Jewish Leisure in Postwar Tokyo

• In Event: Jewish Lives and Communities After War and Genocide

Abstract

In 1952, a mansion in Tokyo's Shibuya neighborhood was acquired that would become the Tokyo Jewish Community Center. It was to be styled as a clubhouse in addition to a synagogue, complete with a Japanese garden and a swimming pool. Two years prior to the building's acquisition, the U.S. military began to roll out Rest & Recuperation (R&R) for soldiers serving in the Korean War, which consisted of a five-day leave in Japan. For soldiers, R&R was heavily associated with sex tourism, though dominant American discourse orientalized women and the city as entrapping vulnerable GIs.
Within the context of moral anxiety, the Jewish Welfare Board (JWB), the official Jewish organization under the United Service Organization for National Defense (USO), sought to provide alternative activities through the Tokyo Jewish Community Center. This paper explores the JWB's quest to control the leisure and intimate relations of Jewish GIs and the resulting intra-Jewish encounter between the far from homogenous Tokyo Jewish community and American Jewish military personnel. This encounter complicates notions of Jewish solidarity and brings to light the reshaping of Jewish networks in the Pacific. By centering the Pacific, the paper is additionally able to bring new insights into the intersection of gender, race, and regime in American Jews' service overseas.

Author

• Hana Cordero Rothstein, University of Southern California