Prostitution, like most forms of sexual encounter, simultaneously offers and impedes perspectives for academic research. It marks an intersection of various ordering principles such as race, class, gender, and sexuality culminating in one phenomenon, it is targeted by state intervention as well as by civil society activism, and it exists on the outskirts of the global capitalist economy, never freely regulated by supply and demand but obviously by moral, political, and social forces. Notwithstanding these intersections, prostitution is a domain of the intimate, where desires, tastes, feelings, and urges for power, pleasure, lust, satisfaction, but also shame, indifference, and violence are practiced and experienced, often hidden from the scholar’s gaze. Most prominently, Ann Laura Stoler has called attention to the “tense and tender ties” embodied in intimate—usually connoted as private—domains. Within them, the power of governance and/through classification either enters the inner realms of subjects’ hearts and minds, where it affects even people’s affections, and/or can be subverted or dodged by historical agents,83 for instance in domestic spaces, brothel bedrooms, or other niches that can be conceived of as heterotopian “other spaces,” to follow Michel Foucault.84 Either way, addressing intimacy offers angles to scrutinize the “affective dimensions of global and transnational power,” to quote Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, and thus opens perspectives on further and arguably deeper workings of power.85 Approaching intimacy is, however, only possible by cautiously groping at and within historical material to detect traces left behind by the historical agents. While this can result in an overemphasis or overinterpretation of seemingly minor, maybe mumbled utterances, gestures, or overt silences, passing them over in ignorance would mean missing chances to reconstruct insights into often marginalized—yet, at least for the historical actors themselves, existential—dimensions of subjectivity.
The way sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease were regulated during the occupation of Japan between 1945 and 1952 bears striking resemblances to previous imperial settings. Sexual opportunities for servicemen in occupied Japan were numerous, and soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the occupation forces heavily patronized bars, clubs, and brothels that offered sexual services. Occupation authorities, but also political elites and the publics in Washington, London, and Canberra heatedly debated the existence and form of prostitution, and addressed the degree, means, and aims of intervention. Occupiers and occupied alike, though following different agendas, raised concerns about the threat prostitution would pose or the stability it would bring to the security, health, and morale of the occupation troops and the civilian Japanese population. Prostitution and its regulation thus constituted a pivotal “contact zone”86 for both occupiers and occupied to negotiate, reproduce, but occasionally also undermine the asymmetric power relations between and among them.
Methodologically, in its attempt to reconstruct the occupation period’s “microphysics of power,”87 Sanitized Sex is mainly a discourse analysis, but it is also attentive to the historical agents’ practices and experiences in their everyday lives—experiences that, at times, transgress discursive boundaries.88 It borrows much from the perspectives and methods developed by various advocates of postcolonial studies, in particular their insights into the operations of power as they relate to race, class, gender, and sexuality, and their insistence on drawing a connection between local historical variety, agency and experience, and broader, global processes of (imperial) history.89 On the one hand, a focus on the agency of both occupiers and occupied does not identify the occupiers as a homogeneous body of rule and the occupied as passive subjects of power.90 To overcome a binary of ruling versus subjection or resistance, however, it is important to highlight the various levels of cooperation, complicity, ignorance, rejection, and tension between and among occupiers and occupied, and to pay attention to significant nuances in what Alf Lüdtke has called “ruling as social praxis” (Herrschaft als soziale Praxis).91 This I will demonstrate foremost with a focus on both occupation and occupied authorities’ efforts to sanitize sex, their masculinized and masculinizing competition and complicity in the attempts to regulate sexual behavior and sexual encounter. Civil society groups, journalists, physicians, academics, as well as sex workers and their clients, male and female, participated in this arena, contributing to establish and reaffirm sexualized subjectivities and gendered hierarchies, in particular the privileges of primarily white middle-class heterosexual men.92 On the other hand, the chapters of this book trace transnational circulations of knowledge and practices of governance that were translated into the occupation of Japan. The transnationality of the occupation project, however, was not limited to a bilateral encounter between America and Japan. Sanitized Sex integrates trajectories of Japan’s, America’s, and Europe’s empires that are significant for the occupation of Japan, while also providing comparative glimpses of the postwar occupation experiences in Korea.93
In order to engage in the complex interplay of discourse and practice, and the transnational circulation of knowledge and governance, the book reads through the occupation period’s records, which were predominantly compiled by low- to mid-level administrators of both the occupation regime and Japan’s authorities. Sanitized Sex draws on various sources, covering memoranda, reports, and petitions composed by occupation officials, Japanese administrators, and civil society activists. It also includes veterans’ narratives, memoirs of servicemen stationed in Japan, and visuals from the occupation period. Analyzing this rich variety of historical materials with a view to the three major themes of security, health, and morality allows me to organize the book not solely chronologically but also thematically. This outline helps grasp and highlight the various overlapping yet sometimes conflicting concepts and practices in regulating sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease. Moreover, it enables a reading of the available source material as narratives in different settings and a contextualization of certain positions among occupiers and occupied within their distinct yet intertwined imperial histories. Perceiving these records both as bureaucratic files—the prevailing media of official communication between occupier and occupied—and as narratives unravels marginalized, often silenced and hidden spots of everyday experiences by American and Japanese military commanders, (military) police officers, public health administrators, and educators. In addition, appreciating the narrative of official documents enables one to bridge a hierarchization of sources between official and unofficial accounts, and brings memoranda, directives, and reports in dialogue with other forms of historical material, such as veterans’ memoirs, personal letters, feminist petitions, newspaper articles, literary works, academic surveys, and also visuals like photographs, cartoons, and campaign posters. This covers a wide range of commentators on the issue of sex, sex work, and (its supposedly inevitable underside) venereal disease, and detects the contemporaries’—and sometimes retrospectively recorded—poetics of “truth” in intimacy during the occupation period.94 However, the materials available hardly capture the voices of sex workers, which are thus more or less silenced throughout this study. Clients, observers, and regulators only occasionally provide angles that allow for a reconstruction of sex workers’ everyday lives. Nevertheless, the variety of sources at hand and their close reading opens up perspectives on fuzzy and sometimes inconclusive dimensions of the encounter between and among occupiers and occupied, and the analysis of the narratives and practices of regulating sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease attempts to approximate the occupation period’s inscrutable terrain of intimacy.95
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Chapter 1 begins by tackling the imaginary encounter of occupier and occupied in the postsurrender period, and highlights the eventfulness and significance of the last two weeks in August 1945, between Japan’s defeat and the arrival of the occupation forces. Although it precedes the subsequent chapters chronologically, the first half of chapter 1 addresses more than the prelude to the real occupation. It looks at the ways Japan’s authorities conceptualized prostitution to build a “female floodwall” to comfort the occupiers and to keep them separated from the Japanese population and from Japanese women in particular. Japanese politicians, police officers, bureaucrats, and advocates of
