The Horne Thesis and Cold War Japan

Abstract

Gerald Horne’s explication of Cold War-era political history as negotiated white supremacy leads to an enhanced understanding of Japan in the Cold War. Although subject to important qualifications, Japanese anti-racism and solidarity with non-white peoples before, during, and after World War II contextualizes the view held by American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois—and complicated and in places contested by Horne—that Japan was, in many ways, a champion of anti-white supremacy. The experiences of Black American servicemen and -women who served in Japan during the Cold War provide important historical grounding for Du Bois’ initial, state-centered insights about Japan as an anti-racist power. This modified “Du Bois Thesis” in turn guides the Horne Thesis, on the role of white supremacy in modern global history, into a deeper harmony with the history of Cold War Japan.

1. Introduction

The Cold War is often framed as an ideological contest between the capitalist, liberal West (the United States of America and its allies) and the communist, illiberal East (the Soviet Union and its satellite and aligned states). These ideological categories are generally understood to be “culturally odorless” and without racial valence.1 However, the historical record, especially within American Black and other non-white communities, as well as within the Empire of Japan, tells a very different story about the grounding of the Cold War (Plummer 2011, pp. 221–30). The color line was, as American philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) put it in 1906, the defining issue of the twentieth century. “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” (Du Bois 1986, p. 372; Mullen and Wilson 2005, p. vii). This defining line runs through the first half of the twentieth century and into the second, the latter half dominated by the usually ideologically interpreted Cold War.2 There is continuity between the prewar and postwar on this reading, with the Cold War understandable as a recapitulation of the “color line” problem indicated earlier by Du Bois.

But how is that continuity to be understood? In this essay, I rely on the experiences of Black servicemen and -women in Cold War Japan, and the work of Cold War Japanese scholars of African American history, to marry the insights of Du Bois to those of American historian Gerald Horne, who posits race as an indelible and formative element of Cold War politics, both international and domestic in the United States. On this Horne reading of the Cold War as an extension of Du Bois’ vision of the twentieth century as defined by the color line, the figure of Japan—which warred in part for racial equality and an end to white colonialism in Asia before and during World War II—looms surprisingly large (see Du Bois 2007, p. 9).3 By bringing Japan’s quest—albeit qualified by racist affronts from some in Japan—for racial equality into the analysis of the Cold War, a move inspired by the historical interpretations of both Du Bois and Horne and couched in the experiences of both Black and Japanese people in Cold War Japan, it becomes clearer how that quest freed up spaces in occupied Japan for Black servicemen and -women to challenge racial prejudices, effecting real and lasting change to the “color-line” in America. The Horne Thesis, coupled with Du Bois’ analysis and the example of Japan, allows historians of the present more latitude to reinterpret the Cold War as a contest at least as much about race as about overarching, putatively “culturally odorless” ideologies.

2. The Horne Thesis

The Cold War is very often presented, in both scholarly historiography and in popular histories, as an ideological clash (Westad 2005). The two visions of post-capitalist transnationalism—Anglo-American colonio-liberal Westphalian internationalism, and Soviet Moscow-centered world socialism—teamed up to fight nationalists in World War II, the standard treatment goes, but then turned on one another in the postwar, dividing the globe between them in a struggle over what was ultimately a political idea. On this telling, “the American way of life” shades effortlessly into ideals of freedom and democracy, while “Russia” connotes Stalinism, terror, subversion, and ideological control.4

American historian Gerald Horne has developed a stark alternative reading of the Cold War, incorporating the missing element of race into the political standoff between “America” and “Russia”. In particular, Horne insists that white supremacy, which he argues was a prime motivator for Anglo-American colonialism and which also constituted an organizing principle for Washington’s rule over the American homefront, was directly challenged by communist, socialist, and other left-wing ideologies.5 For Horne, the story of the Cold War is largely the story of how white-supremacist ideologues, especially in the United States, negotiated the threat, as they saw it, of communism in America and abroad, marginalizing non-white (mainly Black) American leftists in favor of less threatening, more moderate social reformers as part of a global stratagem of defeating the Soviet Union ideologically while maintaining racial-political problems in the U.S.A. (See Bacon 1993, pp. 94–97) As historian Erik S. McDuffie puts it:

[T]he “Horne thesis” [is] the argument that white supremacy and anticommunism were the major forces shaping post-World War II life and politics in the United States, with significant implications for African-descended and colonized people globally. Locked in a Manichean struggle with the Soviet Union for global supremacy, U.S. cold warriors, [Horne] argues, realized that legal or Jim Crow segregation was the ‘Achilles heel’ for Washington’s propaganda campaign to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of people throughout the emerging ‘Third World’. As a result, U.S. government officials brutally suppressed […] African American leftists who pursued an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, proletarian internationalist agenda. Simultaneously, the U.S. ruling class acquiesced to civil rights reforms for African Americans and other people of color out of fear that legal racial segregation would invalidate the U.S. claim to being the leader of the ‘democratic free world’.

(McDuffie 2011, p. 236)

When race is included in the Cold War historical interpretation, as Horne insists it must be, the Cold War takes on an entirely new aspect, including in a cogent historiographical whole the domestic racial politics of the United States within the abstractions of the ideological struggle the Cold War is often presented as having been (see generally Plummer 2013). This, in turn, raises further questions about the role of race in the Cold War outside the borders of the U.S. On this note, McDuffie adds:

Anticommunism and white supremacy, Horne concludes, profoundly shaped the trajectory of freedom movements across the African Diaspora. The Cold War, then, represented a rupture in African American life and political advancement (McDuffie 2011, p. 236).

The historiographical intervention of the Horne thesis allows for a much richer and more nuanced examination of the Cold War, with ideology and race interacting across a broad spectrum of classes and ethnic groupings not just in the United States but throughout the diasporic and colonized world (see Onishi 2018).

3. The Challenge of Japan

The Horne thesis is one of the most important Cold War historiographical insights in modern scholarship. Horne’s premise and conclusion are both thoroughly rooted in historical fact. Although Horne’s deployment of white supremacy as explanatory cause for a range of historical events may at times be open to critiques of overdetermination, there can be little doubt that his assessment of both American and global racial politics is accurate, and that white supremacy remains a largely unacknowledged factor in the ideological struggle of the Cold War.6

