Negotiating Race and Womanhood across the
Pacific: African American Women in Japan under U.S.
Military Occupation, 1945–52
Yasuhiro Okada, Nagoya University of Foreign Studies
Abstract
This paper examines the experiences of African American women who were stationed in various parts of mainland Japan under U.S. military occupation from
1945 to 1952 as major actors in shaping the postwar U.S.-Japanese relationship.
It argues that African American women in Japan defined, asserted, and performed
alternative racial identities, gender roles, and class positions to achieve their
own empowerment within the “trans-Pacific” boundaries they encountered as
“occupiers,” as well as racial and gender minorities. Regardless of their social
backgrounds in the U.S., African American women were in privileged positions that
held considerable power and prerogative vis-à-vis Japanese citizens as members
of the U.S. occupation forces. Among them, those in civilian duty greatly advanced
their rank within the U.S. Army and enjoyed luxurious lifestyles with political and
economic privilege enough to hire Japanese maids and gain access to extensive
leisure and shopping activities. African American women developed an appreciation for interracialism and internationalism through their daily encounters with
Japanese people, and their exchanges with white Americans as well, in the integrated and multiracial setting of Japan. Moreover, they faced and resisted racism
and sexism within the U.S. Army and from the patriarchal sector of the African
American community in Japan.
Introduction
I
n post–World War II U.S.-occupied Japan, extensive interaction occurred
between African Americans and the Japanese for the first time in the history of the U.S.-Japanese relationship. African American servicemen have
Black Women, Gender, and Families Spring 2012, Vol. 6, No. 1 pp. 71–96
©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
72 ya suhiro ok ada
been central to the formation, in both popular and academic contexts, of the
postwar black-Japanese encounter from the occupation onward. The highly
masculinized images of blackness in postwar Japanese literary and cultural
productions, which shed light on the sexual subjectivities of African American GIs, especially those who engaged in intimate and/or sexual relationships
with Japanese women, have been influential in shaping the contemporary
Japanese perception of African Americans. Of those associated with the U.S.
occupation of Japan, African American women are underrepresented in the
gender-skewed discourse of the postwar black-Japanese encounter. How
did African American women in Japan negotiate their identities within the
“trans-Pacific” historical contexts of the U.S. military occupation of Japan,
African American-Japanese relations, and postwar transformations in racial
and gender regimes in the U.S.?
This paper examines the experiences of African American women who
were stationed in various parts of mainland Japan under U.S. military occupation from 1945 to 1952 as major actors in shaping the contours of the
postwar U.S.-Japanese relationship. It argues that African American women
in Japan defined, asserted, and performed alternative racial identities, gender
roles, and class positions to achieve their own empowerment within the
“trans-Pacific” boundaries they encountered as “occupiers,” as well as racial
and gender minorities. These boundaries included enhanced political status
and broader socioeconomic opportunities that African American women
enjoyed as part of the U.S. occupation forces and the racism and sexism that
they faced in the U.S. Army and the African American community in Japan.
The presence of African American women has been marginalized or even
ignored in the dominant historical narrative of the relationship between
African Americans and the Japanese in general1 and during the U.S. occupation of Japan in particular.2 In historiographies of African American women
and gender, and those of U.S. international relations as well, the diverse
experiences of “militarized” African American women who were stationed in
Japan and other foreign areas as agents of the postwar U.S. military deployment have been generally unexplored, although some historical studies have
posed intersecting questions regarding the issues of race, gender, class, and
sexuality that complicated the lives of African American women in the U.S.
Armed Forces, especially during World War II.3
Regardless of their social backgrounds in the U.S., African American
women were in privileged positions that held considerable power and prerogative vis-à-vis Japanese citizens as members of the U.S. occupation forces.
Among them, those in civilian duty greatly advanced their rank within the
U.S. Army and enjoyed luxurious lifestyles with political and economic privi-
spring 2012 / bl ack women, gender, and families 73
lege enough to hire Japanese maids and gain access to extensive leisure and
shopping activities. African American women developed an appreciation
for interracialism and internationalism through their daily encounters with
Japanese people, and their exchanges with white Americans as well, in the
integrated and multiracial setting of Japan. Moreover, they faced and resisted
racism and sexism within the U.S. Army and from the patriarchal sector of
the African American community in Japan. African American nurses protested racial discrimination within the U.S. Army Nurse Corps by soliciting
“trans-Pacific” legal advice from a civil rights organization in the U.S. African
American women experienced masculinist backlash from African American
men against their enhanced sense of gender empowerment in Japan within
the confinements of the traditional black patriarchy and the conservative
gender and sexual norms in American society during the early Cold War
period.
Backgrounds of African American Women in Occupied Japan
The diverse social positions and backgrounds of African American women
shaped their heterogeneous experiences and representations in occupied
Japan. Those African American women can be divided into several groups
by such factors as military-civilian status, organizational affiliation, rank and
assignment, and familial relations.
The first group of African American women who served in Japan was the
Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in the Far East Command.4 African American WACs, who had been previously excluded from the occupation duties
in Japan, were assigned there on an integrated basis when the Korean War
occurred in June 1950.5 Ralph Matthews reported in the Baltimore AfroAmerican in September 1951 that there were several hundred WACs in the
Yokohama area because of their large encampment there.6 The WAC detachments remained on duty in Japan and Okinawa without reassignment to
Korea during the war, although individual WACs served in Korea on special
assignments.7 The rank, place of duty, and type of assignment of the African American WACs in Japan varied depending on their previous military
experience and special skills.8
Another group of African American military women assigned to duties in
Japan was the U.S. Army Nurse Corps.9 Records indicate that some African
American army nurses were assigned to duties in Japan in the late 1940s. They
joined the celebration of the forty-eighth anniversary of the founding of the
U.S. Army Nurse Corps, which was hosted by the 24th Infantry Regiment
74 ya suhiro ok ada
at Camp Gifu in central Japan in early 1949.10 Lt. Millie S. Hooks and Lt.
