Like other personal writings, Yumi Goto's memoir, Those Days in Muramatsu, is both private and public. It reflects upon an interlude not only in her personal history but also in the social history of Japan. More precisely, Mrs. Goto's memoir reflects upon those days from September to December 1945 when she served as an interpreter for the railroad company working with the American military stationed as part of the Allied Occupation in Muramatsu, a small rural town in the province of Niigata in northern Japan; as such, the memoir illuminates a significant moment in the history of Japan-American relations, during which the lives of diverse people in Muramatsu were connected with the lives of 1500 American GIs.
Having come to Muramatsu from Tokyo with her husband and her two-year-old
son in order to escape the devastating effects of the war upon
Japan's capital, Mrs. Goto did not, however, escape the war. Her
memoir refers to the loss of her family's home to the incendiary
bombing and their long-term deprivations of food, including such
luxuries as sugar and sake. A student of English at the elite
Tokyo women's school, Tsuda College, Mrs. Goto, like all Japanese
during the war, was prohibited from using English; her subsequent,
succinct description of the war years as "four years of blank"
evokes the sense of an intellectual hiatus which was personally
calamitous. At various points in her memoir, Mrs. Goto indicates
her conviction that the Japanese people were duped during the
war by the propaganda of Japanese politicians and militarists;
she acknowledges the disaster of fighting the technically superior
American war machine with bamboo spears and falsification of radio
reports proclaiming "No damage" when American bombs
were destroying Japanese lives and homes; she comes to perceive
the government's legitimizing of expansion in order to resolve
Japan's growing population demands was a rationalization and might
have been resolved by a birth control policy. Regarding the war's
end, she speaks for herself, her family, and many other Japanese:
"the feeling of relief was far greater than any other emotion.
We could now enjoy the beauty of the sky day and night without
any fear. No threatening sound of an alarm siren would disturb
our sleep."
Despite her awareness of the tragedies of war, a subtext of Those
Days in Muramatsu establishes Mrs. Goto as "a patriot":
"I loved my country." Against the advice of the men
in her family, she had purchased national bonds to support the
war effort and was dismayed by the Emperor's announcement of defeat
on August 15, 1945: "When I… knew what he was telling
us, something hot and cold ran through my body, and I could not
stay with the others. I ran upstairs and cried very hard."
Early in her memoir, she describes another interpreter, a man
wearing dirty clothes and defiling Japanese culture by eating
in public, as representing "a defeated nation." Beginning
her own work as an interpreter, she explicitly expresses her own
determinism to contribute to the shaping of a new Japan. She would
not be one of those who might have had "some knowledge of
English" but "no pride in being Japanese". "For,
though we were misled and defeated, I had not lost faith and hope
in my fellow countrymen." Thus Mrs. Goto's memoir reveals
her commitment not only to record her personal memories of her
three months of intensive and close work with the American military
personnel but also to record these memories in such a way as to
represent the vitality and complexity of Japanese culture. Writing
Those Days in Muramatsu in English in 1946--just a year
after the end of the war, Mrs. Goto is primarily addressing an
American readership. In the course of the memoir, she pauses to
present capsule lectures on diverse aspects of Japanese culture,
such as the difference between Shintoism and Buddhism, the symbolic
subtleties of kimono colors, the nuances of the Japanese language,
the complexities of marriage arrangements. Unlike prewar Asian
autobiographers writing in English, Mrs. Goto makes no attempt
to exoticize Japan; nor is she writing a cultural handbook. By
including these explanations, she appears to be concerned strictly
to inform her readers that Japan, though defeated, is not humiliated;
that Japan, though occupied, retains its integrity.
Although her primary narrative moves beyond national abstractions
to reveal the interactions among diverse personalities in the
Japanese and American communities in Muramatsu, Mrs. Goto does
generalize about national personality traits. Not only is she
always conscious of herself as Japanese, but on her first meeting
of Americans, she is quick to associate their appearances and
their names with specific nationalities. Throughout her text she
continues to differentiate among Americans as to their perceived
"Mexican," "Italian," or "French"
backgrounds. Conscious of the Japanese wartime policy to demonize
Americans, she describes the American soldiers generally as good-natured,
almost as innocents abroad. However, if she presents her readers
with numerous examples of their good humor and generosity, she
also makes a point of describing the good humor and generosity
of the people of Muramatsu who were assiduous in arranging parties
and dinners for the soldiers. She also notes the insensitivity
of some Americans to Japanese culture--referring, for example,
to Japanese farming techniques as "primitive" or wearing
their heavy shoes on the highly polished Japanese floors. Her
lengthy description of an American officer's concerns for the
Japanese farm boy injured when he had run out in from of his jeep
is balanced by her description of her difficulty in obtaining
recompense for the elderly woman whose cart had been destroyed
by another American jeep.
