Okinawans differs from that of their predecessors, including writers such as Higashi Mineo, whose personal memories of their homeland pre-date the Battle of Okinawa. The GIs in Higashi’s stories remain amorphous symbols of America and masculinity. In contrast, Matayoshi has written stories in which he narrates the thoughts of his American characters as well as those of Okinawans, including women; and Uehara has adopted a narrative voice that assumes a startling sense of parity with the occupiers. Matayoshi is among Okinawa’s most prolific and successful novelists. In 1996 he was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for his novella, Pig’s Revenge (Buta no mukui), making him the third Okinawan writer after Ōshiro Tatsuhiro and Higashi Mineo to receive the prize.3 His 1978 work, “The Wild Boar that George Shot” (“Jōji ga shasatsu shita inoshishi”), is among the first Okinawan stories to depict the inner turmoil of an American soldier.4 The fictional character, George, is a small, timid, white soldier stationed in Okinawa during the height of the Vietnam War, when both U.S. dollars and human blood flowed freely through Okinawa’s base towns. One scene in this story depicts George standing by as a group of soldiers harasses and molests a bar hostess; another shows him wandering into the black district known as “The Bush,” and getting beaten up by a group of African-American soldiers. George eventually grows paranoid and believes that even the old Okinawan man who gathers scrap and empty bullet shells outside his military base is mocking him. One night, unable to sleep, George takes a walk in search of the old man. He finds him and points his gun at the Okinawan, who peers back impassively. Unable to tolerate the thought that even an old Okinawan man would view him with derision, George tells himself that the target is a wild boar and shoots the man to death. In Matayoshi’s story, American military authorities accept George’s excuse that he mistook the Okinawan for a wild boar. For Okinawan readers at the time, this story triggered memories of a real incident that occurred in December 1960 when an American soldier, who claimed to have been hunting, shot and killed an Okinawan farmer. The soldier insisted that he mistook the farmer for a wild boar, and U.S. military authorities accepted his explanation at face value, infuriating the Okinawan public.5 “The Wild Boar that George Shot” draws on local memories of this incident while drastically reframing the event by adopting the narrative perspective of a weak, paranoid GI. This was a bold and ambitious strategy on Matayoshi’s part, for few readers at the time were predisposed to view Americans as either weak or deserving of sympathy. “The Wild Boar that George Shot” thus begins to break down the stereotypical image of the distant and invincible occupier, and by doing so it stakes out a new, confident stance toward the United States—a stance that may only have been possible after America’s humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam. Uehara’s “1970: The Gang Era” (“1970-nen no gyangu eiji,” 1982), also presents an unorthodox view of the occupiers. Although the author has published

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few subsequent works, this story won critical acclaim for its unusual mode of direct address, “spoken” retrospectively by the Okinawan narrator to his American rival from childhood. The story’s opening lines, translated below, convey a sense of this narrative voice: Hey Johnnie, what’s become of you since that day you suddenly moved away? You know, it’s kind of funny. My buddies and I hated your guts. In fact, we were planning to beat the crap out of you. But when all of a sudden you disappeared, I felt as though I had lost a close friend.6 The entire story is narrated in this second-person address, which attests to the Okinawan protagonist’s sense of parity with the American boy. In the Japanese text of the passage translated above, the narrator’s self-assured voice is underscored by his use of the emphatic sentence particle, “yo,” and especially through the second-person pronoun, “omae.” Today, this pronoun is used mainly by men and presumes the speaker’s superiority or, at the very least, social equality with his interlocutor. It can further signify a patronizing affection for wife, children, and younger friends; omae is also used between boys who consider themselves equals. Thus, depending on the relationship between speaker and interlocutor, the term can signify either intimacy or insult. If one wishes to pick a fight in Japan, “omae” is the pronoun of choice. Throughout this story, Uehara deploys the term’s semantic ambiguity to underscore the narrator’s confident yet conflicted feelings toward his American neighbor. Like Toshio in “American Hijiki,” this male narrator seeks revenge while viewing the occupier with nostalgia and even fondness. Uehara’s male protagonist might remember the occupation years with nostalgia, but few of Okinawa’s fictional female characters who worked in GI bars and brothels retain fond memories of the era. Unlike occupation literature from mainland Japan, where stories written by women are the primary source of fiction about women, in Okinawa it is mainly male authors who have written about the occupation’s impact on women. A small group of women did publish isolated stories during the early postwar years, but it was not until the 1980s that women writers emerged as a significant force in Okinawa’s literary world, and despite their substantial contributions, this recent generation of women writers has produced only a few stories about either the occupation or the ongoing American military presence.7 The best-known work of occupation literature written by an Okinawan woman is Yoshida Sueko’s “Double Suicide at Kamāra” (“Kamāra shinjū,” 1984), which was also published as a drama.8 Set in the Kamāra district of Koza during the height of the Vietnam War, this story describes an unusual relationship between an American soldier and an Okinawan civilian. The main character, Kiyo, is a fifty-eight-year-old prostitute who has catered to American soldiers in Okinawa for much of her life. In her desperate effort to disguise her age and attract enough customers to make a living, Kiyo wears heavy makeup and hides

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in the shadows. One night she brings a young GI named Sammy back to her room. Attracted to his youthful innocence and good looks, Kiyo encourages him to stay, but she soon learns that Sammy has stabbed his senior officer during an argument and has gone AWOL. Sammy claims that as soon as he finds the money, he intends to flee Okinawa for Japan’s main islands, where he plans to defect to North Korea or the Soviet Union. For now, however, he has nowhere to go, and Kiyo gives him refuge despite her own financial troubles. The story explores the mutual dependency of this unlikely couple. Sammy, who is little more than a boy in a man’s body, has no one to look out for him except Kiyo, yet he is repulsed by her fading looks. Kiyo is too old to keep attracting young soldiers, and she seduces Sammy to prolong his stay. Each time he ejaculates his youthful energy into her aging body, Kiyo feels rejuvenated. The two live together in this precarious balance for several months until Sammy tells Kiyo that he intends to surrender to U.S. military authorities. Kiyo is unable to face the thought of abandonment or the crushing loneliness that is certain to ensue, so one night when Sammy is asleep, she turns on the gas and lights a match. The story ends with this “double suicide.” “Double Suicide at Kamāra” offers a sympathetic account of a woman who has spent much of her life servicing the American forces in Okinawa yet has nothing to show for her sacrifice. Readers familiar with postwar Okinawan society will have little difficulty imagining women such as Kiyo, women who began working as prostitutes shortly after the war and continued—throughout the Korean War and the 1950s land seizures, through the reversion movement of the 1960s, through the demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the years since. Inevitably, as time passes, Kiyo grows old while her customers remain young.9 “Double Suicide at Kamāra” underscores how the sheer length of America’s occupation of Okinawa continues to shape individual lives long after reversion. As noted above, with the exception of “Double Suicide at Kamāra” and a few lesser-known works, men have written most stories about Okinawan women and the occupation. Ōshiro Tatsuhiro and Matayoshi Eiki, Okinawa’s two most prolific writers, have both written stories with female protagonists, but perhaps the male author who has produced the most varied and engaging fictional accounts of the occupation’s impact on women may be Nagadō Eikichi. Nagadō was born in 1932 and is therefore of the same generation as Ōshiro and mainland writers Nosaka Akiyuki and Ōe Kenzaburō. He began writing fiction in the 1960s and first attracted attention with his 1966 story, “The Black District” (“Kokujingai”). This work depicts a woman who runs a small bar in Koza’s Teruya district. Today, “The Black District” seems hackneyed in its account of a lonely woman who suffers countless misfortunes and ends up struggling in the water trade, but the story’s focus on Okinawan women serving African-American soldiers no doubt seemed fresh and relevant at the time. In 1993 Nagadō published a more compelling work about women and the occupation, “A Paper Airplane from the Empire State Building” (“Enpaiyā sutēto biru no kami-hikōki”).10 Perhapsnoother story by an Okinawan writer so

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effectively conveys the lingering impact of the occupation on a woman’s life from the 1940s through the decades after reversion. Set during the 1980s, “A Paper Airplane from the Empire State Building” is a melancholy and mildly sentimental story. Unlike most works of occupation literature about women, the protagonist, Kana, is neither a forsaken prostitute nor a bar hostess but an independent Okinawan entrepeneur who runs a large, successful supermarket. Kana’s parents and sister were killed in the war, and in 1949 she began working as a maid for the family of an American pilot stationed at Kadena Air Force Base in Koza. The pilot was soon transferred to Korea, and Kana moved to another American household, this one plagued by marital quarrels between the husband, Mike, and his haughty wife, Sarah. After one particularly heated argument, Sarah takes their child and returns to the United States. Mike and Kana eventually become lovers and spend two blissful years together until 1951 when Mike, claiming that he must leave for a quick trip to Korea, suddenly vanishes. Kana later learns that Mike had lied and never went to Korea but instead flew directly to the United States. Kana travels to America in an unsuccessful search for Mike, after which she returns to Koza. She never marries nor does she fall in love. She does, however, build a successful business from the tiny sundries shop that she began during the early 1950s with black market goods acquired through Mike’s connections at Kadena Airforce Base. In the ensuing years, Kana shrewdly carves out a niche for herself in the local economy by catering to women who served the occupation soldiers—bar hostesses, mistresses, and prostitutes. As Koza’s economy is weaned from its occupation roots in the post-reversion years, Kana transforms the shop into one of the town’s major supermarkets. By the early 1980s, Kana is a successful businesswoman and seems content. But her world is suddenly turned upside-down as old acquaintances, returning from vacations to New York City, begin calling her and reporting that they saw Mike, now a homeless grey-haired man, following groups of Japanese tourists around Manhattan and using his fluent Japanese to beg for money. Not only was Mike remarkably fluent in Japanese, he also happened to be from New York, so when several of Kana’s friends claim to have seen him there, she is convinced that the man in question is indeed her former lover. Fond memories of a forgotten life begin to overwhelm Kana, who never learned why Mike deserted her. Reports of the man’s impoverished condition further disturb her, so she decides to travel to New York and seek him out for herself. By following along with a Japanese tour group she eventually finds the man who matches Mike’s description, but he turns out to be someone else. Mike and Kana had long shared a romantic fantasy of tossing a paper airplane over the fence of the Empire State Building to see how far it would fly. The story ends with Kana fulfilling their fantasy alone, only to have the paper plane instantly disappear from view. Much of this story is devoted to descriptions of Manhattan tourist sites, and for readers already familiar with the city, these digressions are apt to detract from the narrative’s interest. Yet the account of Kana’s life—especially of how she builds her business by adapting to Koza’s shifting economic and social conditions

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throughout the postwar decades—are informative and convincing. Okinawan men barely appear in this work. Nagadō instead concentrates on Okinawan women and the American occupiers they formerly served. Although in the end Kana is more prosperous than many of the former occupiers, the author (to his credit) does not dwell on the obvious theme of economic reversal but rather integrates it into his complex portrait of a woman whose emotional loss and financial gains can both be traced back directly to the occupiers. In the process, Nagadō offers a fresh view of how the occupation continues to resonate in the private lives of Okinawans today. Saegusa Kazuko’s A Winter’s Death Whereas the American occupation remains a central theme in postwar Okinawan literature, mainland Japanese writers have produced few works of occupation literature during the past two decades. Among those works that have appeared, the most ambitious is Saegusa Kazuko’s trilogy about women in postwar Japan, Summer One Day (Sono hi no natsu, 1987), A Winter’s Death (Sono fuyu no shi, 1989), and A Night’s End (Sono yoru no owari, 1990). Saegusa has remarked that these three novels should not be viewed as a formal trilogy despite their loose thematic connection. In fact, there is no direct relation between any characters in the three books, and each novel stands alone.11 Saegusa (1929–) is unusual among women writers of her generation. She was one of the first women to attend a four-year university after they were made coeducational during the occupation years, and when she enrolled in Kansai Gakuin University, she was the only female student in attendance and chose to major in philosophy—an uncommon choice for women even today, not to mention during the 1940s. After graduating, Saegusa taught middle school while participating in philosophy study groups and literary circles. She began writing fiction in the mid-1950s, and by the late 1960s had established a reputation for her “anti-romantic, non-realist novels.”12 One critic claims that until recently, when she began writing explicitly about women and self-consciously from “a woman’s perspective,” Saegusa’s literary strength was “her conceptual and methodological approach to the experimental novel, which gave the strong impression of her being a masculine writer…honestly speaking, she was placed at a disadvantage by being viewed as a ‘female writer’ [joryū sakka].”13 Saegusa herself has insistently distinguished her literature from that of mainstream women writers, many of whom she does not seem to hold in high regard. She has remarked that until recently, few women writers had serious intellectual interests and instead tended to write only about their personal experiences. According to Saegusa, even when women wrote about the atomic bomb or the war, their accounts “rarely amounted to more than a documentary literature”.14 Saegusa has insisted that fiction be an imaginative endeavor, and her own writing brings together her philosophical interests and her commitment to representing an imagined world.

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As suggested above, Saegusa has never fit comfortably into the categories reserved for modern Japanese women writers: she was not involved in communist or anarchist groups, she was adamantly opposed to the autobiographical fiction that constituted the mainstream (and wrote essays decrying this narrative approach), and it was not until the 1980s that she began explicitly addressing questions of gender. The postwar trilogy is a result of this new direction in Saegusa’s literary career. The first volume, Summer One Day, loosely draws on the author’s own experiences in the Kansai region during the ten days following Japan’s surrender in August 1945 and is, for Saegusa, a rare concession to Japan’s shishōsetsu tradition. Ironically, it is also her most widely read novel, since the book was adopted by the Japanese Ministry of Education for use in the nation’s high schools. This novel was also translated into German, and portions were included in German school textbooks. Summer One Day explores the aftermath of war, but ends before American forces arrive on Japanese soil. The following discussion concentrates on the second volume, A Winter’s Death, which views everyday life under the occupation through the eyes of a broad range of Japanese: a repatriated soldier, a former wartime “comfort woman” who works as an RAA prostitute after the war, an old man and the five-year-old girl (a war orphan) he has cared for since Japan’s surrender, a veteran prostitute who now recruits for the RAA, a black market merchant, and a young female student who is raped by occupation soldiers. A Winter’s Death extends the inquiry begun by Hirabayashi Taiko in that it challenges popular assumptions about gender and sexuality, marriage and prostitution in the context of the occupation. Like Nosaka’s “American Hijiki,” the novel moves back and forth between the war and occupation years, but Saegusa frames each temporal shift within the private memory of a different character. And whereas Nosaka restricts his authorial empathy to male characters of Toshio’s generation, Saegusa represents the occupation from multiple perspectives bound by neither gender nor generation.15 In this regard, A Winter’s Death is among the most ambitious works of Japanese occupation literature. The narrative begins in December 1945 with a repatriated Japanese soldier surveying the burned-out ruins of his hometown, which is identified only as “K.” The city’s physical landscape has been so thoroughly transformed that the soldier is uncertain of where his own house once stood. He is disoriented not so much by the physical destruction—he had expected this before returning to Japan —but by “another, different form of devastation” (3). The man is left to remember, re-imagine, and reconstruct an obliterated world. He must now seek out or replace those people and places that had connected him to the past, and readers of A Winter’s Death will recognize this soldier’s plight as one that faced much of the nation after Japan’s defeat. It is when she narrates the thoughts of her female characters that Saegusa offers her most original views on postwar life. The following passage, for example, describes a prostitute’s reaction to walking in high-heeled shoes:

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The surprising sensation of high heels, which she was wearing for the first time in her life! Her back straightened, and she felt confident. Her stride grew wider, her line of vision higher. She felt herself begin to strut down those roads that she used to walk so timidly. The humiliating feeling of being a woman from a defeated country faded with each step. She had never thought that clothes could alter one’s feelings so dramatically. (18) Feminists today might view high heels as sexist relics, as fashion that imposes unnatural demands on the female form for the viewing pleasure of men. Saegusa, however, reminds readers how liberating this new fashion seemed to Japanese women during the early postwar years, women whose gait had long been restricted by a kimono. Readers will recall Michiko in “The American School” as she tries to assume her own new postwar persona by changing from sneakers to high heels after reaching the school. Yet Michiko trips when wearing the heels and drops the pair of chopsticks she borrowed from Isa, exposing her “true” Japanese identity. Kojima Nobuo seems to suggest that all such attempts to adopt American attitudes and practices are doomed to failure, that they are futile efforts at cultural impersonation. Saegusa represents the pair of high heels not as an illfitting cultural import destined to fall by the wayside while bringing down its Japanese consumer; rather, she depicts this particular icon of postwar life as unshackling Japan’s women from their own restrictive cultural traditions. A Winter’s Death takes mundane experiences of postwar life and transforms them into events that extend our understanding of the era. Although this is hardly a humorous work, A Winter’s Death resembles Hirabayashi Taiko’s in “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido” in that it includes women from different social classes and explores their positions in both wartime and occupied Japan. The young female student in Saegusa’s novel is from a privileged background and hopes to continue with her education. At first, the occupation signifies liberation to this woman since it is only through SCAP’s legal reforms that her dream seems possible: “She felt grateful that Japan lost the war. Having been born a girl, she knew that if Japan had won, she would not be given the chance to pursue her education […] Thanks to the defeat, Japanese men lost their authority, which brought forth rare opportunities [for women]”. (42–43) Soon, however, the woman’s dreams are dashed when she is raped by a group of black GIs. Yet Saegusa does not use the rape merely to condemn the occupation forces, to cancel out the significance of SCAP’s reforms, or to represent the occupation era itself primarily as an era of loss and national humiliation. On the contrary, the rape attests to the occupier’s unfettered authority while, at the same

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time, exposing the complicity of Japanese men in the young woman’s victimhood. The following scene describes the victim’s abduction by American soldiers: “Help! Call the police! Help me…” They did not cover her mouth so she continued to yell, but no one tried to help. In the crowd were men who watched, leering. “Cowards! Are you afraid of the occupiers?” She glared at the male bystanders as she was carried off by her abductors. (108–9) It is not only these leering bystanders who contribute to the woman’s victimhood but Japanese patriarchy itself, as embodied by the woman’s own father: “If my father knew what had happened to me,” she thought, “I wonder if he’d tell me to the. Yes, there’s no doubt he would” (118). Indeed it is not so much the rape itself, however traumatic, that makes her a victim but society’s condemnation of women who have been “sullied” by the occupiers. The fictional victim in A Winter’s Death knows that she can neither return home nor go back to the school dormitory. “I must disappear,” she thinks, concluding that her only choices are suicide or becoming a prostitute (119, 129). The novel’s other main female character is a panpan who began her career as a military prostitute working in the brothels of Japanese-occupied territory in Southeast Asia. Nearly all of the other Japanese women at the brothel had been born into poor families and became military sex workers solely to pay off familial debts. This woman, however, signed up not to help her family or to serve her nation, nor had she been raped. Instead, she agreed to the job merely because “she wanted to get away from her father” (133). Not long after the Japan’s defeat, the woman contemplates whether to become a GI mistress (“onrii”) or to work again as a military prostitute, this time servicing American occupation soldiers: She sighed, thinking that she had to find a place to live before winter arrived. The easiest solution was to become an American soldier’s “only one,” but she still couldn’t decide. Emotionally, it was easier to deal with a different man from one day to the next. In the end, an “only one” is nothing more than a mistress, and a mistress is basically a wife—the sole difference being that one relationship is legal and the other isn’t. Either way, the woman is tied to a single man. Freedom seemed better, even though it entailed greater uncertainty. (14) Hiroike Akiko and Nakamoto Takako suggested that if a mistress is not quite a prostitute, neither is she a wife—however desperately she may cling to the

