Sanitized Sex: Regulating Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Intimacy in Occupied Japan, 1945-1952

By Robert Kramm

Sanitized Sex analyzes the development of new forms of regulation concerning prostitution, venereal disease, and intimacy during the American occupation of Japan after the Second World War, focusing on the period between 1945 and 1952. It contributes to the cultural and social history of the occupation of Japan by investigating the intersections of ordering principles like race, class, gender, and sexuality. It also reveals how sex and its regulation were not marginal but key issues in postwar empire-building, U.S.-Japanese relations, and American and Japanese self-imagery. The regulation of sexual encounters between occupiers and occupied was closely linked to the disintegration of the Japanese empire and the rise of U.S. hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region during the Cold War era. Shedding new light on the configuration of postwar Japan, the process of decolonization, the postcolonial formation of the Asia-Pacific region, and the particularities of postwar U.S. imperialism, Sanitized Sex offers a reading of the intimacies of empires—defeated and victorious.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9780520968691

Robert Kramm

Robert Kramm is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, University of Hong Kong.

Book preview

Sanitized Sex

Sanitized Sex

ASIA PACIFIC MODERN

Takashi Fujitani, Series Editor

1.Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, by Miriam Silverberg

2.Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, by Shu-mei Shih

3.The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945, by Theodore Jun Yoo

4.Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines, by John D. Blanco

5.Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, by Robert Thomas Tierney

6.Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan, by Andrew D. Morris

7.Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II, by T. Fujitani

8.The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter

9.A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949, by Tong Lam

11.Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan, by Jonathan E. Abel

12.Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945, by Todd A. Henry

13.Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan, by Joseph D. Hankins

14.Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan, by Travis Workman

15.Sanitized Sex: Regulating Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Intimacy in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952, by Robert Kramm

Sanitized Sex

Regulating Prostitution, Venereal

Disease, and Intimacy in Occupied

Japan, 1945–1952

Robert Kramm

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished

university presses in the United States, enriches

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humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its

activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and

by philanthropic contributions from individuals and

institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2017 by Robert Kramm

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kramm, Robert, author.

Title: Sanitized sex : regulating prostitution, venereal

disease, and intimacy in occupied Japan, 1945–1952 /

Robert Kramm.

Description: Oakland, California : University of

California Press, [2017] | Series: Asia Pacific Modern;

15 | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017013716 (print) | LCCN 2017016883

(ebook) | ISBN 9780520968691 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780520295971 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Prostitutes—Legal status, laws, etc.—

Japan—History—20th century. | Japan—History—

Allied occupation, 1945–1952—Social aspects. |

Sexually transmitted diseases—Japan—Prevention—

History—20th century. | Sex-oriented businesses—

Japan—History—20th century. | Soldiers—Sexual

behavior—Japan. | Soldiers—Sexual behavior—United

States.

Classification: LCC HQ247.A5 (ebook) | LCC HQ247.A5

K73 2017 (print) | DDC 363.4/409520904—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013716

Manufactured in the United States of America

26    25    24    23    22    21    20    19    18    17

10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

For Pauline

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1Comforting the Occupiers: Prostitution as Administrative Practice in Japan at the End of World War II

2Security: Policing Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Occupied Japan

3Health: Preventing, Diagnosing, and Treating Venereal Disease

4Morale: Character Guidance and Moral Purification

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1.Entrance to a prophylactic station in Kyoto, 1947

2.Inside a prophylactic station, 1947: sink, anti-VD poster Tokyo Rose has Thorns, and visuals of venereal infections

3.Condoms, pro kits, and chemical prophylaxis in a prophylactic station, 1947

4.Arrangement of hybrid toilets, sanitary products, instruction boards, and anti-VD poster in a pro station in Kyoto, 1947

5.U.S. Far East Command’s lecture material: There’s a family in your future, 1950

6.U.S. Far East Command’s lecture material: Mr. United States, 1950

7.Takekawa Masayuki’s photograph "Tenraku (Degeneration"), 1949

8.Map of Ueno Park’s sex work scene drawn by Ōtani Susumu, 1948

9.Map of sex work scene in Ueno Park and around Ueno Station drawn by Kanzaki Kiyoshi, 1949

10.Cartoon by Bill Hume: Babysan is waving goodbye, 1953

Acknowledgments

Many people have supported me along the way of conceptualizing, writing, and finishing this book. It derives from my doctoral dissertation submitted to ETH Zurich in 2015, and I would like to thank my thesis advisers Harald Fischer-Tiné, Tak Fujitani, and Martin Dusinberre for the guidance, encouragement, and constructive critique they offered me over the years. I am extremely grateful to You Jae Lee at the University of Tübingen, who gently guided me through the early stages of my doctoral research and also provided strong personal and institutional support to accomplish major parts of my archival quests. I owe special thanks to Sebastian Conrad, Alf Lüdtke, John G. Russell, Jie-Hyun Lim, Umemori Naoyuki, Mire Koikari, David Arnold, Thoralf Klein, Michael Kim, David Courtwright, Jürgen Martschukat, Henry Em, Todd Henry, Sarah Kovner and Andre Schmid, who all gave me—knowingly and unknowingly—invaluable comments and advice during various stages of this project and pointed me in directions that I could never have foreseen on my own.

