It is a testimony to human resilience that the great majority of Japanese transcended exhaustion and despair to refashion their lives in diverse and often imaginative ways. Some took years to do so. Some threw off the psychological prostration of kyodatsu within days. Others never succumbed to it at all. They experienced a sense of liberation and opportunity from the moment they heard the scratchy recording of the emperor’s voice. People splurged on a fancy meal or a special celebratory dish such as sekihan (boiled white rice with red beans). They hastened to remove the blackout paper from their windows, letting light back into their lives. Millions of them began to consider what it might mean to create a private life free from the dictates of the state.1
Recalling all this years later, a critic spoke of a new “space” suddenly existing in society.2 People behaved differently, thought differently, encountered circumstances that differed from any they had previously experienced—or would ever experience again. It was a rare moment of flux, freedom, and openness when new patterns of authority and new norms of behavior were still in the process of forming. People were acutely conscious of the need to reinvent their own lives.
If cynical opportunism was everywhere visible, so was opportunity—the chance to do things, say things, think about things in ways that had been impossible under the militarists. The occupation was a military dictatorship, of course, but in its early stages it destroyed enough of the authoritarian controls of the previous elites to allow for a generally unpredictable efflorescence of popular sentiment and initiative. At the popular level, these developments involved the refashioning of the very meaning of “Japan” in ways that encouraged greater personal autonomy. Prior to August 15, the state had defined in the most doctrinaire terms imaginable what the “cardinal principles of the national polity” were; what the correct “way of the subject” was; how it was essential to observe one’s “proper place” in the established hierarchies of class and gender; which “decadent” and “corrupting” foreign thoughts or cultural expressions were forbidden; what could be said or not said in virtually every situation.
When ideologues rhapsodized about “one hundred million hearts beating as one,” Japan’s enemies commonly took this at face value. During the war, the Americans and others simply used this racial self-praise to reinforce the racist stereotype of a robotic, ferociously brainwashed people. What defeat showed, to the astonishment of many, was how quickly all the years of ultranationalistic indoctrination could be sloughed off. Love of country remained, but mindless fanaticism and numbing regimentation were happily abandoned. By deed as much as word, people everywhere demonstrated relief at the collapse of the authoritarian state and receptivity to, or at least tolerance of, an immense variety of pleasures and activities.
The most flamboyant early expression of the casting off of despair and the creation of new space was to be found on the margins of “respectable society.” There, distinctive subcultures of defeat emerged, shocking yet mesmerizing symbols of the collapse of the old order and the emergence of a new spirit of iconoclasm and self-reliance. Not all marginalized groups came to possess such an aura, of course. Many “third-country people”—Koreans, Formosans, Chinese (and Okinawans, too, in the view of most Japanese)—played defiant roles on the margins, but with few exceptions they were largely rendered all but invisible by the society at large.3
The marginal groups that electrified popular consciousness came from three overlapping subcultures: the world of the panpan prostitute, whose embrace of the conqueror was disturbingly literal; the black market, with its formidable energy and seductively maverick code of behavior; and the well-lubricated “kasutori culture” demimonde, which celebrated self-indulgence and introduced such enduring attractions as pulp literature and commercialized sex. All three marginal worlds came to exemplify not merely the confusion and despair of the kyodatsu condition, but also the vital, visceral, even carnal transcending of it.
Two incidents gave prostitution a face in occupied Japan. On September 29, 1946, the Mainichi newspaper published a letter from a twenty-one-year-old prostitute. The young woman described how she had been repatriated from Manchuria and, without relatives or resources, ended up living in the cavernous reaches of Tokyo’s Ueno station:
I slept there and looked for work, but could not find anything, and there were three consecutive days when I went without eating. Then on the night of the third day a man I did not know gave me two rice balls. I devoured them. The following night he again brought me two rice balls. He then asked me to come to the park because he wanted to talk with me. I followed him. That is when I sank into the despised profession of being a “woman of the dark.”4
Even though the press was full of letters expressing the anguish of ordinary people, this one caused a sensation, albeit in an unusual and delayed manner. The letter inspired “In the Flow of the Stars,” a maudlin popular song released with little notice in December 1947. Almost a year later, the song belatedly became a great hit, and its refrain of konna onna ni dare ga shita—essentially, “Who made me such a woman?”—was taken up as a serious social question. The proper answer was usually understood not to be the sleazy procurers and pimps who took advantage of such destitute young women, but an incompetent government and bureaucracy.
Between the publication of the Mainichi letter and the release of the song, a national radio broadcast of an interview with a nineteen-year-old streetwalker shocked the public and captured quite a different view of the nether world of prostitution. Caught on a hidden microphone in April 1947, she was identified on the program as “Rakuchō no Otoki”—that is, Otoki of the Yūrakuchō district in Tokyo, where many streetwalkers operated—and was described as a leader among the prostitutes in that area. Otoki’s interviewer painted a vivid word picture of her. She was tall and sharp looking, he said, wearing navy slacks and a lavender sweater, her hair tied stylishly with a yellow band. Her face was quite beautiful, the skin almost transparently white, eyebrows strong, lips thickly rouged. However, when she talked, he observed, she had a habit of twisting her mouth in an unsavory way reminiscent of a gangster. A photograph of Otoki from this time captures the curl of her lip.
Otoki’s words made an even stronger impression than her appearance:
Of course it’s bad to be a hooker. But without relatives or jobs due to the war disaster, how are we supposed to live? . . . There aren’t many of us who do this because we like it . . . but even so, when we try to go straight and find a job, people point their fingers at us and say we were hookers. . . . I’ve turned many of these girls straight and sent them back into society, but then . . . they all [her voice becomes tearful] get picked on and chased out and end up back here under the tracks. . . . You can’t trust society. They despise us.