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fantasy of becoming one. Saegusa, like Hirabayashi, probes deeper and suggests that the roles of wife, mistress, and prostitute are best understood not as separate realms but as overlapping sections on a continuum of women’s oppression. When she wrote A Winter’s Death, Saegusa was unaware of the occupation literature of either Hirabayashi or Nakamoto, yet she follows in her predecessor’s footsteps when she reminds us that the occupation’s legal reforms often had little impact on lower-class women, and that women’s subjugation could not be reduced to a single cause.16 In addition to pursuing questions posed by her literary predecessors, Saegusa draws on recent research and feminist debates about Japan’s wartime exploitation of “comfort women.” She interrogates the often unsavory relationship between soldiers and sex, and between organized prostitution and tacitly sanctioned rape. A Winter’s Death explores these issues through two female characters, both of whom worked in state-run military brothels during the war. The first, named Hanamaru, is a small-time boss in the black market and recruits former prostitutes and rape victims to work for the RAA. In the following passage, her interlocutor is the woman (described above) who tries on high heels and debates whether to become a GI mistress or remain a freelance prostitute. Hanamaru knows better than to use the government-sanctioned propaganda about “sacrifice” and “female floodwalls” if she is to persuade this woman to again work in a military brothel. Instead, she cuts to the chase: Hanamaru’s eyes narrowed cunningly. “Money. You do want money, don’t you?” “Sure,” she thought, “who doesn’t?” Then Hanamaru’s lips twisted into a grin. “Whether they’re Japanese or Americans, soldiers are all the same, you know.” That convinced her. She had made her decision. (17) Saegusa suggests that while Japan’s postwar prostitutes may indeed be victims, they are best understood as being victims of patriarchy itself, not merely of the foreign occupiers, and she shows patriarchy to invite the complicity of other women, such as Hanamaru. In addition to its many feminist insights, A Winter’s Death offers a provocative view of social memory in postwar Japan. Saegusa deploys the figure of an old man plagued by a fading memory to raise questions about Japan’s relationship to its wartime past. The old man is a quixotic figure in the novel: he has forgotten his wife’s face and cannot remember whether he once had a daughter, yet he takes in a young girl orphaned in the war and later looks after the student raped by the American occupiers. His desire to save others seems propelled by his need to bury his past and, at the same time, to replicate it— although the man himself does not seem to recognize that these two adopted females are surrogates for his own lost family. At the novel’s end, the old man

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lies on his deathbed, his thoughts framed between commentary by the omniscient narrator: The past has vanished, only the present remains. All is now tranquil. “Perhaps I’m happier being unable to remember the past,” thought the old man. He didn’t read the newspapers, but he knew from events around him that men were being investigated for war crimes, and that some in high positions had been driven to commit suicide. It’s only natural, now that Japan has lost the war and American troops have arrived to occupy the nation, that those who ordered attacks on the United States would be held responsible. Maybe the easiest way to avoid responsibility is to forget the past as quickly as possible. After all, there isn’t one adult male in all of Japan who does not bear at least some responsibility for the war, and in this sense the old man may have discovered an expedient way to go on living. In fact, it may well be that the desire to forget the past served the old man as a safety valve of sorts and prevented him from recovering his memory. (193–94) A Winter’s Death begins with a young soldier, wandering amidst the burned-out ruins, trying to remember and recreate a city that has been transformed by war. The novel ends with the death of an old man whose life may have been prolonged by his reluctance to remember the past. Together these two men, one who strives to remember and the other determined to forget, can be read allegorically as embodying two faces of a nation that has yet to decide how—or whether—it should confront its wartime legacy. A bolder allegorical reading of the novel might identify the old man as Hirohito himself. After all, A Winter’s Death was published only months before the emperor died. Questions of Japan’s war responsibility and historical memory loomed large at the time (although public discussion of these issues was muted due to the emperor’s moribund condition).17 And while Saegusa can hardly be said to impose this interpretation on her readers, the book’s many nameless characters and places, as well as its broad social scope, support an allegorical reading. As national allegory, Saegusa’s work constitutes a new approach to the war and occupation, one distinguished by its feminist insights and its multiple narrative perspectives, which include men as well as women, young and old, soldier and civilian. The breadth of Saegusa’s social vision, coupled with her probing historical imagination, points to new directions for Japanese literature about the occupation era. A decade later, it remains to be seen whether other writers have the desire and ambition to extend her inquiry. With the exception of those post-Vietnam era works of Okinawan literature discussed in this chapter, men’s stories about the occupation tend to be narrated from a single, male-centered perspective. They also tend to revolve around scenes where the pants are down. Whether the story depicts a Japanese stud struck impotent by his memories of the occupiers, or male passengers on a bus forced to

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drop their drawers and become “human sheep,” or women raped by occupation soldiers, or an Okinawan boy masturbating to the heavy breathing of a GI and prostitute who have usurped his bed, men’s narratives from both mainland Japan and Okinawa typically focus on sexual domination at the hands of the foreign occupiers while revealing the occupied subject’s homosocial identification with American soldiers. The male protagonists of these stories are deprived of their native language and become lost within a domestic landscape that has been thoroughly transformed. The allegorical impetus of these men’s narratives calls for a conflation of individual and national body, and conceives of loss and subjugation through the disembodied yet insistently corporeal figure of Woman. In contrast, women’s fictional accounts of the era rarely reduce their female characters to symbols of national victimhood. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that “confessional accounts” such as The Chastity of Japan are in fact works of fiction written by men, not women. When a woman’s story does assert a sense of humiliation or loss, it usually attributes this loss to factors other than the occupation itself. Nakamoto Takako, for example, prefers to underscore the myriad forms of domestic social oppression that persisted throughout the occupation years in spite of SCAP’s reforms. Admittedly, Japanese women writers are no more homogeneous a group than are their male counterparts. Yet writers as different as Sono Ayako, Hiroike Akiko, and Hirabayashi Taiko undeniably offer critical perspectives on the occupation years not found in contemporary men’s stories—just as Okinawan writers such as Ōshiro Tatsuhirō provide a much-needed corrective to mainland memories of the occupation era by viewing America’s postwar hegemony against the backdrop of Japan’s historical domination of the Ryukyu Islands. In the final analysis, no single author can be expected to represent an entire nation’s experience of an era. Nor is it fair to expect a single group of writers— whether defined by gender or generation, by region, class, or ideology—to capture a truly comprehensive view of life under American occupation. Such a view is accessible only through a broad cross-section of texts, including (but not limited to) those often deemed too low-brow, regional, or otherwise undeserving of critical attention. National memory, after all, is a dynamic and contested discourse. At the same time, it is a discourse which, paradoxically, claims authority only to the extent that it appears static and incontestable. If literature helps give voice to a nation’s memories of an era, then the stories discussed in this book surely contribute to the cacophony, bringing a vital dissonance to what has long seemed a muted exercise in counterpoint.

Notes

Introduction 1 Fussell (1975:335) concludes his book with this phrase, adopted from Northrup Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism. 2 Okinawan political historian Gabe Masao (1990:7) agrees that “…in actuality, at the level of political process, the two occupations [of Okinawa and mainland Japan] existed as separate entities.” 3 Fussell (1975) offers a persuasive argument for this assumption in the context of Great Britain earlier in this century. While I would be reluctant to insist on a prominent role for literature in shaping Japanese social discourse today (television and video obviously reign supreme), literature did play an influential role during the 1950s and 1960s, when most of the works I discuss were published. 4 Ishikawa (1980) specifically uses the word “boy” (shōnen), not “girl” or “child” when referring to the survivor of the postwar ruins throughout his book. 5 Among the more influential Japanese studies of literature and the occupation that do not focus on censorship are Etō Jun (1973); Isoda Kōichi (1983); and Katō Norihiro (1985). Sharalyn Orbaugh’s forthcoming book from Stanford University Press, The Japanese Fiction of the American Occupation, examines mainland Japanese literature written during the occupation and complements the present study’s focus on works published after 1952. Author-centered studies in English that devote attention to the occupation include Van C.Gessel (1989); Susan Napier (1991); and Michiko N.Wilson (1986). Also see Ernestine Schlant and J.Thomas Rimer (1991). 6 American censorship restrictions in mainland Japan were officially lifted in 1949, but I have nevertheless concentrated on works published after the occupation ended because it is only then that writers could feel confident that criticisms of the occupation forces would not be censored. As for the Okinawan works I discuss, only Arakawa Akira’s 1956 poem, “The Colored Race,” was written at a time when American censorship significantly impinged on literary production. By the mid-1960s, sharply critical accounts of the occupiers, such as Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s 1967 novella, The Cocktail Party (see Chapter One), were published without intervention by American censors. 7 For example, if one discusses Okinawa or Ryukyu in reference to “Nihon” (“Japan),” then one seems to distinguish Okinawa from the Japanese nation-state.

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8 9 10

11 12

13

14

15

Alternately, “hondo” (the mainland) relegates Okinawa to the periphery but still locates it within the nation-state. In fact, some Okinawan intellectuals prefer to use “Yamato” when discussing Japan, since this term harks back to the tribal conflicts of early history and rejects nationalism and modernity as the proper source of Okinawan subjectivity. Similar problems arise when referring to “Okinawans.” Are they “Okinawans” (“Okinawajin,” which emphasizes a separate ethnic identity), citizens of Okinawa Prefecture (“Okinawa kenmin”), “Ryukyuans” (“Ryūkūjin”), or “Uchinanchu” (the term for “Okinawan” in the region’s dialect)? It depends, of course, where one stands, and any choice is laden with ideological implications and contentious historical assumptions. LaCapra (1998:19–20). Fentress and Wickham (1992:7). On the role of the other Allied nations in the occupation administration, see Chapter Five of Finn (1992). Finn’s book offers a relatively balanced and comprehensive overview of the occupation. For a detailed account of Great Britain’s role in the occupation, see Buckley (1982). Dower (1993:166). Scholars of the occupation disagree on how much significance to attribute to the reverse course, and about its basic causes and chronology. Some assert that the policy shift began early in 1947, when MacArthur intervened to prohibit a massive general strike planned for February 1; others point to the “red purge” of 1949–50 as the defining moment. There are also those who question the concept’s usefulness for understanding the occupation at all. For an overview in English of the entire “history of the history of the occupation” (including the reverse course debates), see Carol Gluck (1983:169–236). Also see Ray A.Moore (1981:317–28). For a critical assessment of the reverse course theory, see Robert Ward (1987) “Conclusion”, especially pp. 405–15. For a persuasive argument in support of the reverse course thesis, see the work of John Dower (1979:305–68; 1993:3–33). The footnotes to Dower’s “Occupied Japan and the Cold War in Asia” also provide a useful review of recent trends in occupation studies. As Carol Gluck notes, this generation “virtually captured the memory market in the postwar decades” (1993:78). Nosaka Akiyuki repeatedly refers to the importance of generation in discussing the era, as do the editors of a popular collection of interviews about the occupation: Yasuda Tsuneo and Amano Masako (1991:5). This book emerged from a two-part special issue of the journal Shisō no kagaku. On the relationship between “generation” (sedai) and history in writing about the occupation, see Takahara Kenkichi (1972:173). Most Japanese have maintained a strict separation between the war and postwar, viewing the postwar years as the beginning of a new era and the war years as an historical aberration perpetrated by a group of fanatic militarists. Gluck points out that during the early postwar years even many leftists maintained a view that conceptually severed the war from the postwar: “Theirs was thus an interrupted, not a discontinuous, discourse, and now that it had resumed they believed that ‘true modernity’ or the ‘democratic revolution’ was at long last at hand,” (1993:67). Takemae (1990:5). Also see Ōshiro Masayasu (1989:7), and Ōta Masahide’s account of his war experience in Cook and Cook (1992:367–72). On Okinawa’s new war memorial, see Gerald Figal (1997:745–78).

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16 For English-language accounts of Japanese daily life during the war, see Thomas R.H.Havens (1978) and Cook and Cook (1992). 17 In Okinawa, too, the postwar was often thought of as beginning from zero. One book of photographs about postwar Okinawa, for example, is entitled Zero kara no jidai, or “The Era that began from Zero.” 18 Ward and Sakamoto (1987:428). 19 On chocolate and chewing gum as icons of the era, see Takemae Eiji and Kinbara Samon (1991:242); Enari Tsuneo, “‘Sensō hanayome’ no Amerika,” in Yasuda and Amano (1991:175). The phrase “Give me chocolate” is also prominently featured on the cover illustration of a two-volume collection of photographs about everyday life in postwar Japan, Kyūdai Mineo (1974). 20 The Historical Studies Research Group (Rekishigaku kenkyūkai) notes that most Japanese who came in contact with the occupiers were impressed above all by the Americans’ “material supremacy.” Rekishigaku kenkyūkai (1990:257). Also see Yasuda and Amano (1991:116–17, 144–45). 21 Although there are numerous books about postwar popular culture, one that especially conveys the vitality of the era is Kuwabara Ietoshi (1982). This book consists of twelve biographies of colorful figures from the early postwar years. Also see Tsurumi Shunsuke (1984); and Minami Hiroshi and Shakai shinri kenkyūsho (1990). 22 By the late 1940s, the dregs magazines had begun to lose their novelty and declined, as did some of their more staid counterparts. The magazines were known as “dregs” because their paper was made from the lowest quality pulp, like cheap sake made from dregs. On kasutori zasshi, see Fukushima Jūrō (1985 and 1987). Also, Kimoto Itaru (1985) and Yamamoto Akira (1986). 23 Takemae Eiji refers to “Come, Come English” in many of his books about the occupation, although the most detailed account is contained in Takemae (1992). 24 In addition to the work of Etō Jun listed below, see the following Japanese studies of occupation censorship. With respect to journalism, Matsuura Sōzō is the leading researcher. See his article, “Shirarezaru senryōka no genron dan’atsu” in Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (1972). Matsuura also wrote books on the topic, including 1969 and 1984. Also see Kusabe Norikazu (1962:147–54) and Fukushima (1985). One of the most useful studies of literary censorship is the two-volume work by Yokote Kazuhiko (1995). This second of two volumes provides deleted passages, translations, and comments from the Civil Censorship Detachment files, allowing the reader to see how the process operated and to read the censors’ comments on specific passages. For English-language studies of both the mechanisms of SCAP’s literary censorship and examples culled from the files of the Civil Censorship Detachment, see Marlene Mayo: “Civil Censorship in Occupied Japan,” in Schlant and Rimer (1991:135–61) and Mayo’s “Civil Censorship and Media Control in Early Occupied Japan,” in Wolfe (1984:263–320). Other English language studies include Jay Rubin (1985: 71–103). On censorship in relation to the atomic bomb, the most thorough study in English is Monica Braw (1991). For a shorter version of Braw’s research, see her chapter, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Voluntary Silence,” in Hein and Selden (1997:155–72). Also on A-bomb censorship: J.Victor Koschmann, “The Japan Communist Party and the Debate over Literary Strategy

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25

26

27 28

29

under the Allied Occupation of Japan,” in Schlant and Rimer (1991:164–65); and Mayo’s chapter in the same volume. The most vociferous critic of SCAP’s censorship activities has been Etō Jun, who argues that American censorship stunted the development of postwar Japanese discourse. Not surprisingly, Etō’s books on the topic have invited vitriolic rebuttals from various quarters. Etō’s publications on occupation censorship include 1981 and 1982: 34–109. The latter piece was translated into English by Jay Rubin in Hikaku bunka zasshi, vols. 2 and 3 (1984). For examples of Etō's critics, see Sodei Rinjirō, (1986). Also Sodei Rinjirō et al., (1981:2–61); and Matsuura (1984:200– 06. Mayo cautions, however, “it would be precipitate to conclude, as does [Jay] Rubin, that this is the single greatest reason for deletions. Statistics compiled by PPB for the category of literature, 1946–48, show that the chief offense by far, as in other types of publications, was militarist and nationalist propaganda,” (1991:143). The charts and data provided in Yokote’s study (1995) corroborate Mayo’s conclusion. Ishikawa Jun’s 1946 story, “Ōgon densetsu” [“The Legend of Gold”] was among the first to incorporate these postwar icons to signify a woman’s transformation from a respectable housewife to war widow to GI slut. Ishikawa points to the woman’s possession of foreign cigarettes, her red dress, and her use of the term “Hama” for Yokohama to indicate her fall from respectability. Another example of panpan argot was to abbreviate Yūrakuchō to “Rakuchō.” This area of Tokyo, near Ginza, was renowned at the time for its streetwalkers. Ishikawa Jun (1961, vol 2: 53–64). This story originally appeared in the monthly magazine, Chūō kōron, in 1946 and is among the first postwar works to feature a black GI. William Tyler’s translation of this and other Ishikawa short stories can be found in Ishikawa Jun, The Legend of Gold and Other Stories, William Tyler, trns., (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998). In a little-known essay, writer Takami Jun also refers to the “code language” commonly employed by postwar authors to circumvent SCAP censorship. See Takami Jun (1953:117). On prewar literary censorship, the definitive English-language study is Rubin (1984). For examples of literary censorship and ways in which they were circumvented, see Yokote (1995); for circumlocutions from newspapers discreetly reporting GI crime, see Kobayashi Daijirō and Murase Akira (1971:55). Kōno Taeko (1974:11). Historical linguists generally agree that based on its syntax, morphology, and phonology, Ryukyuan—which itself consists of four or five major dialect groups— is a variant of the Japanese language and split off from a single “mother dialect” around AD 700. Although Ryukyuans who traveled to Japan and China spoke the languages of those countries, Chinese remained the written language of the Ryukyuan elite, as it did in Japan throughout most of its history. For an overview of Ryukyuan history from premodern times through the early postwar years, George Kerr’s Okinawa: The History of an Island People (1958) remains serviceable. On early modern Ryukyuan intellectual history, see Gregory Smits (1999). Japanese folklorists Yanagita Kunio and Yanagi Sōetsu, together with Okinawan scholars such as Iha Fuyu, identified material artifacts, cultural practices, and phonological remnants of the modern Japanese language, all of which suggested that the Ryukyus were historically part of Japan’s cultural sphere. These scholars

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maintained an ambivalent relationship to Japanese imperialism, and their research was often appropriated to serve the ideology of less circumspect cultural nationalists. The folklorists themselves were ostensibly sympathetic investigators who viewed Okinawa as a valuable “missing link,” as the cultural repository of a nation threatened by the encroachments of modernity and its attendant processes of urbanization and Westernization. The folklorists’ work was often characterized by a romantic nostalgia, but when their findings were placed under the Spencerian lenses of Japanese imperialists, sites such as Okinawa acquired value precisely because they had yet fully to “evolve.” The idea of Okinawa as a cultural repository was recast to signify that the region had yet to reach mainland Japan’s advanced stage of cultural development. Okinawa’s “incomplete development” was thus deemed valuable for the insights it offered into premodern Japan, which was always assumed to be the originary culture. As an expanding state, Japan felt the need to incorporate Okinawa’s distinctive language and architecture, music and dance, food and clothing into the Japanese historical domain, hence the inordinate attention devoted to origins in prewar discourses on Japanese culture. On the folklore movement and Okinawa, see Alan Christy (1993:607–39); also Yoshinobu Ōta, “Politics and Representations of Ryukyuan Culture in Japanese Folklore Studies,” unpublished paper. On the ideology of the folklorists and their relationship to Edo scholars of “National Studies” (kokugaku), refer to H.D.Harutoonian (1988). For a critical study of folklorist Yanagita Kunio in relation to Japanese colonialism in Korea and Southeast Asia, see Murai Osamu (1992). Recent archeological discoveries buttress the view that the Ryukyus are most closely linked to what came to be known as “Japan.” In March 1997, for example, a group of archeologists discovered pottery shards dating back 5,500 years, indicating that residents of Okinawa Island had historical contact with the Japanese mainland from the early Jōmon Era. The excavation also uncovered wooden objects that predate all comparable objects yet identified. Ironically, this discovery, which has been hailed as “epochmaking” (kakkiteki), was made by Okinawan researchers who had gained special permission to conduct the dig on a U.S. military base. Japanese laws protecting valuable archeological sites do not apply to U.S. bases, although 180 archeological sites have been confirmed within American bases in Okinawa alone. It thus appears that the United States military presence impinges even on explorations into Japanese-Okinawan prehistory. See “Okinawa no kichi kam jōmon toki,” in Asahi shinbun. Evening Edition, 29 March 1997. 30 On the Ainu, see Richard Siddle (1997:17–49). On Okinawan immigration, see Koji Taira’s essay in the same book, “Troubled national identity: the Ryukyuans/ Okinawans,” pp 140–77. 31 See the classic accounts of colonialism by Frantz Fanon (1967) and Albert Memmi (1965). 32 Perhaps the most sophisticated treatment of Japanese discrimination against Okinawans in the prewar era is Tomiyama Ichirō (1990). Chapter One is a detailed study of labor conditions in prewar Okinawa and explores labor emigration as well, focusing on the lives of Okinawans who settled in Osaka early in the twentieth century. Tomiyama has another chapter on the subject, “Okinawa sabetsu to puroretariaka,” in Ryūkyū shinpōsha (1992:169–90). Tomiyama’s Senjō no kioku (1995), addresses the problem of war and memory in Okinawa. A useful English

