AND ORGANIZATION OF THE “FEMALE FLOODWALL”
Beginning on August 16, 1945, one day after Japan’s surrender in World War II, major railway stations in Tokyo such as Ueno and Shinjuku Station were overcrowded with people hastily boarding trains for the countryside. All over the Kantō area, people panicked and were imagining the horrors of what the “American and English devils” (kichiku beiei) might do to them upon their arrival in Japan. Rumors of violent revenge and rape by the foreign troops spread, reinforcing fear among the population and encouraging women and children in particular to hide from the arriving occupation forces far away from the metropolitan areas. In the most extreme scenarios, some rumors predicted that the foreign soldiers would violate and rape all Japanese women and force them to become their concubines, while all Japanese men would be enslaved, killed, and/or castrated.1
Japan’s authorities were equally overcome by defeat in the late summer of 1945, and their anxiety and uncertainty about the arrival of the Allied occupation forces at the end of the war manifested in official announcements and reports. In Kanagawa Prefecture, where the Allied occupation forces were initially supposed to enter Japan, civil servants of the local administration advised all citizens to evacuate women and children to the countryside far away from the landing areas. The prefectural bureau of Kanagawa released this notification in the national daily Asahi Shinbun on August 19, 1945, and then released all their female staff as a precaution.2 The city offices of Yokohama and Yokosuka and the local train services also discharged all their female employees.3 Members of the Japanese police force reported similar concerns at the end of the war. In most of the few remaining official accounts documented prior to the arrival of the occupation forces, the police sustained the possibility of “violence, looting and so on upon the invasion.”4 In Kanagawa Prefecture, the police also reported rumors predicting violence against women by soldiers of the foreign army and supported the Yokohama city office’s announcement that women and children would be evacuated to the countryside. To safeguard women and children more effectively, the Kanagawa Prefecture police even considered relocating them by force.5
The rumors, official announcements, and reports at the end of the war were all closely related to fears of physical violence, which Japanese contemporaries generally perceived as sexual violence. All statements explicitly indicated that the victims of sexual violence would be predominantly women. Mass media coverage supported such gender-biased fear. Shortly before the arrival of the occupation forces, the Yomiuri Hōchi published an “Alerting Notice About Women and Children Walking Alone,” warning women not to go out alone, especially at night, and asking them to “refrain from wearing licentious clothes.”6 The gendered threat posed by the impending arrival of the Allied occupation forces is deeply inscribed in the records of Japanese bureaucrats, politicians, policemen, and entrepreneurs of the entertainment industry. The traces of their discursive practices reveal that they perceived the arrival of thousands of enemy soldiers as a violent and sexual invasion, and they responded by constituting a discourse that grasped prostitution as a necessary measure for preventing rape and other acts of physical violence. The voices in this discourse were exclusively male, and the predominantly male agents of the Japanese state articulated anxiety about the sexual aggression of foreign male soldiers, echoing their fears of a complete loss of manhood after Japan’s emasculating defeat in World War II.7
This chapter demonstrates how Japan’s authorities, pimps, nightclub owners, and fascist organizations channeled male anxiety and uncertainty at the end of the war into the administrative practice of conceptualizing and organizing prostitution as a “female floodwall” (onna no bōhatei) to comfort the occupiers. Their zealous engagement in taking control of sexual encounters between occupiers and occupied was an effort to masculinize after defeat. Previous research has convincingly argued that the idea to set up a broad prostitution scheme to comfort the occupiers was predominantly aimed at securing the kokutai (national body) rather than at the protection of individual Japanese citizens.8 It is usually claimed that the guiding concepts of the prostitution scheme that was swiftly organized in postsurrender Japan derived more or less solely from Japan’s wartime comfort women system.9 Indeed, many similarities existed between the wartime and postwar prostitution systems, and some commentators have emphasized the structural conditions of patriarchal power relations in imperial Japan, which supposedly provided the foundation for the continuity between wartime and postwar prostitution—embodied mainly by the Japanese state functioning as pimp in the 1940s.10
However, prostitution as administrative practice to comfort the Allied occupiers in Japan after 1945 has to be more thoroughly historicized, for it is also entangled with longer trajectories of patriarchal power in modern Japanese history. The initial plans and the regulations implemented to set up prostitution for the occupation troops did correspond to the wartime comfort system, but they also reveal legacies of Japan’s empire beyond the parallels to the wartime military prostitution system. Concepts and governmental practices of controlling prostitution that had been developed since the nineteenth century, such as the police-controlled prostitution license system involving regular health inspections for sex workers, shaped wartime and postsurrender prostitution. These concepts and practices were closely entwined with intersecting notions of sexuality, gender, class, and race, which had been constitutive for the construction of Japan’s “national body” and its understanding of empire. As I will argue in this chapter, Japanese authorities appropriated these concepts and practices while organizing prostitution after defeat in order to instantly comfort the occupiers. However, their performative discourse in reformulating the ideals of womanhood, domesticity, hygienic regulation, and racial purity and aligning them with Japanese sovereignty and national uniqueness produced new rules of signification in the historic event of postsurrender Japan.11
The Eventfulness of Postsurrender Japan and Threats to “Public Peace”
The occupation of Japan after World War II officially started on September 2, 1945, when Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender. The first occupation troops had already entered Japan on August 28, but in September and October they were followed by the larger body of occupation personnel advancing throughout the country. The subsequent occupation period, which ended more than seven years later in 1952, has been the subject of research in various, often conflicting studies, which have often interpreted the occupation as either a benevolent and successful democratization and modernization project, or as a failure of the U.S. mission in Japan and Asia.12 Others have tried to overcome such one-dimensional perspectives by stressing a reverse course and highlighting the pivotal change occupation policy underwent when the United States turned away from its early policy of ambitious democratization and demilitarization in favor of the hegemonic Cold War containment policy of the late 1940s.13 In most cases, however, there is a shared belief that, first, the occupation that started in 1945 signaled a new, democratic beginning for Japan; second, they place overwhelming emphasis on the U.S. involvement in the occupation of Japan, which has had—for better or for worse—major political, economic, social, and cultural significance for U.S.-Japanese relations until today.14 In any scenario, the significance of the occupation period itself is perpetually marked by the arrival of the occupation forces on August 28 or the signing of the Instrument of Surrender on September 2, 1945, which officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Peace (San Francisco Treaty) on September 8, 1951, which went into force on April 28, 1952. Except for the atomic bombings and the radio broadcast on August 15, 1945, in which the emperor publicly announced the end of the war, the two short weeks between Japan’s surrender and the arrival of the occupation troops is hardly ever mentioned, and if it is, then often only in a footnote remarking on Japan’s devastation at the end of the war.15 Takemae Eiji’s monumental monograph on the occupation of Japan, Inside GHQ—The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy, for instance, acknowledges those two weeks—despite providing a dense description of the origins of the predominantly American occupier’s General Headquarters in the Pacific War—with almost one full page.16 Herbert Bix, who has raised the question of Japan’s “delayed surrender” by scrutinizing the sources and discussions of the imperial
