nationwide Zengakuren student federation and newly formed labor organizations.
While inflation doubled and tripled the cost of consumer goods, the arrival of aid packages helped ease the plight of the people. They also found a heady joy in the freedom which anticipated the new constitution even before it became law in May of the following year. Freedom of thought, equality of the sexes, coeducation in schools, abolition of absentee landlords, all were alien concepts to a people subjected to thought control since the February 26 uprising of young officers in 1936 confirmed the rise of Japanese militarism. In 1936, local movie houses had separate seating for men and women. In 1940, a girl and boy merely strolling together on a street near the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo could be called to a halt by a policeman and given a tongue-lashing.
One correspondent who capitalized on this Japanese psyche was Earnest Hoberecht. Earnie, who made himself known among young Japanese as "America's Greatest Writer," was visiting the Shochiku movie studio when a crisis developed. As Weldon James recounted the story in Collier's magazine, the leading lady, Hideko Mimura, had just learned that the script called for her to be kissed before the camera. The twenty-six-year-old actress had never been kissed and wanted no part of it. Japanese censors, to protect the sensibilities of their womenfolk, had until that time scissored kiss scenes from imported films, and the national impression of a movie kiss was of a rapturous couple breathing softly without touching each other's lips.
But Dapper Earnie "seen his duty and done it." He suggested that kissing scenes "would be a step toward democratization." Earnie embraced and kissed Mimura to show her how it was done, and "newspapers throughout the world carried the story," according to James. Earnie described The Kiss as a "prairie-twister." But the results were unexpected. Miss Mimura came out of the clinch in a daze, "promptly downed three or four tablets, retired to her dressing room, and wrote him that after what had happened, clearly they ought not to see each other again."
The Kiss made Earnie famous in Japan. When his novel Tokyo Romance appeared a couple of months later, telling how an American correspondent wooed and won a famous Japanese movie actress, James reported, "It was a smash hit. . . . The first edition of one hundred thousand copies disappeared in less than a fortnight. . . . The lad from Watonga was in." Time magazine's review called Tokyo Romance "the worst book ever published in the English language." Earnie denied this. "I've written worse myself," he said.
Prewar Japanese governments banned coeducation in schools from grade schools on up. Girls went to girls' schools. Period. And so it was big news when the Japanese government made schools coeducational on October 9. Such were the grist of feature stories when correspondents ran out of hard news.
Making its appearance a year after the first Western press description of A-bombed Hiroshima was the book Hiroshima, by John Hersey. Time often lends perspective and depth to mind-searing events such as this. This was especially true in the case of Hiroshima and its victims, where many of the most terrifying after-effects of the bomb appeared long after the event. John Hersey, already well known at the time as the author of Men on Bataan and A Bell for Adano, wrote a report on six survivors of Hiroshima, a report to which the New Yorker devoted its entire issue of August 31, 1946. The article was published that same year in book form under the title Hiroshima. Hersey's report had worldwide repercussions.
The gender problem and the question of access to the Club's upper floors continued to nag the Cochrane administration. A general meeting on March 14 found members at loggerheads over prohibiting women on the upper floors between certain hours. The meeting finally passed a proposal that until a suitable rule could be drafted and enforced, no woman should be allowed above the street floor of the Club between the hours of 12 midnight and 9 A.M. In fact, these hours were changed from time to time, varying between 2 and 4, and 4 and 6, to the accompaniment of much grumbling.
On June 20, Mrs. Lee Martin, wife of Robert (Pepper) Martin (Time-Life), put her foot down and demanded that women correspondents be allowed to live in the Club. A motion that they be given space on the third floor, with the use of the shower there, was tabled when Joe Fromm said this required amendment of the constitution, which could only be carried out by a referendum. On June 27, the referendum was duly approved, 19-10, and women correspondents finally gained practical equality with the men. By another referendum on July 29, the members went all the way, passing unanimously a change in the Rules to give "full membership" to "all women correspondents who meet the definition of a member."
Though this made it official, apparently women correspondents were residents of the billets before then. The minutes for the general meeting held on May 7, under the chairmanship of the secretary Burton Crane, carried a statement by three women members, Gwen Dew, Margaret Parton, and Martha Ferguson, protesting against "filthy" and crowded conditions in the bathrooms. They proposed two bathrooms for women: "1. One bathroom for American women and one for Japanese, or 2. One bathroom for women members of the club and associate members, and one for all other women guests, resident and nonresident."
The document is intriguing, less for its insistence upon women's rights than its reference to "associate members." No documentation previously mentioned a category for "associate members." There had been speculation that certain people active in the Club's affairs, like William Salter, who gave advice on Club finances, was an "associate" before such a category was created in 1955. Salter later was voted a "life member." Rutherford Poats states categorically that there were "associates" in 1947, although it may not have become an official membership category until later.
Honor Tracy, of the Observer, couldn't see what was so great about the Press Club billets anyway. In her book Kakemono (Hanging Scroll), she wrote that her room was sparsely furnished and located between, on one side, the room of a male correspondent with "a somewhat complicated private life," and, on the other, the quarters of the female Japanese staff, who chattered late into the night. She didn't like the crowded showers and washroom, shared by women correspondents, correspondents' wives, Japanese maids, and a shifting population of women "friends" of the male correspondents. She was turned off also by the "plump, cheeky rats" who invaded her room and fed on her foodstuff. One pair, she wrote, even encroached upon the pillow beside her and stared at her with "bright, malignant eyes."
In defense of the Club's nonhuman rodent population, it should be pointed out that every big city has nonhuman as well as human rats. The poor Press Club rats previously had been forced to live on crumbs from an inferior wartime Japanese diet, then had been driven out of their homes by bombs which turned their nests into rubble. To them, the Press Club was heaven. Not only was the food a thousand times better, but the residents were more generous in leaving it lying around, as did Honor.
Of the role of No. 1 Shimbun Alley as a residential rooming house, however, Rud Poats recalls, "Several couples, including Lee and Pepper Martin, Helen and Bill Costello, and others awaiting permanent housing, had rooms upstairs and reported freely on the antics of the (temporarily) single reporters and their short-time girlfriends. One of the skits at an anniversary party featured Lee and Helen peering down into a large wooden o furo (bathtub) at a naked
