entrepreneurs of the entertainment business repeatedly articulated their nationalistic desire to protect Japan and its people. Thus, I claim, the conceptualization of prostitution to comfort the occupiers did not only play a pivotal role in transmitting such knowledge beyond 1945, it furthermore continued to influence male-dominated Japanese self-conceptions of nation and culture in the longer postwar period, and led ultimately to the possibility of imagining a “new” Japan.
Conceptualizing the “Female Floodwall”: Kokutai Ideology and Imperial Knowledge of Prostitution
At the end of the war, material and physical devastation as well as psychological despair severely affected everyday life in Japan. Massive and even atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had destroyed Japan’s major cities while mobilization for the war effort, military discipline, police surveillance, and food shortage had created misery, suffering, and hunger. The people, especially those living in Japan’s urban centers, had hardly any access to food and were forced to sell valuable possessions like silk kimonos and jewelry cheaply in the countryside or on the black market to avoid starvation—a phenomenon that came to be known, in a metaphor derived from the image of peeling a bamboo shoot layer by layer, as “bamboo shoot living” (takenoko seikatsu) for the stripping away of all one’s belongings.32 Wartime propaganda, which encouraged fighting for the purity and survival of the Yamato race, echoed the angst about the looting and raping foreign “devils.”33 Yet while Japan’s authorities tried to control the situation and reshape wartime propaganda for a bloodless transition to a postwar order, most people were war-weary and expressed the hope that with the war over, there would now be a chance to start over again; a feeling that, according to John Dower, led most people to “embrace defeat” in the course of the early occupation period.34
At this ambivalent time of suffering and hope there was obviously far-reaching uncertainty about the impending arrival of the occupation forces and the outcome of the occupation itself.35 News from the fiercely fought Battle of Okinawa, which was the only battle in the Second World War with significant Japanese civilian casualties, frightened many Japanese as to what might happen in the Japanese metropole (naichi), and the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki also substantiated fears among the populace.36 Diplomatic and political historians, moreover, have mainly argued that the vague formulations of the Potsdam Declaration issued on July 26, 1945, along with the demands postulated in the Instrument of Surrender and General Order No. 1, reinforced an uncertainty about the future of Japan and its people. All documents were received and acknowledged by Japan’s authorities prior to the arrival of the occupation forces. The Potsdam Declaration, the Instrument of Surrender, and General Order No. 1 stipulated Japan’s unconditional surrender, the forfeiture of its empire, and a military occupation by the Allied powers under the aegis of the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers and his headquarters (SCAP/GHQ), with the subsequent loss of Japan’s sovereignty.37
Yet the civilian population and Japan’s authorities in particular not only rationalized the impending arrival of the occupation troops in political terms, they also imagined it as a destructive threat. Emperor Hirohito also conveyed such a notion in the famous “Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War” (Daitōa sensō shūketsu no shōsho), broadcast on radio on August 15, 1945. In the gyokuon-hōsō (literally translated as “Jewel Voice Broadcast”), as the emperor’s broadcast speech came to be called, Hirohito officially announced the “end of the war” (shūsen) and Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration without direct mention of Japan’s “surrender” or “defeat” (haisen).38 Rather, he claimed: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her [Japan’s] interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”
All his subjects, the “one hundred million people,” would have to face hardships and sufferings, but, Hirohito continued, “it is according to the dictates of time and fate that We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.” The emperor thus called upon his subjects to “let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith in the imperishability of its sacred land,” and to unite the “total strength, to be devoted to construction of the future.” All Japanese should “cultivate the ways of rectitude, foster nobility in spirit, and work with resolution—so that you may enhance the innate glory of the imperial state and keep pace with the progress of the world.”39
Although Hirohito’s speech addressed the future of Japan and encouraged the Japanese people to work hard to keep pace with the world’s progress, the emperor’s rhetoric was actually deeply reactionary. This is foremost marked by the language and rhetorical figures applied by Hirohito, who spoke, as Dower has pointed out, “in a highly formal language studded with ornamental phrases.”40 The speech was hardly understood by anyone in the audience, and radio commentators and journalists had to translate his words and explain their meaning in common Japanese in follow-up broadcasts and newspaper articles. Moreover, Hirohito’s terminology, with its strong roots in wartime and prewar propaganda promoting the sacredness of the imperial institution, the divinity of Japan’s soil, and the unity of the Japanese people, did not break with imperial Japan’s ideology—whereby the expression “one hundred million people” was a marker to encompass all subjects under imperial Japan’s rule throughout Asia.41 Another pivotal ideological umbrella term that embraced all these features is kokutai. Hirohito himself uttered the term to express the desire to perpetuate Japan’s unity and what might be called cultural autonomy toward the Allied powers after the war, and it also appeared in accompanying newspaper articles, mostly in the phrase kokutai goji, meaning the protection and preservation of the kokutai.42
Kokutai, usually translated into English as body politic or national body, is a vague and multifaceted concept of modern Japanese nation- and state-building. It had been a central reference for emperor-centered state ideology and institutions since the Meiji period (1868–1912). Its meaning oscillated somewhat between the German terms Staatskörper and Volksgemeinschaft in its application until 1945, and signifies the construct of a unity of the Japanese people, the Japanese state, its institutions, and the Japanese emperor (tennō).43 Of course, as Susan Burns has shown, the idea of unity and community through “a set of unique and enduring cultural values” such as language, ancestor worship, and religious beliefs had already been formulated by intellectuals in the late Tokugawa period (1603–1868) and predates modern Japanese kokutai ideology.44 Earlier debates thus offered a vocabulary for Meiji-period ideologues to construct the kokutai as what Iida Yumiko has called an “embodiment of a timeless Japanese cultural essence” in the process of defining Japanese national identity.45 It was nevertheless the multiple meanings and flexibility of kokutai that enabled Japanese ideologues from various backgrounds to apply the term to Meiji Japan. Kokutai thus encompassed a somewhat contradictory amalgamation in which modern institutions were adapted to the image of an ancient Japanese “cultural essence,” which imperial Japan’s authorities produced and performed in state rituals, Japan’s constitution, State Shinto religion, military parades, as well as education and hygienic reforms.46
One of the key institutional developments for building and promoting kokutai was the establishment of a modern health regime, through which Japanese ideologues attempted to establish a sense of national belonging by integrating the individual body and its health into the “national body” and conceiving the amalgam as an organic unity.47 Of course, the interventions of state agencies also faced much resistance, which ranged from heated debates about the privacy of the citizen’s body to peasant uprisings against quarantine restrictions enacted to control
