Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  In a sense, the panpan fits into a particular raffish Japanese tradition that combines low life with glamour. The prostitutes of premodern Tokyo, then still called Edo, were fashion plates of a kind, publicized in woodblock prints and the Kabuki theater. In the early years of the Allied occupation, the culture associated with the panpan was a great deal less refined. Military defeat and liberation from wartime censorship and militarist education revived a commercial sex culture with roots in the past, but with a great deal of American influence. Salacious pulp magazines with such titles as Lovely, Venus, Sex Bizarre, and Pin-Up flourished. Striptease parlors opened up in the old entertainment districts, often jerry-built shacks constructed around the bomb craters. Pimps, black marketers, and young hoodlums in Hawaiian shirts danced the mambo with their girlfriends in cheap dance halls. Japanese swing bands and jazz singers came alive again, after years of bans on such foreign decadence. There was a craze for boogie-woogie.

  Many women turned to prostitution out of necessity. But not all. Surveys of the time show that a large number of women became panpan “out of curiosity.”35 And this, more than getting paid for sex, was what earned the panpan particular opprobrium. To “sacrifice” one’s body to keep a poor rural family going, or from patriotic duty, was all right, perhaps even laudable; to do it out of curiosity, or a desire for cash, cigarettes, or silk stockings, was a disgrace. Organized prostitution had a long tradition and was tolerated. But the panpan were condemned for their free enterprise. It made them dangerously independent.

  Tawdry and desperate though much of it was, the commercial sex culture in 1945 was, like mambo dancing and boogie-woogie, liberation of a kind, welcomed by some people, and loathed by others. The roughly ninety thousand babies born in 1946 from unmarried women cannot all have resulted from purely commercial transactions.36 Having been fed with so much negative propaganda about the barbarian rapists and killers, many Japanese women were much relieved when they actually saw the less fearsome Americans. In the words of one woman writing in the utterly respectable women’s magazine Fujin Gaho: “I find them courteous, friendly, carefree and perfectly at ease. What a sharp and painful contrast to the haughty, mean and discourteous Japanese soldiers who used to live in the barracks near my home.”37

  This is not to say that Allied soldiers were never abusive, particularly at the beginning of the Occupation. According to one estimate, forty women were raped every day in the latter half of 1945, which is probably an underestimation, since many cases would not have been reported, out of shame.38 Such figures would never have appeared in the censored Occupation press, of course. But most Japanese would still have recognized that the Americans were far more disciplined than they had feared, especially in comparison to the behavior of their own troops abroad.

  In an odd way, changing sexual mores fitted into the propagandistic effort by the Americans to “reeducate” the Japanese. To become democratic, so the Japanese were told, women should be treated more equally. Panpan girls may not have been quite what the educators had in mind. But Japanese were encouraged to show physical affection more openly, just like Americans. So it was that the first screen kiss, after much American prompting, was shown for Japanese edification in 1946, in a movie entitled Young Hearts (Hatachi no Seishun). It proved to be highly popular with young audiences.

  Of course there is a broad spectrum between streetwalkers picking up GIs in Hibiya Park and the first cinematic kiss, but the public hunger for erotic entertainment and highly sexed popular music suggests that the gap between the liberated and the defeated peoples was actually not as great as one might think. For the Japanese, too, a new sense of liberty came with the sound of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”

  It was the same story in the Western zones of Germany. In areas occupied by Soviet troops, things were rather different, certainly as far as sex was concerned. If “fratting” came to define relations with foreign troops in the West, rape was one of the curses of being defeated by the Soviet Red Army. Of course, rape happened in the Western zones too, especially, but by no means exclusively, under French occupation. In Stuttgart, for example, about 3,000 women were said to have been raped by French troops, many from Algeria.39 In the American occupation zone, by far the largest, the number of recorded rapes by American troops in the whole of 1945 did not exceed 1,500.40

