Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

The sandoicchi-man, or sandwich-board man, became a symbol of postwar disorientation, especially after the media discovered in 1948 that one of the forlorn figures shuffling along the street wearing advertising boards was the son of the former admiral Takahashi Sankichi, another of yesterday’s men of influence.

the introduction of American-style daylight savings time. Called sanmō taimu (“summer time”) in the marvelous new pidgin terminology of the moment, setting the clock forward an hour was opposed on the grounds that it simply extended the difficulty of “daily” life. People preferred that darkness come earlier, although they did not succeed in getting daylight savings time repealed until September 1951.37

It was young women of marriageable age who found themselves in the most desperate circumstances, for the demography of death in the recent war had removed a huge aggregation of prospective husbands.

Alcoholism, never a rarity in male society, became a gaudy symbol of social disintegration in part because the cheap liquor available was frequently made with dubious and dangerous ingredients. Kasutori shōchū, an exceedingly popular lower-class drink made from sake dregs (kasu, hence the name), was said to render most drinkers unconscious after three cups.

In the midst of unprecedented hardship, all the homilies about Japan’s unique racial and cultural harmony, its “beautiful customs” and “familial” sense of social solidarity, proved to be hollow.

Certain incidents were singled out for their symbolism. It was reported, for example, that surviving members of the virtually deified Tokkōtai—the “special forces” who flew suicide missions in the final stages of the war, and were better known in the West as kamikaze pilots—were turning to strong-arm robbery. The phrase Tokkōtai kuzure, literally “degenerate Tokkōtai,” suggestive of a thoroughly destructive fusion of drinking, womanizing, and criminal activity, came into vogue. Here was a world turned upside down.41

Jeeps were associated with the chocolate and chewing gum handed out by cheerful GIs, and thus with the few delicious amenities imaginable in these war-torn lives. “Hello,” “good-bye,” “jeep,” and “give me chocolate” were the first English words most youngsters learned. They also learned to fold newspapers into soft GI-style hats rather than the traditional samurai helmets of the past.

Early in 1946, for example, it was reported that the three most popular activities among small boys and girls were yamiichigokko, panpan asobi, and demo asobi—that is, holding a mock black market, playing prostitute and customer, and recreating left-wing political demonstrations.

schoolboys as well as orphans and runaways quickly learned how to earn pocket money as pimps by leading GIs to women. “You like to meet my sister?” became, for some, the next level of English after “give me chocolate.”

In “repatriate train,” children put on their school knapsacks, jammed together on the dais, shook and trembled, and got off at “Osaka.” “Special train”—obviously a takeoff on the railway cars reserved for occupation personnel—allowed only “pretty people” to get on. A “conductor” judged who was favored and who wasn’t. A button missing? Rejected. Dirty face? Rejected. Those who passed these arbitrary hurdles sat in leisure on the train. Those rejected stood by enviously. In “ordinary train,” everyone piled on, pushing and shoving, complaining about being stepped on, crying out for help.

Well into 1949, children continued to turn social disorders into games.

The remaining 30 percent (26.6 billion yen out of a total military budget of 85 billion yen) was hastily disbursed before the arrival of occupation forces, mainly to military contractors.

During this same period, the Bank of Japan turned its energies to extending massive loans to erstwhile war contractors for the ostensible purpose of facilitating conversion to “peaceful” production. The impression one gains from later investigations into these activities is that during the turbulent two weeks following the emperor’s broadcast, a great many men of influence spent most of their waking hours looting military storehouses, arranging hasty payments from the military budget or from the Bank of Japan to contractors and cronies, and destroying documents. In the greatest moment of crisis in Japanese history, it was a rare officer, official, or executive who devoted himself with sincerity and foresight to serving the well-being of the general populace. No wise men or heroes, no commendable statesmen, emerged from among the old elites.

Some months after the surrender, occupation authorities naively turned over to the government a major portion of the military stocks that had been properly maintained intact, with instructions that these be used for public welfare and economic reconstruction. A substantial portion of these goods consisted of construction materials and machinery, and the Home Ministry proceeded to entrust their disposal to a committee consisting of five representatives from zaibatsu enterprises. The total value of goods involved was estimated to be roughly 100 billion yen—and these materials, too, quickly disappeared almost without a trace.

