a reference to the ambivalence inherent in colonial discourse, the mission of which is modernity, rationality, and progress, even while it simultaneously enforces clear racial and cultural distinctions and hierarchies in the very practice of colonial rule.48
In a similar vein, forms of racism that were articulated in the relations between Japan and the “West” since the early nineteenth century had also been dominating the war and battles fought between Japan and the United States.49 Koshiro Yukiko has argued in her analysis of trans-Pacific racisms that although open and violent racism was officially banned in occupied Japan to allow a tensionless cooperation between occupiers and occupied, old patterns of racial scaling nevertheless unconsciously structured their power relations.50 In addition, Mire Koikari and Lisa Yoneyama have shown in their studies on feminist movements and the introduction of women’s suffrage in occupied Japan that race and racism closely intersected with gender dimensions in the U.S. democratization programs.51 The gendered political reforms inherited patterns similar to classical elements of colonial discourses, such as the omnipresence of the dichotomy between Japan’s backwardness (feudalism, oppression of women, etc.) and America’s modernity (democracy, women’s suffrage, etc.). And the “maternal” ambitions of U.S. women’s organizations, in their attempt to educate Japanese women in political participation, were similar to forms of imperial feminism in Great Britain,52 whose advocates, in line with Gayatri Spivak’s observation, were basically speaking for rather than speaking with Japanese women.53 The attempt to liberate Japanese women from what MacArthur called “traditional feudalistic chauvinism” was thus not only reproducing gender-specific, but also racial hierarchies during the occupation period.54
The occupation of Japan, with its inherent intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, therefore revealed—in contrast to the Allied occupation of Germany—cultural and social patterns of differentiation that were common in colonial settings and imperial encounters. The occupation of Japan did not result from the expansion of an imperial metropolitan power into a colonial periphery. It was the outcome of a clash of two competing empires with the subsequent disintegration of Japan’s empire and the rise of American hegemony in the postwar era. Moreover, understanding the occupation of Japan as an instance of imperialism and manifestation of (neo-)colonial rule does not mean dwelling in a polemic of anti-Americanism. Nor does it immediately imply following the apologetic arguments of Japanese conservatives, who, according to Dower, “denounce the occupation as an exercise in cultural imperialism and ‘victor’s justice’ that undermined the very spirit and traditions of the country.”55 Perceiving the occupation of Japan as an instance of imperial encounter offers analytical perspectives. In doing so I follow, in a deliberately loose sense, Tony Ballantyne’s and Antoinette Burton’s use of the term empire to signify “webs of trade, knowledge, migration, military power, and political intervention that allowed certain communities to assert their influence and sovereignty over other groups.” Furthermore, “The web’s intricate strands carried with them and helped to create hierarchies of race, class, religion, and gender, among others, thereby casting the conquerors as superior and the conquered as subordinate, with important and lingering consequences for the communities they touched.”56 The notion of the web makes us think beyond fixed borders and boundaries, and, in the case at hand, overcomes the idea of Japan as a national container by comparing and connecting the occupation period and occupation policy to diachronic and synchronous forms of imperial power elsewhere. In particular, the idea of webs of knowledge opens up a perspective on the genealogies of colonial rule and imperial power that shaped the occupation period; genealogies that will be addressed repeatedly throughout the chapters of this book.
The figure of the web also helps underscore yet another aspect of American power in the postwar period and to distinguish it from classical colonialism. After World War II, at the height of its power, the United States increasingly erected a global network of military installations to ensure the global mobility of American troops and enhance U.S. national security.57 The American “empire of bases” did not only enable immediate U.S. military intervention, but also functioned “as a symbol of American power,” despite being driven simultaneously by fear of instability, insecurity, and lack of influence.58 The occupation of Japan was one local manifestation of the global expansion of U.S. dominance in the postwar world and—as I want to argue—a very significant one. Postwar U.S. military occupation, in Japan and elsewhere, obviously departed from former forms of colonialism. Occupied Japan did not become a settler colony, nor did it become part of a formal empire in classical terms, but the occupiers subordinated Japan and its people, and claimed command over Japan’s territory and institutions. According to David M. Edelstein, Japan, like Germany, was a “comprehensive occupation . . . to secure the interests of the occupying power and to ensure long-term stability,” and was thus apparently only temporarily controlled “by another state that claims no rights to permanent sovereign control.”59 This evaluation, however, underestimates the long-lasting effects of the occupying power, such as the continuous economic and military dependency of Japan under U.S. tutelage and the new constitution and legal system imposed to support the occupiers’ primary objective of securing their strategic interests in the region. Moreover, it fails to acknowledge the important point that the occupation of Japan was not a singular case, but part of a larger project to fortify American long-term interests regionally and globally in the postwar period. To account for such long-term effects, theorists of U.S. imperialism would argue—in the line of Carl Schmitt’s notion of the Nomos—that the occupation of Japan was characteristic for a nonterritorial form of imperialism based not on the formal acquisition of territory but on the authoritative administration of space.60 While it is true that the United States never formally incorporated Japan into U.S. national territory as it did Hawai‘i, and that Japan never became an unincorporated territory of the United States as Guam did in 1950, the United States did control these territories, either directly or indirectly, and at any rate systematically through its massive military presence and its claim to indefinite territorial property rights in the form of military installations. In Japan, the presence of the U.S. military was and still is particularly overwhelming in Okinawa. Studies on the U.S. occupation of Okinawa indicate that the occupation of the Ryukyu Islands was from the very outset an enterprise of U.S. empire building during and after World War II. This is clearly apparent in the limited sovereignty enjoyed by Okinawa, which was not reaffiliated with Japan until 1972. Even today, Okinawa is often interpreted as a U.S. military colony struggling with the legacies of two imperial powers: Japan and the United States.61
However, top-down definitions of military occupation and America’s empire-building tend to forget what was actually happening “on the ground,” to quote Mary A. Renda’s study on the U.S. occupation of Haiti, where “cross-cultural dynamics complicated Washington’s script for the occupation.”62 Critics, academics, and activists alike have pointed out the pitfalls of the basing system and analyzed the structural changes the empire of bases brought to local populations. Unjust political interventions into local governments, limited mobility and economic dependencies of whole countries and local communities, as well as the accidents and pollution military personnel cause in neighborhoods near military bases are among the most frequently cited complaints against the persisting U.S. military presence overseas.63 Critics have raised equally compelling questions concerning gender, race, and sexuality within and in the proximity of military bases, often linking them directly to the aforementioned issues. Military occupations had been “littered with men and the spectre of masculinity,”64 to use Glenda Sluga’s words. This might, however, obscure the fact that women were vital agents for sustaining military operations and organizations—whether in war, peacetime, or in between: in military occupations.65 Yet the specter of militarized masculinity created and enforced specific gendered and sexed encounters in the shadow of military bases. The most notorious of these encounters involved the availability and maintenance of commercial sex, which the U.S. military legitimated or at least tolerated for the sake of recreation, troop morale, and discipline, as well as reaffirmation of servicemen’s masculinity. In Asian countries, military prostitution was and is a particularly apparent and alarming current of U.S. military base culture.66