NOTES 203

33

34

35 36 37

38

39 40 41

42 43 44

summary of Japan’s assimilation policy in Okinawa can be found in Steve Rabson (1997). I am only discussing the war as it impacted residents of Okinawa Island, which is where the prefecture’s population was concentrated. Many living on other islands in the Ryukyus had starkly different experiences. For example, American forces did not arrive on many of the outlying islands until after the battle ended. For a brief summary of the war’s impact on outlying islands, see Okinawa-ken (1996:23–24). The most thorough exploration of contemporary American views of Okinawa is Miyagi (1982). Miyagi cites Frank Gibney’s 28 November 1949 Time magazine article in which Gibney labels Okinawa “the forgotten island,” and Miyagi also quotes from 1940s magazines such as Christian Century and Life. For a shorter version of his research on this topic, see Miyagi Etsujirō (1992:17–19). It is widely acknowledged that some highly dedicated and competent naval officers served in Okinawa during the early years of the occupation, but their command and influence lasted only briefly as administrative responsibility shifted from one military branch to the next. See Masahide Ōta, “The U.S. Occupation of Okinawa and Postwar Reforms in Japan Proper” in Ward and Sakamoto (1987:290). Okinawa-ken (1996:18). Masahide Ōta in Ward and Sakamoto (1987:290). On conscription policy, see Okinawa-ken (1996:20–21). For a thoughtful analysis of the “Maiden Lilies Corps” in English, see Linda Angst, “In a Dark Time: Community, Memory and the Discursive Construction of Gendered Selves in Postwar Okinawa,” Ph.D. dissertation (Yale University, forthcoming). Critical studies of the topic in Japanese are often controversial. A good antidote for the sentimental and subliminally erotic films on the himeyuri is to read the graphic and gritty first-hand accounts by survivors. A brief example in English can be found in Cook and Cook (1992:354–63). On group suicides, see Ishihara Masaie (1984); and Shimojima Tetsurō (1992). Masahide Ōta writes that “practically all those who were rescued from the horrors of war by American troops were astonished and gratified at the way the American soldiers treated them.” Masahide Ōta (1987:292). Nevertheless, it is important to remember that Americans did rape Okinawa women and shoot unarmed civilians, especially as the battle wore on. Such events were occasionally reported in the early days of the internment camps as well. Sasaki Takeshi et al. (1995:80). Masahide Ōta (1987:301). Miyagi (1992:11). This perspective on the war’s end is encountered frequently in Okinawan writing on the war and occupation. For example, see Hokama Yoneko, “Kutsujoku to eikō kara no shuppatsu” Miyari (1986:10–11) and Ōshiro Masayasu (1989:7). Most civilians already on the island were placed in the camps by June or July 1945, but some soldiers and noncombatants continued hiding in caves and forests for months after the war ended, unaware of Japan’s surrender. For example, see Ichibangase Yasuko (1984:11–18). For a vivid description of life in the camps, see Miyagi Etsujirō (1992:11–17). The information on internment camps can be found in Ōshiro Masayasu (1989:17– 18). I do not wish to suggest that the occupation posed universal suffering in Okinawa or that the Americans lacked goodwill toward their occupied subjects. On 20 September 1945, for example, American occupation authorities in Okinawa

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45

46

47 48 49 50

51 52

granted women the right to vote and to run for office, putting them seven months ahead of Japanese women in their attainment of suffrage rights. Still, suffrage meant little as long as the local government remained under the strict control of U.S. authorities, and the American occupiers of Okinawa did not enact the sweeping reforms undertaken in Japan by SCAP Whereas the revision of Japan’s Civil Code was among the most far-reaching reforms affecting Japanese women (see Chapter Four), similar legal rights were achieved in Okinawa years later and only through an ongoing struggle by women’s groups. For a concise overview of Okinawan women’s movements and events affecting women during the occupation era, see Hokama Yoneko (1975:109–22). On the movement to revise the Civil Code in Okinawa, see Nakamura Fumiko, “Bosei shūdan sanjūhachi-nen no ayumi” in Miyari Etsu (1986:85–9). On regulated prostitution, see Shin Okinawa bungaku, vol. 30 (Winter 1975) for Kinjō Kiyoko’s article, “Okinawa no baishun mondai,” pp. 58–66. Also, Hokama Yoneko, “Kutsujoku to eikō kara no shuppatsu,” pp. 43–50. Even John Dower, who is generally a harsh critic of U.S. policy, writes: “Judged on its own terms, the Occupation [of mainland Japan] had been unexpectedly amicable; and despite the so-called reverse course that marked the shift in U.S. policies from reform to rehabilitation of Japan as a Cold War ally, many of the initial democratic reforms remained intact.” Dower, “Occupied Japan and the Cold War in Asia,” in Dower (1993:158). For a detailed account of the early stages, including presurrender planning, see Ōta Masahide (1987:284–305). In Japanese, see Miyagi (1982); Arasaki Moriteru (1976); Nakano Yoshio and Arasaki Moriteru (1990). Also, Steve Rabson (1989:1– 31). M.Ōta (1987:291). M.Ōta (1987:300); Ōshiro Masayasu (1989:15). Ōshiro Masayasu (1989:21). Dower (1993:170–71). This view is not only shared by the majority of Okinawan scholars of the occupation but by leading scholars of the occupation of mainland Japan, such as Takemae Eiji. See, for example, Takemae’s Senryō sengoshi. Hokama Yoneko (1984:41–42). Beginning around 1967, heated debates filled the pages of Japanese and Okinawan newspapers and magazines about what type of reversion accord would be acceptable. Some insisted on an agreement that granted Okinawa full parity with Japan, including a guarantee from the United States that no nuclear weapons would be placed on Okinawan soil; others demanded annulment of the Japan—U.S. Security Treaty as a condition for reversion; and still others called for complete removal of American bases. Many of these positions obviously overlap, and myriad other views were put forth as well, including outright opposition to reversion policy by a small minority calling for Ryukyuan independence. The data for the student petition drive is cited in Ōshiro Masayasu (1989:22). Ōshiro also gives a useful summary of the reversion movement, although the most detailed account is contained in Arasaki (1976). On the reversion movement in relation to the Vietnam War, see Thomas R.H.Havens (1987). On conflicting positions within the reversion movement, see Arasaki (1976); and Nakano Yoshio and Arasaki Moriteru, Okinawa sengoshi. I am currently writing an article on the debates over Okinawa’s reversion. As for the Okinawan independence movement,

NOTES 205

it has its own long history and is experiencing renewed interest today, albeit among a small minority of the Okinawan population. For an overview of independence movements, see Shin Okinawa bungaku tokushū: Okinawa ni kodawaru— dokuritsuron no keifu (Fall 1982). 53 The 30 May 1998 edition of the Ryūkyū Shinpō newspaper reports the prefectural unemployment rate as 7.8 percent 1998. According to a 1997 report issued by the Ministry of Education, only 23.5 percent of Okinawan high school graduates enter college or junior college, which is the lowest percentage in the nation. The national average is 37.6 percent. Next to Okinawa, the lowest percentage was Aomori Prefecture at 27.3 percent. Aomori is traditionally among the nation’s poorest prefectures and is located on the northern end of Japan’s main island of Honshu. Statistics are from the 1997 edition of Gakkō kihon chōsa hōkokusho, compiled and published by the Ministry of Education. In 1993, Okinawa Prefecture’s live birth rate was 13.8 per thousand population— more than three births per thousand above the next highest prefecture. Okinawa’s divorce rate for that year was 2.18 per 1,000 population. The national average was 1.52; Osaka had the second highest divorce rate at 1.96, and Hokkaido was third at 1.94. See Statistics Bureau of the Management and Coordination Agency (eds), Japan Statistical Yearbook 1996 (based on data compiled by the Ministry of Health and Welfare). 54 Statistics taken from the Okinawa prefectural government’s publication, Okinawaken sōmubu chiji kōshitsu (1993:1–3). Also see Nagamoto Tomohiro (1996:193– 220). On page 197, Kuniyoshi notes that between Okinawa’s reversion in 1972 and 1996, that the space occupied by U.S. bases in Okinawa and the number of American military personnel have hardly changed. 55 “Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things,” Ernst Renan (1990:11).

1 Roads to no-man’s land 1 Ōshiro Masayasu (1989:2–5). Ōshiro is a common Okinawan surname, and although Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, the author of The Cocktail Party (discussed later in this chapter), also writes plays and historical studies in addition to works of fiction, he is not related to Ōshiro Masayasu. Ōshiro Masayasu’s literary works appear under his pen name, Shima Tsuyoshi. His short story, “Hone,” is contained in Okinawa bungaku zenshū, vol. 8 (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 1990), pp. 6–14, and has been translated by William J.Tyler as “Bones” in Molasky and Rabson (forthcoming). 2 Benedict Anderson (1983). 3 Gayle Rubin (1985:157–210); Luce Irigaray (1985); Eve Kosotsky Sedgwick (1985). 4 The word that I have translated as “barbed-wire fence” generally appears in the texts as kanaami (“steel mesh fence”), which refers to a tall steel fence with three rows of barbed-wire on top. (See the photograph on p. 26.) The fence is often encountered as a symbol of the divided landscape in occupation fiction from Okinawa. See the photograph in this book. For other examples from Okinawan literature, see the following stories from Okinawa bungaku zenshū, vol. 8: Aka

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Seiichirō, “Fushimatsu no sekinin,” Matayoshi Eiki, “Kānibaru tōgyū taikai” Matayoshi Eiki, “Fōji ga shasatsu shita inoshishi,” and Uehara Noboru, “1970nen no gyangu eiji.” I briefly discuss the last two stories in the Epilogue. 5 In the Introduction to their book, Nationalisms and Sexualities, the editors write: “One need only recall the title of a book that sold like hotcakes during the recent Gulf War —The Rape of Kuwait—to appreciate how deeply ingrained has been the depiction of the homeland as a female body whose violation by foreigners requires its citizens and allies to rush to her defense,” Parker, Russo et al. (1992:6). Annette Kolodny’s classic feminist study of landscape and American literature also discusses the “land-as-woman metaphor” (1975:3–9, 67). Lydia H.Liu, in a recent study of Chinese women’s writing from the 1930s, has written about an analagous Chinese literary discourse in response to Japan’s wartime occupation of Manchuria: As a sign of symbolic exchange, the raped woman often serves as a powerful trope in anti-Japanese propaganda. Her victimization is used to represent—or more precisely, to eroticize—China’s own plight. In such a signifying practice, the female body is ultimately displaced by nationalism, whose discourse denies the specificity of female experience by giving larger symbolic meanings to the signifier of rape: namely, China itself is being violated by the Japanese rapist. (Liu 1994:161) 6 The issue of silence and its potential as a strategy of resistance is explored by Ōe Kenzaburō in several of his early works of occupation literature, including “Ningen no hitsuji (“Human Sheep,” discussed in Chapter Six) and “Fui no oshi,” both of which are contained in Ōe Kenzaburō (1996). 7 Among the numerous literary critics and anthropologists who in recent years have discussed the issue of “representing the colonized” (or the occupied), Gayatri Spivak has perhaps most effectively highlighted the complexity of the undertaking, pointing out that class, caste, gender, regional background, and ethnic or religious differences defer the possibility of any “balanced” representation of colonial subjectivity (1988:271–313; see also 1990). 8 John Edwards (1985:3–16). 9 Ashcroft et at. (1989:54); Fanon (1967: ch. one); Memmi (1967:108–9). 10 On the dilemma of language in postcolonial writing, see Achebe (1973:5, 12); Ashcroft et al. (1989:7–8); Josaphat B.Kubayanda (1990:250–51); Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1988, especially ch. one). I am using the structuralist distinction between “story” and “text” with the understanding that these terms do not signify rigid, mutually exclusive categories. One of the most lucid explanations of these terms can be found in Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (1983). Rimmon-Kenan proposes a tripartite model that distinguishes between “story” and “text,” on the one hand, and “text” and “narration” on the other: “‘Story’ designates the narrated events, abstracted from their disposition in the text and reconstructed in their chronological order, together with the participants in these events. Whereas ‘story’ is a succession of events, ‘text’ is a spoken or written discourse which undertakes their telling. Put more

NOTES 207

11

12 13

14

15

16

17 18 19

simply, the text is what we read…. The act or process of production is the third aspect—‘narration’. Narration can be considered as both real and fictional,” (1983: 3). A critical overview of this and other theories of narratology is offered in Toolan (1988). In contrast, Japan’s neocolonial policy in Okinawa (1879–1945), its full-fledged colonization of Taiwan (1895–1945) and Korea (1910–45) succeeded, to a great extent, in fostering bilingualism among these populations, which should also serve as a reminder of Japan’s inclusion within the pantheon of twentieth-century colonial powers. The U.S. occupation of Okinawa did succeed in promoting English among a tiny group of elite students who were sent to the United States for their higher education. This group included the former prefectural governor, Ōta Masahide. Also, Japanese and Okinawans who served the occupation forces (especially maids and prostitutes) developed speech akin to a “pidgin” used for communicating with the foreign occupiers, although it never achieved wide currency even among these limited populations, nor did it evolve into a Creole. See Ashcroft et al. (1989:56–66), on glossing as both a signifier of difference and as a way of registering domination in the text. Admittedly, written texts in almost every language must rely on orthography as their “final” mode of representation. Nevertheless, in Japanese texts an orthographic combination in itself often signifies code-switching between languages, dialects, or registers. Kojima’s account of his wartime duties is translated in Gessel (1989:15–16). Gessel devotes a chapter of his book to Kojima’s fiction, in which he discusses both “The American School” and a later novel, Embracing Family (Hōyō kazoku). This novel is the subject of Etō Jun’s influential study of literature and the occupation, “Seijuku to sōshitsu” (1973: vol 1). On the “shishōsetsu,” see Fowler (1989); Hijiya-Kirschnereit (1996); Suzuki (1996). Fowler is especially persuasive in arguing that the shishōsetsu’s pretensions of being an unmediated autobiographical narrative are invariably compromised by the contingencies of representation, which include literary conventions and the nature of language itself. Throughout this book, I will hereafter place within parentheses those page numbers for passages from literary texts. When numbers are separated by a semi-colon, the first number refers to the Japanese text and the second number to the published English translation. When no semi-colon is given, the number refers to the Japanese text, and the translation is mine. I have used the following Japanese texts in this chapter: Kojima Nobuo (1967:183–228); Ōshiro Tatsuhiro (1982:181–258). Excellent English translations are available for both works, and unless otherwise noted I have used these: Kojima Nobuo (1977:120–44); Ōshiro Tatsuhiro (1989:35– 80). See Rimmon-Kenan (1983:68), especially on visual and morphological aspects of analogous names. My attention to the road as a symbolic space for the passage of culture and commodities is informed by Mark Auslander’s work (1997). Ueno Chizuko argues that during the war, women were denied the “privilege” of dying for the emperor, and this was both a condition and reflection of their lack of subjectivity in the eyes of the state. Despite their attainment of full political subjectivity in 1947 through the newly promulgated constitution, women were

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20 21 22

23

24 25

26

27

28

29 30

nevertheless confined to a secondary status within Japanese society. On women and the wartime state; see Ueno Chizuko (1998), especially pp. 31–38 on wartime mobilization and female subjectivity. Norma Field, among others, has noted the thematic relationship in “The American School” between the realms of the mouth (speaking and eating) and feet (1985:32). In her reading of the story, Field also notes the association of Michiko with the prostitute (1985:34). For just a few of the many additional war metaphors in the story, consider the following: “kiken kuiki” (“danger zone,” 191); “taigo” (“the ranks,” 204); “kōgun jōtai” (“marching formation,” 204); “teki ni ippō sakizuru sakusen” (“to keep one step ahead of the enemy,” 205). Yamada’s comical attempt to “go American” evokes Homi Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry. In Yamada’s inept attempt at mimicry, however, it is difficult to discern a parody of the occupiers that would constitute an act of resistance, and to my mind this poses a problem with Bhabha’s theory: namely, it fails to account for agency and intention, however hermeneutically problematic these notions may be. In other words, can resistance lie purely in the eyes of the observer? (see Bhabha 1984:93–122). Kojima Nobuo (1977:125). Again we are presented with America as teacher and policeman of democracy. The choice of a black GI for this role could either be read as evidence of America’s commitment to democracy or as proof of Japan’s thorough fall from power (since the Japanese are now subjugated “even to blacks”). The latter, less generous, interpretation is supported by the story’s brief depiction of this character: his beard, juxtaposed against his dark skin, lends him “an incongruously civilized air” (188; 122). See Chapter Three for an analysis of other ambivalent representations of black GIs. The English apology noted above appears in the text as “Omatase itashimashite makoto ni ai-sumimasen de gozaimashita” (187), whereas the Japanese speech begins with the gruff expression, “Oi,” which is akin to “Hey, you!” in English, and then continues, “Omae ni Nihongo o hanashite da na. Hanasenakattara yōsha shinai to ittara do narun da.” We might imagine Isa’s English apology as roughly: “I express my most profound apologies for causing your having waited.” Sibley translates Isa’s Japanese taunt into English as: “You’ll have to speak our language. Speak Japanese or else! What would you do if someone really said that to you?” (Kojima Nobuo 1977:122). On abrogation, see Ashcroft et al. (1989:38–40). Also see Ngugi (1988), although I feel that Ngugi’s own treatment of the issues succumbs to a certain essentialism, in which he links language and identity in an excessively deterministic fashion. For a similar criticism, see the discussion of Ngugi in Ashcroft et al. (1989:131). In his translation of this passage, William Sibley has taken the liberty of reminding the reader of Yamada’s faulty English pronunciation by translating “akui” (malice) as “marice”; the passage in the Japanese text is devoid of any such linguistic markers, orthographic or otherwise. For example, Kano Masanao (1987:367–68); Komesu Okifumi (1991:212); Okamoto Keitoku (1981a:164); Ōshiro Tatsuhiro (1968:38). Food and talk in The Cocktail Party are linked in one humorous scene where the protagonist stuffs his mouth with food to avoid participating in an unwanted

NOTES 209

31

32

33

34

35 36

37

38

conversation (190; 140). In “The American School,” Isa at one point uses the same strategy to avoid speaking English (191; 123). As in the introduction, I use the term “native” intentionally, both to underscore the colonial dynamic in this context and because the text occasionally succumbs to a nativist ideology. I hesitate, however, to claim that Euro-American categories of “otherness” have been imported by Okinawan male writers to represent their own sense of impotence before the white occupiers. On the other hand, John Dower has convincingly argued that Japan, in its wartime propaganda, did employ English discursive strategies in its claims to Asian solidarity as part of the country’s imperial expansion. On representations of “the other” that conflate sex and race, see de Groot (1989:89–128); Dower (1986:209–10); Gilman (1985:109–10, 158– 61). Jameson (1986:65–88). For a thoughtful critique of this article, see Ahmad (1992: ch. three). I must reiterate that I am taking Jameson out of context since he is primarily concerned with how different modes of production (“primitive” and “Asiatic” versus “capitalist”) impact on cultural representation in “the third world” as opposed to “the first world.” I have translated this passage to emphasize the frequent use of the word “higaisha” (victim) and have added the italics in the final sentence, which reads “Okinawajin toshite no higai da to kangaeru to, mondai o fukuzatsu ni sum.” Rabson’s translation appears on (1989:58). The passage that perhaps best reveals the protagonist’s identification with his daughter as a victim is especially difficult to render into English. Sun at one point refers to Harris as “higaisha” (a victim), and the protagonist becomes incensed, responding that “Higaisha wa kotchi nan desu” (228). A literal English translation might render this as “the victim(s) is/are on this side,” but the challenge is how to interpret the word “kotchi.” In the first printing of his translation, Steve Rabson rendered this passage as “She is the injured party” (63), but he has revised this to “We are the injured party” for the second printing. Rabson, trans., Okinawa: Two Postwar Novellas (Berkeley: Center for Japanese Studies, University of California, 1996, 2nd printing), p. 61. For example, see the comments by the Akutagawa Prize Selection Committee: Bungei shunjū (September 1967), p. 317. Ōshiro believes that “Turtleback Tombs” was overlooked for the award because its references to traditional Okinawan cultural practices were less accessible to the selection committee, which included Mishima Yukio and other prominent Japanese writers (1972:323–24). Also see the interview with Ōshiro in the evening edition of the Yomiuri shinbun (19 January 1996). In this interview Ōshiro notes the resemblance between The Cocktail Party and the September 1995 rape incident. Several Okinawan critics have praised “Turtleback Tombs.” For a brief but influential commentary on this work, see Komesu Okifumi (1978:176–77). Steve Rabson’s recent translation of the story can be found in Molasky and Rabson (forthcoming). On Okinawa and the Vietnam War, see Thomas R.H.Havens (1987). Chapters 5 and 7 are especially informative about Prime Minister Satō’s reversion policy and about Okinawa’s relationship to the anti-war movement. See notes below for data on GI crime.

