Facing the Rising Sun

by Gerald Horne

  This viewpoint presumably was not shared by another prominent Negro intellectual and educator, Charles Johnson, who made a conspicuous arrival in Tokyo in 1946, though the circumstances were not what was envisioned in East St. Louis in 1942. Johnson, given the rank of brigadier general, was tasked with the responsibility of helping to coordinate the “re-education” of Japan away from militarism.34 Remaking this proud nation’s “cultural” system was also part of his task.35 In other words—with irony manifest—he was executing an important task that Tokyo thought it would be executing in Black America if the war had ended differently.

  Johnson’s ministrations might have been better applied to his compatriots in Japan rather than the Japanese themselves. Writing from Yokohama in 1946, Edwin Gregory, a member in good standing of the U.S. elite, informed Senator Bilbo that “many Jews were sent to the training center” there and “they invariably proved poor soldiers and dangerous for other soldiers” besides, since “if sent to the point at the front, they had the attitude of ‘let the best of the Gentiles get killed off and [we] will be more powerful after the war.’” African Americans were far worse, he thought; surprisingly, he found “the Northern [white] men hate the Negro more than the Southern ones”; in fact, “all soldiers have to despise the Negro” and acted accordingly. This minority group was responsible for having “stolen millions of dollars from the government. They are the ones who do the stealing,” he insisted, and thus “Negro troops [should] be sent home” immediately.36 By 1949 there were at least fifty-five Negro units assigned to duty in Japan, which provided plenty of opportunity for clashes.37

  Keeping an eye peeled on the Philippines was one purpose of these bases in Japan, as the collaboration of these two archipelagos against Washington before 1945 had yet to be forgotten. Thus, despite the recent harrowing experience with Japan and the widespread acknowledgment that bigotry had helped to fuel the war, old habits continued to die hard. Robert Bennett was stationed with U.S. forces in Manila after the war. “The type of people who surround us daily,” he spluttered furiously, were “clannish, primitive heathens”; they were “friendly yet schemish [sic], you never know what their primitive minds are thinking of next.” He was irate with the thought of “missing valuables” of his: “I’d like to get my hands on the little brown-skinned devil who took it,” he exclaimed, using expressions that would have not been out of place in his native Athens, Georgia.38 Subsequently, he worried about an FBI investigation of the Ku Klux Klan in his home state, and inquired whether there were “any discoveries” that would be worrisome to those of his ilk.39 Whatever the answer to that query, the wider point was that the aftermath of the Pacific War, in which Bennett was now enmeshed, had led to a renewed emphasis on eroding the conditions that caused some in East St. Louis, a few years earlier, to await eagerly an expected Japanese invasion.

  By 1946 in Manila considerable anti-Negro propaganda persisted. African Americans were accused by certain Philippine elites of joining in a radical rebellion against the regime, along with “Russians and Chinese.”40 An attempt by the U.S. secretary of war to calm the worried failed, as “vicious white elements” were blamed for the questioning of Negroes’ mettle. Apparently some were upset at the leading roles played in Manila by the likes of the U.S. Negro Calvin Parrish, a Manila resident for years and a leading radio personality.41 Finally, the U.S. military felt compelled to deny that “250 American soldiers deserted the army to become members of the Huks,”42 the militant anti-colonial resistance. Somehow these charges of Negro sedition persisted, despite the presence in the Philippines of those like Millie Sanders, an African American who had been a highly regarded businesswoman before the war in Manila but wound up interned at the notorious Santo Tomas camp.43

  The problem for Washington was that the more perceptive Negro leaders realized—even when they did not act upon the idea—that global leverage was mandatory if the United States was to retreat from its racial recalcitrance. Even Lester Granger of the normally staid National Urban League admitted in 1947 that the “hope of Negroes rests on U.S. desire for world respect.”44 Such sentiment helped to unleash a titanic struggle, for the United States was being compelled to retreat from ossified policies that had mass support. This would not have been a simple task in the best of times, but this was an era when a significant percentage of Negro intellectuals, including Robeson and Du Bois, were attracted in various ways to the new foe and former ally, Moscow. One Australian visiting the United States in 1947 found that “Negro vets,” who had sacrificed so much so recently, “expressed deep disappointment with the shape of the post-war world” and “wonder[ed] whether their sacrifices in the war have produced commensurate [gain].”45

