Year Zero (5 page)

Survival often dissolved class distinctions. Norman Lewis was a young British army officer stationed in Naples. In his wonderful account,
Naples '44
, he describes the visit to his HQ of a grand Italian aristocrat, owner of a palazzo somewhere in the south. He arrived with his sister:

Both are remarkably alike in appearance: thin, with extremely pale skin and cold, patrician expressions bordering on severity. The purpose of the visit was to enquire if we could arrange for the sister to enter an army brothel. We explained that there was no such institution in the British Army. “A pity”, the prince said. Both of them speak excellent English, learned from an English governess. “Ah
well, Luisa, I suppose if it can't be, it can't be.” They thanked us with polite calm and departed.
²⁸

In Japan, prostitution was institutionalized from the beginning. They had their reasons. Japanese authorities were terrified that Allied soldiers would do to the Japanese what Japanese troops had done to the Chinese and other Asians. When Nanking was sacked in 1937, and Manila more or less destroyed in a last-ditch battle in 1945, tens of thousands of women were raped, mutilated, and usually killed, if they hadn't died of the ordeal already. These were two particularly bad instances. There were many more. In China, rape by Imperial Japanese soldiers was perpetrated on such a massive scale that it became a military problem, by provoking fiercer Chinese resistance. To cope with this difficulty girls were sometimes drafted, but mostly kidnapped, especially in Korea and other countries under Japanese control, to serve as so-called comfort women, meaning sex slaves, in Japanese army brothels.

Government and military propaganda had frightened Japanese citizens with constant predictions that, in the case of defeat, Japanese women would be raped, tortured, and murdered by foreign soldiers. To prevent this ghastly and dishonorable fate, Japanese were ordered to fight to the death, or kill themselves. Women and children in the Pacific islands and in Okinawa were ordered to blow themselves up with hand grenades or jump off cliffs. Many did.

And so, on August 18, three days after the Japanese surrender, the Home Ministry ordered local police officials to set up “comfort facilities” for the conquering Allies. Women were recruited to “sacrifice their bodies” in the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) as a patriotic duty. The former prime minister, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, who bore a large responsibility for starting the Pacific War, told the national police commissioner to “please defend the young women of Japan.”
²⁹
Perhaps the invading foreigners would be appeased by this measure, and so respectable Japanese women might be able to come out of their hiding places and walk the streets unmolested.

It must have been a sordid business. Recreation and Amusement facilities were set up in such haste that there were no beds to accommodate the soldiers and the sacrificial women. Sexual intercourse took place wherever space could be found, mostly on the floors, or in the halls and corridors of the improvised brothels. It took a few months for the Japanese to come up with more efficient arrangements. A huge, hangarlike brothel was built in Funabashi, outside Tokyo, known as the International Palace, or IP. The IP offered sex on a kind of assembly line, known as “the willow run” after the wartime bomber factory built by Ford near Detroit. Men would leave their shoes at the entrance of the long building, and pick them up polished to a sheen at the other end.

Army billets, such as the Nomura Hotel in Tokyo, were swarming with women, identified as clerks or cleaning ladies, who regularly spent the nights there. Some of them brought their families to escape from the winter cold. A big dance hall in the center of Tokyo had a sign in Japanese that read: “Patriotic Girls! Assist the Reconstruction of Japan by Serving as Dance Partners!”
³⁰
Condoms were sold at the army PXs (special stores selling food, clothing, and other supplies to members of the occupation forces).

