Yasuhiro Okada“Cold War Black Orientalism”: Race, Gender,
and African American Representations ofJapanese Women during the Early 1950s(「 冷戦期の黒人オリエンタリズム」: 1950 年代
初期のアフリカ系アメリカ人による日本人
女性の表象における人種とジェンダー)Yasuhiro Okada*

SUMMARY IN JAPANESE:占領期の日本におけるアフリカ系ア
メリカ人男性兵士と日本人女性の間の親密かつ性的な関係は、「冷戦期の黒人オリエンタリズム」(Cold War Black Orientalism)の言説において中心的なテーマとなった。本稿は、1950年代初期の占領下の日本とアメリカ本国という太平洋を横断するアフリ
カ系アメリカ人コミュニティにおける、日本人女性の表象をめぐる言説形成のポリティクスを、主に人種とジェンダーの観点から分析するものである。黒人兵士と日本人女性の関係をめぐるアメリカ黒人社会の論争は、冷戦初期の占領、軍事化、反共産主義、「封じ込め」の文化を背景に、アフリカ系アメリカ人が人種関係、ジェンダー規範、性的行動、アジア人のエスニシ
ティ、国際関係などの諸問題を議論し、アイデンティティの政治を再編成していく契機となった。
占領下の日本に駐留していたアフリカ系アメリカ人男性および女性は、日本人女性との関係をめぐるジェンダー摩擦の中で、「従順」かつ「性的に奔放」な日本人女性というアメリカのオリ
エンタリズムにおける伝統的な表象をそれぞれ異なる形で援用しながら、エンパワメントを達成しようとした。また、黒人兵士と結婚した日本人花嫁に関するアメリカ本国の言説は、異人種間結婚をめぐる人種とジェンダーのポリティクスや、日米間の友好関係の樹立を基調とする冷戦期のオリエンタリズムの展開の中で、日本人花嫁のアメリカ黒人社会への統合を促進するものであった。さらに、「従順」
な日本人花嫁像は、家庭性や伝* 岡田

泰弘 Visiting Fellow, Institute of American and Canadian Studies, Sophia University,

Tokyo, Japan.

45Cold War Black Orientalism

統的な性別役割を重視する冷戦初期の保守的な性的規範や、黒人社会の家父長的な伝統の枠組みにおいて、アフリカ系アメリ
カ人のジェンダー意識・役割を強化するものであった。

Introduction
In September 1950, a newspaper article published in Baltimore Afro-American
attracted attention of African American communities on both sides of the Pacificover the intimate, sexual relationships between black male soldiers and Japanesewomen in Japan under U.S. military occupation.1 Under the sensational title“GI’s in Tokyo Lavish Gifts on Jap Girls, Shun Own Clubs,” Afro-Americancorrespondent James Hicks revealed that gender conflicts existed between African American men and women in Japan over the issue of black GIs who weredating Japanese women. Hicks reported: “Colored women in civilian duty inoccupied Japan are being ignored by colored soldiers stationed here to the pointthat many of the women swear that once they get ‘stateside’ again, they will neverso much as speak to a colored soldier who has been stationed in Japan.”2 This
article fueled a series of controversies over black-Japanese romance, sexual relations, and marriage in African American communities across the Pacific during theearly 1950s.
This paper aims to reconsider the U.S. Orientalist discourse of Japanesewomen in general, and those in relationships with U.S. Army soldiers in particular, during the early Cold War period from the perspective of African Americans.
The current research on this topic has centered on the mainstream U.S. media andcultural representations of GI-Japanese marriage, which has focused mostly on
white-Japanese couples, and the Japanese American press’s coverage of marriages between Nisei soldiers and Japanese women.3 Japanese women who werein intimate relationships with African American soldiers were central to the postwar African American discursive investment in Japan, which I call “Cold War
Black Orientalism,” in the changing international relationship between the U.S.
and Japan, and the domestic transformations in racial and gender regimes in the
U.S. This paper examines the postwar African American representations ofJapanese women, whose international, interracial relationships with black GIs
took the forms of romance, marriage, and even prostitution, in major black newspapers and magazines during and immediately after the U.S. military occupation46

Yasuhiro Okada

of mainland Japan (1945-1952). This study stresses the “trans-Pacific” dimension in the discursive formation of “Cold War Black Orientalism” in the twodifferent but interconnected contexts of occupied Japan and the U.S. home front.
It also focuses on the “gendered” and “racialized” agencies of African American
men and women who engaged in the debate over black GI-Japanese women
intimacy and sexuality from both sides of the Pacific as major actors in shaping
the postwar U.S.-Japanese and black-Japanese relationships.
This paper argues that African American men and women employed, andeven exploited, the dominant sexual and gender images of Japanese women in thecontemporary U.S. Orientalist discourse in racial and gendered terms in the crossnational discursive spheres in occupied Japan and in the U.S., through which theygrappled with the issues of race relations, gender convention, sexual practice,
Asian ethnicity, and global politics within the Cold War imperatives of occupation, militarization, international integration, and the cultures of “containment” aswell as the postwar African American politics of race, gender, class, sex, andintimacy. In occupied Japan, African American men and women resorted to U.S.
Orientalist representations of Japanese femininity from the opposite sides toachieve the gendered form of empowerment within the specific “militarized”
context of their encounter and interaction with Japanese women. On the stateside, African Americans invested in the U.S. Orientalist discourse of “U.S.-Asian
integration,” which historian Christina Klein calls “Cold War Orientalism,” inracialized and gendered ways to reconstitute the image of the Japanese brides of
black GIs, or the women of the former “enemy” nation, as new members of their
racial and national communities in the U.S., within the boundaries of the postwar black politics of interracial marriage, the cultures of domestic “containment,” and anti-Communism in U.S. foreign relations during the early Cold War
period.4

Literature Review
The major purpose of this paper is to critically revisit the thesis in Alex
Lubin’s In Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954(2005), one of the few works of scholarship focusing on African American representations of black GI-Japanese women intimacy and sexuality in the context of
the U.S. occupation of Japan.5 His comparative analysis of the black newspaper
47

Cold War Black Orientalism

and magazine representations of GI interracial intimacy in Europe and Asia suggests that “while the politics of interracial intimacy in Europe posited white
women as the appropriate judges of black masculine desirability, the same politics in Japan posited Japanese women as engendering black patriarchy.”6 As
Lubin correctly points out, the black press was instrumental in sustaining the“patriarchal” privileges of African American GIs with respect to Japanese womenby rearticulating the influential U.S. representations of Asian female sexuality and“docility.” However, Lubin’s discussion of the black press representations ofblack-Japanese intimacy narrowly focuses on the stereotypical reformation ofJapanese women within the traditional framework of Orientalism, and its implications on black patriarchy. First, he fails to capture the “gendered” dynamics inthe discursive formation process in which African American women, as well as
men, contested over the notions of Japanese femininity in the larger international,
domestic political contexts of militarization, occupation, the cultures of “containment,” and U.S.-Japanese integration during the early Cold War period. Secondly,
Lubin overlooks the “trans-Pacific” dimension in the politics of black-Japanese
intimacy, paying exclusive attention to the romantic, sexual relationships between black men and Japanese women on the side of occupied Japan. He does nottake the black representations of Japanese brides on the American side into
consideration at all, although his broad definition of “interracial intimacy” includes interracial sex, marriage, and romance.7 Next, Lubin’s narrow attention to
the “intimate” spheres of black-Japanese relationships in occupied Japan ignores
another, but more exploitative form of the GI-Japanese sexual interaction which
affected the construction of the “militarized” sense of masculinity among blacksoldiers: prostitution. Finally, Lubin does not consider the specific historicalexperience of African American men and women in occupied Japan, who achieveda racialized sense of empowerment in gender-specific ways, as a material context
for the productions of the gendered discourses about Japanese women.
This paper is built upon, and aims to contribute to, recent developments ininterdisciplinary, international scholarship in the following three fields: U.S.
Orientalism, the U.S. military occupation of Japan, and the black-Asian relationship. First, more scholars have been engaged in the project to complicate the stillinfluential Edward Said’s model of Orientalism by historicizing, racializing, andgendering the discursive formation of the ontological/epistemological difference
between the West and the East in U.S. politics and culture across time.8 In Cold
War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (2003), Christina
48

