Sanitized Sex. Robert Kramm
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“contact zone”86 for both occupiers and occupied to negotiate, reproduce, but occasionally also undermine the asymmetric power relations between and among them.
Methodologically, in its attempt to reconstruct the occupation period’s “microphysics of power,”87 Sanitized Sex is mainly a discourse analysis, but it is also attentive to the historical agents’ practices and experiences in their everyday lives—experiences that, at times, transgress discursive boundaries.88 It borrows much from the perspectives and methods developed by various advocates of postcolonial studies, in particular their insights into the operations of power as they relate to race, class, gender, and sexuality, and their insistence on drawing a connection between local historical variety, agency and experience, and broader, global processes of (imperial) history.89 On the one hand, a focus on the agency of both occupiers and occupied does not identify the occupiers as a homogeneous body of rule and the occupied as passive subjects of power.90 To overcome a binary of ruling versus subjection or resistance, however, it is important to highlight the various levels of cooperation, complicity, ignorance, rejection, and tension between and among occupiers and occupied, and to pay attention to significant nuances in what Alf Lüdtke has called “ruling as social praxis” (Herrschaft als soziale Praxis).91 This I will demonstrate foremost with a focus on both occupation and occupied authorities’ efforts to sanitize sex, their masculinized and masculinizing competition and complicity in the attempts to regulate sexual behavior and sexual encounter. Civil society groups, journalists, physicians, academics, as well as sex workers and their clients, male and female, participated in this arena, contributing to establish and reaffirm sexualized subjectivities and gendered hierarchies, in particular the privileges of primarily white middle-class heterosexual men.92 On the other hand, the chapters of this book trace transnational circulations of knowledge and practices of governance that were translated into the occupation of Japan. The transnationality of the occupation project, however, was not limited to a bilateral encounter between America and Japan. Sanitized Sex integrates trajectories of Japan’s, America’s, and Europe’s empires that are significant for the occupation of Japan, while also providing comparative glimpses of the postwar occupation experiences in Korea.93
In order to engage in the complex interplay of discourse and practice, and the transnational circulation of knowledge and governance, the book reads through the occupation period’s records, which were predominantly compiled by low- to mid-level administrators of both the occupation regime and Japan’s authorities. Sanitized Sex draws on various sources, covering memoranda, reports, and petitions composed by occupation officials, Japanese administrators, and civil society activists. It also includes veterans’ narratives, memoirs of servicemen stationed in Japan, and visuals from the occupation period. Analyzing this rich variety of historical materials with a view to the three major themes of security, health, and morality allows me to organize the book not solely chronologically but also thematically. This outline helps grasp and highlight the various overlapping yet sometimes conflicting concepts and practices in regulating sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease. Moreover, it enables a reading of the available source material as narratives in different settings and a contextualization of certain positions among occupiers and occupied within their distinct yet intertwined imperial histories. Perceiving these records both as bureaucratic files—the prevailing media of official communication between occupier and occupied—and as narratives unravels marginalized, often silenced and hidden spots of everyday experiences by American and Japanese military commanders, (military) police officers, public health administrators, and educators. In addition, appreciating the narrative of official documents enables one to bridge a hierarchization of sources between official and unofficial accounts, and brings memoranda, directives, and reports in dialogue with other forms of historical material, such as veterans’ memoirs, personal letters, feminist petitions, newspaper articles, literary works, academic surveys, and also visuals like photographs, cartoons, and campaign posters. This covers a wide range of commentators on the issue of sex, sex work, and (its supposedly inevitable underside) venereal disease, and detects the contemporaries’—and sometimes retrospectively recorded—poetics of “truth” in intimacy during the occupation period.94 However, the materials available hardly capture the voices of sex workers, which are thus more or less silenced throughout this study. Clients, observers, and regulators only occasionally provide angles that allow for a reconstruction of sex workers’ everyday lives. Nevertheless, the variety of sources at hand and their close reading opens up perspectives on fuzzy and sometimes inconclusive dimensions of the encounter between and among occupiers and occupied, and the analysis of the narratives and practices of regulating sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease attempts to approximate the occupation period’s inscrutable terrain of intimacy.95
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Chapter 1 begins by tackling the imaginary encounter of occupier and occupied in the postsurrender period, and highlights the eventfulness and significance of the last two weeks in August 1945, between Japan’s defeat and the arrival of the occupation forces. Although it precedes the subsequent chapters chronologically, the first half of chapter 1 addresses more than the prelude to the real occupation. It looks at the ways Japan’s authorities conceptualized prostitution to build a “female floodwall” to comfort the occupiers and to keep them separated from the Japanese population and from Japanese women in particular. Japanese politicians, police officers, bureaucrats, and advocates of the entertainment industry appropriated certain notions of the gendered, classed, raced, and sexed body prevalent in prewar and wartime Japan, and translated them into the immediate postwar era to legitimate the erection of recreational facilities and the recruitment of lower-class women to facilitate sexual services for the occupation army’s servicemen. The discourse on prostitution that emerged in this period was pivotal to the postwar era. It enabled Japan’s authorities to imagine the contours of postwar Japan and the Japanese self through the establishment of a broad sexualized entertainment scheme fostered by their fears that envisioned the violation of the Japanese “body” through ravaging and raping GIs. The second half of the first chapter deals with the first physical encounter, in which nationalistic fears and desires imagined prior to the occupiers’ arrival were resurrected. It assembles accounts of sexual violence, in particular rape and molestation of Japanese women by American and Allied servicemen, which Japan’s authorities heavily exploited by integrating them into narratives of a defeated Japan’s victimization under the wrath of the occupiers.
The next three chapters follow a thematic organization, their dramaturgy reflecting the global historical development of prostitution’s modern regulatory forms. Police forces first perceived prostitution as a matter of security, later physicians and public health administrators approached prostitution as an important health issue in the wake of public health’s rising prominence, and, finally, moral reformers criticized prostitution’s supposedly innate, vicious temptations. Accordingly, chapter 2 focuses on matters of security and legal debates on prostitution, venereal disease, and its control among the occupier’s law divisions, and closely looks at the enforcement of law by the occupiers’ military police and Japanese police units. It addresses, first, the emergence of nonlicensed prostitution after the abolition of licensed prostitution in 1946, in which the streetwalking sex worker surfaced as a new phenomenon in modern Japanese history. Second, it highlights the ambiguity that most male occupiers favored the availability of commercial sex but nevertheless perceived it anxiously as a reservoir of venereal disease. However, due to political, social, and moral pressures, they were not able to express their approval of prostitution publicly. The law and law enforcement did not repress prostitution in general, but managed it in response to concerns about security and public order. Nevertheless, the law and law enforcement practices stigmatized and criminalized sex workers for spreading venereal disease. For instance, a venereal disease prevention law passed during the occupation period maintained that women in general were the primary source of venereal disease, because only women supposedly possessed the potential to become prostitutes. Third, this chapter reconstructs the informal strategies used to police prostitution and venereal disease by highlighting the practices of the occupiers’ and occupieds’ law enforcement agencies. This focus on agency underscores