Cold War Manifest Domesticity: The “Kitchen Debate” and Single American Occupationnaire Women in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952

On October 18, 1945, the U.S. Women’s Army Corps (WAC) disembarked at Yokohama to participate in the U.S. occupation of Japan (1945–52). Sharply dressed in uniform skirts and wearing aviator glasses, these white American women provided a stark contrast to the majority of Japanese women who, after the horrors and deprivations of World War II, were emaciated and shabbily dressed in wartime workpants. In defeated, bomb-destroyed Japan, where 9 million of the country’s 72 million people were homeless, the division between occupier and occupied was visible not only in terms of race but also in the material affluence of the conquerors.¹ Some of these American women, or “occupationnaires,” led by Lieutenant Ethel Weed (1906–75) of the Civil Information and Education Section (CIE) under the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), were assigned to formulate policies to “liberate” Japanese women. In this context, white American women were to be bearers of democracy, while Japanese women were to be subject to “liberation” and tutelage at their hands.² The occupation highlighted this cultural construction of American and Japanese women, including the economic divide between them, to justify the imposition of policies that purported to offer the Japanese a better life—that is, a more American way of life. However, as this article shows, there was a significant gap between the ideal of the American way of life, with its iconic image of a happy housewife in her modern kitchen, and the experience of American women tasked with policy making in U.S.-occupied Japan.

Previous scholarship, informed by postcolonial theory and Cold War studies, has focused on the occupationnaires’ imperialistic qualities, viewing their attitudes as closely resembling those of European women toward colonized women.³ Calling the occupation of Japan “America’s mid-twentieth-century imperial project of democratization,” Lisa Yoneyama inserts the classic colonial binary of white women as rescuers and brown “Oriental women” as victims into her examination of the U.S. claim about liberating Japanese women.⁴ Similarly, Mire Koikari argues that the occupationnaires were agents of “imperial middle-class feminism” that constructed Japanese women as helpless. Both Koikari and Tsuchiya Yuka claim that the occupationnaires promoted the ideal of mid-century American womanhood to re-create Japanese women as homemakers.⁵ Malia McAndrew asserts that the occupationnaires even used the notion of Euro-American beauty being superior to Japanese beauty to establish American women’s authority.⁶ These scholars collectively argue that creating the image of progressive, democratic, and more beautiful (white) American women in contrast to the image of helpless Oriental Japanese women “saved” by the American occupation was intimately linked to the American drive for Cold War hegemony in the effort to contain Soviet communism.⁷

This article, however, demonstrates that the role of American occupationnaire women was much more ambiguous than that of privileged imperial women, precisely because of the Cold War context that generated the American domesticity ideology. On the one hand, my examination of the so-called kitchen debate in American-censored postwar Japanese print media—which foreshadowed U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon’s spat with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in a model kitchen exhibit in 1959—affirms that occupationnaire women were potent agents of American authority as they promoted the American way of life.⁸ The occupationnaires used media and education to suggest, as Nixon later asserted to Khrushchev, that American housewives had affluence and better lives via their modern kitchens—proof of the superiority of capitalism over communism.

On the other hand, occupationnaire women’s autobiographies indicate that most of them were single working women who eschewed the domesticity ideology they were supposed to promote. Although this same ideology had been invoked to urge mobilized American women to “go back home” after the war, the occupationnaires remained single and were working full time in a foreign county. This suggests that the occupationnaires saw occupied Japan as a site not only for Japanese women’s social advancement but for their own as...