high prevalence of prostitution near U.S. military bases in the Asia-Pacific region is inseparably intertwined with the colonial past and present that shaped the region. As Naoki Sakai suspects, “the U.S. military’s dominance (in that region) inherited many aspects of the system of colonial dominance from the Japanese Empire,” one aspect being that parts of “the Japanese comfort station system were adopted and conserved in the U.S. military’s management of Asia.”67 Indeed, the current militarization of the Asia-Pacific region is what Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho have called an “extension of colonialism,” because U.S. power, spearheaded by its military with its net of bases, appropriated former colonial power structures of the Japanese Empire after Japan’s defeat in World War II.68 The U.S. military appropriated and continued to use former Japanese military bases such as Sasebo in Japan and Chinhae in Korea, and women in Japan, Korea, but also the Philippines, Guam, and other Pacific Islands continued to work for the recreation of soldiers—not always, but quite often in the sex business. Equally telling, the Americans applied an imperialistic rhetoric of liberation similar to that of their Japanese predecessors: whereas Japanese colonialists called for Pan-Asian solidarity to shake off the yoke of white, Western colonialism, U.S. occupiers popularized their intervention in the Asia-Pacific region with the notion that they were freeing the region from Japanese militarism and colonization.69 This legacy of Japanese imperialism and its continuity under U.S. hegemony—with the might of the U.S. military presence in Asia—also creates contemporary and future obstacles for the seemingly impossible process of decolonization in countries like Korea and Taiwan.70 The myths of liberation as well as the maintenance of military prostitution are both obvious examples of the imperial baggage the Asia-Pacific region has not yet overcome, and they vividly reveal the prevailing hierarchies between occupying powers and local people, and how the asymmetries of power intersect with issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Following the lead of Mary Louise Roberts’s arguments on the U.S. military’s intervention in World War II Europe, Sanitized Sex also investigates “What Soldiers Do,” placing the often marginalized issues of regulating sex, sexual relations, and the behavior of soldiers of the occupying power at the center of its analysis to better understand the struggle over the management of sex as a struggle for authority.71 However, the Asia-Pacific theater of war and the subsequent occupation of Japan differed starkly in key aspects from America’s European theater and its aftermath in the occupation of Germany. Japan was literally dominated by the United States and was not divided into several spheres of influence like occupied Germany. Racial hierarchies were obviously different, but connected to them were issues of gender and sexuality rooted in Asia’s colonial histories. The occupiers had their own experiences in previous (and ongoing) imperial interventions in Asia and could thus continue to step into the footprints of longstanding orientalist, racialized, gendered, and sexualized images of Japan and its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region. Yet longer continuities and prevailing cultural elements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism outside the Asia-Pacific region were also highly significant for the occupiers’ postwar management of Japan and the Asia-Pacific region. The focus on the occupation period’s everyday experiences and, arguably, its most intimate ones—the sexual encounters between occupier and occupied—allows these continuities to be highlighted. It enables an analysis of the neocolonial conditions of postwar Japan by shedding light on circumstances that differed from direct colonial rule, circumstances that required even the regulation of sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease to be constantly negotiated between occupation authorities and local administrations. For example, brothels and entertainment districts had to be patrolled by U.S. military police and Japanese police officers collaboratively, the occupiers’ medical surveillance of venereal disease had to be established in cooperation with local public health administrators, and the occupation regime had to invest significant time and resources to maintain its reputation as a democratic, modern, and progressive authority, which brawling, harassing, whoring, and infection-carrying servicemen threatened to undermine. Hence, Sanitized Sex proposes to think of the occupation of Japan as a relay of older forms of imperialism to the Cold War era and a laboratory for future occupations in the postwar period. This does not mean looking at the occupation of Japan as a blueprint for contemporary occupations;72 the claim is, rather, that the occupation of Japan was a very significant event in the twentieth-century process by which the United States built an empire of bases. Indeed, the occupation of Japan initiated a process that normalized the enduring presence and dominance of the U.S. military in the Asia-Pacific region, and arguably worldwide. And one might suspect that the occupiers did adjust, learn, and develop particular strategies for, and confidence in, their neocolonial rule in Japan—strategies that they either went on to transfer to other occupation projects, or with which they at least created a pool of experience for future military occupiers.
SANITIZED SEX: METHODS AND MATERIALS
Imperial encounters and the asymmetries of power in colonial settings have been intriguingly illustrated in previous scholarship by focusing on the body, sexuality, and prostitution. Issues of the body are numerous: the physical well-being of settlers, soldiers, administrators, but also of whole populations in colonial societies was of much concern and debate within empires, and metropolitan agencies and colonial states put an immense amount of effort and resources into the establishment of modern health regimes to sustain imperial power that—to use David Arnold’s words—colonized the body.73 Bodily health and integrity often functioned as a vehicle to demonstrate the colonizer’s supposed civilizational advancement over indigenous societies, but also to demarcate wider mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.74 Distinctions of race and class were arguably the most visible and notorious markers for the “rule of colonial difference,”75 which nevertheless intersected with other ordering principles and had to be constantly negotiated in a “politics of difference” to adjust the boundaries between colonizer and colonized.76 No less significantly, gender and sexuality were central to a politics of the body that could stabilize and threaten imperial orders. Colonial regimes and their agents articulated and visualized the discovery of distant shores in gendered and sexualized terminology, they dedicated much energy to maintaining heterosexual cultures, they ascribed colonizers and colonized alike with specific yet variable tropes of masculinity and femininity, and they closely monitored the reproduction of colonial settlers due to their fears that mixed-race children would undermine racial boundaries, colonial rule, and ultimately civilizational development.77
The sanitation of sex, the regulation of reproductive and nonreproductive sexualities, sexual encounters, and venereal diseases along moral, hygienic, gendered, and racial codes, was a core issue of the modern biopolitical management of bodies, both in imperial metropoles and colonial peripheries.78 Although contemporary debates also addressed long-term liaisons such as marriage or concubinage, the short-term satisfaction of sexual desires caused just as much fuss, most notably in the form of commercial sex. White men, especially, fantasized about the sexual opportunities in nonwhite countries, while others, such as moral reformers and feminist activists, made a scandal of the globally widespread organized provision of female sexuality to satisfy men’s sexual lust.79 Globally, since the nineteenth century and increasingly in the twentieth century, agents of the state as well as civil society activists either considered prostitution an important institution to directly secure social stability, control public health, and maintain gender roles and family ties, or critically debated the regulation of prostitution—both approaches ultimately helped to expand and consolidate modern state- and empire-building projects in most Asian, Latin American, and Western countries.80 In colonial settings, some colonial administrations favored regulated prostitution or concubinage to manage the colonizers’ sexuality and health, and also to maintain racial boundaries, family stability, and economic productivity, by which the supposedly uncivilized native prostitute not only provided sexual services, but also served as an archetype of alleged nonwhite degradation to legitimate the need for colonial rule.81 Commercial sex itself was definitely not a new phenomenon. Yet, newly implemented hygienic regulations and new modes of representing sex workers cast prostitution as a modern institution for administering a population’s security, health, morale, and sexuality, and it thus became a
