Christine R. Yano is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai`i, Manoa. She is the author of Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawai`i’s Cherry Blossom Festival and Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song.

AIRBORNE DREAMS

“Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World AirwaysBy CHRISTINE YANO

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4836-8

Contents

Preface CONDUCTING RESEARCH THE “PAN AM WAY”…………………………………………………………viiAcknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………xiiiIntroduction THE PAN AM SKIES AS FRONTIER OF JET-AGE MOBILITY………………………………………….1One 1955 Postwar America, Things Japanese, and “One-World” Tourism…………………………………….17Two “THE WORLD’S MOST EXPERIENCED AIRLINE” Pan Am as Global, National, and Personal Icon…………………33Three “NISEI” STEWARDESSES Dreams of Pan American’s Girl-Next-Door Frontier…………………………….57Four AIRBORNE CLASS ACT Service and Prestige as Racialized Spectacle…………………………………..93Five BECOMING PAN AM Bodies, Emotions, Subjectivity………………………………………………….129Six FRONTIER DREAMS Race, Gender, Class, Cosmopolitan Mobilities………………………………………161Appendix CHRONOLOGY OF PAN AMERICAN WORLD AIRWAYS, 1927-1991…………………………………………..183Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………….187Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………205Index…………………………………………………………………………………………….221

Chapter One

1955

Postwar America, things Japanese, and “One-World” Tourism

There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one. WENDELL WILLKIE, One World (1943)

Let us set the stage for the “Nisei” stewardess by examining 1955 as the year of a particular confluence of events for Pan Am (jets, logos, and Asian women) and the United States. Within the events of 1955 I focus on everyday popular culture and middle-class consumption, Cold War tensions, and key events in race relations. This was the cusp of the Jet Age, when African American struggles were juxtaposed with a taste for exotic women from the Asian American “model minority.” Asian American stereotypes found their way into the marketing of mass tourism and girl-next-door stewardesses, exotic and otherwise. In this “Nisei” stewardesses played their role, shaping postwar America’s conceptualization of itself and its role in the new internationalist “one-world” order.

In the view of Wendell Willkie, Republican nominee for president in 1940 and author of the words quoted above, overseas travel would teach ordinary citizens and leaders alike the utopian lessons of “one world.” Willkie and others saw overseas travel as fostering global peace and understanding by effacing national boundaries in favor of one-world citizenship. Anthony Sampson argues that airlines are “among the most national of industries, inextricably bound up with their home country’s ambitions and security” (1984, 19). Thus wherever Pan Am flew, it carried the American banner. America’s exceptionalism was Pan Am’s exceptionalism. Pan Am’s “frontier ideology” as represented by its practices in 1955 thus constitutes a critical dimension of globalism in postwar America. Willkie’s one-world utopianism of air travel—contextualized within the events of the year 1955 and images of Asian women—remains firmly tethered to nationalist configurations.

THE YEAR 1955: MOVING IN AND MOVING OUT

That both the Jet Age and Pan Am’s “Nisei” program began in 1955 is no accident. The year was pivotal for various “frontiers” in the United States, as culture went global, the Cold War reaffirmed Asia as an international hot spot, and the civil rights movement was born. A sense of newness—that this was the start of an era—engulfed the American public. Pan Am presented itself as one of that era’s pioneers, with “Nisei” stewardesses playing an important part on its corporate stage.

The turn to the new took place within what has been characterized as a culture of containment; this refers primarily to controlling the perceived threat of communism during the Cold War, but also to the social control centered around female domesticity, heteronormativity, and the nuclear household. Elaine Tyler May’s seminal work Homeward Bound (1988) paints a picture of middle-class life and the American dream that has become an iconic symbol of the 1950s. This was a dream not equally shared or practiced across the country, however. In The Way We Never Were (2000) Stephanie Coontz criticizes the dream as a historical fluke and a media-based image rather than a reality. In a provocative rejoinder to May’s work, Joanne Meyerowitz juxtaposes counterhistories of women of color and different sexual orientations, class positions, and regional backgrounds in an edited volume boldly titled Not June Cleaver (1994) (referring to the mother figure in the postwar television situation comedy Leave It to Beaver). As Meyerowitz argues, “The sustained focus on a white middle-class domestic ideal and on suburban middle-class housewives sometimes renders other ideals and other women invisible” (4).

