Sanitized Sex. Robert Kramm
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efforts to establish the “female floodwall.” Although most individuals and groups were somehow linked to Japan’s imperial state, the recruitment itself was not planned and executed by a single, central governmental agency. Nevertheless, Japan’s authorities were highly supportive of these mostly private and semigovernmental groups and organizations, helping them financially and encouraging them politically to implement a recreational scheme. Obviously, Japan’s empire had not vanished overnight, and neither had Japan’s imperial agents, some of whom were eager to organize sex work to cater to the occupiers.
An instance of the close collaboration between officials of Japan’s imperial state and private agents of the sex industry is documented for a former amusement and brothel quarter (yūkaku) in Yokosuka, a major port for the Imperial Japanese Navy in the south of Kanagawa Prefecture. Close to the port facilities, a number of privately run brothels (ianjo) had served Japanese sailors on shore leave, which had apparently been a highly lucrative business for Yokosuka’s licensed sex workers (kōshō) during the wartime period. On August 29, 1945, a policeman and a representative of the Home Ministry came to one of Yokosuka’s brothels and, after asking the landlord to gather all sex workers, addressed them in a short speech: “From tomorrow you must partner with the Americans. This is an order coming from the gods (okami kara no meirei), and we all carefully follow them. It is your sacrifice (gisei) that will make it possible for Japan’s women to escape the fangs of American soldiers. Although this is truly painful for you, in the gods’ great will, for the country, and for the dignified imperial family’s princesses, we urge you to shed your tears. You carry the destiny of all Japanese women as a burden upon your shoulders.”90
Following the speech, the women went to their rooms to burn all pictures of Japanese warships and sailors, and the brothel owner posted a sign saying “Welcome, U.S. soldier” at the brothel’s door to greet the new customers.91 The legacy of Japan’s empire was thus twofold; it legitimated the enterprise ideologically and appropriated imperial Japan’s license system to remodel its institutions and labor for their use in the postsurrender period.
Various prefectural police departments engaged autonomously in the recruitment of sex workers beginning right away in August 1945. Although the Home Ministry had ordered them to do so, according to Japanese law, it was actually illegal for the police to organize prostitution. Units of the Kanagawa Prefectural Police Department nevertheless started to round up formerly or still licensed prostitutes and to inspect various locations in the Yokohama area with an eye to their suitability as comfort facilities. Subsequently, they chose an apartment building in Yamashita-chō in Yokohama’s Naka Ward and on August 28 opened it as a comfort facility under the name Goraku-sō.92 In most cases, however, the police merely supervised the recruitment of women and provided logistical support. Since it had been the police’s responsibility to monitor (and occasionally repress) prostitution in imperial Japan’s prostitution license system, they could rely on piles of files on registered sex workers to locate licensed and unlicensed former prostitutes. The police’s filing cabinet, which meticulously archived names, addresses, personal descriptions, photographs, and license records, was a most efficient tool for personally approaching women for recruitment.93 Another advantage of the police’s recruitment campaigns and support was access to food stores and consumer goods such as clothing and blankets, which were strictly rationed during the war years. Additionally, the police gathered commodities like alcohol, but also sanitary products, futons, and other furniture. They attempted to convert factories and factory dormitories that had withstood Allied bombardment into brothels and beer halls, and used police trucks for transportation to furnish the facilities.
In the official histories of local police forces, Tanaka Yuki has found some credible evidence for the police’s involvement. In Hokkaido Prefecture, for example, the police department’s official history revealed: “The recruitment [of comfort women] was carried out mainly through labor brokers, but as it was a matter of great account, police officers were also directly engaged in this task. In other words, officers checked the names and addresses of [formerly] licensed former prostitutes from the list in the police stations, visited the villages in the mountain and seacoast areas where these women lived, gave them blankets, socks and sugar, and asked for their cooperation by persuading them to work again for the sake of the nation and for the [safety] of the Japanese people.”94 In this way, the police in Hokkaido apparently recruited almost 500 women who had formerly worked as licensed prostitutes to work in bars and brothels.95
Some police officers passionately participated in the campaign to establish comfort facilities and even expressed pride in their work. Superintendent Ikeda Hirohiko of the Kanagawa police department, for instance, stated: “Although it was a sort of overstepping the bounds of the Police Act, I thought that, even if I had requested further instructions from Headquarters, I would not have got anything at all. Therefore I made up my mind to deal with the matter myself, on my own responsibility, without making any queries to my superiors. I was prepared to stand between the occupation forces and the Japanese people for general good in maintaining peace and order, and, if necessary, to bear any reprimand.”96 Such initiatives by individual police officers or whole police units also translated into creative yet discriminatory recruitment practices. In prefectures like Akita and Toyama, for example, where the police apparently faced some difficulties mobilizing enough women, police departments and prefectural governments decided to collaborate and share recruited women across prefectural borders with the prefectures of Aomori and Iwate.97
On other occasions, the police depended on privately operating labor brokers, who could themselves rely on their decades-old human and sex trafficking networks. Labor brokers usually maneuvered within legal limbo, because, as Fujime Yuki has argued, imperial Japan’s prostitution regulation “created a loophole through which such trafficking was permitted if based on free will.”98 Such supposed freedom to choose sex work as a means of living, however, was in fact usually coerced through debt dependency. At the time a working contract was concluded, poor young women or their families received advance payment, which had to be repaid to brokers and brothel owners—a system that, according to Fujime, sustained “the hypocrisy that the state’s recognition of prostitution demonstrated its sympathy for the plight of the poor.”99 Such trafficking networks existed throughout Japan, and particularly poor regions in the countryside functioned as reservoirs for sex traffickers to gather young women and bring them to licensed brothels in Japan’s major cities and across the Japanese empire.100 Although it is hard to prove, it is nevertheless highly conceivable that such networks were still active or were reactivated in the postsurrender period. There is evidence, however, that the police issued special travel documents to labor brokers for traveling freely through the countryside where many women and children had fled in order to find food, escape Japan’s bombed cities, or hide from the arriving occupiers. The idea was to offer food, clothing, and shelter, if women were willing to join and work in the newly established comfort centers.101
The police and labor brokers were not the only agents involved in the recruitment of women as sex workers, barmaids, and dancers. As Yoshimi Yoshiaki has shown, some right-wing politicians and fascist organizations were just as active in establishing prostitution for the occupiers.102 According to a report filed by the Tokkō, on September 18, 1945, Sasagawa Ryōzō, the younger brother of the Greater Japan National Essence League’s president, Sasagawa Ryōichi, established the “American Club” in Osaka together with fellow members of the Dai Nippon Kokusui league.103 And Hishitani Toshio, the leader of the Greater Japan Sincerity Association (dai nippon sekisei-kai), a youth organization in Iwate Prefecture fashioned similarly to the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany, was apparently taking an active part in organizing sex workers for the occupiers. A report by the prefectural governor’s office stated that Hishitani “involved himself with the people establishing comfort facilities for accommodating the Allied forces currently occupying the area.”104 Although it is difficult to reconstruct the actual cooperation between fascist organizations, yakuza-gangs, and most likely local police units, Japan’s authorities had a thorough knowledge of who was involved in the project to comfort the occupiers.
The most conspicuous organization in the recruitment of women was the already mentioned Recreation