Notes
CHAPTER 8 Ties That (Un)Bind Asians
I grew up hearing two stories of Japanese-Burmese wartime romance from my mother. One was about the Japanese obstetrician who attended my birth, whom I will call Sakai. He was stationed in the Arakan Mountains, the western limit of the Japanese Empire at the border of Burma and India and a major battlefront, where he fell in love with a young Arakanese woman. When the Japanese army began its retreat in 1944 and Sakai was ordered to make his way south to the port of Akyab, his lover, who was pregnant with his child, guided him through the Arakan mountain ranges. He boarded a boat back to Japan and promised her he would return to find her and their child as soon as possible. As promised, Sakai returned to Burma. But he was never able to find out what happened to his lover or their child. He eventually married a Japanese woman. But he insisted to my mother that the Arakanese woman was his first love and he had never loved another in the same way.
Though key details are missing (and more on this below), this is a story located in the broader arc of the collapse of the Japanese Empire with the British defeat of the Japanese army at Imphal and Kohima, where Uncle Mohan had been posted. According to the Japanese army’s chief of logistics Lt. Colonel Kurahashi Takeo, only thirty-one thousand Japanese soldiers survived the battle and the ensuing retreat, ordered by the Japanese army on 2 July 1944. If we are to believe him, 80 percent of the Japanese deployed to Imphal and Kohima perished.1
Sakai was among the fortunate minority who survived the war and the retreat, and he credited his Arakanese lover with his survival. Without her, he may have been captured by the Allied forces or the anti-Japanese Burmese soldiers of the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL). And without her, he may have not survived the long trek through the treacherous hills of Arakan. The following excerpt from a British intelligence report that describes the passes at the Assam-Burma border and the local people, including women and children, who were pressed into corvée labor for the Allied forces during the war provides a sense of the arduous journey that Sakai’s lover undertook while pregnant to ensure his safety: “The strain of persistent portering of 50lb loads over hilly country where stages are anything from 10–20 miles and where the path may descend 3000 feet or more to a stream and climb again to its original height inevitably begins to tell after two years and the coolie-potential itself is reduced by the resultant weakness and greater susceptibility to sickness, thereby increasing the burden on the other villagers.”2
Though my mother never explained, it was clear that he had shared this story with her by way of explaining his tenderness for my mother, a Burmese woman in her twenties at the time. She has often spoken of his affection for her and how much it meant as she struggled to cope with the challenges of being a first-time mother far away from her own family and in a country (Japan) that only recognized her as a gaijin (outsider, foreigner). Sakai may have viewed my mother as an agent of redemption who provided an opportunity to atone for his decision to leave his own Arakanese lover and unborn child to save himself, a way to repay through proxy his debt to the one who helped him survive.
Sakai’s story typifies both the motifs and tensions of Japanese postwar narratives of imperialism that displace violence, coercion, and domination with love, consent, and cooperation. One example that closely mirrors Sakai’s story is the fabled tale of the seventeen-year-old aborigine woman (from the indigenous Atayal tribe) Sayon (or Sayun) set in Japanese Taiwan. In September 1938, Sayon and ten other Atayal women assisted a Japanese police officer cum schoolteacher who had been drafted by the Japanese forces in China to descend a precipitous mountain path, thirty-four kilometers long, during a torrential typhoon. Weighed down with three of his suitcases, Sayon fell into the river and drowned. “While many treatments of Sayon emphasize the hoopla generated by her supposed spirit of sacrifice,” Paul D. Barclay notes, “she was essentially a porter.”3 The governor-general of Taiwan took the first step in representing Sayon the porter as Sayon the patriot when he presented Sayon with a commemorative bell inscribed with the phrase “The Bell of the Patriotic Maiden Sayon.” Since then, songs and films have contributed to the memorialization of Sayon as the model colonial subject. Not unlike the colonial myth of Pocahontas and her intimate relationships with the British colonialists John Smith and John Rolfe, the legend of Sayon romanticized colonization by transposing the history of conquest with a tragic tale of love in which a noble savage and heroine rescued the colonizer.
The resemblance between the romantic tragedies of Sayon and Sakai is striking. It raises the question of Sakai’s possible improvisation of his own memory. Perhaps his Arakanese lover-savior was not his lover after all. She may have been a porter or a guide, as in the case of Sayon. And she may not have chosen to accompany Sakai as he maintained.
