LOVE AMONGTHE RUINS: AMERICAN FICTIONSOF OCCUPIED
JAPAN IN THE 1950S ALIDE CAGIDEMETRIO
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.
—Robert Browning, “Love Among the Ruins”
The title of my essay echoes Robert Browning’s 1855 poem, whose male protagonist muses over a splendid city destroyed by war, and the everlasting power of a love capable of overcoming despair and nostalgia for what is lost. It also echoes Victoria Wolh’s study of the eroticism underlying the political discourse of Athenian democracy: the language of love, she maintains, characterizes international relations, and both hides and exposes the doubts and contradictions of enforced policies.1
“There is a golden vein in love […] and I must mine it while I can”, the American novelist and reporter in occupied Japan Earnest Hoberecht declared, commenting on the roaring success of his Tokyo Romance, published in Tokyo in 1946, in Japanese translation, and in 1947 in the United States.2 Tokyo Romance tells the story of a love affair in occupied Japan between an American war correspondent, Kent Wood, and a beautiful Japanese actress, Hara Tamiko, and it is provided with a happy ending that includes the lifting of the fraternization ban for the Japanese, and the triumph of democratic love mores. Though considered “an unfortunate specimen of U.S. culture” and “possibly the worst novel of modern times”,3 Tokyo Romance was addressed to the Japanese public and successfully transformed the conqueror into a lover and the conquered into a democratically inspired agent of the Pax Americana, glossing over cultural and political tensions, wholeheartedly embracing the U.S. policy of “liberal paternalism” which Shibusawa Naoko has set at the center of the re-imagination of post-war Japanese-American relationships.4 “You sound like a professional propagandist”, Tamiko says to Kent, when he, extolling the superiority of the American way of life, proudly declares:
“America is the melting pot of the world”.5 Love is at the core of an imagined future able to erase the sight of the ruins of Japan, the memory of the atomic bomb which still haunts Tamiko’s nightmares; love is “more than just a personal thing”, intermarriage between American men and Japanese women is “an example” and “requires the courage to cast aside all ideas of racial superiority”.6
It seems that courage was indeed needed in 1947 to celebrate intermarriage in occupied Japan, judging from Elliott Chaze’s scornful presentation of a love affair between a Japanese girl and an American soldier in The Stainless Steel Kimono: “it was just like Madame Buttercup in the movies with that navy guy”, comments the narrator, referring to 1932 Madame Butterfly film starring Cary Grant. Sarcasm surrounds the Japanese girl, who remains nameless but for her grossly corrupted nickname, and, deeming her “something to be apologized for”, is made to exit Chaze’s fiction savagely beaten back to where she belongs.7 The love plots and romantic stereotypes in U.S. fictions of occupation from the 1950s did not follow in Chaze’s footsteps, they do nonetheless reflect the contemporary clashes over racial and sexual issues and address the country’s uneasiness about post-war American democratic inclusion and exclusion, at home and abroad. For example, as Caroline Chung Simpson has shown, the imaging of the war-bride as representative of the Japanese
“model minority” was linked to the contemporary debate on segregation;
American culture was engaged in a process of “redeeming democracy”, in David Palumbo-Liu’s view, whose protagonists are Japanese and Japanese-Americans because of their double status of previous enemies and victims of internment.8
Operation Butterflies
It is apparent that writers in the U.S. took a short-cut to transform Japanese from previous enemies into friends by relying on a form of exoticism, adopted by widely popular Hollywood movies such as The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) or Sayonara (1957), both based on bestselling novels, respectively by Vernon Snyder (1951) and by James Michener (1953). The discourse of exoticism, writes Graham Huggan,
“may be described as a kind of semiotic circuit that oscillates between the opposite poles of strangeness and familiarity. Within this circuit, the strange and the familiar, as well as the relations between them, may be recoded to serve, different, even contradictory, political needs and ends”.