Bernice E. Britton were two African American army nurses stationed in the
128th Station Hospital in Yokohama at the beginning of June 1949, whose
protest against institutional racism in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps I discuss
later in detail.11 After the outbreak of the Korean War, more black nurses
were regularly assigned to occupation hospitals in Japan to supplement the
shortage of American nurses treating casualties who had been evacuated
from the battlefield in Korea.12 Some African American women served as
members of the newly independent U.S. Air Forces Nurse Corps.13
The next group was the civilian African American women who were
employed under contract with the U.S. Army. These uniformed civilian
black women were assigned to various positions within the U.S. Army in
Japan. Elvira Turner, a graduate of Wilberforce University, visited Japan
with the U.S. occupation forces in August 1949 and was first employed as a
clerk stenographer. She was soon promoted to the position of secretary and
administrative assistant in the Civil Property Custodian office of General
Headquarters (GHQ) of the Supreme Command of Allied Powers (SCAP).14
Ethel Payne, a graduate of Northwestern University who had served with the
U.S. Navy at Great Lakes, Illinois, during World War II, was assigned to the
Tokyo Quartermaster Depot. She served as a director of the Special Services
Seaview Club, the interracial club that the Red Cross had established in 1947
for the welfare of U.S. service members.15
Other civilian African American women were employed in Japan by the
U.S. Department of the Army and were called “DACs,” or Department of
the Army Civilians, by the U.S. occupation personnel. Nan Watson, one of
the twelve African American women working as DACs in Japan, joined the
department in early 1947 when she transferred from her former job as a
correspondence clerk at the New York Port of Embarkation. She claimed,
“We have some pretty smart people among the Negroes here, all of them a
credit to the race,” because many of the African American DACs serving in
Japan, regardless of gender, had more advanced professional and educational
backgrounds than the average U.S. occupation personnel did. For example,
her friend Ann had worked as a secretary to the dean of A and T University
in South Carolina before she accepted her appointment with the Far East
Command.16
Some African American women were stationed as Red Cross workers
at military installations throughout Japan.17 Sylvia J. Rock, one of those
African American Red Cross workers, served in Sasebo in southwest Japan
from October 1950. According to Rock, there were eighteen female African
spring 2012 / bl ack women, gender, and families 75
American Red Cross workers in Japan while she served there, and their number increased to fifty after her resignation in September 1951.18 Others stayed
in Japan without any affiliation with the military or civilian branches of the
U.S. Army. Daisy Tibbs, an African American home economics teacher in
Athens, Alabama, was one of the four young Americans who visited Japan
as a member of the interracial, interfaith team to construct the “House of
Hiroshima,” a Quaker-oriented project that would house four of the 4,000
still-homeless families whose houses had been destroyed by the atomic bomb
in 1945. She was selected by the Quaker leader Floyd Shomoe as a member
of this international mission to Japan because of her previous experience
with the Nisei evacuees at West Coast concentration camps during World
War II.19
Finally, there were some African American women stationed in Japan
as family members of U.S. occupation personnel. Spouses of the African
American soldiers engaged in occupation duties in Japan or fighting in Korea
made up the majority of this group.20 Mrs. W. A. Bobo lived in the garrison
community of Camp Gifu with her husband, a senior officer, and taught at
the high school on the base.21 During the Korean War, African American
wives who were waiting in Japan for the return of their soldier husbands were
as anxious as those in the U.S. Clovis Snead, whose husband was a soldier
fighting in Korea, remained in her home at the air base in Tokyo instead of
returning to the U.S. because she felt geographically closer to her husband
in Japan. Snead engaged in voluntary activities at the base by assisting the
service club and attending various evening meetings with white women while
her husband was absent.22 Moreover, the African American wives at Gifu
performed volunteer work for the Red Cross by arranging the daily necessities that would be shipped to the troops in Korea on an interracial basis.
These African American women contributed to the U.S. war effort in Korea
in gender-specific ways by actively aiding their soldiers from their “home
front” in Japan. 23
Privileged Status of African American Women as “Occupiers”
In occupied Japan, the political status of African American women vis-à-vis
Japanese civilians was primarily defined in terms of the highly asymmetrical power relationship that existed between the U.S. and Japan during that
period. Despite their racial and gendered subordination in the communities
of American nationals, African American women were entitled to various
76 ya suhiro ok ada
political prerogatives and economic privileges as “occupiers” in their relationship with Japanese women and men by claiming their American citizenship.
African American women observed many Japanese workers serving
American personnel as maids, doormen, elevator girls, drivers, and waitresses
in everyday situations. They saw the Japanese show respect to Americans,
regardless of race and gender, with their customary gestures. Nan Watson,
who had returned to Japan from the U.S. after a month of vacation, experienced a “feeling of potency” when she met a Japanese doorman at an office
building who opened the door “grinning and bowing” to her. Watson felt
the same way at a bank when two Japanese girls made similar gestures while
holding an elevator open for her.24 Their daily encounters with Japanese civilians were crucial for African American women to reconsolidate their national
identity, recognizing their own political power and status as “occupiers.”
Watson’s friend Lisa shared a similar experience by claiming, “In America
we are just women[;] over here we each are very definite individuals.”25 By
enjoying their privileged national status over the Japanese, African American
women experienced an enhanced sense of racial and gendered “respect” that
was unattainable in their own country.
Among the African American women who were stationed in Japan, the
civilian occupation personnel enjoyed particularly privileged lives, both economically and culturally, in their luxurious lifestyles, leisure activities, and
shopping excursions. Nan Watson succinctly described the essence of the
privileged life that the civilian African American women were pursuing in
Japan: “The expression, ‘You never had it so good,’ which is seen and heard
everywhere, is not far wrong. I have luxuries I never dreamed of--a private
maid, masseuse, music teacher, art and sculptoring teacher, and still I manage to save most of my pay check each month.”26 The personal narratives
of African American women and their journalistic coverage by black newsmen further substantiate their luxurious lives in Japan. According to their
accounts, black civilian personnel were assigned to one of several high-rise
hotels in Tokyo that were reserved for American women. The highly qualified
services at these hotels, especially the Japanese maid service and other amenities, including a snack bar, dining room, cocktail lounge, Post Exchange (PX),
flower shop, and telephones in individual rooms, enabled them to pursue a
luxurious and comfortable life that they had never experienced in America.
These civilian African American women enjoyed their leisure hours off
work by joining their friends to pursue various entertainments available at
the officer’s clubs, theaters, and sports facilities. They were entitled to charter a jeep inexpensively with a Japanese driver at the GHQ carpool to enjoy
spring 2012 / bl ack women, gender, and families 77
the nightlife. Some of them spent weekends at the sea-view clubs located in
Japanese resorts to relax and enjoy various seasonal sports at a reasonable
rate.27 Shopping in Japanese markets or at the military PX was particularly
appealing to civilian African American women, who could take advantage of
their consuming power due to the economic strength of the U.S. dollar over
Japanese currency during that period. Nan Watson attested to this gendered
pattern of exercising economic privileges by African American women, as
evident in their consumer behavior. She remarked, “Dear to a woman’s heart
are the inexpensive values found in cultured pearls, jade, coral, star sapphires,
and other jewels. . . . The newly-opened Export Bazaar stores import the
best quality goods from all over the world that sell here for amazingly low
prices.”28
Their access to a luxurious social life and the release of their responsibility
from domestic service to Japanese maids in particular encouraged African
American women to explore alternative race, class, and gender identities
within the possibilities of newly attained social and economic status in Japan.
During World War II and its immediate aftermath, many Japanese women,
whose role had been defined as domestic keepers in the prewar patriarchal
society, assumed the role of breadwinners as heads of households due to
the male casualties in the war. The influx of the U.S. occupation troops provided various working positions for Japanese women, who were desperate
for employment opportunities to support their families under the economic
devastation, to serve Americans as interpreters, waitresses, typists, office
workers, and maids. These working positions were attractive because the rate
paid by the U.S. military was higher than any other available job in occupied
Japan.29
African American women, some of whom had experience as domestic
workers in the U.S., enjoyed their privileged position by employing Japanese women and men to serve them in various menial jobs. Civilian African
American women who stayed at luxurious hotels were relieved of household
chores by the domestic services of Japanese maids who took care of cleaning
rooms, making beds, and doing laundry for them.30 Maid service was also
available for married African American women. Some of them took advantage of their economic opportunity to hire Japanese maids by advancing
their educational and professional careers and participating in community
service. Clovis Snead could afford to hire several Japanese servants in her
four-room bungalow on the airbase in Tokyo. Relieved of the burden of
household chores, she was then able to teach two classes at the base school,
78 ya suhiro ok ada
take a course in flower arrangement, and was deeply involved in the voluntary
activities of the base community.31
However, there were some ambivalent feelings among the African American women who were suddenly placed in the privileged position of being
served by Japanese maids. Some African American women revealed their condescending attitudes toward Japanese maids because of their complex feelings
stemming from their own experiences as domestic workers in America.32
Ralph Matthews reported that one African American wife in Tokyo, who
had been a maid in the U.S., complained to him about the Japanese maid
for whom she paid less than six dollars a week. She grumbled to him, “I’m
sorry the house is so untidy. You see, my maid did not come in today. I don’t
know what I am going to do with that girl.”33 When she joined the privileged
group of those who employed a maid in Japan, this woman projected her
superiority complex on the subordinate Japanese women, recreating the
racial, gender, and class oppressions she had experienced as a black domestic
worker in the U.S.
