Seductive Alienation: The American Way of Life Rearticulated in Occupied Japan

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the notion of American domesticity promoted by US occupation forces in postwar Japan was decoded and rearticulated by non-elite Japanese women, a social group that has been largely overlooked in studies of the global promotion of the American way of life during the early Cold War years. Specifically examined here is the case of Takehisa Chieko, an actress and the wife of an American officer, who enjoyed high visibility in popular women’s magazines as the embodiment of the idealised postwar American lifestyle. A reading of Takehisa’s magazine writings, interviews, and photographs suggests, however, that she was far from a passive recipient and transmitter of this cultural message. As such, a close unpacking of her rearticulation of the idea of American domesticity toward the particular socio-cultural fabric of postwar Japan reveals the particular nature of this supposedly universal American model. In demonstrating the various dilemmas that stemmed from confronting both the seductive and alienating features of the American way as promoted in occupied Japan, this study illuminates a point of rupture in the larger US global promotion of American domesticity as a means toward cultural hegemony and political containment in the early Cold War period.

KEYWORDS:

• US occupation of Japan
• Cold War
• American way of life
• domesticity
• consumerism
• popular women’s magazines
• Americanisation
• cultural hegemony

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to David Luke Houston, Michael Barr and Anne Platt for their thoughtful editorial suggestions. I also thank Ki-young Shin, Woonkyung Yeo and the anonymous reviewers for helping me to improve the ideas presented in this article. Marlene J. Mayo, Eiko Sakaguchi and Ken Shimada helped me during my archival research at the Prange Collection, University of Maryland. An earlier draft of this article was presented at the Asian Studies Conference Japan in 2017.

Notes

1. Murphy (1995) offers a valuable account of the shaping of Cold War domesticity in Australia. On the significance of home appliances and the modern kitchen in exhibiting American affluence and the model of domesticity, see Haddow (1997, pp. 153–161); on the popularisation of the American-style modern kitchen in Europe during the early Cold War period, refer to Oldenziel & Zachmann (2009).

2. Yoneyama (2005, pp. 899–900) points out that the cultivated conformity to bourgeois heteronormative domesticity contained the potential for challenges to the Cold War consensus by anti-capitalist critics and gender, racial and sexual minorities.

3. For a useful account of Americanisation discourses in postwar Japan, see Iwamoto (2007, pp. 249–266).

4. Hattori (1983) and Katori (1996; 2007–08) provide journalistic biographical accounts of Takehisa. Yet these accounts neither adequately address her role in disseminating the ideas of the American way nor analyse the materials that this article utilises.

5. For informative accounts of the general production, circulation and censorship of Japanese women’s magazines under the occupation, see Miki (2010) and Yamaguchi (2010). For a more focused study on the representations of American everyday life in women’s magazines in relation to the occupation’s democratisation policy, see H. Matsuda (2012).

6. The Gordon W. Prange Collection is the most comprehensive archive of Japanese print materials published between 1945 and 1949 and subjected to the occupation’s censorship. In H. Matsuda’s (2012, p. 520) estimation, the collection has 102 titles of general women’s magazines and 102 titles of housework and housekeeping magazines for a general audience. I utilised the collection housed at the University of Maryland at College Park. I also utilised “The Database of Newspapers and Magazines Published during the Postwar Occupation Period from 1945–1949” (http://20thdb.jp/) compiled by the Institute of 20^th Century Media at Waseda University in order to gather statistics on journal articles that featured Takehisa.

7. Clark Kawakami was the mixed-race child of an American mother of Scottish descent and a Japanese American father. From the American authorities’ perspective, however, a person with 50 per cent or more of Japanese blood was considered non-white. According to the Japanese standard, Kawakami’s father being Japanese meant he could pass as Japanese much more easily than a mixed-race child with a non-Japanese father. In any case, Kawakami’s family ancestry was rarely mentioned in popular magazines (e.g. Anonymous, 1949a, p. 77). Instead, most magazine articles attached the convenient label “nisei fujin” (wife of a second-generation Japanese American) to Takehisa (e.g. Oka, 1948, p. 4; K. & Takehisa, 1949, p. 29; Anonymous, 1948, p. 47).

8. I borrow the concept of “almost the same, but not quite” from Homi Bhabha’s (2004, pp. 121–131, esp. pp. 122–123) discussion on the ambivalence of mimicry as “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other”, and at the same time, strategic limitation or prohibition of the Other’s complete identification with the Self. Although he uses the concept to account for the British colonial context, I found it also useful to understand the logic of differential inclusion underlying multiculturalism as the strategy of the US global hegemonic project during the early postwar era. As Hein (2011, pp. 581–582) acknowledges, quite a few recent studies on the US occupation of Japan have proposed seeing the occupation as a new form of imperialism (Dower, 1999, pp. 203–224; Koikari, 2008, p. 17). On the emergence of cultural racism during the total war years of the Asia Pacific War as an important technique of the empire’s inclusionary project that paved the way for postwar multiculturalism, see Fujitani (2011). Koikari (2015) locates the US occupation of Okinawa, which continued until 1972, at the intersection of the legacies of Japanese imperialism and American new imperial expansionism. On US multiculturalism in relation to postcolonial Asia and the tenacious orientalist gaze, refer to Klein (2003).

9. On socioeconomic conditions in early postwar Japan, see Dower (1999, pp. 87–120). On food shortages, perhaps the most serious social problem in the immediate postwar years, see Fuchs (2007). To take the example of electric appliances, even in 1955, three years after the occupation forces left Japan, the rate of washing machine use was only 4 per cent, and the rates for black and white TVs and refrigerators were both less than 1 per cent (Yoshimi, 1999, pp. 155).

10. Another format utilised to expose her domestic life was a diary that documented her childrearing activities (Takehisa, 1949c).

11. The interviewer’s name was abbreviated to K. in the original text.

12. Approved on 28 December 1945, the Act gave temporary permission to alien spouses of American soldiers to enter the US as non-quota immigrants, if they were otherwise admissible under the immigration laws. At first, the Act excluded Asian brides who were inadmissible under the Immigration Act of 1924. The 1947 amendment to the Act permitted the “racially inadmissible” spouses of US citizen members of the armed forces to enter the US until the temporary law expired on 28 December 1948 (Koshiro, 1999, pp. 6–7; Simpson, 2001, pp. 51–52).

13. For similar remarks, see Takehisa (1949a, p. 57; 1949b, p. 23; 1949d, p. 19), K. & Takehisa (1949, p. 28) and Takehisa & Fujikura (1949, p. 68).

14. Simpson (2001, pp. 164–185) observes that notable changes occurred in American attitudes towards Japanese war brides in the early 1950s as these women provided “a chance to project a benevolent cultural pluralism in America through the salvaged Japanese subject”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant by the Korean Government (NRF-2008-362-B00006).