Additionally, exoticism relies on a social asymmetry of power, fashioning a cultural imaginary that allows for both acceptance of, and resistance to,
its content within and without constituted societies at different times of their history.9 The “Japanese” in the 1950s may as well be stylized as an
“exotic at home”, home being both the American motherland or the occupied territory, or their intersection in American culture, a character strange and familiar at the same time, who may be set at the center of an American foundational plot renewal.
American culture has traditionally invoked love plots in representing the opposite poles of inclusion and exclusion: since the nineteenth century romantic love (and the individual free will at the core of it) is often weighed against insurmountable racial differences, constructed as a perilous, if necessary, adventure into a contested national ground, into the contradictions of the Republican experiment, all inclusive but racially exclusive. At the beginning there were the exotics-at-home, deserving Native Americans, but “vanishing Indians”, especially vanishing Indian women, who embraced the republican fervor of early American democracy while deeming themselves too “different” to be part of it,10 and assuming the outlandish character of “foreigners”, in what was their own land. A similarly vanishing Japanese woman was available for use in twentieth century popular mythology, in the 1950s the Butterfly reference becomes a pervasive tag: the arrival of Japanese war brides in the United States for example was named “operation Butterfly” in a Stars and Stripes article of 19 January 1952, titled “Modern Butterflies find happiness”.11 The 1950s “butterflies” perhaps found happiness in America, as Stars and Stripes claimed, but pairing happiness and the Butterfly stereotype provides an oxymoronic short circuit between the national “pursuit of happiness” and the popular tale of the exotic character driven to suicide.
Given the state of affairs brought about by the American occupation of Japan, Butterflies are, like their cultural grandmothers, the Indian Princesses, bound to embody both acceptance of and resistance to the conquerors.
This is what happens in what turned out to be the most popular novel of occupied Japan in the United States, James Michener’s Sayonara, whose plot, differently from Tokyo Romance to which it bears some resemblances,12 reasserts the inevitability of separation for the romantic lovers. To build an American-style democracy elsewhere, the national myth has to be reassessed, recognizing the potential of free will and independence of the “exotic”: Butterfly becomes “Swing Butterfly”, where
“swing” - in itself a background music to early efforts of desegregation - rather than signaling the American dance the Takarazuka girls perform, points to the “swinging” of the stereotype toward a successful comedy of empowered butterflies hilariously chasing the occupying Americans away;
and Major “Ace” Gruver, the protagonist and first person narrator of
Sayonara, thus comments the star’s performance: “She was all Japanese women making fun of all American men”.13
The staging of “Swing Butterfly” announces and matches the swinging of Gruver from a bigoted view of interracial love to the sentimental education made possible by the Japanese dancer Hana-Ogi. At the same time the episode adds a political meaning to Hana-Ogi’s refusal to marry him: as a swing Butterfly, by her achieved liberating free will and independence, she will stay to carry on honored traditions in the “New Japan”. As she says: “Because I know you, now I better Japanese. You better American”.14
This appears as a “separate but equal” solution to romantic love, reminiscent of the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the legitimacy of segregation. Indeed in the 1953 novel, Major Crawford, a Southerner, calls Gruver, also a Southerner, “nigger lover”, a clear allusion to the fierce debate on desegregation that led to the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education Supreme Court decision and the following dramatic enforcement of it. For the lovers who cross racial barriers, as Gina Marchetti has observed, a “tragic punishment” is in store.15 In Sayonara such punishment is staged by the double suicide of Private Joe and his wife Katsumi, an exceedingly happy couple. The act is triggered by their “watching one of the many classical plays” from the Japanese past, staged by men in black, or black figures, while the lovers are “caught in an increasing set of pressures”, made more and more effective by almost barbaric sounds contrasting with the matter-of-fact American response to them.16 While at home the “separate but equal” solution is being overturned, in Japan an ancient, mysterious culture is feared to project a shadow on the postwar enforcement of democracy, or such exotic culture may have in store values that could prove helpful once translated into American culture. Four years later in the film version of Sayonara the double suicide may appear as a tragic mistake, in the light of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act which eliminated race as an obstacle to naturalization and allowed the legal recognition of GI’s marriages to Japanese women. The tragic ending of the secondary plot reinforces for the American audiences the message delivered by Gruver and Hana-Ogi who are at last seen on their way to be married, and to America, where, she says, they will happily raise their mixed race children. In Joshua Logan’s movie Marlon Brando-Gruver’s resolve to marry his Japanese girlfriend moreover supports and enhances the appreciation of the Japanese brand of wifehood, a motif that is also insisted upon in Michener’s novel: “they make their men feel important”, allow for “the man” to run “his job on the outside” and for the woman to run “her job at home”.17 In short: “There are all kinds of things wrong in Japan. But
