Like accomplished courtesans of the past, the panpan also possessed special talents—most notably, in their case, the ability to communicate in a polyglot form of English, a hybrid mix of hooker’s Japanese and the GI’s native tongue that was humorously identified as “panglish.” Getting along in this second language, broken or not, was a skill highly valued in post-surrender Japan—hundreds of thousands of men were also struggling to survive by dealing with the conqueror in the conqueror’s tongue (their pidgin English was sometimes laughed off as “SCAPanese”).