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39 The most thorough study of the reversion movement can be found in Arasaki Moriteru (1976). 40 Andrew Pollack, “Rape Case in Japan Turns Harsh Light on U.S. Military,” New York Times (19 September 1995). 41 My information on the history of the Sanno Hotel is based on a written response to questions I posed to Colonel Thomas J.Boyd, U.S. Air Force, Director of Public Affairs, Headquarters, United States Forces, Japan (response dated 16 May 1996). Col. Boyd’s letter notes that U.S. forces began using the old Sanno Hotel in 1946; a Japanese source lists 1947 as the year that the SCAP officially “procured” the Sanno for use by the occupation forces: Sasaki Takeshi et al. (1995:523). I also posted an inquiry about the Sanno Hotel on the Internet user’s group, “Dead Fukuzawa Society,” and this generated conflicting responses about the New Sanno’s accessibility to non-military personnel. The hotel’s security director purportedly informed one person that “only U.S. military personnel or people traveling under orders” were permitted to stay at the hotel, but several U.S. government employees noted that non-military personnel with the proper papers were allowed entrance, and others noted that Japanese guests were among the customers in the hotel’s bar and three restaurants. Despite my own lack of connections to U.S. military and government authorities, in the early 1980s I had the privilege of visiting the officers’ club in the old Sanno, thanks to an invitation from a Japanese friend who was playing bass with a jazz trio in the hotel bar. 42 Okinawa Times (12 October 1995). 43 Higgins and Silver (1991:4). 44 Scarry (1985). 45 The Status of Forces Agreement was a set of special provisions in the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty that defines the legal status of U.S. forces in Japan. Under the agreement, U.S. military personnel and their dependents can not be held in custody by Japanese police as suspects in a crime until a formal indictment is lodged, unlike Japanese suspects, who can be held and interrogated before indictment. Okinawans have long called for revision of SOFA, and pressure mounted after the 1995 rape incident, since the suspects were released by the Japanese police and transferred to the custody of the U.S. military, which placed them in the brig at Camp Hansen until a formal indictment was lodged. As a result of the protests, the U.S. and Japan signed a “side letter” to the SOFA allowing U.S. military personnel to be placed in Japanese custody before they are indicted if Japanese investigators request it. Clinton’s visit was originally scheduled for November 1995 but was postponed, ostensibly due to a dispute between China and Taiwan that threatened to develop into a serious conflict. The Okinawan protests during October and November that were spurred by the rape incident were never mentioned as a reason for the postponement of the President’s visit, but the timing of the “crisis” in Taiwan, and North Korean incursions into the demilitarized zone along the North-South border, provided a convenient justification for postponing the visit and for affirming the need for America’s continued U.S. military presence in Asia. It should not be overlooked that the 1995 friendship dinner was timed to generate support for both Clinton’s visit and the Security Treaty. 46 Even the Himeyuri (Maiden Lily Nurse Corps), which has traditionally embodied pure victimhood of Okinawans in the minds of mainland Japanese as well as Okinawans, have not escaped scrutiny. Yoshida Tsukasa spurred a debate with his

NOTES 211

47

48

49

50

1993 book, Himeyuri chūshingura, in which he criticized the sentimental treatment of the Himeyuri. This book also challenges the assumption that the girls were chaste and virginal and thereby calls into question their pre-eminence as the symbol of female purity and Okinawan victimhood (1993). Yoshida Tsukasa. Yet by sparking a debate over the chastity of the Himeyuri, both the hagiographers and their detractors tacitly agree on the centrality of female chastity in establishing the Himeyuri’s privileged claim to victimhood (see Angst 1996). In his speech at the 19 September 1995 friendship dinner, Lieutenant General Myers noted, “Of course, this terrible tragedy was an outrageous attack toward humanity and makes all of us wearing the US military uniform deeply ashamed. As the U.S. military has a long-term friendly relationship and partnership with the people of Japan, we know the Japanese people understand that this does not represent what the American people stand for and that any criminal behavior by U.S. military personnel will simply not be tolerated by us.” Similar sentiments were expressed in the Pacific Stars and Stripes newspaper and by individual military personnel in letters posted on the Internet. The Okinawa Times (12 October 1995) lists serious crimes and accidents caused by U.S. military personnel before and after reversion. The list is too long to include here, but in addition to rapes and murders, it records fatal traffic accidents in which the American driver was found not guilty or was required to pay compensation of as little as 623 to the bereaved family. A traffic accident in February 1963 in which a twelve-year-old boy was killed led to protests throughout the Ryukyus when the American driver was acquitted by U.S. military investigators. Frustrated Okinawans responded similarly when an American serviceman who had been driving while drunk, hit and killed an Okinawan housewife in October 1970, only to be acquitted in December for “lack of evidence.” Ten days after the acquittal, another traffic accident in Koza led to a violent confrontation between residents and the military police, and a full-scale riot ensued in which scores of U.S. military vehicles were set on fire. See Nakano Yoshio and Arasaki Moriteru (1990:211– 13); Isa Chihiro (1986). Other deaths of Okinawan civilians—often children—have been caused by U.S. military jets crashes, bombs misfiring, and accidental shootings (see discussion of “The Wild Boar that George Shot” in the Epilogue). On 11 June, 1965, a small trailer was accidentally dropped from a U.S. bomber, killing an eleven-year-old schoolgirl. In this case, the U.S. Army paid the bereaved family 4,700 in compensation. A concise overview of GI crime in Okinawa and the land struggle is contained in Nagamoto Tomohiro (1996:193–220). Under the April 1996 agreement, Futenma airbase and several smaller U.S. military holdings on Okinawa would be returned within seven years, should all conditions of the agreement be satisfied. These military installations represents approximately 20 per cent of the total land held by the U.S. military on Okinawa. The conditions require that all U.S. military personnel be reassigned to another base within either Okinawa or mainland Japan, maintaining the overall number of U.S. troops in Japan. Ambassador Walter Mondale emphasized that these base reductions would in no way compromise the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty nor weaken the American presence in Okinawa. “Futenma zenmen henkan de gōi,” Asahi shinbun (13 April, 1996); “Kichi shukushō ni kinō iji no kabe” Asahi shinbun (16 April 1996). The Okinawa Times (9–18 December 1996).

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51 Asahi shinbun (11 February 1997). 52 Patrick Smith (1998).

2 A base town in the literary imagination 1 Okinawa-shi kyōiku iinkai (eds) (1974:465–66). The Okinawa City government has begun a multi-volume study of the history of the Koza region (dating back hundreds of years), but the volumes on postwar Koza have yet to appear (Okinawashi 1984–). 2 Nakahodo Shōkichi (1968:39; Tasato Yūtetsu (1983:217). 3 For a detailed account of the municipal merger, including the effort to solicit a new city name, see Sunakawa Masao (1993:217–44). Sunakawa notes that the decision to change the municipal name without receiving approval from the prefectural governor may have violated Item 3, Article 3 of the Regional Governance Code (ibid: 231). Also see “‘Okinawa-shi’ ni naitei,” an article from the 25 March 1973 edition of Misato Kōhō (Misato Public Register). This issue was the Register’s last: a few days later the village, together with the city of Koza, was relegated to history. The article is reprinted in Okinawa shiyakusho (1988:27). 4 On the various kanji used to write “Koza,” see Okinawa-shi kyōiku iinkai (eds) (1974:465–66). 5 When proposals for a new city name were solicited in 1973, several respondents suggested that “Koza” be maintained but written using kanji. Sunakawa Masao (1993:232). It may seem puzzling that kanji originally borrowed from the Chinese language are perceived in mainland Japan and Okinawa to lend orthographic legitimacy to “indigenous” place names, but this is only further testimony that all histories are highly selective. 6 One of the earliest Okinawan stories about black GIs was Nagadō Eikichi, “Kokujin-gai” (1966:6–22). This appeared on the first page of the inaugural issue of Shin-Okinawa bungaku, which soon became the region’s most influential journal of literature and criticism. Also see Matayoshi Eiki (1990b:118–41).Ōshiro Tatsuhiro has also written about black GIs in Koza in his novel, Furemukeba kōya (1995:6–168). For a journalistic treatment of race relations among GIs in Okinawa, see Chapter Six of Takamine Tomokazu (1989). 7 The interview with Higashi is published in Aoi umi (February 1972), pp. 70–73. 8 Following The Cocktail Party, Higashi’s An Okinawan Boy is the second Okinawan work of fiction to be awarded the Akutagawa Prize and may be as wellknown as Ōshiro’s novella among mainland Japanese readers. Unlike Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, who is Okinawa’s most prolific author, Higashi has published only a few stories since An Okinawan Boy attracted the attention of Japanese critics in the early 1970s. More than two decades since it first appeared, An Okinawan Boy is still available in a paperback edition in Japan, which attests to its staying power. A film version of the same title, directed by Shinjō Taku, was released in 1983. The director was determined to imbue the film with greater authenticity by selectively incorporating local dialect into the script but was frustrated by actors such as my Okinawan brother-in-law, who played a bit part in the film, and who Shinjō constantly berated for his inability to speak Okinawan dialect.

NOTES 213

9 I have used the following Japanese texts: Higashi Mineo (1980); Genga Asayoshi (1975); and Tanaka Kōkei (1992:6–35). Except where otherwise noted, I have used Steve Rabson’s English translation of “Okinawa no shōnen” which appears under the title “Child of Okinawa,” in Ōshiro Tatsuhiro (1989:81–119). Note that although I largely rely on Rabson’s excellent translation, I have chosen to refer to the story as An Okinawan Boy to highlight the centrality of gender in this work. All translations of “Aozameta machi” and “Konketsuji” are my own. 10 Although there is no direct indication of when the story was set, the narrator—a boy of thirteen or fourteen at the time of the story—records his memories of Saipan, where he lived until the war’s end. It can therefore be assumed that the story takes place during the early 1950s. 11 Several scholars and critics have commented on the use of dialect in this text. although to my knowledge there has yet to be a thorough analysis of Higashi’s style. For comments by Okinawan scholars on Higashi’s use of dialect, see Okinawan linguist Hokama Shuzen’s remarks in a roundtable discussion with novelist Ōe Kenzaburō and Nagatsumi Yasuaki (1972: 30–32). Also, Nakahodo Masanori (1981:102–12); Okamoto Keitoku (1981:45–46). For some brief, impressionistic comments on Higashi’s style by critics not proficient in Okinawan dialect, see the following: Maruya Saiichi (1971:103); Sasaki Kei’ichi (1974:300–01); Kitazawa Miho (1980:276–81). In English, refer to Steve Rabson’s commentary accompanying his translation of the story in Higashi Mineo (1989:127). 12 Although I have loosely translated “fūzoku eigyō” as “the entertainment business,” the word conjures up images of smoky bars, strip joints, brothels, and similar establishments. 13 On shifting American images of Okinawa during the occupation see, Miyagi Etsujirō (1982). This is the most thorough study of the American occupiers’ shifting views of Okinawa during the course of the occupation. Miyagi details how the Americans’ image of Okinawa underwent a gradual transformation from “The Rock” to an “Island Paradise.” 14 Ishikawa Jun, "Ōgon densetsu” (1961:53–64). 15 Chiiko is portrayed as a victim later in the story, when a frustrated and overzealous GI throws a grenade into her bar, leaving her scarred. This twist in the story may seem farfetched, but articles from Japan’s national newspapers attest to the occurrence of such events in Koza, particularly during the Vietnam War. For example, see “Beihei, bakudan? nage-abareru,” Nihon keizai shinbun [Evening Edition] (19 October 1970); “Minka e hōka, saimindan,” Akahata (30 October, 1965). 16 Here I am following Rabson’s interpretation of Tsuneyoshi’s elliptical comment, “sore na no ni…heitai-tachi wa…nan to iu…mō…(24; 93). 17 The word used in the original text is “shigami-tsuite iru,” which is perhaps best translated as “clings” or even as “clings desperately.” Rabson has revised the translation accordingly for the second edition of Two Okinawan Novellas. 18 On the complex history of currency policy in postwar Okinawa, see Makino Hirotaka (1987). 19 For a brief account of the events preceding the Koza riot, see the notes for Chapter One. The most thorough treatment of the 1970 Koza riot is Isa Chihiro (1986). Also see Okinawa-shi kyōiku iinkai (eds) (1974:803–10) and Chapter Two of Takamine Tomokazu (1989).

214 NOTES

20 Stories about “mixed-blood” children are not limited to those by Okinawan writers. In browsing through mainland Japanese literary magazines from the 1950s, I found works of fiction as well as essays on the topic. Fiction includes Inoue Yūichirō (1952); and Hirabayashi Taiko (1952). For examples of essays, see Hirabayashi Taiko (1953); Koya Yoshio (1953); Yuzawa Reiko and Takeshita Eiko (1953). Yuzawa and Takeshita are mothers of biracial children, and this article takes the form of a published dialogue. 21 Young (1995). 22 Field (1991:39). 23 On America’s influence on the postwar Okinawan diet, see Kinjō Sumiko (1995: 152–80). 24 On the origins of Business Center Street, see Tasato (1983:201–03) and Okinawashi kyōiku iinkai (eds) (1974:486–89). 25 My information on the B.C.Street Merchants’ Association (formally known as “Chūō paaku abenyū Okinawa-shi sentaa shōtengai fukkō kumiai”) is based on a 1993 interview with the Association’s leader, Nakasone Kazuo, and on Moromizato Michihiro, “Koza monogatari,” The Okinawa Times (7–15 April 1982). 26 For a sense of the various official proclamations issued by Okinawa City authorities, see Okinawa shiyakusho (1988). The favorite expression of government authorities reflecting their vision of the city’s new image is “kokusai bunka toshi,” which translates roughly as “City of International Culture.” 27 For an account of women from the Philippines working in Okinawan base towns, see Sturdevant and Stoltzfus (1992); Ishikawa Mao et al. (1996). A classic study of local women, military bases, and international politics is Enloe (1989). On women working near American bases in Korea, see Moon (1997). 28 Nantō chimei kenkyū sentā (1991). 29 This was the consensus of a broad range of artists, scholars, and general citizens attending the panel on “Culture Under Occupation” at the International Symposium on the Occupation of Okinawa, held in Okinawa City on 13 September 1992. Among the commentators were writer Ōshiro Tatsuhiro; rock musician Miyanaga Eiichi; and Okinawan folk musician, actor, and self-proclaimed “President of the Independent Republic of Koza,” Teruya Rinsuke. See also the series on Koza by The Okinawa Times reporter Moromizato, “Koza monogatari.” The continued preference for the name “Koza” among the city’s residents was the subject of discussion at the June 1995 meeting of the municipal government representatives. One representative proposed that the city government officially reinstitute the katakana name “Koza” because “although it has been twenty-one years since the town became ‘Okinawa City,’ neither city nor prefectural citizens have become comfortable with this name.” See “Okinawa-shi ka Koza-shi ka,” Ryūkyū shinpō (29 June 1995). 30 Okinawan rock has become Japan’s own form of “world music” and several Okinawan groups—nearly all of which originated in Koza—have successfully blended local folk music traditions with American rock. These musicians, many of whom themselves were fathered by Americans but were raised in Koza by Okinawan relatives, cut their teeth at Koza’s clubs catering to GIs, and lyrics typically mix English and Okinawan dialect, which is glossed in standard Japanese for the benefit of mainland audiences.

NOTES 215

3 A darker shade of difference 1 Ōe’s “Shiiku” (“Prize Stock”) first appeared in the January 1958 edition of Bungakukai. Ōe was twenty-three at the time, and this work was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, propelling him to literary fame at a time when Japan boasted many talented writers. Matsumoto Seichō’s “Kuroji no e” (“Painting on Black Canvas”) was first published in the March and April editions of the magazine, Shinchō. It is a long piece, perhaps best characterized as a “novella,” and although not among Matsumoto’s most popular or critically acclaimed stories, it too was written as the author was producing a series of works related to the war and occupation. 2 Yamada Eimi (1985); Ieda Shōko (1985). For a sympathetic reading of Yamada’s literature, see Theodore Goosen (1994:398–431). Other critics have been less generous, and I share their reservations about Yamada’s work. For example, Russell (1998:113–77). Also see this article for a discussion of Ieda Shōko’s role in the black boom. 3 In her research on “interracial sex,” Karen Kelsky has argued that the young Japanese women whose sexual “promiscuity” with foreign men has earned them the disdainful label, “yellow cab,” are in fact engaging in acts of resistance against Japanese men: “the so-called yellow cab is able to employ gaijin men as temporary tools in this domestic discourse of complaint primarily because of enduring Japanese racial ideologies which construct and maintain an essential identity of ‘the Japanese,’ and definitively differentiate that identity from that of non-Japanese or ‘the Other’” (Kelsky 1994:466). Also see Kelsky (1996). The term “yellow cab” seems to have emerged in the 1980s and refers to those women who travel abroad or to Japan’s own foreign enclaves in search of men, black or white, for one-night stands. Nina Cornyetz criticizes Kelsky for failing to examine the “role of power informing the logic of a black/white antipodal paradigm, and the resultant production of Japanese hybridity…”, but when writing specifically about sexual liaisons between Japanese women and African-American men, Cornyetz comes to a similar conclusion as Kelsky: “…by choosing an African-American lover, encoded with a text of phallic empowerment, and by rejecting the economic and social stability of a Japanese husband, the Japanese woman has availed herself of a passive-aggressive act of resistance” (Cornyetz 1994:127, 131). Cornyetz further reveals how young Japanese men also try to appropriate the power of the mythic black phallus by transforming themselves through fashion and physical alterations, such as hair treatment and skin darkening. She suggests that while “latent female rage” compels Japanese women to reject “the economic and social stability of a Japanese husband” and to adopt a passive-aggressive strategy of resistance, young men seek to appropriate the phallic power of blackness in order to reassert their dominance over Japanese women (ibid: 113–14). 4 “The black Other serves as a reflexive symbol through which Japanese attempt to reappraise their status vis-à-vis whites and the symbolic power (e.g. modernity, enlightenment, European-style civility, and High Culture)

216 NOTES

they are seen to represent; that is, it is employed as a category mediating white Otherness and Japanese Selfhood, forcing Japanese, particularly those who have lived abroad, to rethink both their identification with whites and their valorization of Eurocentric aesthetic and cultural values. Such reflexive use of the blacks expresses itself in two ways: (1) The Japanese agent/ narrator may continue to accept the racial status quo and see oneself as an excluded and inferior other vis-à-vis Euro-American norms, but attempt to compensate for the perceived deficiencies by elevating him or herself above other “backward” groups; (2) He/she may identify with the black Other, asserting solidarity with nonwhites in general as a fellow yūshokujin (person of color), and reject the racial status quo.” (Russell 1991:13) 5 Russell (1998:120). Russell has generously shared his unpublished research with me, and my own thoughts on this topic have benefited from his writing and from his comments on an earlier version of this chapter. In addition to “Consuming Passions” and “Race and Reflexivity…” Russell has written several papers in English and two books on the topic in Japanese (see 1991, 1994, 1995, 1996). Russell 1995 contains a useful bibliography of Japanese language scholarship and journalism on blacks, discrimination, and Japanese minorities. 6 For example, Cornyetz and Goosen refer to the war and occupation in their studies of blacks in Japanese popular culture during the 1980s and 1990s (Cornyetz 1994: 115; Goosen 1994:408). John Dower’s War Without Mercy (1986), remains the authoritative treatment of race in WWII, and new research is beginning to appear on conceptions of race in imperial Japan. See Weiner (1995:433–56; 1997). Yoshino Kosaku also discusses race in several sections of his book, Cultural Nationalism in Modern Japan (1992), and H.D.Harutoonian’s Things Seen and Unseen (1988), touches on the formation of ethnicity in his analysis of the nativist underpinnings of the folklore movement in prewar Japan. 7 As Cornyetz has noted, “many of Yamada’s female protagonists flaunt their sexual and economic dominance over their black lovers, overturning the immediate postwar paradigm by which Japanese prostitutes serviced black servicemen,” (1994: 127–28). Cornyetz has a detailed study of Yamada (Schalow and Walker 1996:425– 57). For a rare exception to this “postwar paradigm,” see my discussion of Hirabayashi Taiko’s “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido” in Chapter Five. 8 See, for example, her essay, “Osaru-san ka ningen-sama ka” Chūō kōron: bungei tokushū (1993:88–91). 9 Russell (1996:5). 10 I understand “race” to be a socially constructed category fraught with ambiguities rather than a preconstituted biological fact. Categories such as race and ethnicity not only vary across cultures and through history, they rely on elusive criteria. “Race,” for example, is arguably more useful as an ideological category than as a biological one, for as Miles and others have noted, “the scientific conception of ‘race’ grounded in the idea of fixed typologies and based upon certain phenotypical features such as skin colour and skull shape does not have any significant scientific meaning or utility” (Miles 1989:37).