  There are several reasons why rape was less common under Western occupation than in the Soviet zone. Allied troops, with the possible exception of the French, were not as vengeful as the Soviets. Nor were they encouraged by their superiors to do as they liked with German women. (Stalin himself notoriously stated that soldiers who had crossed thousands of miles through blood and fire were entitled to “have some fun with women.”) Besides, the willingness of German women to “frat” with Allied soldiers was such that rape was hardly necessary. A popular quip among GIs in the summer of 1945 was that German women were the loosest “this side of Tahiti.”41

  This was no doubt an exaggeration, promoted not just by grateful GIs, but by Germans who were outraged by actions they regarded as a further insult to their already shattered sense of national pride. Still, many soldiers claimed that German women, known variously as “frauleins,” “furlines,” or “fratkernazis,” were even more willing to have sexual relations with them than the French women were. One rather brutal, but perhaps not wholly inaccurate, analysis of this phenomenon was given by a GI after he had just returned to the U.S. “At the risk of letting the cat out of the bag,” he wrote, “it must be admitted that all the GI wants in Europe is a ‘good deal,’” which included “a chance to fraternize as often as possible.” He continued: “In Germany, naturally, the GI finds the best deal . . . In France the deal is different. The GI doesn’t find the all-out bootlicking of Germany. He can’t make France the plaything he heard it was from his Dad and from the liberators in 1944.”42

  And there were of course far more women than men in Germany by about a 16 to 10 ratio, and the men who were left were often old, crippled, or despised. As the young German says in Rossellini’s brilliant film Germany Year Zero, shot in the ruins of Berlin: “We were men before, National Socialists, now we are just Nazis.”

  Benoîte Groult in her literary memoir of liberated France could not resist comparing the “beauty of Americans” to “the Frenchmen who all look gnarled, swarthy, and undernourished to me.”43 The demoralization of German and Japanese men was of course worse. Typical was the attitude of a German waitress interviewed by Carl Zuckmayer, the German playwright and screenwriter (The Blue Angel) who returned to his native land as a U.S. cultural attaché in 1946. This waitress wouldn’t touch German men, she said: “They are too soft, they are not men any more. In the past they showed off too much.”44

  For me, the most memorable account of masculine humiliation is by Nosaka Akiyuki, a novelist who was himself a teenager in 1945, hanging around the black markets of Osaka. His brilliant novella, American Hijiki (Amerika Hijiki, 1967), concerns masculinity as well as race. The main character is a Japanese of his own age. At school during the war he was told that Western men were taller than Japanese but weaker, especially around the hips, due to their soft habit of sitting on chairs, instead of Japanese tatami floors. They could be physically bested by any tough little Japanese with muscular thighs. The schoolboys were frequently reminded of the squat, bullnecked General Yamashita, “The Tiger of Malaya,” who accepted the surrender of Singapore from the British general Percival, whose rather absurd-looking spindly legs were not flattered by his khaki shorts.

  But then the Japanese teenager sees the real thing up close, the unforgettable sight of an American soldier, “his arms like logs, his waist like a mortar . . . the manliness of his buttocks encased in shiny uniform pants . . . Ah, no wonder Japan lost the war.”45 Clearly, not all Allied soldiers were so big and brawny, and many Japanese men were far from puny. But the perception, that first impression of a hungry teenage boy, would last as the melancholy memory of
a war that had been presented to the Japanese as a racial contest between noble Asian warriors and the arrogant white race. This made the first confrontation after the war between victors and the defeated more shocking in Japan than in Germany.

  In Germany, the Western (but not the Soviet) authorities did their best to enforce a nonfraternization policy at first. “Pretty girls can sabotage an Allied victory,” announced the American Forces Network. “Soldiers wise don’t fraternize,” warned Stars and Stripes, the military paper, or “Don’t play Samson to her Delilah—she’d like to cut your hair off—at the neck.”46 Lifting the ban, said the Times of London, “would probably distress a large number of women at home.”47 But none of this was convincing to men on the spot. The “Mistress Army” was a popular expression for the Western Allies at the time. This referred to the many German mistresses attached to American officers (more than to British officers, for some reason; the British appear to have preferred drinking). This, in turn, led to jealousy in the lower ranks, a feeling expressed in bitter jokes such as, “The policy is just to give the brass the first crack at all the good-looking women.”48