Such sentimentalized master’s narratives of wartime romances appeal to the mutual fidelity of the Japanese colonizer and the colonized female to justify Japanese imperialism, only to foreclose the possibility of the couple consummating their intimacy. The Japanese colonizer is forced to repatriate and abandon his native lover, as in the case of Sakai, or the native lover is killed off, as in the case of Sayon. In not a single case—none that I have come across—is there a happily ever after. Characteristic of colonial interracial love plots that culminate in the separation of the lovers, repatriation of the colonizer, and the early demise of the native, the colonial promise of pan-Asian union never materializes.4
The Pan-Asian Family Romance
Historians of imperial Japan have emphasized that after Japan annexed Korea in 1910, it embraced racial assimilation to promote “mixed-blood” imperialism. Only in the aftermath of World War II did the idea that the Japanese were a “pure-blood” race and nation become mainstream and konketsuji (mixed-blood children), once celebrated as offspring of imperial expansion, rejected.5 In the lead-up to World War II, two different theories of the Japanese race gained adherents in Japanese circles. One posited that the Japanese were descendants of the Malay race, not the Indo-Aryan race, as had been theorized in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The other, known as fukugō minzoku ron (theory of a mixed nation), viewed the Japanese as a “mixed-blood” people with an exceptional gift for fusing the multiplicity of Asian races into a harmonious whole.6 These ideas of Asians united by a primordial blood bond found advocates among those who had once insisted on Japanese racial purity and homogeneity.7
Accordingly, a country profile for Burma prepared by the Japanese military in anticipation of its “southward advance” emphasized the racial affinity of the Japanese and Burmese and their shared blood.8 Its essay on Burmese culture emphasized that Burmese women, unlike their Chinese or Indian counterparts, shared not only the racial features (e.g., skin tone, “soft” or “kind” face) but also the “innocence” of Japanese women.9 This closeness enabled the Japanese to appreciate the natives of the nanpō (southern regions) in ways that white imperialists never could, wrote the Southern propagandist writer Takami Jun (1907–1965) in his chronicle of wartime Burma.10 Southern propagandist writers like Takami romanticized Japanese militarism as Japan’s manifest destiny. Allegedly, conquest was a selfless labor of love by the Japanese to restore the Asian family torn asunder by Euro-American imperialists.
To take but one example, the semifictional travelogue Biruma no asa (Burma’s dawn, 1943) by the writer Sakakiyama Jun (1900–1980) follows the evolving friendship between the Japanese soldier Shiki and his young Burmese charge U Thant, who continually refers to Shiki as “master.”11 Their relationship originates in a confession by U Thant that his wife, along with other young women from his village, was “taken” by the British—presumably for the purpose of sexual labor—only five months after the couple was married. Moved by this intimate revelation, Shiki returns U Thant’s trust by taking on the role of confidante and mentor to the young man, who seeks Shiki’s advice on whether to search for his wife or to avenge her violation by fighting the British. The two men part ways when U Thant joins the resistance army. They meet again and again throughout the course of the novel. In these reencounters, the reader learns of U Thant’s bittersweet reunion with his wife, who manages to break free from the British only to fall fatally ill during her escape. Although rescued by a Japanese army doctor, she does not recover. She is on the verge of death when U Thant runs into Shiki, prompting Shiki to go see her as she lay dying. When the two men meet for the final time, U Thant informs Shiki that his wife took her last breath the day after Shiki visited her: “She was most grateful for your coming to see her,” U Thant tells Shiki, declaring that “she died in peace because of your visit which, I believe, alone made bearable her unspeakable suffering.”12
A melodramatic story of Asian brotherhood, the helpless native disciple (U Thant) becomes a real man under the tutelage of his loving Japanese master (Shiki), whose own imperial masculinity as warrior and savior is reaffirmed. The two male protagonists achieve both solidarity and a common Asian manhood over the dead body of “their” woman and against “their” common enemy (the white imperialists). The discourse of “Asia for Asians” disguised as Asian fraternity the coercive conditions that underwrote Japanese-Burmese “cooperation.”13
Such self-serving narratives of the paternal Japanese master-comrade and the filial native, their shared experience of (British) colonial violence, and their mutual bond of affection were not artifacts of the officially appointed propagandists alone. They typify many postwar memoirs written by Japanese soldiers, such as Tales of a Militarized Civilian in Burma (1973) by Yoshiichi Shigemitsu.14 Written by a civilian conscript of the Japanese imperial army in Burma, it centers around the author’s relationship with Hla Maung, a young Burmese servant of the Japanese imperial army whom Yoshiichi describes endearingly as his brother. Halfway through the memoir, Hla Maung dies trying to save Yoshiichi during an airstrike by the Allied forces. This act of self-sacrifice is simultaneously—and ironically—an act of triumphant self-actualization in which the colonized native transforms himself into a full-fledged man and sovereign subject under the guidance of his Japanese master.
