“No Color Line Exists in Japan”: US Occupation, Black Soldiers, and the Cold War Politicization of the Korean Minority Question in Postwar Japan

On the night of April 24, 1948, the U.S. Commander of the Kobe Base in western Japan declared a "state of limited emergency" in the face of a series of mass demonstrations staged by Korean residents in the region. It became the first declaration of a state of emergency under U.S. occupation, and the U.S. Commander mobilized a unit of African-American soldiers for emergency action. With the collaboration of Japanese police forces, African-American soldiers launched massive roundups of nearly two thousand local Korean residents who were suspected of having been involved in the aggressive demonstration in Kobe City that day, during which a crowd of two hundred Koreans stormed into the Hyogo Prefectural Office to protest the closing of Korean schools. General Robert L. Eichelberger, the Commander of the Eighth Army stationed in occupied Japan, blamed "Communists" for this Korean "riot" and also stated: "The use of Negro troops was not resented, as no color line exists in Japan."

My paper presents this event later called the "Kobe Incident" as a critical site where decolonization, U.S. racial politics, and the Cold War intersected in occupied Japan. While scholars position decolonization as a "non-event" in Japanese history as they understand that the Japanese empire lost its colonies all at once as a result of defeat in World War II, this paper reevaluates its significance by examining the following question: How did Japan’s postcolonial problem of the so-called "Korean minority question" become a flashpoint for U.S. Cold War interventionism in Japan? I will also argue that a close examination of the Kobe Incident reveals under-explored dimensions of the U.S. occupation of Japan, namely, the transnational linkages of Cold War politics between U.S.-occupied Japan and U.S.- and Soviet-occupied Korea, and the transpacific interactions of racial politics between Japan and the United States.