CHAPTER 7

JAPAN

HER MOTHER’S CONSENT SECURED, ETHEL PAYNE PREPARED for her departure. She had several bad teeth pulled, fearing that dental care might be hard to procure in Japan, and even gave her insides a flushing by dosing herself with magnesium citrate. For the sea voyage, she laid in a stock of seasickness pills, dry crackers, and lemons. Japan was an uncommon destination for a South Sider. For a thirty-six-year-old single black woman in 1948, this was a journey of courage.

Japan put a pause on her romantic life. Since her teenaged years when she had her first love, a boy a year younger than she from a Mississippi family that had moved into the neighborhood, Payne had dated frequently. But by this point in her life, only one man, whom we know only as Paul, had asked her to marry him. A postal employee, Paul was “not particularly, you know, dashing or anything like that,” said Payne. “It would have been a marriage, maybe a good marriage, but it wouldn’t have been exciting and full of adventure.” As the date of her departure neared, Paul asked Ethel when she would return. “I’ll come back in a year,” she promised. “So,” Payne laughingly told an interviewer four decades later, “I left him at the dock.”

Setting off by train in early June, at the same time that President Harry Truman passed through Chicago on a train similarly bound for the West, Payne spent several days as a tourist in San Francisco, riding the cable cars and eating at Fisherman’s Wharf. The final leg of her overland trip brought her to Seattle, where an Army transport ship bound for Japan awaited. After checking in with the military authorities in charge of her ship’s voyage, Payne went off to explore downtown Seattle. She ditched her uniform, feeling conspicuous in it. “Evidently,” she said, “there aren’t many colored girls going through here in uniform.”

Her sightseeing agenda, however, was altered as she found herself in a sea of 100,000 people flooding the streets for a peek at President Truman. In the late afternoon sun, hundreds of flags along the parade route snapped in the breeze and buckets of confetti poured down from office building windows when Truman appeared in an open automobile. “I says to myself,” Payne wrote that night, “‘Look here, Harry, who’s chasing who? Darn if we ain’t bumped into each other all the way from Chicago to Seattle.’”

ON JUNE 15, Payne boarded her ship. Unlike during the war, when ships sailed under the cover of darkness, the ship steamed into Puget Sound at lunchtime and out to sea before sunset. During the passage across the Pacific, Payne spent time with the other women who had been selected as club directors and hostesses. They came from all parts of the United States, and while the military remained segregated, the white and black women traveled as a group, although they did sleep apart. At times it got to be a bit much for Payne. In particular, one white woman from Michigan was genial to a fault. “What she doesn’t know,” said Payne, “is that you can’t run this brotherly love down everybody’s throat and besides she don’t understand I can take only so much of white folk trying to be nice.”

After nearly two weeks, on the morning of June 28, the ship docked at Yokohama, just south of Tokyo, and awaiting buses ferried the new recruits to their quarters. As she got off her bus, still without her land legs, Payne felt the ground moving under her feet. It was an earthquake, centered in Fukui, less than three hundred miles to the west. While it devastated that city, the damage was minimal around Tokyo. “It was over in a few minutes,” according to Payne, “but I said, ‘Oh, what a welcome. What a welcome.’”

Payne was assigned to a small house just off the main part of the Tokyo Quartermaster Depot in Shinagawa, right on Tokyo Bay. A flimsy and drafty cottage with no cooking facilities and a Japanese-style shower, it had lodged a group of Red Cross hostesses getting ready to head home. Payne and another woman were to take their place as the Army took over running the social clubs.

The Seaview Club, where Payne was to work, was the only facility with a black staff in the Tokyo-Yokohama area. It was housed on the grounds of the massive depot, the largest of its kind in the world, charged with supplying all the U.S. forces in the Far East. Housing and life on the depot was not all that different than Chicago. Four months after President Truman had issued his executive order directing the desegregation of the military, the depot remained segregated, with white and black soldiers housed at either end of the facility. Payne’s club was solely for the black soldiers.

“There were rules and the ‘unwritten rules’ for blacks,” recalled Vivian Lee, an African American woman who was a child growing up on the depot at the time. “Black soldiers in my stepfather’s company had to be immaculately dressed and groomed before my stepfather, Sgt. Frank Little, would issue them a pass because the white Military Police would deliberately target them.”

