by Alisa Freedman, Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
October 14, 1950: Chie Okada, student at Tokyo Women’s Christian University (Tokyo Joshi Daigaku), arrives at the testing center to take the English examination for a year of graduate-level study in the United States. She is vying for a GARIOA (Government Aid for Relief of Individuals in Occupied Areas, 1949-1952) scholarship, financed by Japan’s war debt and administered by the U.S. Army. Chie is one of 7,899 people, between the ages of 21 and 41, who registered for the test from around Japan, including 261 applicants in Hiroshima, bombed by the United States five years earlier. The 1,000 applicants with the highest scores will undergo oral interviews and medical examinations before the pool is winnowed down to around 500 students, who will be placed at American universities by the International Institute for Education. Students are forbidden from directly contacting universities. Seventy students from Okinawa, then governed by the United States, will also be chosen. Scholarships are among the only means for Japanese students to attend American universities in an era when travel to and from Japan is restricted, Japanese immigration is prohibited by U.S. laws, and women’s access to higher education in Japan is limited.
Chie’s professors at Tokyo Women’s Christian University, a school known for English instruction, mostly teach British authors, but she wants to learn about Nathaniel Hawthorne. She studied for the test, which assesses English skills and the ability to acclimate to American life, by paying close attention in her classes and memorizing words from dictionaries. Yet she worries that she is not as adept at English as the test takers who are professors, translators, and interpreters. Chie feels she that she has nothing to lose, only knowledge and independence to gain. Chie became one of the youngest GARIOA recipients and was assigned to Smith College. As she wrote on a postcard while onboard the General Collins military ship that took her and around seventy other Japanese students to San Francisco in July 1951, “Believing that joy and happiness is brought by myself.”
July 13, 2019: Chie tells this story to her 22-year-old granddaughter, as we lunch in a tempura restaurant in the old Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo. Her granddaughter, a recent graduate in psychology from Waseda University, grew up seeing Chie’s photo album from her year in the United States, but she did not know that her unassuming grandmother had participated in a cultural diplomacy experiment. After returning to Japan in 1952, Chie translated dissertation abstracts for students at the University of Tokyo, where she met her husband, a professor of economics. Chie taught English part-time at a university, and, later in 1975, with a fellow GARIOA 1951 recipient, she offered English conversation classes for house wives in Tokyo. These meetings formed communities of women and predated the proliferation of English conversation schools in Japan in the 1980s. Her granddaughter, now planning her own study trip, is reassured that her grandmother felt similar excitement and nervousness in 1951.
It is a little-known fact that the largest cohort of Japanese exchange students in all of history came to the United States in 1951. Thanks to a 2015 Mazie Giustina Fellowship, I began a project I affectionately call “How I Gained 100 Grandmothers” of recording the personal stories of women, now above age 80, who studied in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s and who witnessed changes in international relations, gender equality, and universities. Also aboard the General Collins ship were twin sisters, Utako Noda and Fumiko Kurata, both en route to the University of Oregon. Fumiko’s husband Yasuo Kurata attended UO on a GARIOA fellowship in 1952 and wrote a 1953 book about studying with his wife at “ahiru daigaku,” or “Duck University.” My project was inspired by Professor Yoko McClain, who also came to UO through the GARIOA program in 1952 and later led our university’s Japanese language program for around thirty years. In 2010, I asked Yoko to write a personal essay for Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor, a conference and co-edited volume (Stanford University Press, 2013) supported by CSWS. To prepare, Yoko and I perused her scrapbooks full of memorabilia from 1950s Oregon. The conversation that began with Yoko’s friendship will result, thanks to CSWS’s generosity, in two books.
First, Cold-War Coeds: The Untold Story of Japanese Women Sponsored by the U.S. Military analyzes how an American imperial project meant to “reeducate” and “reorient” the people of Japan paid off in unexpected dividends for Japanese women in their professional and personal lives. Around 787 Japanese nationals received GARIOA scholarships; among them were 182 women. (After February 1952, Fulbright replaced GARIOA in mainland Japan. GARIOA in Okinawa lasted until the 1970s when the islands reverted to Japan.) Japanese women also received private scholarships from international foundations, philanthropy organizations, and U.S. universities; Japanese groups lacked financial and political resources to support study abroad. American universities were expanding, thanks to programs like the G.I. Bill, and more spots for exchange students became available as American men went off to fight in the Korean War. U.S. graduate degrees helped men gain high-level positions in Japan, but for women who were not expected to pursue full-time careers, study abroad also had a symbolic meaning. Female students served as cultural ambassadors and received more American and Japanese media attention than men. Their work, whether they realized it or not, was political and integral to 1950s American democratic efforts in Asia.
