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Introduction

“We did not really want to go to Japan. Every mile toward Japan was a mile farther away from home and our loved ones,” writes Alton Chamberlin, veteran of the U.S. occupation forces in Japan, in his memoirs. “Sometime in September [1945] we pulled into Yokohama, Japan. I was amazed as I looked down from the ship’s rail at the Japanese workers on the pier. They were so tiny! They reminded me of monkeys scurrying around at their assigned tasks.” In his racist sentiments, he “couldn’t imagine ever being a friend to one of them or having an intimate relation with a Japanese woman. We were taught to hate them. We were told not to trust them for fear they would stick a knife in our back or cut our throat.” Very soon, however, Chamberlin realized that, “A pack of cigarettes brought two dollars worth of Japanese yen (I think fifteen yen equaled one dollar), or a session with a geisha girl. A cake of soap or a candy bar would bring the same.” After Chamberlin and his companions Pee Wee and Malek had settled in temporarily in Yokohama, they went to town for the first time. “Despite our pure intentions,” Chamberlin recalls, “we soon found ourselves entering a Japanese abode which turned out to be one of ill repute.” In quite some detail Chamberlin describes his first sexual encounter in a brothel in occupied Japan:

[W]e were led into a room where there were several very cute young Japanese girls all dolled out in pretty kimonos and attractive make up. . . . Pee Wee was hot to trot. Malek was agreeable. I didn’t want to kill the joy. So we followed the mamasan’s directions and each picked a girl and went into small private rooms. The floor covering was of straw mat material. The room was clean and bare. There was no bed. On the floor was a cotton quilted pad. A box of Kleenex completed the furnishings.

There was no foreplay. This was strictly business to them. My girl helped me undress and quickly slipped out of her kimono. We did not kiss. There was no fondling except her taking my already ready penis in her little hand to guide it into her. She moved deftly in unison with my thrusts as if she was enjoying it. I came quickly as usual. Our racial differences dissolved in the liquid passion of my sperm. Being in her felt good so I continued thrusting until I came again.¹

Sex sold well in occupied Japan and helped many servicemen like Chamberlin forget their dislocation far away from home and family while realizing orientalist fantasies through the joy of cheap and available sex, and—despite Chamberlin’s belief in dissolving racial differences—nourishing racist privileges. After World War II, in the immediate postsurrender period in the late summer of 1945, Japanese authorities had, in cooperation with private entrepreneurs of Japan’s entertainment industry, initiated a broad recreation scheme with brothels, cabarets, and nightclubs to comfort the Allied occupiers. In Tokyo alone, between fifty and seventy thousand sex workers catered to predominantly American servicemen during the occupation period. According to the estimates of the Japanese journalist Sumimoto Toshio, the hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen stationed in Japan spent $185 million on recreation, of which “almost half” passed through the hands of sex workers.² Prostitution was thus generating high revenues during the seven-year-long occupation period, and was by some accounts even believed to be an essential economic factor in the reconstruction of postwar Japan.³

Since the arrival of the occupation forces in 1945, foreign servicemen heavily frequented the brothels and other recreational facilities Japan’s authorities had provided for them. Half a year later, in early 1946, however, the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP) released an ordinance abolishing licensed prostitution. Celebrated as a milestone of democracy that would liberate Japanese women from Japanese male chauvinism, the abolition of prostitution more significantly aimed at limiting the spread of venereal disease, which took on epidemic proportions among the occupation personnel—almost one in four servicemen was infected with one or more venereal diseases. Though the abolition of licensed prostitution did not prohibit sex work per se, it illegalized sex trafficking and binding contracts between brothel owners or pimps and sex workers. Obviously, prostitution did not vanish, but rather flourished, either in privately run brothels, cabarets, bars, and “special restaurants” (tokushu inshokuten), or as decentralized street prostitution in parks, railway underpasses, and nearby occupation army camps.

Just a stone’s throw away from the Imperial Palace, for instance, scenes like the one described by Chamberlin were part of everyday life in one of the many red-light districts sprawling across occupied Japan. Under the bridges of Yurakucho Station, along the Ginza, and in Hibiya Park, sex workers offered their bodies to servicemen of the occupation army, who could cheaply consume sex on what in the mid-1940s was an almost open sex market. They provided quick sexual services for a package of American cigarettes in brothels, but also quite publicly in the backs of military jeeps or around the corner in the next gloomy alley. As rumor has it, commercial sexual activity was so widespread that even the moat of the Imperial Palace—which separated the emperor, who had once been worshipped as a god, from Japan’s new patron operating in the Dai-Ichi Seimei Building, in which SCAP established its headquarters—had to be cleaned weekly to remove all the used condoms chucked into its water.⁴

