Japanese empire.84 As Oguma Eiji has argued, the idea of the Japanese self was not only quite inclusive—an implication shared by intellectual movements such as Pan-Asianism—and the concept of being Japanese also always shifted with the political environment.85 Racial hygiene in the Japanese metropole (naiichi) was thus focused instead on the creation and reproduction of healthy and disciplined subjects of the empire. This idea also translated into the most aggressive agent of Japan’s imperial expansion, the Imperial Japanese Army, which was—despite various racially motivated killings by Japanese soldiers—nonetheless highly interested in the integration of soldiers from colonies such as Korea and Taiwan.86 While this was surely meant to legitimate Japan’s imperialistic expansion and to ground Japan’s hegemony throughout Asia, multiracial inclusion also signaled a desire for autonomy in constant negotiation with the imaginary, omnipresent “West” as a reference for civilization and modernity.87 Against this backdrop, racial hygienic programs and racial scaling in the prewar and wartime period functioned much more as an expression of cultural maturity than of biologically determined racial superiority.88
Nonetheless, considering Miyazawa’s speech in front of the imperial palace and the fear shared by the Japanese emperor, politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, journalists, and entrepreneurs that the occupation forces would inevitably mass rape Japanese women and thereby contaminate and destroy the kokutai, the conceptualization of prostitution to comfort the occupiers obviously involved a certain racist and culturalist thought. The vocabulary to formulate such ideas was provided by prewar and wartime discourses of race, gender, class, and sexuality. In the immediate postwar period, Japan’s authorities and entrepreneurs of Japan’s entertainment industry appropriated these ideals and concepts of kokutai along with the image of the chaste female body, which ultimately satisfied a specifically male nationalistic desire to imagine a postsurrender “Japaneseness.” The conceptualization of prostitution to comfort the occupiers thus served not only the purpose of satisfying the sexual lust of the occupying army’s soldiers and sailors; it simultaneously comforted the soon-to-be occupied as well.
Organizing Prostitution in Postsurrender Japan: Agents and Methods
Nationalistic ideals and desires based on gendered and racialized concepts of sexuality generated in imperial Japan surfaced in the conceptualization of prostitution as administrative practice to comfort the occupiers. Yet they also became constitutive in practice through the palpable undertaking to arrange recreational facilities and to recruit women to work in brothels, bars, beer halls, restaurants, and cabarets. John Lie has provocatively suggested viewing the Japanese state as a pimp whose agents and institutions were primarily responsible for the organization of prostitution in the 1940s—in (military) comfort stations throughout Japan’s empire during the war, as well as domestically within Japan after defeat in 1945.89 Although I do not intend to neglect the involvement and responsibility of Japan’s authorities in that matter, Lie’s vague assessment neglects the complexity of organizing sex work and recruiting sex workers in the immediate postsurrender period. Of course, the Home Ministry released an ordinance directing Japan’s national police force to set up comfort facilities and to recruit women, which was probably pushed by governmental officials and politicians, and local police units were occasionally directly responsible for carrying it out. In addition, however, a variety of agents and groups of actors such as private entrepreneurs of the entertainment industry as well as ultranationalist and fascist groups were heavily involved in and contributed to the efforts to establish the “female floodwall.” Although most individuals and groups were somehow linked to Japan’s imperial state, the recruitment itself was not planned and executed by a single, central governmental agency. Nevertheless, Japan’s authorities were highly supportive of these mostly private and semigovernmental groups and organizations, helping them financially and encouraging them politically to implement a recreational scheme. Obviously, Japan’s empire had not vanished overnight, and neither had Japan’s imperial agents, some of whom were eager to organize sex work to cater to the occupiers.
An instance of the close collaboration between officials of Japan’s imperial state and private agents of the sex industry is documented for a former amusement and brothel quarter (yūkaku) in Yokosuka, a major port for the Imperial Japanese Navy in the south of Kanagawa Prefecture. Close to the port facilities, a number of privately run brothels (ianjo) had served Japanese sailors on shore leave, which had apparently been a highly lucrative business for Yokosuka’s licensed sex workers (kōshō) during the wartime period. On August 29, 1945, a policeman and a representative of the Home Ministry came to one of Yokosuka’s brothels and, after asking the landlord to gather all sex workers, addressed them in a short speech: “From tomorrow you must partner with the Americans. This is an order coming from the gods (okami kara no meirei), and we all carefully follow them. It is your sacrifice (gisei) that will make it possible for Japan’s women to escape the fangs of American soldiers. Although this is truly painful for you, in the gods’ great will, for the country, and for the dignified imperial family’s princesses, we urge you to shed your tears. You carry the destiny of all Japanese women as a burden upon your shoulders.”90
Following the speech, the women went to their rooms to burn all pictures of Japanese warships and sailors, and the brothel owner posted a sign saying “Welcome, U.S. soldier” at the brothel’s door to greet the new customers.91 The legacy of Japan’s empire was thus twofold; it legitimated the enterprise ideologically and appropriated imperial Japan’s license system to remodel its institutions and labor for their use in the postsurrender period.
Various prefectural police departments engaged autonomously in the recruitment of sex workers beginning right away in August 1945. Although the Home Ministry had ordered them to do so, according to Japanese law, it was actually illegal for the police to organize prostitution. Units of the Kanagawa Prefectural Police Department nevertheless started to round up formerly or still licensed prostitutes and to inspect various locations in the Yokohama area with an eye to their suitability as comfort facilities. Subsequently, they chose an apartment building in Yamashita-chō in Yokohama’s Naka Ward and on August 28 opened it as a comfort facility under the name Goraku-sō.92 In most cases, however, the police merely supervised the recruitment of women and provided logistical support. Since it had been the police’s responsibility to monitor (and occasionally repress) prostitution in imperial Japan’s prostitution license system, they could rely on piles of files on registered sex workers to locate licensed and unlicensed former prostitutes. The police’s filing cabinet, which meticulously archived names, addresses, personal descriptions, photographs, and license records, was a most efficient tool for personally approaching women for recruitment.93 Another advantage of the police’s recruitment campaigns and support was access to food stores and consumer goods such as clothing and blankets, which were strictly rationed during the war years. Additionally, the police gathered commodities like alcohol, but also sanitary products, futons, and other furniture. They attempted to convert factories and factory dormitories that had withstood Allied bombardment into brothels and beer halls, and used police trucks for transportation to furnish the facilities.
In the official histories of local police forces, Tanaka Yuki has found some credible evidence for the police’s involvement. In Hokkaido Prefecture, for example, the police department’s official history revealed: “The recruitment [of comfort women] was carried out mainly through labor brokers, but as it was a matter of great account, police officers were also directly engaged in this task. In other words, officers checked the names and addresses of [formerly] licensed former prostitutes from the list in the police stations, visited the villages in the mountain and seacoast areas where these women lived, gave them blankets, socks and sugar, and asked for their cooperation by persuading them to work again for the sake of the nation and for the [safety] of the Japanese people.”94 In this way, the police in Hokkaido apparently recruited almost 500 women who had formerly worked as licensed prostitutes to work in bars and brothels.95
Some police officers passionately participated in the campaign to establish comfort facilities and even expressed pride in