Other African American women, many of whom were placed in the
position of hiring a domestic worker for the first time in their lives, were
confused as to how to treat their Japanese maids. Clovis Snead hired a collegeeducated Japanese girl named Suki as her live-in maid. Snead complained
that Suki annoyed her husband by calling him “master” and “waited on him
too zealously.” The Sneads, who considered treating their Japanese maid in
a “democratic” way, tried to stop Suki from calling him “master,” but their
efforts were in vain.34 Sylvia Rock was another African American woman who
was puzzled at suddenly finding herself in the position of hiring a maid in
Japan. For the first few weeks of her stay in a hotel in Tokyo, she battled her
Japanese maid over the details of what domestic services Rock expected from
her. She frankly confessed her embarrassment about possessing a maid: “I
was embarrassed to have another human being doing the things for me that
I was perfectly capable of doing for my self. . . . I did not treat them as if they
were less than human. I did not try to build up my own ego at the expense of
theirs.”35 Rock insisted on viewing the maids as human beings because the
employment of Japanese maids by Americans was another case of exploitative
labor relations based on power disparities. She was also surprised to find
that the menial jobs, including janitors, waitresses, and chauffeurs, as well as
maids, were exclusively performed by the Japanese civilians, most of whom
were university students or graduates.36 Reflecting the history of racial and
gender exploitation of black labor in the U.S., the African American women,
who were placed in privileged positions of receiving, rather than performing,
spring 2012 / bl ack women, gender, and families 79
menial services for the first time, were annoyed by the power disparities in
human relations that were clearly manifested in the labor exploitation of the
native people of Japan. Moreover, the collective experiences and memories
of black domestic workers in the U.S. armed some African American women
with a heightened racial and gender consciousness and made them more
sensitive to the domestic service of Japanese maids than African American
men and white Americans.
Negotiating Identities in an Integrated and Multiracial Setting
Their overseas experiences gave some African American women the opportunity to expand their worldview, especially their racial perception beyond
the domestic social contexts of oppression and discrimination in the U.S.,
while they negotiated various interracial and multiracial conditions in their
residences, work, and social lives in occupied Japan. First, African American
civilian personnel shared rooms with white American women on an integrated basis at the women-only hotels in Tokyo. The testimonies of some
African American civilian women who were stationed there in the early
1950s revealed that the residential space of the civilian American personnel was segregated by gender and class but racially integrated in terms of
room assignment. After sharing hotel rooms with her friends, both black
and white, Nan Watson remarked excitedly, “[I]t is amazing how the color
line is forgotten on this side of the ocean, although occasionally it rears its
ugly head among some few individuals.”37 Those African American women
were able to develop more cooperative and egalitarian relationships with
white American women based on their common political and social status
as civilian personnel of the U.S. occupation troops in Japan.
In their work duties, some African American women were involved in
various assignments or projects, which were integrated and occasionally
multiracial, within or outside the institution of the U.S. Army in Japan. As
a director of the Special Services Seaview Club in Tokyo, Ethel Payne was
instrumental in the effective management of an interracial soldiers’ club.
The club had a history of racial tension but was officially declared by the
commander to be “on limits” to all personnel on the depot.38 Daisy Tibbs
worked together and shared a room with Ruth Jenkins, a white American
woman from Arizona, on an interracial team ordered to build the “House
of Hiroshima.”39 Mrs. W. A. Bobo, who had trained as a social worker and
earned a master’s degree in the U.S., had an opportunity to teach social
studies and math at the high school on the base at Camp Gifu. This school
80 ya suhiro ok ada
was an integrated institution headed by an African American woman, and
Bobo taught both black and white students, all of whom were the teenage
children of field-grade officers, without any problems.40 Moreover, African
American army nurses experienced multiracial situations at Tokyo General
Hospital, where they encountered United Nations soldiers from numerous
racial, national, and religious groups who were evacuated there from the
battlefield in Korea. Capt. Rosalie Wiggins was impressed with the cultural
diversity among the patients of “all creeds” who were hospitalized in the ward
under her direction, including Turkish, Korean, and Greek soldiers as well
as the “Americans of all the races and creeds that make America.”41 These
civilian and military African American women developed a thorough understanding of and appreciation for interracialism or multiracialism through
their encounters with “others” in the racially, nationally, and culturally heterogeneous work environment in Japan.
Some African American women not only shared time and space with
white Americans in the desegregated environment of their workplaces and
residential areas, but they often got together with white American friends
in their leisure time. In her account of her social life in Japan, Nan Watson
indicated that she and her colleagues spent leisure time in “mixed groups”
for various sports such as skating and horseback riding.42 Elvira Turner often
accepted invitations to the homes of her Japanese friends in the company of
both black and white Americans.43 However, other African American women
who preferred the company of their own race or who may have yearned for
black culture in America congregated in the “colored” spots. Sylvia Rock
often visited Yokohama, the city with the largest African American population in Japan. Rock felt as if she were “back in Harlem” at the 400 Club, an
“all-colored” spot where black GIs and some Japanese girls who accompanied
them danced to music played by Japanese bands who catered to the tastes of
African Americans.44 Those African American women enjoyed their leisure
and entertainment off duty in either racially integrated or segregated groups
by taking advantage of opportunities to alternate interracial companionship
and racial camaraderie in their social life in Japan.
African American women expanded their sense of the world and renegotiated their racial self-perception through their interracial interactions with
Japanese citizens. Some of them became more conscious of their racial differences because of their everyday encounters with Japanese men and women.
Indeed, many Japanese showed a special interest in African American women
who were, after all, less visible than African American men due to their small
numbers in the racial and gender composition of the U.S. occupation troops.
spring 2012 / bl ack women, gender, and families 81
Sylvia Rock often felt exposed to the curious gazes of Japanese people who,
she suspected, saw the “first really brown American in Red Cross uniform”
on the street. She remarked, “When I walked down the street I would be surrounded by crowds of people who would gingerly touch me to feel my skin,
my hair, and my clothes. People turned around while driving to watch me
on the street. I have never felt so conspicuous in all my life.”45 Unexpectedly,
Rock discovered the racial similarities between blacks and Asians as a member
of the group of darker races through her daily encounters with the Japanese.
Rock was embarrassed to find that she was racially mistaken for a Korean by
Japanese people, as she was sometimes asked if she was American or Korean.
This intriguing question of racial identification posed by the Japanese based
on their observation of her skin color was personally comprehensible to Rock
because she herself identified the Koreans in racial terms as a “bit darker and
taller than the Japanese.” In addition, she felt a sense of interracial sisterhood,
or a gendered racial affinity, toward some young Japanese women in the clubs
because of their appearance as well as their appreciation of African American
culture. Observing the Japanese girls who were dancing in the black club in
Yokohama, Rock stated that some of them were “rather brown, some had
their hair cut short, and almost all could ‘bop’ better than many of us in the
States.”46 Her encounters with the Japanese, and Japanese girls in particular,
gave Rock the opportunity to reconfigure her racial and gender identities in
terms of the broader racial dynamics of the international world.