The occupiers as well as the occupied developed various strategies to handle the vast prevalence of sex, sex work, and venereal disease in occupied Japan. Military commanders, (military) police officers, military surgeons and civilian physicians, public health administrators, military chaplains, but also welfare workers and feminist activists implemented regulatory efforts to limit venereal disease. They all predominantly accused sex workers, but sometimes also women in general, of spreading venereal disease, which the occupiers considered a danger to the security, a hazard to the health, and an attack on the morality of its personnel. The occupied, for their part, were particularly interested in protecting reproductive sexualities and the respectability of middle- and upper-class women. Their multiple, often complicit and overlapping, but also at times conflicting interventions focused on the sexual encounter between occupiers and occupied—an endeavor to target the intimacy of both occupation army servicemen and ordinary people of occupied Japan alike.

The various regulatory attempts to sanitize sexuality during the occupation period are at the center of this book. An analysis of the narratives and practices circulating around the sanitization of sex between occupiers and occupied provides angles to unravel the complex relations and dynamics of power during the occupation period. Close attention to the conceptualization and actual implementation of regulatory techniques underscores, first, the historically specific hierarchies of race, class, and gender that occupiers and occupied negotiated on the basis of sex. Sanitized Sex thus depicts the multiple layers of agency between and among occupiers and occupied while paying particular attention to the mostly male, low- and middle-ranking American and Japanese administrators. On the one hand, it explicates the overall male-dominated character of the occupation of Japan as enforced by the occupation regime and Japanese authorities, who both sought to control the sexual behavior of occupation servicemen and women of occupied Japan. Their struggle over the control of men, women, and their sexualities was a struggle to seize authority by establishing and maintaining male dominance in the wake of victory and defeat. On the other hand, a focus on men’s and women’s bodies and the bodily regimes seeking to regulate them brings attention to the dimension of intimacy. This encompasses the sexual relations mostly between the occupation servicemen and the women of occupied Japan, but furthermore uncovers predominantly male anxieties as a driving force for controlling not only sexuality, but also the multiple intimate relations of the regulated to their own bodies. Moreover, the intimate allows glimpses at the receiving end of regulatory interventions, making it possible to appraise their effectiveness and to illuminate the historical actors’ often hidden (re-)actions. Second, a close reading of the regulatory practices reveals longer trajectories of the occupation period. It highlights the continuities of local traditions of sex management (American and Japanese) as well as similarities to other, previous intimate imperial encounters and their regulation. It thus points toward a transnational circulation and appropriation of certain forms of knowledge and governance and the impact they had on the occupation of Japan. Third, the focus on the regulation of sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease explores the various temporal and spatial coordinates of the occupation period, and indicates the significance such regulations have had on the political, social, and cultural formation of postwar Japan, U.S.-Japanese relations, and the Asia-Pacific region. Sex was indeed not peripheral, but a key issue during the occupation of Japan. That said, Sanitized Sex is more than a book about the regulation of sex between occupiers and occupied in postwar Japan. Rather, it offers a reading of the intimacies of empires—defeated and victorious.

PROSTITUTION AND OCCUPATION—PROSTITUTION AS OCCUPATION

Sanitized Sex is indebted to the rich insights previous works have furnished on intimacy, sexuality, prostitution, venereal disease, and its regulation in imperial, wartime, and postwar Japan. The erection of brothels and other recreational facilities in the immediate postsurrender period was not planned by Japan’s authorities to protect individuals from the wrath of a few looting and raping GIs. The establishment of recreation for the occupying foreign servicemen, the centerpiece of which was formed by the comforts of prostitution, aimed at securing the Japanese “national body” (kokutai)—an attempt that actually comforted Japan’s authorities as well. As an institution of quarantine, the initiators of the postwar recreation program conceptualized prostitution as a protective zone to separate the incoming foreign soldiers and sailors from the Japanese population—and from Japanese women in particular. Their goal was nevertheless to maintain Japan’s sovereignty and integrity after the lost war.⁵

While most studies on prostitution during the occupation period fail to acknowledge military prostitution as a global phenomenon, Cynthia Enloe has reminded us that prostitution and sexual violence against women during warfare and military occupations are integral parts of any modern military organization’s need to construct and confirm a “militarized masculinity.”⁶ It sustains the image of the hypermasculine soldier who is trained to follow orders, enforce physical violence, and sacrifice himself to protect his country and its families, and thus appears to be privileged to sometimes transgress boundaries.⁷ Such a militarized culture of masculinity was highly influential in the wartime military comfort system (jūgun ian seido), the systematic coercion of women into sexual slavery by imperial Japanese bureaucrats, militarists, politicians, and private entrepreneurs. Militarized masculinity would also have been fundamental to the idea of providing brothels and other recreational facilities to comfort the occupation troops after the war—although with a particular nationalistic twist, such as in protecting the kokutai from the invading occupiers.⁸ One remnant of wartime Japan’s military masculine comfort system can be seen in the status of the lower-class prostitute recruited to cater to the occupiers in immediate postwar Japan; they resembled the colonial subjects who had been forced to work in comfort facilities during the war.⁹