Japanese women aren’t one of them and their view of love suits me fine”.18 Such a description of Japanese women provides answers for the protagonist’s fear of American women,19 their post-war freedoms magnified by the data of the recently published Kinsey reports. Japan’s past may become socially beneficial, its exotic quality can be domesticated and propagate its particular nostalgia for a lost past now found in a far- away place: Japanese women embody the past the country imagines to be losing, and their future, like that of Hana-Ogi transformed from a successful dancer and custodian of traditions into a proper housewife, is in America. It is not surprising that in the movie the Swing Butterfly episode is excised, with all its potential of a resisting, individualized Japan, allowing instead the Hollywood hypertrophy of the exotic:20 “A porously obvious modern rewrite of the old ‘Madame Butterfly’ tale, fixed up with an easy happy ending. It could be as ho-hum as a yawn”,21 wrote a New York Times critic in 1957, the year after Japan joined the United Nations, its democracy and alliance with the U.S. solidified, and when the first Japanese car was sold in the United States.
Where are the Victors?
A year earlier the most intense, and by far the least popular American novel of occupied Japan, This Scorching Earth by Donald Richie, was published. Written from 1948 to 1953, it is narrated from American and Japanese characters’ perspectives, and relies for verisimilitude on a diary Richie kept as a soldier in occupied Japan.22 He was perhaps “writing history”23 and publishers might have thought the same, since the title of the first edition was changed to This Scorching Earth from Where Are the Victors?, the latter probably deemed too controversial for a novel that invites controversy, given its dark humor, the devastating representation of some in the American Army, the serious considerations it gives to the ways of democracy and to “the Occupation’s self-appointed task of democratizing Japan”.24
Both a Japanese/American love story and a Butterfly appear in it: in fact Richie, as a reporter for Stars and Stripes, reviewed the first post-war production of Puccini’s Butterfly in Tokyo.25 In the novel the representation of Puccini’s Butterfly26 exposes the exotic lenses through which Americans look at Japan and the Japanese are led to look at themselves. Sponsored by the Occupation government and produced by a shady Japanese businessman with a Cornell degree, Madama Butterfly turns into a farce, amidst stage mishaps and a cacophony of languages.
Americans in the audience are caught in an orgy of poisonous remarks on
Japan and the Japanese (they “merely gossiped about a nation”), or in the act of aggrandizing themselves: “We’re examples. We got to go around acting like examples to these people. They’re going to imitate us” as a villainous major puts it.27 As to the Japanese, Haruko, the girl who identifies with Cho-cho-san, at the final scene of the opera explodes in a sweet-sour laughter together with her old-time Japanese boy friend, to whom she is now engaged to be married, swinging around her introjected Butterfly’s “fatal love” for private Richardson, who had exotically seen her like “one of the girls in the old prints he’d liked” but also had imagined as “terrible beyond belief” her encounter with his family.28
Unlike other American fictions of occupied Japan, in Richie’s novel ruins characterize the Tokyo landscape. And love among the ruins is a sad affair embodied by a sort of Butterfly antitype, or a revived Pinkerton, the American Gloria Wilson, from Muncie, Indiana. Since the publication of Robert and Helen Lynd’s 1929 Middletown, A Study in Contemporary American Culture, Muncie had become the obvious reference for provincial America and its traditional core culture. As its representative Gloria Wilson demolishes whatever may be considered appropriate in Middletown America, and occupied Japan becomes her land of freedom, or rather of license, where she obsessively pursues sexual encounters and indulges in epic drinking sprees. As Gloria sees it: “She was in the glamorous Orient and she was one of the most glamorous things in it”.29 A lewd character, but with the wit of despair, she gives her version of the time and place:
Often she had seen other Americans here smile for no apparent reason as they walked in the sunlight. Was it because they were conquerors? She doubted it. It was because they were free. Free from their families, their homes, their culture – free even from themselves […] Nothing they had been taught could be used in understanding the Japanese, and most of them didn’t want to anyway. It was too much fun being away from home, in a country famed for exoticism […]
She felt herself a part of something larger, something benevolent, like god, engaged in kind works and noble edifices. Her own country - the United States, Indiana, Muncie - like an arranged vista, fell perfectly into place. She understood it; she understood her place in it […]
The ruins were one huge playground where everything forbidden was now allowed and clandestine meetings were held under the noonday sun.