Moreover, some African American women contributed to the development of mutual understanding and respect between Americans and Japanese
while they actively engaged in various forms of personal exchanges with
Japanese citizens. Nan Watson attested to the wide range of international
fraternization that the African American occupation personnel engaged in
during her stay in Japan. She claimed that “Americans of both races are
taking advantage of SCAP’s decision to allow us to mingle with the masses
of the Japanese people” after many establishments became “on limits” to
both nationals. Watson found a particular social gathering at the Japanese
YWCA to be “highly entertaining and profitable,” where she mingled and
conversed with Japanese students over coffee and dancing. On this occasion,
a serious discussion of various topics including religion, movies, the FBI, and
the mutual perception of their countries was held among African Americans
and young Japanese students. It served as an illuminating experience for her
to “become acquainted with the country, the people and their customs.”
Watson also taught a part-time English composition class for young Japanese
82 ya suhiro ok ada
students of the Business Men’s Association, some of whom expected to go
to America in the future.47
Other civilian African American women played a critical role as “personal
ambassadors” to Japan, attempting to construct a better international relationship between the Japanese and Americans at the grassroots level. Daisy
Tibbs mingled actively among the local Japanese people during her work
hours and leisure time: she engaged in voluntary work at the Hiroshima
Memorial Hospital, attended a conference with the local Japanese leaders
on a project, joined the multiracial congregation in a Japanese church, and
enjoyed folk dancing with volunteer Japanese students. An Ebony magazine
article in January 1950 featured her contributions to the interracial ideal
of this mission. It reported that Tibbs “fitted well into the house-building
routine and won the hearts of Japanese in Hiroshima, many of whom had
never before seen a black girl.”48
Some African American women were often invited by their Japanese
friends to house parties to enjoy Japanese-style hospitality and develop more
familiarity with Japanese culture. Elvira Turner attended sukiyaki parties at
the homes of her Japanese friends with her American friends. At the party,
she was treated to a series of Japanese dishes and drinks at the dinner table,
including sukiyaki, rice, tempura, and hot sake. On these occasions, Turner
tried to expose herself as much as possible to the traditional customs of the
Japanese by wearing a native Japanese dress, taking off her shoes on entering
the house, and sitting on cushions on the floor.49 These special occasions
of intercultural exchange in such intimate atmospheres at private Japanese
homes provided Turner, who continued her American lifestyle by taking
American meals at the hotel, with a chance to expand her cultural horizons
by developing the level of her appreciation of the Japanese culture and lifestyle as well as her personal relationships with Japanese friends. It is important to stress the cultural, intellectual, and labor exchanges in which African
American women like Turner, Watson, and Tibbs were engaged with Japanese
citizens and their implications for the development of mutual understanding and respect between Americans and the Japanese in order to balance
the dominant gender-skewed, sexualized discourse of the black-Japanese
encounter during the occupation.
spring 2012 / bl ack women, gender, and families 83
Resisting Racism within the U.S. Army Nurse Corps
Compared with their civilian counterparts who fully enjoyed their privileged
status as part of the U.S. occupation forces in Japan, the lives of African
American military women were not only regimented by duties and regulations but also challenged by segregation and other discriminatory practices
that persisted within the U.S. Army. The following story of Millie Hooks
shows how African American women suffered from institutional racism
within the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. Furthermore, it reveals how they resisted
it by soliciting “trans-Pacific” legal assistance from a black civil rights organization in the U.S., as well as exchanging information through the intraracial
professional network of African American army nurses in Japan.
On June 6, 1949, Lt. Millie Susan Hooks, who was serving as one of two
African American nurses in the 128th Station Hospital in Yokohama, suddenly received a notice from the hospital commander requesting her “separation” from the Army Nurse Corps.50 Hooks suspected that this request was
related to prejudicial judgment on the part of Capt. Johnson, her supervisor,
whom she insisted had reported her “disqualifying inefficiency” because
of “personal antagonism.” She filed a formal complaint with the inspector
general of the HQ of the Eighth Army on June 10 and submitted a certificate
on June 17 indicating her “desire to remain in an active duty” to the HQ of
the 128th Station Hospital.51 After sensing a racially motivated organizational
plot targeting Hooks within the internal exchanges regarding her complaint,
she filed an additional formal request for retention in service with the adjutant general in Washington, D.C., on June 18.52
In the investigation that was ordered in response to her complaint, the
high commanders of the HQ of the Eighth Army interrogated Hooks as
if she were a racial instigator among African American nurses, instead of
examining the actual conditions of discrimination within the 128th Station
Hospital. Her commanders suspected Hooks’s involvement in the heightened racial tensions among African American nurses in the 155th Station
Hospital, although she denied it. Recognizing the racial conflict that was
developing in the 128th Station Hospital, some African American nurses
in the 155th resisted being transferred there as replacements for Hooks and
Lt. Britton, another black nurse in the 128th who had already requested a
transfer to the Eighth Station Hospital in Kobe. At first, Lt. Jenkins strongly
protested the order of her transfer to the 128th by threatening to resign
from her commission when she was selected as a replacement for Britton,
although she followed the order in the end. In addition to her command-
84 ya suhiro ok ada
ers’ persistent inquiries regarding her attitudes toward army nursing and
her social relationships, the psychiatric evaluation that Hooks received as
a part of the investigation regarding her complaint was a most humiliating experience. She was charged by a military psychiatrist with being “over
critical, anti-social, aloof, eccentric, and possessed with an overwhelming
superiority complex” for the action of filing her complaint.53 As a result of
the investigation, Hooks was returned to the U.S. as “surplus” and discharged
under “honorable” conditions by the orders of the commander-in-chief of
the Far East Command on July 30.54
Furthermore, Hooks solicited legal advice from the NAACP Legal Defense
and Educational Fund in New York about her charge of discrimination in the
Army Nurse Corps in Japan. Franklin H. Williams, the assistant special counsel of the NAACP in charge of her case, not only contacted the Department
of the Army on her behalf to determine the status of the investigation of her
complaint but also pressured the department to improve the racial conditions of the nurse corps in Japan by raising another nonofficial complaint
of an “only other colored nurse” in the 128th Station Hospital (who seems
to be Britton, mentioned above). Expounding on her charge that Hooks
was assigned to an entire wing of the nurses’ quarters for housing, Williams
declared that the status of residential segregation within the army hospital
constituted enough evidence to support the charge of discrimination that
she had raised against the chief nurse of that installation. However, he was
prevented from further assisting Hooks when his request for disclosure of
the record of her investigation was declined by the Department of the Army
because of its confidentiality.55
This episode reveals the international and gendered dimensions of the
postwar African American struggle against discrimination and segregation
within the U.S. Armed Forces and in the larger American society.56 The
increasing demands for civil rights legislation in the U.S. after World War
II encouraged some African American military women in Japan to protest
against serving under a prejudiced supervisor or in the segregated environments that were evident in some hospital installations in Japan. They did
so on the grounds of performing their duties as efficiently as possible as
professional nurses. Forging diasporic racial and gender consciousness in
their battle against the U.S. military authorities in Japan and in Washington,
D.C., those African American army nurses linked their resistance against
discrimination in Japan to the larger civil rights activism growing in the U.S.
through their “trans-Pacific” exchanges with the NAACP.
spring 2012 / bl ack women, gender, and families 85
Masculinist Backlash against Black Womanhood
African American women experienced gender backlash from the highly “masculinized” African American soldiers stationed in occupied Japan within the
boundaries of black patriarchy, as well as conservative gender and sexual
norms in the larger American society during the early Cold War period.57
African American men employed the influential U.S. Orientalist representation of “submissive” Japanese women as an idealized model of femininity to
discipline African American women, who were exploring alternative gender
identities and roles within the possibilities of political privilege, improved
economic conditions, and elevated social status in Japan. In response, African
American women constructed a counternarrative against the black masculinist attack on their womanhood in their critique of Japanese female passivity
and black patriarchal masculinity.