One purpose of this book is to interrogate how essential parts of the June Cleaver ideal superimposed themselves upon other women such as “Nisei” stewardesses through industrial practices that were racialized, gendered, and commodified. The “Nisei” stewardesses became hostesses, à la June Cleaver, in the air, while setting themselves apart in other ways. Instead of being confined to the home, they built careers flying to the farthest reaches of commercial aviation. That they did so through the refraction of race colors their stories with the exotic appeal of the incipient Jet Age.

In 1955 Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald’s restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, Elvis Presley struck a deal with “Colonel” Tom Parker to manage his career, and James Dean died in a one-car crash near Cholame, California. It was against this background that Pan Am embarked on its effort to hire “Nisei” stewardesses, symbolizing the beginning of postwar American domination of popular culture globally. Nothing captured middle-class life more than consumption, what Lizabeth Cohen calls a “consumers’ republic”—”an economy, culture, and politics built around the promises of mass consumption, both in terms of material life and the more idealistic goals of greater freedom, democracy, and equality” (2003, 7). In postwar America to buy was to be a good citizen, helping the economy to recover after depression and war. Consumption—and especially international air travel on a carrier such as Pan Am—thus became a political virtue.

One of the major effects of the Cold War was the turn to Asia by the United States, as it waged the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, maintained major military bases in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, and became embroiled in conflicts in Vietnam. This turn to Asia had direct repercussions for Asian Americans: the Cold War spotlight tied Asian Americans more closely to their ancestral homeland, causing some to question once again their American identity (Lim 2006, 124). More importantly, the act of placing Japanese American women aboard a prestigious airline such as Pan Am took on added symbolic significance. When all eyes were turning to Asia, they could be displayed as a triumph of assimilation and mastery of the world. Pan American’s hiring of Japanese (American) women in service roles performed the global politics of postwar America.

The year 1955 also saw the birth of the civil rights movement, which was sparked by two events: the murder of a fourteen-year-old African American, Emmett Till, in Money, Mississippi, for purportedly whistling at a white woman, and the arrest of an African American woman, Rosa Parks, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. The resultant protests and intense focus on African American injustices deflected attention from other nonwhite minorities, including Hispanics and Asian Americans. There were no demonstrations by Japanese Americans, no boycotts or protest marches in the 1950s or 1960s. But this only meant that Japanese Americans had a different, more circumspect public face—that of a “model minority”—quiet, hard-working, and highly assimilable. It is for this reason that Pan Am hired “Nisei” stewardesses, or at least the Japanese Americans who constituted the early and definitive groups of stewardesses. Frank Chin calls the model minority image “racist love,” “expressed in the form of praise” (1976, 556–57). Heaped with praise, Japanese American stewardesses provided Pan Am with an exoticized presence (and Asian language), without the encumbrances of more contentious minority populations. “Nisei” stewardesses were racialized as acceptably, even desirably, women “of color.”

In her study of multicultural marketing, Arlene Davila paints a somber picture of ethnic relations: “The fact that multicultural marketing ends up pitting one ethnic group against another in terms of who is advertising-worthy and who is not … means the gains of one group (in terms of public exposure or advertising revenues) amount to a loss for another” (2001, 237). Thus the elevation of the “Nisei” stewardess must be seen in relation to the relative absence of other women of color in the air. Although Pan Am hired Hispanic stewardesses as far back as 1950, these women, based in Miami (an “open” Spanish-language base that included non-Spanish speakers), flew primarily the Latin American routes. By contrast, “Nisei” stewardesses, based in Honolulu (a “closed” language base, housing only those who spoke an Asian language), flew not only to Asia but also on Pan Am’s round-the-world flights. All of Pan Am’s westbound Flights 001 (originating in San Francisco and traveling around the world with stops in Honolulu, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Calcutta, Delhi, Beirut, Istanbul, Frankfurt, London, and New York) and eastbound Flights 002 uniquely maintained a “Japanese-language position” (eventually extended to other Asian languages), to be filled singly by a “Nisei” stewardess. Thus Hispanics and Asian (American) stewardesses received different treatment in terms of their language-base identity, as well as their routes.

