Sanitized Sex. Robert Kramm
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an “unsubstantiated anxiety” (kiyū) concerning violence and looting by the occupation troops, and asked the people to calmly return to and protect their workstations, while further instructions would be communicated through the chairmen of the city or village council.24
However, such “demagogy” and “unsubstantiated anxiety,” as the Yomiuri Hōchi called it, did not stop circulating in rumors about the arrival of the occupation forces, and it also resonated in official reports. In Tokyo, a policeman of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department noted in a secret report titled “Urgent problems concerning the tendencies of the common people” from August 20, 1945, that public opinion was dominated by a “seditious uncertainty” (fuan dōyō) based on rumors of violent acts of revenge by the arriving occupation forces. To indicate acts of violence and insults, the author of the report used the terms bōkō and ryōjoku, which simultaneously convey the meaning of rape. The implication of sexual violence is even more obviously manifest by the use of the expression fujo bōkō, which explicitly means physical sexual violence against women.25 Attached to the police report, the file assembled statements by various nongovernmental actors, such as a chairman of the civil defense unit (keibōdan) of Tokyo’s Meguro ward and a factory director from Nihonbashi in Tokyo, to illustrate the “public spirit” (jinshin). The keibōdan chairman reported food shortage and a lack of drinking water, but also rumors about the violation of Japanese women by the “foreigners” (gaijin). The factory director shared the concern that women would be most vulnerable and stated that they would have a much more intense experience of the shame of the defeat of the “one hundred million [Japanese] people” (ichioku kokumin). According to him, the allegedly predictable violation of women by the American and English “beasts” (yajū) would furthermore endanger every Japanese home and family. In sum, both the keibōdan chairman and the factory director reasoned that the Japanese authorities should make preparations against the threat of sexual violence. The appeal reverberated in the concluding remarks of the police report, whose author suggested the establishment of comfort facilities (ian goraku shisetsu) for the occupation troops.26
Politicians, policemen, and bureaucrats of lower rank shared the people’s fears concerning the arrival of foreign troops, but they also shared the anxiety of Japan’s elites about their future and their loss of control over the people. Thus, policemen listened closely to rumors and city councils released warning notices through mass media channels. Furthermore, police and bureaucracy, two institutions highly involved in the promotion of the war effort and the suppression of dissent, switched to producing “defeat propaganda” in the postsurrender period, with the aim of calming the public and preparing them for the postdefeat encounter with the former enemy.27 In particular the Special Higher Police (Tokubetsu kōtō keisatsu, often referred to simply as Tokkō), a highly militarized special police force with the main duties of counterespionage, repression of (mostly left-wing) political activism, and preservation of “public peace” (chian), made arduous efforts to control the postsurrender situation.28 In numerous documents collected and edited by Awaya Kentarō and Kawashima Takamine, members of the Tokkō articulated their ideas about the maintenance of “public peace“ at the end of the war.29 On the basis of the police work’s huge paper trail, Awaya and Kawashima have convincingly shown how the Tokkō was actively preparing a smooth transition to a peaceful postwar order, mainly through surveillance and by filing reports on the current situation for political implementation. Their reports revolved around the overwhelming fear of domestic threats, such as potential peasant uprisings, or envisioned that anarchists, socialists, and communists would take advantage of the chaos and exploit the confusion for a social revolution. Among those political movements, the Tokkō singled out the so-called chōsenjin, Koreans who were often brought to Japan as forced laborers, as a distinctive group and watched them closely.30 Another major threat to the maintenance of “public peace” was believed to come from overseas: the members of the Tokkō also feared the arrival of foreign soldiers, who were—contrary to the publicly propagated ideals in official newspaper statements—thought to endanger the Japanese people and especially Japanese women.31 The end of the war and the postsurrender situation was thus not an insignificant passage in which the Japanese passively waited for the arrival of the occupation forces. It was, rather, characterized by efforts to control the situation. Indeed, those two weeks between Japan’s surrender and the arrival of the occupation forces played no small part in determining the course of the occupation of Japan and can be identified as an historic event in which prostitution as an administrative practice played a significant role.
On the basis of three documents—the Imperial Rescript to terminate the war, a radiogram by the Home Ministry (naimushō) that instructed the police to organize recreational facilities for the occupiers, and the inaugural speech of the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA)—I will highlight how Japan’s authorities’ discursive practices referred to knowledge about hygienic regulation, licensed prostitution, and racial thinking prevalent in imperial Japan and translated it into the immediate postsurrender period. The organization of prostitution and the recruitment of women to work in the newly established comfort facilities further sustain this significant and signifying shift, in which politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, and entrepreneurs of the entertainment business repeatedly articulated their nationalistic desire to protect Japan and its people. Thus, I claim, the conceptualization of prostitution to comfort the occupiers did not only play a pivotal role in transmitting such knowledge beyond 1945, it furthermore continued to influence male-dominated Japanese self-conceptions of nation and culture in the longer postwar period, and led ultimately to the possibility of imagining a “new” Japan.
Conceptualizing the “Female Floodwall”: Kokutai Ideology and Imperial Knowledge of Prostitution
At the end of the war, material and physical devastation as well as psychological despair severely affected everyday life in Japan. Massive and even atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had destroyed Japan’s major cities while mobilization for the war effort, military discipline, police surveillance, and food shortage had created misery, suffering, and hunger. The people, especially those living in Japan’s urban centers, had hardly any access to food and were forced to sell valuable possessions like silk kimonos and jewelry cheaply in the countryside or on the black market to avoid starvation—a phenomenon that came to be known, in a metaphor derived from the image of peeling a bamboo shoot layer by layer, as “bamboo shoot living” (takenoko seikatsu) for the stripping away of all one’s belongings.32 Wartime propaganda, which encouraged fighting for the purity and survival of the Yamato race, echoed the angst about the looting and raping foreign “devils.”33 Yet while Japan’s authorities tried to control the situation and reshape wartime propaganda for a bloodless transition to a postwar order, most people were war-weary and expressed the hope that with the war over, there would now be a chance to start over again; a feeling that, according to John Dower, led most people to “embrace defeat” in the course of the early occupation period.34
At this ambivalent time of suffering and hope there was obviously far-reaching uncertainty about the impending arrival of the occupation forces and the outcome of the occupation itself.35 News from the fiercely fought Battle of Okinawa, which was the only battle in the Second World War with significant Japanese civilian casualties, frightened many Japanese as to what might happen in the Japanese metropole (naichi), and the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki also substantiated fears among the populace.36 Diplomatic and political historians, moreover, have mainly argued that the vague formulations of the Potsdam Declaration issued on July 26, 1945, along with the demands postulated in the Instrument of Surrender and General Order No. 1, reinforced an uncertainty about the future of Japan and its people. All documents were received and acknowledged by Japan’s authorities prior to the arrival of the occupation forces. The Potsdam Declaration, the Instrument of Surrender, and General Order No. 1 stipulated Japan’s unconditional surrender, the forfeiture of its empire, and a military occupation by the Allied powers under the aegis of the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers and his headquarters (SCAP/GHQ), with the subsequent loss of Japan’s sovereignty.37
Yet the civilian population