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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.
    It is surely no coincidence that so many Japanese and German films about the occupation period show black American soldiers ravishing native women, as though their race made the humiliation of the defeated even worse. A German pamphlet warned: “We’ll tell you right now, we’ll shave off your hair, the blacklist is ready, waiting for when times will have changed.” 56 In fact, some women received this treatment already in 1945. There was a case, in Bayreuth, of a woman who was set on fire. In Würzburg, three men were arrested for organizing a terror group called the “Black Panthers,” who threatened to cut the hair off “all German girls who go walking with colored soldiers.” 57 A twenty-year-old former Nazi wrote about the fraternizing women: “Have the German people no honor left? . . . One can lose a war, one can be humiliated, but one need not dirty one’s honor oneself!” 58
    Again, like Takami Jun’s use of the word “shame,” this reference to honor is revealing. The honor of women (let alone their right to decide for themselves whom to consort with) is beside the point. It is the honor of men that is at stake here. They are the ones who feel humiliated. This was, of course, common to all societies traditionally dominated by men. Postwar conditions upset the old order. Women were no longer under male control. Perhaps that was their greatest sin.
    One way of looking at these resentments is to link them directly to reactionary political views which the Allies wished to stamp out, if not necessarily in their own countries, then at least in the nations they had just defeated. An American army lieutenant named Julian Sebastian Bach, who later worked as an editor for
Life
magazine, wrote an account of the occupation of Germany. He believed that “The extent to which German men accept ‘fratting’ is the thermometer which registers the degree to which they accept defeat, contain their national pride and look forward to a new and more congenial way of life. Obviously the sight of a German woman with an American conqueror enrages an ‘unreconstructed’ German more than a German who is anxious to cooperate with us.”