The Making of Japanese American War Heroes and the Rearmament of Occupied Japan

• In Event: From Enemy Combatant to Junior Ally: Examinations of Occupation-Era Nisei GI's and US-Japan Relations

Abstract

This paper traces the convoluted politico-cultural process in occupied Japan that gave birth to a trope of the Japanese American (Nisei) fighting men as a model for postwar democracy and new soldiers of a free Japan. As the policy of the U.S. military occupation underwent a “reverse course” after late 1948 in the context of the Cold War, the U.S. army brass turned to the wartime accomplishments of the famed all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team to marshal support for the remaking of Japan as a junior U.S. ally. Positive images of Nisei GIs as civilized soldiers served as a powerful counterforce against the racialized/racist notion that the Japanese were inherently atrocious—the notion that the pre-1948 U.S. propaganda had striven to create in the minds of the vanquished. The model Japanese American soldier also shored up the ongoing U.S. effort to rehabilitate Japanese through Americanization, since it was supposedly the Nisei’s American upbringing that made them such fine soldiers of liberty and democracy in the first place. In this propaganda campaign, Nisei occupation troops played a no less important role, since they were deeply involved in the production of slanted knowledge about them as a paragon of democratic America and good soldiers. In addition, influenced by the officially certified stories of Nisei war heroes, many Japanese nationals, especially those who developed a stake in U.S.-led national rebuilding, engaged in their own versions of Nisei glorification. From 1949 through 1950, these three strains of discursive formation unfolded in tandem, and they converged in the most pivotal moment of the U.S. military occupation: the rearmament of defeated Japan.

Author

• Eiichiro Azuma, University of Pennsylvania