NOTES 217

11 12 13

14

15

16

17

For a useful intellectual history of Japanese conceptions of race which also discusses the etymology of key terms such as “jinshu,” see Weiner (1995:435–42). On the “racial” components of Japanese “ethnic” discourse, see Yoshino (1992). On the concept of minzoku in prewar Japan, see Doak (1994). A critical analysis of nihonjinron can be found in Yoshino (1992) and in Dale (1986); Harumi Befu (1992:26–46). The words are Russell’s (1991:6). Russell (1996:5). On shifting conceptions of racial/ethnic identity in imperial Japan and on racial terminology, see Weiner (1995). Fujita Midori has also written suggestively about Japan’s incorporation of Euro-American conceptions of race through translations of Tarzan novels and films, and through Meiji-era publications set in Africa. (1990: 332–53). In imperial Japan, the emphasis on “blood” and on a “pure Japanese spirit” was integral to the state ideology but complicated the effort to incorporate colonial subjects (Ryukyuans, Taiwanese, Koreans) into the expanding body politic. To the extent that all colonial subjects were also subjects of the emperor (whose authority, after all, rests on mythical consanguinity with the Sun Goddess) these ethnic outsiders had to be brought into the national family without compromising its purity. Dower argues that this potential conflict was addressed by reviving the Confucian notion of “proper place,” which situated each group within a hierarchical relationship to Japanese subjects and to the emperor, thereby justifying the subordination of colonial subjects while incorporating them into the empire. Dower (1986:9–10, 278–84). Hereafter, all textual references will be given parenthetically. In my discussion of “Prize Stock,” when page numbers are separated by a semicolon, the first number refers to the Japanese text and the second refers to John Nathan’s English translation in Ōe Kenzaburō (1997). All translations of “Painting on Black Canvas” and “The Colored Race” are mine, and page numbers refer to the Japanese text. For “Prize Stock” I have used Ōe Kenzaburō, (1966:99–138). For “Painting on Black Canvas,” page numbers refer to Matsumoto Seichō (1979). Two translations of “Shiiku” are available in English anthologies: Nathan’s “Prize Stock” and John Bester’s “The Catch,” in Ōe Kenzaburō (1981). (See note 26 below for a significant discrepancy between these two translations.) I have translated “The Colored Race” in its entirety in Molasky and Rabson (forthcoming). I alternate between referring to the black man as a “pilot” and a “soldier” in the generic sense. The story generally refers to him simply as “kokujin-hei” (black soldier). The word used in the original is kau, which is translated by John Nathan as “rear him” (126). Kau is written with the first character in the compound shiiku, which is the Japanese title of the story. As a noun, shiiku refers to the breeding or rearing of domestic animals. On the use of landscape in “Prize Stock, see Nathan, “Introduction” to Oe Kenzaburo (1977); Aeba Takao (1971:45); Field (1989:313); Isogai Hideo (1971:129); Kōno Toshirō (1971:83); Napier (1991:29–31). Theodore Goosen has noted that the characters themselves also contribute to the unreal atmosphere of “Prize Stock.” He points not only to the black man who

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18 19

20 21

22 23

24 25 26

27

28

29

30 31 32 33 34

appears from the sky but to the local characters, who include Harelip, a man with a wooden leg, and the protagonist’s father, who is a hunter (Goosen: 1990:537). Ōe Kenzaburō, “‘Warera no jidai’ to boku jishin,” in (1971:244); Napier (1991). The village is presented as isolated not only from urban Japan but from the nearest town. The text signifies the difference embodied in the town by consistently enclosing the word “machi” (“town”) in brackets. In contrast, the word for “village” receives no comparable signification. That the children from the town look down on the village children as dirty animals further contributes to the construction of the village as part of a separate, pre-modern space. Kōno Toshirō offers an analysis of the story’s social and physical topography in his article, “Shiiku,” (1971:82). On Ōe’s striking literary style, see Takahashi Hideo (1971) and Kōno Toshirō (1971:82). On male eroticism in “Prize Stock” see Goosen (1990:534–39). Goosen also discusses the black soldier who appears in Kojima’s “The American School” (ibid.: 539–42) Field and Goosen are among the handful of critics who have discussed this issue. See Field (1989:314–15); and Goosen (1990:536–37). Napier (1991:30). Etō Jun appears to have been the first critic to use the term “hanshinron” (pantheism) with respect to “Prize Stock.” See Aeba Takao’s comments (1971:48). Homi Bhabha (1983:22). Also see Gilman (1985:22–23). Bhabha (1983:22). The translation is John Nathan’s. John Bester omitted this scene from his translation of the story in “The Catch.” Were it included, it would appear on page 48. Among the most thorough studies of blacks as “primitives” (albeit in the context of English literature), see Street (1975). Russell’s comment can be found in (1991:8). Also see Field (1989:314). Robert Rolf has also remarked on Ōe’s broad use of animal metaphors throughout the story (1987:238). The titles of several Ōe stories attest to his fondness for such metaphor, and he is also partial to assigning animal nicknames to his characters. Consider, for example, Frog and Harelip in “Prize Stock” and the protagonist of A Personal Matter, Bird. Sedgwick (1985) and Girard (1976) remain among the most thorough discussions of the triangle in literary works. With respect to Ōe’s use of the triangular structure in his early works, see Wilson (1986). His Chapter Three discusses several stories set during the occupation that I do not address in this book. Field has also noted that the boy ends up “in a lonely space, neither child nor adult.” (1989:315). Field (1989:314–15). Field (1989); Goosen (1990:536–37). Statistics are from Kamada (1978:165). A brief reference to the incident can be found in Nakajima Kōtarō (1978). For details, see Kitakyūshūshi-shi [The History of Kitakyūshū City], pp. 730–31. According to this municipal history, newspaper reports on the incident were repressed by the occupation forces and official documents are scarce. I wish to thank Mr. Tashima Hiroyuki of the Kitakyūshū City Board of Education for

NOTES 219

35

36 37

38

39 40

41

42

43

44

45

providing me with this and related information on the incident. In English, see Bowers et al., (1996:80–81). Shōchū is a cheap, strong, and popular distilled liquor made primarily in Kyushu. The most well-known type is distilled from potatoes, but certain regions of Kyushu make the drink from wheat, rice, sesame, or sugar cane. I could not locate the original English news reports and have therefore translated them back into English from the Japanese. Several critics have commented on Matsumoto’s distinct concern in his detective stories with social issues and not just with the questions of “whodunit” and how: Aramatsu Takashi (1973:46); Shigematsu Yasuo (1973: 44); Morota Kazuhiro (1978:98–99). Also see Matsumoto’s own published dialogue, Matsumoto Seichō and Miyoshi Yukio (1978:28–47). See pages 172–74 of the original text for the Japanese expressions. Johannes Fabian (1983), offers a compelling analysis of how ethnographers unwittingly deploy temporality in their narratives to relegate the native subject to a “traditional” (i.e. “primitive” or less developed) space. My analysis of Matsumoto’s treatment of the festival drums draws on Fabian’s insights. For a detailed study of the 24th Infantry Regiment in relation to the history of racial segregation within the U.S. military, see Bowers et al. (1996). The History of Kitakyushu City claims that approximately 160 armed GIs escaped from Camp Jōno on the night of July 11 (p. 730). The US Army Center of Military History claims that “only a small minority of the more than three thousand members of the 24th were involved in those incidents…” (Bowers 1996:81). The sense of camaraderie is private because it is rarely shared by the foreign soldiers. This holds true for every work examined in these chapters, the only possible exception being “Prize Stock.” That the camaraderie is not reciprocal is one reason why Sedgwick’s theory of “homosocial desire” must be applied delicately to these works of Japanese occupation literature. The problematic philosophical distinction between “fact” and “fiction” (and the attendant distinction between “text” and “context”) has, of course, been noted by countless philosophers, literary theorists, and historians, but the following two books specifically address the issue in relation to “documentary fiction”: Foley (1986) and Hollowell (1977). I have translated the Japanese word “kuronbō” as “niggers,” although in other contexts it would warrant a slightly less offensive translation, perhaps along the lines of “darkies.” Journalist Honda Katsuichi’s influential book, Amerika gasshūkoku, appeared in 1961, as did Oda Makoto’s Nandemo mite yarō, both of which address the contradictions of America’s positions with respect to race. Although Japanese novelists have, since the Meiji period, been publishing accounts of their travels to Europe and the United States, it became common during the 1960s and 1970s for writers to visit black communities in the U.S., and some writers took special pride in noting that they visited black ghettos in Harlem or South Chicago, thereby appearing to document their own ideological empathy with black Americans as oppressed people of color. These postwar writers include Yasuoka Shōtarō, Nosaka Akiyuki, and Nakagami Kenji. The poem appeared in Ryūdai bungaku, vol. 2, no. 1, under the title “‘Yūshoku jinshu’-shō, sono ichi” (“Thoughts on ‘The Colored Race’, Part One”), but it seems

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46

47 48 49

50 51

52 53

54 55

56

57

that Part Two (or any comparable sequel to Part One) was never written. I will hereafter refer to the poem as “The Colored Race,” which accords with most published Japanese-language references. My information on Ryūdai bungaku derives from readings of the original magazine (found in the University of the Ryukyus library) and on the following secondary sources: Kano Masanao (1987:113–60); Ōe Kenzaburō (1981:29–33); Takara Ben (1991:374–77); Okamoto Keitoku (1981a:57–61; 1981b 113–26). Okamoto, Professor Emeritus of Japanese literature at University of the Ryukyus, was an active member of the literary circle producing the magazine and wrote fiction under the pen name Ikezawa Satoshi. Okamoto and his colleague, Nakahodo Masanori, are considered the foremost authorities on modern Okinawan literature, although neither has written about Ryūdai bungaku as thoroughly as has the Japanese intellectual historian, Kano Masanao. I have relied especially on Kano’s analysis, which is the most meticulous study of the magazine available. Nakano Yoshio and Arasaki Moriteru (1990:74–80). A brief overview of these events is offered in Okamoto Keitoku (1981a:93–101). Okinawa Prefectural Culture Promotion Foundation (1998:50). This is an informative bilingual source on the land confiscation issue, replete with many photographs and contemporary newspaper articles. Also on land confiscation and local protests, see Arasaki Moriteru (1976). Nakano Yoshio and Arasaki Moriteru (1990:83–85). The movement organized to resist land seizures was known as “tochi tōsō” (“The land struggle”). Clearance entailed submitting the issue to university authorities as well as to the censorship section of USCAR. Kano Masanao (1987:135); Ōe Kenzaburō (1981: 32–33). Kano’s meticulous study of Ryūdai bungaku includes a chart listing the editors for each issue and notes their real names when pseudonyms are used (1987: 115–17). Kano Masanao (1987:118, 152); Okamoto Keitoku (1981a:116); Ōe Kenzaburō (1981:32); Takara Ben (1991:374–76). To my knowledge, Kano and Ōe (both “mainland” Japanese) offer the most detailed discussion of the poem in Japanese (Kano Masanao 1987:145–48; Ōe Kenzaburō 1981:29–30). Ōe Kenzaburō (1981:32). Kano Masanao (1987:145–48). Kano’s comment on the negligible literary value of the poetry and fiction appearing in the magazine seems to reflect a general consensus among critics, which is supported by the paucity of references in Okinawa’s postwar literary histories to works published in Ryūdai bungaku. See also Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s comments in Kano Masanao (1987:138). Kano Masanao (1987:41). It is no small irony that the University of the Ryukyus, which was founded with support by the American occupation forces in order to foster goodwill toward the United States, developed into a hotbed of anti-American activities, and Ryūdai bungaku was often at the center of controversy. Kano Masano (1987:118); Okamoto Keitoku (1981b:374). In its early years, Ryūdai bungaku attempted to create a literature of resistance by pursuing what they referred to as “socialist realism.” Okamoto Keitoku notes that the editors at this time were particularly inspired by the writings of Georg Lukács and by the postwar Japanese leftist literary magazines Kindai bungaku and Shin-Nihon bungaku, where critics such as Sasaki Kiichi and Ara Masato published their own interpretations of

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58

59 60

61

62

63

64 65 66

67

realism. Okamoto Keitoku (1981a:114–15). Kano notes that both the magazine’s contributors and literary critics agree that Ryūdai bungaku redefined itself beginning with the sixth issue (July 1954), taking a more aggressive position on literature and politics. The magazine’s “early years” refers to the period between this issue and the late 1950s. Kano Masano (1987:126–27); Okamoto Keitoku (1981b:98–99); Takara Ben (1991:375). “Ancestral land” (sokoku) is more commonly used in Okinawa than “Motherland” (bokoku) to refer to Japan. Arakawa’s comments about his youth are quoted in Arakawa Akira and Arasaki Moriteru (1985:48–49). Arakawa and Arasaki (1985:48). Okamoto Keitoku’s memories of the young Arakawa appear in Kano Masano (1987:119): “He had long hair, wore U.S. Army fatigues that were far too large for him, and walked around campus with his shoulders perpetually hunched up in anger.” The respective Japanese titles are: “Bokura no hifu,” “ Ōshoku jinshu (I),” “Burakku ando ierō (chūryū kokujinhei ni sasageru uta no 1),” “Ōshoku jinshu (II),” and “Ikyō no kokujinhei, mata wa kokujin aishi (chūryū kokujinhei ni sasageru uta no 2).” The “color of wheat” (mugiiro) refers to a hue closer to cocoa than to the goldenyellow English readers are likely to imagine, but I have translated the word literally to preserve the image of natural sustenance associated with wheat. “Honest John” was a highly mobile surface-to-surface artillery rocket capable of carrying both chemical and nuclear warheads. Information sent to me by the Army Missile Command’s Historical Division indicates that a later version of Honest John was deployed by NATO until 1982. It is widely rumored that the missile was deployed in Okinawa by the U.S. Army under the Eisenhower administration. Captain Daniel P.Bernhardt of the Historical Division, U.S. Army Missile Command at Redstone Arsenal (Alabama), who provided me with technical information on the missile (including photographs and a declassified “fact sheet”), wrote that he “could find no mention of deployment in Okinawa.” I received no response from Redstone to subsequent inquiries about whether the information might still be classified. Mike Baker of Redstone’s Historical Division informed me that while there are many speculative and entertaining theories about how Honest John got its name, no definitive explanation exists. Information based on personal correspondence and on the “Honest John Rocket 762MM M31 Missile System Fact Sheet” (Declassified), United States Army Missile Command, Redstone Arsenal (Alabama). Ryūdai bungaku, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 39–43. In the original text the final lines read: “kimitachi o oshitsubusō to sum subete o yakitsukuse!” In a personal conversation in 1991, Ōshiro Tatsuhiro explained to me that the censorship restrictions had loosened considerably by 1967, which enabled his story to appear in both Okinawa and Japan. For example, when Ōe Kenzaburō began visiting Okinawa during the 1960s and writing his influential essays about the plight of Okinawans under American occupation, it was Arakawa who challenged him to overcome his own “liberal guilt” and confront the complexities of Okinawa’s relationship to both Japan and the United States. Ōe refers to his discussions with Arakawa at several points in

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Okinawa keiken (1981). This volume contains all of the essays collected in Ōe’s better-known book, Okinawa nōto, in addition to critical essays that should be of interest to scholars.

4 Female floodwalls 1 Takami Jun claims to have been the first Japanese author to write about the panpan (1953:116). 2 The original Japanese name for the RAA was “Tokushu ian shisetsu kyōkai” (literally: “Association of Special Recreation Establishments”) and was later changed to “Kokusai shinzen kyōkai” (“International Amity League”) (Kobayashi Daijirō and Murase Akira 1971:12). The “ianfu seido” (“comfort woman system”) must be understood as sometimes having entailed outright sexual slavery and as often having involved coercion. 3 The chronology of these events varies slightly from one source to the next. For example, on page 233 of his Japan Diary, journalist Mark Gayn gives August 15 as the date that the Metropolitan Police Department summoned the leaders from Tokyo’s prostitution industry, but Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Kobayashi and Murase, and others give August 18 as the date. I have followed the chronology offered in these more recent, carefully researched, accounts (Yoshimi Yoshiaki 1995:196). 4 Descriptions of the early days at Komachi Garden also vary according to the source. Kobayashi and Murase claim that business boomed from August 28, whereas Masayo Duus (1995) argues that the first large group of troops entered on the 29th. Other sources offer additional contradictions, but few dispute that the RAA’s brothels flourished within days after opening for business. For a detailed chart indicating the name, location, and principle activities of individual RAA establishments, see Kobayashi Daijirō and Murase Akira (1971:21–23); and Fukushima Jūrō (1987:257). 5 Among book-length studies of the RAA, two works of investigative journalism stand out as being well-researched: Kobayashi Daijirō and Murase Akira (1971), first published in 1961 as Minna wa shiranai; and Masayo Duus (1995), first published in a cloth edition by Kōdansha in 1979, later in paperback under the title, Makkāsā no futatsu no bōshi, and then reissued in 1995 by Kodansha with the original title. Kobayashi and Murase interviewed former RAA brothel owners, prostitutes, and government officials. They also sifted through police records and other documents. Duus added a new dimension to the story by acquiring materials from American government archives in Washington and by interviewing former SCAP personnel. Examples of recent studies include Inoue Setsuko (1995), and Yamada Meiko (1992). Another book, Yoshimi Etsuko’s Baishō no shakaishi (1992) offers a more comprehensive “social history of prostitution” but its treatment of the RAA hews extremely closely to that of Murase and Kobayashi. For a thoughtful English-language study of regulated prostitution in Japan since the Meji era, see Garon (1997). 6 Ueda Yasuo (1995:234). 7 Kobayashi Daijirō and Murase Akira (1971:26–30). 8 Masayo Duus (1995:30); Yamada Meiko (1992:24).

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9 The expression “onna no bōhatei” which I have translated as “female floodwall,” was used repeatedly in government documents, RAA records, and private diaries of those involved in establishing the RAA. Masayo Duus notes that the concept of a “female floodwall” has a long lineage in Japan but traces the postwar version to Saka Shin’ya, Superintendent-General of the Metropolitan Police. See Masayo Duus (1995:22). Duus provides a detailed account of Saka’s role in the formation of the RAA in Chapter 2 of her book. The phrase “preserve the pure blood of onehundred million” (“ichioku no junketsu o mamorimotte”) appeared in a prospectus issued by the RAA, and similar phrases were used widely by government and police officials involved in establishing the postwar “comfort woman system” Daijiro Kobayashi and Akira Murase (1971:13, 17). The expression, “good girls of the middle class” (literally, “girls from good homes,” or “ryōke no fujoshi”) appears in Yamada Meiko (1992:32). 10 On floods as a threatening symbol of uncontrolled female sexuality, see Klaus Theleweit (1987:249–300). 11 Yamada Meiko (1992:31–32). 12 Kobayashi Daijiro and Murase Akira (1971:14). Several photocopies of actual RAA recruitment ads are reprinted in Inoue Etsuko (1995:37). This advertisement or a similar one has been quoted in nearly every published account of the RAA. 13 Japan’s modern system of regulated prostitution, which was characterized by compulsory venereal disease examinations of women “sex workers,” was partly based on nineteenth-century European models, which in turn were originally devised to ensure the hygiene of soldiers stationed abroad, particularly in the colonies (Fujime Yuki 1997:135–40); Garon (1997:90–94). In fact, by the end of the nineteenth century many American physicians had already concluded that compulsory examinations alone would be unsuccessful in controlling venereal disease in the U.S. (Hobson 1990:151). On the attempt to control venereal disease among U.S. troops stationed in postwar Korea, see Moon (1997). 14 Nishi Kiyoko (1985:36–40). 15 Kobayashi Daijirō and Murase Akira (1971:69). In Part Two, Kobayashi and Murase offer an overview of the history of the red line districts in the decade following the war. 16 Among the former blue line districts that survives with the original buildings largely intact (although today they function mainly as bars that offer only drink and conversation) is Shinjuku’s “Golden Street” (Goruden gai). For an Englishlanguage description of this district and its history, see Bornoff (1991:231–33) and Seidensticker (1991). After 1946, prostitutes in red line districts who formerly worked in registered brothels and were known as “kōshō” (public prostitutes) came to be referred to by Japanese authorities as “shūshō” (assembled prostitutes). In contrast, the illegal freelancers who worked the blue line districts were known as “sanshō” (dispersed prostitutes), which emphasizes their role in a less centralized sexual marketplace. Another historical account of a neighborhood closely associated with the early postwar years is Shiomitsu Kazu (1982). This book relates, through short essays, photographs, and documents, the history of Ueno’s famous “Ameyoko” district, including its thriving black market and prostitution centers. 17 On government-physician cooperation in regulating prostitution in other countries, see Guy (1990); Hershatter (1987); Moon (1997); and Barry (1995).