This is not entirely new territory, of course. Other scholars have also noticed the relationship between race and war in twentieth-century American and global history (see e.g., Booker 2008; Moore 2005; Oh 2025; and Gallicchio 2000). American historian John Dower, for example, in his pathbreaking 1986 volume War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, takes up the problem of racial hatred in World War Two in Asia in its ugly enormity. But there is, for all its importance, an equivalence in Dower’s portrayal of racism as practiced by Japan and the United States that does not comport with policy or practice at the time. When it came to racial hatred and racism as a bedrock of national policy, Japan and the United States are in very different leagues—a fact that Dower, writing within the Cold War, may have been at pains to fully limn in its historiographical contours. It is true, as Dower notes, that a wartime document titled An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus did circulate among some Japanese bureaucrats (Dower 1986, pp. 262–63; see also Fujitani 2011, pp. 16–17). However, a more thorough examination of documents and discourse from the wartime years in Japan reveals that much more emphasis was placed, by both government officials and by commentators in the public sphere, on the notion of hakkō iu (or hakkō ichiu). Dower mentions this term in a sinister context, but his framing fails to take into account the very different racial contexts prevailing in Japan and the United States (Dower 1986, pp. 20, 274, 284). Western researchers, including Dower, have made much of the Emperor-centered context of hakkō ichiu in its original iterations, but in Japanese discourse, it often has mild, even hopeful connotations. Despite racialist overtones in some presentations, hakkō ichiu was often understood in Japan as more Emperor-centric than suggestive of racial dominance. It was most certainly not a call to racial hatred or ethnic cleansing (Morgan 2021, pp. 6–8; see also Untalan 2025, p. 118). As these scattered examples suggest, what was commonplace in the United States in the early and mid-twentieth century, namely the wholesale exclusion of non-white races from white American life, the lynching of Blacks, and the enforcement of racial segregation by social and legal sanction, was nowhere the norm, in practice or in pronouncement, in Japan (see Ōyama 2023; Akamatsu 2023; J. Kaneko 2023; Meyers and Walker 2020). When Dower’s Atlanticist framing, preferring to use terminology to depict the conflict such as “World War Two” and “Pacific War” imposed by American victors on Japan during the postwar Occupation, is restored to terminology used by Japan—the Greater East Asia War (Dai Tō A Sensō)—then the reasons for fighting that war, as many in Japan understood them, come much more sharply into focus (K. Nishioka 1996).

By the same token, the Horne thesis can be further strengthened by taking into account the twentieth-century history of Japan. This history, which Horne himself has studied in detail, serves to extend the Horne thesis to the prewar and World War II, amplifying Horne’s intervention and redoubling his insistence that race be seen as a, even the, defining element of Cold War history (see Koshiro 2024). Japan’s own domestic historiography, especially before and during World War II, as well as the shared Japanese and American history of the American occupation of Japan and the ongoing base and alliance system stretching throughout the Cold War (including the Korean War (1950–1953) and the Vietnam War (1954–1975)) to the present, in many ways complements the Horne thesis and enhances Horne’s arguments about the complex interplay between transnational politics and race (see generally Doan and Konishi 2024).

To be sure, Horne is decidedly skeptical about the Japanese version of prewar and wartime history. Like Dower, Horne does not accept Japanese war aims regarding racial liberation at face value. Perhaps Horne’s most forceful and sustained declaration of a position on Japan’s war aims is his 2004 book, Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (Horne 2004). Relying heavily on archival material from Hong Kong (Horne did much of the research for Race War while on a Fulbright fellowship at Hong Kong University), Horne writes in Race War that, while the various Asian and non-white ethnic groups in Hong Kong welcomed, even cheered, the Japanese invasion in December of 1941, Japanese claims to be acting in the name of racial justice quickly proved hollow as atrocities against local populations by Japanese forces multiplied. Horne’s judgment of Japan’s anti-racist thrust is that Tokyo acted largely hypocritically in Asia. “I should make it clear early on,” Horne writes that:

if I had been living during the era of the Pacific War, I would have fought against Japan—though I would have been subjected to discriminatory, racially segregated treatment in the U.S. military. Thus, readers should be alert to the fact that my indictment of London—and Washington—is not intended as an exculpation of Tokyo. Instead, I am seeking to show how London’s racial policies in particular actually enabled Tokyo. Likewise, I recognize—above all—that there were salient factors beyond ‘race’ that shaped the Pacific War, economics, geopolitics, and antifascism in the first place.

(Horne 2004, p. viii; emphasis in original; see also M. C. Green 2010 and Dalfiume 1969)

For Horne, then, the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, and the Japanese thrust to rid Asia of white colonialism more broadly and to establish a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in its stead, was an exercise in political hypocrisy. The Japanese presented their actions as being anti-racist, Horne concludes, but in the end the same kind of racial supremacy which animated the depredations of the British, the Dutch, the Germans, the Americans, and other white forces in non-white territories also impelled the Japanese to expand out into East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific. While Horne treats of the complexities of the war, his view on race in that war is that, in Asia, one form of racial supremacy, white supremacy, was simply replaced by another, Japanese supremacy: this is Horne’s basic argument in Race War (Horne 2004, p. ix).7

There is a historiographical current bolstering Horne’s view of Japan’s actions in Asia. Recent scholarship is opening up new inroads into darker chapters of that legacy (Yoshinaka 2022; Tsujimoto 2025; Hayasaka 2021, pp. 20–35). Some contemporary scholars emphasize that there was a “Japanese settler colonialism” in Asia and elsewhere, a view that cancels out much of the salient against white supremacy that Japan might have been seen as making in its refutation of settler colonialism of the American and European variety (Lu 2019; see also Horne 2017). Other scholars point to deeply ingrained assumptions about cultural hierarchies in Japan toward the people of the Korean peninsula (Weiss 2022; see also Henry 2005 and Kowner 2018)8. Legal and educational history also offers examples counterbalancing the argument against pure racial and ethnic harmony (although aesthetic history sometimes, in turn, shows how ideals of equality could unfold even under conditions of annexation) (See Chin 2010; Yanagi and Takasaki 1984). It is also true that Japan has its own internal history of servitude, for example serfs known as nago, although the scope and violence of systematized non-voluntary labor were vastly different than the North American practice (Aruga 2000, pp. 69–104; Mathias 2011, p. 220; Saito 2009, pp. 179–81; N. Miura 2003). And then there are the war memories of Japanese soldiers themselves, which, while often substantiating Japan’s stated war aims in Asia, also sometimes betray scars of war far different from what official propaganda promised (Sugamo Isho Hensankai 1984; Nakamura 2018). The legacy of Japanese children abandoned in China at war’s end also tells a vastly different tale about Asia than the official wartime narrative (Enari 2021). Korean, Taiwanese, mainland Chinese, Filipino, and other Asian voices continue to emphasize (racially motivated) atrocities committed by Japanese troops in Asia.

