Young couple on a date at a Tokyo Tower, Japan, 1959. See more photos of Love and Courtship in 1950s Japan by clicking the link below. (📷 John Dominis/LIFE Picture Collection) LIFEMagazine JohnDominis TokyoTower Japan Love Couple 1950s
John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/ShutterstockAkiksuke Tsutsui, left, bid his girlfriend, Chiyoko Inami, farewell as her train departed. March 1959.Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy and girl get married, buy a house and have 2.2 children. This may have been a common story for heterosexual couples in America in the 1950s, but when LIFE dispatched John Dominis to capture love and marriage in post-war Japan, he found a landscape undergoing a significant transformation.
Whether accompanied by their visiting wives, Japanese girlfriends or prostitutes known as “pan pan girls,” American soldiers modeled the behavior they knew from home: public displays of affection and leisure time spent with women at cafés, parks or the movies. And inside those movie theaters, American movies offered even more examples of Western mating rituals to a Japanese public at once hesitant and intrigued by the bold behaviors of their American counterparts.
Notes written by Dominis and someone who appears to be an assistant that accompanied the dozens of rolls of film he shot provide insight into the song and dance in which the young lovers engaged. Some met by chance, others in settings tailor-made for matchmaking. One young couple, Akiksuke Tsutsui and Chiyoko Inami, met when Chiyoko, who worked at a bank in the same building as Akiksuke’s father’s clothing shop, began frequenting the shop during breaks. When Akiksuke brought Chiyoko to meet his family after several outings to the beach, cafs, beer halls and department stores his siblings welcomed her in ways that reflected the changing times.
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