In the remainder of the memoir, Yoshiichi agonizes over the death of Hla Maung. While Yoshiichi loses other men, mostly fellow Japanese soldiers, it is Hla Maung’s death that haunts him. According to Yoshiichi, Hla Maung, though initially his servant, became his “beloved brother” when Yoshiichi adopted him. In return, he himself was adopted by Hla Maung’s mother and sisters as a member of their family. Fittingly, the memoir ends with moving descriptions of him grieving Hla Maung’s death with his mother. Yoshiichi’s feeling of kinship with Hla Maung, his family, and, more generally, the Burmese people is so strong that he considers himself Burmese. “The truth is,” he proclaims, “I am Japanese and I am Burmese.”15 From the perspective of Japanese soldiers like Yoshiichi who shared the Asianist ideology of “one blood,” this kinship was not metaphorical; it was literal. They were a brotherhood of men bound not only by cause but also by blood.
Though imbued with the language of kinship, love, and solidarity, pan-Asianism, like European and US imperial ideologies of assimilation, assumed the benevolence of the dominant power. Nevertheless, the Japanese idealization of the Asian family challenged the prewar political discourse of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism and its attendant disavowal of interAsian intimacies. The Japanese occupiers called upon the Burmese, Indians, and Chinese, and Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Confucians to imagine themselves as belonging to a family bound by blood and the goal of a pan-Asian revolution against white domination. InterAsian intimacy became a locus of a different sort of expressive, affective investment under Japanese occupation.
Japanese opinions on the desirability of zakkon (mixed marriage) and konketsuji and their potential as instruments of dōka (assimilation) and kōminka (imperialization) varied, however. Many scholars concluded that while the mixing of highly unrelated races—namely, Caucasians and Asians—produced unsatisfactory progeny, similar conclusions could not be drawn with respect to Asians who were “racially related”; most advocated further research about the health of mixed marriages and children among different groups of Asians.16 According to the influential anthropologist Kiyono Kenji (1885–1955), it was neither possible nor practicable to prevent the mixing of blood in the southern regions. Though he also pointed out that available data indicated that konketsuji of Japanese descent found in the southern regions were inferior in their intellect and patriotism to pure-bred Japanese children (but superior to pure-bred native children). “It is true that if left entirely in the care of their native mothers, konketsuji become no different from natives,” he concluded.17 Views of zakkon and konketsuji were therefore ambivalent at best.
The policies and practices of the Japanese metropolitan government were much less equivocal. They did not encourage marriage between naichi jin (metropolitans) and gaichi jin (colonials). The government allocated its resources to recruiting young Japanese women to marry Japanese colonial settlers. And like British women who lost their status as British nationals upon marrying foreigners, Japanese women lost their status as Japanese nationals upon marrying a gaichi jin.18 When the Japanese government finally legalized marriage between metropolitans and colonials—known as nai gai jin kekkon—in 1921, it did so to keep track of the empire’s citizens.
