Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The war also brought a new scrutiny to Ethel Payne.

  CHAPTER 8

  CHOCOLATE JOE

  ONE OF ETHEL PAYNE’S FAVORITE DESTINATIONS IN Tokyo was the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which was housed in a five-story redbrick building tucked into an alley a few minutes’ walk from MacArthur’s headquarters. Run-down and somewhat on the seedy side, the place was nonetheless the center of social life for many, white and black, in the Western community. It was a popular spot to get a drink or a meal, read hard-to-find newspapers, and even play the slots. One correspondent described the place as combining “some of the features of a makeshift bordello, inefficient gaming-house and black market center.”

  Over drinks at the bar in the fall of 1950, Payne met reporters L. Alex Wilson of the Chicago Defender and James L. Hicks of the Baltimore Afro-American. Both World War II veterans, the two reporters had been assigned to cover the role of black soldiers in the Korean War. Everything that went to the Korean peninsula, including reporters, came through Tokyo. Over drinks, Payne told the two about her life in Japan and what she had observed about black troops. Spending time with two men who earned their living as writers, one of whom came from her hometown newspaper, was exhilarating.

  Hicks was impressed with Payne. He came out to Seaview to see her at work. “This reporter,” he wrote after touring her workplace, “has seen and visited many such Special Service Clubs but never yet seen one which received the all-out support and program participation which both colored and white members on the base give the Seaview.” While the place remained a black club, there were no rules prohibiting whites from entering, and quite a few white soldiers had taken to doing so. Once, when an integrated unit took up quarters near the club and white soldiers began patronizing it, a detachment’s sergeant ordered his white men to stay away from the club. The white soldiers complained. The depot’s commander, Hicks said, “promptly issued orders that the club was ‘on limits’ to all personnel on the depot.”

  But what really caught the attention of Hicks and Wilson was what Payne told them about black soldiers and Japanese women. Describing the harsh economic realities of postwar Japan, Payne described how many Japanese women had been drawn to soldiers with their ready cash and easy access to the post exchanges that bulged with Western goods. Unlike in the United States, the fair-skinned Japanese women were not put off by the men’s dark skin. In fact, many found that black soldiers were kinder and more generous than the white ones.

  “By tradition,” Payne told the reporters, “the Japanese woman is submissive.” If a soldier wins the affection of one, he will be showered with affection and servitude. “Then there is the color factor,” she continued. “The hue of the girls ranges from very fair to nut brown. Hence it can be easily understood why our boys fall for them.”

  “A stock comparison with American women would be: Too independent. Won’t take anything off a man or wait on a man,” Payne explained. GIs called their docile Japanese companions “mooses,” picking up on musume, the Japanese word for girl. “The musume fetches the GI’s shoes, washes, cooks, and irons. Keeps quiet, when asked. Never talks back. Laughs easily. All of which is very soothing to the male ego.

  “Musume has played it cool,” she continued. “Her very helplessness has been a powerful weapon and an asset to her and she is using it fully.”

  BY THE STANDARDS OF RACE journalism in 1950, this was one hell of a story about violating the taboo of sex across race lines. Hicks rushed an account to his paper. “This is a story that I hate to write,” explained Hicks to his readers. “Colored women on civilian duty in occupied Japan are being ignored by colored soldiers stationed here to the point that many of the women swear once they get ‘stateside’ again, they will never so much as speak to a colored soldier who has been stationed in Japan.” Hicks’s article, however, made no mention of Payne, and he deliberately left out all names. Wilson, on the other hand, had different reporting plans.

  Like Payne, Wilson had also taken an interest in writing when he was a child, but with greater success. As a male armed with a college degree and time spent studying journalism at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, he had risen up in the ranks of black journalists. The six-foot-three-inch lanky reporter, who favored a black suit and a white fedora, was a prodigious workhorse. With his clipped and sonorous voice and formal demeanor, he projected the air of one who planned to single-handedly cover all aspects of African American involvement in the war.

  Payne and Wilson hit it off. They conferred regularly at the press club, and one night Payne even organized a dinner in his honor with several other Chicagoans. For Payne, time with Wilson gave her a rare opportunity to share her passion for writing with a professional. For Wilson, Payne was a valuable source. After all, for three years Payne had been spending her spare time acting like a reporter and dutifully keeping notes on her encounters and observations.

  Wilson filed a report with the Defender. Headlined WHY TAN YANKS GO FOR JAPANESE GIRLS, the lengthy article quoted Payne, unlike Hicks’s earlier piece for the Afro-American. But Wilson was not done yet. He had his eye on Payne’s diary filled with stories and observations that she had brought to their meetings. “You know,” Wilson said to Payne, “the folks back home don’t know what’s going on, particularly about the GIs and Japanese women. Why don’t you just let me share this with them?”

  Payne agreed. Although later she would feign innocence, claiming that she had actually forgotten about giving Wilson the diary, she certainly knew what she was doing. After years of failed attempts to launch some kind of writing career, providing her articles and notes to Wilson was hardly an act devoid of motivation in the world of journalism. She knew the editors at the vaunted Defender would read her work. Letting Wilson take it back to Chicago was like earning a literary lottery ticket.

  When Wilson was back in the office, he handed editor Louis Martin the diary. “I read the manuscript and I could hardly believe it,” Martin said. Wilson confirmed its contents b
ut warned that Payne could be fired if they published it. “The day the U.S. fired her, she could have a job with the Chicago Defender,” said Martin.

  About a month later, one of Payne’s sisters called from Chicago. Ethel was in the paper again, but this time on the front page with a bylined article. SAYS JAPANESE GIRLS PLAYING GIS FOR SUCKERS, “CHOCOLATE JOE” USED, AMUSED, CONFUSED, read the headline. The editors had taken Payne’s diary and cobbled the entries into two articles. “They rewrote it,” said Payne, “and they put it into the prose that was adapted to the paper.”

  THE ARTICLE, PATCHED TOGETHER as it was from the diary, lacked the cohesion of a unified piece of writing. It opened with a rambling discourse about changes in Japan under the occupation, touching on a wide range of topics from fashions and the Japanese fascination with the Sears, Roebuck catalog to a noticeable growth in height among children because of changes in diet. Halfway through, however, it came to its incendiary point.

  “To get back to ‘Chocolate Joe,’” Payne wrote, “for him it was the opening of an entire new life. Surrounded by tons of army regulations, nevertheless, life in Japan became an escape from the irking confinement of the social caste system and segregation which he had left behind in the States.” With even the pay of the lowliest private, Payne reported that a black soldier could live like a king and retain the pleasures of a musume. Some of what she said had already appeared verbatim in Wilson’s article, but in this instance, here was an employee of the military detailing in a public forum how soldiers paid the rent for their girlfriends, ordered goods for them through the Sears, Roebuck catalog, obtained ration cards at the PX for them, and converted military script to yen on the black market.