  Shortly after this report, President Truman moved to terminate the Jim Crow policies of the military.46 The war had unleashed anti-colonial forces that were difficult to contain and that even the powerful United States could not resist. As Truman was moving to desegregate the armed forces, a group of Negro intellectuals and administrators departed for a tour of India, which only recently had shed its involuntary title as the jewel in the British crown. T. Thomas Fortune Fletcher, who made this journey, was pleased upon arriving in Bombay: “I received every courtesy,” he enthused, at a deluxe hotel akin to Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria. He glimpsed a sign, “Dogs and South Africans not admitted,” a reference to the architects of the recently proclaimed apartheid, which was headed in the opposite direction of global trends. Before independence, he recalled, “non-Europeans” were barred, but times had changed.47 Fletcher’s experience reflected the rise of India, one of the salient and most important aspects of the post-1945 dispensation: New Delhi’s ascension to the front ranks of diplomacy ultimately guaranteed that the promise of “Afro-Asian solidarity” signaled by the rise of Japan in the first few decades of the twentieth century would be at least partially fulfilled.

  The ongoing maltreatment of African Americans stood as testament to the contradictory nature of “war crime” indictments exclusively of Japanese leadership. Moreover, the ongoing racial abuse dictated that U.S. Negroes would adopt stances contrary to U.S. foreign policy, as had just been exposed during the Pacific War, notably in the U.S. colony that was the Philippines. How many—and whether—Negroes fought alongside the anti-imperialist Huks in the Philippines is unclear, though like those who expressed solidarity with Ethiopia in the 1930s, or like David Fagen, who threw in his lot with the precursors of the Huks decades earlier, this kind of solidarity continued after the Pacific War ended. Inevitably, this global wanderlust took intriguing directions. By May 1948 it was reported that “numerous Negroes here [in the United States] have attempted to volunteer to fight for Israel,” including John Harris, who “was reared in a Jewish home. He was confirmed when he was 12.”48

  The postwar hysteria about the African American presence in the Philippines was a throwback to the era decades earlier when numerous Negro soldiers were accused of joining the rebels in the wake of the ouster of Spain in 1898 and the squashing of the archipelago’s independence. This accusation notwithstanding, the blistering nature of the war had helped to convince Brigadier General Carlos Romulo in Manila to assert that “the next war will be a race war” unless the world—notably the colonizing powers—were able to “face frankly the problem of the darker peoples of the Pacific.”49

  ***

  Walter White of the NAACP detected the growing importance of Afro-Asian solidarity in 1949 when he traveled to Africa and Asia, where he found much disparagement of the United States because of maltreatment of the Negro. In India, where sympathy for Japan during the war had been strong, “Nehru told [White] personally that it was a hard job to keep his people from sympathizing with the Russians.” Indian youth often opted for higher education in Russia since “they fear ill-treatment in America due to their skin [being] dark.”50

  When war erupted on the Korean peninsula, Japan became a staging ground for U.S. and United Nations offensives, which led White’s colleague
Roy Wilkins to demand a “probe of army bias in Japan,” which was “as flagrant as it is in Georgia” and belied the U.S. attempt to portray the Korean conflict as being something other than a “racial war.”51 Negro troops railed against the typical designation “U.N. Forces and Negro Troops,” which implied that the latter were otherworldly or that Africans were not part of the human family. Another U.S. observer in Japan found that Negro troops “have always been accepted by the Japanese, since most of them are kind and lack the arrogance of whites which many Japanese find irksome.”52 Evidently, this was reflected in the escalating number of Negro military men filing requests “to marry their Oriental ‘flames of passion.’”53 Ironically, Edith Sampson, who had aided a key figure in the pro-Tokyo Negro movement in Chicago, was appointed to a post at the United Nations, supposedly to provide “an answer to Communist propaganda about the position of Negroes” in the United States.54