The legalization of nai gai jin kekkon, moreover, did not resolve the problem created by Japan’s bifurcated bureaucratic system of family registration that was divided into naichi and gaichi family registers (known as koseki). This dual system prohibited the transfer of one’s family from one system to the other. A Taiwanese wife of a metropolitan, for instance, could not be registered in the latter’s koseki; instead, a note would be added to his metropolitan koseki indicating that he took a Taiwanese woman as wife. Similarly, a metropolitan woman who married a Taiwanese colonial could not be removed from her koseki in the metropole.19 In other words, family registration formed an unbreachable legal-institutional bulwark between metropole and colony that protected the Japanese nation and identity based on biologically determined race and jus sanguinis (the “right of blood”) against Japan’s own imperial doctrine of dōka.20
This imperial system of family registration posed a vexing problem for Japanese legislators, bureaucrats, and politicians especially as the Japanese military sought to mobilize colonized populations for its war efforts. The insistence on withholding from colonized subjects the “insider” status of naichi jin was not just a defect in the Japanese legal system but the main obstacle to mobilization efforts. Nevertheless, the separation of naichi and gaichi family registers remained intact, rendering impossible the full and unconditional assimilation of colonized subjects of the Japanese Empire.21
The legalization of nai gai jin kekkon did not result in the social acceptance of nai gai jin couples who continued to face censure from Japanese relatives. Nor did it resolve the question of konketsuji: What are the consequences of such blood mixing, and should it be condoned?22 “On the question of Japanese-Burmese mixed blood,” Yamada Hidezo, who resided in Burma for thirty-eight years, explained that he “cannot answer in the affirmative.”23 He arrived in Rangoon in 1904 with his Japanese wife in tow, and the couple went on to establish the first department store in Mandalay and Rangoon to specialize in Japanese import products. In a section entitled “the Japanese-Burmese mixed-blood question” in his autobiographical account of life in pre–World War II Burma, he explained that though Burmese women regarded marriage to Japanese men favorably, in all the years he spent in Burma, he had not met a single Japanese man who had benefited from taking a Burmese wife. According to Yamada, the problem was that in the company of their domineering Burmese spouses, the Japanese men lost their Japanese—and manly—pride, enterprise, and industriousness, becoming, essentially, a “lazy native.” The trick, he proposed, was for Japanese men to marry Burmese women no younger than thirty years of age because at that age they became more matronly and submissive—in other words, more wife-like.24
The premature ending of intimate relations between Japanese colonizers and Burmese women enabled the idealization of the union of naichi jin and gaichi jin, while preserving the barrier between metropolitan and colonial subjects. It indulged the Japanese imperial romance of pan-Asianism, without acknowledging or resolving Japanese society’s aversion toward mixed marriage and birth. Sakai’s tragic separation from his Arakanese lover likewise spared him from confronting the ambivalence with which the Japanese apprehended intermarriage and miscegenation.
Marriage between Japanese subjects and Burmese women did occur during and immediately after the war. Takahara, the soldier who befriended the New Burmas, married a woman from Insein and had a child, instead of returning to Japan at the end of the war. Yoshioka Noriki and Kitamura Sanosuke also decided to remain in Burma. The former became a rice miller, and the latter joined the Burmese army; both married Burmese women and made Burma their home.25
Such anecdotes of wartime and postwar intermarriage find confirmation in oral interviews as well as British government records.26 One reconnaissance report by the British stated that Japanese-Burmese marriages were widespread, and if rumors were to be believed, “the Japs have already produced 10,000 children with Burmese mothers.”27 A noncommissioned officer captured in 1944 had apparently testified that the marriage of Burmese women to Japanese soldiers was contributing to the low morale of the Burmese National Army (the successor to the BDA, which was renamed BNA when Burma declared its nominal independence from Japan in 1943), which objected to such marriages.