Yasuhiro Okada

Klein examines the popular U.S. representations of Asia and the Pacific within
the specific historical context of postwar U.S. global expansion, Cold War culture,
and Asian decolonization. She argues that middlebrow intellectuals andWashington policymakers were instrumental in the cultural productions of the“sentimental” discourse of “U.S.-Asian integration,” both at international anddomestic levels, which was predicated on such values as interdependence, sympathy, and hybridity.9 More specifically on the postwar U.S.-Japanese relationship, historian Naoko Shibusawa, in America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining theJapanese Enemy (2006), traces the “remarkable reversal” in the American public
discourse of the Japanese from “hated racial enemy to valuable ally” within theintersecting ideologies of race, gender, and maturity during the two decades after
WWII.10 However, these authors conceptualize the U.S. Orientalist views ofAsia in general, and of Japan in particular, during the early Cold War period as amonolithic, rather than heterogeneous, discourse. Their exclusive attention to thecoverage of Asians and the Japanese in the mainstream U.S. media leaves
unexamined how the black press, among the minority media, negotiated the U.S.
“Cold War Orientalist” discourse in racialized terms in its representations ofJapanese women.
Next, a growing amount of scholarship on the U.S. military occupation of
mainland Japan and Okinawa addresses the issues of race, gender, and sexuality inthe encounters between American GIs and Japanese citizens by exploring such
topics as interracial intimacy, military prostitution, international marriage, andmixed-race children.11 The existence of African American GIs, among the occupation troops, further complicated the racial landscape of the U.S.-Japanese fraternization, because of the institutional racism in the U.S. Army and in American
society at large as well as the existence of racial stigma against blacks in Japanesesociety. Some scholars have examined the social and cultural implications of the
racial visibility of African American GIs on the discursive process in which theJapanese reinforced, reconfigured, and complicated their perception of African
Americans as well as their own racial and national identities.12 The current research on African Americans in occupied Japan, however, focuses mostly on
Japanese literary and popular representations of black soldiers, Japanese warbridesof black GIs, and their mixed-race children, while diminishing the agency ofAfrican Americans, who were living either in Japan or in the U.S., as major actors
in shaping the contours of the postwar black-Japanese relationship. In particular,
the presence of African American women, who were stationed in Japan with49Cold War Black Orientalism

various social statuses during that period, has been completely ignored in bothacademic and popular discourses of the U.S.-Japanese encounter in occupied
Japan, with more attention given to the “masculine” aspect of the U.S. military
engagement and fraternization there.
Finally, there is an emerging body of scholarship on the “black-Asian” relationship which explores the interracial and international encounters, either in material
or imaginary terms, between peoples of the African and Asian diasporas acrosstime and space.13 In Afro-Orientalism (2004), literary critic Bill V. Mullen reconsiders Paul Gilroy’s influential framework of “black Atlantic” in the field of Black
Diaspora Studies, arguing that his “narrow attention to a decidedly Westernized
triangle of influence—Europe/Africa/North America—occludes significant areasof the diasporic world and black experience.” 14 Mullen configures “AfroOrientalism” as an alternative discursive site on race, nation, and global politics
for the “dialectic” formation of Afro-Asian solidarities beyond the temptations ofcultural and racial essentialism. But, Mullen’s materialist criticism of the AfroAsian connections in the U.S. narrowly focuses on the interracial formation inradical and revolutionary terms along the nexus of race, class, and nation, withsome attention to gender. He fails to fully consider other critical dimensions ofAfro-Asian interaction and imagination, especially the intimate and sexual aspects of their relationships, including interracial dating, marriage, and reproduction, in the overlapping diasporas of Africans and Asians within and beyond the
U.S. context.
More specifically, most historical studies on the black-Japanese relationshiphave focused on how African American intellectual and political leaders forged aninternationalist sense of solidarity with the Japanese as racial allies, or critiqued
Japan’s imperialist aggression and colonial projects in Asia, within the global
political dynamics of their struggle against racism, colonialism, and imperialism,
as well as the changing international context of the U.S.-Japanese relationship in
the first half of the twentieth century.15 The fact that there were few face-to-faceencounters and interactions between blacks and the Japanese before WWII partly
explains that the prewar black-Japanese relationship was mainly represented byhistorians as a male-dominant, internationalist discursive site of cross-racial affiliations and unities. But, the centrality of race and nation as analytical categories in
the precedent studies on the black-Japanese relationship has failed to reveal thegender and sexual dynamics of the “trans-Pacific” encounters between African

50

Yasuhiro Okada

American and Japanese men and women through the period of the U.S. militaryoccupation of Japan.16

Black Orientalist Representations of Japanese Womenin Occupied JapanThe controversy over the romantic, sexual relationships between black soldiers and Japanese women in Japan became an international discursive terrain, in
which African American men and women contested over the issues of black
masculinity, femininity, gender relations, and interracial intimacy within the historical context of the U.S. military occupation of Japan. African American soldiers in Japan, like other American GIs, asserted the “militarized” sense of masculinity in their claim on sexual and patriarchal privileges vis-à-vis Japanesewomen in general, and sex workers in particular, as members of the U.S. occupation forces. As feminist political scientist Cynthia Enloe theoretically elaborates,
the process of “militarization” in international politics depended on the gendered“maneuvers” to control women and the notions of femininity, as well as masculinity, by military and civilian policy makers.17 African American GIs appropriatedthe highly sexualized and gendered images of Japanese femininity in the contemporary U.S. Orientalist discourse for their “masculinized” sense of empowerment within the specific “militarized” context of their encounter and interaction
with Japanese women in occupied Japan. Black soldiers also employed thedominant U.S. Orientalist representation of “submissive” Japanese women as
exemplars of womanhood to contain the gender empowerment of African American women, who were stationed in Japan either for military or civilian duty,
within the cultural boundaries of black patriarchy and domestic ideology in thelarger society of Cold War America. African American women, in response,
confronted the “masculinist” backlash against black womanhood by criticizing
black GIs’ interracial sexual behavior and the conservative gender attitude ofJapanese women. How did African American men and women deploy the mainstream U.S. Orientalist representations of Japanese women in gender-specificways to achieve their own masculine/feminine empowerment in occupied Japan,
either by conforming to or subverting the gender and sexual ideology and practicein the U.S. military, in black communities, and in American society at large duringthat period?
51Cold War Black Orientalism

In occupied Japan, African American soldiers were placed in privileged positions and held considerable power and prerogative in their relation to Japanesecitizens as members of the U.S. occupation troops, while they continued serving
in segregated units and being discriminated against in the U.S. Army.18 For the
African American GIs who experienced greater racial acceptance among the local
people, their encounters with Japanese men and women were influential in thereconfiguration of their racial perception beyond the social context of racial oppression and the narrow black-white dichotomy in the U.S.19 Their intimate,sexual interactions with Japanese women became crucial for black GIs to achieve
the “masculinized” sense of empowerment within the specific racial and sexual
politics in Japan. Compared with the European women whose sexual relationships with black GIs in occupied Germany caused racial conflicts among bothwhite American GIs and German citizens, due to the existence of social taboos
against black-white interracial sexuality on both sides of the Atlantic, Japanesewomen were more sexually accessible for African American soldiers not only
because of the absence of such taboos, but also because of the availability of thehighly sexualized image of Japanese women in U.S. Orientalism.20
Afrian Americans reappropriated and reinforced the preexisting image of“promiscuous” Japanese women in the long tradition of Western Orientalism
within the specific historical context of the U.S. military occupation of Japan.21
Pvt. Frank A. Topsail, an Ebony magazine reader from Nurnberg, Germany, questioned the sexual morals and behavior on the part of Japanese women: “If you will
check on the birth and sex rate in Japan, you will find that most of the girls ofJapan are very sexually over-trained. The birth rate is one of the highest in theworld. I really cannot believe that most of those rape cases, if so, are on thesoldiers’ part.”22 Topsail invoked the dominant sexualized Orientalist representation of “lewd” Japanese women when he blamed the widespread interracial sexual
relations, either intimate or violent, in Japan on the alleged sexual “promiscuity”
of Japanese women and Japanese sexual culture, without any consideration of thesexual morals of American GIs. The black press was instrumental in the resexualization of Japanese culture, as well as Japanese women, by observing thevarious forms of sexual encounters between American soldiers and Japanesewomen in occupied Japan. Several articles reported on the Japanese sexualbusinesses catering to American GIs, including cabarets, brothels, and geisha
houses, and expressed concern about the negative implications of such “promiscuous” Japanese culture on the morals of black soldiers.23
52

