Year Zero

Year Zero by Ian Buruma

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Authors: Ian Buruma
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Occupation. According to one estimate, forty women were raped every day in the latter half of 1945, which is probably an underestimation, since many cases would not have been reported, out of shame. 38 Such figures would never have appeared in the censored Occupation press, of course. But most Japanese would still have recognized that the Americans were far more disciplined than they had feared, especially in comparison to the behavior of their own troops abroad.
    In an odd way, changing sexual mores fitted into the propagandistic effort by the Americans to “reeducate” the Japanese. To become democratic, so the Japanese were told, women should be treated more equally.
Panpan
girls may not have been quite what the educators had in mind. But Japanese were encouraged to show physical affection more openly, just like Americans. So it was that the first screen kiss, after much American prompting, was shown for Japanese edification in 1946, in a movie entitled
Young Hearts
(
Hatachi no Seishun
). It proved to be highly popular with young audiences.
    Of course there is a broad spectrum between streetwalkers picking up GIs in Hibiya Park and the first cinematic kiss, but the public hunger forerotic entertainment and highly sexed popular music suggests that the gap between the liberated and the defeated peoples was actually not as great as one might think. For the Japanese, too, a new sense of liberty came with the sound of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”
    It was the same story in the Western zones of Germany. In areas occupied by Soviet troops, things were rather different, certainly as far as sex was concerned. If “fratting” came to define relations with foreign troops in the West, rape was one of the curses of being defeated by the Soviet Red Army. Of course, rape happened in the Western zones too, especially, but by no means exclusively, under French occupation. In Stuttgart, for example, about 3,000 women were said to have been raped by French troops, many from Algeria. 39 In the American occupation zone, by far the largest, the number of recorded rapes by American troops in the whole of 1945 did not exceed 1,500. 40
    There are several reasons why rape was less common under Western occupation than in the Soviet zone. Allied troops, with the possible exception of the French, were not as vengeful as the Soviets. Nor were they encouraged by their superiors to do as they liked with German women. (Stalin himself notoriously stated that soldiers who had crossed thousands of miles through blood and fire were entitled to “have some fun with women.”) Besides, the willingness of German women to “frat” with Allied soldiers was such that rape was hardly necessary. A popular quip among GIs in the summer of 1945 was that German women were the loosest “this side of Tahiti.” 41
    This was no doubt an exaggeration, promoted not just by grateful GIs, but by Germans who were outraged by actions they regarded as a further insult to their already shattered sense of national pride. Still, many soldiers claimed that German women, known variously as “frauleins,” “furlines,” or “fratkernazis,” were even more willing to have sexual relations with them than the French women were. One rather brutal, but perhaps not wholly inaccurate, analysis of this phenomenon was given by a GI after he had just returned to the U.S. “At the risk of letting the cat out of the bag,” he wrote, “it must be admitted that all the GI wants in Europeis a ‘good deal,’” which included “a chance to fraternize as often as possible.” He continued: “In Germany, naturally, the GI finds the best deal . . . In France the deal is different. The GI doesn’t find the all-out bootlicking of Germany. He can’t make France the plaything he heard it was from his Dad and from the liberators in 1944.” 42
    And there were of course far more

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