(ian) soldiers, notably as a dancer, and that she would be working for her country (o-kuni no tame) and the Japanese people (nihonjin toshite). The woman was apparently not instantly attracted to that kind of work and seemed puzzled by the scope of a dancer’s duties in a comfort facility (ianjo). In the end, however, the RAA persuaded her to take the job by emphasizing the prospect of food, shelter, and money.113 The decision to accept the RAA’s job offers was thus not guided by self-sacrifice, but was rather forced upon women by socioeconomically catastrophic circumstances—misery, hunger, and despair—which the RAA and other businessmen in Japan’s postsurrender sex work scene deliberately exploited.
This is not to say that women were recruited exclusively by the “silent compulsion of economic conditions,” as Karl Marx called the mechanisms that compel people who lack access to the means of production and vital necessities to sell their labor power.114 Many women were recruited by systematic coercion or even brute force (or the threat of violence), for instance by being forced into dependency through the accumulation of debts for their living expenses at the comfort centers where they lived and worked—a combination that has a long trajectory in imperial Japan’s modern history of prostitution.115 Coerced debt is but one legacy of Japan’s imperial past in Iwahashi Tomiko’s biography. Tomiko was born in Tokushima on Shikoku in 1929, but moved to Japanese-occupied territories in southern China. In January 1946, then seventeen-year-old Tomiko and her family returned to Japan from Guangzhou (Canton). First, they went to Kyoto, but after her father died and she and her mother had no relatives there, they moved further to Takayama on Shikoku to live with Tomiko’s uncle. Soon, her uncle passed away as well. Having no place to stay, Tomiko and her mother faced even harder times while trying to live on Tomiko’s small salary at a local spinning mill. Around September of the same year, her mother also died and Tomiko decided to leave Shikoku and find work in Osaka. As she arrived at Osaka station, a forty-year-old man approached her and offered her a housekeeping job at a place called Santō. Without a second thought, Tomiko took the job and moved into the Santō House. By December, Tomiko realized that most of the women working at the house would sometimes “take clients” (kyaku o toru), usually servicemen of the occupation forces. Around the same time, the man who offered her the housekeeping job told her that she already owed the Santō House more than 2,000 yen for expenses since moving in, and that it would be useless to either quit or run away. Thus, Tomiko saw no other option than to “take in clients” herself in order to pay off her debts and to hope for a better future.116
Despite the enormous effort and resources mobilized by Japan’s authorities and other agents of the entertainment industry, the organization of comfort facilities and recruitment of sex workers before the arrival of the occupiers met with little success. Although the RAA calculated that 13,000 to 15,000 ianfu would be sufficient to cater to the needs of the occupation army, in the two weeks between surrender and the beginning of the occupation they were only able to recruit 1,360 women in total.117 Additionally, the RAA apparently planned to establish a huge entertainment complex in the former Mitsukoshi department store building, with bars, restaurants, cabarets, and brothels on each floor. The Tokyo police department, however, did not sanction the plan due to security concerns, and recommended focusing on the Ōmori and Ōi districts in southern Tokyo.118 Ōmori was not only an old entertainment district; it had also hosted a major prisoner of war camp during World War II.119 Moreover, Ōmori and Ōi are located on the Keihin Tōhoku railway line and the Keihin highway, which both connect Tokyo with Kawasaki and Yokohama, and Japan’s authorities believed it would be the first route the occupiers would take to enter the capital. Although the RAA did manage to set up some beer halls and restaurants in that district, only the Komachien, a designated brothel with about forty sex workers on hand, was ready to open when the first foreign customers arrived on August 28, 1945.120 In no time, however, the RAA and other entrepreneurs of the entertainment industry established a flourishing infrastructure to comfort the arriving occupiers.
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The two weeks between Japan’s surrender and the arrival of the occupation forces were a significant historical event that produced new rules of signification: A new understanding of a Japanese people and Japanese belonging seems to have emerged along with the formation of a new space, “Japan.” The nationalistic imagination arose out of the fantasized confrontation with the arriving occupation forces as an intimidating other. The imaged fear of raping and looting soldiers and sailors of the occupation army fueled the idea of erecting a “female floodwall” to mediate the encounter with the occupiers. Japan’s authorities believed that the occupiers’ arrival would constitute a “sexual invasion” targeting Japanese women, who would need to be protected to guarantee survival of the “national body.” However, it was at this very moment that Japan’s authorities redrew the contours of the “national body” and its supposed core—Japan’s purity, embodied by the chaste Japanese woman—in order to secure an imagined “Japaneseness,” which had in fact not yet existed in this form. The emperor’s and ideologues’ talk of preservation, as in the expression kokutai goji, was thus misleading, since it actually signified a new essence for Japan and its people.
The signifying shift that occurred in the late summer of 1945 was a result of the traumatic experience of surrender and defeat. While this experience in itself was a referenceless rupture of despair, uncertainty, and anxiety, the predominantly male agents of the Japanese state were nevertheless forced to fictionalize the event that had precipitated the wish for cultural and racial autonomy vis-à-vis the occupiers.121 The reimagined national self and its territorial and biopolitical references were indeed, to quote Sebastian Conrad, “the product—and not the precondition—of processes of transnational interaction, exchange and entanglement.”122 The imagined terrifying presence of the Allies/Americans catalyzed Japanese identification practices transnationally, and discursive patterns prevalent in imperial Japan echoed back, were appropriated, and were renarrated to instantly fill the referenceless gap of the traumatic experience of defeat.123 Certain notions of sexuality, gender, race, and class that were deeply inscribed in imperial Japan’s health, education, and licensed prostitution systems thus affected the postsurrender desire for a decidedly Japanese identity and provided the language to articulate it. It seems conspicuous—in addition to what Leo Ching has called Japan’s “lack of decolonization,” by which he refers to the emperor’s absolution from responsibility for the war, the denial of Japanese war atrocities, the integration of Japan into the Cold War order under the aegis of the United States, and the ongoing legal struggle of former comfort women124—that the conceptualization and organization of prostitution as an administrative practice was vital to constituting the postwar myth of Japanese homogeneity and belonging.125 The conceptualization and organization of the “female floodwall” would thus become a telling example of the process of the postwar imagination and the consolidation of the Japanese nation-state and the simultaneous disintegration of Japan’s empire, or better yet, the reversion of Japan’s imperial expansion: Since the early twentieth century, Japan’s aggressive war and colonial rule in Asia involved exporting sex workers, sex work regulations, and specific notions of sexuality and hygiene—often mediated through further global entanglements with the West and its colonies—that shaped the understanding of Japan’s empire and Japanese imperial subjectivity. With defeat in 1945, Japan’s imperial dreams shattered, but imperial experiences of sexuality and prostitution continued to shape ideas of Japanese belonging. In the immediate postwar period, however, the meaning of Japan started to shift, and one of the significant—or rather signifying—arenas for imagining the formation of a new Japan and a new Japanese belonging was the conceptualization and organization of prostitution to comfort the occupiers.
FIRST ENCOUNTER: SEX AND VIOLENCE IN EARLY OCCUPIED JAPAN
The surrender ceremony, an exclusively male enterprise, was held on September 2, 1945, when representatives of the imperial Japanese government signed the Instrument of Surrender on the U.S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. General Douglas MacArthur, acting supreme commander of Allied Powers, closed the official procedure with a speech in