However, even on historical balance, the view of Japan’s actions in the prewar and during World War II among non-white residents of the United States was somewhat more complicated than a simplistic equivalence narrative, with Japan and America equally guilty of race hatred, reveals. Researcher Xavier Robillard-Martel advises caution against stretching racism comparisons too far, pointing out, I think rightly, that “experiences attached to racial slavery and its legacies” are “unique” (Robillard-Martel 2021, p. 419). As Horne acknowledges, Black and other non-white Americans held a wide range of opinions about prewar and wartime Japan, with some as skeptical about Japan’s true intentions as Horne is, others ready to support even a hypocritical Japan if it meant an attenuation of white supremacy in any form, and still others positively supportive of Japan, at least for a time. Among this latter group was the American thinker and political philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois9 (see Onishi and Shinoda 2019; see also Du Bois 2007, pp. 8–9; Chandler 2022, pp. 180–81). Horne is sharply critical of Du Bois for his advocacy for Japan, and implies that Du Bois, who visited Japan in 1936 and 1937, was duped by his Japanese hosts into repeating their propaganda for an Anglophone Black audience back home (Mullen and Wilson 2005, p. xv). Du Bois’ writings on his travels, which include many strong statements of adulation about Japan’s expansionism as a remedy for white supremacy in the East, are dismissed by Horne and by other public intellectuals (during Du Bois’ time and thereafter) as misguided and lacking in sophisticated geopolitical analysis10 (see Chandler 2022, p. 181).

Let us examine the equivalence narrative more closely. Above, I noted how John Dower sought to relativize America’s racism by setting it on par with that of Japan. This is a very common trope among (white) American liberals. Even now, Americans tend to insist, as Dower did, that, yes, America has a dark history, but so does Japan (Standing with Historians of Japan 2015). The postwar, retroactive construction of a parity of racial animus helps (white) Americans continue to ignore the depths of their own country’s historical sins (see, e.g., Rigg 2024; see also, generally, Mitani 2021; Horne 2020). My argument turns the equivalence narrative on its head. Racism in Japan and in America was and is qualitatively and quantitatively different (see Jacobs 2024; Lombardo 2011; Black 2012). In the United States in the twentieth century, for instance, lynching Black Americans was not only a not infrequent undertaking among whites, but it was also commemorated, even celebrated. Many whites sent post-lynching postcards containing images of tortured and murdered Black Americans. No such barbarity is recorded in Japan. Medical experimentation on living subjects has been pointed out as a glaring crime carried out by Japan in China, as well as against Koreans, but the extent of medical experimentation on living subjects in the United States outstrips that carried out by Japan (Washington 2006; Tsuneishi 2022). Japan did not practice chattel slavery as a national and economic bedrock policy, did not participate in the Transatlantic slave trade, and did not have any “crown jewels” in its empire that it sought to defend as the price of maintaining global racial superiority. Anti-racist continuities remain in force today. For example, Japan has spent the postwar spending enormous sums of money helping to develop Asian and Middle Eastern countries (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2025; see also Best 2013, p. 296). Americans have paid no reparations for slavery. And yet, somehow, for some Western scholars, it is white people who are to be praised for their efforts at reconciliation, and Japan that is to be condemned for its failure to amend for the past11 (Hatch 2025).

A closer reading of historical documents from the other side of the Pacific from the 1930s and 40s reveals a very different scenario than the one that many Anglophone postwar liberals have painted of Japan and race. Soldiers from Japan often went to their deaths fighting, as they themselves told it, for the defense of their country, for racial harmony, and for the liberation of the oppressed (Yasukuni Jinja Shamusho 2024; Sugamo Isho Hensankai 1984; Asano 2024, pp. 200–8; but see also Y. Yoshida 2017, pp. 28–80). They were, more than likely, scared young men, and not racist killers (Hayasaka 2022, pp. 68–70). They very often showed respect for other Asians and were often admired in return (Hayasaka 2023, pp. 86–89). Many of those soldiers developed relationships with women from the Korean peninsula—relationships about which at least one feminist scholar in South Korea has written at the peril of prison time for her impartial historical investigations (Y. Park 2014; see also Choe 2017). Japanese citizens from the Korean Peninsula who went to work on the main islands were often paid at least the same wages as other workers, and in many cases were given better treatment than men hired locally (Nagatani 2024; Lee 2019a, 2019b, 2019c, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c; Joo 2020a, 2020b; T. Nishioka 2022; Matsumoto 2019, pp. 452–57). Japan had annexed the peninsula in 1910, granting citizenship to everyone living there—a practice very different than Western colonialism in Africa and Asia, although it must not be forgotten that Tokyo’s assimilationist policies contextualize and constrain those differences. Korean-born soldiers who fought for Japan were often given deferred conscriptions, and many volunteered (Jeong 2020). Many Taiwan-born soldiers also volunteered (Hamazaki 2000; see also Kase 2022). Although contested even internally, the founding of Manchukuo was in part carried out on a belief in the equality of races and the possibility of realizing that equality in actual lived political arrangements (Tanaka 2024, p. 21; see also Iboshi 1989; contesting views are at Barclay 2020; H. O. Park 2005; Hassanzadeh 2025, p. 345; Frazier 2015, pp. 65–67). After Chiang Kai-shek’s (1887–1975) Nationalist forces destroyed levees in Henan in June 1938, leading to massive flooding and death in the floodplains of the Yellow River, Japanese forces rescued some of the Chinese survivors (Hayasaka 2021, pp. 52–55; see also, on Japanese assistance to local populations, Ara 2022). Pre-war Japanese observers in the United States were appalled at the level of racism directed at non-white peoples there (Itō [1944] 2023, pp. 176–99; see also Miyazaki and Watanabe 2017, pp. 93–96, 164–67). Many Japanese were shocked to find racial hierarchies elsewhere, including in Asia, with white and mixed-white people occupying positions of power (Kayahara 1985, pp. 86–88). Even committed, high-level Nazis in Germany, who were keen to learn scientific and legal racism from Americans, quailed at the level of hatred which white Americans directed against Blacks (Wilkerson 2023, p. 84). Much of this history remains untranslated and, in America, undigested; much of it has been suppressed, in many cases by the same country, America, that now accuses Japan of being at least as racist as America has been (Shimokawa 2020, pp. 20–21; N. Araki 2023; Akagami [1933] 2022, pp. 42–71; Takayama and Mabuchi 2017; Arima 2017; Ezaki 2023; Yamamoto 1983a, p. 104; 1983b, pp. 251–52; 1988, pp. 59–63; Ikeda 2020; Satō 2021, pp. 135–38; Araya 2024, pp. 204–212; Etō 1994; see also Iokibe 1989, p. 2).