The destruction evident everywhere she looked, contributed to or perhaps caused this. She felt like a looter, outside society. Society no longer existed.30
“I think is winning the war that did it”, an anonymous lieutenant says, commenting the sordid “love among the ruins” episode whose protagonists
are Gloria and Tadashi, a Japanese driver employed by the occupation government.31 After the Butterfly performance, a lonely, disgusted, drunken Gloria resolves to seduce “roaringly handsome” Tadashi. She makes him drive to the area of Susaki, “the most extensive ruin” she had ever seen, where Tadashi’s father “had been burned to death” almost five years earlier.32 There Tadashi is reminded of the destruction of Fukagawa and of his family during the great Tokyo air raids, and there, in a symbolic, ludicrous, sad scene reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, a frightened Gloria, turned “masculine” and “predatory”, imposes her kisses on an astonished, frightened Tadashi:
“Let’s look at it this way,” she said, “this is democracy in action”.
“Democracy”. said Tadashi.
“Sure, honey. And now you see – democracy can be fun! Now I’ll give you one of the finer points – this is the Monroe doctrine”.33
Almost a parody of Hoberecht’s Tokyo Romance, where the American reporter teaches the Japanese actress how to kiss, and of Hoberecht himself who declared that in thus kissing he fulfilled his “obligation to democracy”,34 the episode ends in Tadashi’s driving away at full speed, leaving behind Gloria semi-naked on the scorched desolate ground. The
“scorched earth” strategy of the war is translated into the “scorching earth”
of the occupation: the Butterfly antitype is turned into a grotesque, honest Tadashi is left musing on his own defeat, humiliation and failures.
Where are the victors then? The question haunts the novel, the
“mirage-like quality of eternal promise” of Jeffersonian democracy is set against both the resistance/acceptance of the Japanese and, more poignantly, against the effects of occupation: exoticism and democracy clash, and both are deemed fakes by an idealistic (and, in the end, demoted) Colonel. He subscribes to the “time-honored thought that America had never lost a war and never won a peace”,35 and thinks that, for the majority of the occupying forces:
the reconstruction of democracy was a bit like the reconstruction of Williamsburg […] It was an empty shell, devoid of life, a travesty on what it had once been, a tourist attraction which was generally advertised as something quite noble and special, something to which one might make an occasional pilgrimage.36
The Colonel is therefore perceived as un-American. Perhaps this is also how Richie’s novel itself might have been perceived at home, when audiences flocked to see the movie Sayonara at the height of the Cold War.