In contrast to Germany, there was no strict ban on “fraternization with indigenous personnel” in Japan at first. General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for Allied Powers (SCAP), recognized the futility of this rule. He told one of his aides: “They keep trying to get me to stop all this Madame Butterflying around. I won't do it . . . I wouldn't issue a non-fraternization order for all the tea in China.”
³¹

In the beginning of the occupation there were about six hundred thousand U.S. soldiers in Japan, in addition to Australians, British, and a sprinkling of other nationalities. So there was a great deal of fraternizing. A letter written by William Theodore de Bary, a U.S. Navy officer who later became a distinguished scholar of China and Japan, described what it was like in Sasebo, a large naval base on the island of Kyushu, in October 1945:

Fraternization itself has been a problem. The MPs, in fact, had to forbid any more congregating on the large bridge by our
headquarters, so congested had it become with eager marines talking and using sign language to grinning and friendly Japanese. It has been that way from the first.
³²

This went on despite some extraordinarily racist propaganda back home. This, for example, from an article about the occupation of Japan in the
Saturday Evening Post
: “The flat-chested, button-nosed, splayfooted average Japanese woman is about as attractive to most Americans as a 1000-year-old stone idol. In fact, less so. They like to take pictures of the idols.”
³³

The author of this article, if we choose to be charitable, had no idea. Most of SCAP's senior officers had secured Japanese mistresses already in 1945. Since there were very few Western women at first, this was to be expected. Things changed only when a new wave of military officers arrived, less tolerant men who often had had no direct experience of combat. Even as restrictions in Germany had been lifted, they decided to impose more discipline in Japan by declaring most public places, such as local restaurants, hot spring resorts, cinemas, or army hotels, “off-limits.”

As a result, fraternization still took place, just more discreetly, and more and more with freelance prostitutes, which did nothing to keep the VD rates down. In the bombed-out streets and city parks prostitutes had their own territories, known as “islands.” Some could be had for as little as one dollar, which was roughly the price of half a pack of cigarettes on the black market. This type of business thrived, especially after the Allied administration decided, much against Japanese advice, to ban organized prostitution in 1946.

Japanese like to categorize things neatly. The freelance hookers, known as
panpan
girls, were divided into those who specialized in white foreign soldiers, black foreign soldiers, and Japanese only, even though some of the more enterprising ones refused to make such neat distinctions. Some prostitutes, the so-called
onrii
(as in “only one”), managed to latch on to one client. The more than usually promiscuous ones were
batafurais
(butterflies). Certain areas of central Tokyo, such as Hibiya
Park, opposite General MacArthur's headquarters, or nearby Yurakucho station, were typical
panpan
stamping grounds.
³⁴

The
panpan
, heavily lipsticked and high-heeled, was an object of Japanese scorn, as the symbol of national degradation, but also of fascination, tinged with envy. They were materially better off than most homeless, hungry, impoverished Japanese citizens. These working girls were also the first and most avid consumers of American goods, and more familiar than most Japanese with the popular culture of the victors. Using the peculiar argot of the
panpan
, Japanese slang mixed with broken GI English, they were also closer to speaking the language of the occupiers than most Japanese could manage.

In a sense, the
panpan
fits into a particular raffish Japanese tradition that combines low life with glamour. The prostitutes of premodern Tokyo, then still called Edo, were fashion plates of a kind, publicized in woodblock prints and the Kabuki theater. In the early years of the Allied occupation, the culture associated with the
panpan
was a great deal less refined. Military defeat and liberation from wartime censorship and militarist education revived a commercial sex culture with roots in the past, but with a great deal of American influence. Salacious pulp magazines with such titles as
Lovely
,
Venus
,
Sex Bizarre
, and
Pin-Up
flourished. Striptease parlors opened up in the old entertainment districts, often jerry-built shacks constructed around the bomb craters. Pimps, black marketers, and young hoodlums in Hawaiian shirts danced the mambo with their girlfriends in cheap dance halls. Japanese swing bands and jazz singers came alive again, after years of bans on such foreign decadence. There was a craze for boogie-woogie.

Many women turned to prostitution out of necessity. But not all. Surveys of the time show that a large number of women became
panpan
“out of curiosity.”
³⁵
And this, more than getting paid for sex, was what earned the
panpan
particular opprobrium. To “sacrifice” one's body to keep a poor rural family going, or from patriotic duty, was all right, perhaps even laudable; to do it out of curiosity, or a desire for cash, cigarettes, or silk stockings, was a disgrace. Organized prostitution had a long tradition and
was tolerated. But the
panpan
were condemned for their free enterprise. It made them dangerously independent.