Being kept apart from whites, however, did not mean that African Americans in the occupying forces were denied other benefits of life in the military. The Army provided dependable salaries and benefits, generous in comparison to civilian life back home, decent housing, abundant food, and affordable clothing. Moreover, what couldn’t be gotten from the military could be easily bought from Japanese destitute from the destruction of their country in the war. For example, African Americans, including Payne, were in the unusual situation of hiring servants of a different race. “Their dish washing, suds busting, and scrubbing days are over for a while,” declared a Chicago Defender who was a frequent critic of the military. He was so astounded by what he found that he called his piece WELL SHUT MY MOUTH.

Black soldiers, who were not in combat units, were given the military’s most menial positions. At the depot they were used primarily to unload, store, and transport equipment and supplies. The work was hard and long. On the other hand, by the nature of their assignments, African Americans came into greater contact with the Japanese than whites did. On the docks, for instance, Japanese stevedores were hired in large numbers and were often under the supervision of black noncommissioned officers. In turn, as base life mirrored segregated life in the United States, African Americans had a greater incentive to find recreation outside the confines of the facility. But they had to exercise caution because white soldiers, bringing their American racial customs with them, frequently succeeded in occupying and marking certain entertainment districts as exclusively white zones.

Even so, life in Japan could offer a new racial experience for young African Americans. For instance, a twenty-one-year-old black New Yorker heading home said Japan had been, for him, a place where “colored and white soldiers are working, eating, sleeping, drinking and ‘balling’ together, and it works out just fine.”

AT THE SEAVIEW CLUB, Payne enthusiastically took to her job of creating entertainment for the black servicemen and their families. “I lead the life of a squirrel on a treadmill always racing around in circles,” Payne told her family. Picnics by the bay were organized. Soldiers were recruited for musical shows that grew sufficiently popular to be performed for civilians off the base. “These boys are just like little children,” Payne reported, “you have to bear down on them to make them stay in line.” Payne even recruited the wives of enlisted men to put on fashion shows. The first of these featured clothing from China, India, the Philippines, Japan, and Korea. A later edition of the show was elevated to a United Nations Fashion Revue and included the participation of representatives from various embassies. The soldiers, in turn, took an immense liking to Payne and trusted her. “The soldiers kind of flocked around her,” recalled one observer.

On a Saturday, only two months into her stay, a new friend, Marquerite Davis, asked Payne to accompany her to Yokohama. A Louisville, Kentucky, native of mixed-race parents (her father was African American; her mother, German), Davis was Payne’s age and they shared a background of civil rights activism in their native cities. Of the two, however, Davis was the seasoned Asia hand, having worked for three and a half years with the Red Cross in New Guinea and the Philippines and most recently as club director for the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment in Okinawa.

Davis wanted to expose Payne to a heartrending problem stemming from the behavior of the men whom their clubs served and for whom the female club directors often acted like den mothers. Since the arrival of the occupation troops, a growing number of Japanese women had become pregnant by U.S. soldiers. To military officials the infants, known as “occupation babies,” were none of their concern. It was forbidden to collect data on the extent of the problem and the subject was not to be publicly discussed. Only the month before, a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post had been expelled from the country for writing about occupation babies. Simply put, the subject was taboo. If blame was to be assigned, the military said it lay with licentious Japanese women who “made good clean American boys go morally wrong.”

Being of mixed race, the babies were so unwanted by the Japanese, who abhorred what they viewed as the tainting of their blood, that they were frequently abandoned upon birth. In one case, a train passenger unwrapped a cloth bundle she spotted on the luggage rack to discover the corpse of a black Japanese baby.

Military law freed U.S. soldiers “of all but moral responsibility” unless they formally admitted paternity. But if the authorities were to push soldiers, specifically African American ones, to claim paternity or to marry a Japanese woman, it would challenge American opposition to mixed-race relationships and, more to the point, contradict existing prevailing state anti-miscegenation laws. As a result, the children of these relationships were regarded as pariahs by both societies, even more so in the case of those with black fathers.