Yasuhiro Okada

Combined with the traditional sexual image of Japanese women in U.S.
Orientalism, African American GIs committed to the “masculinist” sexual ideology and culture in the U.S. military in their expression of sexual attitudes toward
Japanese women.24 James Hicks of the Baltimore Afro-American elaborated
explicitly on the implications of the alleged sexual “immorality” of Japanesewomen on shaping the “militarized” sexual behavior of black GIs in Japan:
Boiled down to plain bare facts, the soldiers out on the loose in Japan havefound that the morals of the Japanese girls coupled with the fact that he ishere as a conqueror of the Japanese people, make it far more easy for him tohave a “good time” by dating Japanese girls than going around with his own
girls who are here under government regulations and subjected to rigid moral
discipline.25
Hicks suggested that black soldiers invested in the traditional Orientalist image of“promiscuous” Japanese women, combined with their “conqueror’s” sense of
American masculinity, in the formation of their sexual attitude toward Japanesewomen. In response to the Hicks’ accusation, some African American GIs explained their own sexual behavior in Japan as male sexual nature, driving men
across racial and national boundaries to pursue heterosexual relationships withnative women in the areas under military domination. One black GI defended his
association with Japanese women as a universal sexual phenomenon shared by all
military men without considering its political and social implications: “This isboth flattering and extremely well liked by all men and whether it is good or not,the GI’s in Japan have simply been doing what other men do everywhere else—going for the women who appeal to them most. . . . And boy, do these Japanese
girls have appeal.”26 Another black soldier asserted that Hicks should have pointed
out in his article that the “white soldiers are doing the same thing.”27 Those black
GIs unwittingly invested in the hegemonic discourse of “militarized” heterosexual masculinity when they consolidated a “victor’s” sense of sexual privileges,
which they shared with white American GIs and other male soldiers across timeand space, with respect to Japanese women.
Other African American GIs revealed a more highly exploitative dimensionof their sexual morals and behavior in occupied Japan, which degraded Japanesewomen as mere sex objects, in their attitude toward Japanese prostitutes. In his
defense against the allegation of Ralph Matthews of the Baltimore Afro-American53Cold War Black Orientalismthat black male GIs were not asking black female soldiers in the Women’s Army
Corps (WAC) for dates in favor of Japanese prostitutes, one black officer stationed in Yokohama admitted that the WACs who “invariably travel in pairs”
were inconvenient for an easy pick up, because a “guy on short-term leave hasn’t
got a lot of time to waste jockeying for position.”28 According to him, the black
WACs, who “expect to be pampered just as if they were at home under theirmama’s apron strings,” were not suitable for a more casual sexual life which someblack soldiers were expecting to pursue in Japan. In contrast, the Japanese street
walkers called “pom poms,” who were not only wandering alone, but not begging
for dates, long courtships, or promises to marry, were more appropriate companions for black GIs to “make a fast play.”29 The remark of only one black officer
might not fully substantiate the hypothesis that African American GIs, whether
consciously or not, resorted to the dominant Orientalist discourse of Japanese
female sexuality in their “militarized” sexual behavior toward Japanese prostitutes. But as Cynthia Enloe elaborates on the U.S. military and prostitution in
Asia, “without myths of Asian women’s compliant sexuality would many American men be able to sustain their own identities of themselves as manly enough toact as soldiers?”30
The black press also rearticulated the mainstream U.S. Orientalist discourse
which represented Japanese women as victims of male-dominant militarism andtraditional gender relations in Japanese society, and emphasized the “chivalrous”
role of Americans to liberate Japanese women from patriarchal domination in thecontext of U.S. Cold War propaganda.31 Franklin Whisonant, the war correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier, explained why Japanese women captured thehearts of black GIs: the “woman, since time immemorial has been taught to besubmissive and servile to the men folk. She is supposed to cater to his every
whim, be at his beck and call at all times and forever be ready, willing and able towork as much, if not more, than the man in any project undertaken by them.”32
Ralph Matthews stressed, too, the long history of Japanese patriarchy whichcharacterized the subservient attitude among Japanese women, stating that they
“have been taught for centuries that the man is boss and they accept this without
question.”33 Matthews indicated with his illustration how attentively Japanesewomen were catering to the various wishes and needs of her man by cooking his
favorite dishes, sewing his clothes, and washing his body in a steaming bath every
night (see Figure 1).34

54

Yasuhiro Okada

Figure 1. Japanese Woman Attending to an African American Man at Home
Source: Baltimore Afro-American, September 22, 195155

Cold War Black Orientalism

Regardless of their rank within the U.S. Army, African American GIs asserted their patriarchal privileges vis-à-vis Japanese women by embracing theinfluential U.S. Orientalist image of “subservient” Japanese women as a virtue
catering to their masculine pride and desires for power. One black enlisted man
stationed in South Korea praised Japanese women’s traditionally-nurtured obedience toward their men as their major charming point. He declared that the “wholething is that the women of the Eastern world have been conditioned to the factthat a man is head of the house and when one falls in love with a guy she simply
gets behind him and lets him lead the way.”35 Lt. Clinton Moorman of the 24th
Infantry Regiment associated loyalty, devotion, thriftiness, and domesticity, thecharacteristics which reflected the traditional gender roles in patriarchal societies,
with Japanese women.36 Another black sergeant stressed the maternal nature ofJapanese women as a distinctive characteristic of their sexual appeal. He noted,“When my Japanese girl friend embraces me, I feel that nothing in the world canharm me—she makes me feel just that secure.”37
Some African American soldiers invoked the dominant U.S. discourse of“submissive” Japanese women as models of domestic womanhood for African
American women. One black GI deployed such an image as a point of reference
for criticizing black womanhood: “They never saw the day they could hold a lightto a Japanese girl when it comes to treating a man like he should be treated. Letthem howl. Maybe it will wake them up and they will stop taking men for
granted.”38 As 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 andafter WWII.39 The celebration of “submissive” Japanese women by this blacksoldier as appropriate models for black womanhood reflected the traditional
patriarchal culture in African American society at large.40 The problem of intraracial
gender conflicts within black communities, especially the patriarchal privileges,
misogyny, and sexism on the part of black men, had been marginalized for a longtime in the African American struggle for racial equality. Racial solidarity had
been privileged over gender identity in the male-dominant leadership structure of
the mainstream black activist organizations.41
Moreover, the elevation of Japanese women as exemplars of black womanhood by black soldiers should be considered within the specific historical context
of the tension-filled intraracial gender relations which occurred between African
American men and women in occupied Japan. The black “masculinist” represen56

Yasuhiro Okada

tations of Japanese women functioned as a disciplinary discourse to police thegender behavior of the black women stationed in Japan, who were exploringalternative gender identities and roles within the boundaries of their politicalprivileges, improved economic conditions, and elevated social status in occupied
Japan.42 The African American women who were serving in the civilian branch of
the U.S. Army in Japan, whom GIs called “DACs” as the abbreviation for “Department of Army Civilians,” became the major target of criticism by black GIs,
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 black 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 thatthey held the “simulated rank of an officer” in the Army. The black enlisted men
who were asking 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.43 These black officers blamed the elite
civilian black women, who were claiming their sense of superiority and classprivilege vis-à-vis black enlisted men, for violating the masculine pride and patriarchal privilege of black GIs, whose chance of promotion was limited due to thepersistence of discrimination within the U.S. Army.
African American soldiers also pathologized the black single women, either
civilian or military, who were engaged in the “unfeminine” U.S. military project ofoccupation in peace time, as deviant from the gender roles and sexual standards interms of Cold War domesticity as well as black patriarchy.44 African American
officers claimed that black DACs and those in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC),
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 “notinterested in men anyway.”45 These black officers rearticulated and reinforced thepathological discourse of the “militarized” women, by invoking the association
between women’s sexual independence, female masculinity, and lesbianism in the
popular discourse of the Women’s Army Corps, in their criticism of the African
American DACs and WACs who highly enhanced their sense of femininity inJapan.46 African American soldiers resorted to the Orientalist representation of“submissive” Japanese women to contain the gender empowerment of thoseblack women as a threat to the conservative gender and sexual regime of the57

Cold War Black Orientalism

period. Furthermore, African American men in Japan, who were embracing thedominant “masculinized” racial consciousness and gender ideology of the blacksociety at large, took their patriarchal privileges for granted and did not hesitate toimpose them on their women, whether they were black or Japanese.
In response to the black “masculinist” discursive denigration of their womanhood, African American women who were stationed in occupied Japan confronted the charge of their gender deviancy by targeting the gender attitude of both
Japanese women and the black men who were dating them. Ethel Payne, who wasthen serving as a director of Army Services Club in Yokohama, was the civilian
African American woman who most vocally opposed interracial dating and marriage between black GIs and Japanese women. On the one hand, Payne criticallychallenged Japanese women’s “subservient” attitude, the gender characteristic
which black men admired so greatly, as just a conventional cultural pattern of
behavior in Japanese patriarchy. Payne declared, “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 affection.”47 She further
charged Japanese women with exploiting their “helplessness” as a “powerfulweapon and asset” so that they could win the hearts of black GIs.48 On the other
hand, Payne observed that black GIs found their masculine pride and ego moresatisfied by Japanese than 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.”49 Their “feminist” sense of criticism of “submissive” Japanesewomen, combined with their apparent competition and rivalry with Japanesewomen, became a focal point among black women in Japan for opposing interracial romance and marriage between black men and Japanese women.
African American women also criticized the “militarized” sexual behavior of
African American men in their relation to Japanese women in general, and prostitutes in particular. One black WAC stationed in Yokohama clearly revealed herclassist disdain for the degraded womanhood of Japanese prostitutes. She insisted that they “get away with murder, because, to a girl who never had but one
kimono in her life, even a $2 dress is a windfall.”50 However, she expressed more
bitter contempt for the black GIs who were sexually pursing such prostitutes on
the streets by ignoring black women. She stated: “Some of these fools from the
backwoods, who perhaps never had a girl in their lives, think they are living greatwith a little straight-haired girl fawning all over them. Some of them spend all58

Yasuhiro Okada

their earnings on their girls and their families while their own relatives back homeare suffering (italics mine).”51 In her eyes, these black soldiers, who could notsexually attract women on the American side, approached Japanese sex workers
with the economic privilege which they were able to attain through power disparities in occupied Japan. Furthermore, such men violated the familial ideal of
Cold War domesticity by lavishing money and gifts on Japanese women forsexual favors at the expense of the economic well-being of their families in theU.S.
The discursive exchanges between African American women and men overblack GIs’ interracial relationships in Japan further revealed the complex issues ofcolor, femininity, and beauty in the black politics of interracial intimacy in occupied Japan. The WAC’s statement quoted above indicates clearly the importanceof the physical features of race and its implications for the definition of femininity in the black women’s discourse against black-Japanese intimacy. Her explicit
reference to the “straight-hair” of Japanese women suggests that hair texture
served significantly in the African American sexual politics during that period.
Ethel Payne declared, too, that skin color mattered in the shaping of interracialromance between black men and Japanese women. Invoking strategically thehistorical myth of black men sexually seeking white women, she claimed, “the hueof the girls range from very fair to a nut brown. Hence it can be easily understood
why our boys fall for them.”52 The relationships between black men and Japanese women, who assumed an ambiguous position in the bipolar racial spectrum
between black and white in terms of the dominant sexual politics of interracial
intimacy, complicated the gendered problem of racial loyalty in Japan. Moreover, the double standards in the black sexual politics of interracial intimacy andin the “masculinist” sexual culture of American society at large, which functioned
to police the sexual behavior of black women while encouraging black men toenhance their racial and masculine empowerment through their pursuit of interracial relationships with Japanese women, made intraracial gender antagonism
between African American women and men more explosive in Japan.53
African American women actively participated in the counter-hegemonic
discursive formation of Japanese women in occupied Japan, when they defended
their womanhood by resisting the black “masculinist” backlash against their gender empowerment. African American women, particularly those living on the59Cold War Black Orientalism

American side, played more visible roles in the black representations of Japanesewomen, as more Japanese brides of African American GIs migrated to the U.S.,
and the major issue in the controversy on black-Japanese intimacy shifted to theirmarital lives in the U.S. rather than their romance and sexual relations in Japan.