However, prostitution and its regulation in occupied Japan require more thorough historicizing, and the genealogies of sex work reach deeper into imperial Japan’s past than just the wartime comfort system. The licensed prostitution system in imperial Japan demanded regular health examinations for sex workers and allowed prostitution only in designated red-light districts with licensed brothels. It maintained established 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 August 15, 1945.²²

In the same vein as MacDermott’s 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 the reverse course narrative as a temporal caesura that would supposedly mark a clear-cut split between imperial, wartime, and postwar Japan. Although something significant did happen “within” Japan after Japan’s defeat, emphasizing a supposedly decisive break between war and peace does not account for the multiple experiences of Japan’s empire, war, and legacy in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Asia-Pacific region.³⁶

A comparison of the occupation of Japan with the postwar history of Korea further illuminates the limits of the reverse course narrative. Japan had been colonizing Korea officially since 1910, increasingly incorporating Korea into Japan’s empire from the 1930s onward, and rigorously mobilizing its people for Japan’s war effort.³⁷ After World War II, the American military also occupied Korea, headed by Lt. General John R. Hodge under the command of Douglas MacArthur as superior commander of the Far East Command (FEC). Unlike Japan, the U.S. occupiers implemented occupation policy in Korea according to Cold War objectives from its very beginning in 1945, and Korea was thus never the subject of a reverse course.³⁸ Moreover, the occupying U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) basically replaced Japan’s colonial rule and established a military government, which relied heavily on the previous colonial administration and its elites.³⁹ The overall plan was to incorporate Korea into what Dean Acheson, U.S. secretary of state from 1949 to 1953, called a “great crescent” of U.S. hegemony in East and Southeast Asia. American Cold War strategists envisioned a network of anticommunist periphery states with close economic and military-strategic ties to Japan, which was to function as a subcenter under the control of the United States. As this vision came close to replacing Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, it is no wonder that it reproduced older regional imperial formations.⁴⁰

Yet even in postsurrender Japan it is rather questionable whether U.S. imperialism in its neocolonial form manifested after a reverse course had occurred, or whether imperialistic rule had already characterized the occupation of Japan from the very beginning. It is striking to consider the applicability of Jürgen Osterhammel’s notion of a colony to the case of occupied Japan after World War II. Osterhammel perceives a colony as a newly established political body, created through invasion and ties to precolonial conditions, with a longer durability than a merely temporary military occupation. Furthermore, the new and foreign elites are in an enduring dependency on a spatially distant imperial center, which claims exclusive property rights within the colony.⁴¹ In unraveling this definition in the context of occupied Japan, it is imperative to acknowledge that—despite the many contradictory explanations of the war’s legitimation—Allied and especially American forces occupied Japan subsequent to military invasion after World War II. The occupiers erected a new body of authoritarian rule in the occupied territory. They exercised their political power indirectly, with SCAP relying on “precolonial” conditions in the form of existing Japanese governmental and bureaucratic institutions and personnel, mainly because the occupiers lacked Japanese-language skills and the cultural competence to rule on their own.⁴² MacArthur and his General Headquarters were dependent on an imperial center, being nominally bound to the advice by the Far Eastern Commission and its U.S.-dominated Allied Council for Japan as well as to orders from the U.S. State Department in Washington, DC. And the United States claimed exclusive property rights within Japan, especially in the form of military bases. Such claims did not vanish with the official end of the occupation period, marked by the San Francisco Peace Treaty signed on September 8, 1951, and in force since April 28, 1952. Many of the occupation policy’s remnants prevailed far beyond 1952, which questions the provisional nature of the military occupation.