The civilian African American women in the Department of the Army
became the major target of gender backlash from African American men,
especially for their higher rank than most black enlisted men enjoyed within
the racialized class hierarchies of the U.S. Army. According to some African
American officers in Japan, those civilian African American women were not
supposed to socialize with enlisted personnel as “equals” and demanded that
enlisted men, even if they were years senior, reply to them with “Yes, Ma’am,”
because they believed that they held the “simulated rank of an officer” in
the army. The black enlisted men who asked for dates were mostly turned
down by the African American DACs, who preferred associating with officers
in pursuit of the numerous privileges that they were supposed to enjoy. 58
These black officers blamed elite civilian African American women, who
were claiming their sense of superiority and class privilege vis-à-vis black
enlisted men, for violating the masculine pride and patriarchal privilege of
black GIs, whose chances for promotion were limited due to the persistence
of discrimination within the U.S. Army.
African American soldiers also pathologized African American single
women, either civilian or military, who were engaged in the “unfeminine”
U.S. military project of occupation in peace time, as having deviated from
the traditional gender roles and sexual standards during that period. Black
officers claimed that African American DACs, who could not attract men
stateside, applied for military service in Japan, looking for opportunities to
meet American men in uniforms. Some of them even suggested that those
women who came so far to Japan without marrying were “not interested in
men anyway.”59 African American WACs were more explicitly associated with
deviancy for their unquestionably professional military background in Japan
86 ya suhiro ok ada
than DACs by African American men. One black officer observed in Yokohama that his soldiers did not call the black women in the U.S. Army WACs
but “SSRS,” which meant in GI’s parlance “Stateside Rejects.”60 These black
officers rearticulated and reinforced the pathological discourse concerning the “militarized” women by invoking the popular association between
women’s sexual independence, female masculinity, and lesbianism within
the Women’s Army Corps, as well as Cold War domesticity, in their critique
of the enhanced sense of femininity that African American DACs and WACs
achieved in Japan.61
African American men further resorted to the patriarchal representation
of Japanese women to contain the gender empowerment of African American
women in Japan within the confinements of Cold War domesticity and black
patriarchy. They often invoked the dominant U.S. Orientalist discourse of
“submissive” Japanese women during the early Cold War period as exemplars
of domestic womanhood for American women.62 One black soldier deployed
such an image as a point of reference for criticizing African American DACs
in Japan. He declared, “They never saw the day they could hold a light to a
Japanese girl when it comes to treating a man like he should be treated. Let
them howl. Maybe it will wake them up and they will stop taking men for
granted.”63 As historian Naoko Shibusawa points out, Japanese women were
“held up as exemplars of femininity” by both men and women in the mainstream American public discourse within the shifting gender roles of American women during and after World War II.64 Furthermore, the celebration of
“submissive” Japanese women by African American soldiers as appropriate
models for black womanhood reflected the traditional patriarchal culture
within the African American community.65 African American men in Japan,
who embraced the “masculinized” race consciousness and gender ideology
of the African American society at large, took their patriarchal privileges for
granted and did not hesitate to impose them on their women, whether they
were black or Japanese.
In response to the black masculinist backlash against their womanhood,
some African American women in Japan confronted charges of gender
deviancy by targeting both Japanese women and African American men.
Ethel Payne, who was the most vocal opponent of black-Japanese intimacies, critically challenged Japanese female passivity, the gender characteristic
that African American men admired so greatly, as a conventional cultural
pattern of behavior in Japanese patriarchy. She remarked, “By tradition, the
Japanese woman is submissive. To the man of her choice or the one who
wins her attention she presents a convincing superficial respectfulness and
spring 2012 / bl ack women, gender, and families 87
affection.”66 Payne further charged that Japanese girls were “playing GIs for
suckers” by exploiting their “helplessness” as a “powerful weapon and asset”
to win the hearts of African American GIs. Her critique of Japanese female
passivity reinforced, reconstructed, and complicated--in racial, gendered,
and sexualized ways--the dominant U.S. Orientalist stereotype of Japanese
women as patriarchal victims in traditional Japanese society within the specific context of the tension-filled intraracial relationships between African
American women and men in occupied Japan. 67
Payne’s criticism also targeted the patriarchal attitudes of African American men who associated with Japanese women. Payne asserted that African American men found their masculine pride and ego more satisfied by
Japanese women who expressed their devotion to men, rather than African
American women. Compared with “too independent” American women,
she claimed, Japanese women “fetch your shoes, wash, cook, iron, and sew.
‘Keep quiet’ when you want her to. Never talk back, laugh when you want her
to.”68 Furthermore, she pointed out that skin color mattered in the shaping
of interracial sexual behavior among African American men in Japan. By
strategically invoking the historical myth of black men sexually seeking white
women, she elaborated that the “hue of the girls range from very fair to a nut
brown. Hence it can be easily understood why our boys fall for them.”69 The
relationship of African American men with Japanese women, who assumed
an ambiguous position in the influential bipolar racial spectrum between
black and white in the contemporary African American sexual politics of
interracial intimacy, complicated the gendered problem of racial loyalty in
Japan. Their “feminist” sense of criticism of black-Japanese intimacies, combined with their apparent competition with Japanese women over African
American men, became a focal point among some African American women
for opposing such interracial relationships.
Moreover, African American women criticized the sexual behavior of
African American men who were engaged in “militarized” prostitution in
Japan. One African American WAC stationed in Yokohama expressed her
bitter contempt for African American GIs who were sexually pursuing the
Japanese street walkers called “pom poms,” as well as her disdain for Japanese prostitutes for their degraded womanhood. She complained, “Some of
these fools from the backwoods, who perhaps never had a girl in their lives,
think they are living great with a little straight-haired girl fawning all over
them. Some of them spend all their earnings on their girls and their families
while their own relatives back home are suffering.”70 In her eyes, those African American soldiers, who could not sexually attract women in the U.S.,
88 ya suhiro ok ada
approached Japanese sex workers with the economic privilege that they were
able to attain only by investing in the power disparity in the U.S.-Japanese
relationship during the occupation. In addition, her explicit reference to the
“straight-hair” of Japanese women attested to the sexual implications of hair
texture, as well as skin color and other physical features, on the definition
of black femininity in the African American politics of interracial intimacy
and sexuality in Japan.
The interracial relationships between African American men and Japanese
women were central to the tension-filled intraracial gender relations within
the African American community in occupied Japan.71 Compared with the
widely reported relationships between African American GIs and Japanese
women, there were few stories found in the contemporary black press about
interracial romances and sexual relations between African American women
and Japanese men.72 The skewed gender ratio in the African American population in Japan partly explains the higher visibility of black men and their
intimate, sexual relationships with Japanese women than those of black
women. However, the gendered difference between African American women
and men in their interracial sexual behavior was more complexly related to
the gender asymmetry in their sexual subjectivity formations in the U.S.
The double standards in the African American sexual politics of interracial
intimacy and in the “masculinized” sexual culture in the U.S. Army and the
larger American society discouraged African American women from actively
pursuing interracial relationships with Japanese men, while they encouraged African American men to enhance their racial and masculine pride
and power in developing romantic and sexual relationships with Japanese
women.73 For African American women who were traditionally socialized
in a culture to “dissemble” their true sexual selves for their sexual autonomy
in the American racial-sexual regime, the pursuit of their sexual association
with Japanese men was not a desirable form of achieving a feminine sense
of empowerment.74 Moreover, Japanese men were refeminized in the gendered imagination of Americans by Japan’s defeat in World War II.75 Such
“feminized” men were far from sexually attractive for the African American
women who were involved with the military project of “emasculating” the
Japanese as members of the “hypermasculinized” U.S. occupation forces.