Nine months later, as in a perfect parable of fall and redemption, the interviewer received a letter from Otoki saying that she had been shocked to hear her own voice on the radio. It sounded “like a devil,” and as a consequence she had left the streets and found a job. Society was still harsh to her, she continued, and her resolve often came close to breaking, but she was determined to hold on.5
These sentimentalized images of “women of the dark” left a great deal unsaid, and necessarily so; for a great part of the prostitute’s trade involved catering to the huge army of occupation. The sexual implications of having to accommodate hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen had been terrifying, especially to those who were aware of the rapacity their own forces had exhibited elsewhere as well as of the huge numbers of non-Japanese women who had been forced to serve the imperial troops as ianfu or “comfort women.” In the wake of the emperor’s surrender broadcast, rumors spread like wildfire that “the enemy, once landed, will violate women one after the other.” The Home Ministry’s intelligence analysts immediately recognized the link between these rumors and the behavior of their own forces abroad. As one internal police report put it, “many of those who speak of pillage and rape, unsettling people’s minds, are returnees from the war front.”6 Urban families were urged to send their womenfolk to the countryside. Women were advised to continue to wear the baggy monpe pantaloons of the war years rather than more enticing feminine attire. Young girls were cautioned not to appear friendly. Still, it was taken for granted that the foreigners would demand sexual gratification. The question was simply: who would provide it?
The government lost no time in answering this question. On August 18, the Home Ministry sent a secret wireless message to regional police officials throughout the country instructing them to prepare special and exclusive “comfort facilities” for the occupation army. Such preparations were to be made with maximum discretion. Responsibility for staffing such facilities should be assumed by local chiefs of police, who were to mobilize local entrepreneurs and individuals already engaged in providing sexual services. On the same day, high police officials in Tokyo met with “entrepreneurs” operating in the Tokyo-Yokohama area and promised them 50 million yen in financial backing, with the understanding that they should raise a similar amount themselves.7
This classic photograph of a panpan or “woman of the night” was taken by Yoshida Jun in Tokyo’s Yūrakuchō district. In a later collection, the photo was captioned with a famous song title from the time: “Who Made Me Such a Woman?”
On the following day, Vice Premier Prince Konoe Fumimaro asked the national police commissioner to personally take charge of this urgent matter. “Please defend the young women of Japan,” the prince, a former prime minister, is said to have implored him. Within a matter of days, however, a new approach would be taken. General Kawabe Torashirō, one of the officers who had met with General MacArthur and his staff in Manila to arrange the surrender, returned to Tokyo and urged that the government not become directly involved in managing these facilities.
Thereafter, the government’s role consisted primarily of formally endorsing the project and providing it with loans and police support. The businessmen encouraged to undertake the task solicited private investment with a circular announcing official support from the Home Ministry, Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Finance, national commissioner of police, and Tokyo municipal government. On September 6, the official Kangyō Bank advanced upwards of 30 million yen as the presumed first installment on a government loan for these activities. Ikeda Hayato, a rising young star in the Ministry of Finance who was instrumental in arranging government backing, was later quoted as saying that “a hundred million yen is cheap for protecting chastity.” The entrepreneurs publicly expressed their gratitude for this lucrative opportunity to serve the nation by gathering in front of the imperial palace and shouting “Long live the emperor!”8
Enlisting a small number of women to serve as a buffer protecting the chastity of the “good” women of Japan was well-established policy in dealing with Western barbarians. Special pleasure quarters had been set up for foreigners immediately after Commodore Perry forced the country to abolish its policy of seclusion, and in modern mythology one young woman who gave her body for the nation had already been glorified as a patriotic martyr. Her name was Okichi, and she had been assigned as a consort for Townsend Harris, the first American consul, who assumed his duties in 1856. The procurers of 1945 appropriated her sad, sensual image in defining their own task. The women they were assembling, they declared, would be Shōwa no Tōjin Okichi, “the Okichis of the present era.”
To the government’s surprise, professional prostitutes proved reluctant to become latter-day Okichis. By one account, they were fearful that the Americans, commonly portrayed as demonic figures in wartime propaganda, possessed oversized sexual organs that could injure them. The organizers of the special comfort facilities thus undertook to recruit ordinary women by posting a large signboard addressed “To New Japanese Women” in the Ginza district of downtown Tokyo. “As part of urgent national facilities to deal with the postwar,” this read, somewhat vaguely, “we are seeking the active cooperation of new Japanese women to participate in the great task of comforting the occupation force.” The solicitation also mentioned openings for “female office clerks, aged between eighteen and twenty-five. Housing, clothing, and food supplied.”9
Most of the women attracted by this advertisement arrived for their interviews shabbily dressed. Some, it is said, were even barefoot. The great majority had no experience in the “water trade” of the red-light districts, and most left when informed what their actual duties would be. Among those who remained, some claimed to be attracted not so much by the assurance of food and shelter as by the appeal to give their bodies “for the country.” This was, after all, essentially the same message of patriotic self-sacrifice that had been drilled into them all their lives. By August 27, 1,360 women in Tokyo had enlisted in what soon would become known in English as the R.A.A., short for Recreation and Amusement Association (Tokushu Ian Shisetsu Kyōkai in Japanese).
The next day, just as the first small contingents of occupation forces were arriving, an inaugural ceremony for the R.A.A. was held in the plaza in front of the imperial palace. On this occasion, the following “oath,” couched in ornate Japanese, was read:
Although our family has endured for 3,000 years, unchanging as the mountains and valleys, the rivers and grasses, since the great rending of August 15, 1945, which marked the end of an era, we have been wracked with infinite, piercing grief and endless sorrow, and are about to sink to the bottom of perilous, boundless desperation. . . .
The time has come, an order has been given, and by virtue of our realm of business we have been assigned the difficult task of comforting the occupation army as part of the urgent national facilities for postwar management. This order is heavy and immense. And success will be extremely difficult. . . .