What concerned the British government in exile was the nature and extent of Burmese collaboration with the Japanese. Japanese-Burmese marriages and births served as one measure. There were others. Captain O. H. Molloy, an ICS officer reporting on the activities of Kachins in the “anti-Japanese campaign” in northeast Burma, extolled “the gallantry and loyalty of the ordinary villagers.” Among those he praised were two Kachin women schoolteachers who “remained behind to act as a collecting post” for British agents and “sent very useful information up” to the British for six months.28 A district commissioner of the Chin Hills, F. Franklin, was less impressed with the record of the Chins. The chief of the Tashon Chins, he complained, had given the Japanese “very active assistance,” and one of his daughters was working as a stenographer for the senior Japanese official in the area.29
The “chieftain’s daughter” featured centrally in the Japanese popular imagination of empire. She was, for instance, the subject of the 1930 hit song “Shūchō no musume” (The Chieftain’s Daughter) about a love affair between a Japanese colonizer and an Indigenous woman much like the story of Sayon. Set in the Marshall Islands, then under Japanese rule, a Marshallese woman rescues a Japanese man who throws himself into the sea in an attempted suicide.30 In colonial Taiwan, “political marriages” between low-ranking Japanese officers and Indigenous women of chiefly lineages were once instrumental in activating Japanese-native alliances and economic interdependence as well as gathering intelligence for both sides.31 The “chieftain’s daughter” was a stock figure in accounts of the Japanese occupation of Burma too. They appear as daughters “gifted” as wives, students, translators, assistant teachers, and stenographers by village chiefs to manage new relations of power and patronage. As the daughters of key collaborators with the Japanese, the women may have enjoyed a measure of security denied to the majority of women in Burma under the occupation. Though perhaps not. In her study of the Tokugawa government practice of encouraging—even mandating—Wajin migrants in Hokkaido to take Indigenous Ainu women as “local wives” (genchi tsuma) or “wife-mistresses” (tsuma-mekake), ann-elise lewallen argues that unlike the Japanese-native political marriage in Taiwan, the Wajin-Ainu unions were largely nonconsensual and failed to “convey social capital to Ainu women.”32 In her analysis, the practice represented a colonial system of sexual assault and reproductive exploitation of the Ainu women who were compelled to partner with Wajin men.
In the case of Burma, some women who partnered with the Japanese occupiers were spies for the British or the anti-Japanese resistance force who had knowingly contracted contrived conjugal relationships. Kyaw Win Maung (alias Wali Mohamed), a member of the BDA who served as liaison officer between the AFPFL and the US Army “Detachment 101” sent to assist the underground resistance force, recalled meeting many women trainees and operatives. In his memoir, he recounted the story of one such spy, Tin Tin Kyi, who married a Japanese soldier to spy for the resistance only to fall in love with him. The latter was apparently no less committed to the marriage and had entreated Tin Tin Kyi to accompany him back to Japan. But he died before the end of the war and just one week before she gave birth to their son.33
The relationships that occupied women developed with Japanese soldiers were not just effects of political expediency but also of economic necessity. Most were ordinary women who, to make a living for themselves and for their families, had little choice but to interact routinely with Japanese soldiers: as porters, food stall owners, cooks, sellers, laundresses, and so forth. In part this was due to the large number of men who had been drafted as soldiers and labor conscripts during the war. The aforementioned Kyaw Win Maung, for instance, lamented that over the course of the japan khit, he had relied upon his wife and her siblings to feed him (as well as a number of his comrades) because he had no salary or income as a member of the BDA.34
Lin Yone Thit Lwin, who worked as a propagandist during the war, recalled that although some laborers received a wage from the Japanese army, they had no means of remitting it to their families. He was tasked with promoting cooperation with the Japanese army among the one hundred seventy-seven thousand laborers, collectively known as the chwe tat (sweat army), recruited for the construction of the Thailand–Burma Railway.35 As such, he lived for several years alongside the thousands of chwe tat troops, a significant number of whom perished along the railway that came to be known as the “death railway.” While the sufferings of the approximately sixty-one thousand Allied prisoners of war who labored on the railway have defined the memory and history of the railway, many more Asians than POWs labored and died on the railway. Estimates of death among them have run as high as one hundred thousand or roughly one-half to one-third of Asian labor conscripts (compared with the estimated 12,568 deaths among POWs).36 In Burma, it is estimated that anywhere between thirty thousand to eighty thousand chwe tat conscripts died.37 Understandably, Lin Yone Thit Lwin’s memoir concentrates on the horrifying living and working conditions for the undernourished, tortured, and diseased chwe tat soldiers who were left to die. But what kept many members of the chwe tat up at night was the anxiety over the fate of their wives and children—and how were they feeding themselves when the men were never allowed to return home and give their wages to their families.38
The absence of adult men turned many women into sole providers of their family. Women also bore the responsibility of freeing their kinsmen from labor conscription, arrest, or detention. This development formed the backbone of the main plot of the acclaimed Burmese satirical-historical novel Nga Ba (1947), written by Maung Htin. Told from the vantage point of rural people in the 1930s and 1940s, it follows the life of the eponymous protagonist and his tenant farmer family, increasingly caught among turbulent events they do not fully understand: the war, Japanese occupation, antifascist resistance movements, and insurrections. Nga Ba is imprisoned by village authorities for refusing to “donate” some of his crops as protection money to Burmese soldiers and then dragooned to work on the Thailand–Burma Railway. This leaves his wife, Mi Po, and their children to take on the work of farming and harvesting rice. All the while, Mi Po pleads with village elders for Nga Ba’s safe return.39 Mi Po spends what time and energy she has beseeching her relatives and friends to lend her money to save her family from starvation. Since the majority of chwe tat troops were tenant farmers, there were doubtless many women like Mi Po who assumed the full range of daily chores once divided among family members, kept their family alive and together, and struggled to repay large amounts of debt they incurred in the process.
