By Mire Koikari, Japan Focus
On August 15, 1945, World War II came to an end with Japan's unconditional surrender. General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), flew from the Philippines to Japan with a mission to occupy and demilitarize the defeated nation. The place and manner of MacArthur’s arrival seemed to signal the victor’s absolute confidence and unquestioned authority over its vanquished enemy. MacArthur – the embodiment of U.S. military power and a consummate actor well known for his grand performance – landed at the Atsugi Airfield, previously a training field for Japanese kamikaze fighters, with a handful of Allied troops. MacArthur himself was armed only with a corncob pipe. Despite his staff’s concern about possible attacks by enemy soldiers not yet disarmed, MacArthur’s triumphant landing was followed by a smooth procession to the New Grand Hotel in Yokohama and later an entry into Tokyo where he established the General Headquarters (GHQ) of SCAP in the Dai-ichi Seimei Insurance Building. A new chapter of postwar U.S.-Japan relations thus opened with richly gendered and racialized symbolism: the United State’s imposition of white masculine military authority over Japan, now a defeated and subjugated nation in the Far East.
Following the ferocious belligerence between the enemies in World War II, many Japanese feared that the objective of the occupation was to punish Japan. Yet, MacArthur declared U.S. intentions benign and noble: to "reorient" and "rehabilitate" Japan into a modern, democratic, and enlightened nation. Perceiving the Japanese as an "alien race of spiritual growth stunted by long tenure under the physical, mental and cultural strictures of feudal precepts," he was supremely confident of his ability to transplant American ideals to Japan and to civilize its subjects. He had what he considered evidence to support his conviction: a half century of U.S. governance in the Philippines had demonstrated America's capacity to "civilize" an alien and inferior race and lay the foundations for "democracy" abroad. Just as the U.S. policy of "benign assimilation" in the Philippines had uplifted its subjects from a state of ignorance and savagery, so would the U.S. occupation give the Japanese an unprecedented opportunity for civilization and enlightenment.1
It was within this context of the American project to civilize and democratize a racially inferior other that Japanese women as gendered subjects emerged as centrally important figures. Seen by the occupation authorities as victims for centuries of "Oriental male chauvinism," Japanese women embodied feudal tradition, backwardness, and lack of civilization. As helpless women of color, they became ideal candidates for American salvation and emancipation. The occupier's zeal for liberation of Japanese women from indigenous male domination was all-consuming and multifaceted. MacArthur granted suffrage to Japanese women and praised their "progress" under U.S. tutelage as setting an example for the world.2 Other male occupiers "emancipated" Japanese women by initiating various constitutional and legal changes and policies. Following a familiar colonial trope of heterosexual rescue and romance, some American men expressed their desire to save Japanese women in more personal ways: Earnest Hoberecht, a correspondent for United Press International, advocated kissing as a path to liberation’3 Raymond Higgins, the military governor stationed in Hiroshima, married his Japanese maid to "save" her from the aftermath of the atomic bomb and her abusive husband.4
The postwar U.S.-Japan encounter involved dynamics that went beyond the colonial trope of heterosexual romance, however. No less earnest in their attempt to emancipate and transform Japanese women were American women reformers in the occupation forces. Beate Sirota Gordon, a twenty-two-year-old European Jewish immigrant to the US who had spent early years in Japan, pushed for a constitutional guarantee of gender equality – a guarantee nonexistent in the United States – as “the only woman in the room” where American male reformers debated the contours and content of postwar Japanese constitution.
A group of American women occupiers led by Ethel Weed worked tirelessly to implement the ideal of gender equality and transform Japanese women at the grassroots level. Using skits, role playing, pamphlets, among others, women occupiers such as Carmen Johnson and Helen Hosp Seamans disseminated the spirit and practice of “democracy” among Japanese women with whom they often formed strong bonds that continued well after the occupation. These American women's passion for gender reform was all the more remarkable, as they were utterly unfamiliar with Japan, with few exceptions had no Japanese language skills, received no extensive training for their task, and were often relegated to marginal positions within the predominantly male SCAP bureaucracy. Many Japanese women enthusiastically welcomed American reformers and their efforts to democratize Japan, and tapped into shared discursive repertoires of gender equality and democracy to articulate their own visions of postwar womanhood. For some, such as Katō Shizue, the occupation provided unprecedented opportunities to collaborate with American reformers and to promote herself as the feminist leader in postwar Japan. Even those who explicitly challenged American rule, such as Nosaka Ryō and Miyamoto Yuriko who were communist writer-activists and champions of working-class women's causes, also benefited from the occupation as they stepped into a new space opened up by American reformers to articulate their own visions of gender and nation in postwar Japan.
Over the past six decades, belief in the successful transformation of Japanese women's lives provided many occupiers and subsequent generations of Americans with "unquestionable" evidence that U.S. interventions in Japan were beneficent. The picture of Japanese women being liberated from feudal male domination and gaining new rights under U.S. tutelage is also etched in the minds of many Japanese, and is understood as a turning point in the history of Japan. The view of the occupation as a remarkably generous effort by the victor to democratize Japan and emancipate its women has constituted a gendered historical account shaping American and Japanese self-understandings.
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