Once exotic love is set among the ruins, it becomes predatory and empty from the American point of view, and an impossibility nourished by divided memories and divided loyalties from the Japanese. Haruko, though refusing at the end her identification with Cho-cho-san, writes in uncertain English in her diary: “I have fatal love like Romeo and Juliet, like Tristan and Isolde, like Miss Greer Garson in Dusty Blossoms”.37 The Western
“fatal love” sequel exposes the fake uniqueness of the exotic Butterfly myth, and, more interestingly, adds a variant to it, that of Greer Garson’s character in Blossoms in the Dust (1941). Garson is no Isolde, Juliet or Butterfly, she plays the role of an American childless widow who takes care of hundreds of orphans or abandoned children, puts them up for adoption and succeeds in having the word “illegitimate” lifted from their birth certificates. The full-screen movie dedication reads: "This is the story of a great woman, and of the great work she is doing for humanity”. What does Haruko’s Greer Garson stand for? Does she stand for America and its relation to the Japanese people? Is it an allusion to a different type of fatal love, that for the Japanese as “children” to be educated, as General MacArthur famously put it, or to the Japanese as “illegitimate children” in an American-style democracy? Or does it refer to the pervasive American policy of making Japanese women protagonists of Japan’s democratization,38 or to Gloria Wilson’s particular way of spreading democracy among the ruins? Is the occupation an example of “the great work” being done for humanity? Richie leaves this to his few readers, and only evokes doubts, contradictions, and the symbolic, omnipresent, ambiguous soft power of the Americans: “The rising sun cast the shadows of the buildings far behind them. The distant rails shone silver in the sun, and Greer Garson luxuriated, her paper face half in the shadow”.39
Notes
Collier’s Weekly, 8 March 1947, p. 58.
3 Life, 7 April 1947, p. 107.
4 Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
5 Earnest Hoberecht, Tokyo Romance (New York: Didier, 1947), p. 49. Quotations are from this edition.
6 Ibid., p. 144.
7 Elliott Chaze, The Stainless Steel Kimono (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947), p. 167 and 169. Racial superiority characterizes this novel whose “Foreword” (p. vii) begins with: “I believe the reaction of most occupation troops in Japan is that of a person suddenly handed a brimming bedpan and told to guard its contents carefully”.
8 Respectively: Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese-Americans in Post-war American Culture, 1945-1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999).
9 Graham Huggan, The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 13.
10 Such as in the archetypes of Uncas and Cora in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), or in the bodies of the many Indian Princess who do indeed commit the equivalent of suicide by renouncing love and disappearing in the primeval forest (as in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, 1827). See Alide Cagidemetrio, “Vanishing Indian Princesses, or the Sentimental Transformation of the Pocahontas Myth”, RSA 7 (1997), pp. 5-26.
11 Nathan Glazer in a much quoted essay, has maintained that cultural stereotypes about Japan have not changed much since Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). See Nathan Glazer, “From Ruth Benedict to Herman Kahn”, in Mutual Images, Essays in American-Japanese Relations, ed. Akira Iriye (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 138-68.
12 In Tokyo Romance the female protagonist is a famous movie actress, in Sayonara a famous Takarazuka performer, in both novels intermarriage is disparaged, and there are lengthy discussions about the qualities of Japanese women. James Michener wrote what can be seen as a curious disclaimer in 1957: “When I finished my talk to the students from Waseda University in Tokyo, the first question from the floor was, ‘How do you compare the literary accomplishments of Jean Paul Sartre and Earnest Hoberecht?’ I had to confess that for the past several years I had been traveling and had been unable to keep up with the younger German writers. My audience laughed. After the meeting a graduate student said, ‘I'm writing my thesis on The Influence of Earnest Hoberecht on Modern Japanese Thought. I'm really surprised you didn't even know that Hoberecht was an American.’ I explained that since 1950 I had been away from home and hadn't been able to read all of our bright young men. I said, ‘I did get some books by Capote and Buechner flown out to me, but apparently I missed Hoberecht.’ Replied the intense young men with obvious disdain, ‘But Earnest Hoberecht is America's greatest writer. He's been famous since 1945. In my thesis I prove he's America's most significant modern novelist.’ This bowled me over, for wherever I am I studiously read Time's weekly book section and drop into big libraries around the world to catch up on the Sunday New York Times book section. But four days later my amazement was compounded when I attended a round table conducted by some of Japan's intellectual leaders: college professors, a head of the radio system, literary critics and two famous novelists. After opening amenities had been taken care of, a professor asked me directly, and in a somewhat hushed voice,
‘Do you consider the short stories of Earnest Hoberecht superior to those of Ernest Hemingway?’”. See “1957 Newsday Piece on Earnest Hoberecht”, available at www.downhold.org/lowry/earnest1.html (cited 10 September 2013).