To cope with the growing problem, the nuns of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary opened an orphanage inside the Yokohama general hospital. As Davis and Payne approached the place, Payne already knew something of the issue. “We have a case in our club now of one of our Japanese girls who is pregnant by a master sergeant,” she had told her family. “We talked and talked to him to try to get him to help in some way, but he will do nothing. There is no law requiring him to do so.”

But Payne was unprepared for what she would see. As she and Davis made their way down the hall of the hospital they found the infants in a segregated corner of the facility. “Here were 160 foundlings of all mixtures, about 50 of them ‘Spookinese,’ Negro and Japanese,” said Payne. “Some beds had three babies they are so crowded.”

The nuns were doing the best they could with the large population of abandoned infants thrust into their care, but their resources were severely limited. “They need canned milk and Karo syrup for formulas, mosquito nets, all the children’s clothes they can get, powder, baby oil, diapers, money,” Payne wrote home. “Yes, I’m afraid you are all in for another project. If you could see these helpless babies, your heart would really go out for them.”

Before leaving to return to the base, Payne talked with the mother superior about the pregnant Japanese employee at the club. She agreed to take in the woman and care for the baby when it was born, but Payne remained skeptical that the offer would be of use. “The girl would rather have an abortion.”

AS HER FIRST CHRISTMAS in Japan neared, Payne tried to raise money and find needed items for the orphans, including those at Our Lady of Lourdes, “where,” Payne added, “the brown babies are.” The club brought in a group of orphans for a holiday show with a trick bicycle act and a visit from Santa Claus.

Christmas in Tokyo was Payne’s first away from South Side Chicago. For her and other Christian foreigners, the festive preparations for the Japanese celebration of the New Year substituted as an “Occupation Christmas.” During the day, women in kimonos, their hair piled high, dashed about getting foods for the holiday, and in the evenings the trains and streets were full of, in Payne’s words, “sake-happy” commuters. A few stores had bunting and some even displayed Christmas signs in a tribute to the occupiers, but it was, said Payne, a “far cry from Marshall Field’s.”

On New Year’s Day, Payne sampled the style of celebration at the house of a Japanese artist who worked for the club. The family served her sake, several kinds of raw and dried fish, bean and rice cakes, preserved persimmons, fresh oranges, pickled spinach, sweet potatoes, and green tea. “After two hours I could take no more of the bitter cold nor the strange dishes so I bowed myself out laden with gifts,” she said. Back in the cottage she downed a double dose of Ex-Lax, hot lemonade, aspirin, and soda.

As her second year in Japan got under way, the separation from home became harder. In the spring, her mother shared an anxiety about municipal plans that might alter the neighborhood. Ever the activist, Payne fretted. “I have not slept well since I got the letter,” Payne wrote. “Being 8,000 miles away and not being able to jump in and fight has me just about frantic.” Her alien surroundings and the distance from home grew increasingly taxing, as the letters from Paul ceased to come. He had even forgotten her birthday. Although she worked in a sea of men, her other options were limited. “Hundreds of soldiers pass through my hands,” Payne said, “but the romantic possibilities for me are very few.” The men were either so young they could conceivably be her children or else they were what Payne called career military “hoboes” not interested in marriage. Nonetheless, there was no absence of suitors. “An American Negro woman is a rare object to an extent over here, and even if you look like ‘Lena the Hyena’* somebody will make passes at you.”

IN JAPAN, PAYNE LIVED TWO LIVES. Inside the depot she was an exemplary and industrious worker bee, earning letters of commendation and eventually a promotion to club director. Outside the base, Payne was a consummate explorer. Free time meant one thing to Payne: a chance to see Japan and meet its people.

At Nara Park, south of Tokyo, she fed the deer, considered by the Shinto religion to be messengers from god. At Nikko, to the north, she climbed the many steps to the shrine and spent time talking to “the withered old lady who had the tea shop at the head of the stairs who spoke English with a New York accent and who remembered vividly lunching with Eleanor Roosevelt on a visit by her to Mount Holyoke College.” At Kamakura, she stood before the Great Buddha. In Tokyo, she attended a performance of the all-male Kabuki theater, where she witnessed its renowned dance piece the Heron Maiden (Sagi Musume), which includes four onstage rapid costume changes. “The make up and costuming alone is something to behold,” Payne wrote home, “but the acting! is a revelation.”