And so we unite and go forward to where our beliefs lead us, and through the sacrifice of several thousands of “Okichis of our era” build a breakwater to hold back the raging waves and defend and nurture the purity of our race, becoming as well an invisible underground pillar at the root of the postwar social order. . . .
A word as we conclude this proclamation. We absolutely are not flattering the occupation force. We are not compromising our integrity or selling our souls. We are paying an inescapable courtesy, and serving to fulfill one part of our obligations and to contribute to the security of our society. We dare say it loudly: we are but offering ourselves for the defense of the national polity. We reaffirm this. This is our proclamation.10
GIs attempt to strike up a conversation with young women in Yokohama on August 31, 1945, three days after the first occupation forces arrived in Japan.
A statement was also issued by the seven professional associations engaged in the water trade who were to run the Tokyo R.A.A. collectively. After paying solemn homage to “the great spirit of maintaining the national polity by protecting the pure blood of the hundred million,” these patriotic procurers moved with almost breathtaking agility into the facile new rhetoric of these rapidly changing times. Through the R.A.A., they declared, “we hope to promote mutual understanding between [the Allied occupation forces] and our people, and to contribute to the smooth development of people’s diplomacy and abet the construction of a peaceful world.”11
Several hundred GIs on that day quickly found their way to an R.A.A. facility in Tokyo’s ōmori district, where a small number of mostly inexperienced recruits had been gathered. Neither beds, futons, nor room partitions were yet available, and fornication took place without privacy everywhere, even in the corridors. Later Japanese accounts of the scene tend to be irate, speaking of shameless “animalistic intercourse” that showed the “true colors” of so-called American civilization. The local police chief is said to have wept.12
One naive recruit to the R.A.A. later recalled the terror of her first day, when she was called on to service twenty-three American soldiers. By one estimate, R.A.A. women engaged between fifteen and sixty GIs a day. A nineteen-year-old who previously had been a typist committed suicide almost immediately. Some women broke down or deserted. By mid-September, however, this grotesque exercise in “people’s diplomacy” had become more or less routine. In his diary entry for September 13, the writer Takami Jun recorded a conversation with a taxi driver who reported seeing a woman in a flashy kimono—like something from an operetta, he said—greeting an American soldier outside one of the comfort facilities. She leaped up, threw her arms around his neck, and said Harō—“Hello.” It was, for Japanese men, a depressing scene.13
Japanese waitresses pose with members of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey who were rushed to Japan to evaluate the effects of the wartime air raids.
Since the greater part of Tokyo had been incinerated in the air raids, initially there were not many areas where comfort facilities could be provided. In the latter part of September, Dr. Yosano Mitsuru, the head of the municipal government’s hygiene department (and eldest son of Yosano Akiko, a celebrated feminist and poet), was summoned by GHQ and asked to help apportion the prostitutes into separate districts to be reserved for use by U.S. officers, white enlisted men, and black enlisted men. Initially, women designated for use by black soldiers were said to have been horrified—until they discovered that many black GIs treated them more kindly than the whites did. In their meticulous preoccupation with race and racial hierarchy, some Japanese concluded that such relative kindness derived from the fact that black soldiers had been socialized to regard them as “whites.”14
Such “recreation and amusement” centers expanded rapidly in Tokyo—there were soon thirty-three by one count—and spread almost as quickly to some twenty other cities. Not surprisingly, they proved popular among U.S. servicemen. They were, among other things, inexpensive. The price for a short visit with an R.A.A. prostitute was 15 yen, or one dollar—about the same as half a pack of cigarettes on the Japanese market. Two or three times that amount purchased an entire night of personal diplomacy.15 Although these services did not prevent rape and assault, the incidence of rape remained relatively low given the huge size of the occupation force—much as the government had hoped.16
Despite its popularity and initial support from the victors, the R.A.A. did not survive the early months of the occupation. In January 1946, occupation authorities ordered the abolition of all “public” prostitution, declaring it undemocratic and in violation of women’s human rights. Privately, they acknowledged that their major motivation was an alarming rise in venereal disease among the troops. By the time the prohibition went into effect a few months later, almost 90 percent of the R.A.A. women tested positive for infection. Around the same time, syphilis was detected in 70 percent of the members of a single unit of the U.S. Eighth Army, and gonorrhea in 50 percent. It was largely to combat such diseases that the first U.S. patents for penicillin were sold to Japanese companies in April of that year.17
Alarmed by the threat of widespread venereal disease, U.S. military authorities quickly established “prophylactic stations” outside places of prostitution that catered to the GI trade—here, conveniently lettered in English, the popular “Oasis of Ginza.”
