Part I

All told, there were some 60000 Japanese war brides that made their way to the US between 1945 and 1967. This was a much smaller number than their equivalent German war brides, as well as other European women. Marriage between Japanese women and American men was an issue laden with a good deal of racial discrimination and issues of national identity that were not present with other Axis powers. Although there was some fear of "fraternazis" in the early years of OMGUS administration, the US military government's acceptance of marriage soon became one of its tools for the wider rehabilitation of Germany after the Third Reich. Although the same impulse to rehabilitate Japan also existed among SCAP, there was a much greater reluctance on the part of the military government to sanction such marriages.

This leeriness of Japanese war brides was already apparent early in the postwar occupation. The War Brides Act of 1945 in theory streamlined the red tape associated with marriages between American servicemen and occupation personnel and foreign women, but the Act explicitly stated that its process did not apply for individuals who were subject to the Immigration Exclusion Act of 1924. This rather racist legislation, which enjoyed a broad bipartisan support, effectively ended immigration from East Asian and other non-European countries. Marriages between Japanese or other Asians thus had to jump through a number of hoops for the bride to legally enter the US. Servicemen would frequently petition their congressman to have a special act of congress passed to enable their wives to enter the US legally. As pressures mounted, Truman signed Public Law No. 126 in 28 June 1947 which allowed a thirty-day period in which approved marriages could bypass the 1924 exclusions, and the AP reported some 823 marriages during this grace period. After that, servicemen had to go through the US consulate and congress to gain immigration approval. The case of Frank Endo, a Nissei American citizen, exemplifies some of the barriers to immigration. Even though he was ethnically Japanese and worked as a translator in the Tokyo War Crimes, he had to engage in a two and a half year battle with red tape and a special act of Congress to have his Japanese wife enter the US in 1950. Adding to these federal legal barriers, a number of states pre-Loving had anti-miscegenation laws on the books that made these marriages illegal and void in the eyes of the state government. In a 31 May 1952 news item in the black newspaper The Chicago Defender on Mississippi anti-miscegenation laws, the Defender noted that white servicemen were now subject to these laws, which could entail fines or a prison sentence and tartly observed:

The situation is regarded as a "boomerang," wherein laws erected to "keep Negroes in their place" are indirectly shackling unfortunate veterans whose ancestors perhaps had a hand in making them.

Although the Defender's sympathies are with the veterans, a number of civil rights activists noted that Japanese war brides highlighted the existence of these laws and their hypocrisies.

There were other extralegal and negative disincentives preventing Japanese and American intermarriages. One common strategy was to reassign a serviceman if they applied for or even elicited interest in marrying a Japanese woman. One serviceman, Michael Forrester, recalled that even though he volunteered for an extra term of service in Japan (normally something rather uncommon), once he asked for the information on the marriage process, he soon received orders to return stateside. In the early days of SCAP, other servicemen would be shunted around the country by their superior officers if it appeared that they wanted to wed a Japanese woman. Another SCAP barrier was a regimen of psychological testing of both bride and groom to ensure that the marriage would last. These tests were both invasive and quite time-consuming and worked to wear down applicants and strangle thoughts of marriage while they were still in the cradle. For civilians in SCAP, marrying a foreigner also meant a loss of security clearances, which meant that their career could suddenly reach a dead-end.

The publicly stated rationale for these barriers and disincentives often was a paternalistic concern for a healthy marriage, but racism typically lurked beneath this disapproval. The Australian government, whose immigration and citizenship policies were much more stringent and racist than the US, maintained a similar window like Public Law No. 126, but March 1952 Reuters report, Immigration Minister Harold Holt stated

Before any Japanese will be allowed into Australia, the authorities will have to be satisfied their marriage was bona fide and there is a reasonable chance of it remaining unbroken. Each case will be considered on merits.

the prospect of Japanese marriage also exposed racial anxieties about American men rejecting brassy and independent American women in lieu of a pliant and submissive Japanese bride. In a somewhat hyperbolic 25 April 1954 letter to the Chicago Daily Tribune entitled "American Girls First", Harley Barnes warned that state sanctioning of war brides would have dire consequences for the republic. Although Barnes notes that these war brides are photogenic, they are :

collectively responsible for the creation of an American army of old maids. The votes of these spinsters added to the 7,500,000 widows in this country are sufficient to form the nucleus of a feminist America First party which will have what it takes for political fission.

Although the letter lumped in European women with Japanese brides, Barnes’s racial anxieties were apparent when she noted that if the US occupied China and when

GIs start marrying millions of Mongolian maidens, the American girls at home may wake up to what internationalism really means.

A number of SCAP's female employees likewise attacked intermarriage as a threat to the domestic order. A number of reporters noted by 1947 that a number of servicemen were seeking to marry their baby-sans (Japanese girlfriends). In a 11 November 1950 Chicago Defender expose on Japanese marriages, "Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls," Defender reporter Alex Wilson quoted a number of Red Cross women in SCAP that disapproved of marriage. Ethel Payne, a volunteer at an African-American service club saying:

By tradition, the Japanese woman is submissive. To the man of her choice or the one who wins her attention she presents a convincing superficial respectfulness and affection. Then there is the color factor. The hue of the girls range from very fair to a nut brown. Hence it can be easily understood why our boys fall for them .

Another volunteer, Thelma Scott, mirrored Payne’s sentiments. According to her:

there is no comparison between the deceit of the Japanese woman and that of the American woman. The American woman won’t keep her mouth shut and resents bending to a man. It is not unusual on the other hand, for the Japanese girl to shut up when ordered to do so and to voluntarily look after every whim of her mate while he is with her.

Wilson further notes in his report that such sentiments were the rule rather than the exception. The racial anxieties of Payne, whose engagement with the Defender in Japan led to her own journalist career, was barely submerged with the fear that African-American servicemen were racially "marrying up" with an ersatz white woman (fair or nut-brown skinned). The white American media also hewed to these same racial anxieties and media depictions and stories of Japanese war brides tended to deal white-Japanese or Nissei-Japanese marriages to the exclusion of African-American-Japanese partnerships.

But the racial anxieties over Japanese women were not always tinged with fear of male abandonment. In her 1949 memoir/guidebook Popcorn on the Ginza: An Informal Portrait of Postwar Japan, Lucy Herndon Crockett noted:

Baby-san and her humble sisters nevertheless are held up as having qualities which our own women would do well to emulate—qualities which make the proud American beauty in contrast seem harsh, petulant, talkative, restless, spoiled, and arrogant.

Other Red Cross workers with SCAP also saw that their job was to uplift Japanese women's subordinate place in society and reform them. For these workers, American servicemen subsidized what they saw as a retrograde culture of submissiveness and male domination that was counterproductive to the larger mission of reforming Japan.