founded upon faith and understanding—a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance and justice.”126 Despite such emphasis on reconciliation, the ceremony was nonetheless a tremendous demonstration of power: in a symbolic gesture, the Missouri was flying the same American flag that had flown over the White House on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941 as well as the thirty-one-star flag used by Commodore Matthew C. Perry when he sailed to Japan in 1853 to “open” the country with gunboat diplomacy. During the ceremony, Tokyo Bay was crowded with hundreds of American, British, and Australian warships and the sky above the bay was filled with hundreds of planes, whereas the Japanese navy and air force had been nearly completely destroyed; and after the ceremony ended, thousands of well-fed American soldiers and sailors disembarked and advanced into a Japan where the majority of people were facing hunger in bombed-out cities.127
The waves of disembarking servicemen hit the newly erected “female floodwall” in Japan’s major cities. Almost instantly, members of the occupation regime patronized the still rather scarce, but strategically well-placed brothels in Tokyo and Kanagawa prefectures. Even members of the U.S. army’s advance party, who had landed on Atsugi Airfield in Tokyo on August 28, 1945, and had been assigned to prepare the arrival of the occupation army, seem to have visited the RAA’s Komachien the very night of the brothel’s opening.128 According to Tanaka Yuki, they probably “found the comfort station on the way from Atsugi to Kanagawa Prefecture, where they had to inspect the port facilities of Yokosuka in preparation for the landing of US marines a few days later.” Tanaka further argues, “The selection of this site—on the highway linking Tokyo, Yokohama and Yokosuka—was a deft business decision by the RAA.”129 Shortly after September 2, when thousands of occupation servicemen began to move further into Japan and started establishing their first military bases, the RAA followed the occupiers and set up recreational facilities close to occupation army camps. After the occupation troops occupied Tokyo’s Tachikawa Airbase on September 3, for instance, the RAA installed a brothel called Fussa with forty-three sex workers in a nearby dormitory building formerly used by the Imperial Japanese Army.130 Close to Tachikawa, also along the banks of Tama River in western Tokyo, a unit of occupiers settled in at another airfield in Chōfu. On the night of September 9, members of the RAA are said to have visited the newly established military camp in a truck loaded with several young women. In his Japan Diary, Mark Gayn, an American and Canadian journalist and the Chicago Sun’s correspondent in occupied Japan between 1945 and 1947, described the scene according to an eyewitness report: “Long after nightfall, GIs heard the sound of an approaching truck. When it was within hailing distance, one of the sentries yelled ‘Halt!’ The truck stopped, and from it emerged a Japanese man, with a flock of young women. Warily, they walked towards the waiting GIs. When they came close, the man stopped, bowed respectfully, swept the ground behind him with a wide, generous gesture, and said: ‘Compliments of the Recreation and Amusement Association!’”131
The occupation authorities themselves initially agreed to the sexual services provided, and some members of the occupation forces even wanted to make it possible for their servicemen to enjoy supposedly safe and sanitary sexual activities. In a letter to Representative Howard H. Buffett of Omaha, Nebraska, Navy chaplain Lawrence L. Lacour, the first U.S. Navy chaplain to arrive in Japan, recalled the early “sexual contact” of American sailors and Japanese sex workers. After medical officers inspected several houses in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, it was proposed at a meeting on September 26, 1945, that “one large house be opened, that it be operated with the understanding that all women were diseased, and that a voluntary system of prophylaxis be available by placing a Navy-operated treatment station within the house. Although some medical officers and two chaplains in attendance protested, it was stated by the senior medical officer that this was to be the policy.” A subsequent, complaint submitted by the chaplains was ignored, and on Sunday, October 7, “the Yasuura house was opened to enlisted men, with geisha houses permitted to accept the patronage of chiefs and officers. Although the number of men on liberty next day was considerably under normal because of rain, I [Lacour] observed, in company with four chaplains and the officer of the day of the military police, a line of enlisted men almost a block long, waiting their turn. MP’s kept the line orderly and permitted only as many as could be served to enter at a time.”132
Although it is somewhat speculative to consider the underlying political or economical intentions of American occupiers, Japanese authorities, and RAA entrepreneurs and pimps, it is—at a first glance—rather remarkable how the first encounter between occupiers and occupied, whether at the ceremony in Tokyo Bay or in brothels organized postsurrender, appears to have been meticulously planned by both American and Japanese authorities. Both, it seems, were eager to avoid more bloodshed after the war had officially ended, and both tried to facilitate—according to their own preferred aims and means, of course—a transition from wartime antagonism to peaceful coexistence in the postwar era. Yet, both occupation and occupied authorities were eager to maintain control and to uphold their respective masculine superiority. Sex and sexual pleasure, or at least the immediate satisfaction of sexual desires, played a significant role in these attempts, and the first encounter between occupiers and occupied was arranged according to specific heteronormative patterns. The occupiers paraded their military, economic, and political power before the vanquished—itself a sexualized performance of militaristic masculine power133—and allowed their personnel, who, as men, and especially in their role as (victorious) soldiers, were allegedly inclined to have sex, to seek sexual adventures in Japanese brothels.134 The occupiers were primarily concerned with the servicemen’s security, health, and morale, and, as will be discussed in detail in later chapters, the occupiers’ military police patrolled red-light districts, medical departments provided prophylaxis against venereal disease, and chaplains offered character guidance in the longer course of the occupation period. Japanese agents under the aegis of the Japanese imperial state, for their part, furnished recreational facilities to erect the envisioned “female floodwall.” They followed every movement of the occupying servicemen in order to satisfy their imagined sexual hunger and thus protect “respectable” Japanese women from raging GIs—and tried to stay in charge despite Japan’s defeat and loss of sovereignty.
As MacArthur announced in his initial speech on deck of the Missouri, the overall goal of occupation policy was a peaceful future for Japan within a “better world” based on “freedom, tolerance and justice,” usually expressed throughout the occupation period in mantra-like repetition of the catchwords democratization and demilitarization. In a broader perspective, as John Dower and Takemae Eiji have convincingly argued, these goals were definitely accomplished, since after 1945, Japan never again threatened its Asian neighbors as imperial Japan’s militarist aggression had in the first half of the twentieth century.135 Nevertheless, the occupation of Japan was more than a mere lesson in American-style democracy, and the anticipated transition from warfare to peaceful liberation was far from going smoothly according to either American or Japanese planning. In particular, the first encounter between occupiers and occupied—but also the occupation period in general—was not entirely harmonious and was marked by high tensions that could erupt in physical and sexual violence. Sexual assault, theft and robbery, and in the worst scenarios rape and murder did occur despite the “gifts of the defeated” (haisha no okurimono), as Masayo Duus has called the sexual offerings—or “sacrifices,” in the language of Japanese ideologues—provided by Japan’s authorities.136 Contrary to the logic of male agents of the Japanese state and entertainment industry, who initiated brothels and other recreational facilities to comfort the occupiers and prevent them from engaging sexually with “respectable” Japanese women, the first encounters did not generate their desired results. And furthermore, the occupiers’ praise of democracy—as in MacArthur’s “freedom, tolerance and justice”—likewise failed to prevent servicemen of the occupation army from attacking and molesting Japanese civilians. For Japanese women in particular, who were the predominant targets of U.S. servicemen’s sexual violence, it is thus rather questionable whether September 2, 1945 truly marks the groundbreaking beginning of freedom and peace, as proposed by MacArthur, or whether it simply meant that a