Her memoir reveals the fledgling attempts of each culture to learn
from the other. She calls the sight of Mr. Mitsuno dressed in
Western clothes and incongruously singing a Japanese song and
dancing a Japanese folk dance for his American guests "funny,"
yet she recognizes that the American "boys," far from
patronizing him, appreciated his effort and joined him by applauding
and jitterbugging. Likewise young women, dancing with the Americans
in traditional dress, may have tripped on their slippers, but
enjoyed themselves thoroughly. Although Those Days in Muramatsu
affirms that a principal means by which Americans sought access
to Japanese culture was reducing it to mere "souvenirs,"
artifacts which could be packaged and sent home, she also related
the soldiers many attempts to learn Japanese. The description
of her excitement in teaching Japanese to a group of eager GIs
implies that this activity seemed more meaningful to her than
a commercial exchange.
Throughout Those Days in Muramatsu Mrs. Goto gives particular
attention to the interaction between Japanese women and American
men. Although demonstrative of her determination to remain loyal
to her country, her memoir anticipates dramatic changes in gender
relations which events of the war and Occupation accelerated.
She exposes her anxiety about changes in Japan's traditional patriarchal
system, simultaneously reinforcing this system even as she takes
a subversive position toward it. Japan's new democratic constitution,
outlined in large part by General MacArthur and based on the principles
of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, was
approved by the Japanese Cabinet in March, 1946, and put into
law by the Japanese Diet by November, 1946, shortly after Mrs.
Goto returned to Tokyo from Muramatsu and began writing her memoir.
In addition to other liberalizing changes, the new constitution
revised the status of Japanese women, giving them for the first
time the rights to vote, to own property as individuals separate
from their husbands, to succeed to the same share of the family
inheritance as their brothers, and to apply for divorce on the
same grounds as their husbands. Acknowledging that "It has…
become quite common to attribute to the Occupation, and specifically
even to the informal example of the GIs treatment of women, the
chief influence for bringing about the change in the status of
women in Japan," (1)
Kazuo Kawai argues that liberalizing changes in women's lives
had been underway in Japanese society before the Occupation. Those
Days in Muramatsu validates both arguments--the accepted opinion,
cited above, assigning the Occupation the revolutionary role in
restructuring Japanese women's lives as well as Kawai's position
stressing a gradual reformation in their lives.
That Mrs. Goto perceived herself to be a liberated woman before
the legalization of women's rights in the new postwar constitution
is apparent from the first section of her memoir. In the opening
lines of the narrative she shows herself to be a conventional
wife, expressing hesitancy regarding her husband's and the town's
approval of her application for the interpreter's job. However,
her dilemma appears immediately resolved as she recalls her antagonism
toward the priest of the temple where she and her family first
stayed in Muramatsu. She presents him as an archetypical patriarch,
tyrannizing over a household of women and an idiot boy and demanding
they should address him as "my lord." Her recollection
of the priest's reprimanding her for reading an English book and
lecturing her for two hours to the effect "that knowledge
of such a kind was unnecessary for a Japanese woman whose duty
it was to do domestic work and take care of her children,"
results in her decision to assert herself independently. Her recollection
of this old man's limited view of women's capabilities, she explicitly
tells her readers, leads her to persuade her husband to move out
of the temple into a house in Muramatsu, but she also tells them
that this recollection--and not her husband's permission--was
the catalyst in her decision to use her skills outside of the
traditional domestic sphere. Although both she and the Americans
left Muramatsu in December 1945, during her brief stay in Muramatsu
she proved herself an able interpreter for the Muramatsu railroad
and the American military as well as an enthusiastic language
teacher. Thus Mrs. Goto's memoir reveals that like many other
Japanese women who assumed new work responsibilities in both rural
and urban settings, she and Miss Kato, her fellow interpreter,
readily met the challenge. (2)
In the second section of Those Days in Muramatsu, Mrs.
Goto lists seven precautions established by the town's neighborhood
organizations to insure their protection from the arriving Americans.