At the archives I visited, I always received a warm welcome and I want to express my gratitude to all the archivists without whose assistance this book wouldn’t have been possible. I especially want to thank Eric Vanslander at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, who showed much patience in navigating me through finding aids and piles and boxes of records. His vast archival knowledge enabled me to discover hidden treasures. Sakaguchi Eiko, Amy Wasserstrom, and Kana Jenkins were of enormous help at the Prange Collection and the East Asia Collection at the University of Maryland, and they assisted and encouraged me to dig deeper in Japanese-language source material from the occupation period. Many thanks go also to Megan Harris from the Veteran’s History Project in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, who provided me insights into firsthand occupiers’ narratives.

Numerous forums allowed me to present my thoughts and helped me to cope with my manifold concerns throughout the research for this project. At Waseda University, members of the Umemori-zemi were kind enough to listen to my initial and still incoherent research proposal, encouraging me to continue—or rather: to start the project—and also gave me helpful advice. Sebastian Jobs, Bruce Dorsey, Woody Register, and Olaf Stieglitz kindly gave their attention to a preliminary draft of my very first chapter at a fascinating workshop on Uncertain Knowledge at the GHI, Washington, DC, and their illuminating comments boosted and structured my subsequent research. As the project proceeded, I became indebted to the members of the research group Korea and East Asia in Global History, 1840–2000 (based at the FU Berlin and funded by the Academy of Korean Studies) for including me in their workshops and talks, namely Nadin Heé, Jaekyom Shim, Sunho Ko, Tobias Scholl, and Hakjae Kim. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my former colleagues at ETH Zurich for the collegial environment that allowed for endless discussions of my research project. It was a comforting atmosphere in which to overcome those uncertainties inevitably connected to the at times seemingly unbearable process of writing a doctoral dissertation. In particular I would like to thank Judith Große, Bernhard C. Schär, Vasudha Bharadwaj, Patricia Putschert, Sönke Bauck, Miguel Kempf, Anna Mohr, Francesco Spöring, Jana Tschurenev, Maria Framke, and Nikolay Kamenov, who read and reread chapters of my thesis, shared their insights, pointed me toward important literature, and helped me to organize my thoughts. Béatrice Schatzmann-von-Aesch was an inestimable support in accomplishing administrative tasks and guiding me through the university’s bureaucracy during my work and graduation at ETH Zurich.

The Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture at Hanyang University in Seoul was my first postdoctoral stopover and provided a warm welcome and supportive environment that enabled me to revise my manuscript. Director Park Chan Seung, faculty members Kim Sang-Hyun, Lee Changnam, Kim Chung-kang, So Hyunsoog, Yang Hee Hong, and administrative assistant Hong Sunghee all helped me tremendously to keep focused. The Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Konstanz allowed me to finish my final revisions, and I would like to thank Fred Girod, Svenia Schneider-Wulf, and Felicia Afriyie for the institutional support.

At the University of California Press, Reed Malcolm and Zuha Khan were both of indispensable help in navigating me patiently through the demanding process of turning a manuscript into a book. I owe many thanks to three anonymous reviewers, who were very critical yet unquestionably inspiring for my revisions of the final manuscript, particularly in encouraging me to underscore issues of masculinity and masculinization during the occupation of Japan. John Koster was of great help regarding proofreading and style editing that allowed me to publish a more reader-friendly book. All remaining mistakes are unquestionably my own.

Many friends and colleagues supported me individually in multiple ways. I would like to extend my gratitude to Jessica R. Pliley, who viciously read through many chapter drafts and guided me through American university press procedures with incredible patience until the final stages of this book. Till Knaudt, Shiro Yukawa, Toshihiko Nogami, Cyrian Pitteloud, Jan Schmidt, Hans-Martin Krämer, Matsusaka Hiroaki, Damien Kunik, and Max Ward, with their deep local knowledge, were a wonderful if also sobering corrective, reminding me not to lose track of modern Japanese history. I am very grateful to the Erfurt gang, to David Möller, Sebastian Jobs, Robert Fischer, Silvan Niedermeier, and Nina Mackert, who read parts and chapters of this book, and who gave me justifiably harsh critiques but also friendly advice. Their undisputed friendship provided both intellectual and emotional support. My deepest thanks go to my parents Friederike and Franz-Albert for their long-lasting hope in their son’s doings, and to my wife Anna and our daughter Pauline who kept supporting me with their love and patience while I was finishing this book.

• • •

Parts of Chapter 1 appear in the articles Sexual Violence, Masculinity and Agency in Post-Surrender Japan in the Journal of Women’s History, and Haunted by Defeat: Imperial Sexualities, Prostitution and the Emergence of Postwar Japan in the Journal of World History’s special issue Gender and Empire. Japanese names are written with surname preceding the given name, and Japanese expressions and places are transcribed in the revised Hepburn system.

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