Pro arguendo, and in order to get closer to what might have animated Du Bois’ and others’ positive views, let us attempt to interpret Japan’s prewar and wartime actions in light of Du Bois’ arguments.12 What did Du Bois see in Japanese history and (to Du Bois) contemporary actions that inspired him with such hope? (See Du Bois 1933; see also Lanham 2024, p. 484fn322) For example, Japanese “continental samurai” went to China, under varying degrees of surreptitiousness, to assist Chinese counter-colonialists in their attempt to free China from the sway of Europeans (See Fogel 2000, pp. 927–50; Yim 1964, pp. 63–73; Saaler and Szpilman 2011, pp. 121–32). Japan welcomed a massive influx of Chinese students and became a hub for revolutionary foment against the foreign suppression of China. Japan fought the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) ostensibly to free the Korean court from Russian machinations and domination by the Qing. Japan then fought the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) to prevent the Russian Empire from encroaching into Manchuria and again threatening the Korean Peninsula (Miyawaki 2018)13. Japan promoted racial harmony (gozoku kyōwa) in Manchuria, a sharply different policy than the Han-chauvinist nationalism promoted by Sun Yatsen (1866–1925) (Hagihara 2007). Japan worked with Indian revolutionary Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) in his fight against the British Raj, an effort which ended proximately in defeat for Bose but, by 1947, in independence for India (Kunizuka 1995; Fujiwara 1972). Japan inspired, and cooperated with, independence movements by Muslim groups in Asia (N. Green 2013, pp. 611–31). Japan collaborated with independence forces in the Netherlands East Indies (today, Indonesia).14 Japan hosted the Greater East Asia Conference in 1943, bringing together Asian leaders in a setting free of, and opposed to, white colonial powers (K. Miura 2025). Japan temporarily freed the Philippines from American rule (Lebra 1977, pp. 140–45). Japan staged a coup in French Indochina in early 1945, paving the way for Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) to declare independence on 2 September of that year, the very same day that Japanese officials surrendered to the Allied Powers in Tokyo Bay (See Gluckstein 2012, pp. 193–206). There was talk of Japan’s supporting Ethiopian independence in the 1930s in the face of Italian aggression, aggression which many in the Japanese public opposed.15 As Brenda Gayle Plummer writes, “During World War II, the FBI sought to uncover pro-Japanese activity among blacks in the United States.” (Plummer 2013, p. 507) Japan assumed the Mandate over many Western Pacific islands from Germany after World War I and freed many other Pacific islands from colonial control, threatening even “White Australia” with invasion (See Wang 1936, pp. 86–91; van Dijk 2015, pp. 463–88). The world was radically transformed by Japan’s anti-racist outbreak and sustained fight against European colonialism, leading eventually to independence for virtually all of the Asia-Pacific region.16 Japan did not accomplish these things alone, of course. But Japan’s actions were very much in line with anti-colonial sentiment globally at the time, and Japan was the only country to take an organized, military-level, concerted stand against globalized white supremacy prior to the freeing of other colonized peoples. Ironically, the only colonized polity remaining in East Asia might be said to be the parts of Japan occupied by American military forces, along with the American bases on the Korean peninsula, which was also once officially Japanese territory. Japan, on some readings, traded its own sovereignty for the liberation of Asia.

Horne and others critical of Du Bois’ Japan position would surely remain unconvinced by this interpretation. Here, however, I propose to expand the scope of the argument. The Horne thesis is almost exclusively concerned with postwar, Cold War transnational politics. But by incorporating what we might call the “Du Bois thesis”—that is, the notion that Japan’s prewar and wartime attempt at racial liberation was by and large effective, and, I would add, eventually successful—the Horne thesis takes on a new explicative power in the Cold War context (see Uchi Mōko Apakakai and Okamura 1990; Kishida 2020). The challenge of Japan was, indeed, profound, and the racial history of Japan in the Cold War strengthens the claim, made by Du Bois, that Japan’s intentions in assuming a leadership role in Asia had been more sincere than detractors were willing to admit. In particular, the experience of Black servicemen in Japan during the Cold War, and the efforts of Cold War-era Japanese scholars to develop a new scholarly field of Black Studies, help tilt the historiographical scales in favor of Du Bois’ original interpretation, while also providing important experiential context. This in turn strengthens the Horne thesis, showing that racial politics were the mainstay not just of the Cold War but were prominent well before the ideological standoff between two (white) superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. As more and more Black voices from the Cold War past come to the fore, and as the postwar liberal interpretation of the war fades from view, a more complex and nuanced reading of the racialist drivers of the twentieth century’s global conflicts will, I hope, increasingly take a place at the center of historiography in our time.17

4. Black Servicemen and -Women in Occupied Japan

The postwar occupation of Japan is almost exclusively portrayed in English-language historiography as a period of white-dominated political and military domination and exchange. Indeed, it was. But missing from this tendentious narrative are the experiences of Black servicemen and -women who also participated in the Occupation. In many ways, the interaction between Black Americans and occupied Japan, and Japanese, had a farther-reaching effect on American history than did the momentous fact of the Occupation for American-led geopolitics in the Cold War. Fittingly, Black and Japanese scholars have been working in tandem, and sometimes together, to reconstruct this often-elided aspect of Cold War history, giving historiographical salience to the Black experience of Cold War Japan.

One of the pioneers of this emerging field of Black Japan Cold War studies is Japanese historian Yasuhiro Okada. Okada’s (2011) essay on Black soldiers at Camp Majestic (“Camp Gifu”) in central Japan from 1947 to 1951 brings to the fore many of the key struggles and awakenings by Black servicemen during the Occupation. As Okada writes:

In occupied Gifu, African American soldiers reconsolidated, reconstructed, and complicated their sense of ‘American-ness’, ‘blackness’, and notions of masculinity through their daily personal encounters and exchanges with local Japanese women and men. The overseas military experience in Japan, the defeated ‘non-white nation’ that African Americans had admired as their racial ally before the war, encouraged African American GIs to reconfigure their racial identity beyond the domestic context of racial oppression and discrimination found in the United States.

(Okada 2011, p. 180)

Okada’s key insights lie in going beyond the Du Bois-Horne focus on prewar and wartime Japan and the myriad of critiques of racial politics centering on Japan in the first half of the twentieth century to include the lived experiences of African American servicemen and -women in Cold War Japan. In particular, Okada foregrounds how interracial marriages between Black GIs and Japanese women, and the children born of those unions, were powerful, immediate rejoinders to the ongoing discrimination which Black and other non-white Americans faced both in the military abroad and in life back in the United States, as well as, occasionally, in Japan (See Horne 2018, pp. 63–65, 158).

In the very early stages of the Cold War, American military and political leaders began to adjust to racial realities as white supremacist policies grew increasingly untenable within America’s de facto Asian empire. Black troops in occupied Japan acted as a vector for conveying to white American leaders the necessity for that change. Okada writes that:

In January 1947, Robert L. Eichelberger [(1886–1961)], commanding general of the U.S. 8th Army, announced the plan to integrate the 24th Infantry Regiment into the all-white 25th Infantry Division following the recommendation of the Gillem Board on the utilization of black troops in the postwar U.S. military.

