Issue:
March 2026 | Japan Media Review
Women and their offspring were the chief victims of the long U.S. occupation of Okinawa.
NHK airs an occasional documentary series called Image Century, which attempts to explain phenomena and events in Japanese history using assembled and edited footage from the public broadcaster's archives. An installment in January, titled Ai to Kanashimi Josei-tachi (Women of Love and Sadness), addressed relationships between Okinawan women and U.S. servicemen stationed in Okinawa from 1945 to 1972, when the archipelago was occupied and administered by the U.S. military.
As background, the documentary describes the Battle of Okinawa, the only fighting between U.S. and Japanese forces that took place in the Japanese homeland. Some 300,000 Okinawans were held in camps right after the war ended, and NHK says that Okinawan women suffered in particular. Rapes by American soldiers were everyday occurrences, and so women who would normally work the fields to grow food were afraid to go out. It's implied that many were offered as sexual sacrifices to appease American soldiers. It was normal for Okinawan women to not travel anywhere alone, but only in groups.
Another reason for the heavier burden on women is that so many Okinawan men had been killed during the war, so all females, regardless of age, had to work in order to support their families. Many worked for the U.S. military, initially in an informal manner, such as doing laundry for soldiers in exchange for daily necessities. In many cases, having work obligations was the only way they could leave the camps, and some later became maids and housekeepers for military personnel.
The tension between Okinawans and the American military only increased over the years due to crimes committed by soldiers, especially in the city of Koza, which was adjacent to Kadena air base, where B-52 bombers were based during the Korean War. Because of the large influx of soldiers there was no real check on their behavior. Prostitution was common and conspicuous, a matter that finally prompted the U.S. military to act. The officer in charge of Kadena admitted that it was too difficult to monitor soldiers' sexual activities, and so the solution was to create the Yaejima "special area" in the 1950s on the outskirts of Koza where soldiers could "relax", in essence providing cover for the establishment of brothels. Okinawans agreed to this arrangement, hoping it would reduce some of the lawlessness. Consequently, businesses proliferated in Yaejima that serviced soldiers. These businesses were inspected by the U.S. military and certified with a sign emblazoned with the letter "A", which indicated that the business was "sanitary," meaning none of the employees had sexually transmitted diseases. Only U.S. military personnel could patronize these businesses, and, in turn, soldiers were restricted to Yaejima in terms of recreation. Local women reportedly sought work there because the pay was much higher than the local average. However, since the work was associated with prostitution even when it didn't directly involve sex work, most of these women didn't tell their families what they did, even though they could support them on the money they received.
After the San Francisco Treaty was signed in 1952 and the U.S. occupation of the mainland ended, the U.S. military continued its occupation of Okinawa, a situation that dismayed many residents, who had expected the soldiers to leave. Okinawa's importance to the American presence in the Pacific only intensified, and the military moved to procure more land on the archipelago. Local owners say they couldn't do anything if the U.S. wanted to commandeer their land. By 1962, the military had increased its holding on the island by 70% compared to 1952. The U.S. now controlled 20% of all the land on the island, including one-third of its farmland. The military paid rent for the land, but it was only ¥2.23 per year per tsubo (3.3 square meters). Construction of facilities on this land increased apace through the 1960s as Okinawa became the launching point for soldiers going to Vietnam. Farmers who had been displaced by the confiscation of their land had to find other work, usually at low pay, so the women in their families who worked in Yaejima became the de facto breadwinners.
The documentary also shows how tensions resulted in demonstrations against the military. In the summer of 1955, a 6-year-old girl was raped and killed, her body left on a beach at Kadena. A 31-year-old sergeant was arrested for the crime. Huge demonstrations against the base continued into 1956, and while the sergeant was initially convicted and given the death sentence, the sentence was later commuted and he was sent back to the U.S., where he was eventually released. But even as resistance against the occupation increased in the 1950s and 60s, businesses catering to soldiers in Koza also increased in number. By the end of the 1960s, when the Vietnam War was at its peak and Okinawa hosted 50,000 soldiers a year, the city had become completely dependent economically on Kadena, having grown from a small village before the war into a city of 60,000 people. The city's prosperity was built on the backs of local women, and while many of these women worked in pawn shops, nightclubs. and bars, there was still open prostitution that was ostensibly illegal. Women caught soliciting could be fined $20 (which, according to NHK, was the same amount they charged for a sexual encounter), while soldiers who patronized these women were not punished at all.
Naturally, intimate relationships between local women and American soldiers proliferated during this time, with many women getting pregnant. The documentary says that this development led to the establishment of at least five "unauthorized" daycare centers in Koza at a time when child daycare was very rare in Japan. There was even nighttime daycare since so many women worked at night in Yaejima.
The first marriage between an American and an Okinawan is mentioned in a newspaper article that appeared in August 1947. NHK said the article shocked many Japanese readers because Americans had been referred to as "devils" by the media only two years earlier, but marriage was a problem from the standpoint of the U.S. military, which banned fraternization between Americans and Japanese in 1948. Soldiers protested, however, and many just ignored the order, which was rescinded only four months after it was implemented. The documentary emphasizes the difference between American men and Japanese men in terms of their treatment of women. One woman in the film says, "When I have my hands full, often a G.I. will step up to open the door for me," she says. "A Japanese man would never do that." This quote is followed by a montage of mixed couples demonstrating affection in public. NHK says the strongest opposition to these relationships came not from the American side, but from the Okinawan families of the women involved.
