Chamberlin recalls, “we soon found ourselves entering a Japanese abode which turned out to be one of ill repute.” In quite some detail Chamberlin describes his first sexual encounter in a brothel in occupied Japan:
[W]e were led into a room where there were several very cute young Japanese girls all dolled out in pretty kimonos and attractive make up. . . . Pee Wee was hot to trot. Malek was agreeable. I didn’t want to kill the joy. So we followed the mamasan’s directions and each picked a girl and went into small private rooms. The floor covering was of straw mat material. The room was clean and bare. There was no bed. On the floor was a cotton quilted pad. A box of Kleenex completed the furnishings.
There was no foreplay. This was strictly business to them. My girl helped me undress and quickly slipped out of her kimono. We did not kiss. There was no fondling except her taking my already ready penis in her little hand to guide it into her. She moved deftly in unison with my thrusts as if she was enjoying it. I came quickly as usual. Our racial differences dissolved in the liquid passion of my sperm. Being in her felt good so I continued thrusting until I came again.1
Sex sold well in occupied Japan and helped many servicemen like Chamberlin forget their dislocation far away from home and family while realizing orientalist fantasies through the joy of cheap and available sex, and—despite Chamberlin’s belief in dissolving racial differences—nourishing racist privileges. After World War II, in the immediate postsurrender period in the late summer of 1945, Japanese authorities had, in cooperation with private entrepreneurs of Japan’s entertainment industry, initiated a broad recreation scheme with brothels, cabarets, and nightclubs to comfort the Allied occupiers. In Tokyo alone, between fifty and seventy thousand sex workers catered to predominantly American servicemen during the occupation period. According to the estimates of the Japanese journalist Sumimoto Toshio, the hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen stationed in Japan spent $185 million on recreation, of which “almost half” passed through the hands of sex workers.2 Prostitution was thus generating high revenues during the seven-year-long occupation period, and was by some accounts even believed to be an essential economic factor in the reconstruction of postwar Japan.3
Since the arrival of the occupation forces in 1945, foreign servicemen heavily frequented the brothels and other recreational facilities Japan’s authorities had provided for them. Half a year later, in early 1946, however, the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP) released an ordinance abolishing licensed prostitution. Celebrated as a milestone of democracy that would liberate Japanese women from Japanese male chauvinism, the abolition of prostitution more significantly aimed at limiting the spread of venereal disease, which took on epidemic proportions among the occupation personnel—almost one in four servicemen was infected with one or more venereal diseases. Though the abolition of licensed prostitution did not prohibit sex work per se, it illegalized sex trafficking and binding contracts between brothel owners or pimps and sex workers. Obviously, prostitution did not vanish, but rather flourished, either in privately run brothels, cabarets, bars, and “special restaurants” (tokushu inshokuten), or as decentralized street prostitution in parks, railway underpasses, and nearby occupation army camps.
Just a stone’s throw away from the Imperial Palace, for instance, scenes like the one described by Chamberlin were part of everyday life in one of the many red-light districts sprawling across occupied Japan. Under the bridges of Yurakucho Station, along the Ginza, and in Hibiya Park, sex workers offered their bodies to servicemen of the occupation army, who could cheaply consume sex on what in the mid-1940s was an almost open sex market. They provided quick sexual services for a package of American cigarettes in brothels, but also quite publicly in the backs of military jeeps or around the corner in the next gloomy alley. As rumor has it, commercial sexual activity was so widespread that even the moat of the Imperial Palace—which separated the emperor, who had once been worshipped as a god, from Japan’s new patron operating in the Dai-Ichi Seimei Building, in which SCAP established its headquarters—had to be cleaned weekly to remove all the used condoms chucked into its water.4
The occupiers as well as the occupied developed various strategies to handle the vast prevalence of sex, sex work, and venereal disease in occupied Japan. Military commanders, (military) police officers, military surgeons and civilian physicians, public health administrators, military chaplains, but also welfare workers and feminist activists implemented regulatory efforts to limit venereal disease. They all predominantly accused sex workers, but sometimes also women in general, of spreading venereal disease, which the occupiers considered a danger to the security, a hazard to the health, and an attack on the morality of its personnel. The occupied, for their part, were particularly interested in protecting reproductive sexualities and the respectability of middle- and upper-class women. Their multiple, often complicit and overlapping, but also at times conflicting interventions focused on the sexual encounter between occupiers and occupied—an endeavor to target the intimacy of both occupation army servicemen and ordinary people of occupied Japan alike.
The various regulatory attempts to sanitize sexuality during the occupation period are at the center of this book. An analysis of the narratives and practices circulating around the sanitization of sex between occupiers and occupied provides angles to unravel the complex relations and dynamics of power during the occupation period. Close attention to the conceptualization and actual implementation of regulatory techniques underscores, first, the historically specific hierarchies of race, class, and gender that occupiers and occupied negotiated on the basis of sex. Sanitized Sex thus depicts the multiple layers of agency between and among occupiers and occupied while paying particular attention to the mostly male, low- and middle-ranking American and Japanese administrators. On the one hand, it explicates the overall male-dominated character of the occupation of Japan as enforced by the occupation regime and Japanese authorities, who both sought to control the sexual behavior of occupation servicemen and women of occupied Japan. Their struggle over the control of men, women, and their sexualities was a struggle to seize authority by establishing and maintaining male dominance in the wake of victory and defeat. On the other hand, a focus on men’s and women’s bodies and the bodily regimes seeking to regulate them brings attention to the dimension of intimacy. This encompasses the sexual relations mostly between the occupation servicemen and the women of occupied Japan, but furthermore uncovers predominantly male anxieties as a driving force for controlling not only sexuality, but also the multiple intimate relations of the regulated to their own bodies. Moreover, the intimate allows glimpses at the receiving end of regulatory interventions, making it possible to appraise their effectiveness and to illuminate the historical actors’ often hidden (re-)actions. Second, a close reading of the regulatory practices reveals longer trajectories of the occupation period. It highlights the continuities of local traditions of sex management (American and Japanese) as well as similarities to other, previous intimate imperial encounters and their regulation. It thus points toward a transnational circulation and appropriation of certain forms of knowledge and governance and the impact they had on the occupation of Japan. Third, the focus on the regulation of sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease explores the various temporal and spatial coordinates of the occupation period, and indicates the significance such regulations have had on the political, social, and cultural formation of postwar Japan, U.S.-Japanese relations, and the Asia-Pacific region. Sex was indeed not peripheral, but a key issue during the occupation of Japan. That said, Sanitized Sex is more than a book about the regulation of sex between occupiers and occupied in postwar Japan. Rather, it offers a reading of the intimacies of empires—defeated and victorious.
PROSTITUTION AND OCCUPATION—PROSTITUTION AS OCCUPATION
Sanitized Sex is indebted to the rich insights previous works have furnished on intimacy, sexuality, prostitution, venereal disease, and its regulation in imperial, wartime, and postwar Japan. The erection of brothels and other recreational facilities in the immediate postsurrender period was not planned by Japan’s authorities to protect individuals from the wrath of a few looting and raping GIs. The establishment of recreation for the occupying foreign servicemen, the centerpiece of which was formed by the comforts of prostitution, aimed at securing the Japanese