(Okada 2011, p. 181)18

However, change was more easily announced than achieved. According to Okada, “Despite black and white regiments sharing a common base, ‘social segregation’ marked the life of African American GIs at Camp Gifu.” (Okada 2011, p. 181; citing Bowers et al. 1996, p. 48). One Black serviceman wrote a letter to the Baltimore Afro-American in May of 1947 in which he ironically referred to the “fresh ‘experiment’ at Camp Majestic,” communicating to African American readers back home that “Nobody is interested in ‘integration’ [at Camp Gifu] except the colored people.” (Okada 2011, p. 181). President Harry S Truman’s (1884–1972) Executive Order 9981, issued in July 1948 and ordering the complete desegregation of all United States armed forces, was virtually without effect, Okada concludes.19 The 24th Infantry at Camp Gifu “continued to be segregated until it was disbanded and integrated into white units in October 1951 for military and combat exigencies in the midst of the Korea War.” (Okada 2011, p. 182). The Korean War experience was a bitter reminder to many Black Americans that the goals of racial equality touted by Washington went unrealized even on ground that Black Americans had wetted with their blood. “As late as 1952,” Horne notes, “Negro soldiers slain on the battlefields of Korea could not be buried in cemeteries designated back home for the ‘white dead’.” (Horne 2018, p. 158). Perhaps even more astounding was that “in [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur’s own headquarters signs marked the toilets and water fountains as ‘For Japanese Only’ and ‘Allied Personnel Only’,” with separate “white” and “colored” swimming pools even for Americans. “‘Tokyo today’,” Horne writes, quoting writer James Hicks (1915–1986), “‘looks like Mississippi’.” (Horne 2018, p. 159).

Hicks was not the only Black American to look askance at putative American war aims and conduct. “The American Soldier in World War II,” a searchable database administered by Virginia Tech, contains records of surveys collected from United States Army officers and enlisted men about their views on the Second World War.20 Many of the comments in the surveys completed by Black servicemen are pointed, even exasperated. In March of 1943, for example, one Black serviceman wrote, “I am not at much [sic] at war with Germany or Japan as I am with the people of the State of Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, ect. [sic] […] The white people say we are black they say Japs are Brown. Why should a colored person fight them. The Whites here dont [sic] like us but the Japs do. I would rather kill a southern white soldier M.P. than 5 Japs.” (Attitudes of and Toward Negroes 1943a, S32N, Subject 15806740). In the same month, another Black serviceman lamented that “We should treated [sic] Japan right, and we would have not been fighting them. […] The only race that will profit by the war is the white man.” (Attitudes of and Toward Negroes 1943e, S32N, Subject 15805764). In August of 1944, more than two years after the Battle of Midway, another Black serviceman wrote, “No Negro troops should fight Japan which is a colored race. We are being forced to help the white races dominate the colored races. Justice and liberty can be given us just as easy as it can be given to the people of the Islands owned by the U.S.A.” (Post-War Plans of Negro Soldiers 1944a, S144, Subject 15917526) In the same month another Black serviceman wrote, “I feel about Southern States as you all did when Japan made their attack Dec. 7 1941.” (Post-War Plans of Negro Soldiers 1944c, S144, Subject 15910392) Yet another respondent that month wrote that, while “the fight with Germany is fundamentally for the preservation of Democracy” (albeit a “ridiculous” fight, he noted, given the denial of the right to vote to Blacks in America), the “main issue” in the war against Japan “seems to be, ‘The maintenance of white supremacy’.” (Post-War Plans of Negro Soldiers 1944b, S144, Subject 15902195) In March of 1943, a Black serviceman despaired that “As a Negro soldier, I truly feel and believe that their [sic] are millions of white people, that rather see German [sic] & Japan win the war than to see the Negroes get a equal opportunity.” (Attitudes of and Toward Negroes 1943d, S32N, Subject 20740440). One of those millions was apparently Herman Talmadge (1913–2002), the notoriously racist governor of Georgia. As another Black serviceman put it in March, 1943, “Gov. Talmadge of Georgia said over the radio that he would rather see Germany + Japan rule the world than see a negro sit down beside him on a bus.” (Attitudes of and Toward Negroes 1943c, S32N, Subject 15806459). A Black serviceman’s response to the March 1943 survey made things even more explicit. “Foreign Governments know that […] there is a difference made between White and colored[.] That is one reason our country was attacked by Japan.” (Attitudes of and Toward Negroes 1943b, S32N, Subject 20739613). In August 1944, one Black serviceman wrote that if conditions of racism persisted after the war was over, then “Japan should make a Pearl harbor out of the whole dam [sic] country.” (Post-War Plans of Negro Soldiers 1944d, S144, Subject 15922375).

Despite the seemingly Pyrrhic victories for racial equality engendered by Black servicemen’s experiences in Japan, the bitterness with which many Black Americans reflected on the wider meaning of the war, and the resistance to integration even by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, there was substantial change afoot. Black servicemen, while disappointed in the slow pace, or in many cases the lack altogether, of racial progress among American military units stationed in Japan, did not for that reason simply accept the second-class status that had been foisted upon them by prejudice, white supremacy, and bureaucratic inertia. Many Black servicemen formed relationships with local Japanese and in doing so opened up an entirely new social space, leading to renewed and more insistent calls for racial equality in Japan and in America (Okada 2011, pp. 183–91).

One of the most momentous relationships was a friendship between future civil rights leader James Meredith and a Japanese schoolboy. Meredith had enrolled in the newly formed United States Air Force in 1951, and while stationed in Japan as a staff sergeant, he came to see the possibilities for racial advancement in the United States through the lens of his racially liberating time spent in a non-white country. Historian William Doyle writes that Meredith’s “experience as a black noncommissioned officer in Japan was a transforming one. […H]e was amazed by the air of racial tolerance he experienced in the Japan of the mid-1950s.” (Doyle 2001, p. 20) While Meredith would share in Americans’ skepticism toward Japan later on, remarking that “when World War Three” broke out “our enemy will be Japan,” Meredith was invigorated by his sojourn at the time, particularly by the way in which he was treated by ordinary people, including a Japanese schoolboy he met in September of 1957 who, on learning of Meredith’s hometown, “was stunned to meet someone from Mississippi”. (Doyle 2001, p. 20) Meredith and the schoolboy had been “chatting about the Little Rock crisis,” the 1957 incident when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus (1910–1994) tried to prevent the “Little Rock Nine” from entering all-white Little Rock Central High School. The boy “couldn’t believe that Meredith would want to go back to such a place” as Meredith’s native Mississippi, which was infamous for even worse racial hatred than had been displayed in Little Rock (Doyle 2001, p. 20). “The encounter helped persuade Meredith that he should someday go back to his home state to fight for a better society,” which Meredith did by going on to enroll at Ole Miss in 1962 as the first Black student in the school’s history (Doyle 2001, p. 20). “I returned to America inspired by my experience in Japan,” Meredith wrote, “determined to break the System of White Supremacy in Mississippi and the South.” (Horne 2018, p. 23; Eagles 2009).

Even after returning to the U.S., Meredith continued to receive support from Japan. Alice S. Cary, M.D. (1920–), wrote to Meredith from the Interboard Committee for Christian Work in Japan, blessing him and praising him as one of “the heroes of the mid-20th century” (Cary 2019). A certain Toshiko Yoshida sent Meredith a postcard from Niigata, wishing success to her “dear friend” (T. Yoshida 2019). Tomoko Okunchi, sixteen, sent Meredith a heartfelt letter in October of 1962 from Osaka after having seen on television Meredith’s “strife against the feudalistic idea of America.” Okunchi encouraged Meredith: “I can understand that you are right,” she wrote, “and you are fighting to keep the democracy. I look up you [sic] and I feel you as my friend. […] The matter is not only yours. Everyone must think over about it, as own oneself [sic].” (Okunchi 1965) Meredith’s time in Japan had circled back, and he was now inspiring the people who had inspired him.

