of overstepping the bounds of the Police Act, I thought that, even if I had requested further instructions from Headquarters, I would not have got anything at all. Therefore I made up my mind to deal with the matter myself, on my own responsibility, without making any queries to my superiors. I was prepared to stand between the occupation forces and the Japanese people for general good in maintaining peace and order, and, if necessary, to bear any reprimand.”96 Such initiatives by individual police officers or whole police units also translated into creative yet discriminatory recruitment practices. In prefectures like Akita and Toyama, for example, where the police apparently faced some difficulties mobilizing enough women, police departments and prefectural governments decided to collaborate and share recruited women across prefectural borders with the prefectures of Aomori and Iwate.97
On other occasions, the police depended on privately operating labor brokers, who could themselves rely on their decades-old human and sex trafficking networks. Labor brokers usually maneuvered within legal limbo, because, as Fujime Yuki has argued, imperial Japan’s prostitution regulation “created a loophole through which such trafficking was permitted if based on free will.”98 Such supposed freedom to choose sex work as a means of living, however, was in fact usually coerced through debt dependency. At the time a working contract was concluded, poor young women or their families received advance payment, which had to be repaid to brokers and brothel owners—a system that, according to Fujime, sustained “the hypocrisy that the state’s recognition of prostitution demonstrated its sympathy for the plight of the poor.”99 Such trafficking networks existed throughout Japan, and particularly poor regions in the countryside functioned as reservoirs for sex traffickers to gather young women and bring them to licensed brothels in Japan’s major cities and across the Japanese empire.100 Although it is hard to prove, it is nevertheless highly conceivable that such networks were still active or were reactivated in the postsurrender period. There is evidence, however, that the police issued special travel documents to labor brokers for traveling freely through the countryside where many women and children had fled in order to find food, escape Japan’s bombed cities, or hide from the arriving occupiers. The idea was to offer food, clothing, and shelter, if women were willing to join and work in the newly established comfort centers.101
The police and labor brokers were not the only agents involved in the recruitment of women as sex workers, barmaids, and dancers. As Yoshimi Yoshiaki has shown, some right-wing politicians and fascist organizations were just as active in establishing prostitution for the occupiers.102 According to a report filed by the Tokkō, on September 18, 1945, Sasagawa Ryōzō, the younger brother of the Greater Japan National Essence League’s president, Sasagawa Ryōichi, established the “American Club” in Osaka together with fellow members of the Dai Nippon Kokusui league.103 And Hishitani Toshio, the leader of the Greater Japan Sincerity Association (dai nippon sekisei-kai), a youth organization in Iwate Prefecture fashioned similarly to the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany, was apparently taking an active part in organizing sex workers for the occupiers. A report by the prefectural governor’s office stated that Hishitani “involved himself with the people establishing comfort facilities for accommodating the Allied forces currently occupying the area.”104 Although it is difficult to reconstruct the actual cooperation between fascist organizations, yakuza-gangs, and most likely local police units, Japan’s authorities had a thorough knowledge of who was involved in the project to comfort the occupiers.
The most conspicuous organization in the recruitment of women was the already mentioned Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA). In September 1945, the RAA received generous funding from the Ministry of Finance (zaimushō) in the form of an instant low-interest loan of more than 30 million yen from the Nippon Kangyō Bank. Ikeda Hayatato, who at the time was the director of the ministry’s tax division and later served as prime minister of Japan between 1960 and 1964, appears to have negotiated the loan.105 Local police and military units granted access to rationed commodities such as blankets, beds, and toiletries, and also shared their prostitution licensing files to aid in recruitment.106 The RAA thus had enough resources to rent or buy facilities, furnish its establishments, offer food and salaries, and to run public recruitment campaigns. They disseminated advertisements widely through various channels. In newspapers, the RAA solicited so-called “special girls,” who would receive good and advance pay, food, shelter, and, for applicants from the countryside, travel expenses.107 And the RAA addressed young women on posters, too. One prominent exemplar hung in front of the RAA’s main office in the old Mitsukoshi department store on the Ginza, a major street and district in Tokyo: “Announcement to the New Japanese Woman [shin nihon josei]. For postwar management [sengo shori] of the situation of national emergency [kokka tekina kinkyūshisetsu], we require the initial cooperation [sossen kyōroku] of the new Japanese woman to participate in the great project to comfort [ian] the occupation forces. Female employees between 18 and 25 years old are wanted. Accommodation, clothes and meals will be provided.”108 The plan to comfort the occupiers, conceptualized in secrecy after Japan’s defeat and tangible only in police reports and ministerial ordinances, became public knowledge through such advertisements. The fact that Ginza was the epicenter of such publicity bares a certain historical irony: Ginza was a major site where the discourse of “modern life,” with its trope of the “modern girl“ (moga)—which was produced by mass media, modern architecture and practices of consumption—manifested in the 1920s and 1930s.109 At the end of the war, Ginza was destroyed along with the rest of Tokyo by Allied bombings and the fantasies of modern life could not discursively come to terms with the devastation and misery of the war. And the trope of the “New Japanese Woman,” a euphemism recapitulating the propagated, but never achieved, emancipation of women—which already signified the tragedy of modern life decades ago, and only repeated itself as farce in 1945—could never be realized in the ruins of the Ginza. The young women of Japan’s lowest classes between eighteen and twenty-five years old who were recruited were in material need of food, clothing and accommodation. They were, however, also drawn into a nationalistic, patriarchal, heteronormative project that was meant to signal the building of a new Japan. As they had in imperial Japan, women of lower-class and/or colonial background were to function in their role as prostitutes as a protective zone to regulate Japan’s sexualities. Whereas imperial Japan’s prostitutes were meant to channel male sexual desire in general to protect “respectable” reproductive sexuality, this time around, postsurrender ianfu were expected to sexually defuse the encounter between the Japanese population and the occupation forces.110
The extent to which the recruitment campaigns were actually fruitful is impossible to measure, and there are hardly any records of responses to newspaper ads or the RAA’s recruitment posters. Kobayashi Daijirō and Murase Akira have offered a rare story in which a former member of the Tokubetsu kōgekitai (“Special Attack Unit,” often referred to as kamikaze) supposedly entered the RAA’s office in anger and, armed with a sword, accused the RAA of disgracefully (keshikaran) selling Japanese women to the “American and English devils” (kichiku beiei). Somehow the present RAA members convinced him that their enterprise actually aimed at “protecting the purity of the one hundred million” (ichioku no junketsu o mamori) and “preserving the national body” (kokutai goji), which apparently helped them to avoid bloodshed.111 There even appear to have been some women who were actually attracted to the idea of serving their country. John Dower has explained this circumstance by referring to wartime propaganda, arguing that, since the RAA’s appeal was “essentially the same message of patriotic self-sacrifice that had been drilled into them all their lives,” it helped them recruit women.112
However, this image of an unbroken continuity of wartime ideology seems rather exaggerated. Of course, there might have been some women willing to sacrifice their bodies for emperor and country, but it is hard to believe that such self-abandonment could have been widespread. Women, attracted by the advertisements’ offerings, usually entered the RAA’s office with mixed expectations. On one occasion, according to Kobayashi and Murase, a women dressed in her wartime work suit (monpe) entered the office, curious about whether any positions
