Sanitized Sex. Robert Kramm
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hierarchies of sex, gender, and class relations, and allowed the state to intervene in most intimate realms of everyday life.10 The administrative practices of regulating prostitution in imperial Japan were not genuinely Japanese, but “an outgrowth of colonial modernity, the world capitalist system, and Meiji political and economic class formation,” molded through the transfer, appropriation, and adaption of regulatory forms developed in European metropoles such as Paris and Berlin.11 This current of research helps to situate prostitution in a longer history of Japan’s expanding empire in East Asia, for instance by including not only the wartime prostitution system and imperial Japan’s licensed prostitution system, but also the testimonies of the karayuki-san, women who migrated from poor rural areas as service women and sex workers to port cities throughout East and Southeast Asia, and were significant agents of imperial Japan’s globalization and transnational economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.12 Considering the impact of empire in the Japanese history of prostitution also stresses imperial Japan’s legacy in the postwar period and helps us better understand, for instance, the various positions in the lengthy legal debates on the prohibition of prostitution in 1950s that led to the Prostitution Prevention Bill passing the Diet in May 1956, the first national law in Japanese history that officially abolished sex work.13
Recent studies on queer sexualities have justifiably stressed the pitfalls of previous work on gender and sexuality during the occupation period, which focused exclusively on heterosexual relations, mostly between Japanese women and American men.14 This reproduced the notion of sexuality as binary and encouraged the reader to “accept the categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ as self-evident.”15 This is a valid point, and Sanitized Sex is also limited by analyzing the regulation of nonreproductive, mostly short-term, heterosexual relations between male occupiers and female occupied, silencing many of the multiple sexualities and sexual practices prevalent in postwar Japanese society and among the Allies’ military and civilian personnel.16 However, this book traces the sanitization of sex during the occupation period as a key site where occupiers and occupied to the same extent constructed and constantly reproduced a hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity, most popularly through the image of the masculine American soldier and the chaste Japanese woman, setting the binary model of sexuality and heterosexism as standard.17 Indeed, occupiers and occupied alike put much effort and resources into the maintenance of masculine ideals and heteronormative sexualities. On the one hand, they structured the postwar image of a “masculine” victorious America penetrating a “feminine” defeated Japan.18 On the other hand, Sanitized Sex demonstrates that, despite this powerful image, Japan’s authorities nevertheless devoted serious and sustained effort to maintaining their own masculinity. Their attempts to sanitize the occupation period’s sexualities sometimes conflicted, but also colluded with those of the occupation regime, and thus created an arena of competing and collaborating masculine power.
As many, mainly feminist scholars have already articulated, prostitution and its regulation in occupied Japan were deeply gender-biased, with primarily male perpetrators stemming from both Japan’s authorities as well as from the occupation regime. Of course, it is imperative to point out the sex workers’ agency, their room to maneuver as lower-class laborers, and their everyday lives beyond passive victimhood—indeed their occupation as prostitutes.19 Nonetheless, I regard it as an important political issue to emphasize the exploitative mechanisms in the organization, recruitment, regulation, and patronization of prostitution and sex workers. The similarities between the wartime military comfort system and the initial, postsurrender prostitution scheme are striking. The brothel structure and hygienic procedures were almost identical. Furthermore, the discursive patterns according to which Japanese bureaucrats, politicians, and policemen conceptualized prostitution in postsurrender Japan and the terminology they used to articulate it—they referred to brothels and sex work–related recreational facilities as ian shisetsu (comfort facilities)—link postwar prostitution closely to its wartime predecessor. The comfort system was part of Japan’s aggressive war effort, but it was also significantly molded by a patriarchal licensed prostitution system in imperial Japan, which was itself entangled in a longer, global history of prostitution and its regulation. Of course, the occupiers also contributed to the exploitation of sex workers. They reproduced racist stereotypes of the obedient and sexually available Asian woman, and servicemen used sex—paid and unpaid—to satisfy their sexual desires and to affirm their superiority and militarized masculinity. Indeed, occupier and occupied shared a judgmental, pejorative, and sometimes plain discriminatory language in addressing prostitution and sex workers, and their regulatory models both derived from imperial pasts. An analysis of the terminology, regulatory practice, and their negotiation reveals the depth of the occupation period’s asymmetries of power, underscoring how the sanitization of sex was a male-dominated struggle for control, superiority, and subjectification. The trajectories and the complex narratives and practices that shaped regulatory interventions, their effects as well as their limitations within the intimate realm of occupied Japan’s sexualities, are the key issues of this book. Sanitized Sex thus asks: What was happening in and through the conceptualization and practice of regulating sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease, and how did occupiers and occupied negotiate (or not negotiate) such issues? The compelling similarities and connections to other histories of sanitizing sex allow us to read the history of the postwar occupation of Japan beyond a singular national framework and to put it in conversation with a global history of empire and sexuality, in particular with the establishment of a new form of American empire after World War II.
EMPIRES’ ENCOUNTER—IMPERIAL ENCOUNTERS: “COLONIZING” JAPAN AFTER WORLD WAR II?
Mr. MacDermott of the British government, who was the first British official to enter Japan after the war, colorfully described the asymmetry of power between occupiers and occupied, as well as the victors’ confidence. MacDermott had been acting vice-consul in Yokohama in 1934, and returned to Japan on September 1, 1945. In a memorandum to his superiors in London’s Foreign Office, he wired his first impressions of Japan after defeat with remarkable arrogance and sarcasm. After witnessing the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay on September 2, he traveled to Tokyo on September 5:
The proportion of destruction in Tokyo is probably about the same as Yokohama but it looks worse because it covers such a vast area. It is easier to say what is left than what has gone. . . . The wood and lath-and-plaster houses left very little residue but it is amusing to see the landscape now dotted with iron safes and stone storehouses which have survived. The levelling of buildings makes it a much easier place to find one’s way about in, you can go from point to point by visual direction and there is still not much army traffic about. . . . It is very pleasing to see the enemy capital brought so low but at the same time it is depressing to live entirely surrounded by rubble and ruins and I hope that Personal Department will not condemn any officers to be stationed in this environment for too long!20
“In conclusion,” MacDermott asked rhetorically, “what does it feel like to be with the conquerors in Tokyo?” His immediate response was:
Well, it was certainly a great deal of fun in the first few days when one could ride through the Yasukuni Shrine in a jeep . . . and it is still agreeable to see our planes zooming all day long over the Imperial Palace. But the gilt is wearing off the gingerbread a little in the very depressing atmosphere of so much ruin, and the people of Japan look smaller and uglier and stupider than one had remembered them to be and too insignificant to be angry with, and it is difficult to realise that they ever gave us a stand-up fight and impossible to contemplate their ever being able to do so again.21
Of course, MacDermott’s statement can be dismissed as a singular voice of an aged and nostalgic British imperialist, whose arrogance was grounded in the colonial rhetoric that propagated the West’s supposed civilizational advancement and white supremacy. Nonetheless, MacDermott’s racist rhetoric also reverberated in Allied, and in particular American, war propaganda, which until a few weeks prior to Japan’s surrender was still claiming the West’s (racial) superiority over the Japanese “monkey folk”; the description of the “tiny monkeys” in the veteran Chamberlin’s memoirs is but one example that such cultural arrogance and racism continued to echo beyond