13 James A. Michener, Sayonara (New York: Random House, 1954), p. 94. Quotations are from this edition.
14 Ibid., p. 225.
15 “In the case of the interracial romance, the two couples provide the tragic ‘punishment’ for those who cross racial barriers as well as the liberal ‘happy ending’ for those who can be assimilated into the American mainstream […]. The tragic couple acts ambivalently as both the voice of social critique and as confirmation of the racial status quo. The couple that transcends the social taboo against miscegenation usually provides a weaker indictment of racism, since their union, at the conclusion of the film, confirms that American society is the tolerant melting pot it claims to be”. See Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 125-6.
16 Michener, Sayonara, p. 222.
17 Ibid.. Quotations from p. 52 and p. 59, respectively.
18 Ibid., p. 59.
19 Ibid., p. 118-9.
20 For a discussion of gender identity in the representation of the Takarazuka girls in Michener’s novel see Jessica Hester, “Japanese Women/American Men: National Identities and the Takarazuka Revue”, in Portrayals of Americans on the World Stage, Critical Essays, ed. Kevin J. Wetmore (Jefferson: McFarland and Co., 2009), pp. 191-200.
21 Bosley Crowther, “Screen: Brando Stars in 'Sayonara'; Off-Beat Acting Marks Film at Music Hall”, New York Times, 6 December 1957.
22 Richie’s novel never became popular, and was sardonically reviewed in The Journal of Asian Studies particularly because of his offering Japanese characters’ points of view, making them “not credible” since such technique “requires that the novelist be born in Japan”. See John Ashmead, “This Scorching Earth. By Donald Richie”, The Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 2 (1957), p. 324.
23 As he states in the preface to the 1986 edition of Where Are the Victors? (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co. Publishers, 1986).
Quotations are from this edition.
24 Ibid., p. 95.
25 Stars and Stripes, 25 April 1948.
26 As Arthur Groos has pointed out, Madama Butterfly was constantly revised for Japanese audiences in the occupation years, enabling “the gradual assertion of a Japanese perspective”. He also mentions versions by the Takarazuka Revue, Cho-cho-san in 1946 and later in 1953, when, as part of the celebration of the centenary of Commodore Perry’s arrival to Japan, Three Generation Cho-Cho-San was staged offering a redeeming story centered on the encounter of a young Japanese American woman with the descendant of Pinkerton’s son. See: “Return of the Native: Japan in Madama Butterfly/Madama Butterfly in Japan”, Cambridge Opera Journal 1, no. 2 (1989), pp. 167-94.
27 Richie, Where Are the Victors?, p. 252.
Ibid., p. 27.
30 Ibid., p. 43-4.
31 Ibid., p. 308.
32 Ibid.. Quotations from p. 300 and p. 302, respectively.
33 Ibid., p. 303.
34 Quoted in Mark J. McLelland’s “'Kissing Is a Symbol of Democracy!' Dating, Democracy and Romance in Occupied Japan 1945- 1952”, Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, no. 3 (2010): 508-35. The “kissing debate” originated in the suggestion to Japanese film makers by Occupation authorities to include kissing scenes in movies, kissing being considered an inappropriate public behaviour in Japanese society. See Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: The Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, 1992), pp. 144-54.
35 Richie, Where Are the Victors?, p. 208.
36 Ibid., p. 207.
37 Ibid., p. 141.
38 Not differently from the American old-time derogatory representation of exotics at home, natives or slaves, the Japanese are often called “women”, or “children”, ”; see Shibusawa Naoko’s America’s Geisha Ally, on the feminization of Japan and childishness as paradigm for cultural change in the U.S. apprehension of Japan during the occupation and on the parallel promotion of “a traditional view of women’s and children’s dependence and helplessness” calling “for occupation forces to bestow strong, manly protection, intervention, and guidance (p. 19).
39 Richie, Where Are the Victors?, p. 316.