I mentioned at the beginning of chapter 7 that it is the specter of young nubile women ravished by Japanese colonizers or abducted for comfort stations that haunts Burmese narratives of the japan khit. Nga Ba is no exception. Mi Po and Nga Ba’s daughter Mi Ni is raped by a Japanese soldier and becomes pregnant. With Mi Po’s help, Mi Ni delivers and kills the baby.40 As the novel suggests, however, there is another visceral fear that permeates stories of the japan khit: women’s fear of their men being taken and disappearing. It was this fear that resulted in my own family story of wartime Japanese-Burmese romance, though that is not how my mother tells it.
Ghosts of War and Romance
At the start of the war, Thein Yin and Albert Maitland Hood, my mother’s Shan mother and Anglo-Burmese father, lived in Maymyo, a hilltop city that had become a garrison town, British enclave, holiday destination, and summer headquarters of the British administration in Burma. It was home to scores of retired Europeans, Anglo-Indians, and Anglo-Burmans. Given its large population of Europeans and Eurasians, the Japanese army may have viewed Maymyo with both suspicion and fascination: a hotbed of pro-British, anti-Japanese activity, on the one hand, and an exotic location populated by “mixed-blood” women, on the other. Japanese soldiers were reputed to be avid admirers of Eurasian women in particular—a reputation they shared with the British and American soldiers who, upon reoccupying Maymyo in 1944–1945, competed to court Eurasian women.41
Like the New Burmas, Thein Yin and Albert enrolled all their children—Rita, Phylomena, Mary, Albert, and, my mother, Teresa, who was their only child born after the war—in Catholic boarding schools far away from home. And as with the New Burmas, the war occasioned a rare reunion for the family, which periodically fled to nearby villages to escape the air raids.
The oldest, Rita, who must have been about fourteen or fifteen years old at the time, earned income for the family mending clothes, especially the uniforms of Japanese soldiers. The war had led to an acute shortage of clothing and textiles. British intelligence even reported that some families shared “one presentable longyi” between its many members and were able to “venture out in public in turns and only one at a time.” Women in one district were found wearing longyi “made of gunny bags and jackets of mosquito-netting.”42 The war had made cloth mending and sewing indispensable and thus provided women with reliable jobs during the war. For Rita it was an important livelihood. Her siblings were young, and her father, who had worked as an electrical engineer prior to the war, had no job. The family worried that he might be forced into the labor corps for the Thailand–Burma Railway or arrested by the Japanese under suspicion of spying for the British, as had been the case for P. D. Patel, the Parsi resident of Insein mentioned in chapter 6.
Patel had moved to Kalaw, another hilltop station a stone’s throw from Maymyo, during the war, where life for Patel was at first untroubled, perhaps owing to the fact that he had an Indian acquaintance who was persona grata with the Japanese commander in town. But he too came under suspicion and was “classed as a British spy” and spent twenty-one days in detention, where he was tortured in 1943. As it turned out, a kempeitai chief and his Japanese interpreter had moved into Patel’s house during his imprisonment, and upon his release, all three men began living together. “Every day I provided dinner and so became friendly with the Chief,” Patel recalled in a published biographical essay. The “friendship” apparently came with the expectation on the part of the military police chief that Patel serves as an informer; he asked Patel “to prepare a list of all Anglo-Indians, Anglo-Burmans and Europeans” and “to report as to their antecedents and whether they could be trusted.” In return, Patel faced “no more trouble”: “As a matter of fact, Indians who had any difficulty came to me for help owing to my friendship with the Kempeitai Chief.”43
“Anglo-” families such as my mother’s and the New Burmas thus faced the possibility of suspicion and incrimination not only from the Japanese occupiers but also neighbors and acquaintances. In recounting his experience as a member of the BDA, Kyaw Win Maung lamented that kabya men like him—he was of Indian, British, and Shan descent—faced discrimination from Bamar officers. Many were prevented from enlisting in the BDA.44 The British reported that thakins made Anglo-Burmans and Anglo-Indians “declare themselves to be ‘Dobamas.’ ”45 So, like Auntie Rosie’s Anglo-Burmese uncles, Albert spent much of the japan khit in hiding.