Pan Am’s establishment on its round-the-world flights of positions reserved for speakers of Japanese and other Asian languages reflected not only a customer base that may have included Japanese (or other Asians) but also an eagerness to employ model-minority “Nisei” stewardesses as part of a racial, cultural, and linguistic display when circumnavigating the globe. Furthermore, “Nisei” stewardesses predated any African American hire by Pan Am by ten years: the airline took that step only in 1965, under pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). (The airline’s argument that it hired on the basis of language rather than race—therefore denying any special place for African Americans—proved ultimately unconvincing.)

In these ways, the complexities of race in America in 1955 found corporate expression in Pan Am’s differential hires of the 1950s and 1960s. Within the hierarchy of minorities in the United States, Asian Americans sometimes occupied a top rung as “honorary whites” or “near-whites”; at other times they were viewed as “just like blacks,” even as “forever foreigners” (Okihiro 1994, 33; Tuan 2003; Davila 2001, 231; cf. Lowe 1996). The tension between these variable positions was exactly the dilemma of the “Nisei” stewardess—domesticated enough to wear the Pan Am uniform, even while framed as racially exotic. She inhabited the racialized interstices that combined orientalism, model-minority assimilation, and marketability in ways denied to other women of color. Notably, the Japanese-Asian-language position on Pan Am’s round-the-world flights was hers and hers alone.

Race relations in the United States may be viewed against the backdrop of a photo exhibit, “The Family of Man,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955 for which the photographer Edward Steichen was the curator. The exhibit opened in January to great acclaim and public interest; 503 amateur and professional works by 273 photographers, covering 68 countries, sent a powerful message to the American audience. The exhibit used race as a spectacle of difference, even as it set aside the volatility of actual race relations in the United States. Looking past domestic inequities so well dramatized in 1955, the exhibit displayed a romanticized, humanistic view of world harmony, utilizing a visual “rhetoric of unity” (Sandeen 1995, 2). Some of the same assumptions of racial display and visuality undergirded Pan Am’s hiring of “Nisei” stewardesses, balancing unity and assimilation with difference. Although Pan Am’s was a business strategy, not an artistic or “humanitarian” one, the American public was already inured to some of the same principles expressed in Steichen’s exhibit and book. Pan Am banked upon the allure of particular forms of racialized difference, made acceptable within model-minority femininity and reconfigured to corporate specifications.

What, then, constituted this model-minority femininity? I turn now to various postwar images of Japanese (American) women in order to frame more closely Pan Am’s “Nisei” stewardess program. These images formed part of the reason why Pan Am wanted “Nisei” stewardesses in 1955, as well as creating a bank of stereotypes against which the women worked and that they manipulated and sometimes resisted. In examining these images I do not mean to imply that there is either a single gaze or a unidirectional one. Rather, part of the project of this book is to embrace multiple vectors of subjectivity by interweaving corporate and individual gazes. I also acknowledge that the images of Japanese (American) and other Asian (American) women were both overlapping and distinctive. The overlap in images lies in processes of racialization; the distinctiveness is due in part to wartime imaging that drew careful boundaries between Japan and other Asian nations and peoples, as well as the experiences of American soldiers in occupied Japan. Renee Tajima points out two seemingly contradictory aspects of Asian female media images pertinent to our discussion—their invisibility and their marked quality (1989, 314). In other words, Asian women typically appear in supporting (“invisible”) roles of a drama, rather than as the main character; they are also rarely portrayed as “ordinary” people. The question that arises is what practices these images enable or promote. As David Palumbo-Liu is careful to point out: “Sometimes racial others are read as synonymous with the general exotica of modern forms; at other times, they are markers of a ‘racial frontier’ that cannot be crossed without cost” (1999, 83). Pan Am crossed that racial frontier specifically by drawing upon exoticized images of Japanese American women, carefully assimilated within the professionalism of the company’s Tunis blue uniform.