Meredith’s chance encounter with a local Japanese youth rippled out into positive racial change in the United States later on, but not all relationships between Black and Japanese people in occupied Japan were so platonic. As in human communities everywhere, much of the social interaction between Black Americans and their Japanese counterparts involved intimacy, and the relationships that formed out of this interplay of the sexes presented perhaps the most pressing demands for racial change in the United States. While prostitution formed a substantial part of these relationships, surely the most lasting change was prompted by Black American Gis’ marrying and fathering children with Japanese women. These relationships presented an intractable problem for racial anti-miscegenation laws in the United States and engendered large-scale social change on the homefront.

In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws in various states provided clear boundaries blocking interracial intimacy, let alone interracial marriage (See Sohoni 2007, pp. 587–618; Calderón-Zaks 2011, pp. 325–59). These internally directed American laws were bolstered by the 1924 Immigration Act, which, among other effects, reduced immigration from Asian countries to virtually zero (Okada 2011, p. 192; See also Ngai 1999, pp. 67–92; Campney 2019, pp. 841–78). However, the racial situation in overseas territories occupied by the American military was not entirely clear. As the first mincing steps toward unit integration taken by the commander of Camp Gifu indicate, there was much more latitude outside of the United States for ad hoc improvisation. To be sure, much of this was made necessary by the confused state of policy on the ground. The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), Gen. Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) (also a native of Little Rock, Arkansas), issued an anti-fraternization order on 2 April 1946, forbidding “Japanese women of immoral character” from entering into “sexual liaisons” with American GIs. This order was subsequently expanded to discourage Japanese-American interaction more generally. However, on 20 September 1949, Gen. MacArthur “reversed [SCAP’s earlier] anti-fraternization policies” and replaced those former pronouncements with a “pro-fraternization order to improve the U.S.–Japanese relationship within the U.S. international context of anti-communism in the late 1940s.” (Okada 2011, p. 201, endnote 53; citing Koshiro 1999, pp. 60, 70–72).

Even before this sudden reversal, though, Black servicemen had been entering into stable relationships, including marriages, with Japanese women. Indeed, Pres. Truman pre-empted Gen. MacArthur by some two years when, on 22 July 1947, the president:

Signed Public Law 213, called the ‘Japanese War Brides Act’, as an amendment to the War Brides Act of 1945. PL213 allowed Japanese brides who submitted their marriage applications within thirty days of the act’s enactment to enter the United States, thus temporarily voiding the racial restrictions in the 1924 Immigration Act. […] Public Law 717, enacted on 19 August 1950 as a temporary extension of PL213, further permitted Japanese brides and their dependents to enter the United States on a non-quota basis, again setting aside the 1924 Immigration Act’s racial restrictions.

(Okada 2011, p. 192)

As Black American servicemen such as Sgt. Paul Shaw and Corporal Ernest Steinbeck began applying to bring their mixed-race families to the United States, they were directly challenging and overturning, with each successful application, the white supremacy ideology that guided racial legislation and policy back home (Okada 2011, pp. 191–92). White GIs also married Japanese women in occupied Japan, but the example of Black GIs exercising agency within multiple repressive hierarchies had a multiplying effect that bolstered the drive to overturn racist assumptions.

To be sure, the resistance to these applications from within the American military ranks in Japan was often intense. It is also true that acceptance for mixed-race marriages and children in Japan was not always forthcoming, showing that Japan’s rhetoric about racial equality before and during the war could get mired in prejudices when confronted with the lived reality of racial integration. As with the wartime fight against racism in Asia, Japan’s resistance to racism in the postwar period was often a complicated negotiation, and not always free from racial prejudice of a homegrown variety (see Okada 2009). However, as the experiences of Meredith and others attest, the fact of prejudice in Japan did not equate to systematic racism, much less policy-level discrimination. On the American side, the spousal application process provided a framework for activism by progressive servicemen and officers, including chaplains—as well as activists within the U.S., such as the members of the Japanese American Citizenship League (JACL) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—to mount a sustained challenge to racialist domestic American laws, a challenge which had the sanction of the president and, after 1949, of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan (Okada 2011, pp. 192–96). History scholar Sonia Gomez writes that, “Between 1947 and 1953, 7153 Japanese women immigrated to the United States as wives of American citizens, many as wives of African American servicemen.” (Gomez 2019, p. 36). Each one of these immigrations constituted a victory for racial equality—arguably Japan’s first postwar export to the United States.

Even more overlooked in Cold War historiography than Black servicemen and the role they played in changing racial politics and discourse in the U.S. military and in the United States are Black servicewomen.21 This historiographical lacuna is unfortunate. As Yasuhiro Okada writes, Black women, especially in Japan, helped precipitate changes in policy and in thinking through the inter-racial interactions made possible by the comparatively freer racial atmosphere in occupied Japan. The exigencies of the Cold War, Okada shows, brought Black women to Japan in the first place, as “The first group of African American women who served in Japan was the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in the Far East Command[, …] assigned [to Japan] on an integrated basis when the Korean War occurred in June 1950.” (Okada 2012, p. 73). Other Black American servicewomen were in Japan on assignment with the U.S. Army Nurse Corps.22 Yet other Black American women were based in Japan as civilians, performing roles such as teachers, Red Cross workers, or wives of U.S. military personnel (many of whom were on active duty in the Korean War) (Okada 2012, pp. 73–75). In the course of these women’s daily interactions and by dint of their service to their country, Okada argues, the racial (and gendered) policies of the American homeland were gradually upended, and the antebellum status quo grew increasingly untenable in light of the integration and (often) positive inter-racial mixing which was made possible in the first place by the Occupation (Okada 2011, pp. 88–89).

5. The Dawn of Black Studies in Cold War Japan

The lived experiences of Black servicemen and -women, and other Black Americans, in occupied Japan constituted a provocation and an impetus toward progressive change in racialist policies in the American homeland. These advancements were made possible by the relatively enlightened attitudes of many Japanese men and women on the subject of race. To be sure, not all was perfect. Sherick A. Hughes writes trenchantly about “the convenient scapegoating of Blacks in postwar Japan,” sounding a warning knell that racism is a universal temptation (Hughes 2003, pp. 335–53). And as Yukiko Koshiro argues, there was a good deal of anti-Black, as well as anti-Caucasian, prejudice in Japan, in addition to racial prejudice against those from other Asian countries such as Korea and China. However, even Koshiro provides historical evidence that Japan has been on balance progressive when it comes to relations with people of African descent. “The official record of the Iwakura Mission of 1871–1873,” Koshiro points out, referring to the nineteenth-century embassy of Japanese political leaders who toured the world seeking cues for Japan’s modernization, noted of American Blacks that “It is obvious that skin color has no bearing on one’s intellect. Therefore, those ambitious blacks who saw the importance of education strove to learn and work harder and became great intellectuals, for whom uneducated whites were no match.” (Koshiro 2003, p. 185; citing Kume 1982, p. 419)23.

