Sanitized Sex. Robert Kramm
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gender-biased policing of prostitution, who were assisting the occupiers in police raids or as translators, usually keen on supporting the existence and smooth functioning of the sex business. It also shows how Japan’s authorities negotiated the occupier’s directives in order to maintain their own imperial Japanese methods and concepts of regulating prostitution. However, occupiers and occupied parted ways in one key aspect, because whereas the occupiers suspected any Japanese woman of being a potential threat to the security of occupation personnel, Japanese regulators—at least symbolically—were eager to clearly distinguish between lower-class diseased prostitutes and respectable and chaste women from Japan’s middle- and upper-classes.
Venereal disease and its biomedical control are the major topics of chapter 3. The spread of venereal diseases was epidemic in occupied Japan with an average 25 percent infection rate among servicemen and among Japanese civilians, although dark figures were unquestionably much higher. Military physicians and public health officers, the main agents in this chapter, blamed Japan’s supposedly backward health system for the high risk of venereal infection. They put significant effort and resources into the education of Japanese doctors and the reform of public health to increase venereal disease control. Even more significantly, they established a new report system to trace venereal disease contacts, which was encoded as a modern and effective instrument for limiting communicable diseases, and simultaneously helped the occupiers to measure, quantify, and map occupied Japan and its people. To control venereal disease among servicemen, the occupiers’ health departments erected a comprehensive infrastructure of prophylactic stations in which servicemen were compelled to wash themselves after sexual exposure. Prophylaxis as propagated by the occupation military entered the most private spaces of the servicemen’s lives—a place where they cleaned and protected their genitalia—and worked hidden from the gaze of the occupied. The social hygienic strategies developed and implemented by the occupiers often derived from previous knowledge of public health control. Health officers transferred this knowledge to occupied Japan, where it became mingled with existing forms and institutions of public health. However, military physicians and public health officers faced difficulties implementing their ideas, also due to quarrels over jurisdiction within the occupation regime. The military police with its provost marshal claimed responsibility for public health enforcement outside military installations, and advocates of moral reform, mostly army chaplains, criticized the existence of regulated prostitution in general.
The legacy of moral reform and its intersection with social hygienic knowledge in occupied Japan is the main theme of the first half of chapter 4. It analyzes the narratives circulating around sex education and character guidance among occupation personnel. The chapter approaches a terrain in which social hygienists and moral reformers clashed, but occasionally also cooperated, in the sex and moral education of servicemen. It can thus highlight some traces of a longer struggle that existed since the early twentieth century, particularly in the United States, and how these traces extended into the occupation of Japan. During the occupation period, sex education and character guidance incorporated the specific ideals of masculinity, middle-class family values, and white community-building that American Cold War ideology popularized. Military commanders, chaplains, and other military educators propagated these ideals to occupation personnel as the best means to stay physically and spiritually fit to be effective soldiers, responsible fathers, and qualified leaders in the global postwar order. The second half of the chapter discusses morality concerning sexuality and prostitution among Japanese contemporaries. Their ideals were sometimes rooted similarly deeply in longer imperial histories and were also personally and rhetorically tied to global histories of moral reform. For instance, feminist organizations were among the strongest antiprostitution activists in occupied Japan. Some of them were experienced moral reformers, having been members of transnationally organized Christian and/or feminist groups in the prewar period, but they had also been willingly mobilized in World War II by the Japanese imperial state to promote the moral purification that was supposed to sustain the war effort. In occupied Japan, moral debates focused especially on the streetwalking prostitute, embodied by the panpan girl. She became a famous symbol of occupied Japan, representing vividly the revolutionary changes that took place during the occupation period. Others perceived her as the incarnation of moral and social decay. Various commentators, ranging from feminists to bureaucrats and including writers, photographers, social scientists, ethnographers, and journalists, all tackled the issue of street prostitution. Their narratives portraying Japan’s postwar sex workers as sexual dangers or as revolutionary heroines reverberated and reaffirmed masculinized images and patriotic desires for a new Japan.
Indeed, sanitizing sex was a matter of great importance to occupation period contemporaries. This book scrutinizes the various narratives and practices of the sanitization of sex to make sense of the anxiety-ridden discourse that proliferated about prostitution, venereal disease, sexual-intimate relationships, and notions of the body during the occupation of Japan. It helps us to understand the asymmetric power relations between occupiers and occupied, to highlight the tensions and cooperation between and among various actors, branches, and institutions of the occupation regime and Japan’s authorities, and to dig deeper into the occupation period’s history of everyday life.
1
Comforting the Occupiers
Prostitution as Administrative Practice
in Japan at the End of World War II
OVERCOME BY DEFEAT: THE CONCEPTUALIZATION AND ORGANIZATION OF THE “FEMALE FLOODWALL”
Beginning on August 16, 1945, one day after Japan’s surrender in World War II, major railway stations in Tokyo such as Ueno and Shinjuku Station were overcrowded with people hastily boarding trains for the countryside. All over the Kantō area, people panicked and were imagining the horrors of what the “American and English devils” (kichiku beiei) might do to them upon their arrival in Japan. Rumors of violent revenge and rape by the foreign troops spread, reinforcing fear among the population and encouraging women and children in particular to hide from the arriving occupation forces far away from the metropolitan areas. In the most extreme scenarios, some rumors predicted that the foreign soldiers would violate and rape all Japanese women and force them to become their concubines, while all Japanese men would be enslaved, killed, and/or castrated.1
Japan’s authorities were equally overcome by defeat in the late summer of 1945, and their anxiety and uncertainty about the arrival of the Allied occupation forces at the end of the war manifested in official announcements and reports. In Kanagawa Prefecture, where the Allied occupation forces were initially supposed to enter Japan, civil servants of the local administration advised all citizens to evacuate women and children to the countryside far away from the landing areas. The prefectural bureau of Kanagawa released this notification in the national daily Asahi Shinbun on August 19, 1945, and then released all their female staff as a precaution.2 The city offices of Yokohama and Yokosuka and the local train services also discharged all their female employees.3 Members of the Japanese police force reported similar concerns at the end of the war. In most of the few remaining official accounts documented prior to the arrival of the occupation forces, the police sustained the possibility of “violence, looting and so on upon the invasion.”4 In Kanagawa Prefecture, the police also reported rumors predicting violence against women by soldiers of the foreign army and supported the Yokohama city office’s announcement that women and children would be evacuated to the countryside. To safeguard women and children more effectively, the Kanagawa Prefecture police even considered relocating them by force.5
The rumors, official announcements, and reports at the end of the war were all closely related to fears of physical violence, which Japanese contemporaries generally perceived as sexual violence. All statements explicitly indicated that the victims of sexual violence would be predominantly women. Mass media coverage supported such gender-biased fear. Shortly before the arrival of the occupation forces, the Yomiuri Hōchi published an “Alerting Notice About Women and Children Walking Alone,” warning women not to go out alone, especially at night, and asking them to “refrain from wearing licentious clothes.”6 The gendered threat posed by the impending arrival of the Allied occupation forces is deeply inscribed in the records of Japanese bureaucrats,