Although the list reflects their fear of an enemy bent on pillage
and plunder, their final recommendation reflected their fear regarding
women. Cautioning women to cover their bodies by wearing mompe
(loose-fitting trousers, traditionally worn by women engaged in
hard labor) and tabi (traditional two-toed socks) and not by breast-feeding
in public, Item #7 obviously was written to discourage American
men from finding Japanese women sexually alluring. Word from Tokyo
had reached Muramatsu that "young women were moved to the
safer mountain side to avoid being raped by the Americans,"
and several families with whom Mrs. Goto spoke, while expressing
their anxiety that the Americans would deprive them of their food,
expressed special concern for their daughters' protection. In
their study of World War II brides, Elfrieda Berthiaume Shukert
and Barbara Smith Scibette quote women from other parts of Japan
as remembering, "I was only 13 years old. Scared. My older
girlfriends shaved their heads so they would look like men!"
as recalling a mother's warning that "when the American troops
arrived, they would rape and murder girls like me and I must hide
myself and not let myself be seen."(3) With the actual arrival of the American
soldiers, whose faces, in Mrs. Goto's words, showed astonishingly
"no hatred, no contempt," the fears of the Muramatsu
community were initially dispelled, and in short order this New
York regiment and the women from Muramatsu were becoming acquainted.
The severity of the restrictions placed on American troops by
SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers)--rape was punishable
by the death penalty, for example--as well as their restraint
reduced people's worry over possible sexual aggression; Mrs. Goto
explains to an American journalist stationed in Muramatsu the
town's attitude toward the GIs: "They like American soldiers
because they don't behave like victors. They like you because
you are friendly, frank, and good-mannered. No complaint has been
heard regarding your behavior. There was one case of a soldier
stealing money from a girl with whom he had spent the night, but
the soldier was duely (sic) punished, the people concerned were
satisfied."
Those Days in Muramatsu records a diversity of relationships
that evolved between American soldiers and Japanese women during
the Occupation. Although some women like Mrs. Goto herself and
Miss Kato were involved with the Americans professionally, as
Mrs. Goto's memoir evidences, the sexually charged atmosphere
these men generated was both liberating and frightening. Mrs.
Goto clearly enjoyed joking with these Americans, and their flirtatious
attentions were flattering. When praised for being able to "'understand
our jokes as well as any American girl,'" she seems to be
asking for approval from her American audience. However, other
incidents in her narrative indicate her determination to prevent
amiable flirtation from becoming sexual harassment; thus she tactfully
puts off the lieutenant who seductively asks her, "'Do Japanese
people kiss?'" and later reproaches him when he picks her
up in his arms to lift her out of a Jeep, telling him emphatically,
"'Don't! This is not a Japanese custom.'" Miss Kato,
derogatorily characterized early in the memoir as "an educated
spinster" and represented throughout as being hopelessly
infatuated with one of the soldiers, does not protest, however,
when he, on the day of the troops' departure from Muramatsu, picks
her up and carries her the length of the train to deposit her
on the platform outside.
Other relationships between Japanese women and American men demonstrate
Mrs. Goto's discomfort regarding the atmosphere of sexual freedom
evoked by the Occupation. She describes the soldiers' eagerness
to make contact with Japanese women, sitting on railings and whistling
"especially at the pretty girls," almost as a parody
of male behavior in Western films. If the soldiers sought out
families with daughters to visit in the town and organized special
parties on the base for them, their presence in the town also
led to an increased number of prostitutes in areas around American
military bases throughout Japan. (4)
To Mrs. Goto's consternation, the soldiers' response to all young
women in kimono was to assume they were "'Geisha girls! Geisha
girls!'" synonymous in their minds with prostitutes. Subsequently,
however, she hears about "a geisha girl set free by an American
soldier," which elicits her exclamation: "It was quite
symbolic. The dawn of happy days for the long enslaved women of
Japan!" Although she is apparently exuberant at the possibility
of change in women's lives her cliched phrasing suggests a certain
irony.