The women who had been recruited by the R.A.A. were sent off without severance pay, but with uplifting speeches to the effect that they had “served the country” and been a “dike of chastity,” albeit not their own.18 Ending formal public prostitution did not, of course, mean the end of prostitution itself. The trade simply was carried out more privately—and venereal disease naturally remained difficult to control. Nonetheless, the transition did have its precious moments. Outside the new comfort facilities that had been created exclusively for the foreigners, in one licensed quarter of the traditional geisha-centered “floating world,” the last day of public prostitution was memorably recorded in a photograph of kimono-clad young women standing before an American flag affixed to the wall of their brothel and throwing up their arms in the familiar banzai cheer of celebration.19
In responding to SCAP’s orders, Japanese bureaucrats revealed a rare and unusually fine appreciation of human rights. In December 1946, the Home Ministry declared that women had the right to become prostitutes, and this became the ostensible rationale behind designating “red-line” districts in which it was understood by all parties that they would continue to ply their trade. (The “red-line” designation came from markings on the city maps used by the police; in areas outlined in blue, such activity was not allowed). In the years that followed, an estimated fifty-five thousand to seventy thousand women, many of “third country” origin, worked these areas as full-time or part-time prostitutes.20
This was the milieu epitomized by the panpan—tough, vulnerable figures remembered for their bright lipstick, nail polish, sharp clothes, and sometimes enviable material possessions. They became inseparable from the urban nightscapes and memory landscapes of postwar Japan. Photographs of them remain among the most melancholy and evocative of this period: the leaning figure in the dark, wearing a kerchief, handbag on her arm, often lighting or smoking a cigarette. They were known by many euphemisms—women of the night, women of the street, women of the dark—but panpan was the most familiar. Although male prostitutes also emerged to cater to the GI trade, little public mention was made of them and they failed to capture the popular imagination.21
The origin of the word panpan is obscure, although it was said to have been picked up by Americans in the South Seas during the war as a term for available women. A book published in 1948 observed that Japanese sailors repatriated from the southern areas also sometimes spoke of pan-pan. Among GIs, the term provoked ridicule, pity, compassion, exoticism, and plain eroticism. When prostitutes used the label themselves, it conveyed a similarly mixed impression—a sense of “desperation” and “misery,” as popular accounts put it, coupled with a proud defiance of conventional norms, a sensual joie de vivre.
Although “Rakuchō no Otoki” spoke bitterly of being treated with contempt by “society,” she and her companions also came to seem attractively bold and subversive in the popular mind. An opinion column in the humor magazine Van hinted at this. “What is the oldest (most feu-dalistic) feature of contemporary Japanese society?” Van asked a selection of famous people, “and what is the newest (most democratic)?” In the opinion of Tatsuno Yutaka, a well-known social critic and scholar of French literature, “politics” was the oldest and most unchanged feature of the present-day scene, for it still had no meaningful connection to people’s lives. The newest and most democratic? “The panpan girls,” Tatsuno responded, “because they have transcended racial and international prejudice.”22
The comment was clever and barbed, even if only half true. In certain areas, the panpan trade was strictly organized not merely into territories (called shima, literally, “islands”), but also in regard to clientele. Some pan-pan serviced only Japanese customers; others, much more numerous, serviced Americans. The distinction was rigidly observed in certain shima, and panpan who transgressed either turf or race could be subjected to abuse or even torture by other prostitutes. Still, Tatsuno’s glib reply, mocking the political charades that often masked themselves as “democracy,” had a ring of truth to it. He was calling attention not merely to the most intimate manifestation of “international relations” in his occupied country, but also to its racial dimensions. Thousands of panpan consorted openly and comfortably with both white and black GIs. Even while being looked down upon, they came to exemplify a certain tolerance toward other races and an undeniable independence in their defiant behavior as a whole.
Despite the tawdry nature of their lives, the panpan became associated with the liberation of repressed sensuality—a world of erotic indulgence that had found earlier expression not merely in the pleasure quarters of the late feudal period, but in the bawdy relationships and amorous dalliances celebrated in popular tales and courtly romances of ancient times. Their self-indulgent carnality was as sharp a repudiation as could be imagined of the stultifying austerity and discipline the militarists had demanded. Although some men may have been shocked by their sexual frankness, more than a few found themselves attracted to it as well. To numerous entrepreneurs, the panpan heralded an oncoming commercialization of sex that would flourish long after they themselves disappeared.23
The very reasons that young women gave for becoming panpan in the first place reflected the ambiguous persona of these women of the night. One survey of street women found that many were war orphans, or—virtually as devastating in terms of economic and social security—had no fathers. A considerable number were eldest daughters who professed to feeling an especially strong sense of responsibility for the well-being of their parents and siblings. The same survey also noted, however, that a majority of those interviewed had lost their virginity “willingly” outside of marriage, and that many had turned to prostitution for reasons other than economic desperation. Although some used their incomes frugally to support themselves or their families, others threw their money away on ephemeral pleasures—displays of extravagant indulgence that defied the general poverty of the times. Surveys of panpan rounded up by the police in 1946 and 1947 found a substantial number who frankly said they chose their way of life simply “out of curiosity.”24
Police transcripts recording the “life histories” of arrested prostitutes sometimes conveyed their candid acknowledgment of sexual pleasure in considerable detail. An eighteen-year-old in Kyoto told of how, while attending a dressmaking school in Nara the previous year, she had lost her virginity to a young GI in a park on a summer night. Several months later, after their romantic liaison broke up, she decided almost casually to become a prostitute and moved to Kyoto to do so. Most of her customers were GIs. If a customer was especially good looking, she blandly told the police, she often did not charge him. Despite illness and hospitalization, she claimed to have no serious second thoughts about pursuing this way of life.25
Prostitution usually paid far better than other jobs available to most women, and the argot of the profession tended to romanticize the pan-pan in subtly traditional ways. A prostitute who flitted indiscriminately from customer to customer was known, in borrowed English, as a bata-furai or “butterfly.” She was seen, in her way, as a modern-day counterpart of “the woman who loved love,” the promiscuous heroine of a famous work by the great seventeenth-century writer Ihara Saikaku. Panpan who specialized in the GI trade were also called yōpan—the ideograph for yō connoting foreign or Western. They were the new Okichis, counterparts of a group of women known as rashamen who became the mistresses or wives of foreigners in the mid-nineteenth-century treaty ports of newly opened Japan (and who have survived in photographs as evocative and melancholy as those of the panpan). Panpan who were loyal to a single American patron were identified, again in borrowed English, as onrii (“only”), short for onrii wan (“only one”). Here the reworking of old values was subtle indeed. Like the samurai and his lord or high-ranking geisha and their privileged patrons, a panpan, too, could exemplify loyalty. The virtue remained; only the object it was directed toward had changed.
