Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9329271" data-attributes="member: 7044704">Was going through my deceased father's storage and stumbled across an unexpected prize, a book of cartoons originally published in Pacific Stars & Stripes during the US Occupation of Japan and collected under the title of "Tokyo Joe" in late 1946.  Created by Sgt. Ed Doughty, the one-panel gag comics feature the exploits of three GI characters - JOE, Joe, and joe - during the Occupation and revolve around "serviceman jokes" around the difficulties GIs had interacting with unfamiliar Japanese culture.  Surprisingly less horribly racist than you might expect from pre-surrender propaganda, although still far from good.  The other theme is the perennial complaint about the MPs keeping the Joes from having "fun" while off duty, for which you can read "finding booze, sex and war souvenirs" despite the military censors keeping it from being too explicitly stated.The cartoons are nowhere near on par with the far superior work of better-known creators like Bill Mauldin or Theodor Seuss Geisel, but I'm not the target audience for them and actual GIs stuck in Japan would probably have appreciated them more - even if some of it is pretty dark humor about war-weary soldiers who just want to get home and go back to their civilian lives.  One interesting feature is that each of the ~62 cartoons has a brief explanation of conditions (including some rather misguided etiquette advice) during the Occupation on the facing page, essentially explaining the joke for anyone who didn't get it.  Normally that's death to humor, but in this case it does make the whole thing more easily accessible to someone reading from a very alien future.Interesting bit of history, although I suspect it was my maternal grandfather's book originally rather than my father's, since gramps served in the Occupation forces while dad did his Air Force time working on the Atlas silos outside of Plattsburgh NY just before the Cuban Missile Crisis.  AFAIK my paternal grandfather didn't serve at all for health reasons.  The box I found it in also had some wartime newspaper clippings, seemingly at random - one was a clothing ad - the prize of which was a copy of this famously grim 1943 editorial cartoon by the vastly underappreciated Anne Mergen (image taken from online - mine is rather faded and yellowed, although I'm still donating it to the local historical society along with the book and some other mementos):<img src="https://www.nationalww2museum.org/sites/default/files/2020-06/gifts%20-%20Tanja%20B.%20Spitzer_0.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></blockquote>

Verification