On the Home Front: the Integration of Japanese Brides
into African American Communities
The international, interracial marriage between American GIs and Japanesewomen attracted more attention from those on the American side during the1950s, as the amendment to the War Brides Act in 1947, its extension in 1950, andthe McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 finally permitted a large number of Japanesebrides to enter the U.S. to live with their husbands and children.54 Naoko Shibusawa
contends that the U.S. mainstream media and popular culture emphasized theintimate relationships between “Euroamerican” men and Japanese women despite the fact that the Nisei and African Americans constituted one-fourth of theAmerican GIs who married a Japanese woman during the decade after WWII.
Shibusawa explains that this racially-skewed U.S. representation of GI-Japanesemarriage as white-Japanese couples served as a metonym for the postwar U.S.Japanese relationship as the relation of the “predominantly white” United Stateswith Japan. She further suggests that white-Japanese couples allowed Americans
to approve such interracial relations as less socially taboo than white-black ones
during the early years of the Civil Rights Movement.55 However, the Japanesebrides who married African American GIs and migrated to the U.S. were oftenfeatured in major black newspapers and magazines, which Shibusawa did notconsult at all in her study, during the same period. In the controversy on Japanesewarbrides, African Americans negotiated the boundaries of racial acceptance andnational integration of Japanese women in racial and gendered terms within thespecific historical contexts of the black politics of interracial marriage, U.S.Japanese integration, and the cultural politics of domestic “containment” on the
U.S. home front during the early Cold War years.
First, the postwar black politics of interracial marriage, as well as the larger
U.S. history of interracial intimacy and sexuality, shaped how African Americans
represented the Japanese women who married black GIs. The controversy on
interracial marriage became a contested discursive terrain through which African
60Yasuhiro Okada

Americans attempted to reframe in the “public” sphere the issues of romance andsexuality, which the postwar U.S. courts and popular culture attempted to “contain” as “private” matters within the boundaries of the nuclear family, until the
U.S. Supreme Court finally declared as unconstitutional the bans on interracial
marriage in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision. Black newspapers and magazines played a central role in publicizing the interracial marriage between black
men and white women both at home and abroad as victories for civil rights andblack masculinity. Black leaders and activists in such civil rights organizations as
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) werereluctant to defend publicly the right to intermarriage on the home front, in spiteof their strong support of black GIs’ right to intermarriage abroad. They were
careful not to reproduce the segregationist’s argument, which conflated civil rights
with racial amalgamation, in their legal struggle for integration.56
In contrast to the strong opposition among African American women to
black GIs’ intimate relationships with Japanese women in occupied Japan, theblack press’s coverage of black-Japanese couples focused on the generally positive reactions to them from the larger black society on the American side. The
debate over black-Japanese intermarriage in black communities functioned insome ways as a touchstone for African Americans to test their racial tolerance
toward the Japanese, at both domestic and international levels, within the postwar transformations in the U.S.-Japanese relationship, while complicating the
traditional black politics of interracial intimacy which operated within the central
nexus of black-white sexual relations. Carey Noaldin, a Chicago Defender reader
from Philadelphia, expressed her total approval of black-Japanese intermarriage
with the following statement: “I am just about convinced now that inter-marriage
is about the only solution to most of our problems—domestic and international.
How else can a real understanding of people be obtained except through so
intimate a thing as marriage?” She considered black-Japanese marriage as lesscontroversial because the “color” perspective was subordinated in the intermarriage between the groups of “dark” people.57 Distinguishing black-Japaneseintermarriage clearly from black-white within the historical context of interracial
intimacy in the U.S., she celebrated black-Japanese couples as symbol of theinternational, interracial understanding between African Americans and the peopleof Japanese descent beyond wartime hostilities.
The reactions to black-Japanese intermarriage in the stateside African American communities took some different forms in terms of gender, class, and region.
61

Cold War Black Orientalism

One newspaper article highlighted, in November 1950, the generally tolerant
attitude toward black-Japanese intermarriage among African American women. It
reported that “if our boys find love and romance in far off Japan, let them have it,is the consensus,” although there was some regional variation in their responses.
According to the article, the strongest opposition to their marriage was foundamong those living in Atlanta, one of the Southern states with the most oppressive history of interracial sexual relations. The majority of black women there
thought it was “terrible” and “awful” that African American men wanted permission to marry Japanese girls. The article further revealed the existence of ambivalence among black women in their expression of racial tolerance toward suchinterracial marriage. It stated that “tolerance is rapidly taking the place of theformer resentful attitude toward overseas girls, even though the foreign girls aretaking away the scarcest commodity in the U.S. market, MEN.”58 African American women, especially single ones, considered black-Japanese intermarriage froma more gendered perspective as an issue of interracial competition with Japanesewomen over black men as intimate and sexual partners.59
In the same article, the Pittsburgh Courier featured the following commentof Nannie Burroughs, the president of the Women’s Auxiliary of the National
Baptist Convention, as a representative view of black-Japanese marriage among
middle-class African American women in the nation’s capital, although it reflected
her individual sensitivity to gender and women’s issues in the black politics ofinterracial intimacy:60
What would be the objection? It’s up to the couple; marriage is a personalmatter. If it is not forbidden by law in Japan, and the soldiers entered the
Army without knowledge of any restrictions on marriages of this kind, thenthe question should not be raised at all. The world’s on fire . . . better thatthat fire be put out first; then the race question will settle itself.61
Burroughs’ remark about black-Japanese intermarriage was noteworthy, because
she was more critical of black-white interracial marriage as a form of assimilation
into the dominant white American society and a lack of racial pride, asserting thatblacks “should pitch in and make the race worth belonging to instead of escaping
into a race that is already made.”62 Among many African Americans who were“ambivalent” about their acceptance of interracial marriage in practice while supporting the right to intermarry in principle during the 1940s and 1950s, those in62

Yasuhiro Okada

the middle-class were most critical of interracial marriage because of their classspecific investment in the politics of respectability and racial unity.63 Burroughs
did not consider African American GIs marrying Japanese women as racial betrayal, because their interracial marriage was less explosive and disrespectable
than black-white ones in light of the U.S. history of interracial sexuality, and did
not promise them upward social mobility within the racial hierarchies in contemporary white-dominant American society. In addition, Burroughs privatized theissue of black-Japanese intermarriage instead of politicizing it, when she considered marriage as a “personal” matter, or the problem of an individual’s choice ofpartner. This was the major strategy of African American civil rights leaders intheir treatment of the issue of interracial marriage, especially between blacks andwhites during that period.64
Next, the controversy over black-Japanese intermarriage in black newspapers and magazines became a discursive strategy for African Americans to reshape the image of Japanese brides, or the women of the former “enemy” race and“unassimilable” aliens, as their national and racial allies by articulating the mainstream U.S. discourse of “Cold War Orientalism” within the postwar transformations in the U.S.-Japanese relationship and the U.S. fight against Communism
during the early 1950s.65 During WWII, the black press played a crucial role inraising among black people their patriotic support for the American war effort
against Japan. Black editors and journalists invested in the dominant U.S. representation of the Japanese as an “enemy” race in their appeal for a “double victory” over fascism abroad and racism at home, while they continued perceiving
the war in the Pacific from a racial perspective without explicit identification withJapan as a leader of the “colored” people.66 The postwar black press representations of Japanese brides revealed that African Americans discursively negotiatedthe boundaries of Americanization, or the integration and assimilation of Japanesewomen into American society at large, and black communities in particular, fromtheir specific racial, as well as national, ethnic, and gendered points of view.
The black press appealed to its readers for their support for the U.S. legal
sanction of international marriage between African American GIs and Japanesewomen by highlighting the instability of such unions. It revealed that blackJapanese couples in Japan did not receive official approval from the U.S. Armyand the U.S. Consulate, and their marriage was only religiously sanctioned in
Shinto services without any recognition by the U.S. government.67 It also focusedon the “ethnic” identity of the Japanese brides of black soldiers, and emphasized
63Cold War Black Orientalism

