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By Root 1413 0

army in Tokyo had their newspapers and magazines, as well as their radio blaring out from sentry boxes. They had their brothels (the RAA, or Recreation and Amusement Association) and their sanctioned pick-up joints (the Oasis of Ginza, with girls dressed in ‘shoddy imitations of long, afternoon frocks’, in the words of one American commentator). There were special carriages on trains reserved for members of the Occupation Army. A theatre had been requisitioned and had become the ‘Ernie Pyle’, where soldiers could see films or revues, go to a library or to one of ‘several large lounges’. And there were the Occupation-only stores, the OSS (Overseas Supply Store) and the PX, which stocked American and European food, cigarettes, household utensils and liquor. They accepted only dollars or MFC: military payment certificates, military scrip.

As this was an occupied country, everything had an acronym – opaque to both the defeated and to newcomers.

In this strange defeated city, street names had been removed, so that there was now an A Avenue and a 10th Street. Alongside the military jeeps and General MacArthur’s 1941 black Cadillac, with a master sergeant at the wheel and an escort of white MP jeeps sweeping through the streets en route to his office, were Japanese vans and trucks burning coal or wood for propulsion, spewing out smoke, and three-wheeler taxis, the bata-bata, getting stuck in the cavernous potholes. There were still notices up outside Ueno station asking for information on lost relatives, soldiers returning from abroad.

The poverty of those years was extreme. The destruction of 60 per cent of the city meant overcrowding in the ramshackle houses that had been rebuilt out of any materials to hand. The American army had commandeered most building materials in the first eighteen months. But it also meant that workers had to struggle for hours to get in from countryside billets on horrific trains. New clothing was very difficult to buy, and it was common for years after the war to see decommissioned men still in their uniforms, stripped of their badges, and women in mompei, the baggy trousers that used to be worn in the fields.

There was not enough fuel. Everyone was cold. The baths charged black-market rates for the first hour before the water temperature dropped. Offices were barely heated, but workers were ‘not in a hurry to leave the office, since they have nothing much else to do. Most of the offices have some sort of heating in winter, and the workers can keep warm as long as they stay there.’ In one bad winter, train officials said that they would silence the whistles of locomotives to save coal.

Above all, there simply was not enough food. This meant leaving before dawn on crowded trains to barter in the country for rice. There were rumours that farmers had stacks of money a foot high. Or it meant going to the blue-sky black markets that had sprung up near the railway stations in Tokyo, where you could buy and sell and barter anything in the open air under the disinterested eyes of the army. There was an American Lane in the market near the Ueno station to cater for goods that had been appropriated or bartered from Occupation forces. American army blankets were particularly sought after. ‘As the trees shed their leaves, Japanese shed their kimonos, one by one, to sell for food. They even devised an ironic name for their wretched existence: takenoko, after the bamboo sprout which peels, layer after layer.’ Faced with this hardship, the phrase of the moment was Shikata ga nai. It means ‘Nothing can be done about it’, with a strong undercurrent of ‘and don’t complain’.

Many of these American goods, the spam and the Ritz biscuits and the Lucky Strikes, were taken to the black market by the panpan girls, the ‘squalid tribe of harpies . . . girls who go with soldiers for food . . . In the daytime, they stroll about in cheap, smart dresses from the PX, noisily talking and laughing, almost invariably chewing gum, or enraging hungry citizens in trains and buses by a display of their ill-gotten gains.’

There was