also saving the daughters of respectable families from depravity and protecting the family in general as a haven of reproduction free of venereal disease.64 Feminists worldwide have criticized this concept of prostitution as underlying a double standard that demanded that women be chaste while allowing men to have extramarital sex.65 Nonetheless, Japanese military and public health officials were particularly keen to regulate the health of the male body that signified—predominantly in form of the manly soldier—the security and expansion of Japan to the “outer” world. Since the meaning of the male body was generated in symbolic entwinement with nation, empire, and war, sick soldiers, and especially those infected with venereal disease, were signs of disciplinary and moral weakness and were perceived as a danger to national security—the tight regulation of prostitution was supposed to limit such risks.66 Moreover, licensed prostitution also enabled the control and rationalization of civilian sexuality. It allowed men to postpone marriage and family planning without renouncing sex, while a double standard demanded that “respectable” women employ their sexuality reasonably, for biological reproduction only. Within this construction of gender, licensed lower-class prostitutes functioned as a mechanism to channel undisciplined male sexual desire and protect middle- and upper-class women to secure healthy and “proper” reproduction.67
However, this modern form of prostitution was not limited to Japan proper, but developed along the lines of Japan’s history of imperial entanglement in Asia. During the second half of the nineteenth century, poor Japanese women, predominantly from Kyushu and later known as karayuki-san, emigrated all over East and Southeast Asia, settling as sex workers in port cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and becoming an integral part of imperial Japan’s transnational economy.68 With Japan’s imperial expansion, the Japanese government became increasingly concerned that the magnitude of Japanese prostitution overseas could damage the reputation of the empire and tried to regulate the transnational sex trade.69 Simultaneously, a license system was introduced in Taiwan, Korea, and China to administer prostitution and the growing Japanese population in Japan’s colonies and overseas settlements.70 In the 1930s, during the Second World War in East and Southeast Asia, measures to control prostitution further intensified: Japanese military officers and bureaucrats organized a system of military prostitution (jūgun ian seido) and forced women, predominantly from Japan’s colonies, into sexual slavery in brothels in garrison towns and along the front lines.71 The military comfort system was supposed to prevent massacres and mass rapes, but it simultaneously functioned as an institution to discipline the Japanese troops and to control their morale and health with sanitary regulations and regular medical examinations of the comfort women.72 Comfort stations (ianjo) were erected not only overseas, but also within the Japanese metropole. In the wartime period, when extramarital social and sexual relations between men and women in general were increasingly controlled and restricted,73 Japanese authorities established ianjo near military bases and centers of the arms industry as part of wartime mobilization. Not unlike their overseas military counterparts, predominantly Korean women were recruited to service soldiers and workers in these ianjo.74 Such measures enforced the meaning of prostitution as a heteronormative institution for social hygienic regulation, which Japan’s authorities deliberately applied to preserve public peace (chian) and morality (fūzoku), to channel male sexual desire, to protect female middle- and upper-class sexuality, and to foster biological reproduction with the aim of preserving the continuity of the Japanese “national body.”75 As the Home Ministry’s directive shows, it was the same logic that underlay the decision by Japan’s authorities to establish comfort stations for the occupiers at the end of World War II.
The desire for national preservation and even essentialization in the program to comfort the occupiers after the war is most apparent in the founding of the Tokushu ianshisestu kyōkai around August 20, 1945, an organization commonly known under the later name Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA). It is said that Prince Konoe Fumimaro, then deputy prime minister, together with Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police chief Saka Nobuya, members of the Tokyo police’s Public Peace and Security Section (which was also highly involved in controlling prostitution in the Tokyo area), and several private entrepreneurs of Tokyo’s gastronomy and nightlife industry cooperatively initiated the RAA.76 Authorities granted the RAA police support and financial aid, and it became a right-wing, semigovernmental association for organizing brothels and other recreational facilities for the occupation forces. The RAA’s zeal for a nationalist postwar order is documented in the inaugural speech given by Miyazawa Hamajirō, the president of Tokyo’s gastronomy association and director of the RAA, on August 28, 1945, in front of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. August 15, 1945, according to Miyazawa, marked the end of an era: “At this time, we are burdened through our previous occupation [as entrepreneurs in the entertainment industry] with the difficult task of comforting the occupation forces as part of the urgently needed national facilities for postwar management. . . . In united alliance with our beliefs we go unhesitatingly forward, and through the human sacrifice of several thousand ‘Okichis of the Shōwa period’ we build a floodwall against the raging waves, helping to defend and nurture the purity of our race, thereby becoming an invisible base for the postwar social order.”77
The speech itself ended with cheers of “banzai” to salute the emperor and was later released as an “oath” by the RAA to defend the kokutai and preserve the “3,000 years of unchanging lineage of the emperor and the Japanese people.”78
In mentioning Okichi, Miyazawa was referring to the history of a geisha who was said to have served, under orders of the Tokugawa shogunate’s government (bakufu), the first U.S. general consul, Townsend Harris, during his residency in Japan in the 1850s—before she committed suicide. It is believed that her comforting and explicitly sexual services contributed significantly to the peaceful negotiations for diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States. The legend of Okichi therefore also helped construct an ideology of inevitable sacrifice for the well-being of the nation, a supposedly positive meaning for those women who were to function as a “floodwall” in the postwar period. The same image of the sacrifice of young, lower-class women, embedded in a narrative of progress and modernity, can also be traced in the recruitment and mobilization practices of the RAA.
Following the construction of the vulnerable female body and of prostitutes’ lower-class origins, Miyazawa called in his inaugural speech for defending and nurturing the “purity” of the Japanese race (minzoku) and thus linked postsurrender prostitution closely to notions of racial hygiene that had originated in the prewar and wartime periods.79 According to the historian Awaya Kentarō, the fear of racial contamination through the rape of Japanese women by U.S. servicemen gave rise to the idea of setting up brothels for the occupation forces. Awaya’s analysis focused on Konoe Fumimaro, also notorious for being the founder of the para-fascist organization Taisei yokusankai (Imperial Rule Assistance Association) and three-time prime minister of Japan, who apparently argued for the establishment of a prostitution scheme to prevent the rape of Japanese women and thereby save Japan’s “purity of blood” (junketsu).80
Taking a concept of racial homogeneity as determinative of policy, however, is to ahistorically project modern Japanese hygiene thought onto Japan’s prewar and wartime history, thereby simplifying modern Japanese racial hygiene thought. Racist thinking was not uncommon among various fascist and ultranationalist organizations, and it certainly surfaced in Japan’s often violent colonial rule in Taiwan, Korea, and China.81 Nevertheless, official statements as well as eugenic legislation and even wartime propaganda did not promote the racial superiority of Japan in the sense of biological determination.82 Accordingly, eugenic scholarship was never fully dominated by proponents of a “pure blood” theory, and the idea of a “mixed blood” (konketsu) heritage of the Japanese people was never abandoned.83 The Japanese empire and the Japanese nation itself were in fact commonly perceived as being multiracial, while Japanese imperial ideologues struggled with the double bind of Japan’s equal position among other imperial powers, its imperial superiority in the colonies, its simultaneous