GARIOA scholars were among the first Japanese people to travel abroad after World War II. They arrived bearing the burdens of the past, while possessing an openness to the future. They came to study in a land that had interned around 120,000 Japanese Americans during the war and needed to figure out what it meant to be Japanese in a racially divided America. At a time when being a housewife was held up as a middle-class ideal in Japan, many female exchange students pioneered academic fields that relied on cross-cultural knowledge and were instrumental in historical events like the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Equipped with new learning and overcoming gender biases, these women were a hidden force in postwar development who forever changed women’s roles in Japan and the United States. Study abroad changed them in other ways, as they formed friendships, built networks, and reassessed their life goals. Some found alternatives to patriarchal life courses. My book brings together these women’s experiences for the first time; by doing so, I recover a forgotten chapter in the history of education, illuminate another side of relations between Japan and the United States, and trace stories that are truly inspirational.
A challenge has been finding ways to tell the story of this unacknowledged force of women who used the system they found themselves in to do something extraordinary. To contextualize my interviews, I have delved into a range of materials—military documents, university records, propaganda films, local newspapers, memoirs, guidebooks, and textbooks—to understand why and which kinds of women were given fellowships and how grants promoting American-style democracy gave rise to academic fields that critiqued the very political structures and social systems that had made them possible. My interdisciplinary work is inspired by the notion of modern literature as capturing and presenting, in a creative and thought-provoking form, moments and encounters of daily life, ordinary experiences with the power to transform worldviews and encourage self-realization. This is true of stories about rides on commuter trains (as I analyzed in Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road, Stanford University Press, 2010) and those about studying abroad in early Cold-War America. I try to account for the different ways in which women have processed, narrated, circulated, and consumed their own and others’ experiences. The things we save and remember reflect our values and worldviews. As a result, my book reads more personally than most academic studies. It also benefits from the feedback of my interview subjects.
Several female exchange students became professors of Japanese Studies because they had reflected on notions of nation and home while abroad. Concurrently, American women increasingly studied in Japan in the 1950s through 1970s with scholarships. They were among the first American scholars to use original Japanese sources in their research. This generation of Japanese and American women helped establish Japanese Studies as we know it today and challenge the common narrative that the field was founded primarily by men who worked for the U.S. military or were from missionary families in Japan. My second CSWS project—Women in Japanese Studies: Voices of a Trailblazing Generation, print book and open-access digital archive—makes available to academic audiences and the broad public the personal stories of scholars who became professors in the 1950s through 1970s and published groundbreaking studies, translated Japanese culture, and fostered generations of students. This project, a close collaboration with the women profiled, offers trailblazing women the opportunity to tell, in their own words, how they came to research and teach about Japan and deal with institutionalized patterns of discrimination at universities. Their personal stories capture emotional and intellectual experiences omitted from institutional histories, provide a more balanced history of Japanese Studies, and reflect on gender in the academy.
I have brought the lessons I have learned while researching women’s stories into my UO courses. In spring 2020, I taught a seminar on “Women in Modern Japan.” The class discussed how, due to laws, social conventions, business practices, and other factors, women have faced different choices in work and family and different access to education, jobs, and politics than people of other genders. We studied how women in various fields, from literature to sports, have told their own stories and how documentary filmmakers, writers, and academics have depicted women whose unusual choices have changed Japanese and American society. While reading several kinds of narratives, we analyzed how women have coped with public and personal traumas and have initiated movements for equality. We discussed the importance of personal stories in reflecting who we are and how we want to be remembered. For their class projects, UO students wrote children’s books to teach younger generations, interviewed their grandmothers (including a Japanese war bride), and recorded their own quarantine stories. And one of the women I am researching came to class.
May 20, 2020: Takako Lento, profiled in Women in Japanese Studies, joins a Zoom meeting with my seminar on “Women in Modern Japan.” With a Fulbright Fellowship in 1965, Takako studied linguistics at the University of Iowa, where she met her husband Tom (a fellow graduate student) and later taught the university’s first Japanese literature classes (1968-1971). She translated prizewinning books of poetry, including a volume of Buson’s haiku with U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). Takako says that studying abroad “fortified” her with another culture, strengthening her and her scholarship. Today, Takako is the guest judge of our class “COVID-19 Quarantine Tanka Contest.” (Tanka are 31-syllable poems historically written by Japanese women.) She answers student questions and shares a poem she wrote about being quarantined. My seminar is compiling a PDF of our poems as a keepsake of this unusual spring term. The intergenerational conversation helps us feel less isolated and more connected during a challenging time.
My CSWS project has encouraged grandmothers to talk with their grandchildren, daughters to reminisce about their mothers, and students to interview their professors. Women who rode the General Collins together in 1951 but lost touch in subsequent years have reunited. As Sumie Jones (Fulbright 1962, University of Washington, and later professor of Japanese Literature at Indiana University) wrote in a March 4, 2020 email to contributors to Women in Japanese Studies, “Unlike institutional histories, in which experiences and views are bound into a unified public story that ignores the edges and borders, oral histories are based on the premise that any part of human community should be heard and that each story tells of an individual experience.” What the women I have interviewed consider most meaningful about their experiences provides insight into larger issues concerning gender, education, nation, and home. Their accounts are not merely tales of discrimination; they are stories of memory and empowerment.
—Alisa Freedman is a professor of Japanese literature and film.