The United States Armed Forces, along with military contingents from World War II Allied Nations, ruled Japan from September 1945 until the spring of 1952. This action was known as “the Occupation of Japan,” and was without a doubt the most remarkable military occupation of one country by another in the annals of history.
The first American Occupation troops arrived at Atsugi Air Base southwest of Tokyo on August 28, 1945, thirteen days after Japan’s unconditional surrender.
After boarding trucks that they had brought along, the troops headed for Yokohama (where the man in charge of the Occupation, General Douglas MacArthur, was to set up temporary headquarters until preparations could be made for him in Tokyo). Shortly after leaving Atsugi, the convoy of American troops was flagged down by a much smaller Japanese convoy carrying prostitutes whose services were immediately offered to the arriving American troops.
The Japanese instigators of the prostitute convoy believed that one of the first things the American troops would do in Japan would be to go on a rape rampage—something their own soldiers had done repeatedly in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
They wanted to protect their own women by taking the edge off of the lust-drive of the Americans. Of course, they had the right idea but both their timing and their approach was off, and much to their chagrin the American officers in charge of the arriving, GIs not only turned them down they were rude about it.
Up to this point in Japan’s history, the Japanese had lived in a Confucian-oriented society ruled over by a military dictatorship of one kind or another for nearly two thousand years. The people had obligations and duties but few rights. It was the law of the land that fathers ruled their families with absolute authority.
Virtually all marriages were arranged by parents or third parties, and romantic love was seen as an obstacle to the obligations of husbands and wives. Marriage was for the purpose of siring children and continuing the household; it was not an emotional affair.
Prior to the mid–1900s young unmarried Japanese men and women (with the very rare exceptions of those who had lived abroad and become Westernized), did not date in the Western sense.
Husbands and wives would visit family members together, attend such public outings as cherry blossom viewings, and visit shrines or temples on special occasions, but as a rule they did not go out together—just the two of them—for social entertainment.
Married men who could afford to do so commonly kept mistresses, frequented houses of assignation—often with their wives’ approval—and otherwise engaged in whatever extramarital activity took their fancy.
Young men who could afford to do so began visiting the red-light districts and/or assignation inns when they reached their late teens. For the most part, “non-public women” had no choice but to find other ways to sublimate their sex-energy buildup, or quietly suffer the consequences.
When the Occupation by foreign troops began, Japan’s economy was shattered and the people, who had never known personal freedom before, were numb with shock and fright. They knew instinctively, from long historical experience, that the only way to survive a military defeat was to cooperate with the enemy, to adapt themselves to the new “winning lord;” to be passive and pleasing.
Fortunately for Japan, the “winning lord” was the United States—a country whose people had absolutely no affinity for war or the strict military occupation of an alien nation, especially one of which they knew virtually nothing, and whose people they could not communicate with or understand.
But what the Americans did have was a built-in compassion for people that surfaced almost immediately—an ability to quickly distinguish between the innocent civilian population of Japan and the arrogant military warlords who had started and pursued the war, and an inherent kindness that compelled them to begin immediately to treat the ordinary Japanese as victims who needed all the help they could get.
There was something else the newly arrived foreign troops in Japan had that was to influence the whole tenor and tone of the Occupation, and that was an immense reservoir of pentup sexual energy—an aspect of the human condition that American society had traditionally ignored or down played as something that should not be recognized officially and preferably not even privately.
But away from home and in an alien society that was receptive to unbridled sexual activity, the bonds of American culture were easily slipped. As a result, an overwhelming majority of the Occupation forces were soon head-over-heels in an orgy of intercourse.
For perhaps as many as 70 percent of the young Americans it was their first experience with sex and they took to it with extraordinary alacrity.
Many factors beyond the sensual facet of Japanese culture contributed to this feast of ecstasy. The war had killed several million young Japanese men, leaving a significant imbalance between the sexes.
The war had also reduced most Japanese to living at a bare subsistence level, and the younger, more attractive women learned quickly that the foreign GIS, especially the always generous Americans, would shower them with food, clothing, money, and other amenities in exchange for sex and female companionship.
In no time, over two-thirds of all the male Occupationaires had full-time mistresses or were regular patrons at the newly enlivened red-light districts dotting the islands. The amount of money and goods pumped into the Japanese economy through this sexual link amounted to millions of dollars per month.
Hundreds of thousands of the women making up this link became serial mistresses, passed from one patron to the next as the GIS finished out their enlistments and were replaced by newly arrived troops.
The intelligence network of these women was incredible. They often knew well in advance—and often long before the Occupation personnel themselves knew—when individuals were going to be returned home or transferred to a new post in Japan.