Tawdry and desperate though much of it was, the commercial sex culture in 1945 was, like mambo dancing and boogie-woogie, liberation of a kind, welcomed by some people, and loathed by others. The roughly ninety thousand babies born in 1946 from unmarried women cannot all have resulted from purely commercial transactions.
³⁶
Having been fed with so much negative propaganda about the barbarian rapists and killers, many Japanese women were much relieved when they actually saw the less fearsome Americans. In the words of one woman writing in the utterly respectable women's magazine
Fujin Gaho
: “I find them courteous, friendly, carefree and perfectly at ease. What a sharp and painful contrast to the haughty, mean and discourteous Japanese soldiers who used to live in the barracks near my home.”
³⁷

This is not to say that Allied soldiers were never abusive, particularly at the beginning of the Occupation. According to one estimate, forty women were raped every day in the latter half of 1945, which is probably an underestimation, since many cases would not have been reported, out of shame.
³⁸
Such figures would never have appeared in the censored Occupation press, of course. But most Japanese would still have recognized that the Americans were far more disciplined than they had feared, especially in comparison to the behavior of their own troops abroad.

In an odd way, changing sexual mores fitted into the propagandistic effort by the Americans to “reeducate” the Japanese. To become democratic, so the Japanese were told, women should be treated more equally.
Panpan
girls may not have been quite what the educators had in mind. But Japanese were encouraged to show physical affection more openly, just like Americans. So it was that the first screen kiss, after much American prompting, was shown for Japanese edification in 1946, in a movie entitled
Young Hearts
(
Hatachi no Seishun
). It proved to be highly popular with young audiences.

Of course there is a broad spectrum between streetwalkers picking up GIs in Hibiya Park and the first cinematic kiss, but the public hunger for
erotic entertainment and highly sexed popular music suggests that the gap between the liberated and the defeated peoples was actually not as great as one might think. For the Japanese, too, a new sense of liberty came with the sound of Glenn Miller's “In the Mood.”

It was the same story in the Western zones of Germany. In areas occupied by Soviet troops, things were rather different, certainly as far as sex was concerned. If “fratting” came to define relations with foreign troops in the West, rape was one of the curses of being defeated by the Soviet Red Army. Of course, rape happened in the Western zones too, especially, but by no means exclusively, under French occupation. In Stuttgart, for example, about 3,000 women were said to have been raped by French troops, many from Algeria.
³⁹
In the American occupation zone, by far the largest, the number of recorded rapes by American troops in the whole of 1945 did not exceed 1,500.
⁴⁰

There are several reasons why rape was less common under Western occupation than in the Soviet zone. Allied troops, with the possible exception of the French, were not as vengeful as the Soviets. Nor were they encouraged by their superiors to do as they liked with German women. (Stalin himself notoriously stated that soldiers who had crossed thousands of miles through blood and fire were entitled to “have some fun with women.”) Besides, the willingness of German women to “frat” with Allied soldiers was such that rape was hardly necessary. A popular quip among GIs in the summer of 1945 was that German women were the loosest “this side of Tahiti.”
⁴¹

This was no doubt an exaggeration, promoted not just by grateful GIs, but by Germans who were outraged by actions they regarded as a further insult to their already shattered sense of national pride. Still, many soldiers claimed that German women, known variously as “frauleins,” “furlines,” or “fratkernazis,” were even more willing to have sexual relations with them than the French women were. One rather brutal, but perhaps not wholly inaccurate, analysis of this phenomenon was given by a GI after he had just returned to the U.S. “At the risk of letting the cat out of the bag,” he wrote, “it must be admitted that all the GI wants in Europe
is a ‘good deal,'” which included “a chance to fraternize as often as possible.” He continued: “In Germany, naturally, the GI finds the best deal . . . In France the deal is different. The GI doesn't find the all-out bootlicking of Germany. He can't make France the plaything he heard it was from his Dad and from the liberators in 1944.”
⁴²