Conclusion
By bringing the experiences of African American women, who have been
traditionally marginalized in terms of race and gender in the dominant nar-
spring 2012 / bl ack women, gender, and families 89
rative of the U.S. occupation of Japan, into the center of the analysis, this
paper has revealed that they were active agents in reshaping the U.S.-Japanese
relationship after World War II. In occupied Japan, African American women
reconsolidated, reconfigured, and complicated their racial and gendered
senses of power, justice, and identity across the Pacific within the boundaries of their privileged national status as “occupiers”--which they gained in
respect to Japanese citizens--as well as the racism and sexism that they still
faced and resisted in the U.S. Army or in the patriarchal sector of the African American community. In one sense, African American women served
as “imperialist” agents in the postwar U.S. empire building in Asia and the
Pacific areas through their involvement with the U.S. military occupation of
Japan. As historian Michael Green argues, many African Americans “enjoyed
the privileges of first-class, consumption-based citizenship” while stationed
in Japan in an “age of American military empire” after World War II.76
The discussion presented in this paper also suggests that their overseas
“militarized” experience in Japan provided the intercultural and transnational framework of negotiation and contestation through which African
American women explored alternative identities and lifestyles for their racial
and gendered empowerment. African American women expanded their
worldview and transformed their racial perceptions beyond the domestic
social contexts of oppression and discrimination in the U.S. through their
daily encounters with Japanese people as well as their exchanges with white
Americans on an integrated basis. African American women enhanced their
political consciousness about racism and sexism in the U.S., confronting
the racial discrimination within the U.S. Army Nurse Corps and the gender
backlash from African American men in Japan. Moreover, African American
women developed a sense of racial affinity and interracial sisterhood with
Japanese women based on their common experiences as domestic workers
and of patriarchal oppression, despite the interracial rivalry between African
American and Japanese women over African American men. As some African
American WACs critiqued black GI’s pursuit of Japanese prostitutes, the
subjugation of native women by American male soldiers in areas where U.S.
military presence existed might have created conditions for the international
and interracial formation of a women’s alliance against “militarized” masculine sexual behavior and the globalized patriarchal institution and sexist
regime during and after the U.S. occupation of Japan.
90 ya suhiro ok ada
Endnotes
1. For major historical studies on the relationship between African Americans and the
Japanese, see Mark Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black
Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000);
Reginald Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1998); Ernest Allen Jr., “Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan
Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932–1943,” Gateway Heritage 15, no. 2 (1994): 16–33; and
“When Japan Was ‘Champion of the Darker Races’: Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism,” The Black Scholar 24, no. 1 (1994): 23–46; Gerald
Horne, Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New
York: New York University Press, 2004), esp. chaps. 2 and 5; and “Tokyo-Bound: African
Americans and Japan Confront White Supremacy,” Souls 3, no. 3 (2001): 16–28; George
Lipsitz, “‘Frantic to Join . . . the Japanese Army’: Black Soldiers and Civilians Confront the
Asia-Pacific War,” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), ed. T. Fujitani, G. M. White,
and L. Yoneyama, 347–77 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Yukiko Koshiro,
“Beyond an Alliance of Color: The African American Impact on Modern Japan,” positions
11, no. 1 (2003): 183–215; Yuichiro Onishi, “The New Negro of the Pacific: How African
Americans Forged Cross-Racial Solidarity with Japan, 1917–1922,” The Journal of African
American History 92, no. 2 (2007): 191–213; and “The Presence of (Black) Liberation in
Okinawa Freedom: Transnational Moments, 1968–1972,” in Extending the Diaspora: New
Histories of Black People, ed. D. Y. Curry, E. D. Duke, and M. A. Smith, 178–202 (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Etsuko Taketani, “The Cartography of the
Black Pacific: James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way,” American Quarterly 59, no. 1
(2007): 79–106; and “Colored Empires in the 1930s: Black Internationalism, the U.S. Black
Press, and George Samuel Schuyler,” American Literature 82, no. 1 (2010): 121–49; Hiromi
Furukawa and Tetsushi Furukawa, Nihonjin to afurika-kei amerikajin: nichi-bei kankeishi ni
okeru sono shosō [Japanese and African Americans: Historical Aspects of Their Relations]
(Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2004).
2. Historian Michael Green refers only briefly to the existence of the African American
women who were stationed in occupied Japan as families of black servicemen, servicewomen, or civilian employees in his monograph on African American soldiers in the U.S.
occupation of Japan and the Korean War. Michael Cullen Green, Black Yanks in the Pacific:
Race in the Making of American Military Empire after World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2010), 50–52, 74–77. For other major scholarship that refers to the African American-Japanese encounter during the U.S. occupation of Japan, see Michael S.
Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory (London,
New York: Routledge, 1999), chap. 3; Yukiko Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S.
Occupation of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), esp. chap. 5; and “Race
as International Identity? ‘Miscegenation’ in the U.S. Occupation of Japan and Beyond,”
Amerikastudien 48, no. 1 (2003): 61–77; Furukawa and Furukawa, Nihonjin to afurika-kei
amerikajin, pt. III, chaps. 1–3, 9; John G. Russell, “The Other Other: The Black Presence
in the Japanese Experience,” in Japan’ Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, 2d ed.,
ed. M. Weiner, 84-115 (London, New York: Routledge, 2009); and Nihonjin no kokujinkan: mondai wa “chibikuro sambo” dake dewa nai [Japanese Perceptions of Blacks: The
spring 2012 / bl ack women, gender, and families 91
Problem is More Than “Little Black Sambo”] (Tokyo: Shinhyōron, 1991), chap. 1; Hiroshi
Wagatsuma, “The Social Perception of Skin Color in Japan,” Daedalus 96 (1967): 407–43.
3. I use the word “militarized” instead of “military” to include both military and civilian
African American women in association with the U.S. occupation of Japan, regardless of
their official affiliation with the U.S. Armed Forces. For the concept of gendered “militarization,” see the multiple works of feminist political scientist Cynthia Enloe, including
Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2000); Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); The Morning
After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993). On the role of African American women in the U.S. military during World War II,
see Martha S. Putney, When the Nation Was in Need: Blacks in the Women’s Army Corps
during World War II (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001); Brenda L. Moore, To Serve
My Country, to Serve My Race: The Story of the Only African American WACs Stationed
Overseas during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
4. For the establishment and development of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) during
and after World War II, see Bettie J. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 1945–1978 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1990), chap. 1; Leisa D. Meyer, Creating
GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), chap. 1.
5. African American WACs remained racially segregated and discriminated against in
the postwar U.S. Army. They were recruited under a quota system, given basic training
in segregated units, and allocated segregated work assignments until President Harry S.
Truman issued Executive Order #9981 in July 1948 to officially declare the desegregation
of the U.S. Armed Forces. Racial quotas and segregation were eliminated in the WAC with
the Army directive issued in April 1950. Initially, few if any opportunities for overseas
assignment were open to African American women in the postwar WAC. Some black WAC
attachments were assigned to the European Command in the late 1940s. However, African
American WACs were entirely excluded from assignment to occupation duties in Japan until
the outbreak of the Korean War, while two exclusively white WAC attachments (8000th
WAC Battalion in Yokohama and the 8225th WAC Battalion in Tokyo) had already been
activated in Japan in 1946. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 1945–1978, 47, 85–86;
Putney, When the Nation Was in Need, 145.
6. Ralph Matthews, “Wacs and Pom Poms Wage War in Yokohama: GIs Counter-Attack
in Battle of Sexes,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 22, 1951.
