those of the emperor.17 And John Dower in his Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, probably the most popular study on the occupation in English, has only some minor remarks on this period: He points out the confusion felt by most people upon hearing the announcement of surrender on the radio, and the frenetic destruction of files and documents by Japanese military officers and bureaucrats who “devoted themselves to obscuring their wartime deeds.”18
Nonetheless, Bix and Dower both have raised the issue of why the Japanese people, despite some minor violent incidents, were relatively docile in accepting the drastic change from wartime mobilization to peacetime occupation. Bix has argued that the emperor and the Higashikuni cabinet, established to handle the capitulation procedures, focused on “controlling the people’s reaction to defeat and keeping them obedient and unconcerned with the question of accountability” for wartime aggression.19 By presenting a simplified top-down power structure in which the Japanese people are portrayed as passive subjects who merely followed their leaders’ orders, Bix reproduces the perennial racist trope of the obedient Japanese masses.20 Dower, for his part, claimed in his study on the Pacific War that the Japanese wartime propaganda helped in the transition process. He refers to Japanese depictions of the enemy as demons, which made use of rather flexible images “deeply embedded into Japanese folk culture.” These images could portray the demon’s “human face” as not entirely evil, but also as possessing powers of protection and change, and thus established features that helped Japan come to terms with its new position vis-à-vis the occupiers after the war.21 Although Dower is well aware of the racist stereotypes of Japan circulating in Western scholarship, quite surprisingly, he himself has depicted Japan in the same vein by articulating an “ahistorical culturalist analysis,” to quote Takashi Fujitani, that dwells on a forced explanation of Japan’s supposedly ancient, unchanging tradition and folk knowledge.22
In any case, Bix and Dower have both failed to highlight the efforts made by Japanese contemporaries to deal with the situation after Japan’s surrender. In various attempts, the Japanese authorities tried to calm the public. An article published by the national newspaper Yomiuri Hōchi on August 20 with the title “Lapsing into dema[gogy] is foolish” aimed to convince its readers that it would be wrong to misjudge the situation at the end of the war on the basis of hearsay. The article cited a long comment by Horikiri Zenjirō, a former diplomat and member of the Kizokuin (House of Peers), explaining that a military occupation is by definition a peacetime operation, and the Japanese people, having no reason to worry, would not “become the scorn of the world by showing unnecessary confusion.” Horikiri agreed that it might not be possible to completely avoid some minor individual misbehavior by soldiers of the occupation army. Nevertheless, because a modern and well-disciplined army was conducting the occupation, and in particular because the occupation was legitimated by the Potsdam Declaration, the security of the postwar order was guaranteed, according to Horikiri.23 In another article published three days later, the Yomiuri Hōchi also pronounced an “unsubstantiated anxiety” (kiyū) concerning violence and looting by the occupation troops, and asked the people to calmly return to and protect their workstations, while further instructions would be communicated through the chairmen of the city or village council.24
However, such “demagogy” and “unsubstantiated anxiety,” as the Yomiuri Hōchi called it, did not stop circulating in rumors about the arrival of the occupation forces, and it also resonated in official reports. In Tokyo, a policeman of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department noted in a secret report titled “Urgent problems concerning the tendencies of the common people” from August 20, 1945, that public opinion was dominated by a “seditious uncertainty” (fuan dōyō) based on rumors of violent acts of revenge by the arriving occupation forces. To indicate acts of violence and insults, the author of the report used the terms bōkō and ryōjoku, which simultaneously convey the meaning of rape. The implication of sexual violence is even more obviously manifest by the use of the expression fujo bōkō, which explicitly means physical sexual violence against women.25 Attached to the police report, the file assembled statements by various nongovernmental actors, such as a chairman of the civil defense unit (keibōdan) of Tokyo’s Meguro ward and a factory director from Nihonbashi in Tokyo, to illustrate the “public spirit” (jinshin). The keibōdan chairman reported food shortage and a lack of drinking water, but also rumors about the violation of Japanese women by the “foreigners” (gaijin). The factory director shared the concern that women would be most vulnerable and stated that they would have a much more intense experience of the shame of the defeat of the “one hundred million [Japanese] people” (ichioku kokumin). According to him, the allegedly predictable violation of women by the American and English “beasts” (yajū) would furthermore endanger every Japanese home and family. In sum, both the keibōdan chairman and the factory director reasoned that the Japanese authorities should make preparations against the threat of sexual violence. The appeal reverberated in the concluding remarks of the police report, whose author suggested the establishment of comfort facilities (ian goraku shisetsu) for the occupation troops.26
Politicians, policemen, and bureaucrats of lower rank shared the people’s fears concerning the arrival of foreign troops, but they also shared the anxiety of Japan’s elites about their future and their loss of control over the people. Thus, policemen listened closely to rumors and city councils released warning notices through mass media channels. Furthermore, police and bureaucracy, two institutions highly involved in the promotion of the war effort and the suppression of dissent, switched to producing “defeat propaganda” in the postsurrender period, with the aim of calming the public and preparing them for the postdefeat encounter with the former enemy.27 In particular the Special Higher Police (Tokubetsu kōtō keisatsu, often referred to simply as Tokkō), a highly militarized special police force with the main duties of counterespionage, repression of (mostly left-wing) political activism, and preservation of “public peace” (chian), made arduous efforts to control the postsurrender situation.28 In numerous documents collected and edited by Awaya Kentarō and Kawashima Takamine, members of the Tokkō articulated their ideas about the maintenance of “public peace“ at the end of the war.29 On the basis of the police work’s huge paper trail, Awaya and Kawashima have convincingly shown how the Tokkō was actively preparing a smooth transition to a peaceful postwar order, mainly through surveillance and by filing reports on the current situation for political implementation. Their reports revolved around the overwhelming fear of domestic threats, such as potential peasant uprisings, or envisioned that anarchists, socialists, and communists would take advantage of the chaos and exploit the confusion for a social revolution. Among those political movements, the Tokkō singled out the so-called chōsenjin, Koreans who were often brought to Japan as forced laborers, as a distinctive group and watched them closely.30 Another major threat to the maintenance of “public peace” was believed to come from overseas: the members of the Tokkō also feared the arrival of foreign soldiers, who were—contrary to the publicly propagated ideals in official newspaper statements—thought to endanger the Japanese people and especially Japanese women.31 The end of the war and the postsurrender situation was thus not an insignificant passage in which the Japanese passively waited for the arrival of the occupation forces. It was, rather, characterized by efforts to control the situation. Indeed, those two weeks between Japan’s surrender and the arrival of the occupation forces played no small part in determining the course of the occupation of Japan and can be identified as an historic event in which prostitution as an administrative practice played a significant role.
On the basis of three documents—the Imperial Rescript to terminate the war, a radiogram by the Home Ministry (naimushō) that instructed the police to organize recreational facilities for the occupiers, and the inaugural speech of the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA)—I will highlight how Japan’s authorities’ discursive practices referred to knowledge about hygienic regulation, licensed prostitution, and racial thinking prevalent in imperial Japan and translated it into the immediate postsurrender period. The organization of prostitution and the recruitment of women