The Euro-American image of the geisha—a highly sexualized figure whose existence centers around serving men—dominated the postwar view of Japanese (American) women. In fact, the geisha image can be seen as the exemplar of a host-guest relationship that points directly to the flight attendant profession. This shared concept lends itself to a shared fetishization. Najeeb Halaby, head of Pan Am from 1969 to 1972, was known to have referred to flight attendants as “geisha,” suggesting that his stewardesses “should be more like Japanese geisha girls, prepared to flatter and entertain the male passengers” (Kane with Chandler 1974, 52). Hiring “Nisei” stew ardesses drew Pan Am that much closer to the “geisha girls” whom Halaby and others lauded.

Whether the image of geisha in postwar America was historically accurate is less revealing than how the image served particular purposes in the American fantasy. Thus it does not matter that originally geisha (i.e. performers of art) included men, but it does matter that the image of geisha was sexualized as serving (and servicing) men. As Kelly Foreman argues, “The strength and continuity of the ‘geisha-girl’ image [in the United States] stems from its usefulness in defining American gender roles, that ‘geisha-girls’ serve as a vibrant source of female ‘other'” (2005, 37). Through the geisha image the guest-host relationship readily elides into an idealized service culture that elevates guest-males by means of attentive, solicitous host-female pampering. This kind of gendered pampering rests at the crux of the geisha image—as well as Halaby’s directive.

The geisha-laden stereotype finds expression in books, plays, operas, and films, the most notable being Madame Butterfly (1904), Puccini’s opera based on the novel Madame Chrysantheme (1887) by Pierre Loti. Madame Butterfly adds qualities of loyalty, suffering, and sacrifice to the geisha image, acting as a primer on interracial, international liaisons. It enacts a prototype of a young woman (not coincidentally, a geisha) who sacrifices everything for heterosexual love. That this love is interracial and international portends the tragedy of the encounter. In postwar America that prototype distilled the allure and danger of the exotic—and became part of the assumptions under which Pan Am’s “Nisei” stewardesses worked.

The Second World War provided the American public with a host of images of Japanese women, from alluring geisha to the highly demonized Tokyo Rose (the taunting female American voice broadcast to American soldiers in Japan), and later the “Hiroshima Maidens,” a group of young Japanese women disfigured by the atomic bomb and brought to the United States in 1955 for plastic surgery (aboard a Pan American flight). For people in various American communities, those images became part of a lived reality when six to seven thousand war brides from Japan were resettled as a result of the War Brides Relocation Act of 1945.

Japanese war brides prompted a flurry of big-name Hollywood films about Japanese-American interracial romance. Within the fictive framework, the American public could negotiate some of the ambivalences and complexities of this wartime byproduct. One notable film is Sayonara (1957), originally a novel by James Michener (1953). In the novel and film, Lloyd Gruver (Marlon Brando in the film version), an American military officer who has fallen in love with a Japanese star actress announces, “I concluded that no man could comprehend women until he had known the women of Japan with their unbelievable combination of unremitting work, endless suffering and boundless warmth” (Michener 1953, 128; quoted in Yamamoto 1999, 41). It was this combination of work, perseverance, and warmth that created the model-minority reputation of “Nisei” stewardesses. Interracial romance such as this throws the gauntlet at western women’s feet, validating the “unbelievable combination” possessed by Japanese women. The lesson of the Japanese woman made her an ideal to be read against the independent postwar American woman as part of the project to refeminize American middle-class women.

(Continues…)

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