Like accomplished courtesans of the past, the panpan also possessed special talents—most notably, in their case, the ability to communicate in a polyglot form of English, a hybrid mix of hooker’s Japanese and the GI’s native tongue that was humorously identified as “panglish.” Getting along in this second language, broken or not, was a skill highly valued in post-surrender Japan—hundreds of thousands of men were also struggling to survive by dealing with the conqueror in the conqueror’s tongue (their pidgin English was sometimes laughed off as “SCAPanese”). And here lay the rub. The panpan arm in arm with her GI companion, or riding gaily in his jeep, constituted a piercing wound to national pride in general and masculine pride in particular. Yet at the same time, these women were striking symbols of the whole convoluted phenomenon of “Americanization” in which everyone was in some way engaged. The panpan openly, brazenly prostituted themselves to the conqueror—while others, especially the “good” Japanese who consorted with the Americans as privileged elites, only did it figuratively. This was unsettling.
The wound to masculine pride of having to kowtow to an army of occupation was compounded by the ubiquitous fraternization of the victors with Japanese women. Endō Takeo’s undated cartoon of a disabled veteran encountering a burly GI was accompanied by a long caption observing that things had changed greatly since the two men had confronted each other at Guadalcanal several years earlier.
In the heat of war, the Japanese enemy was commonly regarded as subhuman by the victors. In this photo from December 1944, American sailors in the Pacific theater gather to observe a newly captured prisoner being “deloused.”
In their embarrassing way, the panpan were the exemplary pioneer materialists and consumers of the postwar era. In those years of acute hunger and scarcity, the material comfort of the Americans was simply staggering to behold. What made America “great” was that it was so rich; and, for many, what made “democracy” appealing was that it apparently was the way to become prosperous. Among ordinary people, no group tapped the material treasures of the conquerors as blatantly as the panpan. They were the recipients of goods from the U.S. military exchange posts (the famous PXs) that in those impoverished days truly seemed like treasure houses from a magic land: crammed not only with basic foodstuffs, but with liquor and cigarettes, sweets and delicacies, voluptuously decadent feminine things such as lipstick and nylon stockings.
The appeal of this “America” can hardly be exaggerated. Otoki’s brightly rouged lips and colorful clothing were not merely a prostitute’s regalia, but part of a mystique of American glamour and fashion that made a spectacular impact after the drab parsimony of the war years. The sensual panpan was as close as anyone in Japan might hope to get, in the flesh, to Hollywood. Even Shiseidō, the premiere purveyor of cosmetics, with a haut bourgeois prewar tradition, was caught up in this. The company’s first new postwar product was a “nail stick” resembling lipstick that was used to color fingernails. It was especially popular among women who consorted with GIs.26 To women who had been denied make-up, permanents, and colorful clothing (“extravagance is an enemy” was a wartime slogan), the application of a bit of cosmetics could be a touching and understandable way to try to transcend despair and exhaustion, even if just for a moment. A journalist recalled how nylons, never seen before, arrived along with the Americans just as women were shedding their ugly monpe pantaloons. Their hearts were tempted, she observed acidly, and some were known to have exchanged their chastity for a pair of stockings.27
The eroticization of defeated Japan in the eyes of the conquerors took place almost immediately, creating a complex interplay of assumed masculine and feminine roles that has colored U.S.-Japan relations ever since.
The bearing of gifts, a routine practice among enlisted men in the occupation force and their paramours, was carried out on a far more lavish level when occupation officers engaged in such personal diplomacy. The sheer quantitative dimensions of this intercourse—in terms of material exchange as well as sexual relations—are impressive to contemplate. Regular force rotations continued to bring in hundreds of thousands of new troops to staff the quarter-million-man occupation army, and those who chose the path of chastity during their tour of duty were by all accounts exceptional. By one estimate, almost half of the many tens of millions of dollars that occupation personnel spent on “recreation” passed through the hands of the Okichis of that era.28
At that time, the panpan was perhaps the most obvious symbol of a new phenomenon in intercultural relations: the “horizontal” westernization of Japan. Previously, such influences had penetrated the country vertically, almost invariably introduced by the elites. Even seeming exceptions like the spread of flapper culture in the 1920s, with its “modern boys” and “Clara Bow girls,” tended to involve only the comfortable bourgeoisie, while ordinary people remained relatively unaffected. The lower-class panpan represented an unprecedented phenomenon—a popular westernization “from the side.” Figuratively as well as literally, these tough, animated young women were closer to the Americans than anyone else. No one surpassed them as the harbingers of a hedonistic, materialistic, American-style consumer culture.29
The ubiquitous sexuality linking conqueror and conquered had far-reaching ramifications insofar as American perceptions of the defeated nation and its people were concerned. To some members of the occupation force, native women came to be regarded as little more than available sexual objects. This characteristic colonial attitude led to a notorious incident in which all the women on a commuter train were detained by American MPs and forced to submit to medical examinations for venereal disease. Every Japanese woman, in a word, was potentially a whore.30 More strikingly, the defeated country itself was feminized in the minds of the Americans who poured in. The enemy was transformed with startling suddenness from a bestial people fit to be annihilated into receptive exotics to be handled and enjoyed. That enjoyment was palpable—the pan-pan personified this. Japan—only yesterday a menacing, masculine threat—had been transformed, almost in the blink of an eye, into a compliant, feminine body on which the white victors could impose their will. At the same time, fraternization between the occupation forces and Japanese women—both within and outside the structures of prostitution—also became, for some, a starting point for interracial affection, mutual respect, even love. There was metaphor here too. For all parties, this was—however one engaged in it—a phenomenal cultural event.
