the establishment of modern hospitals and physician training all aimed at creating a strong bond between individual patients and the modern nation-state.48 The constitutive mechanisms of public health, but also education, had a particularly powerful effect on the state- and nation-building process through the construction of certain gender roles. Since the end of the nineteenth century, debates on public health and education had included a strong emphasis on hygiene, domesticity, and reproduction according to the ideal of the “wise mother and good housewife” (ryōsai kenbō).49 Women’s roles were increasingly described in terms of obedience not only to father and husband, but also to the emperor and the state.50 Accordingly, the basic functions ascribed to women were to manage the household and educate the children, both for the sake of creating loyal, obedient, and efficient imperial subjects, and the female body became a symbol for the maintenance and continuity of the “national body.”51 Such ideals intensified with the increasing militarization of Japan in the 1930s, and women were perceived more or less as breeding machines. This was reinforced in particular by the repression of birth control, the banning of abortion, and the enforcement of eugenics laws.52 Simultaneously, as in most nationalistic constructions of gender, women were believed to be the most vulnerable and endangered part of the nation. Especially during warfare, the female body was construed as open to violation and, to quote Ruth Seifert, conceived “as always penetrable and endangered to rape.”53 For civilian and military physicians, civil servants, politicians, and public health officials, female sexuality therefore always represented an ambivalence between security and danger, which had to be managed with proper care in order to secure the survival of the “national body.”
However, kokutai in its use until 1945 cannot be reduced to signifying a singular national entity; the vagueness and multiple meanings of the term evolved with Japan’s imperial expansion in Asia, where kokutai was also employed as an ideological slogan to construct imperial unity under Japan’s rule. The flexibility and expandability of the concept of kokutai was particularly explicit in colonial Korea, where Japan’s colonial assimilation policies (dōka) attempted to propagate under the phrase of naissen ittai (“Korea and Japan as one body”) the integration of Korea and its people into the body politics of Japan’s imperial rule.54 In Japan’s colonies, hygiene and public health were major vehicles for legitimizing colonial rule as a benevolent civilizing process. This benevolence, as some studies have highlighted, adhered to ambivalent implications, because Japan’s colonial administrations used public health interventions to integrate Japan’s colonies into imperial Japan’s body politics, but simultaneously created a hierarchy between an allegedly more modern Japan and the countries and people of Japan’s empire on the basis of hygiene.55
Nevertheless, in the wake of defeat in August 1945, Japan’s authorities appear to have dropped their imperial baggage instantly, and kokutai’s reference must have changed. As is evident in the emperor’s speech as well as in police reports and newspaper articles, after defeat it was only the people in the Japanese metropole (naiichi) who were supposed to be endangered by the invading foreign soldiers. This evaluation totally ignored the fate of formerly colonized people in Japan’s empire. Within this web of meanings and references, kokutai goji, as pronounced by the emperor, had quite extensive and existential dimensions. Due to the notion of kokutai as an organic body generated in close connection to public health, hygiene, biological reproduction, and sexuality, Japan’s authorities perceived military occupation after defeat as an intrusion of an alien other. Their anxious articulations of the allegedly predictable contamination of the “national body” through the occupying forces shaped the discourse that emerged concomitantly with Japan’s defeat. They imagined the arrival of the occupation forces in sexual terms and as a sexual “invasion” that would inevitably be accompanied by physical and sexual violence against Japanese women, and thus considered it a fundamental destructive threat to kokutai.
Whereas the emperor’s speech addressed the postsurrender situation on an abstract level, Japan’s authorities in the police and the bureaucracy tackled the fears resulting from the invasion with concrete plans. On August 18, 1945, the Police and Security Section of the Home Ministry released a nationwide radiogram titled “Concerning the comfort facilities in areas where the foreign troops will be stationed” to all prefectural governors and police departments. The radiogram, which was most likely issued on behalf of the bureau’s chief, Hashimoto Masami,56 ordered police units to set up comfort facilities (ian shisetsu) as a preventive action all over Japan where the occupation forces might build their bases. The police departments were further instructed to keep this information strictly confidential, but in the case of its public exposure they were required to announce that the program had been initiated to protect Japanese citizens. In a special note, the radiogram listed specific details for the establishment of the recreational facilities, which included bars, restaurants, cabarets, and brothels. All of these facilities were to be located in special designated areas that were considered off-limits to Japanese civilians. It was the duty of the police to patrol these areas and to monitor all facilities. Furthermore, local police units were ordered to supervise and actively support the establishment of all facilities, and to oversee the recruitment of entertainers, dancers, barmaids, and licensed as well as unlicensed prostitutes.57
In Japan, the concept of regulated prostitution as a modern form defined by police security and public health was first introduced in Nagasaki around 1860 after the encounter with foreign sailors that accompanied the opening of Japan’s relations with Europe.58 The Japanese state installed a licensed prostitution system according to a French and German regulation model that allowed sex work only in designated areas with licensed brothels and venereal disease clinics. The police could easily patrol those quarters, and licensed brothel areas promised spatial boundaries that would limit the spread of venereal diseases as well as social and moral vices.59 Weekly mandatory health examinations to check for venereal diseases were a major aspect of regulating the prostitutes’ bodies, a procedure focused much more on the protection of the male clientele than on the health of the prostitutes. A nationwide regulation compelling sex workers to undergo medical examinations was first introduced in 1876. Health examinations were also compulsory for receiving a license. Local police units, who often cooperated closely with civil servants of the prefectural hygiene boards, issued such licenses. Ever since, prostitution and the licensed prostitution system have received significant attention in Japan’s modern health regime, in which the body of the prostitute was incorporated into modern health, education, and military institutions, where it helped to substantiate the normalization processes of creating a modern Japanese body.60
In the Japanese metropole—similarly to many Western and Latin American countries as well as colonial contexts—debates on prostitution since the establishment of the license system were mostly concerned with public health. Yet in the twentieth century, these debates increasingly turned on issues of sexuality and reproduction, and brought prostitution and its regulation into an even closer relationship to modern nation-state and empire-building.61 Although significant influence was exerted by nongovernmental actors, such as sexologists and moral reformers who campaigned against the state-sanctioned license system by questioning state authority on matters of sexuality, or by criticizing the state for sponsoring extramarital sex, most of these individuals and groups were integrated into the governmental programs of public morality that ultimately enabled the Japanese state to intervene even more deeply into people’s everyday life. Hence, state intervention in the regulation of hygiene and sexuality rapidly intensified during the 1920s and 1930s, and licensed prostitution became a highly politicized topic.62 The regulation of prostitution allowed agents of the state (and those working in close relation to the state) not only to control hygiene and sexual morals, but also to define reproduction, domesticity, and gender roles. From the Meiji period onward, prostitution thereby became an integral part of the modern health and education regime, which stigmatized it as a “dishonorable trade“ (shūgyō) and used it as a reference ex negativo to the ideal of the “wise mother and good housewife” that defined middle-class domesticity.63 In practice, however, Japan’s authorities perceived and maintained prostitution as
