Samantha Lanevi is a third year PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her research explores United States policy towards foreign-born war brides in the twentieth century, specifically marriages between American GIs and German and Japanese women. Her dissertation posits fraternization, occupation, and immigration policies towards these women serve as a prism to explore American conceptions of nation and empire in the aftermath of the Second World War. Samantha completed her M.Phil at the University of Cambridge and her undergraduate at Wellesley College.

US Forces Must Be Powerful, General Eichelberger Warns”: The American Occupation of Japan

Abstract: In the aftermath of World War II, there was no doubt the United States sharpened its national identity and status as a global superpower. My dissertation focuses on the marriages between American soldiers and German and Japanese women in World War II and how these marriages reflected the United States’ engagement in empire-making through restrictive legislation and policies which stratified ease of immigration for foreign women on the basis of race and nationality. Drawing on papers of General Robert Eichelberger, who commanded the US Eight Army responsible for overseeing the occupation of Japan, as well as newspaper and other primary sources, this chapter seeks to illuminate how American occupation policy and policy towards American-Japanese relationships and eventual marriages reflected its imperial aims in the wake of the war’s end. More specifically, the chapter delves into venereal disease control, the interplay of government control over prostitution and fraternization with the public reaction to these policies, and the Japanese public opinion over the occupation and the nascent romantic relationships between Japanese women and American soldiers, particularly the relationships between Black American soldiers and Japanese women. The American and Japanese government’s attempted governance over women’s bodies will be a central pillar in this chapter to interrogate American imperial aims. This attempted governance speaks not only to the boundaries crossed by the US government but also to the boundaries supposedly crossed by these relationships which crossed racial and national lines.