Sanitized Sex. Robert Kramm
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by the emperor, had quite extensive and existential dimensions. Due to the notion of kokutai as an organic body generated in close connection to public health, hygiene, biological reproduction, and sexuality, Japan’s authorities perceived military occupation after defeat as an intrusion of an alien other. Their anxious articulations of the allegedly predictable contamination of the “national body” through the occupying forces shaped the discourse that emerged concomitantly with Japan’s defeat. They imagined the arrival of the occupation forces in sexual terms and as a sexual “invasion” that would inevitably be accompanied by physical and sexual violence against Japanese women, and thus considered it a fundamental destructive threat to kokutai.
Whereas the emperor’s speech addressed the postsurrender situation on an abstract level, Japan’s authorities in the police and the bureaucracy tackled the fears resulting from the invasion with concrete plans. On August 18, 1945, the Police and Security Section of the Home Ministry released a nationwide radiogram titled “Concerning the comfort facilities in areas where the foreign troops will be stationed” to all prefectural governors and police departments. The radiogram, which was most likely issued on behalf of the bureau’s chief, Hashimoto Masami,56 ordered police units to set up comfort facilities (ian shisetsu) as a preventive action all over Japan where the occupation forces might build their bases. The police departments were further instructed to keep this information strictly confidential, but in the case of its public exposure they were required to announce that the program had been initiated to protect Japanese citizens. In a special note, the radiogram listed specific details for the establishment of the recreational facilities, which included bars, restaurants, cabarets, and brothels. All of these facilities were to be located in special designated areas that were considered off-limits to Japanese civilians. It was the duty of the police to patrol these areas and to monitor all facilities. Furthermore, local police units were ordered to supervise and actively support the establishment of all facilities, and to oversee the recruitment of entertainers, dancers, barmaids, and licensed as well as unlicensed prostitutes.57
In Japan, the concept of regulated prostitution as a modern form defined by police security and public health was first introduced in Nagasaki around 1860 after the encounter with foreign sailors that accompanied the opening of Japan’s relations with Europe.58 The Japanese state installed a licensed prostitution system according to a French and German regulation model that allowed sex work only in designated areas with licensed brothels and venereal disease clinics. The police could easily patrol those quarters, and licensed brothel areas promised spatial boundaries that would limit the spread of venereal diseases as well as social and moral vices.59 Weekly mandatory health examinations to check for venereal diseases were a major aspect of regulating the prostitutes’ bodies, a procedure focused much more on the protection of the male clientele than on the health of the prostitutes. A nationwide regulation compelling sex workers to undergo medical examinations was first introduced in 1876. Health examinations were also compulsory for receiving a license. Local police units, who often cooperated closely with civil servants of the prefectural hygiene boards, issued such licenses. Ever since, prostitution and the licensed prostitution system have received significant attention in Japan’s modern health regime, in which the body of the prostitute was incorporated into modern health, education, and military institutions, where it helped to substantiate the normalization processes of creating a modern Japanese body.60
In the Japanese metropole—similarly to many Western and Latin American countries as well as colonial contexts—debates on prostitution since the establishment of the license system were mostly concerned with public health. Yet in the twentieth century, these debates increasingly turned on issues of sexuality and reproduction, and brought prostitution and its regulation into an even closer relationship to modern nation-state and empire-building.61 Although significant influence was exerted by nongovernmental actors, such as sexologists and moral reformers who campaigned against the state-sanctioned license system by questioning state authority on matters of sexuality, or by criticizing the state for sponsoring extramarital sex, most of these individuals and groups were integrated into the governmental programs of public morality that ultimately enabled the Japanese state to intervene even more deeply into people’s everyday life. Hence, state intervention in the regulation of hygiene and sexuality rapidly intensified during the 1920s and 1930s, and licensed prostitution became a highly politicized topic.62 The regulation of prostitution allowed agents of the state (and those working in close relation to the state) not only to control hygiene and sexual morals, but also to define reproduction, domesticity, and gender roles. From the Meiji period onward, prostitution thereby became an integral part of the modern health and education regime, which stigmatized it as a “dishonorable trade“ (shūgyō) and used it as a reference ex negativo to the ideal of the “wise mother and good housewife” that defined middle-class domesticity.63 In practice, however, Japan’s authorities perceived and maintained prostitution as an institution necessary to control the male sex drive and to guarantee healthy and safe sex for men, while supposedly also saving the daughters of respectable families from depravity and protecting the family in general as a haven of reproduction free of venereal disease.64 Feminists worldwide have criticized this concept of prostitution as underlying a double standard that demanded that women be chaste while allowing men to have extramarital sex.65 Nonetheless, Japanese military and public health officials were particularly keen to regulate the health of the male body that signified—predominantly in form of the manly soldier—the security and expansion of Japan to the “outer” world. Since the meaning of the male body was generated in symbolic entwinement with nation, empire, and war, sick soldiers, and especially those infected with venereal disease, were signs of disciplinary and moral weakness and were perceived as a danger to national security—the tight regulation of prostitution was supposed to limit such risks.66 Moreover, licensed prostitution also enabled the control and rationalization of civilian sexuality. It allowed men to postpone marriage and family planning without renouncing sex, while a double standard demanded that “respectable” women employ their sexuality reasonably, for biological reproduction only. Within this construction of gender, licensed lower-class prostitutes functioned as a mechanism to channel undisciplined male sexual desire and protect middle- and upper-class women to secure healthy and “proper” reproduction.67
However, this modern form of prostitution was not limited to Japan proper, but developed along the lines of Japan’s history of imperial entanglement in Asia. During the second half of the nineteenth century, poor Japanese women, predominantly from Kyushu and later known as karayuki-san, emigrated all over East and Southeast Asia, settling as sex workers in port cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and becoming an integral part of imperial Japan’s transnational economy.68 With Japan’s imperial expansion, the Japanese government became increasingly concerned that the magnitude of Japanese prostitution overseas could damage the reputation of the empire and tried to regulate the transnational sex trade.69 Simultaneously, a license system was introduced in Taiwan, Korea, and China to administer prostitution and the growing Japanese population in Japan’s colonies and overseas settlements.70 In the 1930s, during the Second World War in East and Southeast Asia, measures to control prostitution further intensified: Japanese military officers and bureaucrats organized a system of military prostitution (jūgun ian seido) and forced women, predominantly from Japan’s colonies, into sexual slavery in brothels in garrison towns and along the front lines.71 The military comfort system was supposed to prevent massacres and mass rapes, but it simultaneously functioned as an institution to discipline the Japanese troops and to control their morale and health with sanitary regulations and regular medical examinations of the comfort women.72 Comfort stations (ianjo) were erected not only overseas, but also within the Japanese metropole. In the wartime period, when extramarital social and sexual relations between men and women in general were increasingly controlled and restricted,73 Japanese authorities established ianjo near military bases and centers of the arms industry as part of wartime mobilization. Not unlike their overseas military counterparts, predominantly Korean women were recruited to service soldiers and workers in these ianjo.74 Such measures enforced the meaning of prostitution as a heteronormative institution for social hygienic regulation, which Japan’s authorities deliberately applied