Occupation Babies: Mixed-Race Japanese Children

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, History, Media Archive, United States on 2015-03-03 15:24Z by Steven

Occupation Babies: Mixed-Race Japanese Children

Wonders & Marvels: A Community for Curious MInds who love History, its Odd Stories, and Good Reads
2015-02-28

James McGrath Morris, Guest Contributor

One of the pleasures of researching a book is coming across something you don’t anticipate, something surprising that is fascinating to both the reader and the writer.

In my case, in the course of working on Eye on the Struggle, I learned for the first time the story of mixed-race babies in Japan born from African American soldiers and Japanese women in the years shortly after World War II when American troops occupied Japan. White soldiers fathered children as well, but the offspring of black fathers were far more ostracized.

Being of such visible mixed race, the babies were unwanted by the Japanese, who abhorred what they viewed as the tainting of their blood. They were frequently abandoned upon birth. In one case, a train passenger unwrapped a cloth bundle she spotted on the luggage rack to discover the corpse of a black Japanese baby…

Read the entire article here.

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