The documentary isolates several stories of women who had children with American servicemen. Not all these women married the fathers of their children, but some did. One woman interviewed for an NHK news story from the mid-1980s named Haruko Profumo said she married a G.I. named Michael Profumo in 1963. "He was very kind," she says, "and relentless" about being with her. However, her father was against the marriage and threatened Michael Profumo with a scythe. But while the couple did marry, he was later sent to Vietnam and never returned. Whether he was declared missing-in-action or simply vanished of his own volition, NHK doesn't say, but when the interview was conducted in the 1980s, the woman said she was still waiting for him to return, though her daughter is now an adult.
Another woman, who doesn't give her name, talks about working in a restaurant and falling in love with a marine. She gave birth to a daughter in 1959 after the marine was sent overseas, but she says she received a letter from him indicating he was aware of the child. The marine also never returned. The daughter, Satomi, grew up to become a rock singer who entertained U.S. soldiers. "I'd rather believe he's still alive," she says of her father in 1986. "My life is not a tragedy because I was born of love."
The documentary also addresses the mixed feelings of Okinawans toward the island's return to Japan in 1972. Many hoped that once Okinawa came under Japanese rule again, the Americans would leave, while most of the people in Koza who depended on the U.S. military for their livelihood wanted the opposite. One business person interviewed at the time said that if the Kadena base was removed, it would be the end of Koza. At the same time, Americans were souring on the Vietnam War, which affected the morale of many of the soldiers stationed in Okinawa. There was lots of drinking and problems—soldiers would go on benders because they thought they would die in Vietnam. One of the most famous statistics of the Vietnam War is that the average age of an American combat soldier at the height of the conflict was 19, and the documentary even makes a case that this situation was the genesis for the musical genre called Okinawan rock, which in a sense sympathized with the sad fate of these soldiers. "Bars themselves became battlefields," as the narrator puts it.
In the end, the documentary says that the legacy of the U.S. occupation during the 1950s and 60s is best characterized by the many mixed heritage children on Okinawa, 80% of whom were legally fatherless when they were born. Because of ignorance and the different laws covering nationality in Japan and the U.S., a great many of these children were also stateless, and remained that way well into their adulthood. However, NHK doesn't go any further into this issue in the documentary, instead emphasizing the romantic aspects of the relationships between Okinawan women and American servicemen by fixating on the word "love".
The main problem in this regard were children born before the 1972 changeover. Even if the parents were married, it didn't necessarily guarantee that the child would automatically be given U.S. citizenship. At the time, in order for a child born overseas to one American parent and one foreign parent to be deemed an American citizen, the American parent had to have resided physically in the U.S. for ten years with at least five of those years coming after their 14th birthday. As already stated, the average age for an American soldier in Vietnam was 19, thus cutting this deadline very close, but in any case, since 80% of these children were born out-of-wedlock there was no documentation proving that their fathers were Americans. And Japan did not retroactively recognize them as being Japanese after Okinawa returned to Japan in 1972.
In his 1982 book Children Who Don't Exist, author Hideo Honda studied the matter of mixed heritage children on Okinawa and found that much of the problem actually had to do with ignorance of the law on the part of Okinawans and lack of any concerted effort to help these children gain nationality. As a matter of fact, people born in Okinawa were, to the Japanese authorities both during the war and during the U.S. occupation, considered "citizens of the Ryukyus", the kingdom that ruled Okinawa before the Japanese took over; and after the changeover in 1972, any Ryukyu citizen was deemed Japanese, but if the child was born during the occupation and was of mixed heritage, it was tacitly assumed by the Japanese authorities that the child was American, regardless of whether the U.S. recognized them as such. Consequently, many of these children were left in legal limbo.
It was even difficult to know how many there were. According to surveys cited by Honda, as of 1980 there were some 4,000 people born during the occupation that were considered of mixed heritage, but only about 100 were confirmed as being stateless. Honda assumes there were more because of poor information gathering, but his main point is that many of these stateless children had by 1980 reached adulthood and were having children of their own who would in turn be stateless, especially if they were born out-of-wedlock. It wasn't until 1985 that Japan changed its nationality law, which previously stated that paternity determined nationality, meaning if an Okinawan child was born to an Okinawan woman and an American man before 1985, that child was, according to Japanese authorities, American, regardless of American law. The U.S. eventually scrapped the stipulation that the U.S. parent of a child born overseas had to physically live in the U.S. for at least 5 years after turning 14, but the mixed heritage children in Okinawa weren't made aware of any of these changes to the law unless someone actively informed them of it. According to Honda, since many of these children born before 1972 were the offspring of Okinawan sex workers or other women who worked in Yaejima, the mothers may not have wanted to draw attention to either themselves or their children, and so their situations remained hidden.
These changes weren't covered by the Japanese media in later years, since they affected so few people and Okinawa did not receive much attention from the Japanese mainland. The fact that NHK didn't mention the matter of stateless children in its "Image Century" overview would seem to indicate that it isn't an issue any more. Perhaps it isn't, but it would have been interesting to see how the matter was eventually resolved, if in fact it ever was.
Philip Brasor is a Tokyo-based writer who covers entertainment, the Japanese media, and money issues. He writes the Japan Media Watch column for the Number 1 Shimbun.
Sources
https://www.web.nhk/tv/an/butterfly/pl/series-tep-9N81M92LXV/ep/DKL6671WR8
https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/存在しない子どもたち―沖縄の無国籍児問題-1982年-同時代叢書-本田-英郎/dp/B000J7RVMY