Only after the Americans arrived did the Japanese learn that they would be required to pay a major portion of the costs of housing and supporting the gigantic army of occupation. As it turned out, these latter expenditures amounted to a staggering one-third of the regular budget at the beginning of the occupation. Nor was this a one-time burden. Although outlays directly supporting the American presence declined as a percentage of the annual budget, they remained one of the government’s single largest expenditures in the years that followed. As a budget line, they were euphemistically disguised as “war termination costs” or simply “other expenses” in compliance with orders from occupation authorities.51

It would be difficult to exaggerate the material as well as psychological ramifications of requiring the Japanese to contribute in a major way to the maintenance of the occupation army. While some 3.7 million families still lacked housing of their own as of 1948, the government was required to direct a substantial portion of its annual budget to providing housing and facilities for the conquerors—and, indeed, ensuring that these met American living standards. While war widows begged to little avail for relief, the government had no choice but to pay the expenses of, say, an American officer who desired to “modernize” the private residence requisitioned for him by upgrading the electricity and plumbing, painting the interior, introducing modern appliances (phones, stoves, and toilets), and perhaps converting the garden pond into a swimming pool.52 While the unbearable press of passengers on the national railways was dramatized by the suffocation, in December 1945, of an infant strapped to its mother’s back, the government was required to run special cars or even “exclusive occupation army trains,” often nowhere near full, for the free use of occupation personnel. Few Americans gave any thought to such “costs of occupation,” but they were readily apparent to many Japanese.

The materials looted by men of position and privilege were obviously of enormous value. They were, after all, being stockpiled to supply a gigantic home army for a protracted “decisive battle.” They were also, in many cases, materials capable of being concealed indefinitely. Large quantities of diamonds and other personal jewelry that patriotic women had donated to support the war effort were among the items stolen; so were drugs and rare precious metals such as titanium brought back from overseas. The sporadic hoards of goods that investigators did manage to track down provided an ongoing menu of tantalizing tidbits for the general public. In April 1946, for instance, a cache of silver ingots was found sunk near the shoreline in Tokyo Bay. Almost a year later, a raid on a single chemical company uncovered “10 tons of naphthalene, 26 tons of caustic soda, 45 tons of lubrication oil, 150 tons of edible oil, 16 tons of industrial salt, 50 tons of steel tube, 50 tons of steel bars, 30 tons of iron sheet, 45 electric motors and other miscellaneous iron, textile and rubber goods.” Although the absence of reliable records makes an accurate calculation of the scale and worth of the diverted goods impossible, a patchwork estimate of a very rough sort suggests that their value in 1947 may have exceeded 300 billion yen. The significance of this sum becomes apparent when it is set against the regular national budget for that year, in which total government expenditures were placed at...

In critical industrial sectors such as coal production, moreover, the country paid dearly for long years of class and racial oppression. By the time of the surrender, much of the most onerous heavy labor—especially in the coal mines—was performed by conscripted Korean laborers or Chinese prisoners. When liberation came, they deserted their hellholes en masse.

All this contributed to the kyodatsu condition. To be called on to endure the unendurable was something the Japanese people had grown used to over long years of war. Then, at least, the exhortation carried a clear sense of purpose: their nation, their culture, their “national polity,” people were led to believe, were imperiled by external forces. To be told to endure the unendurable in the postwar quagmire was a different matter, and the Diet report on the hoarded-goods scandal went a good way toward explaining why, for so many, physical and emotional exhaustion persisted for so long. “Private individuals have profited fabulously and have nourished the black market,” the investigators concluded, whereas attempts to expose the scandal and retrieve looted materials had been “frustrated by a combination of fraud and legal barriers” at every level. Of the men of influence who profited from the scandal, it was observed that “they wear a mask of democracy but in reality they swagger on the black markets,” revelling in the prolongation of economic confusion.

Defeat stimulated skepticism and outright anger at established authority. Poverty radicalized many workers. Blatant corruption often prompted healthy criticism. Sardonic humor flourished alongside despair, and for every personalized story of emotional exhaustion and shattered lives, it usually was possible to find an uplifting counterexample of resilience, hope, and accomplishment. A veritable torrent of diverse publications accompanied the lifting of the old police state restrictions on free expression. The film industry prospered. Radio became lively again. Intellectuals ran on as if there were no tomorrow. New formulations of “culture” were debated alongside new models of “love,” both carnal and pure. “Decadence” itself emerged as a provocative challenge to old orthodoxies.

They hastened to remove the blackout paper from their windows, letting light back into their lives. Millions of them began to consider what it might mean to create a private life free from the dictates of the state.1

Prior to August 15, the state had defined in the most doctrinaire terms imaginable what the “cardinal principles of the national polity” were; what the correct “way of the subject” was; how it was essential to observe one’s “proper place” in the established hierarchies of class and gender; which “decadent” and “corrupting” foreign thoughts or cultural expressions were forbidden; what could be said or not said in virtually every situation.

