Only families of wealth and elevated social status were able to insulate their daughters from the world of American soldiers. Those who had survived needed work, and the Americans provided it. They set up typing schools and English classes, hired secretaries, clerks, maids, babysitters. Nightclubs and cabarets sprang up for the occupiers, and Japanese women found work there, too.

My mother, the daughter of an Imperial Japanese Army officer, had a pampered childhood in Korea when it was ruled by the Japanese, with maids and dance lessons. An aide came every morning to polish her father’s boots and chauffeur him to camp. But her father died of an illness, and the family came back to Japan during the war, reduced in circumstances.

After high school, she looked for a job. There was no money for her to go to college; it would be saved for her brother. The U.S. military operated a PX — or Army post exchange, a retail outlet for soldiers — in the Ginza area of Tokyo. She went for an interview and was hired as a sales clerk in the jewelry department, helping servicemen pick out gifts for their girlfriends.

Hiroko, right, with her mother, Ume Furukawa, and her brother, Masaaki, in a portrait taken in Korea, where the family lived a privileged life under Japanese occupation. (Courtesy of the Tolbert family)

Sometime in 1950, she was going home on a streetcar when a GI started talking to her. She told him she worked at the PX. He started showing up there to talk to her and ask her out. She turned him down, but he kept asking. Japanese men, the war brides recount, rarely pressed their luck after being rebuffed. American men? Extremely persistent.

These ardent Americans also brought presents the Japanese could not afford or had never seen before — chocolate, dresses from Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward and even Spam, a culinary oddity. And they seemed handsome. Tall, well-fed, wearing crisp uniforms. Japan had lost so many of its young men in the war, and the ones who came back were physically and mentally debilitated.

American chivalry, the notion of “ladies first,” also enchanted Japanese women. War brides almost universally say “he was such a gentleman” to describe their American suitors.

There was, of course, bad behavior. A woman remembers seeing GIs in a train station with watches up and down their arms, taken from Japanese men. Others I spoke to witnessed physical abuse of Japanese civilians.

My mother liked Bill, the soldier from Upstate New York who spoke to her on the streetcar. Liked him well enough, that is; she wasn’t head over heels. He was quiet and well-behaved compared with some of the American soldiers she had seen; he did not drink. She does not speak of romance, only of her desperation to get out of what she viewed as her hopeless situation in Japan. He was her opportunity.

I met a family whose story begins with a similar chance meeting in postwar Japan, and in their case led to rural Wisconsin. In a small ranch-style house with a large fenced garden, a deer blind and, across the road, an expanse of cornfields, Nancy Roberts, 84, recalls the day she met Don. Her name was Hiroko Yamamoto then.

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