Sanitized Sex. Robert Kramm
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and on Sunday, October 7, “the Yasuura house was opened to enlisted men, with geisha houses permitted to accept the patronage of chiefs and officers. Although the number of men on liberty next day was considerably under normal because of rain, I [Lacour] observed, in company with four chaplains and the officer of the day of the military police, a line of enlisted men almost a block long, waiting their turn. MP’s kept the line orderly and permitted only as many as could be served to enter at a time.”132
Although it is somewhat speculative to consider the underlying political or economical intentions of American occupiers, Japanese authorities, and RAA entrepreneurs and pimps, it is—at a first glance—rather remarkable how the first encounter between occupiers and occupied, whether at the ceremony in Tokyo Bay or in brothels organized postsurrender, appears to have been meticulously planned by both American and Japanese authorities. Both, it seems, were eager to avoid more bloodshed after the war had officially ended, and both tried to facilitate—according to their own preferred aims and means, of course—a transition from wartime antagonism to peaceful coexistence in the postwar era. Yet, both occupation and occupied authorities were eager to maintain control and to uphold their respective masculine superiority. Sex and sexual pleasure, or at least the immediate satisfaction of sexual desires, played a significant role in these attempts, and the first encounter between occupiers and occupied was arranged according to specific heteronormative patterns. The occupiers paraded their military, economic, and political power before the vanquished—itself a sexualized performance of militaristic masculine power133—and allowed their personnel, who, as men, and especially in their role as (victorious) soldiers, were allegedly inclined to have sex, to seek sexual adventures in Japanese brothels.134 The occupiers were primarily concerned with the servicemen’s security, health, and morale, and, as will be discussed in detail in later chapters, the occupiers’ military police patrolled red-light districts, medical departments provided prophylaxis against venereal disease, and chaplains offered character guidance in the longer course of the occupation period. Japanese agents under the aegis of the Japanese imperial state, for their part, furnished recreational facilities to erect the envisioned “female floodwall.” They followed every movement of the occupying servicemen in order to satisfy their imagined sexual hunger and thus protect “respectable” Japanese women from raging GIs—and tried to stay in charge despite Japan’s defeat and loss of sovereignty.
As MacArthur announced in his initial speech on deck of the Missouri, the overall goal of occupation policy was a peaceful future for Japan within a “better world” based on “freedom, tolerance and justice,” usually expressed throughout the occupation period in mantra-like repetition of the catchwords democratization and demilitarization. In a broader perspective, as John Dower and Takemae Eiji have convincingly argued, these goals were definitely accomplished, since after 1945, Japan never again threatened its Asian neighbors as imperial Japan’s militarist aggression had in the first half of the twentieth century.135 Nevertheless, the occupation of Japan was more than a mere lesson in American-style democracy, and the anticipated transition from warfare to peaceful liberation was far from going smoothly according to either American or Japanese planning. In particular, the first encounter between occupiers and occupied—but also the occupation period in general—was not entirely harmonious and was marked by high tensions that could erupt in physical and sexual violence. Sexual assault, theft and robbery, and in the worst scenarios rape and murder did occur despite the “gifts of the defeated” (haisha no okurimono), as Masayo Duus has called the sexual offerings—or “sacrifices,” in the language of Japanese ideologues—provided by Japan’s authorities.136 Contrary to the logic of male agents of the Japanese state and entertainment industry, who initiated brothels and other recreational facilities to comfort the occupiers and prevent them from engaging sexually with “respectable” Japanese women, the first encounters did not generate their desired results. And furthermore, the occupiers’ praise of democracy—as in MacArthur’s “freedom, tolerance and justice”—likewise failed to prevent servicemen of the occupation army from attacking and molesting Japanese civilians. For Japanese women in particular, who were the predominant targets of U.S. servicemen’s sexual violence, it is thus rather questionable whether September 2, 1945 truly marks the groundbreaking beginning of freedom and peace, as proposed by MacArthur, or whether it simply meant that a new type of conflict had arrived at their doorsteps.137
This chapter assembles a variety of tragic testimonies of sexual violence and other crimes from the first weeks and months of the occupation in 1945. This was a time when sex work was practiced more or less along the model of imperial Japan’s licensed prostitution system; albeit the term “system” distorts the very chaotic nature of this period in which—despite their efforts and claims—neither Japan’s authorities nor SCAP were fully in control of the situation. It will be shown how the imperial encounter between Japan and the United States/Allies and their struggle over authority and masculinity translated into the sexual encounters of servicemen and women of occupied Japan. The occupiers seemed rather lax about, or incapable of, controlling their personnel, and many occupation army servicemen took advantage of the sexual opportunities in postsurrender Japan without reservation. Indeed, they engaged not exclusively with those women “provided” by Japan’s authorities, but some—similarly to many white men in colonial settings—perceived all women in Japan as sexually available.138 Sexual encounters, however, could vary, and they ranged from sexual services in exchange for pleasure or payment to the sexual violence of soldiers and sailors who used threats and physical force to coerce women into sex.139 In all available documented cases from this particular period, the practices of sexual violence were deeply gendered, with male perpetrators and female victims of (sexual) harassments, assaults, and rape.140 The aim of this clear-cut gender distinction is not to reproduce rape as an ahistorical anthropological constant, in which, to quote Susan Brownmiller’s classical feminist critique of rape, men deliberately use their “penis as weapon,” and rape is only possible due to “[m]en’s structural capacity to rape and woman’s corresponding structural vulnerability.”141 On the contrary, I am reading Brownmiller’s suggestion that “rape has a history” in a different, de-essentializing way. This involves portraying the power relations in which sexual violence was practiced, officially and unofficially ignored, sanctioned or persecuted, and how it was spoken of or silenced.142
Sexual violence in early occupied Japan was embedded in a culture of what Cynthia Enloe has labeled “militarized masculinity.” Militarized masculinity and patriarchal power structures peaked during the war but still reverberated, to quote Enloe again, in the “militarized peace” of the postwar era and were significant in shaping and facilitating sexual violence.143 Nevertheless, in order to grasp the multiple experiences and dynamics of violence, Thomas Lindenberger and Alf Lüdtke have reminded us to “watch closely” and have called for necessarily thick descriptions of practices and contexts of physical violence beyond meta-theoretical, political, and ideological claims.144 The same holds true for sexual violence.145 However, the documentation of sexual violence is rather limited in the case of early occupied Japan. Sexual violence is for the most part only visible in police reports and memoranda filed by Japan’s authorities, which often overdetermine the everyday experiences of victims and perpetrators and do not permit detailed reconstructions of the incidents.146 Despite the scarcity of source material, the agency of perpetrators and victims as well as political, bureaucratic, and law-enforcing agents of the Japanese state will be taken into account as much as possible. The analysis of sexual violence is thus not limited to the possibility and practice of acts of rape or other sexual assaults perpetrated by men against women, or, as in this case, by soldiers of a winning army against civilian women of a defeated foe; the aim is rather to address the complexity of sexual violence in the context of broader power relations. In early occupied Japan, it was Japan’s male authorities, mainly police officers and bureaucrats of the Home Ministry, but also ordinary citizens, men and women, who developed various strategies to limit, control, dodge, prevent, articulate, and instrumentalize sexual and other assaults by the occupiers. Their efforts in the occupation period’s first days, weeks, and months are at the center of this chapter.
Investigative Measures: Reporting Sexual Assaults
The first