Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan

As you can guess from the title, this is a scholarly work dealing with racism and the U.S. occupation of Japan after the end of World War II. There's a great deal of information in the book, some of it material that I have not seen elsewhere.

The author starts out by noting that the war itself was extremely brutal, but yet there was a fairly peaceful occupation of the nation after the war. She notes that, during the war, both sides demonized each other through their propaganda, the Japanese often being compared to vermin like rats, and Americans being referred to as beastly.

She points out that the peaceful nature of the occupation should not be really all that surprising since, before the militarists took over, the U.S. and Japan were alike in more ways than they were different.

She then goes into the subject of racism in the East, and notes that it wasn't all that different than the Western form of racism. In the East, the racism relied on 'myths of origin, descent, and the supposed blood ties that exist among peoples.' Japan's racism was basically a colonial form of racism, which is exactly the same kind that the Western nations had developed.

Both countries had the same unofficial, and sometimes official, negative view of marrying 'outside one's race.' In the U.S., this generally referred to marriages between blacks and whites; in Japan, marriages between Americans and Japanese, or Japanese and Koreans or Chinese.

She covers the American anti-immigration laws that were directed against the Japanese and this upset the Japanese (naturally.) She says that the Japanese had not developed any postwar ideas (assuming they would win the war) for dealing with the white race.

The U.S. had begun its move towards the concept of racial equality (at least outside it's own borders) during this time, but the major factor in how things were perceived was the cold war, which changed the view of Japan from a defeated nation to a nation that could be useful in the battle against Communism.

In relation to the Tokyo War Crimes trial, she says it was 'criticized even by members of the Allied nation as as a forum for vengeance, vindication, and propaganda.' That is very interesting, especially in light of the fact that many men who should have been tried as war criminals (in particular, those working for Unit 731) were not actually put on trial, Neither was the Emperor, since it had been decided that putting him on trial could cause major problems with the population of Japan.

It was determined that the Japanese never really had any serious plans for conquering either North or South America. Racism was evident in the way the Japanese treated white prisoners-of-war (although they actually treated most POWs in a terrible manner.)

During the early part of the occupation, U.S. soldiers and civilians were not supposed to fraternize with the Japanese. The idea seemed to be to cut down the amount of interaction to as little as possible. That's interesting, though, in the light of the fact that the Japanese ran 'comfort stations' for the Allied troops.

At first the Japanese evacuated many women from cities, fearful that the U.S. soldiers would rape them in mass (like was done in Nanking.) There were, indeed, some rapes, assaults and other crimes, but not to the scale that anyone expected.

There was also a dual racism going on; not just Americans and Japanese, but black Americans and white Americans. (The treatment of blacks in the war is quite interesting.)

By Sept. of 1946 there was near total segregation of U.S. troops and the Japanese. 'The GIs wsere prohibited from using Japanese hotels, inns, and theaters. In the interest of sanitation no American servicemen could legally drink 'indigenous' water not eart 'indigenous' food. /..GIs could no longer legally give away American food and other goods to the Japanese. They could not visit any Japanese private house that was surrounded by a fence. ...They were even prohibited from playing sports with Japanese people, or from inviting Japanese people to attend and participate in social activities.'

(Again, this all changed with the Cold War., around the end of 1948.)

She then talks about how this became part of the mass media. For example, 'Equal relationships or friendship between Americans and Japanese were unacceptable even in fiction.'

Still, the Japanese admired the American lifestyle and began to adapt parts of it for themselves.

In the spring of 1949, the army newspaper Pacific Stars and Stripes told American soldiers that they were to treat the Japanese with respect, and not look upon them as an inferior race. All the former restrictions got dropped. Even censorship changed. It had previously been pre-publication censorship; it was changed to post-publication censorship, which is a major difference.

The U.S. began to produce films in Hollywood that played up U.S.-Japanese friendship as the move to get them into the Cold War on our side intensified. The Motion Picture Association was discouraged from continuing to release anti-Japanese films made during the war.

The author does cite information, though, that shows that sometimes the Japanese-GI relationships were not very good, especially as seen by younger people.

Japan, of course, had its own form of racism, even against a group of its own citizens. These were the burakumin, who originally were people who were basically ostricized for doing work like butchering and leather working. Even their descendants, though, were ostricized, even if they had other jobs. (I have material on this elsewhere. It's still a problem in Japan.)

Japanese-Korean relationships were also not very good, especially since Japan had conquered Korea well before the war and had ruled it since.

The author also talks about Japanese emigration to the U.S. after the war. She devotes an entire chapter to the subject of cross-racial marriages and the mixed children they produce.

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