What defeat showed, to the astonishment of many, was how quickly all the years of ultranationalistic indoctrination could be sloughed off. Love of country remained, but mindless fanaticism and numbing regimentation were happily abandoned.

The marginal groups that electrified popular consciousness came from three overlapping subcultures: the world of the panpan prostitute, whose embrace of the conqueror was disturbingly literal; the black market, with its formidable energy and seductively maverick code of behavior; and the well-lubricated “kasutori culture” demimonde, which celebrated self-indulgence and introduced such enduring attractions as pulp literature and commercialized sex. All three marginal worlds came to exemplify not merely the confusion and despair of the kyodatsu condition, but also the vital, visceral, even carnal transcending of it.

These sentimentalized images of “women of the dark” left a great deal unsaid, and necessarily so; for a great part of the prostitute’s trade involved catering to the huge army of occupation. The sexual implications of having to accommodate hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen had been terrifying, especially to those who were aware of the rapacity their own forces had exhibited elsewhere as well as of the huge numbers of non-Japanese women who had been forced to serve the imperial troops as ianfu or “comfort women.”

Still, it was taken for granted that the foreigners would demand sexual gratification. The question was simply: who would provide it? The government lost no time in answering this question. On August 18, the Home Ministry sent a secret wireless message to regional police officials throughout the country instructing them to prepare special and exclusive “comfort facilities” for the occupation army.

Enlisting a small number of women to serve as a buffer protecting the chastity of the “good” women of Japan was well-established policy in dealing with Western barbarians. Special pleasure quarters had been set up for foreigners immediately after Commodore Perry forced the country to abolish its policy of seclusion, and in modern mythology one young woman who gave her body for the nation had already been glorified as a patriotic martyr. Her name was Okichi, and she had been assigned as a consort for Townsend Harris, the first American consul, who assumed his duties in 1856. The procurers of 1945 appropriated her sad, sensual image in defining their own task. The women they were assembling, they declared, would be Shōwa no Tōjin Okichi, “the Okichis of the present era.”

The organizers of the special comfort facilities thus undertook to recruit ordinary women by posting a large signboard addressed “To New Japanese Women” in the Ginza district of downtown Tokyo. “As part of urgent national facilities to deal with the postwar,” this read, somewhat vaguely, “we are seeking the active cooperation of new Japanese women to participate in the great task of comforting the occupation force.”

By August 27, 1,360 women in Tokyo had enlisted in what soon would become known in English as the R.A.A., short for Recreation and Amusement Association (Tokushu Ian Shisetsu Kyōkai in Japanese).

The time has come, an order has been given, and by virtue of our realm of business we have been assigned the difficult task of comforting the occupation army as part of the urgent national facilities for postwar management. This order is heavy and immense. And success will be extremely difficult. . . . And so we unite and go forward to where our beliefs lead us, and through the sacrifice of several thousands of “Okichis of our era” build a breakwater to hold back the raging waves and defend and nurture the purity of our race, becoming as well an invisible underground pillar at the root of the postwar social order. . . .

Several hundred GIs on that day quickly found their way to an R.A.A. facility in Tokyo’s ōmori district, where a small number of mostly inexperienced recruits had been gathered. Neither beds, futons, nor room partitions were yet available, and fornication took place without privacy everywhere, even in the corridors. Later Japanese accounts of the scene tend to be irate, speaking of shameless “animalistic intercourse” that showed the “true colors” of so-called American civilization. The local police chief is said to have wept.

By one estimate, R.A.A. women engaged between fifteen and sixty GIs a day. A nineteen-year-old who previously had been a typist committed suicide almost immediately.

In his diary entry for September 13, the writer Takami Jun recorded a conversation with a taxi driver who reported seeing a woman in a flashy kimono—like something from an operetta, he said—greeting an American soldier outside one of the comfort facilities. She leaped up, threw her arms around his neck, and said Harō—“Hello.” It was, for Japanese men, a depressing scene.13

Initially, women designated for use by black soldiers were said to have been horrified—until they discovered that many black GIs treated them more kindly than the whites did. In their meticulous preoccupation with race and racial hierarchy, some Japanese concluded that such relative kindness derived from the fact that black soldiers had been socialized to regard them as “whites.”14

Not surprisingly, they proved popular among U.S. servicemen. They were, among other things, inexpensive. The price for a short visit with an R.A.A. prostitute was 15 yen, or one dollar—about the same as half a pack of cigarettes on the Japanese market. Two or three times that amount purchased an entire night of personal diplomacy.