their acculturation into the American way of life. Under the subheading “Japanese War Brides Adjust Very Easily to Western Civilization,” an Ebony magazine
article reported in March 1952 that “in a wedding involving so many vastlydifferent cultures, a great number of adjustments have to be made and the Japanese bride does most of the adjusting.”68 Occasionally, black newspapers andmagazines elaborated on the racial prejudice which Japanese people expressed intheir attitude toward the Japanese women who married black soldiers, either inJapan or in the U.S.69
The black press paid special attention to the reactions among African Americans to the Japanese brides of black soldiers who came to live in their communities. Several articles highlighted the cordial welcomes which they received fromblack families and relatives.70 Still, adjustment for Japanese brides could provedifficult, such as the social isolation they experienced in black communities and in
American society at large. Under the dramatic title, “The Loneliest Brides in
America,” an Ebony article in January 1953 revealed that the Japanese brides of
black soldiers living in Indianapolis found it hard to make friendships in a “new,strange world in U.S.” where they had “not yet been freely accepted in Negro
communities” and were also avoided in white communities as the “wives of
Negroes.”71 It reported that those Japanese brides socialized only in a small
world of Japanese girls married to black Americans and had few social interactions
with the Japanese girls married to white Americans living there. Many factors
contributed to the social isolation of Japanese brides within African American
communities. The article pointed out that “one of the most baffling barriers
between the Japanese wives and the Negro women of America is that of language.
Few of these most lonesome brides have become glib in English. Most speak asoft-voiced but weird omelette of basic English peppered with GI slang.”72 In its
treatment of the isolation problem of the Japanese brides in black communities,
the Ebony magazine stressed cultural barriers, rather than racial difference, as the
major factor which prevented the formation of interracial friendships between
Japanese brides and African American women, in order to reduce racial tensions
over the presence of such interracial couples.
This Ebony magazine article elicited many reactions from readers throughout
the nation, most of whom were sympathetic to the loneliness of Japanese brides
in the U.S. from a more racialized point of view. Some African American women
expressed their sympathetic view toward Japanese brides and even suggested
making friends with them as pen pals, by drawing on the shared experience of64

Yasuhiro Okada

social isolation which they experienced in their relationships with their neighbors
or as wives of Army career men. 73 Gladys Durham, a reader from Augusta,
Georgia wrote as her advice to the Japanese warbrides: “Keep your chin up andface this thing bravely for we often are shunned by in-laws and friends of ourhusbands and we are of the same race (italics mine).”74 Durham expressed hersincere acceptance of the racial membership of Japanese brides in black communities as wives of African American men, with whom she found commonality interms of their racial and gendered experience in the U.S.
In contrast with the de-racialized treatment of the issue in the Ebony magazine, some readers were more critical of the racial attitude toward Japanese brides
on the part of African Americans. R. D. Pitman, Jr., a reader from Altoona,Pennsylvania called for African American pleple to be “patient” and “understanding” toward the Japanese brides who were learning American ways. He bluntly
declared that the “Negroes should be the last persons to look down on anyone.”75
Edward A. Coble, who had been previously stationed for two and a half years inJapan as a member of the U.S. Navy, harshly criticized the “intolerant” and“unfriendly” treatment of Japanese brides by African Americans as “un-American.”Coble was concerned about the effect of their “cool reception” from the statesideblack communities on the black-Japanese couples in Japan, where many people
believed that “Negroes would be the last to discriminate against Japanesewarbrides.”76 The diverse opinions shown in these letters to the editor revealed
that African Americans appropriated the integrationist discourse of the U.S.
“Cold War Orientalism” in highly racialized as well as gendered terms in theirreactions to Japanese brides, while the Ebony magazine editor discussed the issue
in terms of their ethnicity to downplay the racial dimension of black-Japaneseintermarriage.
Finally, more gendered reactions among African Americans to the living ofJapanese brides in their communities were shown in the ways the black press
continually articulated its Orientalist interest in the gender attitude of Japanesewomen toward their black husbands in light of the conservative gender ideology
during that period. As historian Elaine Tyler May notes, “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.77 In African
65Cold War Black Orientalism

American society, the dominant ideology of “domestic” womanhood was influential in shaping racial activism and sexual politics, especially among middle-classwomen who defined their claim on the postwar state for equal citizenship withina “traditional gendered” sphere, while it contradicted the realities of most workingclass black women.78 Through their gendered engagement in the controversy on“submissive” Japanese brides, African Americans grappled with the terms of
black womanhood, manhood, and gender relations within the specific culturalpolitics of domestic “containment” on the U.S. home front.
Ebony magazine’s 1952 article “The Truth About Japanese War Brides”
focused on the “legendary qualities of attractive Nippon women,” by quoting thefollowing remark as representative of African American soldiers in Japan: “Man,try to find a girl on Seventh Avenue that is as kind and sweet and appreciative as
these little mooses. They appreciate the least little thing you do for them.”79 In
response to this article which implicitly critiqued black womanhood in comparison with the more “appreciative” Japanese women, some African American women,
like Nellie Hand, a married reader from Milwaukee, agreed and confessed that she
considered it as a “plain admission of guilt on the part of the Negro womenneglecting to be good wives and companions to their husbands.”80 Other African
American women, especially single ones, rejected the black “masculinist” bias in
its idealized representations of Japanese women. Ethel Jones, a reader fromVallejo, California countered that “there are some of us that are more kind andconsiderate than those Japanese girls . . . a lot of American girls that could makegood wives to service men, but you’ll only know by giving them a chance.”81 Sara
A. Trower, another black single woman from Pittsburgh, blamed African American GIs, instead of Japanese women, for their preference for interracial marriage
in Japan: “I have nothing against the Japanese girls. But I do think that our
fellows should give us a chance . . . try looking around you with your eyes open
and respect and decency in your heart.”82 Rather than targetting the “submissiveness” of Japanese women, those women questioned the attitute on the part ofAfrican American men, who idealized Japanese women just for their “appreciative” characters while devaluating black women without any sincere concern
about the virtue of their womanhood.
For the African American women living in the U.S., who were more tolerantof the gender attitude of Japanese women than those stationed in Japan, their
participation in the debate over Japanese brides gave them a chance to renegotiate
their own gender consciousness in relation to the much lauded Japanese feminin66

Yasuhiro Okada

ity within the confinements of a conservative gender norm in Cold War America.
Under the subheading “Japanese Girls Treat Husbands like Their ‘Masters’ inHome,” an Ebony article in January 1953 highlighted the antagonism between
black women and Japanese brides over the latter’s subservient attitude toward
black husbands in the U.S., arguing that “some U.S. Negro women accuse theJapanese brides of ‘spoiling our men’ and are hostile to them.”83 According to thearticle, one Japanese bride, who was discovered in sight of her neighbors greeting
her husband on “bended knees” to welcome him home just as her mother had been
doing to her father in Japan, “embarrassed her husband and made her Negro
women neighbors accuse her of ‘spoiling our men.’”84
Over the issue of whether Japanese brides were “spoiling” their black husbands through their excessive show of deference and devotion to them, someblack female readers of Ebony magazine emphasized their cultural difference. One
reader from Columbus, South Carolina stated that “as for the customs towards
their husband—these women were taught this just as we were taught many
American customs. If more of our women would try ‘spoiling’ their husbands,
they, too, will be happy as these women are.”85 Even more positively, Letha M.
Wade, a reader from Philadelphia confessed, “I felt neither envy nor hostility
toward these young women—rather I envied their husbands!”86 Other black
women even praised the Japanese brides’ devotion to their black husbands as an
exemplar of womanhood which black wives, too, could emulate in their marital
relationships. Janie C. Butts, a reader from Philadelphia claimed: “I am a Negro
woman myself, and I have a deep feeling of admiration for these women who havethe spirit and courage to defy the world in letting it know of their deep love anddevotion they have for their husbands.”87 These generally positive responses of
black women to such an attitude of Japanese brides toward their black husbands
indicated how African American women accommodated the dominant U.S. representation of “subservient” Japanese women in gendered ways so that they could
reinforce and reconfigure their gender identity and roles within the confinementsof the “domestic” imperatives during the early Cold War period. But, those black
women were unwittingly complicit in the maintenance of patriarchal privileges
among black men when they praised the “submissive” Japanese brides as exemplary womanhood, leaving the history of Japanese patriarchy unexamined as a
critical pretext for their gender attitude.

