Sanitized Sex. Robert Kramm
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confident statement, the U.S. occupiers’ general attitude was to arrive in Japan as conquerors. This should be no surprise considering that the United States, dominating the occupation project in postwar Japan, carried its own imperial historical baggage. Since the late nineteenth century, the United States had established colonial regimes with the U.S. military as the major agent of its imperial expansion in the Philippines, but also in other parts of the Asia-Pacific region as well as in Latin America.23 Despite the notion of U.S. exceptionalism’s claim that the United States would never be an empire, U.S. expansionists legitimated American imperial engagement with the benevolence of their civilizing mission.24 Such strong rhetoric had long repercussions. In occupied Japan, American political dominance with its authoritarian military occupation also aimed at a benevolent demilitarization and democratization of Japan. The occupiers’ strong imperialist rhetoric was indeed congruent with colonial discourse to the extent that John Dower has called the occupation of Japan “the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as ‘the white man’s burden.’”25
Yet, as Dower and other prominent scholars of the occupation of Japan have repeatedly emphasized, the American occupiers came to Japan not only as conquerors, but even more so as liberators. The occupation period is said to mark a major turning point in modern Japanese history, with a democratic reboot after Japan’s militarist rule, which had begun in the 1930s, and its imperial aggression throughout the first half of the twentieth century.26 In the wake of the body counts, atrocities, hunger, and political persecution for which the Japanese empire and the war in the Asia-Pacific region rightly became infamous, it is hard to challenge such arguments, and there should be no doubt that the postwar situation was remarkably less devastating than imperial Japan’s war and aggression in the early twentieth century had been. However, Dower’s and others’ interpretation of the occupation’s impact on Japan’s postwar long-term development is a typical narrative in modern Japanese historiography, guided by a teleological ideology of capitalist democracy. For the sake of seemingly objectively verifiable goals, such as winning the war, liberating people from Japanese militarism and colonialism, establishing a democratic system, and integrating Japan into the global economy, the interpretation downplays the postwar ambivalences and asymmetric power structure accompanied by the occupiers’ intervention and perceives instances of racist and imperialist rhetoric—such as Chamberlin’s and MacDermott’s—as mere by-products that were indisputably bad, but supposedly peripheral to the larger success story of the occupation. Sanitized Sex, on the contrary, provides an alternative view and shows how allegedly peripheral racist, gendered, and sexist attitudes in imperialistic poetics were pivotal to occupation policy and the behavior of the occupation personnel stationed in Japan, which can be vividly highlighted in the analysis of the regulation of prostitution, venereal disease, and intimacy.
In Japan after World War II, the occupiers established a militaristic, authoritarian regime, which was officially an Allied operation in cooperation with British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF) from Australia, Britain, India, and New Zealand, but American military and civilian personnel in fact mastered the occupation project. Although there was a considerable number of nonwhite servicemen, African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Indians, the majority of servicemen stationed in Japan as tactical troops were white male Americans. Especially those working in the occupation regime’s staff sections in Tokyo or their local military government teams throughout Japan had a white middle-class background. General Douglas MacArthur headed the occupation forces as the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP) with exceeding influence and power. Since September 1945, MacArthur had been the unquestioned ruler of Japan, often ignoring orders from Washington and, as Harry Harootunian has described him, “shamelessly playing the role of an imperial Roman proconsul lacking only a toga,” while he “effectively ruled the country as a distant colony of a vast empire.”27
Among Japanese contemporaries, the notion of perceiving the occupiers as imperial conquerors evolved relatively late.28 In the early stages of the occupation, most people were war-weary and happy about the new rulers, glad about the occupiers’ food distribution and the end of wartime mobilization.29 Japanese intellectuals, whether liberals such as Maruyama Masao or Japanese communists, welcomed the occupiers as liberators from what they called feudalism and hoped for freedom and democracy. On October 4, 1945, after eighteen years of imprisonment as political prisoners, the communist leaders Tokuda Kyūichi and Shiga Yoshio, for instance, celebrated Japan’s liberation from ultranationalist militarism in their first postwar issue of the newspaper Akahata. According to their Marxist concept of historical materialism, they understood the United States as the embodiment of the progressive bourgeoisie, whose “revolution from above” had destroyed Japan’s feudal emperor system and established a capitalist democracy—in Marxist terms, a historical necessity and intermediary step toward future socialism in Japan.30 In the early course of the occupation period, thousands of ordinary citizens were sending letters and postcards to MacArthur to express their gratitude. Only the conservative elites (and of course many ultranationalists and fascists) were apparently instantly skeptical of the occupiers’ reforms and averse to the occupiers’ presence. Accordingly, Yoshida Shigeru and other conservatives, who actually profited significantly from good relations with the occupiers in the later course of Japan’s postwar period, joked that for them, “GHQ” was not only the acronym for SCAP’s General Headquarters, but also meant “Go Home Quickly.”31
But the occupiers did not leave for years and their presence remained highly influential even after the official end of the occupation in 1952. Thus, in the early 1950s, communists and other leftists also changed their opinion of the occupiers and their policies, and the initial euphoria of liberation turned into an accusation of imperialism. In his 1951 thesis, Tokuda Kyūichi revised his earlier statements and declared the United States an exploiter that had brought only “chains and slavery” to Japan. Especially the structural reforms that had been envisioned early on, such as demilitarization and a thorough land reform, had not been accomplished, and, according to Tokuda, the reforms had not only been put on hold but turned upside down, as was evident in Japan’s remilitarization, the strengthening of conservative elites, and the return to monopoly capitalism during the Korean War.32
Although the rhetoric of Japanese communists who labeled Japan’s occupation a manifestation of imperialism may sound polemical, their analysis did point out key pitfalls of U.S. occupation policy. It is no surprise that Tokuda changed his opinion at the beginning of the 1950s. Around this time, a significant political shift in the occupation period occurred, which came to be known as the reverse course. It describes a paradigmatic change in U.S. occupation policy within Japan and postwar U.S. foreign policy concerning Asia in general by dividing the occupation period into a first phase of ambitious democratic reforms and demilitarization and a second phase of U.S. imperialism and Cold War containment concomitant with Japan’s economic and military recovery. The beginning of the reverse course is marked by the change in SCAP’s labor policy in 1947, by restricting workers’ rights and starting to remove communists and other leftist labor activists and intellectuals from public life. And, around the same time, grassroots reforms such as the redistribution of land ownership had ended.33 Furthermore, American strategists entangled Japan in emerging Cold War thinking and pushed it as an anticommunist ally in Asia. They rebuilt Japan’s military and economy, and sycophantically embraced conservative elites—even those associated with wartime crimes—while systematically purging Japanese communists and socialists.34
However, newer studies on the occupation period and the postwar history of East Asia have repeatedly questioned the explanatory model of the reverse course for several reasons. Although there is little dispute about a paradigm shift in occupation policy, various scholars have raised concerns about an overdetermining reverse course narrative that fails to grasp the continuities in Japan’s imperial power structures between the prewar, wartime, and postwar period. Agents and institutions of imperial Japan in politics, economy, bureaucracy, education, and the police system—who were all to varying degrees actively involved in prewar administration, wartime planning, and postwar management—were often not as fundamentally restructured during the early occupation period as the occupiers and Japanese reformers liked to think.35 Connected to this critique is also the evaluation of the date “1945” in