But Payne’s interest in Japan was far deeper than that of an ordinary tourist. Rather, her writerly instincts were energized, and her diary, which she had kept since boarding the ship to Japan, became her book. At last, she believed, she had the material with which to break into writing.

She attended the war tribunals, which were nearing their end, and she sought out audiences with everyone. “I had a very, very great curiosity,” Payne said. “I just tried to mingle as much as I could with the population.” She chivied the Japanese who worked at the club for invitations to their homes and gained entrée to well-known members of the deposed government. She was especially curious to learn what prompted the war and how the Japanese were dealing with defeat. Her self-initiated home visits included ones with Mamoru Shigemitsu, the foreign minister who had signed the surrender on board the USS Missouri, and Toshikazu Kase, a high-ranking member of the ministry recently released from prison. She found the two officials to be welcoming and unsurprised to be plied by questions from an American Negro female. “I thought I had information that very few people had, the fact that I had been there and had been on the scene and could talk to these people and get their feelings,” Payne said.

AT THE END OF A YEAR and a half in Japan, Payne earned home leave. On December 8, 1949, she boarded the USNS General Edwin D. Patrick in Yokohama, bound for San Francisco. She spent Christmas with her family and was feted by her friends. More than two hundred South Siders turned out to hear her give a talk at the Parkway Community House, an important social and cultural center of Bronzeville. Payne delivered a colorful account of her life in Japan matched by the bright red heavily brocaded Chinese mandarin gown she wore for the occasion. The Defender’s account called Payne “Englewood’s ‘Favorite Daughter.’”

Soon, however, the holiday ended, and Payne was back on a ship. In Japan, Payne resumed her private after-work investigations. They were all done, Payne noted, “sans press card and only nerve.” Her hope was to write a magazine article upon her return to the United States.

Payne even found time to work with the Great Books program that was founded three years earlier in Chicago, offering to select books from Asia that could be included on an expanded list.

Payne’s superiors remained pleased with her performance at the Seaview Club, giving her an A+ for personality and emotional stability in her employment file. In early June she requested a yearlong extension to her contract as a GS-6 earning $3,450 a year. But within two weeks, life for Americans in Japan suddenly changed.

At dawn on Sunday morning, June 25, 1950, North Korean troops poured across the 38th parallel, a temporary division line drawn at the end of World War II, and swept down into the south. Convinced that no small nation would be safe if the communist regime in North Korea were permitted to force its way into the south, President Truman promised aid and military troops to back up the United Nations’ condemnation of the invasion.

The occupation forces in Japan, only 700 hundred miles to the east, were called into action. Overnight, the Tokyo Quartermaster Depot took on the primary duty of providing the logistical support for the troops being sent into combat on the peninsula. “I don’t know when I have ever worked as hard or been as tired,” an exhausted Ethel wrote to Thelma two months into the war. “Hospitals are No. 1 on our schedule now. A lot of volunteers are doing all they can, but still there are some neglected soldiers.”

The men whom Payne entertained at the Seaview Club suddenly found themselves in a shooting war. By September, two of them were among the casualties, shot by snipers as they moved supplies. Conditions were harsh. One soldier wrote Payne that he had his first bath in weeks when he found an abandoned oil drum. Correspondence acquired a new urgency. Tired as she was, Payne took up her pen daily to reply to the many men who wrote her from Korea. “If you don’t write, they send such pathetic notes that you feel so debased and cruel that you just drop everything else to grind away.”

The burdens of war fell heavily on African Americans. At the time there were almost 100,000 blacks on active duty. A dismal lack of opportunities in the United States for African Americans continued to make the military an attractive option. “Negro lads,” reported the Pittsburgh Courier in late July, “were swarming into recruiting offices.” But because of General Douglas MacArthur’s intransigency when it came to Truman’s edict to integrate the Army, they went into combat in segregated units.

The war also brought a new scrutiny to Ethel Payne.