67Cold War Black Orientalism

Conclusion
In the controversy over the international, interracial relationships between
African American GIs and Japanese women in the “trans-Pacific” black communities in occupied Japan and in the U.S. during the early 1950s, African American
men and women contested over the dominant U.S. Orientalist representations ofJapanese women in racial and gendered terms to grapple with the terms of race
consciousness, gender convention, and international and interethnic relations within
the larger Cold War parameters of occupation, militarization, U.S.-Asian integration, and the cultures of “containment.” In occupied Japan, African American
men and women employed the highly sexualized and gendered images of Japanese
femininity in the contemporary U.S. Orientalism for their own masculine/feminine empowerment within the specific “militarized” context of their encounterand interaction with Japanese women, as well as the gender and sexual dynamics
in black communities and in American society at large. In Romance and Rights,
Alex Lubin argues that black newspapers and magazines deployed “racist” stereotypes about Asian women’s sexuality and their “docility” so that they could
confirm the status of black men in Japan as “deserving patriarchs.”88 The criticalpoint that Lubin overlooks here is the specific gendered, as well as racialized,
context of “militarization” in which African Americans negotiated and contested
over the notions of Japanese femininity in occupied Japan. African American
soldiers reappropriated, whether consciously or not, the prevailing U.S. Orientalist
representations of Japanese women when they asserted their “victor’s” sense of
sexual and patriarchal privileges vis-à-vis Japanese women. In contrast, African
American women deployed such images more critically so that they could challenge the conservative gender norm of the period, and defend against the black“masculinist” backlash the alternative possibilities of black womanhood which
they were exploring in Japan.
In the debate over black-Japanese intermarriage on the U.S. home front,
African American women, as well as men, rearticulated the dominant U.S. discourse of “Cold War Orientalism” in racialized and gendered ways to reimagine
Japanese women as possible partners in black GIs’ interracial marriage, newmembers in their national and racial communities, and appropriate models forblack womanhood within the boundaries of the black politics of interracial marriage, U.S.-Japanese integration, and the cultures of domestic “containment” during the early Cold War period. Lubin stresses the “limits” of the black politics of68

Yasuhiro Okada

interracial intimacy as a “civil rights” matter, which “derided” black GI-Asianromance and sexuality, while it “celebrated” black GI-European ones as a “champion of black masculinity” and “racial progress.” As he correctly notes, Japanesewomen were marginalized in terms of the racial hierarchies of womanhood in theblack politics of interracial intimacy which “privileged” white women as thejudges of black men’s “desirability.”89 Without any consideration of the black
representations of Japanese brides on the American side, Lubin fails to capture
the larger international political dynamics in which the black politics of interracial
marriage discursively invested in Japanese brides, who migrated across the Pacificto the U.S., as mediators in the postwar U.S.-Japanese and black-Japanese relationships.
Compared with traditional “Black Orientalism” as a male-dominant, internationalist discourse of interracial solidarity, based on their “nonwhiteness,”
between African Americans and the Japanese before WWII, the “Cold War Black
Orientalism” was a highly gendered sphere in which African American men andwomen invested in the mainstream U.S. Orientalist discourse of Japanese women
to negotiate in their own terms the intersecting issues of race, sex, intimacy, classand global politics in the larger political context of postwar U.S. foreign relations.
Alex Lubin contends that “nonwhite” women were excluded from the black press
representations of black GIs’ intimate relationships with occupied women in
Europe and Asia. He explains that the black politics of GI interracial intimacy“privileged” European women over “nonwhite” women, and black men overblack women.90 The fact that there was little coverage of the intimate relationships between black women and Japanese men in black newspapers and magazines only partly supports his argument that African American women were
marginalized in the black representations of interracial intimacy in Japan, as inEurope. However, African American women were not passive objects in theblack press’s exclusive coverage of the black men-Japanese women intimacy andsexuality in Japan. Rather, they were major actors in the “trans-Pacific” discursive formation of “Cold War Black Orientalism” as the critics of the “militarized”
masculinity of black GIs in occupied Japan, and active discussants in the debate
over Japanese brides on the home front. Moreover, African American women
were instrumental in reconfiguring the power alignment in the traditional model of
black-Japanese solidarity, which had been constructed around the central nexus ofrace and nation, along the lines of gender and sexuality through their genderedengagement with “Cold War Black Orientalism.” As some African American69Cold War Black Orientalism

WACs criticized the black GIs’ engagement in prostitution in Japan, the problem
of sexual subjugation of native women by American male soldiers in the areas of
the U.S. military presence might have created the conditions for the possibility of
an international, interracial formation of a women’s alliance against not only the“militarized” masculine sexual cultures, but also globalized patriarchal institutions and sexist regimes beyond the context of the U.S. military occupation ofJapan.
Notes
1 It was not until the outbreak of the Korean War that the news of the international, interracial
relationships between African American soldiers and Japanese women in occupied Japan weredisclosed to the larger black community by the war correspondents who were dispatched to East
Asia by major black newspapers. In addition to their coverage of the military activities of black
troops in Korea, some black journalists reported on the garrison life of African American GIs in
Japan, who were scattered all over mainland Japan and Okinawa and under intensive preparations
for combat missions in Korea.
2 James L. Hicks, “GI’s in Tokyo Lavish Gifts on Jap Girls, Shun Own Clubs,” Baltimore AfroAmerican, 2 September 1950.
3 Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006), 49-50. On the representations of Japanese warbrides in the JapaneseAmerican media, see Shigeyoshi Yasutomi, “Amerika no sensô hanayome heno manazashi: sôshutsu
sareru hyôshô wo megutte [Views on the War Brides in the U.S.: Over the Production of Their
Representations] in Shashi n hanayome, sensô hanayome no tadotta michi: josei imin-shi nohakkutsu [Crossing the Ocean: A New Look at the History of Japanese Picture Brides and War
Brides], ed. Noriko Shimada (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2009), 151-83; Shigeyoshi Yasutomi and
Kazuko Umezu Stout, Amerika ni watatta sensô hanayome: nichibei kokusai kekkon no paionia
no kiroku [War Brides Who Migrated to America: Records on Pioneers in the Japanese-U.S. International Marriage] (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2005), esp. chap. 4.
4 Christina Klein, Cold War Ori entali sm : Asi a i n the Mi ddlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
5 The other scholarship which refer, although briefly, to African American representations of Japanesewarbrides include Yasutomi, “Amerika no sensô hanayome heno manazashi,” 155-56; Yasutomi
and Stout, Amerika ni watatta sensô hanayome, 109-10.
6 Alex Lubin, Romance and Rights: The Poli tics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954 (Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 116.
7 Ibid., xx.
8 Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl Buck, Anna Way Wong, Mayling Soong, and theTransformation of American Orientalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Bill70

Yasuhiro Okada
V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Klein, Cold
War Orientalism; Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asians in American Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before
Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University, 1999); Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Genderin Literature, 1790-1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Sakue Ogawa,
Orientarizumu to jendâ: “chôchô fujin”no keifu [Orientalism and Gender: Genealogy of “Madame Butterfly”] (Tokyo: Hôsei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 2007).
9 Klein, Cold War Orientalism.
1 0 Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 4.
1 1 For the major general studies on U.S. military occupation of Japan in this tradition, see Shibusawa,
America’s Geisha Ally; Yukiko Koshiro, Trans-Pacifi c Racisms and the U.S. Occupation ofJapan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Michael S. Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1999); John W.
Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton andCompany, 1999); Mire Koikari, “Rethinking Gender and Power in the US Occupation of Japan,
1945-1952,” Gender and History 11, no. 2 (July 1999): 313-35. More extensive bibliographicalinformation on each specific topic will be given in the following discussion.
1 2 Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa, chap. 3; Koshiro, Trans-Paci fic
Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan, esp. chap. 5; Hiromi Furukawa and Tetsushi Furukawa,
Nihonjin to afurika-kei amerikajin: nichi-bei kankeishi ni okeru sono shosô [Japanese and African Americans: Historical Aspects of Their Relations] (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2004), part 3, chaps.
1-3, 9; John G. Russell, Nihonjin no kokujin-kan: mondai wa “chibikuro sambo” dake dewa nai[Japanese Perceptions of Blacks: The Problem Is More than “Little Black Sambo”] (Tokyo:
Shinhyôron, 1991), esp. chap. 2.
1 3 The recent general scholarship on Afro-Asian encounters include the following: Fred Ho and BillV. Mullen, eds., Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African
Ameri cans and Asian Ameri cans (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Heike RaphaelHernandez and Shannon Steen, eds., AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York:New York University Press, 2006); Hazel M. McFerson, ed., Blacks and Asians: Crossings, Conflict and Commonality (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2006); Mullen, Afro-Orientalism; The
Afro-Asian Century: A special issue of positions 11, no. 1 (Spring 2003); Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2001).
1 4 Mullen, Afro-Orientalism, xxix.
1 5 Mark Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japanese and China: Black Internationali sm 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); and “The Pro-Japanese Utterances of W. E. B. Du Bois,” Contribu-

