Tokyo Junkie. Robert Whiting
also helped to create massive black markets and a pervasive streetwalker culture. To cap it all off, tens of thousands of US soldiers remained on Japanese soil, a result of the United States–Japan Security Treaty signed in 1951 in San Francisco, a consummation intensely unwelcome in many quarters of the populace.
To be sure, the Occupation had its benevolent side: bulk food donations to prevent mass starvation and a new democratic constitution that eliminated the cruel and inequitable feudal family system of Japan, gave equal rights to women, fostered unionization, promoted land reform and, at the urging of a group of Japanese lawmakers, renounced war. Indeed, such provisions were in stark contrast to the brutality with which Japan had treated its neighboring countries, epitomized by the Nanjing Massacre where Japanese troops engaged in rape, arson, and the mass murder of an estimated 300,000 men, women, and children in the winter of 1937.
In practice, however, the Occupation blueprint proved contradictory, with GHQ (General Headquarters) officials preaching freedom of speech and democracy while simultaneously censoring the Japanese press, limiting fraternization between Japanese and Americans, and prohibiting Japanese filmmakers from showing any evidence of the occupiers in their films. Then there was that confusing change in basic policy midway through, which came to be known as the Reverse Course, whereby the GHQ, alarmed by the rise of Mao in China and the division of the Korean Peninsula into hostile states, dropped its original goal of turning the country into the peace-loving Switzerland of Asia and instead opted to make Japan a “Bulwark against Communism.” That meant rebuilding its defense systems, suppressing left-wing union activity, and putting the zaibatsu back together again in the form of so-called keiretsu groups, a 180-degree change in direction.
Everything considered, the Occupation had been a relatively peaceful one. The Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, Douglas MacArthur, had been widely respected among the Japanese. Given that several hundred thousand young American soldiers had been placed in a country where there had never been more than a handful of Westerners at any one time (people who by and large were traders, teachers, or missionaries), it was remarkable that things went as smoothly as they did. Tens of thousands of American GIs married Japanese women, despite draconian GHQ rules prohibiting fraternization. (Many, many more availed themselves of the services of the pan-pan girls—young street prostitutes—who, in Tokyo, lined the sidewalks all the way from Yurakucho to Shinbashi Station.)
The Korean War brought manufacturing out of a long depression and Japan’s economy began to recover. However, thanks to a number of unpleasant incidents involving American soldiers back from duty in the Republic of Korea on Japanese R&R (Rest and Recreation—or, as some GIs put it, Rape and Revel), the American image took a hit. There were frequent reports of GIs stiffing taxi drivers, trashing bars to blow off steam, and even throwing people into Tokyo’s canals, just for laughs. The most famous crime was that of Specialist Third Class William S. Girard who, while on guard duty at the firing range of a military base in Gunma Prefecture, inadvertently killed a Japanese farmer’s wife who was scavenging for empty shells. The incident developed into an international scandal and Girard became the first American GI to be tried in Japanese court (which gave him a suspended sentence and allowed him to go home with his Taiwan-born wife).
Anger toward the Americans reached a postwar peak at the start of the following decade, when the pro-US government of Japan, under the aegis of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, rammed through an extension of the Security Treaty, now putting a reduced but still significant number of 75,000 American soldiers in the country on a permanent basis (more than the United States had stationed anywhere else in the world, including Germany), causing waves of widespread, and sometimes violent, protests. “Yankee Go Home” was an English phrase that nearly all Japanese knew and understood.
By the time I arrived, however, anti-Americanism had largely dissipated. Most Tokyoites seemed quite taken with new US President John F. Kennedy and the youthful energy, optimism, and good intentions he projected on behalf of the United States. JFK’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade had captured the imagination of the Japanese as much as it had the Americans. The Japanese media seemed especially preoccupied with Jackie Kennedy, whose elegance and fashion sense had become a model for Japanese women to follow. As an American in Japan, you began to feel swathed in a borrowed Kennedy glow.
Robert F. Kennedy at Waseda University. 1964.
People also liked the fact that JFK had appointed as US ambassador to Japan Harvard scholar Edwin Reischauer, who spoke the language fluently and was married to a Japanese. The man Reischauer had replaced, the imperious Douglas MacArthur II, nephew of the famed general, had thought, like many in the foreign service, that French was the only second language a US diplomat needed to know. He regarded the idea of speaking Japanese as undignified and disparaged those Americans who did. “Going native” was poor form, as everyone in the elite American community knew.
At Reischauer’s urging, JFK won further points by sending his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to Tokyo as part of a goodwill tour of Asia in 1962 in order to lay the groundwork for a planned visit by the president himself. Bobby proved to be a tremendous hit. He eschewed the usual diplomatic receptions and state dinners, choosing instead to meet with ordinary citizens as much as possible. He played soccer with Japanese children, met with women’s groups and opposition Socialist Party and union leaders, sat through sumo and judo demonstrations, and sampled sake at a Ginza bar, trading toasts with Japanese customers at the counter and playing the bongos.
On a blurry black-and-white TV set in the Shinjuku Fugetsudo coffee shop, in the company of the largely beatnik clientele, I watched live as RFK engaged angry, jeering Marxist students in spirited debate at Tokyo’s prestigious Waseda University. He responded politely to charges of American imperialism in Japan and complicity with the conservative ruling Liberal Democratic Party in order to further US interests. The tousled-haired Kennedy told the students that Americans believed in having a divergence of views and the right to express them because that was the only way a country could determine its proper course.
He called the most vocal of the students down onto the stage and greeted him warmly, saying, “You are experiencing an example of democracy at its best, because never in communist-controlled lands could citizens object to government policy so vociferously.” At the end, Kennedy sang the Waseda school song, which Reischauer had urged him to learn, with the assembled students.
One of the Fugetsudo denizens, a man in his thirties with a Van Dyke beard and scraggly hair, and wearing a black beret and turtleneck sweater, penned a seventeen-syllable haiku in English when it was over and handed it to me, which I submit here for posterity:
Kennedy is cool
I dig his windblown hair
Banzai the USA
Roppongi
Fuchu Air Base was a tiny island of small-town Americana in the Tokyo suburbs. It had all the accoutrements of home: manicured lawns, soda fountains, supermarkets, cheeseburgers, movie theaters playing the latest first-run hits from Hollywood. For the Japanese who had the opportunity to enter the base, it was like traveling abroad without a passport. There were BX concessions selling American goods unavailable anywhere else in Greater Tokyo at bargain basement prices, military clubs, restaurants, a bowling alley, and a basketball arena. Enlisted men lived in modern, centrally heated dormitory-style buildings. Married personnel lived at the nearby Green Park complex, a military installation with Western-style family housing, grade schools, and teen clubs. Everyone had a maid—quite often war widows who had nowhere else to go and who worked for what Americans regarded as a pittance—and that included me. Mine was an older Japanese woman with wiry hair, silver teeth, and a permanent smile who looked after my room on the third floor of a Fifth Air Force 6000th Support Squadron barracks. The room overlooked a field where old women clad in monpei toiled and, in the distance, young Japanese boys chased fly balls on a makeshift baseball diamond. Beyond that, Mt. Fuji rose majestically in the distance. I called my maid “Mama-san.”