As a range of now classic studies has argued, characteristics of colonial rule and imperialism are not only manifest in political, economic, and military power structures, but equally present in forms of knowledge and culture, which are arguably more subtle, but not less powerful manifestations of domination.⁴³ In the case of the occupation of Japan, MacArthur’s performances and in particular his public speeches throughout the occupation period are paradigmatic in stressing the cultural dimensions of imperialistic asymmetries of power between occupier and occupied. One significant emblem is a famous photograph that started circulating in the American and Japanese press in September 1945, in which MacArthur stands next to Emperor Hirohito and embodies the masculine and self-confident vanquisher in contrast to the subordinate, emasculated, and gawky-looking defeated, a picture that came to symbolize the enduring shadow America cast over postwar Japan.⁴⁴ On other occasions, MacArthur publicly explained Japan’s aggression and expansion between 1932 and 1945 as an odyssey in which Japan got on the wrong track into a “dark valley” (kurai tanima), a nightmare from which he could wake Japan with a lesson in American-style democracy. He not only proposed a Salvationist mission under his command, but also took the liberty of adopting an apologetic stance toward Japan’s wartime aggression and atrocities. Similarly, at a U.S. Senate hearing in 1951, MacArthur compared Japan to a “twelve-year-old boy” he had educated and guided to modernity and democracy during the occupation period. The trope of the “twelve-year-old boy” has been criticized as being a gendered category that would allow boys but not girls to attain higher education.⁴⁵ Equally important, the dimension of a civilizing mission is inherent in the trope of the little boy and signifies its tight entanglement with a colonial discourse that preached civilization and conceptualized its development in linear-temporal stages.⁴⁶ Similar to colonialists in other non-Western countries, the occupiers typically framed Japan in 1945 in a “waiting room of history” that constantly categorized the non-West as “not yet civilized.”⁴⁷ Like former colonialists, MacArthur believed in the civilization of people of color and propagated educating the Japanese with the promise of independence and sovereignty after successful democratization—which MacArthur unmistakably understood as civilizational development according to an American blueprint. As Homi Bhabha has pointed out, such differences between colonizer and colonized marked by time, construed in teleologically developing stages—in this case between occupiers and occupied—can never be overcome. The constructed backwardness of the “almost the same, but not quite” always also implies a “not quite white,” a reference to the ambivalence inherent in colonial discourse, the mission of which is modernity, rationality, and progress, even while it simultaneously enforces clear racial and cultural distinctions and hierarchies in the very practice of colonial rule.⁴⁸

In a similar vein, forms of racism that were articulated in the relations between Japan and the “West” since the early nineteenth century had also been dominating the war and battles fought between Japan and the United States.⁴⁹ Koshiro Yukiko has argued in her analysis of trans-Pacific racisms that although open and violent racism was officially banned in occupied Japan to allow a tensionless cooperation between occupiers and occupied, old patterns of racial scaling nevertheless unconsciously structured their power relations.⁵⁰ In addition, Mire Koikari and Lisa Yoneyama have shown in their studies on feminist movements and the introduction of women’s suffrage in occupied Japan that race and racism closely intersected with gender dimensions in the U.S. democratization programs.⁵¹ The gendered political reforms inherited patterns similar to classical elements of colonial discourses, such as the omnipresence of the dichotomy between Japan’s backwardness (feudalism, oppression of women, etc.) and America’s modernity (democracy, women’s suffrage, etc.). And the “maternal” ambitions of U.S. women’s organizations, in their attempt to educate Japanese women in political participation, were similar to forms of imperial feminism in Great Britain,⁵² whose advocates, in line with Gayatri Spivak’s observation, were basically speaking for rather than speaking with Japanese women.⁵³ The attempt to liberate Japanese women from what MacArthur called “traditional feudalistic chauvinism” was thus not only reproducing gender-specific, but also racial hierarchies during the occupation period.⁵⁴

The occupation of Japan, with its inherent intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, therefore revealed—in contrast to the Allied occupation of Germany—cultural and social patterns of differentiation that were common in colonial settings and imperial encounters. The occupation of Japan did not result from the expansion of an imperial metropolitan power into a colonial periphery. It was the outcome of a clash of two competing empires with the subsequent disintegration of Japan’s empire and the rise of American hegemony in the postwar era. Moreover, understanding the occupation of Japan as an instance of imperialism and manifestation of (neo-)colonial rule does not mean dwelling in a polemic of anti-Americanism. Nor does it immediately imply following the apologetic arguments of Japanese conservatives, who, according to Dower, “denounce the occupation as an exercise in cultural imperialism and ‘victor’s justice’ that undermined the very spirit and traditions of the country.”⁵⁵ Perceiving the occupation of Japan as an instance of imperial encounter offers analytical perspectives. In doing so I follow, in a deliberately loose sense, Tony Ballantyne’s and Antoinette Burton’s use of the term empire to signify “webs of trade, knowledge, migration, military power, and political intervention that allowed certain communities to assert their influence and sovereignty over other groups.” Furthermore, “The web’s intricate strands carried with them and helped to create hierarchies of race, class, religion, and gender, among others, thereby casting the conquerors as superior and the conquered as subordinate, with important and lingering consequences for the communities they touched.”⁵⁶ The notion of the web makes us think beyond fixed borders and boundaries, and, in the case at hand, overcomes the idea of Japan as a national container by comparing and connecting the occupation period and occupation policy to diachronic and synchronous forms of imperial power elsewhere. In particular, the idea of webs of knowledge opens up a perspective on the genealogies of colonial rule and imperial power that shaped the occupation period; genealogies that will be addressed repeatedly throughout the chapters of this book.