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tions in Black Studies 13, no. 14 (1995/1996): 201-17; Ernest Allen, Jr., “Waiting for Tojo: The
Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932-1943,” Gateway Heritage 15 (Fall 1994): 16-33; and“When Japan Was ‘Champion of the Darker Races’: Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black
Messian ic Nat ionalism,” The Black Scholar 24, no. 1 ( Winter 1994 ): 23 - 46; Gerald Horne,“Tokyo-Bound: African Americans and Japan Confront White Supremacy,” Souls 3, no. 3 (Summer
2001): 16-28; 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 (Spring 2007): 191-213; and “Giant Steps of the Black Freedom Struggle: Trans-Pacific Connections between Black America and Japan in the Twentieth Century” (PhD. diss., University of
Minnesota, 2004); Etsuko Taketani, “The Cartography of the Black Pacific: James Weldon
Johnson’s Along This Way,” American Quarterly 59, no. 1 (March 2007): 79-106; Keiko Araki,“Daiichiji sekaitaisen-go ni okeru beikoku kokujin no nihonjin kan: gâvi undô wo chûshin ni[Black American Views of Japan after World War I: Focusing on Garvey Movement],” Hôgaku
seijigaku ronkyû 66 (September 2005): 69-95; Yuko Takeuchi, “W. E. B. Duboisu to nihon [W. E.
B. Du Bois and Japan],” Shien 54, no. 2 (1994): 79-96. For the major scholarship which examine
the black-Japanese encounter from a Japanese perspective, see Furukawa, Nihonjin to afurika-kei
amerikajin; Yukiko Koshiro, “Beyond an Alliance of Color: The African American Impact onModern Japan,” positions 11, no. 1 (Spring 2003).
1 6 For the contemporary Japanese views of African Americans, see the multiple work of anthropologist John G. Russell, including “Consuming Passions: Spectacle, Self-Transformation, and theCommodification of Blackness in Japan,” positions 6, no. 1 (1998): 113-77; Henken to sabetsu wa
dono yô ni tsukurareru ka: kokujin sabetsu, han-yudaya ishiki wo chûshin ni [How Are Prejudice
and Discrimination Produced?: Focusing on Anti-Black Discrimination and and Anti-Semitism](Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1995); “Race and Reflexivity: The Black Other in Contemporary Japanese
Mass Culture,” Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 1 (1991): 3-25; Nihonjin no kokujin-kan. On its
gendered dimension, see Karen Kelsky, Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams(Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), esp. chap. 3; Nina Cornyetz, “Fetishized Blackness: Hip
Hop and Racial Desire in Contemporary Japan,” Social Text 41 (Winter 1994): 113-39.
1 7 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics,
rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Maneuvers: The International Politics
of Mi litarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); The Morning
After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
1 8 As shown in the case of the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment which was stationed in Camp Gifu from1947 to 1950, the Executive Order #9981, which President Truman issued in July 1948 to officiallydeclare the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces, was not strictly followed in the Army during themost part of the U.S. occupation of Japan. The 24th Infantry Regiment was finally disbanded in
October, 1951 only within the military exigencies in the middle of the Korean War. 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), xiii,
37-38.

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1 9 Yasuhiro Okada, “Gendering the ‘Black Pacific’: Race Consciousness, National Identity, and the
Masculine/Feminine Empowerment among African Americans in Japan under U.S. Military Occupation, 1945-1952” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2008), chap. 4.
2 0 For the major scholarship on the GI-German encounter in the U.S.-occupied Germany, see Timothy
L. Schroer, Recasting Race After World War II: Germans and African Americans in AmericanOccupied Germany (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007); Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins:
The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2002); Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Petra Goedde, GIs andGermans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945-1949 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2003); John Willoughby, Remaking the Conquering Heroes: The Social and Geopolitical
Impact of the Post-War American Occupation of Germany (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
2 1 For the sexualization of Japanese women in the traditional Orientalist representations of Japan, see,for example, Ian Littlewood, The Idea of Japan: Western Images, Western Myths (Chicago: Ivan R.
Dee, 1996), chap. 13; Jean-Pierre Lehmann, The Image of Japan: From Feudal Isolation to WorldPower, 1850-1905 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978), chap. 3.
2 2 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 7, no. 1 (December 1951): 8.
2 3 Hicks, “GI’s in Tokyo Lavish Gifts on Jap Girls, Shun Own Clubs”; “Second D. C. Unit Alerted:
715th Truck Co. Called to Active Army Duty,” Baltimore Afro-American, 5 August 1951; Ralph
Matthews, “GIs Sing ‘Inflation Blues’: Spiraling Cost of Love is Joe’s Biggest Gripe,” Baltimore
Afro-American, 8 September 1951; “Is Vice Menacing Our GI’s?” Jet 2, no. 2 (8 May 1952): 1417.
2 4 For the recent scholarship on GI-Japanese sexual relations and the “militarized” prostitution in
occupied Japan, see Keisen jogakuen daigaku heiwa bunka kenkyûjo, ed. Senryô to sei: seisaku,
jittai , hyôshô [Occupation and Sexuality: Policy, Reality, and Representation] (Tokyo: Impact
shuppankai, 2007); Sayuri Guthrie Shimizu, “Sei no kokka kanri wo meguru senryô-ki nichibei
kankei: amerika no kaigai gunji shinshutsu to jendâ [Sexual Control by the State in the JapaneseU.S. Relationship during the Occupation Period: the U.S. Military Engagement Overseas andGender],” Gunji Shigaku 41, no. 4 (2006): 26-49; Hirofumi Hayashi, “Higashi ajia no beigun
kichi to seibaibai/seihanzai [U.S. Military Base in East Asia and Prostitution/Sexual Crime],”Amerika-shi kenkyû 29 (August 2006): 18-35; and “Amerikagun no sei-taisaku no rekishi: 1950
nendai made [A Historical Study of the US Military’s Policy toward Prostitution: Through the1950s],” Josei, Sensô, Jinken 7 (March 2005): 94-118; Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: The
Military and Involuntary Prostitution during War and Occupation (New York: Routledge, 2002),
esp. chaps. 5-6. On sexual behavior of American GIs in other domestic and foreign communities
around the U.S. bases, see, for example, Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Beth Bailey andDavid Farber, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992); Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus eds., Let theGood Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: The New Press, 1992).

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2 5 Hicks, “GI’s in Tokyo Lavish Gifts on Jap Girls, Shun Own Clubs.”
2 6 James L. Hicks, “Japanese or American Girls: Which? Why?” Baltimore Afro-American, 7 October 1950.
2 7 Ibid.
2 8 Ralph Matthews, “Wacs and Pom Poms Wage War in Yokohama: GIs Counter-Attack in Battle ofSexes,” Baltimore Afro-American, 22 September 1951.
2 9 Ibid.
3 0 Cynthia Enloe, “It Takes Two,” ed. Sturdevant and Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll, 23.
3 1 Lisa Yoneyama, “Liberation under Siege: U.S. Military Occupation and Japanese Women’s Enfranchisement,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September 2005): 885-910; Shibusawa, America’s
Geisha Ally, 44-45.
3 2 Frank Whisonant, “‘Moosey Mae’ Wins Hearts of Negro GIs,” Pittsburgh Courier, 9 December
1950.
3 3 Matthews, “Wacs and Pom Poms Wage War in Yokohama.”
3 4 Ibid.
3 5 Hicks, “Japanese or American Girls.”
3 6 L. Alex Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls: Wilson Reveals Story Behind Love
Affairs Between Tan Yanks and Oriental Beauties,” Chicago Defender, 11 November 1950.
3 7 Whisonant, “‘Moosey Mae’ Wins Hearts of Negro GIs,” Pittsburgh Courier, 9 December 1950.
3 8 Hicks, “Japanese or American Girls.”
3 9 Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 41-47.
4 0 For the historical background of black patriarchy, see, for example, bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman:Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), chap.3.
4 1 Historian Deborah Gray White argues that “for women to put gender consciousness ahead of race
consciousness was judged inherently selfish, divisive, and inimical to the race” in the struggle of
African American women’s national associations for defending black womanhood in the midtwentieth century. African American women in the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) andthe Ladies Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters did not challenge “black patriarchy” or “black male leadership” for the cause of “black female autonomy,” in spite of the persistenceof the gender tensions in the life of African Americans, during the period from the 1930s through the
1960s. It was in the early 1970s that African American women in the National Black Feminist
Organization (NBFO) began to confront sexism and misogyny within African American communities in their anti-racist agendas, in response to the emergence of chauvinistic black nationalism aswell as the rise of the national feminist movement in the late 1960s through the early 1970s. Deborah
Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York:W. W. Norton, 1999), 174, and chaps. 4-7.
4 2 Regardless of their social backgrounds in the U.S., African American women achieved the feminine
sense of empowerment by exploring alternative racial identities, gender roles, and class positionsin occupied Japan, where they enjoyed considerable political prerogatives and economic advantages vis-à-vis Japanese citizens as members of the U.S. occupation forces. Some black women,

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especially the civilian personnel who highly advanced their rank within the U.S. Army, enjoyed
the luxurious lifestyles attendant to their privileged position to hire Japanese maids as well as theiraccess to extensive leisure and shopping activities. They developed an appreciation for the senseof interracialism and internationalism through their daily encounter with the Japanese as well as
their exchange with white Americans in the integrated and multiracial settings. Okada, “Genderingthe ‘Black Pacific,’” chap. 5.
4 3 James L. Hicks, “Officer Says Our Girls in Japan Not Attractive,” Baltimore Afro-American, 25
November 1950; “Japanese or American Girls.”
4 4 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, rev. ed. (New York:
Basic Books, 1999), esp. introduction and chap. 1.
4 5 Hicks, “Officer Says Our Girls in Japan Not Attractive”; “Japanese or American Girls.”
4 6 In her study of the Women’s Army Corps during WWII, historian Leisa D. Meyer argues that a seriesof sexual images of American female soldiers, which were consolidated and resisted through theslander campaign targeting the women’s corps during the war, were influential in shaping popular
perceptions of the WAC during and after the war. The pervasive suspicion on the part of blacksoldiers about black women’s sexual motives for joining the Army or the Department of Army wasestablished upon the popular representation of the WAC as the “morale booster” to male soldiers
as well as their alleged “sexual independence” and “sexual immorality.” 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), esp. chap. 2.
4 7 Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls.”
4 8 Ethel Payne, “Says Japanese Girls Playing GIs For Suckers: ‘Chocolate Joe’ Used, Amused, Confused,” Chicago Defender, 18 November 1950.
4 9 Ibid.
5 0 Matthews, “Wacs and Pom Poms Wage War in Yokohama.”
5 1 Ibid.
5 2 Wilson, “Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls.”
5 3 Feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins argues that double standards in the black sexual politics
of interracial intimacy, especially interracial marriage, operated differently for black 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 civilsociety, African American women in interracial love relationships face the stigma of being accusedof being race traitors and whores, where African American men engaged in similar relationships canfind their status as men raised.” Although Collins discusses mainly the case of black-white interracial intimacy, her theoretical view of sexual double standards in black sexual politics can beapplied to the explanation of black-Japanese intimacy, but with careful attention to the specificity
of such interracial relationships in the historical context of the U.S. military occupation of Japan.
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism(New York: Routledge, 2004), 262.
5 4 It is estimated that about 40,000 to 50,000 Japanese brides who married American GIs migrated to75