Although Those Days in Muramatsu does not document the
severe economic conditions of postwar Japan which has been cited
as a reason for Japanese women's attraction in such numbers to
American soldiers during the Occupation (5), it provides convincing testimony that many
Japanese women found new means of self-expression with these young
men. With them, they enjoyed dancing, dating, and riding in jeeps
in the moonlight for the first time. According to Ijichi Junsei,
the Occupation encouraged their developing a "new interpretation
and philosophy of love and marriage."(6) In contrast with the liberating possibilities
opening up for young women by the Occupation, Mrs. Goto, however,
presents the oppressive situation of Mrs. Kuno, the wife of the
managing director of the railroad for which she served as interpreter,
and of their daughter, Kazuko. Mr. Kuno is described in the memoir
as drinking excessively, maintaining a mistress and a second family,
humiliating both his wife and his mistress by forcing a meeting
between them, compelling his wife to serve him elaborate meals
in solitary splendor, and subjecting her to repeated physical
and emotional abuse. Although her husband is directly responsible
for arranging Kazuko's divorce, Mrs. Kuno herself cannot obtain
a divorce. Mrs. Goto exclaims to her American readers, "Poor
Japanese Women! And they dare not sue for divorce. Because, if
they are divorced, the old Japanese civil law did not provide
for their support from their former husband. Moreover, a divorce
is still considered a disgrace and the blame is almost always
placed on the woman." In telling the stories of Kazuko and
her mother, Mrs. Goto's memoir demonstrates the double bind in
which Japan's divorce laws placed women; the Kuno women were damned
if they did and damned if they didn't. At the end of Those
Days in Muramatsu Mrs. Goto's sympathetic description of Kazuko's
tearful parting from the American soldier with whom she fell in
love suggests that as a result of the Occupation, Kazuko found
a means of assuaging the disgrace and blame of her divorce.
In the course of her memoir, however, Mrs. Goto shows her uncertainty
regarding the propriety of the relationships between Japanese
women and American men. In a section titled "Worried Parents,"
she devotes four paragraphs to an explanation for her American
readers of the complex and careful precautions undertaken by Japanese
families in arranging their daughters' marriages. The apparent
rationale for such a detailed and lengthy explanation is the necessity
of illustrating how an association with an American man could
be injurious for a Japanese woman's marriage opportunities. "A
girl's reputation is very important," Mrs. Goto concludes.
"Sometimes, the young man's family will send some one to
ask about [the] girl at her neighboring houses. If neighbors should
talk about her as 'She used to go with American soldiers, It might
spoil her future happiness. It was quite natural that the girls'
parents were not very happy about their daughters going to camp.
I could not blame them." Just as she herself had been sensitive
to the possibility of negative communal opinion when she stepped
outside conventional Japanese gender patterns to apply for her
interpreter's job, Mrs. Goto appreciates the concerns of the parents
of these young women of marriageable age who had discovered the
pleasures of spending time with young men from another culture.
A cluster of deeper concerns forms an unspoken rationale behind
Mrs. Goto's explicit concern for the young women's reputation
and communal opinion, however: Japanese women's exposure to radical
ideas regarding independence in marriage, the increase of sexual
promiscuity, the loss of racial purity. (7) In addition, her consistent reference throughout
this discussion of Japanese engagement procedures to the "girl,"
on the one hand, and the "man" or "young man,"
on the other hand, indicates her reinforcement of Japanese gender
differences. Identifying the women always as "girls,"
she classifies them in specifically sexual terms, signifying her
own and the culture's anxieties for their sexual and experiential
immaturity. She perpetuates this constricting gender pattern by
further claiming in her discussion that "Girls have always
been on the passive side."
Although uncomfortable with either a radical democratic or feminist
agenda, Yumi Goto's own actions and assertions in Those Days
in Muramatsu contradict her conventional descriptions of Japanese
women. The act of reflecting on her experience as mediator between
the Japanese and the Americans in Muramatsu and of writing a memoir
of these experiences in English for American readers suggests
the antithesis of passivity; the fact that her manuscript remained
unknown and unread suggests not the author's passivity but the
lack of attention given in both America and Japan to women's writing,
to informal writing such as diaries and memoirs, as well as to
the historical importance of the Occupation. Indeed, her entire
document is a denunciation of her husband's affectionate, but
opprobrious term for her: "'silly girl.'" Ambivalent
toward changes in Japanese social and political life especially
as it would apply to women, changes which the Occupation was hastening,
Mrs. Goto provides a vibrant record of her feelings and excitement
toward them. With its publication, more than fifty years after
it was written, her account of Those Days of Muramatsu
succeeds in giving her readers the opportunity to contemplate
America's role in the process of democratizing and feminizing
by allowing them to focus on those pivotal days in her life.