Later, when Japanese people began emigrating en masse to the United States, these affinities would play out in unexpected ways, such as when Black Americans were among the very few to offer succor and aid to Japanese Americans rounded up and sent to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s internment camps, and later when Nisei Americans would fight alongside Black Americans for civil rights during the Cold War (See Reeves 2015, pp. 273–74; Fujino 2018, pp. 171–208; Howard 2008; Horne 2018, pp. 112–29)24. As photographer and researcher Shishido Kiyotaka puts it, Americans of Japanese ancestry who fought in the Second World War were insulted as “Japs” by their American colleagues. The Japanese Americans had an ambiguous relationship toward Japan in that it was their political enemy, but, from the standpoint of their comrades at arms, it was also their racial homeland and the cause of suspicion and even hatred toward them (Shishido 2021, p. 50). There is much to contrast here with Japan. Although not impeccable, the overall racial disposition of Cold War Japan was that fostered by Japan’s anti-racist, anti-colonialist, defiant pan-Asian juggernaut in the first half of the twentieth century (See Allen 1994, pp. 23–46; Barnes 2010, pp. 201–19; Annō 2017; Horne 2018, p. 57, ff.; Makalani 2011, pp. 151–78)25. The victory over Czarist Russia by Japan in 1905—the first time an Asian force had prevailed against a white foe in modern history—inspired many non-white peoples around the world, including many African Americans, with hope that the end of white supremacy might be nigh.26 This electrification of a new racial paradigm was given new charge by Japan’s construction of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and Japan’s eviction, by force, of white colonial powers from Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, the Philippines, Indochina, Indonesia, many Pacific islands, and beyond.

While this bold reversal of the white supremacist racial hierarchy enshrined in the almost entirely white League of Nations by American president Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) ended in defeat for Japan in 1945, it is often forgotten that Japanese freedom fighters remained in Asia and continued the fight for racial justice. Eventually, full liberation from white colonialism was achieved.27 Japan’s organized, military, state-directed run against white supremacy collapsed with the American invasion and occupation of the country, but the spirit that had animated that run continued to inform, at least indirectly, the racial environment in Japan for Black servicemen and -women and other Black Americans stationed there during the Cold War.28 Some Black Americans applied the new, concrete freedoms obtained by virtue of their being in this freer racial milieu to fighting Jim Crow policies in the continental United States, winning incremental increases in freedom and helping to reverse or otherwise attenuate and complicate Cold War America’s position on racial prejudice.

However, while it is important to bear in mind these contributions by Black Americans facilitated by Japan and the anti-racist views of many Japanese people, it should not be overlooked that there were Japanese who, during the Cold War, provided much more than a passive anti-racist environment conducive to overcoming prejudice at a remove. There was, in fact, a small but influential coterie of scholars in Cold War Japan who inaugurated a new field, Black Studies, which helped contribute, if modestly, to racial liberation in the United States. Those scholars opened up unprecedented intellectual spaces for considering questions of race, politics, class, and more, in ways that would arguably have been impossible in the United States at the same time. While their initial impact was very limited, the subsequent work carried on by these original Japanese scholars and by their pupils and disciples in Japan, the United States, and elsewhere is now helping shift scholarly views of the Cold War.

America-based historian Yuichiro Onishi has been among the first to chronicle the intellectual history of Black studies in Japan. Onishi focuses in particular on Nukina Yoshitaka (1911–1985), who “helped launch Kokujin Kenkyu no Kai (Association of Negro Studies) in Kobe in June 1954, a collective devoted to the international and diasporan study of Black life, culture, and history.” (Onishi 2013, p. 97) As Onishi explains, Prof. Nukina’s serendipitous encounter with a (very rare) Japanese translation of Du Bois’ (1915) book The Negro galvanized Nukina, destabilizing his former belief in “the legitimacy of Western humanism” and opening for him “new categories and creative energies to render visible and alternative path to human liberation.” (Onishi 2013, p. 98) “One of the early works of Nukina,” writes Tsunehiko Kato, “was on William Lloyd Garrison [(1805–1879)] and the abolitionist movement. It seems obvious that there was continuity between them.” (Kato 2013, p. 832).

Nukina’s scholarly intervention was perhaps a consequence of his having served with the Imperial Japanese Army on the island of Java for some four and a half years during the Greater East Asia War. Onishi frames the Javanese experience during the war as having been peppered with massacres and other atrocities (Onishi 2013, p. 105). But the crucial link is with the war itself, the witness to Japan’s overthrow of white colonial rule in Southeast Asia. It is very possible that this attuned Nukina to be receptive to Du Bois’ vision of race in history when he encountered The Negro at a used book store in Tokyo after the war. Nukina, a former member of the Imperial Japanese Army—had that organization been as racially hypocritical as Horne argues—would not have been likely to find in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois the inspiration for founding a new paradigm of anti-racist scholarly endeavor in Cold War Japan. Nukina was anti-racist in the postwar period because of his wartime service, not in spite of it.

It was not just the work of Du Bois, but also the presence of Black servicemen in Japan during the Occupation which caused Prof. Nukina to question the triumphalist claims about American freedom and democracy being spread by Occupation propaganda (possibly as part of the War Guilt Information Program (WGIP) psychological warfare operation against the conquered Japanese) (See Takahashi 2014, 2019). Having been primed to see the less-than-glorious side of American life, including race relations, by his extensive readings in the novels of Erskine Caldwell (1903–1987) and William Faulkner (1897–1962), Nukina was shocked one day to discover that the barracks for Black American troops at a U.S. military installation (“West Camp”) near the Kobe Municipal College of Foreign Languages, where Nukina taught, were shabbier and much more poorly located than the “East Camp,” for white troops, located very near downtown Kobe (Onishi 2013, pp. 115–16). Nukina, along with his fellow scholar and Kokujin Kenkyu no Kai participant Furukawa Hiromi (1927–), grew disillusioned with white America in light of the prejudice against Black servicemen readily apparent in Japan (See Onishi and Sakashita 2019, pp. 58–61). Nukina became increasingly enmeshed in Black American literature and activism, and came to share, avant la lettre, what is referred to in this essay as the Horne thesis, for example criticizing Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), for “cautiously steer[ing] the Civil Rights Movement in the context of Cold War politics” (Onishi 2013, p. 125).