Nothing was truly sacred any longer, and everything seemed interconnected. Among the numerous cynical sayings of those days was onna ma panpan, otoko wa katsugiya—women become panpan, men become carriers for the black market. The word for “black market” was yami-ichi, for “woman of the dark” it was yami no onna—written with the same ideograph for yami (darkness) in each case. Manga, a humor magazine with a wartime pedigree of brilliant propagandistic articles and illustrations, captured the connection between the two worlds with a cartoon of a large, unshaven thug in an old army uniform accosting a trembling citizen. “Who made me such a man?” its caption asked, mocking the maudlin song about the poor fallen woman of Ueno.31
There were striking differences between these two dark worlds, however. The realm of the panpan was highly Americanized, whereas the black market, even when GIs roamed through it, was first and last for the Japanese. Its distinctive argot derived from the gangster underworld in contrast to the “panglish” of the panpan. Renting a spot for a stall in the black market in Osaka, for example, required shoba dai, “place money.” Shoba was the gangster inversion of basho, the conventional word for “place.”32 Where the world of the panpan was fundamentally sexual and only occasionally violent, that of the black market was almost perpetually carnivorous. Men carried weapons. Order was enforced. No one gave anything away because the customer was good looking—or pathetic, or desperate, or starving to death. There was little room for sentimentality. These outlaw activities often were camouflaged by gentle euphemisms—not only the “free market” but also the lovely “open-sky” or “blue-sky” market-—but when all was said and done, the black market remained a place of hardened hearts and harsh dealings.
Whereas the economic significance of the panpan was greater than commonly realized, no one could fail to be aware of the enormous economic role of the black market. For many Japanese, this was virtually the economy. It emerged almost simultaneously with capitulation. Indeed, a week before the emperor’s broadcast, the Asahi published a letter warning, in a grim pun, that the approaching enemy would try to exploit yami—that is, take advantage of both dark emotions and the illicit market.33 On August 18, the postwar black market received a grand send-off with the publication of a large advertisement in Tokyo’s major newspapers. Presented as an “Urgent message to factories and entrepreneurs engaged in conversion,” the ad, promising sales at “proper prices,” invited people to bring samples of their products to the organization that had placed the ad: the Kantō-area Ozu gang.
Small-factory owners whose livelihood as military subcontractors had come to a sudden end poured into the gang’s office in the Shinjuku district, and its boss quickly emerged as one of the most energetic entrepreneurs of the new Japan. As the folklore of the market had it, he encouraged manufacturers to convert their swords into household cutlery, their battle helmets into pots and pans. Within two days, he had engineered the opening of the Shinjuku black market, a congeries of outdoor stalls and stands selling sundry goods and already sporting a happy motto: “Brightness from Shinjuku.” By September, that slogan was spelled out in a large sign made up of 117 hundred-watt bulbs, visible as far away as neighboring stations on the rail line. In the night darkness of a shattered city only weeks removed from air raids, the literal “brightness from Shinjuku” provided a memorable vision of optimism for a despairing people. Initially, the media greeted these developments with enthusiasm.34
“Blue-sky markets” materialized in most large cities by early September, often springing up without plan. In some instances, ex-servicemen and discharged factory workers went to the countryside, returned with knapsacks full of goods, and started selling right out of their packs. Such spontaneous entrepreneurs soon gained a name—tachiuri, literally, “stand and sell” people. One marketeer told of “opening his store” by plopping a bucket of edible live frogs down on the street. Some he sold for money, the rest he traded for potato powder, dumplings, dry bread, and the like—and with that, his new profession was launched. A returned soldier reportedly got into business on the spur of the moment by selling the pants he was wearing. Surely the blackest of black-market stories concerned the emerging market in Osaka, where a brisk trade quickly developed in blankets and clothing taken from the dead. Many such items came directly from sanitariums and were still stained with blood coughed up by tuberculosis victims. The Osaka entrepreneurs who dealt in such goods referred to them among themselves as oshaka—a ghoulishly pious reference, for shaka refers to the Buddha or buddhas.35
By October 1945, an estimated seventeen thousand open-air markets had blossomed nationwide, mostly in the larger cities. Only months later, there were many as seventy-six thousand stalls, each averaging over forty customers a day, in Tokyo’s numerous markets alone. With this came organizational rationalization, a sometimes brutal process commonly led by yakuza gumi—gangster gangs headed by godfather-type individuals. In Tokyo, the division of black-market territories among various gangs was fairly clear cut. The market in the Shinbashi district was controlled by the Matsuda gang, Asakusa by the Shibayama gang, the Ginza area by the Ueda gang, Ikebukuro by the Sekiguchi gang, and Shinjuku by the Ozu and Wada gangs.36
Gang control of the Osaka “free market” followed similar lines. Mori-moto Mitsuji, who organized the Umeda market there, was a particularly flamboyant figure. He took pleasure in identifying with the tradition of the noble gangster who uses his influence to protect the weak against the rapacious. Repatriated from the Philippines in late 1945, he arrived home a month after the death of his father, who had been a man of influence in local political circles. At the request of the speaker of the municipal assembly, he moved in with his followers to clean up the Umeda market which, as he described it, was a hodgepodge of amateurs who were being shaken down by a small number of toughs. “It was a time,” in Morimoto’s words, “when the strong ate the weak in cold blood. I did what I could to prevent it, but it was a miserable time to be Japanese.” Morimoto’s workday attire included a leather jacket, a knife by his breast, and a pistol on his hip. When the police proved ineffective, he “took care” of things himself. Before long, there was a substantial price on his head. Before long, there was also a colossal Osaka black market extending far beyond Morimoto’s turf. In July 1946, city officials estimated that approximately one hundred thousand individuals were supporting themselves by such activity, of whom around 80 percent were either repatriated soldiers or former factory workers who lost their jobs when the war ended. Sixty percent of the market’s regular operatives were men; 30 percent, women; and the remaining 10 percent, children.37
Some of the buying and selling in these markets was legitimate, essentially a replacement for the countless small urban retailers whose businesses had been destroyed in the air raids. On the other hand, a great deal of the activity was illegal. The black market under the Matsuda gang in Tokyo, which had some two thousand members at its peak, exemplified the complexity and volatility of these arrangements. The gang’s influence was established when the oyabun or “patron” (in the feudalistic vocabulary of this demimonde) Matsuda Giichi began organizing petty vendors unloading their knapsacks and setting up stands around Shinbashi station. The Tokyo municipal government and local police threw their support behind Matsuda, who proceeded to assume responsibility for approving vendors (for a fee) and organizing such practical and essential services as lighting, toilets, and trash collection. He relied on his own gang members rather than the police to enforce order.38
Gangs such as the Matsuda-Gumi played an open and major role in organizing the black markets that dominated the economy until around 1949.
