as well. As an institution of quarantine, the initiators of the postwar recreation program conceptualized prostitution as a protective zone to separate the incoming foreign soldiers and sailors from the Japanese population—and from Japanese women in particular. Their goal was nevertheless to maintain Japan’s sovereignty and integrity after the lost war.5
While most studies on prostitution during the occupation period fail to acknowledge military prostitution as a global phenomenon, Cynthia Enloe has reminded us that prostitution and sexual violence against women during warfare and military occupations are integral parts of any modern military organization’s need to construct and confirm a “militarized masculinity.”6 It sustains the image of the hypermasculine soldier who is trained to follow orders, enforce physical violence, and sacrifice himself to protect his country and its families, and thus appears to be privileged to sometimes transgress boundaries.7 Such a militarized culture of masculinity was highly influential in the wartime military comfort system (jūgun ian seido), the systematic coercion of women into sexual slavery by imperial Japanese bureaucrats, militarists, politicians, and private entrepreneurs. Militarized masculinity would also have been fundamental to the idea of providing brothels and other recreational facilities to comfort the occupation troops after the war—although with a particular nationalistic twist, such as in protecting the kokutai from the invading occupiers.8 One remnant of wartime Japan’s military masculine comfort system can be seen in the status of the lower-class prostitute recruited to cater to the occupiers in immediate postwar Japan; they resembled the colonial subjects who had been forced to work in comfort facilities during the war.9
However, prostitution and its regulation in occupied Japan require more thorough historicizing, and the genealogies of sex work reach deeper into imperial Japan’s past than just the wartime comfort system. The licensed prostitution system in imperial Japan demanded regular health examinations for sex workers and allowed prostitution only in designated red-light districts with licensed brothels. It maintained established hierarchies of sex, gender, and class relations, and allowed the state to intervene in most intimate realms of everyday life.10 The administrative practices of regulating prostitution in imperial Japan were not genuinely Japanese, but “an outgrowth of colonial modernity, the world capitalist system, and Meiji political and economic class formation,” molded through the transfer, appropriation, and adaption of regulatory forms developed in European metropoles such as Paris and Berlin.11 This current of research helps to situate prostitution in a longer history of Japan’s expanding empire in East Asia, for instance by including not only the wartime prostitution system and imperial Japan’s licensed prostitution system, but also the testimonies of the karayuki-san, women who migrated from poor rural areas as service women and sex workers to port cities throughout East and Southeast Asia, and were significant agents of imperial Japan’s globalization and transnational economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.12 Considering the impact of empire in the Japanese history of prostitution also stresses imperial Japan’s legacy in the postwar period and helps us better understand, for instance, the various positions in the lengthy legal debates on the prohibition of prostitution in 1950s that led to the Prostitution Prevention Bill passing the Diet in May 1956, the first national law in Japanese history that officially abolished sex work.13
Recent studies on queer sexualities have justifiably stressed the pitfalls of previous work on gender and sexuality during the occupation period, which focused exclusively on heterosexual relations, mostly between Japanese women and American men.14 This reproduced the notion of sexuality as binary and encouraged the reader to “accept the categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ as self-evident.”15 This is a valid point, and Sanitized Sex is also limited by analyzing the regulation of nonreproductive, mostly short-term, heterosexual relations between male occupiers and female occupied, silencing many of the multiple sexualities and sexual practices prevalent in postwar Japanese society and among the Allies’ military and civilian personnel.16 However, this book traces the sanitization of sex during the occupation period as a key site where occupiers and occupied to the same extent constructed and constantly reproduced a hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity, most popularly through the image of the masculine American soldier and the chaste Japanese woman, setting the binary model of sexuality and heterosexism as standard.17 Indeed, occupiers and occupied alike put much effort and resources into the maintenance of masculine ideals and heteronormative sexualities. On the one hand, they structured the postwar image of a “masculine” victorious America penetrating a “feminine” defeated Japan.18 On the other hand, Sanitized Sex demonstrates that, despite this powerful image, Japan’s authorities nevertheless devoted serious and sustained effort to maintaining their own masculinity. Their attempts to sanitize the occupation period’s sexualities sometimes conflicted, but also colluded with those of the occupation regime, and thus created an arena of competing and collaborating masculine power.
As many, mainly feminist scholars have already articulated, prostitution and its regulation in occupied Japan were deeply gender-biased, with primarily male perpetrators stemming from both Japan’s authorities as well as from the occupation regime. Of course, it is imperative to point out the sex workers’ agency, their room to maneuver as lower-class laborers, and their everyday lives beyond passive victimhood—indeed their occupation as prostitutes.19 Nonetheless, I regard it as an important political issue to emphasize the exploitative mechanisms in the organization, recruitment, regulation, and patronization of prostitution and sex workers. The similarities between the wartime military comfort system and the initial, postsurrender prostitution scheme are striking. The brothel structure and hygienic procedures were almost identical. Furthermore, the discursive patterns according to which Japanese bureaucrats, politicians, and policemen conceptualized prostitution in postsurrender Japan and the terminology they used to articulate it—they referred to brothels and sex work–related recreational facilities as ian shisetsu (comfort facilities)—link postwar prostitution closely to its wartime predecessor. The comfort system was part of Japan’s aggressive war effort, but it was also significantly molded by a patriarchal licensed prostitution system in imperial Japan, which was itself entangled in a longer, global history of prostitution and its regulation. Of course, the occupiers also contributed to the exploitation of sex workers. They reproduced racist stereotypes of the obedient and sexually available Asian woman, and servicemen used sex—paid and unpaid—to satisfy their sexual desires and to affirm their superiority and militarized masculinity. Indeed, occupier and occupied shared a judgmental, pejorative, and sometimes plain discriminatory language in addressing prostitution and sex workers, and their regulatory models both derived from imperial pasts. An analysis of the terminology, regulatory practice, and their negotiation reveals the depth of the occupation period’s asymmetries of power, underscoring how the sanitization of sex was a male-dominated struggle for control, superiority, and subjectification. The trajectories and the complex narratives and practices that shaped regulatory interventions, their effects as well as their limitations within the intimate realm of occupied Japan’s sexualities, are the key issues of this book. Sanitized Sex thus asks: What was happening in and through the conceptualization and practice of regulating sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease, and how did occupiers and occupied negotiate (or not negotiate) such issues? The compelling similarities and connections to other histories of sanitizing sex allow us to read the history of the postwar occupation of Japan beyond a singular national framework and to put it in conversation with a global history of empire and sexuality, in particular with the establishment of a new form of American empire after World War II.
EMPIRES’ ENCOUNTER—IMPERIAL ENCOUNTERS: “COLONIZING” JAPAN AFTER WORLD WAR II?
Mr. MacDermott of the British government, who was the first British official to enter Japan after the war, colorfully described the asymmetry of power between occupiers and occupied, as well as the victors’ confidence. MacDermott had been acting vice-consul in Yokohama in 1934, and returned to Japan on September 1, 1945. In a memorandum to his superiors in London’s Foreign Office, he wired his first impressions of Japan after defeat with remarkable arrogance and sarcasm. After witnessing