On many occasions these young women would begin looking for new patrons weeks ahead. Sometimes the men who were leaving mistresses behind would help them find new patrons—often their own replacements. Some military personnel who had bought homes for their mistresses sold the homes to newly arrived replacements with the women willingly included in the deal.
Of course, a significant number of Occupationaires who took Japanese mistresses did not abandon them. They married them—often to the dismay of their families back home.
Partly as a result of the clamor caused by the growing number of GI Japanese marriages, the military powers took considerable pains to discourage such unions. They made the process of applying for permission to marry Japanese women lengthy, tedious, and embarrassing.
While there was no morally valid reason for opposing some of these mixed marriages, there were many that should not have taken place. In too many cases the individuals involved could not communicate with each other beyond an infantile and physical level. Often the GIS involved were poorly educated and of very low character.
In many cases the women were years older than their would-be spouses, had been working as prostitutes since their early teens, and were merely using the young, naive men to better themselves economically at the moment.
Oddly enough, a high percentage of the lower class men who married or applied for marriage to their Japanese girlfriends actually disliked the Japanese as a whole and had absolutely no affinity for the culture.
I had the extraordinary experience of being given the responsibility of interviewing military personnel assigned to one agency in Tokyo who applied to marry their Japanese girlfriends. My task was to discourage them; to talk them out of getting married.
I cannot remember how many servicemen I interviewed, but I do remember very clearly that I had no success whatsoever—not one. In one case, an extreme one in which the individual had been in Japan only three days when he put in for marriage, I succeeded in getting him transferred to Korea after he refused to even consider postponing his application.
The woman he wanted to marry was notorious. The only reason he gave, repeatedly, for wanting to marry her was that she was the best f... he’d ever had.
Stories about this mass meeting and mating of hundreds of thousands of American GIS and officers and Japanese women are endless. One of my own experiences that I will never forget: I stayed overnight at the home of a girlfriend one weekend (her mother liked me and approved).
The next morning, the 13-year-old sister of my girlfriend came into my bedroom and showed me an old “48 Position Sex Chart” that had been in the family for generations. She wanted me to point out my favorite positions. At that time, I thought I was pretty suave, but I blushed and stammered like I’d been caught behind the barn with my pants down.
One of the more imaginative Occupation escapades, pulled off by three corpsmen assigned to a Tokyo hospital, was the talk of the town for a while. They strung a curtain down the middle of their ambulance, hired two “working” girls to staff the “house on wheels,” and drove around the city, soliciting business from foot-loose GIS.
Word was the experience was such a turn-on the enterprising trio built up a large number of repeat customers.
As usual where large concentrations of military personnel are concerned, the primary meeting points for liaisons with local women are bars that sprout in the vicinity. Japan was no exception.
There was one or more bar districts near every Occupation camp or post in the country. Each bar had a staff of girls as its main draw. Some bars had adjoining rooms for private use, but most of the trysting that resulted from the bar contacts took place in nearby inns or hotels.
Surprising to some, most Occupationaires did not patronize the many red-light districts throughout the country. The women working in these districts had had few if any foreign customers and generally spoke no English.
Most of the servicemen and civilian personnel assigned to Japan did not learn enough of the Japanese language to communicate on any level, and tended to frequent small places known as GI hang-outs, where the girls spoke some English.
Furthermore, having had little or no experience with red-light districts, Americans in particular did not feel comfortable in such large-scale institutionalized settings. Dealing with brothel madams, and knowing there were tough male “guards” lurking in the background, was pretty intimidating to the novice.
But above and beyond the lack of language ability and inexperience of the Occupationaires, most of the red-light districts (unless they were set up just for foreigners, such as one at Yokosuka Naval Base south of Tokyo), actively discouraged the GI trade.
Many of them totally barred foreign customers, including those who could speak Japanese, for the simple reason that they knew they would lose all of their Japanese trade if they allowed foreigners in—and they knew the foreigners would eventually disappear.
I recall visiting Gifu’s famed “floating world” district in the summer of 1950. The buildings were all traditional innstyle, surrounded by garden landscaping complete with miniature rainbow bridges across flowing streams, huge stone pagoda-style lanterns, a forest of willow trees, and colorful paper lanterns strung on overhead lines.
The women, all dressed in bright kimono and wearing the polished katsura (kot-sue-rah) wigs, lined the curving walkways. It was a setting and a scene that had not changed for 200 or more years—and for those with an affinity for traditional Japanese culture, it was like a dream world. Despite being able to communicate fairly well, I and my friend were not admitted.
The Allied military occupation of Japan officially ended on April 28, 1952, but the American military presence there remained large and conspicuous for several additional years. The GI bars and assignation inns continued to flourish.
But by the summer of 1955, ten years after the end of the war, not only was the American presence shrinking at a visible pace, the Japanese were beginning to emerge from the background.