Transnational Encounters in ‘Private Spaces’ of the Japanese Allied Occupation

     This paper is about “Encounters in Occupied Living Spaces after World War II,” specifically analyzing how Americans and Japanese who came to Japan as occupying forces met, interacted, and negotiated with each other. First, it describes a review of the current state of Occupation Studies. Much of the existing research has focused on the “public” domain, including, political, administrative, and economic policies such as the establishment of the Constitution, agrarian reform, the dismantling of conglomerates, or censorship of text and images. While they are the old type of research, recent studies have focused on the “private sphere,” that is, encounters between the occupiers and the occupied in the living spaces of ordinary people.

     It focuses on the living space of the occupiers’ housing, or Dependent Housing (DH). After the war, the occupying forces came to Japan with their families, and GHQ ordered the immediate procurement of 20,000 housing units and 950,000 pieces of furniture and furnishings. As a result, about 1,200 prewar Western-style houses were first confiscated, expanded, and reconstructed, and offered as accommodations for the occupying soldiers along with Western-style hotels. As the number of families coming to Japan increased, construction of 10,000 U.S. Army houses began in 1946, providing living space for occupying families. This is the place where American families and Japanese service providers encountered each other.

     Regarding the working conditions of maids, the 300 maids working at Grant Heights, the largest DH area in occupied Japan, organized a union and appealed for better working conditions. Ms. Hisako Ushijima, who was a key figure in this effort, was invited to the Diet and gave a testimony titled “Working Conditions of Domestic Workers” to the Labor Committee of the House of Representatives. One interesting point is that the maids during the occupation were national civil servants employed by the Japanese government, but after Japan became independent following 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty, they became privately contracted workers and lost their legal protection.

     Another interesting controversy in architectural history of DH is about two separate restrooms in one house. Whereas there is the bath and toilet adjacent to the bedroom for American families, there is the restroom adjacent to the maids’ room for Japanese maids. The question is why? According to the oral history of Takeo Amito, an architect who worked as a chief engineer in the Design Branch of GHQ, the reason was racial discrimination imported from the United States. Among other things, he interprets this as the fact that white families who did not want to share a restroom with black servants. However, we see that in prewar Japan, upper class residences had maids’ private washrooms adjacent to their rooms. This suggests that the remnants of prewar housing may have been incorporated into postwar occupied U.S. military housing. Is Japan’s postwar period disconnected from the prewar period, or is it continuing? It is interesting to note that a topic that is always a point of controversy in postwar Japanese history, including occupation studies, can also be seen in encounters with occupied living spaces after World War II.

(Paper read at the 12th International Convention of Asia Scholars, 27 August 2021)