Holloway Brown oral history interview

1981-05-25

Brown, Holloway; Mayo, Marlene J.

Oral history interview with Holloway Brown conducted by Marlene Mayo on May 25, 1981. Holloway Brown was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and grew up in Washington, D.C. He studied at George Washington University at night, completing two years toward a degree when Pearl Harbor was attacked. In the spring of 1942, he volunteered for the Navy. Brown was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in Washington, where he worked in the mail room. Hoping to be more intimately involved in the war itself, in 1944 he elected to enroll in the Navy School of Photography in Pensacola, Florida, though he had no background in photography. After the completion of his training, the war was over. Brown was given an option -- be discharged or go to Guam. He chose Guam, where he was stationed for six months with the Naval Photo Reconnaissance Squadron. He was then sent to Kanoya, Japan, in early 1946. In April of that year, Brown was offered a job with the Department of the Army (DAC) as a photo editor in General Douglas MacArthur's public relations office. The Signal Corps was responsible for photographing; Brown went to their headquarters daily to select photographs to make available to correspondents. He spent two years in that position (1946-1948). He then joined the Press Analysis Section, Civil Information & Education (CI&E), Press & Publications Division, where he was involved in creating daily summary analyses of select articles in Japanese newspapers for information gathering purposes. In 1949, this unit was merged with the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service (ATIS). There, Brown wrote summary analyses of articles in periodicals. He left Japan in 1950 to finish his Bachelor's degree at Columbia University, as well as earning a Master's degree in Journalism there. Brown returned to Japan in 1953, worked initially as a journalist, and then taught at the International Christian University.

University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)

Oral histories

Japan--History--Allied occupation, 1945-1952

Japan; Tokyo

Postwar Japan

Special Collections and University Archives

English

Collection may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. To obtain permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the University of Maryland Libraries at http://www.lib.umd.edu/special/contact/home.

Recording: 02:48:41 (audio cassette; mp3); Transcript: 50 pages (PDF)

This oral history interview is part of the Marlene J. Mayo oral histories. A guide to the full collection of Marlene J. Mayo oral histories is available in our archival collections: http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/42478.
Accession 2009-209-GWP
An interview transcript is available.

Filename: prange-087513