11 April 2008
 
Kiko’s Boobs

Kiko on lap at Club Grand Shima, 1950

I was in the new office in Ballston, trying to avoid work. It was hard to make out the scrawl at the top of the note. The typing was regular, with occasional strikeouts, since it was done on a real manual machine. But the e-mail address had been made out regular enough, but I could not make out the middle part. It looked like “aloha,” and since most of us have spent some time out of Pearl, I tried it.
 
No dice. The note bounced back, and I realized I would have to either write him or call him up. I haven’t got around to hooking up the printer on the new box, so the choice was easy.
 
He answered crisply, his voice still having the rasp of a Bo’sun’s Mate, or a cop.
 
“Yeah, that’s my email address, and you are welcome to it, though I don’t ever use it. My son got it for me and I can’t figure it out. The middle part is “Mona.” You know what that is doncha?”
 
“No,” I said, watching the traffic rush by on Glebe road far below.
 
“I don’t know what they are teaching you guys these days. Mother Navy. Mona, for short.
 
“You got some stuff wrong in that story you wrote. I got to Japan in 1949, not 1950. August of ‘49. So I was there and trained when the North Koreans came across the line and the war broke out and everything changed.”
 
“Shoot, before June of 1950 there was only one major Navy combatant in all of WESTPAC. It was the light cruiser Saint Paul, and except for the sailors assigned to CFAY, that was the Fleet presence in Asia.”
 
“Military law had been in effect four years by the time I showed up in Tokyo. We lived on a barge in the river up there. The hookers- at least the Rest and Recreation Association ones- were long gone. They didn’t even make it far into 1946. But by then about a third of the troops had the clap.
 
The industrial style of prostitution was not going to be permitted. The General sent that signal from the beginning, when he turned down forty women who were going to be assigned to keep GHQ happy.
 
Japanese entrepreneurs began catering to their needs by opening brothels, usually disguised as bars, restaurants or cabarets, and staffed by karayuki-san, which meant literally “persons going to China.” That came from the old Comfort Woman system of the Japanese Army, and shanghaiing women to service the troops. The yakuza were getting a rake on Recreation Association facilities, and MacArthur put them all “Off Limits” in March of ’46.
 
That is not to say there weren’t women working the street- times were hard, and the greenbacks that the soldiers and sailors pumped into the street was the first basis for the economic recovery. But there was risk to it and smart guys who didn’t want to get sick were a little cautious, and always had to use a rubber. It still wasn’t safe.”
 
Here’s what killed that part of the sex trade.  Everyone in Japan had the clap, at least all the Japanese and the sailors that messed around. That was something MacArthur tried to take care of first.
 
He had a great pal named Jackson Foster who had been a classmate at West Point or something. He was involved in the commercialization of penicillin at the Merck company back in the states. When you have absolute power you can do what you want. He commanded a whole industry to come into existence. Candy-makers and brewers who had the fermentation capacities to cultivate bacteria and produce antibiotics were told to just do it.
 
The product had the dual benefit of helping the public health and taking care of the troops.
 
Foster was GHQ’s minister of Public Health, and he set up a modern pharmaceutical education system and established regulations such as the Pharmaceutical Affairs Law. Enforcing that was part of my job. You wouldn’t think counter-intelligence had a lot in common with public health, but you would be wrong.  
 
The Japanese like to shoot their drugs. All the pharmacies had needles, which is why we thought they were all dope fiends. It wasn’t that. They just liked needles. Don’t know why, hypos were everywhere.
 
VD was still rampant, that was one of my parts of the job, the public health part, since it affected fleet readiness.
 
The Japanese gals danced at the Club Grand Shima, and a lot of places. If they liked you they would sleep with you. They weren’t hooking, per se, they just needed to get by and they looked at things different.
 
Kiko danced at the Grand Shima, which isn’t what you think of dancing at the show. It was taxi-dancing, where your bought tickets and got to be on the floor with a real woman. They cost about as much as a pack of cigarettes.
 
The Shima was quite a place. It was to the left out of the CFAY gate, and the sign outside claimed there were “Over 100 girls!” to keep the sailors happy. It looked like a big warehouse, and it got started right at the outbreak of the Korean War. There was an expat Brit who owned it. It has been so long I don’t remember his name.
 
He had been a trader before the war, and married into a Japanese family. He was interned during the war, but it was pretty light time, not like the POWs who came on the Hell Ships from the Philippines and were starved to death.
 
He operated a pretty clean place, and the girls were free to make their own arrangements. Kiko did well there. She had big tits, and she was tall a gal for a Japanese. Her father was probably a Marine from Hokkaido, since they had to be at least six feet in height. The Ainu people up there were tall by nature- there were documented graves of Europeans who came across Russia that way long ago. *
 
That’s why Manila got raped, by the way. The city was defended by Admiral Iwabuchi Sanji. His Imperial Marines would not take orders to evacuate the city from General Yamashita, the over all commander. They decided to hold out to the last man. The city was destroyed.
 
Before the Korean War started, I had established a relationship with Admiral Decker, the Yokosuka Base Commander. I knew I had to get along with him, and I knew that he had his own way of doing things.
 
When I was new, I found that a Commander in the Supply department was selling diesel fuel to the locals. I had the receipts and everything, and I went in to see him. I told him the story, and handed him the documents of the crime. He looked at me and then tore them up and threw them in the trash.
 
“That fuel was contaminated with water, and it was worthless and had to be surveyed.”
 
I knew right then what the deal was, and that even if the fuel was bad the locals were clever enough to filter it. After that I didn’t take problems to the Admiral, I brought solutions.
 
The CIA had a big presence on the base, behind barbed wire, of course, and I used to pass my evidence about black marketing to to one of the Spooks. I never knew what happened to it, except that once the war started the whole Base administration was fired on the spot and replaced by new people from the States.
 
The Admiral had a couple unusual requests for me before he left. He wanted a portrait picture to take a picture of her- a portrait- and then called me back. He liked the portrait, but he asked me to get another one- a shot that showed her naked boobs. Got someone in the office that wrote Japanese to do some characters on it so it was pretty exotic, I guess. I wish I’d kept a copy of the picture, but I was not much for keeping souvenirs.
 
I would get a call from the civilian hospital on the Economy and they would let me know how many beds they had, and I would round up some marines and go to the geisha area and round up that many girls. They would keep them in the hospital and feed them penicillin until they got better and then let ‘em go.
 
You had to have the Marines with you if you were rousting some woman out of the sack with a sailor.
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
 
* Tom’s contention is not true, but reflects the view common in 1950. Genetic testing of the indigenous Ainu people shows no connection to Europe. Recent DNA testing has shown them to belong mainly to the Y-haplogroup D, which is found only in Tibet and the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. There is no debate about the fact that the Ainu men were tall, or that the Ainu women are blessed with large boobs.