Sanitized Sex. Robert Kramm
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discursive practices reveal that they perceived the arrival of thousands of enemy soldiers as a violent and sexual invasion, and they responded by constituting a discourse that grasped prostitution as a necessary measure for preventing rape and other acts of physical violence. The voices in this discourse were exclusively male, and the predominantly male agents of the Japanese state articulated anxiety about the sexual aggression of foreign male soldiers, echoing their fears of a complete loss of manhood after Japan’s emasculating defeat in World War II.7
This chapter demonstrates how Japan’s authorities, pimps, nightclub owners, and fascist organizations channeled male anxiety and uncertainty at the end of the war into the administrative practice of conceptualizing and organizing prostitution as a “female floodwall” (onna no bōhatei) to comfort the occupiers. Their zealous engagement in taking control of sexual encounters between occupiers and occupied was an effort to masculinize after defeat. Previous research has convincingly argued that the idea to set up a broad prostitution scheme to comfort the occupiers was predominantly aimed at securing the kokutai (national body) rather than at the protection of individual Japanese citizens.8 It is usually claimed that the guiding concepts of the prostitution scheme that was swiftly organized in postsurrender Japan derived more or less solely from Japan’s wartime comfort women system.9 Indeed, many similarities existed between the wartime and postwar prostitution systems, and some commentators have emphasized the structural conditions of patriarchal power relations in imperial Japan, which supposedly provided the foundation for the continuity between wartime and postwar prostitution—embodied mainly by the Japanese state functioning as pimp in the 1940s.10
However, prostitution as administrative practice to comfort the Allied occupiers in Japan after 1945 has to be more thoroughly historicized, for it is also entangled with longer trajectories of patriarchal power in modern Japanese history. The initial plans and the regulations implemented to set up prostitution for the occupation troops did correspond to the wartime comfort system, but they also reveal legacies of Japan’s empire beyond the parallels to the wartime military prostitution system. Concepts and governmental practices of controlling prostitution that had been developed since the nineteenth century, such as the police-controlled prostitution license system involving regular health inspections for sex workers, shaped wartime and postsurrender prostitution. These concepts and practices were closely entwined with intersecting notions of sexuality, gender, class, and race, which had been constitutive for the construction of Japan’s “national body” and its understanding of empire. As I will argue in this chapter, Japanese authorities appropriated these concepts and practices while organizing prostitution after defeat in order to instantly comfort the occupiers. However, their performative discourse in reformulating the ideals of womanhood, domesticity, hygienic regulation, and racial purity and aligning them with Japanese sovereignty and national uniqueness produced new rules of signification in the historic event of postsurrender Japan.11
The Eventfulness of Postsurrender Japan and Threats to “Public Peace”
The occupation of Japan after World War II officially started on September 2, 1945, when Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender. The first occupation troops had already entered Japan on August 28, but in September and October they were followed by the larger body of occupation personnel advancing throughout the country. The subsequent occupation period, which ended more than seven years later in 1952, has been the subject of research in various, often conflicting studies, which have often interpreted the occupation as either a benevolent and successful democratization and modernization project, or as a failure of the U.S. mission in Japan and Asia.12 Others have tried to overcome such one-dimensional perspectives by stressing a reverse course and highlighting the pivotal change occupation policy underwent when the United States turned away from its early policy of ambitious democratization and demilitarization in favor of the hegemonic Cold War containment policy of the late 1940s.13 In most cases, however, there is a shared belief that, first, the occupation that started in 1945 signaled a new, democratic beginning for Japan; second, they place overwhelming emphasis on the U.S. involvement in the occupation of Japan, which has had—for better or for worse—major political, economic, social, and cultural significance for U.S.-Japanese relations until today.14 In any scenario, the significance of the occupation period itself is perpetually marked by the arrival of the occupation forces on August 28 or the signing of the Instrument of Surrender on September 2, 1945, which officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Peace (San Francisco Treaty) on September 8, 1951, which went into force on April 28, 1952. Except for the atomic bombings and the radio broadcast on August 15, 1945, in which the emperor publicly announced the end of the war, the two short weeks between Japan’s surrender and the arrival of the occupation troops is hardly ever mentioned, and if it is, then often only in a footnote remarking on Japan’s devastation at the end of the war.15 Takemae Eiji’s monumental monograph on the occupation of Japan, Inside GHQ—The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy, for instance, acknowledges those two weeks—despite providing a dense description of the origins of the predominantly American occupier’s General Headquarters in the Pacific War—with almost one full page.16 Herbert Bix, who has raised the question of Japan’s “delayed surrender” by scrutinizing the sources and discussions of the imperial government and imperial court leading to Japan’s surrender, focuses only on the elite’s concerns about their own future, and especially those of the emperor.17 And John Dower in his Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, probably the most popular study on the occupation in English, has only some minor remarks on this period: He points out the confusion felt by most people upon hearing the announcement of surrender on the radio, and the frenetic destruction of files and documents by Japanese military officers and bureaucrats who “devoted themselves to obscuring their wartime deeds.”18
Nonetheless, Bix and Dower both have raised the issue of why the Japanese people, despite some minor violent incidents, were relatively docile in accepting the drastic change from wartime mobilization to peacetime occupation. Bix has argued that the emperor and the Higashikuni cabinet, established to handle the capitulation procedures, focused on “controlling the people’s reaction to defeat and keeping them obedient and unconcerned with the question of accountability” for wartime aggression.19 By presenting a simplified top-down power structure in which the Japanese people are portrayed as passive subjects who merely followed their leaders’ orders, Bix reproduces the perennial racist trope of the obedient Japanese masses.20 Dower, for his part, claimed in his study on the Pacific War that the Japanese wartime propaganda helped in the transition process. He refers to Japanese depictions of the enemy as demons, which made use of rather flexible images “deeply embedded into Japanese folk culture.” These images could portray the demon’s “human face” as not entirely evil, but also as possessing powers of protection and change, and thus established features that helped Japan come to terms with its new position vis-à-vis the occupiers after the war.21 Although Dower is well aware of the racist stereotypes of Japan circulating in Western scholarship, quite surprisingly, he himself has depicted Japan in the same vein by articulating an “ahistorical culturalist analysis,” to quote Takashi Fujitani, that dwells on a forced explanation of Japan’s supposedly ancient, unchanging tradition and folk knowledge.22
In any case, Bix and Dower have both failed to highlight the efforts made by Japanese contemporaries to deal with the situation after Japan’s surrender. In various attempts, the Japanese authorities tried to calm the public. An article published by the national newspaper Yomiuri Hōchi on August 20 with the title “Lapsing into dema[gogy] is foolish” aimed to convince its readers that it would be wrong to misjudge the situation at the end of the war on the basis of hearsay. The article cited a long comment by Horikiri Zenjirō, a former diplomat and member of the Kizokuin (House of Peers), explaining that a military occupation is by definition a peacetime operation, and the Japanese people, having no reason to worry, would not “become the scorn of the world by showing unnecessary confusion.” Horikiri agreed that it might not be possible to completely avoid some minor individual misbehavior by soldiers of the occupation army. Nevertheless, because a modern and well-disciplined army was conducting the occupation, and in particular because the occupation was legitimated by the Potsdam Declaration, the security of the postwar order