Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

After the occupation, mass-circulation magazines ran articles about rapes by American servicemen, and Japanese men resentfully recalled incidents of being randomly, almost whimsically, assaulted in public.13 The sexual opportunities enjoyed by men affiliated with the occupation forces, including foreign journalists—with their gifts of tinned goods, chocolates, nylon stockings, cigarettes, and liquor—humiliated and infuriated Japanese males. GIs regarded themselves as experts on “Babysan’s world” and, in a racial idiom they found amusing, joked that this gave them a unique “slant” on Japan. Some spoke with contempt of the “gook girls.” Mixed-blood children became one of the sad, unspoken stories of the occupation—seldom acknowledged by their foreign fathers and invariably ostracized by the Japanese.14