  But the most expert counter-propaganda was hardly effective when the NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall verified unjust treatment of Negro soldiers rotating from Japan to Korea, whose rate of court-martial exceeded that of white soldiers by a ratio of sixteen to one.55 As late as 1952, Negro soldiers slain on the battlefields of Korea could not be buried in cemeteries designated back home for the “white dead.”56 As late as 1953, as the war was stumbling toward a truce, there were credible reports that blood continued to be racially segregated, contrary to directives.57

  Reportedly, 90 percent of the U.S. prisoners-of-war freed in the immediate aftermath of the 1953 truce were Negroes, as those who had fought Japan and gained legitimacy as a result—North Korean and Chinese Communists—took a page from Tokyo’s playbook by seeking to manipulate race relations within the republic. A freed prisoner asserted that “the Reds rated racial bias in the United States as the weak spot in the American armor of democracy. They felt that it would be easier to turn Negroes into Communists than other Americans.” Thus, these wily antagonists mimicked Jim Crow by separating Black and white soldiers, as to better influence the former.58 Reportedly, resistance to collaboration with the stated foe was spearheaded by a group named the Ku Klux Klan, which, it was said, tended to “associate treason with color.”59

  The former prisoner noted above may have had Louis Wheaton in mind. Hailing from New York City, this former Air Force officer defected to China and began broadcasting from there, where he accused his former homeland of engaging in germ warfare and burning Korean women and children alive. From 1942 to 1948 he had been an aviation instructor at Tuskegee. With a law degree from Fordham University, Wheaton was seemingly poised to take advantage of the new era of desegregation then emerging. However, unlike the Black Nationalists who predominated in pro-Tokyo formations before 1945, Wheaton was rumored to be a Communist, suggesting that as long as stains of Jim Crow persisted, the United States would face a continuing national security problem.60

  Hence, those described as “Tan Yanks” chose not to sing “sad songs” when Douglas MacArthur, the U.S. proconsul in Japan and then commander in Korea, was sacked. According to James Hicks, it was “common knowledge” that “the existence of segregation in the army [persisted] in spite of” Truman’s executive order mandating otherwise. MacArthur was fingered as the culprit. “Tokyo today looks like Mississippi,” Hicks asserted in 1951, “so far as racial signs are concerned.” In MacArthur’s own headquarters signs marked the toilets and water fountains as “For Japanese Only” and “Allied Personnel Only”; there were “‘white’ and ‘colored’ swimming pools,” while in other areas “whites” were allowed to use the pools one day and “colored” the next. Hicks did not comment on the paradoxical fact that Tokyo’s self-proclaimed “race war” could end with a Jim Crow result, at least in the short term.61 Hicks’s observations were substantiated by contemporaneous words of Walter White, who lamented, “When I was in Japan, . . . I saw little evidence of any compliance with the integration order,” while “Thurgood Marshall found the same to be true in Tokyo and Korea in 1951.”62

  Hicks also commented on the situation in Australia. In one area in Brisbane, MacArthur had demarcated a six-block area where Negro soldiers could go for recreation—and no other area; military police were stationed strategically to enforce this directive and arrested any “colored” soldiers who dared veer beyond their apartheid zone and seek to partake of the Army’s modern PX. This, said Hicks, was done at MacArthur’s behest for the purpose of keeping Negroes away from Euro-Australian women.63

  Despite the bitter lesson in Korea, which helped to derail victory, old customs perished uneasily in the United States. Five years after the truce, those defined as “Mongoloid,” in addition to “Negroid” and “Caucasian,” were directed by the state senate of Georgia to have their blood segregated, running the risk of alienating Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, and Asians generally.64

  ***

  By 1952, the ANP reported that Japanese expected to face bigotry at the hands of occupation forces yet were still staggered by what was termed the “two Army structure—one white, one black.”65 That same year the leading African American intellectual Hugh Smythe was to be found teaching in Japan. He was struck by the paradox of the U.S. occupation, which created conditions facilitating the rise of Japanese nationalists and extreme right-wing groups who had helped to instigate and aided the prosecution of the last war, while—consistent with the ongoing Red Scare and Cold War—Washington’s policy tended to smother the Socialists and Communists who were the opponents of these chauvinists. He was keen to report to the NAACP readership that he espied a “Little Black Sambo” image in Japan uncomfortably close to a picture of Ralph Bunche, then a rising official within the United Nations but previously a professor at Howard University. Smythe and his spouse, Mabel Murphy Smythe, also a Negro intellectual of some note, found this placement not to be coincidental. After all, as war in Korea raged, the Asian antagonists of Washington were routinely referred to as “gooks,” a replay of Pacific War verbiage, and perceived as the functional equivalent of “nigger.”