By early 1946, the Shinbashi market had a well-rationalized structure, nominally under the oversight of the police, that operated through an association known as the Tokyo Stall Vendors Professional Union. Vending licenses had to be obtained through local police stations, and generally were reserved for individuals who fell into one of the following fairly inclusive categories: war wounded, family of someone killed in the war, handicapped persons, former vendors or street-stall operators, or retail merchants who had lost their shops in the war. An unusually large number of vendors in the Shinbashi market—some 80 percent—were registered in this way, but elsewhere in Tokyo around 80 percent of participants were reported to be unregistered.
The market was supplied, both legally and illegally, by tapping into food supplies in the countryside, sea products from coastal fishing communities, and former military stockpiles. Many American goods also made their way onto the market, often arriving by way of panpan who received them from their patrons. Vendors also struck private deals with occupation personnel. The Ueno outdoor market even featured an “America Lane” specializing in such goods. A hierarchy of brokers soon emerged—from top-level dealers handling lots valued in the millions of yen down through two or three levels of wholesalers to individuals known as oroshiya who delivered the goods directly to vendors. At each step on this ladder, a profit of between 20 and 30 percent was indent. A tough operator working a particular marketplace might pocket as much as 8,000 yen a day in these early months; even the most modest vendors—sometimes called “peanuts,” apparently in mocking reference to the lowly status of peanut sellers—could earn as much as 50 yen a day. In Shinbashi, the Matsuda-gumi indently relied on approximately one hundred fifty underlings to maintain or enforce order, collect fees, and the like. They enjoyed the old-fashioned prestige of being called oniisan or “big brother” by those they policed, and earned a regular monthly income of 600 to 1,000 yen. In addition to the black market per se, the Matsuda organization was also involved in construction and supplied and supervised daily laborers requested by the occupation forces.
Fierce rivalries accompanied these activities. In June 1946, for example, two months after grandly proclaiming the creation of the “Shinbashi New Life Market,” Matsuda Giichi, the gang’s boss, was assassinated by a former gang member. Territorial conflicts were seriously exacerbated, moreover, by racial tensions. Like the world of prostitution, the black market had a large representation of “third-country people” who had chosen not to be repatriated to their native lands. Well-organized Korean and Formosan gangs vied with Japanese gangs, and in July these simmering tensions erupted in spectacular violence. A fight involving hundreds of Formosan vendors and over a thousand Matsuda-gumi toughs spilled over into the neighboring Shibuya district, culminating in a gun-fight outside the Shibuya police station that left seven Formosans dead and thirty-four injured. One policeman was killed and another critically injured.
Repercussions from the “Shibuya incident” extended in many directions. The hostility that already existed between the police and the Formosan and Korean communities was rubbed rawer. Prejudice against “third-country people” increased, and much of the public’s anger against both black-market abuses and the rising crime rate came to fall on non-Japanese Asians. In addition, the inability of law-enforcement officers to control the black market effectively was exposed, prompting ridicule of the police and demoralization in their ranks. Although U.S. authorities attempted to encourage greater control over the black market following the incident, their efforts were largely unavailing.39
The police emerge poorly in accounts of the illegal markets—venal if not thoroughly corrupt, harried and hapless if not completely incompetent. This was nicely captured in a banal vignette: the case of the stolen overcoat. The coat’s owner almost immediately noticed it was missing from his office in Osaka’s city hall and with unerring instinct rushed to the local black market, where he found it two hours later—on sale for 3,500 yen. He summoned two police detectives, who advised him to negotiate the matter with the market bosses, who in turn spoke to the vendor selling the stolen coat, who graciously sold it back to its owner for 500 yen. The owner’s base salary as a city employee at that time was 700 yen a month.40
The top-to-bottom corruption of the system did little to foster faith in politics or confidence in the heralded programs of “democratization” that were being promoted elsewhere. In addition, the undisguised junglelike nature of the “free market” had an effect much like shock therapy on a people who had been indoctrinated to believe that as a race and culture they possessed a unique “familial” consciousness that bound them together in mutual support. As the writer Sakaguchi Ango observed at the time, this predatory world was an extraordinary thing to behold. Men who only months earlier had been willing to die for their country—to fall with the purity and beauty of the cherry blossom, as the mesmerizing cliche of the war years put it—were now mercilessly gouging their compatriots.
Some of the market’s petty operators later acknowledged this of themselves—with awe, much like former soldiers of any time or place who look back, as if at total strangers, on the horrors and atrocities they themselves once witnessed or committed. Thus, Furusawa Kotaro, who later became a journalist, recalled that when the war ended he and his fellow students had parted pledging with high idealism to work hard to rebuild the country. What he actually did, for a half-year or more, was prey on the weak. Exhausted mothers with crying children came to him to barter a precious kimono, and he would beat them down by calling it a moth-eaten rag. He even did this to one of his own relatives, knowing that her home had been bombed and her mother lay sick in bed. “Yamato race” solidarity did not matter, nor did kinship, nor politics. “The emperor’s renunciation of divinity, and the liberal, democratizing policies issued by the occupation forces,” Furusawa recalled, “all seemed irrelevant to the dark faces gathered in the black market.”