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18 On the Socialist Party’s response to the Anti-Prostitution Law, see Yuki ShigaFujime (1993:3–27). 19 Nishi Kiyoko (1985:36–40; 107–15). Also see Sugaya Naoko (1975:64–73). 20 Keiō gijuku daigaku shakai jigyō kenkyūkai (1953). I am grateful to Mr. Fukushima Jūrō for providing me with a copy of this study. 21 Among Kanzaki’s articles in Fujin kōron are the following: “Ruporutāju: Yokosuka —Nihon no reddo rain” (1952:170–75); “Motto hokori o: kichi to teisō no kiki ni tsuite” (1953:48–53); “Shiro to kuro: nichibei konketsuji no chōsa hōkoku” (1953: 128–39); “Baishun kinshi hōan o meguru fujin giin zadankai” (1954:132–39). Fujin kōron catered to relatively well-educated, middle-class women. It was published by Chūō kōronsha as a serious women’s magazine intended to function as a companion volume to their high-brow general interest monthly, Chūō kōron. 22 The single, most thorough study of base towns from this time is the 350-page collection of on-site investigative reports, Shimizu Kitarō et al. (1953). Although not limited to problems of prostitution, it is one of the central problems identified in the 19 reports from base towns throughout Japan. Notably, the book contains not a single report on Okinawan base towns. 23 Articles from Fujin kōron include Yagi Yoshinori, “Ruporutāju: Yokohama” (July 1952), pp. 112–19; Hino Ashihei, “Ruporutāju: Sasebo” (1952:120–25); Yamashita Aiko, “Ruporutāju: Chitose” (1952:176–81); and Takenaka Katsuo, “Ruporutāju: kichi Itami” (1953:176–81). Nakamoto Takako’s article appeared in the leftist literary magazine, Shin Nihon bungaku, but is in roughly the same vein as the Fujin kōron series. Nakamoto Takako, “Kichi ‘Tachikawa’ no yokogao,” Shin Nihon bungaku (1952:34–39). I discuss Nakamoto’s short story, “Women of a Base Town” in Chapter 5. 24 Yamashita Aiko (1952:177). 25 On the Socialist Party’s debates about the 1956 Prostitution Prevention Law, see Shiga-Fujime (1997:3–27); Garon (1997:199–205). 26 In a footnote from his economic and philosophical manuscripts, Marx writes: “Prostitution is only a particular expression of the general prostitution of the worker, and because prostitution is a relationship which includes both the person prostituted and the person prostituting—whose baseness is even greater—thus the capitalist, too, etc. is included within this category,” (Marx 1988:90). 27 Carole Pateman (1988), especially Chapter 7. Pateman was a participant in a lively debate about prostitution that was waged on the pages of the journal Ethics during the 1980s. Her objection to Lars Ericsson’s attempt at a philosophical justification of prostitution focuses on how “liberal contractarianism systematically excludes the patriarchal dimension of our society from philosophical scrutiny.” See Ericsson (1980:335–66) and Pateman (1983:561–65). 28 Shannon Bell (1994:79–80). 29 Pateman and Laurie Shrage, who also participated in the Ethics debates, both advocate a culturally and historically specific approach to theorizing prostitution. See Pateman (1983) and Shrage (1989). 30 For a detailed account of the workings of these establishments in Korea, Okinawa, and the Phillipines, see Sturdevant and Stoltzfus (1992). Sturdevant and Stoltzfus are particularly informative with respect to base prostitution in the Philippines. On GI prostitution in Okinawa, also see Takazato Suzuyo (1996: chs three, four). The

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31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38

39 40

most thorough English-language study of base town prostitution in Korea is Moon (1997). According to one Japanese source, over 40 women from the Philippines and Thailand the in Japan each year due to abuse they suffer as prostitutes (Andō Yoiko and Yoshida Yōko 1995:228). Gail Hershatter makes this point as well in her study of prostitution in modern China (1997:3–4). Minami Hiroshi et al. (1953). The lyrics were written by Shimizu Minoru, the music by Tone Ichirō. The complete lyrics can be found in Mita Munesuke (1997:167–68). Mizuno Hiroshi (1953); Gotō Tsutomu (1953). Nakamura Tōji (1957:208). In addition to specific use of the phrase “chastity of Japan,” the term “chastity” itself appears in the titles of numerous books and articles from the 1950s, although the usage of the term is sometimes parodic, especially in those mildly pornographic books that aim to titillate rather than inform readers. An example is Nishida Minoru (1956). Note that this book is published by the same company that released Female Floodwall the following year. Hagiwara Yōko (1995:81). See, for example, Fukushima Jūrō’s study of postwar magazines and popular books, Sengo zasshi no shūhen (1985). Fukushima, perhaps the foremost authority on and collector of popular publications from the 1940s and 1950s, not only quotes from the jacket sleeve but includes photographs of books with the obi intact and notes what is printed on the back as well. More often than not, at the time of purchase the entire three-layered product— book, bookcover, and obi—is further wrapped in a generic bookcover by a clerk at the checkout counter. It not only conforms with the cultural practice of wrapping new purchases but hides the book from prying eyes, since reading in Japan is a private activity that is often conducted in public places, most notably on trains and in coffee shops. Symbolically, I would suggest that this final layer of wrapping serves to redefine the object, transforming it from a salable and advertised commodity into a personal possession to be savored privately rather than displayed to the public. The wrapping thus signifies the transformation from “advertised product” designed to be viewed to “private possession.” The subtitle does not appear in the sequel edition since it assumed the tone of an objective journalistic study rather than a collection of first-hand accounts. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate the obi from the original volume. Libraries usually discard the obi before placing the volume on the shelves, as do most used bookstores. My own copies of the two volumes were generously given to me by Maesaka Toshiyuki, a former reporter for the Mainichi Newspaper who covered GI-related crimes, and who is currently a Professor of Communications at Shizuoka Prefectural University. The sequel edition of Chastity given to me by Professor Maesaka still contains the obi but the original edition does not. I have never found either book at used bookstores I have visited in Tokyo during the past five years, and while I did see one copy of the sequel edition at a used book fair held at Shinjuku’s Isetan Department Store in August 1996, it did not contain the obi. This book, incidentally, was being sold for ¥2500, or approximately 25. Finally, a photograph of the original edition of Chastity is reproduced in Fukushima Jūrō’s (1985) study of postwar journalism, but this volume also appears

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41

42

43

44 45

46

47 48 49 50

51 52

without the cover sleeve. Fukushima’s photograph of Female Floodwall does feature the obi. For photographs of Chastity and Female Floodwall, see Fukushima (1985:253, 259). I have chosen the expression “naked truth” to preserve the pun in the original phrasing: “yonin no josei ga sekirara ni tsuzutta kono shuki…” The movie to be based on Chastity was never completed. The Japanese phrases used are “gaikokuhei ni yoru teisō no kanzen senryō” and “seiteki mujōken kōfuku.” The latter phrase, which translates as “sexual unconditional surrender,” will immediately evoke the writings of Etō Jun for readers familiar with his later criticism on the occupation era. As I note in the Introduction, Etō’s writing on the occupation is rife with sexual tropes, including his wry claim in the essay, “Amerika to watakushi,” that he went to live in America for a few years because he “wanted to sleep with the occupier.” For a brief discussion of the use of Etō Jun and Sodei Rinjirō’s use of this trope, see my essay, “‘Amerika to neru, to wa: hiseniyō taiken no hyōgen o megutte” (1987:28– 32). Duus Masayo (1995:77–85). Also see Chapter two in Inoue, Semyōgun iansho. Crime statistics are interspersed throughout several of the books on the RAA. The most detailed accounts based on police files are Kobayashi and Murase (1971) Duus Masayo (1995), and Inoue Setsuko (1952), although the most reliable scholarly treatment of the issue is perhaps Yoshimi (1992:199–200). The most detailed police statistics appear to be from Kanagawa Prefecture, which includes the port city of Yokohama and the naval base at Yokosuka. For a detailed study of RAA activities in Kanagawa, see Inoue Setsuko (1952). Dower (1986). During the late 1940s and 1950s, a GI mistress was known as an “onrii,” from the English “only one.” This was a more prestigious position among prostitutes. Not only did it provide greater security, an apartment or house, and make fewer demands on the body, but it occasionally led to marriage—although far less often than was promised. As opposed to an “only,” a prostitute who accepted multiple customers was sometimes referred to as a “butterfly” (batāfurai). Woman-hunting (onna-gari), the illegal abduction of Japanese women by occupation soldiers, must be distinguished from panpan hunting (panpan-gari), the routine roundup and harassment of GI prostitutes by MPs. For a perspective on panpan hunting by a Japanese policeman who rode with American MPs in their jeeps during the occupation, see Harada Hiroshi (1994:169–70). See, for example, Morosawa Yōko (1972:52). Personal conversation with Mr. Hihara Hinenori, May 1997. Hihara claims not to know the real name of the male author. Tanaka Kimiko (1957). Although my personal copy of Female Floodwall still has the jacket sleeve (it was folded inside the book when I found it at a used bookstore), a photograph in which the entire advertisement printed on the sleeve is reprinted in Fukushima, Jūro (1987:253). For a few examples of passages that are sexually explicit and eroticize rape or other forms of violence, see the following pages in Female Floodwall: 14, 23, 56. Brooks (1984). For a critique of Brooks and his school of thought on melodrama, see the essays in Hays and Nikolopoulou (1996). In their Introduction, Hays and

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Nikolpoulou suggest that Brooks and his followers have dehistoricized melodrama by “reinscribing it under an aesthetic category named after the adjective derived from it …[this] is bound to move critical discussion into a subjective arena that must inevitably disregard the cultural dynamics underlying the actual production and reception of the melodrama,” (ibid: viii). But it seems unfair to accuse Brooks of “dehistoricizing” melodrama, for he is, in fact, quite specific about the different origins of the genre, its permutations, and the varied reception to melodrama (in its myriad forms) across cultures but especially in nineteenth-century France and England. Any use of the English term “melodrama” to discuss postwar Japanese literature necessarily takes liberties—historical, cultural, and linguistic—in translating the term to a different context. Nonetheless, the qualities of melodrama that Brooks enumerates largely fit both Chastity and Female Floodwall: these qualities include, in Brooks’ words, “the indulgence of strong emotionalism; moral polarization and schematization; extreme states of being, situations, actions; overt villainy, persecution of the good and final reward of virtue; inflated and extravagant expression; dramatic excess…” (Brooks 1984:11–12). The sole exception with respect to Chastity and Female Floodwall would be the persecution of the good and final reward of virtue, which I would argue is generally omitted from Japanese melodrama because audiences and readers tend to prefer the suffering hero. Japanese melodrama therefore often eschews happy endings, as is clearly the case with the two texts discussed above.

5 Ambivalent allegories 1 Kyoko Inoue (1991:279). On the postwar constitution, also see Shōichi Koseki (1997). 2 A useful overview of the history and revision of the civil code can be found in Steiner (1987:188–220). Also see Nobuyoshi Toshitani (1994:82). In Japanese, see Kaji Chizuko (1984:166–83); Itoya Toshio and Esashi Akiko (1977:1); Takemae Eiji (1990:27–28); Nishi Kiyoko (1985:40–46, 116–31). 3 Susan Pharr argues that Japanese feminist’s advocacy of women’s rights reform: …aimed solely at getting the vote, and not at constitutional revision. Women’s suffrage, a milestone achievement in its own right, was gained, in part through their efforts, with the revision of the Election Law in December 1945. Important as this reform was to all subsequent change…in comparison with the truly radical women’s rights reform effort that was soon under way in Japan, it was not a controversial reform in the context of the Occupation period.” (Pharr 1987:227)

Pharr further notes that the key woman within SCAP who drafted the civil rights articles related to women, Beate Sirota, “had no contact with

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Japanese women regarding women’s rights reform before taking up her task of drafting the relevant articles” (ibid.: 233). 4 These and other events conveying a sense of the times are found in the following compendium of newspaper headlines and articles: Iwasaki Jirō and Katō Hidetoshi (1971:46–49). Also informative is Takemae Eiji and Kinbara Samon (1991), especially Part Three. 5 Nishi Kiyoko (1985:7); Shimada Tomiko (1975:19); Gail M.Nomura (1978:332– 33). Obviously, many of SCAP’s legislative reforms have yet to be fully enacted today, as a cursory look at almost any Japanese corporation or government agency will reveal. Nevertheless, even MacArthur’s harshest critics in Japan agree that the nation’s own leaders were unlikely to have instituted such sweeping legal reforms so quickly. For example, Shimada Tomiko writes: “Considering, for example, women’s rights to political participation, without the directive issued by a powerful source such as the occupiers, reforms such as this would simply not have come about so quickly,” (1975:19). Also see Finn (1992:41–42); and Pharr (1987:221– 52). 6 There are exceptions, of course. Throughout the 1950s, Serizawa Kōjirō regularly wrote stories in women’s magazines about female protagonists, some of whom had GI boyfriends. One such story by Serizawa has been translated into English: “One World,” in Gluck (1963:230–43). This book has been reissued by Weatherhill. 7 Fowler (1988). 8 Ueno Chizuko (1996), A revised version of this essay has been published in her book, Naskonarizumu to jendā (1998). 9 For “Guests From Afar” I have used Sono Ayako (1971:7–32). The year after “Guests From Afar” appeared, Sono Ayako published another story about life during the occupation, “Good Luck for Everybody!”. This work is not included in the seven-volume Sono Ayako senshū (Selected Works of Sono Ayako), nor can it be found in most multi-volume Japanese literary anthologies, which typically contain several representative short stories by featured writers. Critical studies of Sono’s literature have also overlooked or ignored this story and, justifiably, it appears that few readers found it as engaging or well-crafted as “Guests From Afar.” Yet it is worthy of mention since it is among the only works of occupation literature from mainland Japan that depicts the life of a live-in “GI maid” from the maid’s perspective. It is also among the first women’s stories to feature an AfricanAmerican soldier, and precedes Matsumoto’s “Painting on Black Canvas” and Ōe’s “Prize Stock” by several years. Sono Ayako, “Good Luck For Everybody!” (1955: 61–79). Less well-known than Sono is Koyama Itoko (1901–89), who began writing in the 1930s. During the decade following the war, Koyama produced several works about contemporary social problems that critics noted for the broad perspective and careful research she brought to her material. At the same time, however, Koyama published sentimental and formulaic stories in women’s magazines, and she ultimately failed to earn the respect of Japan’s postwar literary establishment. Judging from “Rainbows Ablaze,” the critics were justified in their reservations about Koyama’s literary talent. This is a sappy tale about Komako, a virtuous and selfless war widow with two children. Shortly after the war she falls in love with a

NOTES 229

10

11 12

13 14

15

16

dashing, sensitive, American officer named Captain Christensen, who eventually proposes marriage. Komako, however, is reluctant to accept the proposal because her son is afraid that when his mother remarries he will lose her to the American man. Koyama fails to develop the obvious Oedipal potential of the story and instead chooses to dramatize the theme of a woman torn between her desire for personal fulfillment and her maternal duty. (Significantly, Komako seems less concerned about her daughter.) This conflict between a woman’s personal desire and familial obligations has been subtly explored by writers such as Enchi Fumiko, but Koyama is mainly interested in pulling at the reader’s heartstrings, and her narrative ends up being little more than a formulaic tear-jerker. Koyama Itoko, “Niji moyu” [“Rainbows Ablaze”] (1951). Also see Akagi Keiko’s story, “Nekusuto doa,” [Next Door] (1955). On Japanese women’s stories published during the occupation, see Orbaugh (forthcoming: Chapter five). Hiroike Akiko’s “The Only Ones” first appeared in Bungakusha (November 1953). Page numbers cited in this chapter are based on the following text: Hiroike Akiko, “Onriitachi,” Joryū bungakusha kai, eds., Gendai no joryū bungaku 1 (Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha, 1974:193–212). I have relied on the original publication of Nakamoto Takako’s “Women of a Base Town,” which was published anonymously as part of a regular feature of the literary magazine, Gunzō, at that time: “Kichi no onna,” Gunzō (July: 102–27). An English translation of the story, entitled “The Only One” (not to be confused with Hiroike’s work) appears in Gluck (1963:159– 73). Hirabayashi Taiko’s “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido” first appeared in the literary magazine, Shōsetsu shinchō (December 1952). I have used the text reprinted in Hirabayashi Taiko (1977:427–36). All translated passages in this chapter, including those from Nakamoto’s story, are my own. Imagawa Hideko claims that Sono’s early works are often described as adhering to a “bright nihilism” [akarui nihirizumu] (1986:105). Critical assessments of Sono’s work and especially “Guests From Afar” can be found in Sasamori Keiko’s entry on Sono Ayako (1973:173–74); Katsumata Hiroshi (1974:208–9); Yamada Yūsaku (1985: 158–66); Muramatsu Sadataka and Watanabe Sumiko (1990:187–88). Mishima’s comment and the remark about Sono’s work being merely “a writing composition” can be found in “Finbutsu annai: Sono Ayako” Gunzō (November 1955:79). On Yoshimoto, see the collection of articles in Hasegawa Izumi (1988:265–325), also see Treat (1996). Sono did write a million-seller in 1970 with her collection of essays, For Whom Do We Love? (Dare no tame ni ai sum ka), and during the 1960s and 1970s she wrote many books of investigative reporting based on her travels around the world. The book Danryū bungakuron is a conscious attempt to subvert the term “joryū sakka” by inserting its binary opposite, danryū, into the critical discourse on Japanese literature (Ueno Chizuko et al., 1992). These categories are also interrogated throughout the special edition on women’s writing in the literary journal, Kokubungaku kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū 31 (6) (May, 1986). In English, see Ericson (1996). Similarly, when Sono emerged on Japan’s literary scene in the mid-1950s, she and another new writer, Ariyoshi Sawako, were hailed as “saijo” (“women of talent”).