The figure of the web also helps underscore yet another aspect of American power in the postwar period and to distinguish it from classical colonialism. After World War II, at the height of its power, the United States increasingly erected a global network of military installations to ensure the global mobility of American troops and enhance U.S. national security.⁵⁷ The American “empire of bases” did not only enable immediate U.S. military intervention, but also functioned “as a symbol of American power,” despite being driven simultaneously by fear of instability, insecurity, and lack of influence.⁵⁸ The occupation of Japan was one local manifestation of the global expansion of U.S. dominance in the postwar world and—as I want to argue—a very significant one. Postwar U.S. military occupation, in Japan and elsewhere, obviously departed from former forms of colonialism. Occupied Japan did not become a settler colony, nor did it become part of a formal empire in classical terms, but the occupiers subordinated Japan and its people, and claimed command over Japan’s territory and institutions. According to David M. Edelstein, Japan, like Germany, was a “comprehensive occupation . . . to secure the interests of the occupying power and to ensure long-term stability,” and was thus apparently only temporarily controlled “by another state that claims no rights to permanent sovereign control.”⁵⁹ This evaluation, however, underestimates the long-lasting effects of the occupying power, such as the continuous economic and military dependency of Japan under U.S. tutelage and the new constitution and legal system imposed to support the occupiers’ primary objective of securing their strategic interests in the region. Moreover, it fails to acknowledge the important point that the occupation of Japan was not a singular case, but part of a larger project to fortify American long-term interests regionally and globally in the postwar period. To account for such long-term effects, theorists of U.S. imperialism would argue—in the line of Carl Schmitt’s notion of the Nomos—that the occupation of Japan was characteristic for a nonterritorial form of imperialism based not on the formal acquisition of territory but on the authoritative administration of space.⁶⁰ While it is true that the United States never formally incorporated Japan into U.S. national territory as it did Hawai‘i, and that Japan never became an unincorporated territory of the United States as Guam did in 1950, the United States did control these territories, either directly or indirectly, and at any rate systematically through its massive military presence and its claim to indefinite territorial property rights in the form of military installations. In Japan, the presence of the U.S. military was and still is particularly overwhelming in Okinawa. Studies on the U.S. occupation of Okinawa indicate that the occupation of the Ryukyu Islands was from the very outset an enterprise of U.S. empire building during and after World War II. This is clearly apparent in the limited sovereignty enjoyed by Okinawa, which was not reaffiliated with Japan until 1972. Even today, Okinawa is often interpreted as a U.S. military colony struggling with the legacies of two imperial powers: Japan and the United States.⁶¹

However, top-down definitions of military occupation and America’s empire-building tend to forget what was actually happening “on the ground,” to quote Mary A. Renda’s study on the U.S. occupation of Haiti, where “cross-cultural dynamics complicated Washington’s script for the occupation.”⁶² Critics, academics, and activists alike have pointed out the pitfalls of the basing system and analyzed the structural changes the empire of bases brought to local populations. Unjust political interventions into local governments, limited mobility and economic dependencies of whole countries and local communities, as well as the accidents and pollution military personnel cause in neighborhoods near military bases are among the most frequently cited complaints against the persisting U.S. military presence overseas.⁶³ Critics have raised equally compelling questions concerning gender, race, and sexuality within and in the proximity of military bases, often linking them directly to the aforementioned issues. Military occupations had been “littered with men and the spectre of masculinity,”⁶⁴ to use Glenda Sluga’s words. This might, however, obscure the fact that women were vital agents for sustaining military operations and organizations—whether in war, peacetime, or in between: in military occupations.⁶⁵ Yet the specter of militarized masculinity created and enforced specific gendered and sexed encounters in the shadow of military bases. The most notorious of these encounters involved the availability and maintenance of commercial sex, which the U.S. military legitimated or at least tolerated for the sake of recreation, troop morale, and discipline, as well as reaffirmation of servicemen’s masculinity. In Asian countries, military prostitution was and is a particularly apparent and alarming current of U.S. military base culture.⁶⁶