7. The WAC personnel were engaged primarily in administrative, communications, medical, and intelligence duties at the Far East Command headquarters and other commands
in Tokyo, regional commands throughout Japan, and in general and station hospitals in
Japan and Okinawa. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 106–8.
8. For example, Sgt. Laura A. Bullock, who had served for eight years in the WAC, was
assigned to the U.S. Army Hospital at Camp Yokohama in an administrative capacity on
arriving there in June 1950. Another sergeant, Emma V. Routh, who had enlisted in the
WAC in October 1943 and subsequently completed her assignment as a mess sergeant
at Fort Knox, Kentucky, was selected to serve at the Headquarters and Service Command
in Tokyo. First Lt. Ossie Rountree became the first civilian woman officer in the Far East
Command to be selected for a direct reserve commission in the WAC in 1952. “Attends
92 ya suhiro ok ada
Service School in Japan,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, December 8, 1951; “Wac Unpacks
in Japan,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 28, 1952; “First Civilian Woman Officer for Far
East Command,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, February 2, 1952.
9. After being integrated into the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in January 1945, African American nurses continued serving in a segregated unit in the postwar U.S. Army until their
corps was racially integrated by President Truman’s issuance of Executive Order #9981 in
1948. Mary T. Sarnecky, A History of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 316. For the history of African American nurses and the
process of their integration into the U.S. Armed Forces, see Darlene Clark Hine, Black
Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), esp. chap. 8; and “Black Professional and
Race Consciousness: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 1890–1950,” The Journal of
American History 89, no. 4 (2003): 1279–94.
10. “Army Nurses of 155th Station Hospital, Japan, Feted as Corps Marks 48th Anniversary,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 12, 1949; “Army Nurses in Japan Celebrating
Founding,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 26, 1949.
11. Hooks revealed that ten of the approximately thirty-five nurses who were processed
for duty in Japan at Camp Stoneman in Pittsburgh, California, in August 1949 were African
American. Millie Hooks to Franklin Williams, August 7, 1949; and August 16, 1949, National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., microfilm edition, pt.9-B, reel 25 (hereafter, NAACP papers).
12. The Baltimore Afro-American highlighted four African American women, Capt. Rosalie
H. Wiggins, Lt. Laurence Martin, Lt. Alice H. Dolphy, and Lt. Olga Beaman, who arrived in
Japan in mid-January 1951 as the first cadre of African American nurses to join the staff at
the General Hospital in Tokyo. Milton A. Smith, “Four Army Nurses at Tokyo Hospitals: Philly
Captain Heads Ward Staff; 2 Other Nurses in Korea Hospitals,” Baltimore Afro-American,
March 10, 1951; “Nurse in Tokyo,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 17, 1951; “Nurse in
Tokyo,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 24, 1951.
13. After serving as a chief nurse at the Tuskegee Air Force Base during World War II,
Capt. Ruth Faulkner Johnson reapplied for a commission to Japan to follow her husband,
who had been drafted and dispatched to Korea soon after their marriage. Ralph Matthews,
“Fate Provides Twisted Experience for AAF Nurse,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, October 6,
1951.
14. James L. Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 18, 1950.
15. According to Michael Green, Ethel Payne became a “celebrated” journalist, working
for the Chicago Defender and CBS after returning to the U.S. Payne started her career as a
reporter in occupied Japan, where she was approached by a correspondent of the Chicago
Defender while serving as a director of the Seaview Club. As you see in the later section
of this essay, Payne’s articles on the romance and marriage between African American
soldiers and Japanese women appeared in the Chicago Defender during the early 1950s.
James L. Hicks, “Fine Haven for Soldiers: GI’s [sic] Praise 4 Women Running Tokyo Club,”
Baltimore Afro-American, November 11, 1950; Green, Black Yanks in the Pacific, 76, 169n57.
16. Nan Watson, “Letter from Japan,” Negro Digest, July 1950, 46–49; James L. Hicks,
“GI’s [sic] in Tokyo Lavish Gifts on Jap Girls, Shun Own Clubs,” Baltimore Afro-American,
September 2, 1950.
17. The Ebony magazine reported in 1947 that there were 100 African American girls
spring 2012 / bl ack women, gender, and families 93
who were serving as Red Cross workers in occupation areas, including Japan, Germany,
and Italy. “Red Cross Girl: Myrtle Gross Find Fun and Work in Germany,” Ebony, April 1947,
48.
18. Sylvia J. Rock, “Nippon Girls Look like Americans: Ex-Red Cross Worker Says Yokohama Is like Harlem,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 13, 1951.
19. “Mission to Hiroshima: Interracial Team Rebuilds Homes as Shrine of Peace,” Ebony,
January 1950, 46.
20. Some of the African American women came to Japan to live with their GI sons, like
the mother of Richard L. Fields who was living as his dependant in married-officer quarters
at Camp Gifu. Interview, John Cash with Richard L. Fields, August 18, 1988, the U.S. Army
Center of Military History, Washington, D.C. (hereafter, CMH).
21. According to Mrs. Bobo, the world of soldiers’ wives was rigidly separated by race
and rank at Camp Gifu, the host camp of the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment. There
was no officers’ wives clubs there because of race. African American women organized
a bridge club for field-grade officers’ wives on a segregated basis. Moreover, African
American wives were not a close-knit group because of the rank differences among their
husbands. Interview, John Cash with W. A. Bobo and Mrs. Bobo, undated, CMH. On the
24th Infantry Regiment at Camp Gifu, see William Bowers, William M. Hammond, and
George L. MacGariggle, Black Soldier, White Army: The 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1996), chap. 3; Yasuhiro Okada,
“Race, Masculinity, and Military Occupation: African American Soldiers’ Encounters with
the Japanese at Camp Gifu, 1947–1951,” The Journal of African American History 96, no.
2 (2011): 179–203.
22. Milton A. Smith, “Life One of Waiting in Tokyo: Nearness to Battle Area No Help to
Anxious Wife,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, January 6, 1951.
23. “Women Volunteers Furnish Aid and Comfort to GI’s [sic] in Korea,” Norfolk Journal
and Guide, February 3, 1951.
24. Watson, “Letter from Japan,” 47.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan”; Rock, “Nippon Girls Look like Americans”; Watson, “Letter
from Japan,” 48–49.
28. Watson, “Letter from Japan,” 49.
29. Miki Ward Crawford, Katie Kaori Hayashi, and Shizuko Suenaga, Japanese War
Brides in America: An Oral History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), xiv–xvii.
30. Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan”; Rock, “Nippon Girls Look like Americans.”
31. Smith, “Life One of Waiting in Tokyo.”
32. For the historical background of African American domestic workers, see, for example, Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910–1940 (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Jacqueline
Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery
to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
33. Ralph Matthews Sr., “GI’s [sic] Ponder Peace Moves: Not All Anxious for War to Be
Over,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 22, 1951.
34. Smith, “Life One of Waiting in Tokyo.”
35. Rock, “Nippon Girls Look like Americans.”
94 ya suhiro ok ada
36. Ibid.
37. Watson, “Letter from Japan,” 46, 48; Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan.”
38. Hicks, “Fine Haven for Soldiers.”
39. “Mission to Hiroshima,” 46–48.
40. Interview, Cash with Bobo and Bobo.
41. Smith, “Four Army Nurses at Tokyo Hospitals.”
42. Watson, “Letter from Japan,” 49.
43. Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan.”
44. Rock, “Nippon Girls Look like Americans.”
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Watson, “Letter from Japan,” 47–49.
48. “Mission to Hiroshima,” 46–48.
49. Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan.”