Cold War Black Orientalism
the U.S. by the end of the 1950s. Yasutomi, “Amerika no sensô hanayome heno manazashi,” 151.
On the legal aspect of Japanese warbrides, see Yasutomi and Stout, Amerika ni watatta sensô
hanayome, 94-96; Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 156-58.
For other major scholarship on Japanese warbrides, see other articles in Shimada ed., Shashin
hanayome, sensô hanayome no tadotta michi ; Kaori Hayashi, Keiko Tamura, and Fumiko Takatsu,
Sensô hanayome: kokkyô wo koeta onnatachi no hanseiki [War Brides: Half-Century Record of the
Women Who Crossed the National Border] (Tokyo: Fuyô Shobô Shuppan, 2002); Regina Frances
Lark, “They Challenged Two Nations: Marriages between Japanese Women and American GIs,
1945 to Present” (PhD. diss., University of Southern California, 1999); Elfrieda Berthiaume Shukert
and Barbara Smith Scibetta, War Brides of World War II (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1988), esp.
chaps. 12-14.
5 5 Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 49-50.
5 6 Lubin, Romance and Rights, esp. chaps. 2-4; Renee C. Romano, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (2003; reprint, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), chap.
3. On the recent major scholarship on the U.S. history of interracial intimacy and sexuality, see
Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Phyl Newbeck, Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for
Lovers: Interracial marriage Bans and the case of Richard and Mildred Loving (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004); Susan Koshy, Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003);
Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Rachel F. Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife:
Race, Marriage, and Law: An American History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Martha
Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: NewYork University Press, 1999).
5 7 Letter to the Editor, Chicago Defender, 11 November 1950.
5 8 “Most American Women Say: ‘Let GIs Wed Japanese Girls,’” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 November
1950.
5 9 On the postwar African American discourse of black-white interracial marriage, see Romano, Race
Mixing, esp. prologue and chap. 3; Lubin, Romance and Right, esp. chaps. 3-5.
6 0 Born in Culpepper, Virginia in 1879, Nannie Burroughs assumed a leadership role in the Women’s
Auxiliary since its foundation in 1900 and raised gender issues within the male-dominated black
denomination. Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham writes: “Burroughs, more than anyone
else, embodied the Baptist women’s independent spirit. Determined to maintain women’s autonomy, she led the convention over a number of symbolic and real obstacles during the first two
decades of its existence.” Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s
Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993),
158-59.

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6 1 “Most American Women Say: ‘Let GIs Wed Japanese Girls.’”
6 2 Nannie Burroughs, “Church Leader Argues against Mixed Marriage,” Ebony 6, no. 1 (November1950): 51; Romano, Race Mixing, 88.
6 3 Historian Renee Romano argues that African American reactions to the interracial marriage between
black and white took class-and gender-specific forms in the 1940s and 1950s, and it was frowned
upon especially among the middle-class African Americans. In light of the politics of respectability,
blacks in the middle class saw the interracial relationships, especially black female-white male
relationships, as “disrespectable” or “immoral” for their historically sexualized connotations.
They perceived such relationships as a lack of black racial pride, while they cautioned themselves
not to reproduce the racist thinking in the whites’ intolerance of interracial marriage in their oppositions. Romano, Race Mixing, chap. 3.
6 4 Prominent African American leaders, by the late 1940s, took a public position to “divorce the issue
of interracial marriage from the larger civil rights agenda,” so that they could reconcile their interest
to support the individual’s right to intermarry with their need to refute their opponent’s charges
that they were advocating intermarriage. Romano, Race Mixing, 95-96.
6 5 Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 47-50; Klein, Cold War Orientalism. On racial demonizationin the wartime U.S. imagination of the Japanese, see John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race andPower in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), esp. part 1 and 2. For the legal
construction of the racial “unassimilability” of the Japanese, see, for example, Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 1; Ian F. Haney López, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race
(New York: New York University Press, 1996).
6 6 On African American views of the Japanese during WWII, see Gallicchio, The African American
Encounter with Japanese and Chi na, chaps. 6-7; Kearney, Afri can American Views of theJapanese, chap. 6; Gerald Horne, Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the
British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 5; George Lipsitz,“‘Frantic to Join . . . the Japanese Army’: Black Soldiers and Civilians Confront the Asia-PacificWar,” ed. T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, Perilous Memories: The Asia-PacificWar(s) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 347-77.
6 7 Lois Austin, “Missing Yank’s Mother Begs U.S. For His Children, Japanese Wife,” Chicago Defender, 2 December 1950; “GI’s Mother Wants Tots, Japanese Wife in America,” Baltimore AfroAmerican, 9 December 1950; Ralph Matthews, “Shinto Ceremony Very Popular: Mixed Marriages
Thrive in GI-Occupied Japan,” Baltimore Afro-Ameri can, 25 August 1951; “The Truth about
Japanese War Brides: Negro Soldiers Learn to Admire Legendary Qualities of Attractive Nippon
Women,” Ebony 7, no. 5 (March 1952): 20; “With Little Daughter: Japanese Bride, GI Win Home,”
Pittsburgh Courier, 8 March 1952.
6 8 “The Truth about Japanese War Brides,” 24. See also, W. A. Reed Jr., “WO, Japanese Bride Spend
Yule in U.S.: International Nuptial Knot Sparks Nashville, Tenn., Family Reunion,” Baltimore
Afro-American, 5 January 1952; “3-Year Courtship in Japan: Baltimore GI, Tokyo Bride Find
Love Is All Languages,” Baltimore Afro-American, 26 April 1952; “The Loneliest Brides in77

Cold War Black Orientalism
America: Japanese Brides of Negro Soldiers Find Friendships Hard to Make in New, Strange Worldin U.S.,” Ebony 8, no. 3 (January 1953): 20.
6 9 Some articles referred to the conflicts, ruptures, and tensions that occurred between Japanese brides
and their families who opposed marriage with American GIs in general, and with black soldiers inparticular. Others attested to the existence of racial distance between Japanese brides living in the
U.S. according to the race of their American husbands. An Ebony article in January 1953 reported
that there was “no mixing” between the Japanese brides who married black soldiers and those whomarried white soldiers in Indianapolis, Indiana in accordance with the existing color line. “3-Year
Courtship in Japan”; “The Loneliest Brides in America,” 17-18.
7 0 Ethel Payne, “New Year’s Holds Sad Memories for Japanese Bride in Chicago,” Chicago Defender,
29 December 1951; and “Sgt. Japanese Wife Given Warm Welcome,” Chicago Defender, 15 March
1952; Reed, “WO, Japanese Bride Spend Yule in U.S.”
7 1 “The Loneliest Brides in America,” 19.
7 2 Ibid.
7 3 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 5 (March 1953): 6-7; Ebony 8, no. 6 (April 1953): 9.
7 4 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 6 (April 1953): 9.
7 5 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 5 (March 1953): 6.
7 6 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 6 (April 1953): 8-9.
7 7 May, Homeward Bound, esp. introduction and chap. 1. On gender politics in Cold War America,
see also K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (NewYork: Routledge, 2005); Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and Making of Cold
War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Joanne Meyerowitz, “Gender, Sex, and the Cold War Language of Reform,” and Jane Sherron De Hart, “Containment at Home:
Gender, Sexuality, and National Identity in Cold War America,” ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James
Gilbert, Rethi nki ng Cold War Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 2001); Daniel
Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold
War, and Modern Femi nism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); Joanne
Meyerowitz, ed., Not June C leaver, Women and Gender i n Postwar America, 1945-1960(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).
7 8 Megan Taylor Shockley, “We, Too, Are Americans”: African American Women in Detroit andRichmond, 1940-54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), chap. 3.
7 9 “The Truth About Japanese War Brides,” 17.
8 0 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 7, no. 9 (July 1952): 11.
8 1 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 7, no. 7 (May 1952): 6-7.
8 2 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 7, no. 8 (June 1952): 8.
8 3 “The Loneliest Brides in America,” 23.
8 4 Ibid.
8 5 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 5 (March 1953): 6.
8 6 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 6 (April 1953): 8.
8 7 Letters to the Editor, Ebony 8, no. 5 (March 1953): 7.

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88 Lubin, Romance and Rights, 114-18.
89 Ibid., chap. 4.
90 Ibid., 118.

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