The high prevalence of prostitution near U.S. military bases in the Asia-Pacific region is inseparably intertwined with the colonial past and present that shaped the region. As Naoki Sakai suspects, “the U.S. military’s dominance (in that region) inherited many aspects of the system of colonial dominance from the Japanese Empire,” one aspect being that parts of “the Japanese comfort station system were adopted and conserved in the U.S. military’s management of Asia.”⁶⁷ Indeed, the current militarization of the Asia-Pacific region is what Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho have called an “extension of colonialism,” because U.S. power, spearheaded by its military with its net of bases, appropriated former colonial power structures of the Japanese Empire after Japan’s defeat in World War II.⁶⁸ The U.S. military appropriated and continued to use former Japanese military bases such as Sasebo in Japan and Chinhae in Korea, and women in Japan, Korea, but also the Philippines, Guam, and other Pacific Islands continued to work for the recreation of soldiers—not always, but quite often in the sex business. Equally telling, the Americans applied an imperialistic rhetoric of liberation similar to that of their Japanese predecessors: whereas Japanese colonialists called for Pan-Asian solidarity to shake off the yoke of white, Western colonialism, U.S. occupiers popularized their intervention in the Asia-Pacific region with the notion that they were freeing the region from Japanese militarism and colonization.⁶⁹ This legacy of Japanese imperialism and its continuity under U.S. hegemony—with the might of the U.S. military presence in Asia—also creates contemporary and future obstacles for the seemingly impossible process of decolonization in countries like Korea and Taiwan.⁷⁰ The myths of liberation as well as the maintenance of military prostitution are both obvious examples of the imperial baggage the Asia-Pacific region has not yet overcome, and they vividly reveal the prevailing hierarchies between occupying powers and local people, and how the asymmetries of power intersect with issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Following the lead of Mary Louise Roberts’s arguments on the U.S. military’s intervention in World War II Europe, Sanitized Sex also investigates “What Soldiers Do,” placing the often marginalized issues of regulating sex, sexual relations, and the behavior of soldiers of the occupying power at the center of its analysis to better understand the struggle over the management of sex as a struggle for authority.⁷¹ However, the Asia-Pacific theater of war and the subsequent occupation of Japan differed starkly in key aspects from America’s European theater and its aftermath in the occupation of Germany. Japan was literally dominated by the United States and was not divided into several spheres of influence like occupied Germany. Racial hierarchies were obviously different, but connected to them were issues of gender and sexuality rooted in Asia’s colonial histories. The occupiers had their own experiences in previous (and ongoing) imperial interventions in Asia and could thus continue to step into the footprints of longstanding orientalist, racialized, gendered, and sexualized images of Japan and its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region. Yet longer continuities and prevailing cultural elements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism outside the Asia-Pacific region were also highly significant for the occupiers’ postwar management of Japan and the Asia-Pacific region. The focus on the occupation period’s everyday experiences and, arguably, its most intimate ones—the sexual encounters between occupier and occupied—allows these continuities to be highlighted. It enables an analysis of the neocolonial conditions of postwar Japan by shedding light on circumstances that differed from direct colonial rule, circumstances that required even the regulation of sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease to be constantly negotiated between occupation authorities and local administrations. For example, brothels and entertainment districts had to be patrolled by U.S. military police and Japanese police officers collaboratively, the occupiers’ medical surveillance of venereal disease had to be established in cooperation with local public health administrators, and the occupation regime had to invest significant time and resources to maintain its reputation as a democratic, modern, and progressive authority, which brawling, harassing, whoring, and infection-carrying servicemen threatened to undermine. Hence, Sanitized Sex proposes to think of the occupation of Japan as a relay of older forms of imperialism to the Cold War era and a laboratory for future occupations in the postwar period. This does not mean looking at the occupation of Japan as a blueprint for contemporary occupations;⁷² the claim is, rather, that the occupation of Japan was a very significant event in the twentieth-century process by which the United States built an empire of bases. Indeed, the occupation of Japan initiated a process that normalized the enduring presence and dominance of the U.S. military in the Asia-Pacific region, and arguably worldwide. And one might suspect that the occupiers did adjust, learn, and develop particular strategies for, and confidence in, their neocolonial rule in Japan—strategies that they either went on to transfer to other occupation projects, or with which they at least created a pool of experience for future military occupiers.