230 NOTES

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

The corresponding term, “saijin,” literally means “person of talent,” and it would appear that this expression is normally reserved for men. Biographical information on Hiroike Akiko is scarce. For example, she is not included in the authoritative source, Hisamatsu Sen’ichi et al. (1988), nor is she discussed in the special edition on “joryū sakka” in the September 1985 edition of the journal, Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō. A brief sketch of her life and career can be found in an earlier special edition of the same journal, however (see “Sengo sakka no rireki” in Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō (June: 261–62). Isoda Kōichi briefly discusses “The Only Ones” in his essay, “The Dual Structure of the Occupation” (1983:35–61). Hiroike is also accorded a brief entry in Muramatsu Sadataka and Watanabe Sumiko (1990:302). Muramatsu and Watanabe note that “The Only Ones” is considered Hiroike’s representative literary work and claim that she failed to demonstrate “subsequent literary development.” It was not unusual during the occupation for Japanese male entertainers or jazz musicians to adopt English nicknames and model themselves after American stars. To my knowledge, “Fui no oshi” has yet to be translated into English. I have used William Sibley’s apt translation of the Japanese title. Isoda Kōichi (1983:55–56). Engels uses this expression throughout his essay, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State” (1972:189–204). Goldman (1972:310). Also see Goldman’s essay, “Marriage and Love” in the same volume. de Beauvoir (1974:619). Nakamoto Takako (1952:34–39). As an illustration of the difficulty of tracking down this story, I might recount my own hapless quest for “Women of a Base Town.” I first learned of the story’s existence through the translation entitled “The Only Ones” contained in Jay Gluck’s collection of early postwar literature, Ukiyo. Gluck’s book does not give the Japanese titles or original sources of its stories, and none of the professors, librarians or otherwise well-read Japanese whom I consulted could recall any work by Nakamoto that depicted GI mistresses. When I finally discovered the work’s title and found that it was published in the popular literary magazine, Gunzō, I realized that I already owned a copy of the magazine, having bought it at a used bookstore precisely because the story’s title seemed relevant to my research. I had failed to connect this story with the English translation not only because the titles differed but because the Japanese original was published anonymously. The editors of Gunzō explain that they instituted the monthly feature of publishing one story and withholding the author’s identity so that readers could evaluate the work without being swayed by the author’s reputation. In every case, the editors received the author’s permission to publish the story as an unattributed piece. See the editor’s explanation in Gunzō (July: 127). For a biographical synopsis and brief assessment of Nakamoto’s literature, see Hisamatsu Sen’ichi et al. (1988: 836); and Muramatsu Sedataka and Watanabe Sumiko (1990:248–50). Neither book mentions “Women of a Base Town.” In English, see Yukiko Tanaka (1987:129–34). Tanaka also seems unaware of “Women of a Base Town” because on page 133 she claims that Nakamoto’s “first work after the war [was] ‘A Tiny Crippled Fly’ (Bikko no Ko-bai, 1954).”

NOTES 231

26 I have translated as “most valuable female asset” the expression “josei no motsu saigo no mono.” More literally, one might render the phrase as “a woman’s last possession.” It might be worth noting that both Hiroike Akiko and Hirabayashi Taiko once worked as café waitresses, although I would not wish to suggest that they sold anything other than their literary assets. 27 These and other details of Hirabayashi’s life are summarized in the following biographical accounts: Kumaki Tetsu (1985:19–22); Hisamatsu Sen’ichi et al. (1988:956–59); Muramatsu Sadataka and Watanabe Sumiko (1990:297–302). In English, see Keene (1984:1159–62); Yukiko Tanaka (1987:65–73). On the cover page to her chapter on Hirabayashi, Tanaka mistakenly records the author’s date of death as 1971. The above sources all concur that she died in 1972. 28 Niwa Fumio (1977:484). 29 This shift in tone is marked in the new paragraph which begins with the phrase, “… to iu wake de” (“…And that’s the way it was”). By beginning the paragraph with ellipses and a disarmingly casual reference to previously narrated events, Hirabayashi hints that she is now getting down to her lighthearted business. 30 I have translated the Japanese term “futei” as “infidelity,” although the kanji literally serve to simply negate the word “chastity” (“teisō). 31 Writing in a newspaper commentary in 1953, Hirabayashi suggested that Japanese have made too much of “the problem of black-Japanese biracial children.” See her commentary, “Kokujin konketsuji no mondai,” in the evening edition of the Yomiuri shinbun (5 March 1953).

6 The occupier within 1 All translations of “Human Sheep” in this chapter are mine. Page numbers refer to Ōe Kenzaburō, (1966, vol. 1). A complete English translation of “Ningen no hitsuji” has been published by Frank Motofuji under the title “Sheep,” in Japan Quarterly 17 (2):167–77. For Nosaka’s “American Hijiki” I have relied on Jay Rubin’s excellent translation, and all English page numbers refer to Hibbett (1993:436–68). For the Japanese text I have used Nosaka Akiyuki (1968). 2 See the special issue on Nosaka in Bessatsu shinpyō [Nosaka Akiyuki no sekai—zen tokushū] (July 1973) for both a biography and summary of the various scandals he generated. For a more recent and thorough biographical study of Nosaka, see Shimizu Setsuji (1995). Although Shimizu does not have much to say about Nosaka’s literary works except in relation to his personal biography, he does offer a strong argument for reading Nosaka as a writer of shishōsetsu. 3 On the Nosaka myth, see Shimizu Setsuji (1995). 4 Nosaka’s father, who was once Vice-governor of Niigata Prefecture, has written a lively essay about his son’s past (see Nosaka Sukeyuki 1973:230–38). 5 “During this period I was concerned with questions of living within walled confines and of imprisonment,” Ōe Kenzaburō (1966:vol 1:380). The series of stories he refers to includes “Ningen no hitsuji (“Human Sheep,” discussed in Chapter Six), “Fui no oshi” (“Dumbstruck”), and “Tatakai no kyō (“Today, the Struggle”), all of which were published within a year of “Prize Stock.” See

232 NOTES

6

7

8

9

10 11

12

13

Michiko Wilson (1986: Chapter Three) for a discussion of “Leap Before You Look” and Ōe’s use of the prostitute in these early stories on the occupation. For Ōe’s comment on “Human Sheep” see the interview, “Ōe Kenzaburō-shi ni kiku” (1969:16). In the original, the word “shimerareru” is used to indicate that the back of the bus is “occupied” by the troops (244). The character used to write this word also appears in the word for “occupation forces” (“senryōgun”). The word referring to the soldiers in this story is “gaikokuhei,” literally “foreign troops,” but as the occupation was almost solely an American affair, I have treated the word as if it refers specifically to American soldiers. Despite the philosophical problems posed by the distinction between “form” and “content” and its variations (in this case, “style” and “story”) I believe that these terms still serve as useful heuristic guidelines. My discussion of form in “American Hijiki” is restricted to issues of “style”—what is referred to as “buntai” in Japanese criticism. It seems that nearly every critic who has written about Nosaka’s style has commented on his similarity to Saikaku, but I have yet to discover a substantial narratological comparison of these two writers or a detailed study of Nosaka’s literary style. For brief comments about Nosaka’s style, see: Kamiya Tadataka (1986:95). A brief discussion can also be found in the following two articles from Kokubungaku kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū: Morimoto Kazuo (1974); and Hasebe Hideo (1974). Also see the following two articles from Bessatsu shinfyō: Nosaka Akiyuki no sekai: Matsubara Shin’ichi (1973); and Ozaki Hotsuki (1973). Ozaki’s essay offers the most helpful analysis of Nosaka’s style, although it remains impressionistic. The most thorough study of Saikaku’s narrative technique is Hiromatsu Tamotsu (1982). Professor Mitani Kuniaki, a specialist of narrative technique in premodern (especially Heian-era) Japanese literature, suggested to me that the key “premodern” element in Nosaka’s writing is its multi-voiced, multi-focalized texture. Mitani used the terms “tajūsei” (multi-layered) and “tashiten” (multiple viewpoints). He added that these elements appear in earlier literary traditions, such as Heian prose narratives, and should not be strictly viewed as a seventeenthcentury phenomenon. Nosaka uses the words “kono ossan,” which Rubin has aptly rendered here as “this old dog” (75; 458). Long sentences, a standard feature of pre-modern Japanese prose, routinely plague English translators. In Nosaka’s case, the length of the sentences and other premodern narrative elements (omission of topic markers, use of pre-modern verb inflections, absence of quotative signifiers) highlight the very difference and apparent “modernist” aspects of his prose when compared with that of his contemporaries. The “omniscient” voice is not strictly omniscient, since it speaks only for Toshio’s thoughts and feelings. This voice is signified in the narrative by Toshio’s name followed by the topic marker “wa.” In contrast, the other voice is announced by the first-person pronoun “ore,” which is restricted in Japanese discourse to use by men and has a casual, unrefined air. On synchronous internal focalization see Rimmon-Kenan (1983:78–80); and Cohn (1978), especially Chapter two. Because most narratological studies have

NOTES 233

14

15

16 17

concentrated on European literature, they are not easily applied to Japanese texts. Two key grammatical criteria used in these studies are “tense” and “person,” yet as the above passage from “American Hijiki” indicates, Japanese syntax (subjectobject-verb) enables a writer to avoid clarifying the tense until the very end of a sentence. This is accomplished by employing verb inflections such as the “continual form” and “gerunds,” which indicate ongoing action or a series of events. The length of Nosaka’s sentences adds to their cinematic effect by delaying until the sentence’s very end the arrival of the perfective inflection (-ta), which relegates the sentence’s action to the past. A second, often noted, element of Japanese discourse that fails to accord neatly with European narratological criteria is the ambiguity of “person.” A Japanese writer can continue for long stretches, in prose that reads naturally, without specifying the subject of the sentence. The result is an implicit collapsing of the narrator into the character whose actions are being narrated. Fowler has written about this phenomenon in The Rhetoric of Confession (1988), focusing on the shishōsetsu (“I-novel”) tradition. Also see Fujii (1992). On problems of tense and person in premodern prose, see Mitani Kuniaki (1989:360–76). Both Toshio and Isa use disparaging language to refer to occupation soldiers. Toshio’s actions are limited to his dream, and Isa’s brief moment of linguistic subversion takes the form of direct address to an uncomprehending soldier. Whereas Isa used the rough form of address, “omae” to his English-speaking nemesis, Toshio refers to the foreigner in his dream as “ketō,” which is generally translated into English as “hairy barbarian.” Rubin has kept with the less antiquated —and less colorful—expression, “foreigner.” As noted earlier, the narrative’s “omniscient” voice has access only to Toshio’s thoughts and feelings, not to those of other characters. Any claims about Higgins’ thoughts are therefore suppositions. “Kamu, kamu eigo” (Come, Come, English). See my comments in the introduction. For Nosaka’s own assessment of the importance of generational differences in determining one’s experience of the occupation, see his comments in Nomura Takashi (1973:95–96). Also see Nosaka Akiyuki (1970:3–7). Nosaka’s own sensitivity to fine generational differences is a prevalent element of modern Japanese bio-criticism (including, but not limited to, literary biographies) and manifests itself in taxonomies of postwar Japanese writers, who are categorized according to their age at the war’s end.

Epilogue: Occupation literature in the post-Vietnam era 1 For a synopsis of a wide range of works from postwar Okinawa, including those discussed in this chapter, see Okamoto Keitoku (1996). 2 Quoted in Urata Yoshikazu (1990:312). Okinawan scholars consider Matayoshi and Uehara to be of different generations, but since both grew up under American occupation, I do not consider such fine distinctions necessary for the present study. 3 For a sample of Matayoshi’s writing in English translation, see Molasky and Rabson (forthcoming). The year after Matayoshi received the prize for Pig’s Revenge, a younger Okinawan writer, Medoruma Shun, was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for his story, “Droplets” (“Suiteki” 1997), also included in the

234 NOTES

4 5 6 7

8

9

10 11

12 13 14 15

16

17

above anthology. Although this story is not about the occupation, it is among the most sophisticated Japanese fictional explorations of war memory published in recent decades. Matayoshi Eiki (1990b:118–41). Okamoto Keitoku (1996:175). All translations in this chapter are my own. I have used the following text: Uehara Noboru (1990:289–304). Okamoto Keitoku suggests that several factors contributed to the emergence of Okinawan women writers only after reversion: the sudden upturn in economic conditions following reversion, women’s integration into social and political spheres formally monopolized by men, Okinawa’s regional integration into Japan and an increased exposure to Japanese mass media. One might add that this new generation of women had far more educational opportunities than did their predecessors. For an overview of women’s writing in postwar Okinawa, see Okamoto Keitoku (1996:26–28, 217–46). Yoshida Sueko (1990:161–77). This story will also soon appear in English as Yoshida Sueko, “Love Suicide at Kamara,” translated by Yukie Ohta in Molasky and Rabson (forthcoming). Elderly GI prostitutes are not limited to Okinawa. In her study of military prostitution in Korea’s base towns, Katherine H.S.Moon refers to a woman who “had been walking the kijich’on streets even until she was 65, offering GIs nearly a third her age tricks for cheap,” (1997:5). Nagadō Eikichi (1994). This story was first published in the Japanese monthly magazine, Shinchō in November 1993. All three volumes were published by Kōdansha in 1987, 1989, and 1990, respectively. Translated more literally, the titles would appear in English as That Day’s Summer, That Winter’s Death, and That Night’s End. Saegusa’s statement about the three works standing alone can be found in Saegusa Kazuko, “Atogaki,” Sono fuyu no shi (1989:206). Saegusa also stressed this point during an interview I conducted with her on 22 August 1996. See the entry on Saegusa in Muramatsu Sadataka and Watanabe Sumiko (1991: 141–43). Sone Hiroyoshi (1986:57). Personal interview, 22 August 1996. It must be noted, however, that unlike recent Okinawan writers, who have narrated the thoughts and perspectives of the occupiers themselves, Saegusa does restrict herself to Japanese characters. When I interviewed Saegusa in August 1996, she admitted to having never heard of either Hirabayashi’s “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido” or Nakamoto’s “Women of a Base Town.” On Japan’s struggles with war memory and the nation’s conflicting responses to the emperor, see Field (1991).

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Sodei Rinjirō, Honda Shūgo, Seki Kanji et al. (1981) “Kyōdō tōgi: haisen, senryō, kenpō” [Roundtable Debate: The Defeat, Occupation, Constitution], Bungakuteki tachiba 3 (Spring):2–61. Sone Hiroyoshi (1986) “Gendai bungaku ni okeru josei no hakken: Saegusa Kazuko no baai” [The Discovery of Women in Contemporary Literature: The Case of Saegusa Kazuko], Kokubungaku kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū 31(5):57–63. Sono Ayako (1955) “Good Luck For Everybody!” [original title appears in English], Gunzō 10(11):61–79. —— (1971) Sono Ayako senshū vol. 2 [Selected Works of Sono Ayako] (Tokyo: Yomiuri shinbunsha). Sugaya Naoko (1975) “Haisen to baishun” [The Defeat and Prostitution], in Tanaka Sumiko (ed.), Fosei kaihō no shisō to kōdō (sengo-hen) (Tokyo: Jiji tsūshinsha). Sunakawa Masao (1993) “Hiroku: Okinawa-shi tanjō” [Secret Record: The Birth of Okinawa City], Nakagami bunka, no. 17 (Okinawa City: Okinawa-shi shokuin kōseikai bungei-shi), pp. 217–44. Takahara Kenkichi (1972) “Sanyō to sedai” [The Occupation and Generations], Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (eds), Kyōdō kenkyū: Nihon seniyō (Tokyo: Tokuma shobo), pp. 159–73. Takahashi Hideo (1971) “Ōe Kenzaburō ni okeru buntai no tokushitsu” [Special Stylistic Characteristics in Ōe Kenzaburō], Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō 38(8):pp. 51–6. Takami Jun (1953) “Han-jidaiteki Kōsatsu 3: Panpan reisan” [Thoughts Against the Times, Part 3: In Praise of the Panpan], Shinchō 50(12) (October):116–21. —— (1991) Haisen nikki [Diary of a Defeated Nation] (Tokyo: Bunshun bunko). Takamine Tomokazu (1989) Shirarezaru Okinawa no beihei [The Unknown American Troops in Okinawa] (Tokyo: Kōbunken). Takara Ben (1991) “Kaisetsu” [Commentary], in Okinawa bungaku zenshū: shi II (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai), pp. 371–82. Takazato Suzuyo (1996) Okinawa no onnatachi: josei no jinken to kichi, guntai [The Women of Okinawa: Soldiers, Military Bases, and Women’s Rights] (Tokyo: Akashi shoten). Takemae Eiji (1990) Senryō to sengo kaikaku [The Occupation and Postwar Reforms] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, Iwanami bukkuretto shirizu shōwashi, no. 9). —— (1992) Senryō sengoshi [History of the Occupation and Postwar] (Tokyo: Iwanami dōjidai raiburarii). Takemae Eiji and Kinbara Samon (eds), (1991) Shōwa-shi: kokumin no naka no hamon to gekidō no hanseiki [The History of the Shōwa Era: A Half-century of Upheaval and its Repercussions for the People] (Tokyo: Yūhikaku sensho). Takenaka Katsuo (1953) “Ruporutāju: kichi Itami” [Investigative Report: The Base at Itami], Fujin kōron 429(February):176–81. Tanaka Kimiko (1957) Onna no bōhatei [Female Floodwall] (Tokyo: Dai-ni shobo). Tanaka Kōkei (1972) “Konketsuji” [Children of Mixed Blood], Shin-Okinawa bungaku 23:6–35. Tasato Yūtetsu (1983) Ronshū: Okinawa no shūraku kenkyū [Essay Collection: Research on Okinawan Villages] (Naha: Riuchū-sha). Tomiyama Ichirō (1990) Kindai Nihon shakai to ‘Okinawa-jin’ [Modern Japanese Society and “Okinawans”] (Tokyo: Nihon keizai hyōronsha).

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Yuzawa Reiko and Takeshita Eiko (1953) “Konketsuji no haha wa uttaeru” [The Mothers of Mixed-blood Children Speak Out], Fujin kōron (September) 431:38–42.

Newspaper articles “Beihei, bakudan? nage-abareru” [GI Goes Wild, Throws Bomb (?)], Nihon keizai shinbun [Evening Edition] (19 October 1970). “Futenma zenmen henkan de gōi” [Agreement Reached on Complete Return of Futenma], Asahi shinbun (13 April 1996). “Kichi shukushō ni kinō iji no kabe” [Maintaining Operability Levels is the Barrier to Base Reduction] Asahi shinbun (16 April 1996). “Minka e hōka, saimindan” [Tear Gas Grenade Thrown into Private Home], Akahata (30 October 1965). “Okinawa no kichi kara jōmon tōki” [Jōmon Era Ceramics Unearthed at Military Base in Okinawa], Asahi shinbun [Evening Edition] (29 March 1997). “Okinawa-shi ka Koza-shi ka” [“Okinawa City” or “Koza City”?], Ryūkyū shinpō (29 June 1995). “‘Okinawa-shi’ ni naitei” [Government Unofficially Decides on the Name “Okinawa City”] Misato Kōhō (25 March 1973).

