Its mid-summer and the weather has been pretty cooperative for outdoor activities like picnics. These photos came from a small collection from a woman who spent some time in post-war Japan. Its hard to say exactly why she was there, but quite possibly she was the wife of a serviceman stationed there in occupation duty. The Allied occupation lasted until 1952, 60 years ago this year. In any case, this lady had access to one of many MBs and she made good use of them. One of the uses for the MB was to get away from things on this picnic with friends. The inscription reads “Picnic of K-Rations (Ugh!) near Miyanoshita, Japan 1946. Later in the day we took the top down & did I get sunburned!”
It seems that even with the jeep there are two things that you still can’t get away from, Army food and the sun! Interestingly enough, Miyanoshita is the home of the famous Fujiya Hotel, the first hotel in Japan to cater to Western tourists. It was requisitioned as an R&R center for the Allied occupation forces in the post-war era. You’ll see a bit more of this woman. I have two other photos from this set that will eventually make their way into the calendar and into our database here.
I was hoping to get back to uncredited photos in the LIFE magazine photo archive, but I just haven’t finished researching and discovering all of the photos. I have another 120 anonymous images and am only about halfway through my research so who knows how many I’ll find! Stay tuned and I’ll try to get to them by next week.
In the meanwhile we have a new t-shirt available in the store that I designed using great ads from the 1960’s and we now have the new This-Old-Jeep.com bumper sticker available. Check them out!
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