Militarized Boyhood: Japanese Mascot Children and American GIs during the Allied Occupation and Korean War

During the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), some American GIs took in orphan boys, bringing them on base to reside in the barracks. Calling the boys “mascots” (マスコット) and giving each child an easily pronounceable nickname, GIs dressed mascot boys in military-issue uniforms and assigned them chores around the base. Relationships between GIs and mascot children often took on an undertone of fictive kin or found family, yet were simultaneously rife with the racialized power dynamics of Occupier and Occupied. When some of these GIs were deployed to Korea in 1950, they took their mascots with them, hidden away in tanks or ship cabins. The American Occupation Government caught wind of these mascots three years later and launched a top-secret investigation involving interviews with both the mascot children and GIs who took them in. These interviews have served as the jumping-off point of my research.

My presentation examines the precarity of boyhood among Japanese mascot children, investigating how mascot boys perceived their age and, in turn, how GIs perceived mascot boys as children. Within the hyper-masculine and militarized climate of Occupation and War, mascot boys occupied a tenuous and liminal position as racial others between childhood and adulthood. Using affect theory, I hone in on the emotion of “amusement” among American GIs who enjoyed mascot boy’s precocious, GI-like speech patterns and behaviors. Did American GIs’ need to find amusement in mascot children point to opposite and opposing feelings of dismay or sorrow? And how did Japanese and American conceptualizations of the meaning of childhood shape one another within this militarized context?