24 March 2008
 
The Rest and Recreation Association

Main GAte, Yokosuka Base, 1950

It is a melancholy morning, since the official count of the American dead in Iraq just went over four thousand. I am determined not to dwell on the moment, any more than we did when we marked the violent passing of the last number with three zeros behind it. I am proud of this generation of kids. They are doing this war under General Order One, which makes everything that feels good a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
 
That was not the military I was in, nor any of the incarnations that have gone before. To distract myself from the present, I have been trying to make some sense out of notes from a colleague. He is getting on in years, finally retired, and he wants to write his life story. His service was just getting started when I was an infant, so I find it an interesting book-end to then and now.
 
Tom is old school, so much so that I have to write him by snail mail. I had a long list of questions that I sent last week, and got a sheaf of papers in the Saturday deliver, laboriously typed with spidery erratic handwriting annotating typos.
 
I scanned the letter to save the time of having to hand-poke them all into digits. The letter started out abruptly:   
 
“I told you I would tell you about Kiko, who was a moga- an independent new woman of the new Japan. I'll get to that, but the story is a little complicated, and all the pills I take these days leave my hands a little shaky.
 
That old world is slipping away, and I want to write down what I saw as the Occupation System ended in Japan, and something else started. I am in a unique position on that, since I reported to Yokosuka as Officer in Charge of Japanese police in 1950, and leaving after the Shogun was dismissed by President Truman, and sent home to Amerika-jima in 1951.
 
In my mind, it was the outbreak of the Korean War is what did it, bringing the reestablishment of the Japanese military, in a way, and allowing the Japanese to start to guide their own affairs since Uncle Sam was busy elsewhere.
 
I told you about my in-brief with the Force Intelligence Officer, since counterintelligence was aligned with law enforcement and the intel crowd. There was no seam between us in the military government, just two arms of the same thing.
 
There were some very cozy arrangements between our people and the locals down in Yoko, and MacArthur's Staff was coming down hard on corruption, not knowing how quickly things were going to change. None of us did.
 
In preparation for taking over a detachment of Japanese police, I was sent to the Army CID Lab in downtown Tokyo. It was over four years since the Occupation began, and the city had re-invented itself remarkably. New buildings had been thrown up everywhere to accommodate a population that rivaled London and New York.
 
The Tokyo lab was headed up by Col. Calvin H. Goddard, who was considered the leading expert on modern firearms ballistics. He had perfected the comparison microscope for use in bullet and cartridge case comparison. The device placed the evidential slug in one view of the microscope, and the tube alongside enabled the analyst to place candidate bullets fired alongside to see whether the tell-tale markings left by the grooves of the gun barrel would merge. If they did, it meant they had been fired from the same weapon.
 
Goddard used the technique to prove the Chicago PD didn't fire the Tommy guns in the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre and Capone's goons did. His lab was renowned as being the equal of the FBI, and he had given seminars at Scotland Yard.
 
In 1950, some of the best and brightest in the nation were still in service, though most of those who had mobilized for the big show had gone home to forget about it as quickly as possible.
 
Under his tutelage, I was given extensive instruction in the collection and preservation of evidence, and detailed procedures on working with Japanese Police. There were a lot of factors to deal with. The Japanese are proud people. The devastation of defeat had left a sort of cultural confusion that is impossible for us to imagine. The huge scale of social displacement, missing persons and near starvation was largely over by the time I arrived, but the recent memory had transformed two generations.
The mobilization for war had begun in 1931, after all, and had plunged the nation into ashes. Even in 1950 imperial troops were still making their way home from China or the South Pacific. The men often to found that families had held their funerals, and wives had remarried.
 
The Japanese are remarkable people, though. Even in the depths of despair, they were reshaping their identity and discovering new aspirations.
 
It is easy to see all that was new about Japan, and forget that there was a huge weight of tradition still resting on the backs of the people. Coping with the burden of the war economy, many young industrial workers delayed marriage. Many of the men were gone, over a million of them permanently. There was a strong tradition of family and national loyalty. The first years of the Occupation were consumed by the simple act of getting food, much less worrying about three squares.
 
The Recreation and Amusement Association was the mechanism by which the Japanese government attempted to take the old wartime system into the uneasy new future. The whole thing is un-American, and made everyone uncomfortable on an official level while it continued in a pretty open manner.
 
The establishment of ianjo (“comfort stations”) was official military policy during the war, and the system required extensive collusion between military, government ministries and the prostitution industry, both in Japan and Japanese-occupied territory in Korea, China and the Philippines.
 
At first the women recruited for ianjo were professional Japanese prostitutes and impoverished Japanese and Korean women, but soon enough local women in the occupied territories were 'recruited' by force. Deception, intimidation, violence, and kidnapping were the order of the day, though the victims did not speak out for years.
 
Dealing with defeat was where the R&A Association came from. The Japanese figured the Americans would want the same things their own Army had accepted as its right. As the Americans arrived, dozens of R&A centers were set up to welcome them.
 
As I said, MacArthur's staff hated the whole idea. It was bad PR back home.
 
I remember hearing about the firestorm in the American papers when a Navy chaplain complained to Newsweek magazine about the Geisha Houses in the Yokosuka area that catered to the EMs, Chiefs and Officers. He had personally watched “a line of enlisted men, four abreast, almost a block long, waiting their turn.” Rather than busting it up, order was provided by the Provost Marshal.
 
It was clear that GHQ could not be in a position of sponsoring the R&A system, and so the whole thing was outsourced. Private hooking was subject to zealous criminal prosecution even while the Comfort system was in place. It wasn't for the same reason that we do that in America. The independent woman was viewed as a threat to society.
 
They were symbols individual gain, and personal pleasure. With the official renunciation of the R&A centers though, and the collapse of the rest of the old system, the mogas- “modern girls”- and moga society represented a new class of entrepreneurs. Part giesha, part businesswomen, they were a fact of life I had to deal with in 1950.
 
That is where Kiko comes in, and Club Grand Shima in Yokosuka. I'll have to get to that tomorrow in another letter. I need to take some pills to make my hands stop shaking.”
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com