As noted there was only limited courting and romance among the ordinary people of pre-World War II Japan—although it was common in feudal Japan at the courts of the emperor in Kyoto and the shogun in Edo (Tokyo).
One significant exception to the general rule of little or no courting among ordinary Japanese were romantic liaisons that developed between prostitutes and geisha and their special customers—liaisons that provided themes for many of Japan’s famous literary works of that era as well as for more contemporary movies.
The reason such liaisons were more likely to involve “public” women is that generally speaking these were the only women with whom men could develop intimate relationships. Young unmarried men and non-public women spending time together, falling in love, and carrying on intimate relationships was contrary to the Japanese custom, and therefore rare. Those that did occur often ended in tragedy.
The political reforms imposed on Japan by the Americanled Occupation Forces included freeing women from the tyranny of the Confucian family system and giving them the right to exercise more control over their own lives.
This, combined with the fact that the old male-dominated order in Japan had been totally discredited by the disastrous war and the fact that women were forced by necessity to play a key role in the recovery of Japan, laid the foundation for the rise in women’s social, economic, and political status to levels previously not even imaginable.
It was the incredible influx of American culture into Japan, via the hundreds of thousands of Occupationaires, movies, magazines, and the sudden importance of the English language that was to provide both the impetus and the means for huge numbers of urban Japanese girls and women to take advantage of their new freedom, to break out of the steel cocoon they had been encased in for so many centuries.
Japan owes an immeasurable debt to the women who were teenagers in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. It was they who led the changes that altered Japan from feudal monolith to the colorful menagerie it is today.
Not only did these young women begin wearing bright dresses, high heels, and make-up, they were the first sizable group to learn how to communicate in English and deal with foreigners. They were the first to resist the old arranged marriage system, to become hooked on American music, to begin changing Japan’s eating habits, and to do so many other things that helped make Japan what it is today.
For an insular, proud, and often arrogant people like the Japanese to be utterly defeated in a war they started, and then to be occupied by an alien other-race enemy, had to have been one of the greatest cultural shocks any people could ever experience.
However, within the overall shock, the one facet that was perhaps the hardest for the older people to take—especially for the men to bear—was the daily and nightly sight of hundreds of thousands of Japanese women consorting openly and enthusiastically with foreign men. The fact that the foreign men were the former enemy made the taste even more bitter.
The emotional feelings this sight aroused were understandably intense, but amazingly, there was very little outward show of emotion by the majority of Japanese men and older women. Altercations between young Japanese men and foreign GIS, over women, were few and far between.
The public dating and displays of affection between the Occupationaires and their Japanese girlfriends were obviously irritating to an extraordinary degree, but the fact was the foreign men had not displaced Japanese men as partners for the Japanese women involved. They were doing things young Japanese men had never done in the first place.
And it was, perhaps, this cultural factor that kept the level of violent reaction very low. In fact, until well into the 1960s one of the first questions Japanese men typically asked newly arrived foreigners (sometimes before they had been in the country for a full day) was how they liked Japanese girls. One American movie star who was still in Tokyo’s Haneda Iternational Airport responded to this question by replying, “I don’t know. I haven’t tried one yet!”
Even after Japanese men began picking up on the practice of dating “non-public” women in public, it was generally not the younger men as would normally be expected, but older married men—men who were in their 50s, 60s, and older.
The reason for this was very simple, very basic. Most young men, whether single or not, did not have the money to take women out to restaurants, theaters, resort inns, or other places where there was cost involved.
This phenomenon of young girls dating older men reached its peak in the mid–1950s, resulting in reams of newspaper and magazine hype and numerous movies with a “Romance Gray” theme, in reference to the fact that the men involved in these hundreds of thousands of liaisons were gray-haired. That was a golden time for older men with money in Japan!
And it was not only older Japanese men who created and took advantage of this sex-with-young women boom. Foreign men in fact were in the vanguard of the phenomenon. By this time (the mid–1950s) hostess cabarets, some of them on a huge scale, had appeared in Tokyo and other major cities throughout Japan. These cabarets were staffed by some of the most beautiful women in the country, and it was in these great cabarets that affluent foreign businessmen (who were flocking to Japan by the thousands to buy cheap goods) did most of their girl hunting.
Hundreds of these businessmen, some of whom came to Japan only twice a year, established mistresss relationships with girls they met at cabarets, and paid them thousands of dollars a year in living allowances and fees.
One hostess-mistress, who lived in the Yoyogi apartment building where I lived, had two patrons, and used to regale us with stories about how she kept them apart when they both showed up in Tokyo at the same time. She said some of her friends had up to four out-of-country patrons.
Some of the foreign visitors ended up marrying their cabaret hostess-mistresses. Perhaps the most notable case of this was Sukarno, the president of Indonesia from 1945 to 1967. On an official visit to Tokyo he and his entourage put up at the Imperial Hotel. One of his aides was sent out to get some girls from a Ginza cabaret. Sukarno was so taken by the girl brought to him that he married her—setting a very high standard for other hostesses to follow.
The “Romance Gray” phenomenon was a news media and entertainment topic for nearly two years. The boom itself reached its peak in 1955/56 and then began petering out as the economy picked up speed and the incomes of both young men and non-public women continued to rise. The custom for older men to liaison with younger women, from both the entertainment trade and regular business, did not disappear, however.
In fact, as in other countries older men having sexual access to younger women was a well-established custom in Japan, going back to the beginning of its history. Upper class men had always been permitted to have concubines, who were invariably young. Affluent, powerful men also had mistresses, usually much younger than themselves. And it was almost always older, affluent men who were the chief clients of geisha and elite prostitutes.
This practice had just continued to evolve with the times. The “Romance Gray” boom was unique only in that the young women had a choice and they often took the initiative.
The other unique factor, of course, was that during this time there were large numbers of young, single Japanese men waiting on the sidelines, anxious to get onto the playing field for the first time in Japan’s history.