  General George Patton, like General MacArthur, saw no merit in the ban. Should well-fed American soldiers really refuse to give candy to hungry kids? Were all Germans truly Nazis? (It should be said that Patton was a great deal more indulgent to Germans, even if they were Nazis, than towards the communist allies, or indeed to Jews.) Even the New York Times, not always in the vanguard of public opinion, was critical in its reports from the occupied zones. Their local correspondent reported in June that he had “yet to meet a soldier, whether he comes from London, the Mississippi Valley or the Alberta wheatfields, who wants the ban continued.” The same reporter revealed the absurdity of measures taken to tighten the ban. In one village in the U.S. zone, a counterintelligence detachment was sent out to watch a security guard who was monitoring a military policeman who had been “flirting with a German girl.”49

  On June 8, General Eisenhower lifted the ban on fraternizing with children, whereupon the common greeting from GIs or Tommies to a young woman was “Good Day, Child!” In August, Allied soldiers were allowed to speak to adults, and even, as long as they were safely out in the open air, to hold hands with grown women. On October 1, finally, the Allied Control Council, the governing body of the four powers’ military occupation, lifted the ban entirely. One of the events that nailed it was the arrival of British and U.S. troops in Berlin, where the Soviets were fraternizing quite freely. This divide became intolerable to Western troops, so in a sense the license to frat with Germans was an early consequence of Big Power rivalry. But lifting the ban came with a condition: marriage with Germans, or putting Germans up in army billets, would still be forbidden. This, too, in time became a dead letter, and tens of thousands of German women left with their new husbands to the promised good life of the United States.

  Germany had its version of the panpan women, the lowest and most desperate being the Ruinenmäuschen, the “mice in the ruins.” But, as was true in all countries under military occupation, the borderlines between romance, desire, and prostitution were not always clear. Even in the Soviet zone of Berlin, where few women, including the very young and very old, had managed to avoid sexual assault, and where raping was still a common occurrence for months after the war, sexual relations with foreign troops were not always a straightforward matter. The best and most harrowing account is A Woman in Berlin, a diary kept by a journalist in her early thirties who finally escaped being serially raped by anonymous soldiers by soliciting the protection of one Russian officer. The gentle Lieutenant Anatole became her regular lover. After all, she wrote, “he’s looking more for human, feminine sympathy than for mere sexual satisfaction. And this I’m willing to offer him, even with pleasure . . .”50

  In the Western zones, women who accepted material goods from their American boyfriends, as most of them would have, were quickly branded as prostitutes, a reputation they would not have acquired so easily by taking gifts from German men. Of course, access to goods from the PX was a matter of survival for many. In the winter months, even the warmth of a well-heated nightclub was a welcome refuge from icy rooms, shared with many strangers, in bombed-out buildings. But those Lucky Strikes, chocolates, and silk stockings, along with the swing music and the easygoing GI manners, also represented a culture to women, and many young men, which was all the more desirable for having been forbidden in the oppressive Third Reich. People hungered for the trappings of the New World, however crude, because the Old World had collapsed in such disgrace, not just physically, but culturally, intellectually, spiritually. This was true of liberated countries, like France and Holland. It was even more true of Germany and Japan, where the postwar Americanization of culture, beginning with “fratting,” would go further than anywhere else.

  At least one woman saw all this for what it was, a dream, which was bound to disappoint in the end—but not without leaving a few traces. After Benoîte Groult has turned down her American lover Kurt’s marriage proposal for the last time, she decides to abandon her game of “hunting for Americans.” Now, she writes, “old Europe is all alone. I feel like Europe, very old and desperate. I have just said goodbye to the whole of America this evening. And to you too, Steve, Don, Tex, Wolf, Ian, who came into my life with such a comforting smile, I’ll be closing my door . . . It no longer amuses me to fool around with all of you from the Far West: you came from too far away, and you will go back. You have liberated me. Now it is up to me to remake my own freedom.”