Rita did not live long enough to tell her story of the occupation. Although she died of illness during the war, she became close to one of her Japanese customers before her death. Had she not died when she did, the relationship between Rita and the Japanese soldier may have blossomed into something more, my mother thinks.
I do not present Rita’s story (as my mother recounted it) as some form of indubitable evidence that such romance “really” occurred. Nor do I suggest that because it is narrated by a Burmese woman, it must be less mediated than the memories of Japanese men such as Sakai. After all, my mother had her own motivations for telling the story. She was, as she has often insisted, Rita’s reincarnation, which explains her own marriage to a Japanese man. Far from a banal tale of wartime romance, the tragic story of Rita served to legitimize my mother’s relationship with my father, who was a Japanese consular officer in Rangoon in the 1960s. He was also one of the first foreigners in the postwar period to be permitted to matriculate at Rangoon University, where he met my mother, who, like him, majored in Burmese language and literature.
Their relationship had been roundly condemned by my mother’s siblings, one of whom warned that it would ruin her; rather than marry her, he would abandon her, probably with child and with no prospect of a future marriage. In casting such aspersions on the couple, my aunt was invoking the specter of the japan gadaw. Rare was a Burmese person who did not view their relationship through the allegory of the japan gadaw, according to my mother. No one expected their relationship to result in marriage. In return, she summoned the ghost of Rita and her chaste wartime romance to justify her relationship to the man whom she subsequently married. The relationship had been destined, a predetermined fate over which my mother had little control and for which she could not be blamed. She was not being reckless. She was accepting her karma as a good Buddhist should.
There are other reasons for approaching my mother’s narrative with the proverbial grain of salt. As a Burmese woman who had moved to Japan as a young bride and lived there continuously for almost two decades, she had heard nostalgic tales of Japanese-Burmese love affairs from men like Sakai, who must have presumed that she would lend them a sympathetic ear. It was not enough that men like Sakai had once been saved by a Burmese woman. They wanted to be saved again by my mother, who could offer them redemption by forgiving or legitimizing their actions. Both parties were invested in memories of occupation romance, though in different ways.
Intimacies of Colonialisms
No aspect of Japanese colonialism has been more emblematic of its atrocities than the military institution of ian fu, or “comfort women,” the official and euphemistic coinage of imperial Japan to refer to the women conscripted to provide their bodies to Japanese soldiers before and during World War II. Debates about comfort women and whether they represented a state-sanctioned or regulated institution, to what extent it can be accurately described as sexual slavery versus prostitution, and what are just and equitable forms of reparation have proved exceptionally contentious and intractable.46 The danger in arguing that not all comfort women were sexual slaves is clear: the nuance and complexity of personal stories can be misappropriated as denial of or apology for Japanese wartime aggression.
At the same time, the fixation with comfort women as a uniquely Japanese colonial atrocity has helped whitewash coeval and overlapping colonial structures and cultures of sexual violence, including crimes committed by the Allied forces. In 1944 in the northern Arakanese town of Paletwa, one British force alone reportedly committed more than fifty rapes.47 In the case of Korea and Japan, Katherine Moon, Sarah C. Soh, and Lisa Yoneyama have emphasized how the discussion of comfort women has turned a blind eye to the intersections and collusions of Korean, Japanese, and US patriarchal regimes across colonial divides, resulting in a neglect of the sexual crimes committed by US soldiers as the Japanese colonial system of comfort women evolved into new military sexual operations catering to American troops in the two countries under US occupation (1945–1948 in Korea, 1945–1952 in Japan) and the Korean War (1950–1953).48 Indeed, state licensed brothels and lock hospitals were among the first colonial government institutions to be established under every European and US imperial flag in Asia.49 Enslaved, indentured, and colonized women in colonial households, as well as plantations, were denied protection from sexual assault and control over their own reproductive capacity.50 In rare cases where European men in the colonies were accused of rape, they were exonerated despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.51 While colonization and military occupation in general are equated with the conquest of women, the focus on comfort women has rendered Japanese colonialism anomalous and sadistic.