50. Millie Hooks, “Request for Retention in Service,” June 18, 1949, NAACP papers.
51. Hooks asserted that Johnson prevented her from executing satisfactory performance
of her duties by withholding necessary personnel assistance, often reprimanding her for
the insufficiency of her colleagues in the ward and even intervening in her off-duty activities. Millie Hooks, “Formal Complaint,” June 10, 1949; Millie S. Hooks to Headquarters,
128th Station Hospital, June 17, 1949, NAACP papers.
52. Hooks, “Request for Retention in Service”; Millie Hooks to Franklin Williams, June
19, 1949, NAACP papers.
53. Hooks to Williams, August 7, 1949.
54. Her separation was finally instituted effective by the board of inquiry in the Department of Army in Washington, D.C., on August 24, 1949. R. P. Ovenshine to Franklin Williams,
August 19, 1949; Millie Hooks to Franklin Williams, August 23, 1949, NAACP papers.
55. It seems from the records of their final correspondence that Hooks gave up her battle
and accepted the decision of the army authorities without soliciting further advice from
the NAACP. Franklin Williams to James Evans, July 11, 1949; and July 18, 1949; Franklin
Williams to Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Army, August 15, 1949; R. P. Ovenshine
to Franklin Williams, August 19, 1949; Robert Carter to Millie Hooks, August 30, 1949;
Franklin Williams to Millie Hooks, December 29, 1949, NAACP papers.
56. On the civil rights demands, especially in the U.S. military context, after World War II,
see Paula F. Pfeffer, A Philip Randolph: Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1990), chap. 4; Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A
Biographical Portrait (1972; reprinted Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), chap.
18; Sherie Mershon and Steven Schlossman, Foxholes and Color Lines: Desegregating
the U.S. Armed Forces (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), chap. 7.
57. The domestic ideology and culture, which reinforced the traditional gender roles of
men as “breadwinners” and women as “homemakers” and contained sexuality within the
institution of heterosexual marriage, emerged as a hegemonic gender and sexual norm
within the larger political parameters of anticommunism, conformity, and “containment”
in Cold War America during the 1940s and the 1950s. In African American society, the
dominant ideology of domestic womanhood was influential in shaping racial activism
and sexual politics, especially among the middle-class women who defined their claim
on the postwar state for equal citizenship within a “traditional gendered” sphere, while
spring 2012 / bl ack women, gender, and families 95
it contradicted the realities of most working-class African American women. Elaine Tyler
May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, rev. ed. (New York: Basic
Books, 1999), esp. intro. and chap. 1; Megan Taylor Shockley, “We, Too, Are Americans”:
African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940–54 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2004), chap 3.
58. James L. Hicks, “Japanese or American Girls: Which? Why?” Baltimore Afro-American,
October 7, 1950; and “Officer Says Our Girls in Japan Not Attractive,” Baltimore AfroAmerican, November 25, 1950.
59. Ibid.
60. Matthews, “Wacs and Pom Poms Wage War in Yokohama.”
61. The pervasive suspicion on the part of African American soldiers about black women’s sexual motives for joining the army or the Department of the Army was established
upon the popular representation of the WAC as a morale booster for male soldiers as well
as their alleged sexual independence and sexual immorality. As historian Leisa D. Meyer
notes, a series of sexual images of American female soldiers, which were consolidated
and resisted through the slander campaign targeting the women’s corps during World
War II, were influential in shaping popular perceptions of the WAC during and after the
war. Meyer, Creating GI Jane, chap. 2.
62. U.S. occupation authorities and the U.S. media actively promoted the representation
of Japanese women as victims of male-dominant militarism and traditional gender norms
in Japanese society. They emphasized the liberation of Japanese women, especially their
enfranchisement under U.S. occupation in Cold War U.S. propaganda. Lisa Yoneyama,
“Liberation under Siege: U.S. Military Occupation and Japanese Women’s Enfranchisement,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 885–910.
63. Hicks, “Japanese or American Girls: Which? Why?”
64. Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 41–47.
65. The problem of intraracial gender conflicts within the African American community,
especially the patriarchal privileges, misogyny, and sexism on the part of African American
men, had been marginalized for a long time in the African American struggle for racial
equality through the 1960s. Racial solidarity had been privileged over gender identity in
the male-dominant leadership structure of the mainstream black activist organizations.
Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1999). For the historical background of black patriarchy, see also
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981),
chap. 3.
66. L. Alex Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go for Japanese Girls: Wilson Reveals Story behind
Love Affairs between Tan Yanks and Oriental Beauties,” Chicago Defender, November 11,
1950.
67. Ethel Payne, “Says Japanese Girls Playing GIs for Suckers: ‘Chocolate Joe’ Used,
Amused, Confused,” Chicago Defender, November 18, 1950. Ethel Payne later published
several articles on the reactions of African Americans to the Japanese brides of black
soldiers on the American side. See Ethel Payne, “New Year’s Holds Sad Memories for
Japanese Bride in Chicago,” Chicago Defender, December 29, 1951; and “Sgt. Japanese
Wife Given Warm Welcome,” Chicago Defender, March 15, 1952. On African American
representations of Japanese women during the early Cold War period, see Yasuhiro Okada,
96 ya suhiro ok ada
“‘Cold War Black Orientalism’: Race, Gender, and African American Representations of
Japanese Women during the Early 1950s,” The Journal of American and Canadian Studies
27 (2009): 45–79; Alex Lubin, Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy,
1945–1954 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), chap. 4; Green, Black Yanks
in the Pacific, chap. 3.
68. Payne, “Says Japanese Girls Playing GIs for Suckers.”
69. Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go for Japanese Girls.”
70. Matthews, “Wacs and Pom Poms Wage War in Yokohama.”
71. The intraracial gender conflicts developed between African American women and
men in the U.S. military engagement overseas, as discussed above in the case of occupied
Japan, was already manifest in the experience of the African American WACs who were
serving in the European Theater of Operations during World War II. See Charity Adams
Earley, One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC (College Station: Texas A
& M University Press, 1989), 187; Moore, To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race, 133–37.
72. James Hicks reported that some African American women dated Japanese men,
like Elvira Turner who dated “on alternative nights” men of diverse racial backgrounds,
including a black soldier, a white American officer, and a Japanese man. L. Alex Wilson of
the Chicago Defender observed that African American women were not sexually attracted
to Japanese men. Wilson wrote, “An extensive check on the love affairs of American Negro
women in Japan revealed they spurn the Japanese men. Two very attractive women told
me in a convincing manner that any thought of having a Japanese as a boy friend causes
cold chills. GIs now in Japan confirmed this. There was an exception or so, of course, but
not worthy of detailed mention.” Hicks, “G-Girl in Japan”; Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go for
Japanese Girls.”
73. Feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins argues that double standards in the African
American sexual politics of interracial intimacy, especially interracial marriage, operated
differently for African American men and women. Collins writes, “Any expansion of the pool
of female sexual partners enhances African American men’s standing within the existing
system of hierarchical masculinities. Thus, within black civil society, African American
women in interracial love relationships face the stigma of being accused of being race
traitors and whores, where African American men engaged in similar relationships can
find their status as men raised.” Although Collins mainly discusses the case of black-white
interracial intimacies, her theoretical view of a sexual double standard in African American
society can be applied to the explanation of black-Japanese intimacies, but with careful
attention to the specificity of such interracial relationships in the historical context of the
U.S. occupation of Japan. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans,
Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 262.
74. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women: Thoughts on the
Culture of Dissemblance,” in Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American
History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 37–47.
75. Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 5; John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in
the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 138.
76. Green, Black Yanks in the Pacific, 147.