MONEH!!!MONEH!!!Trick ora ora TreatPlease take your leaveGIB ME CHOCO!!GIB ME GUM!!!Am I a US Soldier?
Excerpt extracted from: Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute:
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Image: Japanese children, seeing a Marine for the first time, eagerly reach for chocolates offered them...
..."Vignettes often epitomize grander circumstances, and in occupied Japan one of the most recurrent of such scenes involved candy. Among the photographs we have of conquerors and conquered encountering each other for the first time is a street scene of children in ragged clothing crowding around an unarmed GI who is passing out sweets, while other Japanese including adults look on from a distance. The date is September 1945 and the place Yokohama. . 'Give me chocolate,' one of the first English phrases Japanese children learned, has become indelibly associated with the occupation and still carries a multilayered ambiance. The killing had ended, and for good. Many GIs were friendly and kind. The Japanese were no longer the faceless, fanatical "beasts" that had to be, and deserved to be, indiscriminately incinerated. There was, moreover, more to the picture. Chocolate was also a symbol of the well-being, even the wealth, of the victors. Virtually all of the children who clamored for candy and chewing gum then and for years after were malnourished, and sweets had disappeared from their lives. The Americans could (and did) provide what the nation's leaders and children's own parents could not.
Photographers accompanying the invasion forces usually dwelled on urban devastation, the awesome evidence of U.S. airborne destruction that had never been seen close-up by the bombers before. Destitute Japanese peopled these ruins, but photos rarely dwelled on the burned or otherwise maimed; it was as if the bombs had destroyed only physical structures. In this setting, scenes of picture-perfect GIs surrounded by charming youngsters clamoring for candy reassured Americans back home about the innate gentleness of their fighting men - and more. .
In these resonant ways, the iconic little scene of GIs passing out chocolate was simultaneously sweet and bittersweet, as well as propagandistic.