Other members of the Kokujin Kenkyu no Kai, such as Nakajima Yoriko (1936–), also joined the political struggle against white supremacy. Nakajima was inspired by a speech given by American activist Robert F. Williams (1925–1996) while Nakajima was an exchange student at the University of Michigan, to immerse herself in the study of the Cuban Revolution, receiving encouragement from Williams in her work even after returning to Japan (Onishi 2013, pp. 128–35). This “colored-internationalism” was facilitated by the pioneering scholarship and community of Black studies given impetus by Black servicemen in Occupation Japan (Onishi 2013, p. 128 ff.). The dialectic of race and liberation in East Asia continued, via the nexus of Japan, from the prewar, through World War II, and into the Cold War. Du Bois and Horne were joined, conceptually and before Horne’s career began, in the work of Black-inspired Japanese intellectuals working in the shadow of a racist Cold War occupation. This became true even more immediately as Japan’s student radicals of the 1960s joined forces with Black radicals in the United States (Onishi 2013, pp. 154–74).

The challenge which Nukina and his research fellows presented to Cold War America and to America’s captive Cold War ally, Japan, should not be overstated. Nukina is virtually unknown in Japan today, and even in his own time, his reach was, at best, highly attenuated. In postwar, Cold War-era Japan, the drive for racial harmony lived on in many ways, but it was almost completely subsumed within the totalizing paradigm of America’s existential struggle, as many in the United States saw it, with global Communism (Morgan 2022; see also Chen 2010, pp. 173–84; T. Yoshida 2016). Nevertheless, although minor in immediate historical context, the Cold War encounter between Japan and Black America, as embodied by Nukina and his study partners, does validate, in many ways, Du Bois’ original insights into the anti-racist motivations of Japan’s imperialism in Asia. The variegated ways in which Cold War Japanese scholars viewed the salience of Black Americans, especially those in their midst as part of the occupying force, underscores the widespread, dispositional attitude toward anti-racist study in Japan. Japanese scholars were continuing the work of combating white dominance, whether militarily, civilizationally, or epistemologically, by embracing the histories of Black Americans. Scholar Ayumu Kaneko, for example, writes about the range of interpretations of Black American history among Japanese scholars, from the Marxism of Kikuchi Ken’ichi (1912–1970) and Honda Sōzō (1924–2001) to the social history turn of Kawashima Masaki and Higuchi Hayumi (Onishi and Sakashita 2019, pp. 112–24). Today, Araki Keiko and Murata Katsuyuki, among other Japanese scholars, are at work on the kinds of transnational themes—Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) and the “Black Atlantic,” for instance, and immigration among Afro-Caribbean populations—that have intrigued the doyen of race-and-Cold War studies, Gerald Horne (A. Kaneko 2019, pp. 124–27).29 Taketani Etsuko, for her part, adopts a critical reading of Horne in her essay on Black intellectual James Weldon Johnson and the notion of the “Black Pacific” (Taketani 2007, pp. 79–106; see also J. W. Johnson 1941 and Smyth 2014, pp. 389–403). Horne may have been critical of Du Bois’ view of Japan, but through the work of Japanese scholars of Black America and the African diaspora, Du Bois and Horne are meeting and meshing in the scholarly field of Japan.

6. Conclusions

This essay has advanced the premise that Japan’s (qualified) example of racial tolerance, displayed before, during, and after World War II, directly and indirectly helped transform racial politics in the Cold War-era United States. One of the most vocal prewar champions of Japan’s anti-racist cause was the American philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois, who saw in Japan’s challenge to white supremacy and European colonial rule in Asia a beacon of hope for non-white peoples in the United States and around the world. Postwar American historian Gerald Horne, who has written extensively about white supremacy during the Cold War, is skeptical of Du Bois’ interpretation of Japan, seeing in prewar and wartime Japan an example of racial hypocrisy. However, by combining these two seemingly antithetical positions in the context of occupied Japan, where many Black Americans experienced their first taste of racial equality, as well as in light of the pre-war and wartime views toward Japan some Black Americans held, it becomes possible to excavate a lost history of the Cold War, including that of the pro-Black activities of many people in Japan during the postwar. The Horne thesis, wedded to the “Du Bois thesis” via the experiences of Black servicemen and -women in Cold War Japan and re-contrasted with the forgotten example of Japan’s efforts for racial justice to overcome the “problem of the color-line” in the twentieth century, opens a new vista onto Cold War history. Seen in this light, there is more than a passing connection between positioning Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) as a “Cold War case” and the fact that in February of 1965, “when the man who had come to be known as Malcolm X was shot in Manhattan,” the person who was “cradling his head as he expired was the Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama [(1921–2014)].” (Horne 2018, p. 147; citing inter alia Fujino 2005. See also Yardley 2014; Dudziak 2004; Fujino 2008, pp. 57–79; Kim and Lee 2001, pp. 631–37).

Although qualifiedly, Horne himself seems also to be evolving in his understanding of the interactions between the African diaspora, particularly in the United States, and Japan during the prewar and Cold War periods. Horne has been a pioneer in setting a “transnational research agenda for African American history in the 21st century,” and his book Facing the Rising Sun explores in detail how people from Japan and Africa, some via the United States, worked together to fight against white supremacy in both North America and in the Asia-Pacific (Horne 2006, pp. 288–303). Whether coincidence or intended, “The Black National Anthem,” penned by James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), contains the poignant lines “facing the rising sun,” and Du Bois’ focus on Japan as conquering hero over white supremacy is in line with the spirit of the age in which he lived (See, e.g., Darian-Smith 2012, pp. 483–505; Adelman 2015, pp. 77–98)30. Black voices from the time help reinforce this interpretation. Black intellectuals Hugh (1913–1977) and Mabel Smythe (1918–2006) “resid[ed] in postwar Japan and t[aught] respectively at Yamaguchi National University and Shiga University,” Horne writes. “Hugh Smythe thought that the ‘type of racialism common in the United States is unknown in Japan’, and as a consequence, Japan had ‘never forgotten the racial slights she suffered’ at the hands of the United States over the decades. ‘This feeling necessarily had to be suppressed during military occupation’, the couple wrote.”31 (Horne 2018, p. 165; see also Smythe 1952, and Smythe and Smythe 1952).

As the Cold War reshuffled alliances and the People’s Republic of China emerged as the vanguard of the anti-imperialist radicals in the late 1950s and 1960s, Du Bois found himself increasingly drawn to Chinese racial radicalism over the quieter witness of defeated Japan (See Gao 2013, pp. 59–85; Frazier 2015; Duan 2019, pp. 1351–80). In many ways, Horne, too, shares Du Bois’ convictions on Cold War politics and race (See Horne 2018, pp. 211–12, note 89). From this starting point of theoretical overlap, it is possible to map in Cold War-era Japan, with the experiences of Black servicemen and -women and Japanese anti-racist scholars and activists as a guide. The Horne thesis presents historians with a powerful tool for revisiting the global Cold War and seeing how white supremacy was pushed back, in Asia and in the United States, by Japanese and Black people working together to realize the vision of racial equality put forth by Japan, which seized Du Bois in the prewar. The Horne thesis and the “Du Bois thesis” are, in the end, much closer than American-dominated Cold War historiography has intimated.