In addition, redress movements in the name of comfort women have too often reduced the issue to a matter of national humiliation or the model victim story of sexual slavery. Nationalist politicians and activists have turned former comfort women into symbols of national shame—a reminder of the failure of colonized men to protect “their” women, female chastity, and therefore national purity and honor—while international women’s and human rights advocates have cast them in the single, fixed mold of the innocent young girl taken from her family by the Japanese military to be imprisoned in “rape centers.”52 In what amounts to institutionalized forgetting, they have suppressed memories of wartime embodied labor that diverge from these scripts.
I have endeavored to repopulate the archive and history of Japanese colonialism with the marginalized memories and stigmatized subjectivities of occupied women that upset collective memories that deem militarized sexual violence the only—albeit deeply shameful—experience of occupied women worth remembering. The stories I examine do not resonate with the triumphalist nationalist narrative of Burmese antifascist, anticolonialist resistance. They do not coordinate with wartime and postwar Japanese romances of the occupation either, troubling the assumption that stories of intimacy under Japanese rule affirm imperial nostalgia and redeem Japanese colonialism. They reveal instead that new dynamics of power and patronage were enacted, routed, and managed through everyday relations of intimacy between Japanese occupiers and occupied women that had uncertain ramifications for the women. The ubiquity of such intimate relationships index neither Japanese colonial benevolence nor Burmese women’s naivety. Reducing wartime intimacies to matters of personal sentiment only obscures the political and economic exigencies that produced and governed the relationships. It conceals the complicity of the Burmese elites in routinizing gender and sexual exploitation and violence, especially against amyo gya and kabya populations, under the Japanese.
Here as in the previous chapters, I deemphasize historical rupture. The veneer of abrupt and radical change (war, exodus, “unmixing,” pan-Asianism, etc.) notwithstanding, interAsian intimacies remained perilous sites through which distinctions between colonizer and colonized—and among the colonized—were reconstituted and made to matter. Mixed marriage, sex, and birth remained the focus of colonial bureaucratic anxiety and regulation under the Japanese and sites of Burmese collaboration and tension with the Japanese. Even in the Japanese imperial romance of pan-Asianism, intermarriage and miscegenation occupied an ambiguous position. That the discourse and imaginary of the suffering captive of the amyo gya was reinscribed during the Japanese interregnum and its immediate aftermath with the japan gadaw betrays the commensurability of the politics of interAsian intimacies under British colonial and Japanese occupation rule.
The history of intimacy and violence in Japanese-occupied Burma thus unsettles assumptions about the incomparability of Japanese imperialism to European and US imperial formations. The othering of Japanese colonizers as abnormally atrocious has enabled other former imperial powers to normalize their own history of colonial violence and claim intimacy as the privilege and property of European and US colonial enterprises. Historians of Japan and its empire have critiqued this Eurocentric paradigm of incomparability, though through an East Asia–centric framework that marginalizes the Japanese wartime colonization of Southeast Asia and reproduces the artificial subregional divisions that have traditionally characterized the field of Asian studies. As a multiply colonized space, Southeast Asia represents an unparalleled temporal and geographical field in which to interrogate changes and continuities, and differences and similarities, across European, US, and Japanese colonialisms and within the Japanese colonial empire itself.
Despite the brevity of the Japanese occupation compared to such colonies as Taiwan and Korea, the logics and legacies of Japanese colonialism are more comparable across the East-Southeast Asia divide than acknowledged. Memories of intimate contact through which the Japanese metropolitan and colonial governments pursued the imperial visions of dōka, kōminka, and the pan-Asian family, such as Japanese-language schools, intermarriage, miscegenation, and collaboration, have proved more controversial and contested in Burma—and therefore more akin to memories of Japanese colonialism elsewhere—than popular and scholarly narratives have suggested. The story of interAsian intimacies in Burma unravels these unlikely intimacies and interwoven histories of colonization across chronologies and territories.