Index

“A-sign” bars 54, 63 Abe Tomoji 111 Ahmad, Aijaz 43 Ainu 13 Akagi Keiko 132–33 Akahata 145 Akihito (Emperor) 158 Akutagawa Prize 27, 48, 56, 133, 143, 158, 179 allegory 2, 11, 27, 43–44, 51, 55–5, 58, 76, 116–17, 123–4, 129, 132, 137, 142, 156– 7, 159, 188 Althusser, Louis 97 Anderson, Benedict 25 “The Apple Song” (“Ringo no uta”) 10 Anpo (see Japan-United States Security Treaty) Arakawa Akira 93–96, 101, 209 n. 60, 210 n. 67; “The Colored Race” (“Yūshoku jinshushō—sono ichi”) 23, 71, 93–102; “An Orphan’s Song” (“Minashigo no uta”) 93–94 atomic bombings 7, 11, 18, 141, 158, 183

censorship 2, 9, 11, 64, 93–4, 100–101, 123 The Chastity of Japan (Nihon no teisō) 23, 110, 114–25, 129, 131–32, 147, 156, 188; “chastity of Japan” as rhetoric 116–17, 120, 124, 213 n. 35 China/Chinese: “boy meets tractor” literature 148; Japanese discrimination against 14; and Japanese writers 29, 158; Japanese invasion of 12–13, 150; and Japanese prostitution 106; in occupation literature 29, 33, 39–41, 44–7, 90; and Ryukyu Kingdom 12; and San Francisco Peace Treaty 6; Sino-Japanese War 12 Chitose City 111, 150–52, 155 chocolate and chewing gum, as postwar icons 9–11, 32, 34, 70–71, 82, 175 Civil Censorship Detachment 11 Civil Code 130 Civil Education and Information Section 11 class (also see prostitution) 3, 23, 32, 41–2, 136, 142, 149–50, 152–3, 155–6, 163, 185–6, 189 Clinton, William Jefferson 51 colonialism (also see China, imperialism, Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan): colonial discourse/postcolonial theory 28–9, 36, 77, 143; European and American colonialism 5, 13, 27–8, 58;

Barazoku 125 Bell, Shannon 112 Bhabha, Homi 77–78, 81, 198 n. 23 “black boom” in Japanese media 72, 101 Brooks, Peter 129 Bungakukai 56 Bungei shunjū 133 burakumin 146–9 “The Bush” district of Koza (see Teruya district)

254

INDEX 255

Japanese colonialism 4–5, 8, 12–15, 95, 107, 206 n. 13; Japanese colonialism and Okinawa 12– 16, 21–2; Japanese colonialism and the Ainu 13 “Come, Come English” radio program 10, 175–6 “comfort women” (also see prostitution and RAA) 23–4, 106–7, 109, 126, 184, 186–7 constitution, postwar 130, 151 “continuity versus disjuncture” in postwar history 7–8, 17–8, 21, 24–5, 27, 31– 5, 39, 46, 52, 106, 120, 148, 156, 168, 177–8, 185–8 Dai-ichi shobō 125 Dai-ni shobō 125 de Beauvoir, Simone 144–5 DeFoe, Daniel: The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 58 Dower, John 6, 20 dregs magazines (kasutori zasshi) 10 Duus Masayo 106 Edwards, John 28 Eisenhower, Dwight 93 Elizabeth Sanders Home 128 Engels, Frederich 144 Ethics 113 Etō Jun 192 n. 24 Fanon, Frantz 25, 28, 72 Female Floodwall (Onna no bōhatei) 23, 106, 110, 115, 118, 124–9, 131, 147, 156; rhetoric of “female floodwall”: 105, 107, 120, 124, 127, 132, 155, 187, 211 n. 9 Fentress, James 4 Field, Norma 67, 80–81 “Following the Stars” (“Hoshi no nagare”) 103, 115 Four Corners district of Koza (see Teruya district) Fowler, Edward 131 fraternization 11, 60

Fujin kōron 111, 143, 212 n. 21 Funagoshi Gishō 95 Fussell, Paul 1 gender (see landscape, language, marriage, patriarchy, prostitution, victimhood, and women) generation, and memory 3, 7, 9, 24, 135– 39, 142, 157, 175–6, 178–81, 184, 189, 191 n. 13, 220 n. 2 Genga Asayoshi: “The Town That Went Pale” (“Aozameta machi”) 56, 63–65, 100, 167 genre, mixing of (also see melodrama) 83–9, 92–3, 126– 7 gesaku literature 168 GHQ (General Headquarters, see SCAP) Goldman, Emma 144 Gotō Tsutomu 115 Great Kantō Earthquake 150 Gunzō 146 Hagiwara Yōko 116 Harris, Townsend 106 Harlot Hotel (Baishun hoteru) 116 Hashimoto Ryūtarō 52 Hayashi Fumiko 134 Higashi Mineo 25, 27, 55–56, 179; Higashi and Ōe Kenzaburō 76; An Okinawan Boy (Okinawa no shōnen; published in English as Child of Okinawa) 23, 55–65, 68, 76, 100, 167, 173 Himeyuritai (see Maiden Lily Nurse Corps) Hino Ashihei 111 Hirabayashi Taiko 133, 145, 149–50, 157 184, 186, 189; travels to Korea and Manchuria 150; “The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido” (“Hokkaido Chitose no onnatachi”) 23, 111, 133, 149–56, 185 Hiragana (see language, especially orthography in occupation literature) Hirohito (Emperor) 7, 20–21, 188

256 INDEX

Hiroike Akiko 133, 143, 145, 186, 189; “The Only Ones” (“Onriitachi”) 23, 133, 143–47, 150, 156 Hitler, Adolph 97, 99 Hokama Yoneko 21 homosocial desire 27, 56, 59–65, 167–8, 173–5, 188 (also see Sedgwick) Honest John missile 96, 209–10 n. 63 “Hoshi no nagare” (see “Following the Stars”) hybridity 29, 53, 54–6, 65, 67–9 Ieda Shōko, The Women Who Flocked to My Black Skin (Ore no hada ni muragatta onnatachi) 72 Ihara Saikaku 158, 168–9 Imperial radio broadcast 7 imperialism (also see China, colonialism Korea, landscape, Manchuria, and Taiwan): and Okinawa 12–15, 25, 27, 29, 48, 58, 95, 177–8, 189, 193 n. 29; and prostitution; 106–07; and race 75; and rhetoric 27–8, 132; U.S. imperialism 123 impotence, metaphors of 28, 162, 165–6, 175–7 Irigaray, Luce 27 Ishigaki Ayako 111 Ishikawa Hiroshi 1–2 Ishikawa Jun, “The Legend of Gold” (“Ōgon densetsu”) 60 Isoda Kōichi 21, 144 Itō Bungaku 125 Itō Tōichi 125 Jameson, Frederic 43–44, 137 Japan Communist Party 123, 145 Japan-United States Security Treaty 6, 34, 51, 93–4, 111, 123, 200–01 n. 45 jazz 9, 217 n. 18 Kabuki-chō district 113 Kadena Air Force Base 68, 182 kaidashi 18–19

Kaizō 114–15 kanji (see language, especially orthography in occupation literature) Kano Masanao 95 Kanzaki Kiyoshi 111 kasutori zasshi (see dregs magazines) katakana (see language, especially orthography in occupation literature) Kin, Okinawa 113 Kishtainy, Khalid 103 Kobayashi Daijirō and Murase Akira 106 Kobori Jinji 150 Kojima Nobuo 29–30, 185; “The American School” (“Amerikan sukūru”) 22, 27–41, 49–50, 100, 134– 36, 138–140, 142–44, 160, 167–8, 172, 185 Komachi Garden (Komachi-en) 105, 128 karayuki-san 106 Kōno Taeko 12 Korea/Koreans: Japan’s colonization of 12–15, 58, 197 n. 11; Japanese discrimination against 14; and Japanese prostitution 106–07; Korean War 1, 6, 83–85, 90–91, 93, 123, 128, 143, 145–6, 181, 143, 145–6, 181; in Okinawan literature 181–2 Koyama Itoko 132–3, 215–6 n. 9 Koza (Okinawa City) 23, 53–69, 95, 167–8, 178, 180–82 Koza Incident 65, 201 n. 48 Kundera, Milan 158 Labor Standards Law 112 LaCapra, Dominick 4, 70 landscape (see especially Chapters One and Two): Americanized landscapes 31–3, 40–41, 55, 58, 150; barbed-wire fences 22, 25–7, 40–41, 47, 113; and black GIs 87–88; black markets 8–9, 19, 103, 109, 120, 169, 182, 184, 186;

INDEX 257

burned-out ruins 1–2, 8–9, 37, 169, 176, 184, 188; in colonial discourse 27–8; and gender/sexuality 13, 27–8, 31–2, 55–65, 188, 196–7 n. 5; and Japanese orthography 29, 31, 40– 41, 53–55; and language 28–9, 31–2, 36–7, 41, 58; mythical landscapes 76; and Okinawan difference 13, 96, 98; postwar landscape as disorienting 41, 184, 188; and purity 36–7, 43, 56–8, 63, 76; road, as spatial and temporal metaphor 25, 31–32, 57–58, 134, 140–41 Language (see especially Chapter One): bilingualism/multilingualism, ideological implications of 29, 33, 37– 40, 46, 144; code-switching 29, 34, 40; dialect in literary works, film, etc. 39, 56–7, 60, 168, 176, 202 n. 8, 202–03 n. 11, 204 n. 30; and gender/sexuality 31, 34, 36–9, 134, 143–4, 157, 160–62, 173, 180; imperial pronoun 142; orthography in occupation literature 23, 29, 31, 35–36, 40–1, 45, 53, 55, 62, 67–69, 98, 148, 169; pidgins and Creoles 29, 144, 197 n. 11; struggles over 28–29, 32–39, 56, 78, 134, 138–40, 144, 160–67, 172–3 Liberal (Riberaru) 116 loss, sense of 7, 33, 60, 76, 108, 132, 185, 188 MacArthur, Douglas (U.S. General; also see SCAP) 5, 11, 20, 108, 178 maid, in occupation literature 23, 32, 40– 42, 44, 154, 182, 215 n. 9 Maiden Lily Nurse Corps (Himeyuritai) 16, 51, 201 n. 46 Manchuria 7, 12, 150, 196–7, n. 5 marriage (also see constitution—Article 24 and prostitution): and postwar civil code 130;

adultery, crime of (kantsūzai) 130; feminist views of 130, 144–6, 186; and men 149, 154–6; in women’s occupation literature 133, 144–56, 184, 186, 215–6 n.9 Marx, Karl 43, 112, 212 n. 26 Matayoshi Eiki 178–9, 181; Pig’s Revenge (Buta no mukui) 179; “The Wild Boar that George Shot” (“Fōji ga shasatsu shita inoshishi”) 179 Matsumoto Seichō 82, 84, 92–93, 102, 126; “Painting on Black Canvas” (“Kuroji no e”) 23, 71, 82–93, 101–102, 126, 166 melodrama 65, 116–17, 129, 146–8, 214 n. 52 memory (also see generation and nostalgia): and history 1–4, 7–8, 12, 24, 53, 169– 77, 187–9; social memory, examples of 7, 9, 12, 28–9, 51–2, 70–71, 179; social versus personal memory 4, 7–8, 45–6, 184 Mill, John Stuart 130, 144 Miller, Henry 158 Ministry of Education 184 miscegenation (see race) Mishima Yukio 114, 133 “mixed-blood” children (see race) Miyamoto Yuriko 134 Miyazawa Hamajirō 126 Mizuno Hiroshi 116, 118, 123 Murase Akira (see Kobayashi Daijirō) Mussolini, Benito 97, 99 Myers, Richard B. (U.S. Lieutenant General) 49 Nagadō Eikichi 181; “The Black District” (“Kokujingai”) 181; “A Paper Airplane from the Empire State Building” (“Enpaiyā sutēto biru no kami-hikōki”) 181–3

258 INDEX

Nakamoto Takako 111, 132–3, 145–6, 148, 157, 186, 188; “Profile of a Base Town, Tachikawa” (“Kichi ‘Tachikawa’ no yokogao”) 145–6; Runway (Kasōro) 145; “Women of a Base Town” (“Kichi no onna”) 23, 133, 145–50, 156 names (personal, place, etc.): and identity under occupation 30–31, 33, 39, 81, 135–6, 151–2, 188; gender and English or katakana names 31, 62, 143–4, 148, 150; and race 75, 89, 92, 101; municipal names and Koza 53, 55, 68– 9, 204 n. 29; unnamed characters and allegory 39, 44, 51, 60, 184–8 Napier, Susan 76–77 Naruse Mikio 103 Nathan, John 76 nihonjinron 38, 74 “Nikutai no mon” (see “Gates of Flesh”) Nimitz, Chester (U.S. Admiral) 20 Niwa Fumio 150 Nixon, Richard 22, 93 Nosaka Akiyuki 157–9, 167, 181; “American Hijiki” (“Amerika hijiki”) 9–10, 24, 28, 139, 144, 157, 167–77, 180, 184; “Grave of the Fireflies” (“Hotaru no haka”) 158–9 nostalgia for occupation 1, 69, 71, 170, 174, 180, 182 “occupation literature,” defn. of 1–3 Ōe Kenzaburō 76, 78, 139, 157–9, 162, 181; “Dumbstruck” (“Fui no oshi”) 144; and Higashi Mineo 76; “Human Sheep” (“Ningen no hitsuji”) 24, 28, 140, 144, 157, 159–67, 177, 188; “life within walls” motif 159; and Nobel Prize 158; and Nosaka Akiyuki 157–9; and Okinawa 95, 158, 210 n. 67;

“Prize Stock” or “The Catch” (“Shiiku”) 23, 71, 75–82, 86, 92, 157, 159–62; on Ryūdai bungaku 95 O-Kichi of the Shōwa Era (Shōwa no OKichi) 106, 127 Okinawa/Okinawans: and Ainu 13; Battle of 7, 12, 15–20, 95, 178–9; dialect and Japanese policy 14; as exotic to mainland Japanese 13, 69; GI crimes and accidents 48–52, 179, 201 n. 48; as racial other in Japan 71; internment camps 17–20; Japanese discrimination against 13–14; land seizures 93–4, 181; reversion 15, 21–2, 25, 48, 53, 63, 65, 67, 69, 181–2, 195–6 n. 52; rock music 204 n. 30; Ryukyu dispensation (Ryūkyū shobun) 12; Ryukyu Kingdom 12, 16; Shuri Castle 16; statistics, demographic, etc. 22, 196 n. 53; turtleback tombs 16–17; women’s occupation literature 180–83, 220 n. 7 onrii (an “only one” or GI mistress) 121, 126, 128, 143–6, 186–7, 214 n. 45 Ōshiro Masayasu 25 Ōshiro Tatsuhiro 29–30, 95, 160, 179, 181, 189; The Cocktail Party (Kakuteru pāti): 22– 3, 27, 29–30, 39–51, 100, 167–8; Turtleback Tombs (Kame no kōbaka): 36, 199–200 n. 36 Ōta Masahide 20 Ōya Sōichi 130–32 Pacific War (also see continuity versus disjuncture, imperialism, Okinawa, Battle of): Japanese experience of 8, 15–19, 108, 132, 158–9 panpan

INDEX 259

(also see prostitution and RAA): history of 105–11; popular images of 11, 103–105, 150; “panglish” 144; “panpan hunting” 108, 214 n. 46; as threat 105, 107–109; in women’s literature 143–44, 147–50, 152–6, 184–7 Pateman, Carole 112 patriarchy (also see prostitution and RAA) 33, 43– 5, 56, 105, 108, 112, 121, 126, 130–32, 146, 156, 186–7 Percival, Arthur E. (British General) 170, 172 police, Japanese: in occupation literature 34, 45, 85, 88, 91, 120–21, 124–5, 166, 177, 185; and regulated prostitution 105–06, 108– 09, 121, 124 prostitution (also see comfort women, onrii, panpan, and RAA): and class 23, 105–109, 113, 115, 120, 129, 149, 163; as “fall” into disrepute 114, 119, 147– 8, 161–3; feminist debates on 112–14; and Japan Socialist Party 110, 112; and Japanese publishing industry 11, 103, 105–106, 109–115, 143; Keio University report 110–11; as labor 111–14; and marriage 109, 112, 115, 126, 144– 8, 153–6, 184, 186; and medical establishment 108–109, 121; in Okinawa 56–61, 68, 113, 181; prostitute as mediator 24, 32, 127, 160, 167, 177; prostitute as victim 60, 106, 109, 117– 21, 124–9, 144, 146–9, 161, 163, 167, 182; red-line and blue-line districts 108, 115, 211 n. 16; “special eating and drinking shops” (tokushu inshokuten) 108; state regulation of 105–110;

and women from Philippines 68, 113; and venereal disease 105, 107–109, 120–21, 148; Yoshiwara Hospital 108; Yoshiwara pleasure quarters 108 Prostitution Prevention Law 110 RAA (Recreation and Amusement Association) 23, 105–110, 117, 120, 124, 126–29, 155, 184, 186–7 race (see Chapter Three; also see burakumin, nihonjinron, stereotype, and Teruya): black GIs in occupation literature 23, 36, 60, 63–5, 67, 127, 143, 147, 152–5, 161, 179, 181, 198 n. 25, 202 n. 6 (see Chapter Three); black GI as rapist 63–64, 82–90, 185; black GI as victim 85, 88, 92–3, 97–9; and blood (also see miscegenation below) 75, 84– 7, 99–102, 107, 127, 147–8; category of 206 n. 10; and censorship 11; commodification of blacks in Japan 72– 73; and culture 67, 74–75, 77, 84–85, 88; and Japanese empire 75; Japanese terminology/conceptions of 23, 67, 72–75, 86, 96–102, 206 n. 13; in memories of occupation 71; miscegenation and “mixed-blood” children 65, 67–8, 100, 109, 111, 127– 8, 143, 147, 154–6, 218 n. 31; Okinawans as racial other in Japan 71, 98–99; and phenotype; 74 racial tensions in Koza 55, 65, 67–8; racism within American society 90–93, 97–9, 101, 208 n. 44; whites as racial other in Japan 73–74, 96–98, 159–61, 172, 205 n. 4; “yellow cabs” 204–05 n. 3; “yellow race” 75, 96–101 rape (also see prostitute as victim and victimhood):

260 INDEX

as advertising fodder 118; camps in Balkans 28; eroticization of 118, 121, 125; and men’s writing 11–12, 28, 42–51, 89, 105, 115, 117–19, 121, 125–9, 174– 5, 188, 196–7 n. 5; September 1995 incident in Okinawa 22–3, 28, 49–52, 69, 113; police records for occupation era 121; and prostitution 11, 109, 115, 119–22, 147–9, 186; and RAA policy 105–07; and women’s writing 11, 118, 121, 147– 8, 156, 185–7 Renan, Ernst 24 resistance to the occupiers 24, 28, 33, 36– 8, 43, 46–7, 83, 88, 91, 100–01, 122, 129, 140, 142, 159–67, 172–75, 177, 185, 219 n. 14 reverse course 6, 15 reversion (see “Okinawa”) Riberaru (see “Liberal”) Ridgway, Matthew (U.S. General) 5 Rubin, Gayle 27 Russell, John 72–74, 78 Ryūdai bungaku 93–95, 100 Ryukyu Dispensation (Ryūkyū shobun; see Okinawa) Saegusa Kazuko 24, 178, 183–4; A Night’s End (Sono yoru no owari) 183; Summer One Day (Sono hi no natsu) 183–4; A Winter’s Death (Sono fuyu no shi) 24, 183–8 Saikaku (see “Ihara Saikaku”) Sakai Toshihiko 149 San Francisco Peace Treaty 5–6, 20–22, 146, 149 Sanno Hotel 49–50, 134, 200 n. 41 Sata Ineko 114, 134 Satō Eisaku 22 SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers;

also see MacArthur) 5–6, 9, 11, 15, 20, 23, 49, 105, 107–108, 123, 130, 134, 156, 164, 185, 188 Scarry, Elaine 50 Scott, James C. 142 Security Treaty (see Japan-United States Security Treaty) Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 27 shimagurumi tōsō (The Struggle Linking the Islands) 94 Shin Okinawa bungaku 56 shishōsetsu 30, 131, 183–4 Sodei Rinjirō 8, 15 SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) 51, 200–01 n. 45 Sōjusha 123 Sono Ayako 132–34, 189; “Guests From Afar” (“Enrai no kyakutachi”) 23, 133–44 stereotype: in Japanese representations of blacks 71–90, 92, 101, 161; theories of 77–78, 81 Tachikawa City 56, 128, 143, 145–6 Tailhook Scandal 51 Taiwan/Taiwanese: and Japanese colonialism 12–15, 58, 197 n. 11; and San Francisco Peace Treaty 6; Japanese discrimination against 13, 58; and Japanese prostitution 107 Takami Jun 157, 159 Takemae Eiji 7 Tamura Taijirō 11, 103, 114; “Gates of Flesh” (“Nikutai no mon”) 11, 114, 123 Tanaka Kakuei 158 Tanaka Kimiko 124 Tanaka Kōkei, “Children of Mixed Blood” (“Konketsuji”) 55–56 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō 119 Teruya district of Koza 55, 70, 179, 181 Truman, Harry 84 Uehara Noboru 178–80;

INDEX 261

“1970: The Gang Era” (“1970-nen no gyangu eiji”) 178–80 Ueno Chizuko 132 USCAR (U.S. Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands) 20, 94 Ushijima Mitsuru (Japanese Army commander) 7 victimhood (also see prostitution—prostitute as victim; and race—black GI as victim): gender and construction of 16, 27–8, 39, 41–51, 89, 105, 115, 117–9, 124, 129, 161, 174–5, 185–6, 188; and complicity 14, 39, 42, 48, 163–7, 185–7; Vietnam War 3, 22, 24, 48, 55, 67, 113, 158, 179–81, 188 war responsibility (also see victimhood) 24, 177–8, 187 Ward, Robert 8 Weiner, Michael 75 White, Hayden 103 Wickham, Chris 4 World War I 1 World War II (see Pacific War) women: as mediators between men (also see prostitute as mediator) 27, 30– 32, 64, 131, 141, 157, 160, 173–7; and subjectivity 30–31, 40, 132, 198 n. 19; women’s rights and legal reform 6, 31, 130–32, 157, 185–6, 188, 195 n. 44, 215 n. 3 “women’s literature,” Japanese terminology of 133–34, 183, 216 n. 15 Yamada Eimi 73, 155; Bedtime Eyes (Beddotaimu aizu) 72 Yokosuka City 110–11, 121, 123 Yoshimoto Banana 133–4 Yoshiyuki Junnosuke 133 Young, Robert 67