In January 1946, occupation authorities ordered the abolition of all “public” prostitution, declaring it undemocratic and in violation of women’s human rights. Privately, they acknowledged that their major motivation was an alarming rise in venereal disease among the troops. By the time the prohibition went into effect a few months later, almost 90 percent of the R.A.A. women tested positive for infection. Around the same time, syphilis was detected in 70 percent of the members of a single unit of the U.S. Eighth Army, and gonorrhea in 50 percent. It was largely to combat such diseases that the first U.S. patents for penicillin were sold to Japanese companies in April of that year.17

In responding to SCAP’s orders, Japanese bureaucrats revealed a rare and unusually fine appreciation of human rights. In December 1946, the Home Ministry declared that women had the right to become prostitutes, and this became the ostensible rationale behind designating “red-line” districts in which it was understood by all parties that they would continue to ply their trade. (The “red-line” designation came from markings on the city maps used by the police; in areas outlined in blue, such activity was not allowed).

A prostitute who flitted indiscriminately from customer to customer was known, in borrowed English, as a bata-furai or “butterfly.”

Panpan who were loyal to a single American patron were identified, again in borrowed English, as onrii (“only”), short for onrii wan (“only one”).

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”).

Yet at the same time, these women were striking symbols of the whole convoluted phenomenon of “Americanization” in which everyone was in some way engaged.

In their embarrassing way, the panpan were the exemplary pioneer materialists and consumers of the postwar era. In those years of acute hunger and scarcity, the material comfort of the Americans was simply staggering to behold. What made America “great” was that it was so rich; and, for many, what made “democracy” appealing was that it apparently was the way to become prosperous. Among ordinary people, no group tapped the material treasures of the conquerors as blatantly as the panpan. They were the recipients of goods from the U.S. military exchange posts (the famous PXs) that in those impoverished days truly seemed like treasure houses from a magic land: crammed not only with basic foodstuffs, but with liquor and cigarettes, sweets and delicacies, voluptuously decadent feminine things such as lipstick and nylon stockings.

The sensual panpan was as close as anyone in Japan might hope to get, in the flesh, to Hollywood. Even Shiseidō, the premiere purveyor of cosmetics, with a haut bourgeois prewar tradition, was caught up in this. The company’s first new postwar product was a “nail stick” resembling lipstick that was used to color fingernails. It was especially popular among women who consorted with GIs.

A journalist recalled how nylons, never seen before, arrived along with the Americans just as women were shedding their ugly monpe pantaloons. Their hearts were tempted, she observed acidly, and some were known to have exchanged their chastity for a pair of stockings.27

The eroticization of defeated Japan in the eyes of the conquerors took place almost immediately, creating a complex interplay of assumed masculine and feminine roles that has colored U.S.-Japan relations ever since.

At that time, the panpan was perhaps the most obvious symbol of a new phenomenon in intercultural relations: the “horizontal” westernization of Japan. Previously, such influences had penetrated the country vertically, almost invariably introduced by the elites. Even seeming exceptions like the spread of flapper culture in the 1920s, with its “modern boys” and “Clara Bow girls,” tended to involve only the comfortable bourgeoisie, while ordinary people remained relatively unaffected. The lower-class panpan represented an unprecedented phenomenon—a popular westernization “from the side.” Figuratively as well as literally, these tough, animated young women were closer to the Americans than anyone else. No one surpassed them as the harbingers of a hedonistic, materialistic, American-style consumer culture.29

To some members of the occupation force, native women came to be regarded as little more than available sexual objects. This characteristic colonial attitude led to a notorious incident in which all the women on a commuter train were detained by American MPs and forced to submit to medical examinations for venereal disease. Every Japanese woman, in a word, was potentially a whore.

More strikingly, the defeated country itself was feminized in the minds of the Americans who poured in. The enemy was transformed with startling suddenness from a bestial people fit to be annihilated into receptive exotics to be handled and enjoyed. That enjoyment was palpable—the pan-pan personified this. Japan—only yesterday a menacing, masculine threat—had been transformed, almost in the blink of an eye, into a compliant, feminine body on which the white victors could impose their will.

Among the numerous cynical sayings of those days was onna ma panpan, otoko wa katsugiya—women become panpan, men become carriers for the black market. The word for “black market” was yami-ichi, for “woman of the dark” it was yami no onna—written with the same ideograph for yami (darkness) in each case.

Surely the blackest of black-market stories concerned the emerging market in Osaka, where a brisk trade quickly developed in blankets and clothing taken from the dead. Many such items came directly from sanitariums and were still stained with blood coughed up by tuberculosis victims. The Osaka entrepreneurs who dealt in such goods referred to them among themselves as oshaka—a ghoulishly pious reference, for shaka refers to the Buddha or buddhas.