  • • •

  NAGAI KAFU, A JAPANESE NOVELIST best known for nostalgic fictions of the seamy side of his beloved Tokyo, wrote the following diary entry on October 9, more than two months after the Japanese defeat: “Had an evening meal at the Sanno Hotel. Observed seven or eight young Americans, who looked like officers. They did not seem to lack a certain refinement. After supper, I saw them sitting at the bar, practicing their Japanese on the young woman serving them. Compared to Japanese soldiers, their behaviour was remarkably humble.”51

  A month before, Kafu noted in his diary that according to the newspapers American soldiers were shamelessly fooling around with Japanese women. Well, he said, “if true, that is payback for what Japanese soldiers did in occupied China.”52

  Kafu was a highly sophisticated eccentric, a Francophile who cared little for conventional opinion. His reaction was, in fact, rare. The more usual view on American fraternization with Japanese women, even among highly educated writers and intellectuals, was a great deal more censorious. Takami Jun, a relatively liberal writer, younger than Kafu, who felt ashamed that he had ever supported, however ambivalently, the militant nationalism of the wartime regime, recalled in his diary something he had seen at the main Tokyo railway station one October evening. Loud American soldiers were flirting with two female station attendants, trying to get them to sit down with them. The girls were giggling, and seemed anything but unwilling. In Takami’s words: “They looked as if being flirted with in this way was unbearably pleasurable. Another station attendant came up. Everything about her suggested that she also wanted to be teased. What an indescribably shameful sight!”53

  This must have been quite typical, both the scene and the reaction to it. But whose shame was Takami really talking about? Was it the flirting he found shameful, or the fact that Japanese girls were flirting with foreigners? Or was it his own shame, as a Japanese male? Disapproval of this type of fraternization was expressed in more violent ways too. Japanese girls hired to work for the U.S. Army in Hokkaido complained that they got beaten up regularly by Japanese men because of their association with foreign troops. Henceforth the army had to escort them home in armed trucks.

  Envy no doubt played an important role in male resentment. And there was a great deal of envy to go around: defeated men were envious of the victors, American soldiers of Soviet soldiers (when the U.S. ban was still in force), soldiers of officers, and so
on. In American Hijiki, Nosaka Akiyuki describes how long this feeling could linger. The teenager in the story grows up and has a family. His wife makes friends with a middle-aged American couple on holiday in Hawaii. They come to visit Japan, a country that brings back fond memories to Mr. Higgins, who served there in the occupation army. Obliged by his wife to be a good host, the Japanese husband decides to entertain Mr. Higgins by taking him to a live sex show in Tokyo. A virile performer, known as Japan’s “Number One,” promises to show the audience what Japanese manhood can do. Alas, that night, Number One’s powers fail him, and once again, the Japanese husband, feeling a vicarious shame, thinks back to that GI he first encountered in the ruins of Osaka, those loglike arms, those tough buttocks encased in shiny gabardine.

  Mr. Higgins is white. Wartime Japanese propaganda did not talk about blacks, except as another example of American racism to discredit the enemy further. But occupation by multiracial troops introduced something more disturbing than mere sexual rivalry. A letter from a Japanese woman, intercepted by U.S. military censors, mentions the rumor that there were “twenty thousand women in Yokohama who had intimate relations with Allied soldiers. It has also been brought to the attention of the prefectural office that thirteen thousand halfbreeds are to be born in Kansai. It is enough to make one shudder when one hears that there are three thousand Japanese women with Negro children in Yokohama.”54 The real source of anger here is not immoral behavior per se, or even prostitution, but the pollution of racial purity.

  Similar sentiments were voiced in Germany, especially towards the end of 1945, after the fraternization ban was lifted, just as many young German men were beginning to be released from POW camps. As was true in Japan, young army veterans were especially sensitive on the “fratting” issue. Here, a pamphlet circulated in Nuremberg, denouncing “Niggerwomen” (Negerweibern): “Painted and tarted up in colors, with red-lacquered nails, a hole in their stockings and a wild, fat Chesterfield stuck in their beaks, strutting around with their black cavaliers.”55 Another word for fraternizing German girls was “chocolate women” (Chokoladeweibern), referring both to material greed and a shameless penchant for those colored cavaliers.