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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.”
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    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 theyoung 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 inthe 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,