Tokyo-Based Stars and Stripes Turns 40 : Pacific GI Newspaper Still Serves Troops

When the first edition of Pacific Stars and Stripes rolled off the press on Oct. 3, 1945, World War II was over but the GI newspaper was still Government Issue all the way.

Editors worked out of a spartan metal Quonset hut, and deliverymen in uniform slogged through mud to distribute free copies to the occupation forces.

Today, the Tokyo-based newspaper is more likely to be bought on base newsstands and is assembled in a state-of-the-art newsroom by civilian and military professionals.

Even at age 40, though, “Stripes” is still serving its original audience--American troops in the Pacific.

Pacific Stars and Stripes was first published as a paper for the occupation troops under Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Now four decades later, it is distributed over a staggering expanse of the Pacific from Hawaii to American bases on tiny Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Managing Editor Hal Foster would like to extend its 40,000 circulation even farther--to serve a civilian readership he knows is out there.

“We could have a daily circulation of 200,000 if we could sell it to local readers,” Foster said, “but we are prohibited from doing so by the Status of Forces agreement,” which limits distribution of Stars and Stripes to U.S. military and diplomatic corps readers.

“A lot of people want to get Stripes, and we can’t sell it to them,” Foster said. “It’s really frustrating.”

Up to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, about 500,000 copies of the newspaper were handed out free to GIs in the field. “It was a morale factor,” Foster said.

Even though times have changed, the tabloid still features heavy coverage of American news and sports, supplementing its own staff’s reporting with all the major news services and two full pages each day of hometown briefs.

“We’re still a hometown paper to our readers,” Foster said.

Corky Alexander, who worked at Stripes from 1957 to 1962, remembers the paper in a simpler time, when one editor used “to trash a dozen typewriters a month. He’d stand up too fast and the old Underwood would go crashing to the floor.”

At that time the paper’s offices were “smack dab in the middle of what was then a red-light and sleazy bar district,” Tokyo’s Roppongi, said Alexander, currently editor and publisher of the Tokyo Weekender.

“We had a bar, and the manager, a master sergeant, lived right next door,” Alexander said. “He’d open the bar at 8:45 in the morning, but he’d consent to open earlier if it was an emergency.”

The Stripes newsroom now has an editorial staff of 82--44 military personnel and 38 civilians. Two of the mainstays have been on the job since the 1950s, sports editor Lee Kavetski and special correspondent Hal Drake.

Drake, who joined the paper in July, 1956, jokes today that he stayed “because I had too much seniority to quit.”

Over the past 2 1/2 years, Stripes has been upgrading equipment. Someday, Foster said, it will be transmitted by satellite from Tokyo to the paper’s major circulation markets in South Korea, the Philippines and Guam.