SANITIZED SEX: METHODS AND MATERIALS

Imperial encounters and the asymmetries of power in colonial settings have been intriguingly illustrated in previous scholarship by focusing on the body, sexuality, and prostitution. Issues of the body are numerous: the physical well-being of settlers, soldiers, administrators, but also of whole populations in colonial societies was of much concern and debate within empires, and metropolitan agencies and colonial states put an immense amount of effort and resources into the establishment of modern health regimes to sustain imperial power that—to use David Arnold’s words—colonized the body.⁷³ Bodily health and integrity often functioned as a vehicle to demonstrate the colonizer’s supposed civilizational advancement over indigenous societies, but also to demarcate wider mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.⁷⁴ Distinctions of race and class were arguably the most visible and notorious markers for the “rule of colonial difference,”⁷⁵ which nevertheless intersected with other ordering principles and had to be constantly negotiated in a “politics of difference” to adjust the boundaries between colonizer and colonized.⁷⁶ No less significantly, gender and sexuality were central to a politics of the body that could stabilize and threaten imperial orders. Colonial regimes and their agents articulated and visualized the discovery of distant shores in gendered and sexualized terminology, they dedicated much energy to maintaining heterosexual cultures, they ascribed colonizers and colonized alike with specific yet variable tropes of masculinity and femininity, and they closely monitored the reproduction of colonial settlers due to their fears that mixed-race children would undermine racial boundaries, colonial rule, and ultimately civilizational development.⁷⁷

The sanitation of sex, the regulation of reproductive and nonreproductive sexualities, sexual encounters, and venereal diseases along moral, hygienic, gendered, and racial codes, was a core issue of the modern biopolitical management of bodies, both in imperial metropoles and colonial peripheries.⁷⁸ Although contemporary debates also addressed long-term liaisons such as marriage or concubinage, the short-term satisfaction of sexual desires caused just as much fuss, most notably in the form of commercial sex. White men, especially, fantasized about the sexual opportunities in nonwhite countries, while others, such as moral reformers and feminist activists, made a scandal of the globally widespread organized provision of female sexuality to satisfy men’s sexual lust.⁷⁹ Globally, since the nineteenth century and increasingly in the twentieth century, agents of the state as well as civil society activists either considered prostitution an important institution to directly secure social stability, control public health, and maintain gender roles and family ties, or critically debated the regulation of prostitution—both approaches ultimately helped to expand and consolidate modern state- and empire-building projects in most Asian, Latin American, and Western countries.⁸⁰ In colonial settings, some colonial administrations favored regulated prostitution or concubinage to manage the colonizers’ sexuality and health, and also to maintain racial boundaries, family stability, and economic productivity, by which the supposedly uncivilized native prostitute not only provided sexual services, but also served as an archetype of alleged nonwhite degradation to legitimate the need for colonial rule.⁸¹ Commercial sex itself was definitely not a new phenomenon. Yet, newly implemented hygienic regulations and new modes of representing sex workers cast prostitution as a modern institution for administering a population’s security, health, morale, and sexuality, and it thus became a significant and signifying interface for sharing the experience of modernity.⁸²

Prostitution, like most forms of sexual encounter, simultaneously offers and impedes perspectives for academic research. It marks an intersection of various ordering principles such as race, class, gender, and sexuality culminating in one phenomenon, it is targeted by state intervention as well as by civil society activism, and it exists on the outskirts of the global capitalist economy, never freely regulated by supply and demand but obviously by moral, political, and social forces. Notwithstanding these intersections, prostitution is a domain of the intimate, where desires, tastes, feelings, and urges for power, pleasure, lust, satisfaction, but also shame, indifference, and violence are practiced and experienced, often hidden from the scholar’s gaze. Most prominently, Ann Laura Stoler has called attention to the “tense and tender ties” embodied in intimate—usually connoted as private—domains. Within them, the power of governance and/through classification either enters the inner realms of subjects’ hearts and minds, where it affects even people’s affections, and/or can be subverted or dodged by historical agents,⁸³ for instance in domestic spaces, brothel bedrooms, or other niches that can be conceived of as heterotopian “other spaces,” to follow Michel Foucault.⁸⁴ Either way, addressing intimacy offers angles to scrutinize the “affective dimensions of global and transnational power,” to quote Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, and thus opens perspectives on further and arguably deeper workings of power.⁸⁵ Approaching intimacy is, however, only possible by cautiously groping at and within historical material to detect traces left behind by the historical agents. While this can result in an overemphasis or overinterpretation of seemingly minor, maybe mumbled utterances, gestures, or overt silences, passing them over in ignorance would mean missing chances to reconstruct insights into often marginalized—yet, at least for the historical actors themselves, existential—dimensions of subjectivity.

