of the gendered, classed, raced, and sexed body prevalent in prewar and wartime Japan, and translated them into the immediate postwar era to legitimate the erection of recreational facilities and the recruitment of lower-class women to facilitate sexual services for the occupation army’s servicemen. The discourse on prostitution that emerged in this period was pivotal to the postwar era. It enabled Japan’s authorities to imagine the contours of postwar Japan and the Japanese self through the establishment of a broad sexualized entertainment scheme fostered by their fears that envisioned the violation of the Japanese “body” through ravaging and raping GIs. The second half of the first chapter deals with the first physical encounter, in which nationalistic fears and desires imagined prior to the occupiers’ arrival were resurrected. It assembles accounts of sexual violence, in particular rape and molestation of Japanese women by American and Allied servicemen, which Japan’s authorities heavily exploited by integrating them into narratives of a defeated Japan’s victimization under the wrath of the occupiers.
The next three chapters follow a thematic organization, their dramaturgy reflecting the global historical development of prostitution’s modern regulatory forms. Police forces first perceived prostitution as a matter of security, later physicians and public health administrators approached prostitution as an important health issue in the wake of public health’s rising prominence, and, finally, moral reformers criticized prostitution’s supposedly innate, vicious temptations. Accordingly, chapter 2 focuses on matters of security and legal debates on prostitution, venereal disease, and its control among the occupier’s law divisions, and closely looks at the enforcement of law by the occupiers’ military police and Japanese police units. It addresses, first, the emergence of nonlicensed prostitution after the abolition of licensed prostitution in 1946, in which the streetwalking sex worker surfaced as a new phenomenon in modern Japanese history. Second, it highlights the ambiguity that most male occupiers favored the availability of commercial sex but nevertheless perceived it anxiously as a reservoir of venereal disease. However, due to political, social, and moral pressures, they were not able to express their approval of prostitution publicly. The law and law enforcement did not repress prostitution in general, but managed it in response to concerns about security and public order. Nevertheless, the law and law enforcement practices stigmatized and criminalized sex workers for spreading venereal disease. For instance, a venereal disease prevention law passed during the occupation period maintained that women in general were the primary source of venereal disease, because only women supposedly possessed the potential to become prostitutes. Third, this chapter reconstructs the informal strategies used to police prostitution and venereal disease by highlighting the practices of the occupiers’ and occupieds’ law enforcement agencies. This focus on agency underscores the complicity of Japanese police officers in the gender-biased policing of prostitution, who were assisting the occupiers in police raids or as translators, usually keen on supporting the existence and smooth functioning of the sex business. It also shows how Japan’s authorities negotiated the occupier’s directives in order to maintain their own imperial Japanese methods and concepts of regulating prostitution. However, occupiers and occupied parted ways in one key aspect, because whereas the occupiers suspected any Japanese woman of being a potential threat to the security of occupation personnel, Japanese regulators—at least symbolically—were eager to clearly distinguish between lower-class diseased prostitutes and respectable and chaste women from Japan’s middle- and upper-classes.
Venereal disease and its biomedical control are the major topics of chapter 3. The spread of venereal diseases was epidemic in occupied Japan with an average 25 percent infection rate among servicemen and among Japanese civilians, although dark figures were unquestionably much higher. Military physicians and public health officers, the main agents in this chapter, blamed Japan’s supposedly backward health system for the high risk of venereal infection. They put significant effort and resources into the education of Japanese doctors and the reform of public health to increase venereal disease control. Even more significantly, they established a new report system to trace venereal disease contacts, which was encoded as a modern and effective instrument for limiting communicable diseases, and simultaneously helped the occupiers to measure, quantify, and map occupied Japan and its people. To control venereal disease among servicemen, the occupiers’ health departments erected a comprehensive infrastructure of prophylactic stations in which servicemen were compelled to wash themselves after sexual exposure. Prophylaxis as propagated by the occupation military entered the most private spaces of the servicemen’s lives—a place where they cleaned and protected their genitalia—and worked hidden from the gaze of the occupied. The social hygienic strategies developed and implemented by the occupiers often derived from previous knowledge of public health control. Health officers transferred this knowledge to occupied Japan, where it became mingled with existing forms and institutions of public health. However, military physicians and public health officers faced difficulties implementing their ideas, also due to quarrels over jurisdiction within the occupation regime. The military police with its provost marshal claimed responsibility for public health enforcement outside military installations, and advocates of moral reform, mostly army chaplains, criticized the existence of regulated prostitution in general.
The legacy of moral reform and its intersection with social hygienic knowledge in occupied Japan is the main theme of the first half of chapter 4. It analyzes the narratives circulating around sex education and character guidance among occupation personnel. The chapter approaches a terrain in which social hygienists and moral reformers clashed, but occasionally also cooperated, in the sex and moral education of servicemen. It can thus highlight some traces of a longer struggle that existed since the early twentieth century, particularly in the United States, and how these traces extended into the occupation of Japan. During the occupation period, sex education and character guidance incorporated the specific ideals of masculinity, middle-class family values, and white community-building that American Cold War ideology popularized. Military commanders, chaplains, and other military educators propagated these ideals to occupation personnel as the best means to stay physically and spiritually fit to be effective soldiers, responsible fathers, and qualified leaders in the global postwar order. The second half of the chapter discusses morality concerning sexuality and prostitution among Japanese contemporaries. Their ideals were sometimes rooted similarly deeply in longer imperial histories and were also personally and rhetorically tied to global histories of moral reform. For instance, feminist organizations were among the strongest antiprostitution activists in occupied Japan. Some of them were experienced moral reformers, having been members of transnationally organized Christian and/or feminist groups in the prewar period, but they had also been willingly mobilized in World War II by the Japanese imperial state to promote the moral purification that was supposed to sustain the war effort. In occupied Japan, moral debates focused especially on the streetwalking prostitute, embodied by the panpan girl. She became a famous symbol of occupied Japan, representing vividly the revolutionary changes that took place during the occupation period. Others perceived her as the incarnation of moral and social decay. Various commentators, ranging from feminists to bureaucrats and including writers, photographers, social scientists, ethnographers, and journalists, all tackled the issue of street prostitution. Their narratives portraying Japan’s postwar sex workers as sexual dangers or as revolutionary heroines reverberated and reaffirmed masculinized images and patriotic desires for a new Japan.
Indeed, sanitizing sex was a matter of great importance to occupation period contemporaries. This book scrutinizes the various narratives and practices of the sanitization of sex to make sense of the anxiety-ridden discourse that proliferated about prostitution, venereal disease, sexual-intimate relationships, and notions of the body during the occupation of Japan. It helps us to understand the asymmetric power relations between occupiers and occupied, to highlight the tensions and cooperation between and among various actors, branches, and institutions of the occupation regime and Japan’s authorities, and to dig deeper into the occupation period’s history of everyday life.
1
Comforting the Occupiers
Prostitution as Administrative Practice
in Japan at the End of World War II
