chapter assembles a variety of tragic testimonies of sexual violence and other crimes from the first weeks and months of the occupation in 1945. This was a time when sex work was practiced more or less along the model of imperial Japan’s licensed prostitution system; albeit the term “system” distorts the very chaotic nature of this period in which—despite their efforts and claims—neither Japan’s authorities nor SCAP were fully in control of the situation. It will be shown how the imperial encounter between Japan and the United States/Allies and their struggle over authority and masculinity translated into the sexual encounters of servicemen and women of occupied Japan. The occupiers seemed rather lax about, or incapable of, controlling their personnel, and many occupation army servicemen took advantage of the sexual opportunities in postsurrender Japan without reservation. Indeed, they engaged not exclusively with those women “provided” by Japan’s authorities, but some—similarly to many white men in colonial settings—perceived all women in Japan as sexually available.138 Sexual encounters, however, could vary, and they ranged from sexual services in exchange for pleasure or payment to the sexual violence of soldiers and sailors who used threats and physical force to coerce women into sex.139 In all available documented cases from this particular period, the practices of sexual violence were deeply gendered, with male perpetrators and female victims of (sexual) harassments, assaults, and rape.140 The aim of this clear-cut gender distinction is not to reproduce rape as an ahistorical anthropological constant, in which, to quote Susan Brownmiller’s classical feminist critique of rape, men deliberately use their “penis as weapon,” and rape is only possible due to “[m]en’s structural capacity to rape and woman’s corresponding structural vulnerability.”141 On the contrary, I am reading Brownmiller’s suggestion that “rape has a history” in a different, de-essentializing way. This involves portraying the power relations in which sexual violence was practiced, officially and unofficially ignored, sanctioned or persecuted, and how it was spoken of or silenced.142
Sexual violence in early occupied Japan was embedded in a culture of what Cynthia Enloe has labeled “militarized masculinity.” Militarized masculinity and patriarchal power structures peaked during the war but still reverberated, to quote Enloe again, in the “militarized peace” of the postwar era and were significant in shaping and facilitating sexual violence.143 Nevertheless, in order to grasp the multiple experiences and dynamics of violence, Thomas Lindenberger and Alf Lüdtke have reminded us to “watch closely” and have called for necessarily thick descriptions of practices and contexts of physical violence beyond meta-theoretical, political, and ideological claims.144 The same holds true for sexual violence.145 However, the documentation of sexual violence is rather limited in the case of early occupied Japan. Sexual violence is for the most part only visible in police reports and memoranda filed by Japan’s authorities, which often overdetermine the everyday experiences of victims and perpetrators and do not permit detailed reconstructions of the incidents.146 Despite the scarcity of source material, the agency of perpetrators and victims as well as political, bureaucratic, and law-enforcing agents of the Japanese state will be taken into account as much as possible. The analysis of sexual violence is thus not limited to the possibility and practice of acts of rape or other sexual assaults perpetrated by men against women, or, as in this case, by soldiers of a winning army against civilian women of a defeated foe; the aim is rather to address the complexity of sexual violence in the context of broader power relations. In early occupied Japan, it was Japan’s male authorities, mainly police officers and bureaucrats of the Home Ministry, but also ordinary citizens, men and women, who developed various strategies to limit, control, dodge, prevent, articulate, and instrumentalize sexual and other assaults by the occupiers. Their efforts in the occupation period’s first days, weeks, and months are at the center of this chapter.
Investigative Measures: Reporting Sexual Assaults
The first sexual assault officially reported after the arrival of the occupation forces occurred on August 30, 1945. In a report, the Kanagawa Prefectural Police stated that at around 11 a.m. in the morning, two U.S. servicemen entered a Japanese house in Yokosuka. “Two American soldiers who were searching the neighborhood invaded the house, left it shortly for five minutes, and upon return one [soldier] forced [a] 36 years old wife . . . into the small room next to the kitchen’s entrance on the ground floor, the other [soldier] forced [her] 17-year-old daughter . . . to go upstairs, both above-mentioned [women] were threatened with drawn pistols and raped.”147 Another, even more violent incident is reported for the following day. On the early evening of September 1, two American soldiers drove around Yokohama City in a stolen truck and coerced two Japanese civilians to show them around the city. Later on, they picked up twenty-four-year-old Miss Y. at Eirakuchō, Naka Ward, and brought her to a U.S. servicemen’s dormitory in Nogeyama Park. At the dormitory, Miss Y. was gang raped by twenty-seven men, who violated her in turn until she lost consciousness. On the morning of the next day, some servicemen took care of her and sent her home.148
Similar incidents took place over the next days and weeks. Tanaka Yuki has gathered 119 officially reported rape cases between September and October, but Masayo Duus has counted up to 1,326, including incidents of rape for the period between August 30 and September 10, 1945 that were not officially reported.149 Duus’s numbers are exceedingly high and there is no evidence documented in the official records supporting her calculations. However, Tanaka’s and Duus’s statistics both indicate a certain decrease of sexual violence after the first few days of the occupiers’ presence in Japan. Nonetheless, a constant ratio of rape and attempted rape of Japanese women by servicemen can be established on the basis of the occupiers’ and Japanese police’s statistical records throughout the occupation period. In Tokyo, for example, the Metropolitan Police Department documented fifteen to thirty cases a month in 1946, and the Eighth Army’s Provost Marshal listed one to ten investigations a month for 1948 in the Tokyo-Yokohama area.150 Of course, these numbers indicate only the officially reported incidents, and most reports on sexual assault and rape described only cases of attempted rape. The official records thus do not reflect the whole extent of sexual violence that actually occurred, and may silence many incidents. One reason might be that rape victims do not typically press charges due to shame or social stigmatization within their community; another one may be the indifferent responses by occupation authorities, who did not pursue reports wholeheartedly.151 Nevertheless, the existing official numbers still suggest that sexual assaults did occur despite the erection of the “female floodwall,” and that both Japanese and American officials were keeping records on the problem. At the very least, this indicates that the occupation period’s authorities were aware of sexual violence and regarded it as a serious issue. Moreover, it is notable that the occupiers’ and occupieds’ statistical data differed, and that Japan’s authorities reported more cases than those actually investigated by the occupiers’ law enforcement and investigative agencies; even fewer cases made it to trial.152
Incidents of sexual violence obviously prompted Japan’s authorities to develop various measures to prevent and monitor assaults on Japanese citizens. Since under occupation law, Japan’s law enforcement agencies had lost all jurisdiction to bring crimes conducted by the occupiers to trial, the Japanese authorities’ ability to intervene was largely limited to collecting information on criminal cases and filing reports with occupation authorities for further investigation. In this regard, the Peace Preservation Section of the still active Home Ministry released a directive on September 4, 1945, to the police departments in Tokyo, Osaka, and all other prefectures. The directive was headed “Concerning the documentation of and counter-measures against illegal acts by American soldiers” and ordered all police departments to report the occupiers’ crimes and sexual assaults in particular.153 Apparently, the members of the Peace Preservation Section were well aware that American civil and military law outlawed sexual assault and considered the reporting of servicemen’s illegal acts to be the most effective way to limit crimes. Incidents could be reported at every police station or kōban, small police stations in Japanese neighborhoods that had been popular since the mid-Meiji period and through which the police managed to maintain a high level of surveillance while simultaneously interacting with residents