  Unsurprisingly Japan had not been purged altogether of its sour view of U.S. relations. When a prominent Harlem pastor toured Japan, he was asked by students whether there were still Negro slaves in the republic. Japan, the Smythes concluded, was “historically racially conscious” and islanders wondered why there was “no colored delegate who occupied a commanding or key position” at the San Francisco Peace Conference. “In this colored nation once a world power,” they added gravely, “the international significance of racialism is recognized.”66

  The labor movement in Japan was more robust—and more influenced by Communists—than its U.S. counterpart, which became evident when the Negro labor leader A. Philip Randolph arrived in Tokyo in 1952, accompanied by the Socialist leader Norman Thomas. The two barely escaped intact when seeking to address 300,000 in Meiji Park. They were not stoned, as reported, but did escape hurriedly with the expert aid of the U.S. military and Japanese police. The riot, considered the worst in the nation’s postwar history, was ascribed to Communists who did not appreciate the two leaders’ strident anticommunism. U.S. property was destroyed in the melee and 1,100 were injured.67

  Two years later seven labor leaders from this Asian nation were received in more genteel fashion when they made a lengthy tour of the United States. They took a keen interest in the problems of Negroes, and raised questions that had not occurred to some in the United States itself—for example, what was to befall Negro teachers if desegregation were to take hold?68

  U.S.-Japan relations remained complicated, in other words. The fraught occupation was even more complicated, Hugh Smythe noted, since a “considerable percentage of Occupation troops among the non-Negroes are individuals from the South and they have brought with them southern mores and racial patterns.” Their presence may have facilitated the wonderment they found among Japanese as to why atomic weapons were dropped on their nation and not in the European theater.69

  Unsurprisingly given such attitudes, by
1953 reports of Black and white soldiers rioting at Yamanaka, southwest of Tokyo, seemed to be old news; the most newsworthy item was that it took place on the Fourth of July.70 These confrontations apparently did not leave locals unaffected. Subsequently, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem denounced what was termed “Japanese bias to Negroes [by] a Japanese bar in Tokyo”71

  But even Powell’s démarche does not capture wholly the point that the effect of decades of racial proselytizing could not disappear instantaneously. In the spring of 1954, as the U.S. Supreme Court was about to rule in Brown v. Board of Education that Jim Crow was no longer legal, the fabled Negro chanteuse Josephine Baker addressed an assemblage in Japan with a speech entitled “Why I Fight Racism.” Approximately a century after Commodore Perry opened Japan to foreign influence, she instructed those assembled pointedly that “it is important that one knows what to adopt” from abroad, “and what to leave aside,” for example, anti-Black racism. “For all my life,” she rhapsodized, “I have dreamt about your country,” and her imaginings were fulfilled. She recalled how in 1952 she was beseeched by Japanese Americans in San Francisco to lobby the mayor to return “their tea-garden” that was “confiscated during the war”—a request she granted promptly. She recalled a meeting in Los Angeles during that same period with a “coloured man” married to a Japanese American woman and how they and their children were compelled to abandon their home and reside in a camp because of the presumed wartime sin of possessing “Japanese blood.” Her mandate, as she saw it, was to ensure that in the future such racism would no longer obtain.72

  Baker’s presence in Japan was emblematic of the fact that artistic endeavor continued to unite Japanese and African Americans. In 1953 the leading Negro musicians Louis Armstrong and Oscar Petersen toured Japan and there discovered Toshiko Akiyoshi, a twenty-six-year-old piano wizard. She played in the same style—in a homage that echoed the pre-1945 era—as the legendary Negro pianist Bud Powell and went on to establish a protean career in the United States.73 The artistic favor was reciprocated that same year when Japan began buzzing about the acting and singing ability of the tenor Danny Williams, co-star of the Japanese movie Yassa Mossa. This talented thirty-year-old Negro sailor formerly had warbled at the famed St. Louis nightspot the Riviera Lounge.74