The way sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease were regulated during the occupation of Japan between 1945 and 1952 bears striking resemblances to previous imperial settings. Sexual opportunities for servicemen in occupied Japan were numerous, and soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the occupation forces heavily patronized bars, clubs, and brothels that offered sexual services. Occupation authorities, but also political elites and the publics in Washington, London, and Canberra heatedly debated the existence and form of prostitution, and addressed the degree, means, and aims of intervention. Occupiers and occupied alike, though following different agendas, raised concerns about the threat prostitution would pose or the stability it would bring to the security, health, and morale of the occupation troops and the civilian Japanese population. Prostitution and its regulation thus constituted a pivotal “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

• • •

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 the complicity of Japanese police officers in the gender-biased policing of prostitution, who were assisting the occupiers in police raids or as translators, usually keen on supporting the existence and smooth functioning of the sex business. It also shows how Japan’s authorities negotiated the occupier’s directives in order to maintain their own imperial Japanese methods and concepts of regulating prostitution. However, occupiers and occupied parted ways in one key aspect, because whereas the occupiers suspected any Japanese woman of being a potential threat to the security of occupation personnel, Japanese regulators—at least symbolically—were eager to clearly distinguish between lower-class diseased prostitutes and respectable and chaste women from Japan’s middle- and upper-classes.

Venereal disease and its biomedical control are the major topics of chapter 3. The spread of venereal diseases was epidemic in occupied Japan with an average 25 percent infection rate among servicemen and among Japanese civilians, although dark figures were unquestionably much higher. Military physicians and public health officers, the main agents in this chapter, blamed Japan’s supposedly backward health system for the high risk of venereal infection. They put significant effort and resources into the education of Japanese doctors and the reform of public health to increase venereal disease control. Even more significantly, they established a new report system to trace venereal disease contacts, which was encoded as a modern and effective instrument for limiting communicable diseases, and simultaneously helped the occupiers to measure, quantify, and map occupied Japan and its people. To control venereal disease among servicemen, the occupiers’ health departments erected a comprehensive infrastructure of prophylactic stations in which servicemen were compelled to wash themselves after sexual exposure. Prophylaxis as propagated by the occupation military entered the most private spaces of the servicemen’s lives—a place where they cleaned and protected their genitalia—and worked hidden from the gaze of the occupied. The social hygienic strategies developed and implemented by the occupiers often derived from previous knowledge of public health control. Health officers transferred this knowledge to occupied Japan, where it became mingled with existing forms and institutions of public health. However, military physicians and public health officers faced difficulties implementing their ideas, also due to quarrels over jurisdiction within the occupation regime. The military police with its provost marshal claimed responsibility for public health enforcement outside military installations, and advocates of moral reform, mostly army chaplains, criticized the existence of regulated prostitution in general.

The legacy of moral reform and its intersection with social hygienic knowledge in occupied Japan is the main theme of the first half of chapter 4. It analyzes the narratives circulating around sex education and character guidance among occupation personnel. The chapter approaches a terrain in which social hygienists and moral reformers clashed, but occasionally also cooperated, in the sex and moral education of servicemen. It can thus highlight some traces of a longer struggle that existed since the early twentieth century, particularly in the United States, and how these traces extended into the occupation of Japan. During the occupation period, sex education and character guidance incorporated the specific ideals of masculinity, middle-class family values, and white community-building that American Cold War ideology popularized. Military commanders, chaplains, and other military educators propagated these ideals to occupation personnel as the best means to stay physically and spiritually fit to be effective soldiers, responsible fathers, and qualified leaders in the global postwar order. The second half of the chapter discusses morality concerning sexuality and prostitution among Japanese contemporaries. Their ideals were sometimes rooted similarly deeply in longer imperial histories and were also personally and rhetorically tied to global histories of moral reform. For instance, feminist organizations were among the strongest antiprostitution activists in occupied Japan. Some of them were experienced moral reformers, having been members of transnationally organized Christian and/or feminist groups in the prewar period, but they had also been willingly mobilized in World War II by the Japanese imperial state to promote the moral purification that was supposed to sustain the war effort. In occupied Japan, moral debates focused especially on the streetwalking prostitute, embodied by the panpan girl. She became a famous symbol of occupied Japan, representing vividly the revolutionary changes that took place during the occupation period. Others perceived her as the incarnation of moral and social decay. Various commentators, ranging from feminists to bureaucrats and including writers, photographers, social scientists, ethnographers, and journalists, all tackled the issue of street prostitution. Their narratives portraying Japan’s postwar sex workers as sexual dangers or as revolutionary heroines reverberated and reaffirmed masculinized images and patriotic desires for a new Japan.

Indeed, sanitizing sex was a matter of great importance to occupation period contemporaries. This book scrutinizes the various narratives and practices of the sanitization of sex to make sense of the anxiety-ridden discourse that proliferated about prostitution, venereal disease, sexual-intimate relationships, and notions of the body during the occupation of Japan. It helps us to understand the asymmetric power relations between occupiers and occupied, to highlight the tensions and cooperation between and among various actors, branches, and institutions of the occupation regime and Japan’s authorities, and to dig deeper into the occupation period’s history of everyday life.