“Blue-sky” black markets flourished in every major city. In this 1946 scene near Tokyo’s Ueno station, vendors are selling metal household utensils. Such consumer products had virtually disappeared during the war, when basic resources such as metal were diverted to the production of military goods.
In this milieu, men and women drank to excess, just as many panpan squandered their earnings in hedonistic indulgence. A timid participant in the Osaka market framed this piquantly: “I bargained for things saying whatever was necessary, and sold them the same way. To numb our consciences and gain courage, many of us merchants did business while drinking kasutori liquor. For me, faint hearted, every day was difficult and full of wounds.” A less faint-hearted marketeer recalled the exhilaration of raking in, in a single day, what would take the average salaried worker a full month to earn. No one had any thought at all of saving for the future. After all, there was no clear future beyond, it appeared, endless runaway inflation. And so, after putting aside that part of the day’s earnings necessary for the next day’s business, he and his companions would squander the rest on prostitutes and liquor. “I drank,” as he put it, drawing on time-worn imagery, “trying to forget a life that hung suspended like a floating weed.”
Sometimes life in the market assumed an almost exquisite merging of delicacy and degeneration. For the right price, all sorts of things were for sale. In one corner of one market, vendors who regularly made a killing would gather around a third-country person who sold an ungodly drink made of alcohol used in aircraft lubricants mixed with artificial sweetener. With this, he served—and this would have been a rare delicacy at any time in Japan—jellyfish in sea-urchin sauce. Although the chronicler of this story could not afford such elegant depravity, he did manage to drink virtually nonstop for a half year after becoming a black-market vendor—and to live to tell the tale.41
A great many other unedifying stories—none of them destined to appear in exemplary accounts of Japan’s postwar recovery—also reveal this sheer spirit of individual survival. The other side of greed and decadence was a brazen vitality. Toughs flaunted their defiance of “good” society by attiring themselves in what became known as their “three sacred regalia,” an irreverent takeoff on the sanctified regalia of the emperor. In place of the imperial mirror, sword, and jewel, they were identified by their predilection for aloha shirts, nylon belts, and rubber-soled shoes.42 Men on black-market runs to the countryside took over whole train cars, where they sang until drunkenness overcame them. Men intent on cornering the fish market put out to sea in boats of their own, surrounding fishing vessels and paying them two to three times the fixed market price to transfer their catches right there on the ocean. Farmers, mythically the most humble and subservient of the emperor’s loyal subjects, turned aside even the most desperate of city folk if they could not meet black-market rates. Such rural hard trading was so commonplace that city dwellers even embraced the rumor that farmers held a celebration whenever their pile of hundred-yen bills became a foot (one shaku) high.43
The life force here was unmistakable. Entrepreneurs dealt in everything from a stew made out of leftovers from GI bases and hotels catering to occupation personnel (known as zanpan or gotteri stew) to job lots of pilfered machinery and construction materials to loan sharking. They did not spend their time stroking the Americans or engaging in polite, hypocritical conversation. In their peculiar way, they were more honest than the prominent politicians, capitalists, and former military officers who snuggled up to the conquerors and put on righteous faces while secretly profiting from the black market.
Despite its pervasive tensions and outright eruptions of violence, the black market was also one of the few arenas where interactions between the Japanese and other Asians took place on a regular and more or less equitable basis. In the view of more romantic Japanese historians, poor Japanese, Koreans, and Formosans came together here in unprecedented ways. Considerations such as class background, education, or former employment had little bearing on personal relationships; and although race and nationality mattered, interracial relationships were taken for granted far more than was the case among the broader public. From this perspective, the marginal black marketeers posed a challenge to society that went beyond the illegality of many of their activities.44
When the victors arrived in Japan, they encountered a country with few privately owned vehicles. Of those, moreover, a great many were powered by charcoal rather than gasoline. This taxi driver, caught by the camera in October 1945, is stoking up his charcoal-driven car.
From a plainer perspective, the men and women who worked the market exemplified, without varnish, a pragmatic materialism and even an exemplary work ethic. In a letter to the Asahi, a young boy asked what was wrong with this. His brother was a black marketeer who got up at 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. every day, rode crowded trains, scratched for small profits, and somehow managed to support his mother and four siblings—and he admired him for it. He was more impressive by far, the boy opined, than those laborers running around in demonstrations and sabotaging work. When he himself graduated from middle school, he intended to follow his brother’s path.
A week or so later, a sixth-grade girl responded that working the black market was not more admirable than engaging in labor protests. What would happen, she asked, if the whole working class turned into black marketeers. “I think,” she concluded, “that the government is at fault for creating such a society as this. The goal of constructing a new Japan should be aimed at creating a country where people can live without a black market.”45
One way or another, the black market/free market/blue-sky market challenged everyone to define where they stood.
The kasutori shōchū that made the faint hearted bold and the strong hearted wild also apparently made prolific those with countercultural proclivities. It was, in any case, the drink of choice among those artists and writers who made a cult out of degeneracy and nihilism. It was a vile liquor—best downed, it was said, while holding one’s nose—and it gave its name to a chaotic subculture that proved a natural complement to the worlds of the panpan and black marketeers: the “kasutori culture” (kasutori bunka).
Kasutori culture flourished into the 1950s and left a gaudy legacy of escapism, titillation, and outright sleaze—a commercial world dominated by sexually oriented entertainments and a veritable cascade of pulp literature. Like the panpan and the black marketeers, however, the denizens of kasutori culture also exhibited an ardor and vitality that conveyed a strong impression of liberation from authority and dogma. This aura of icono-clasm was reinforced by the emergence of a kind of barroom intelligentsia—wittily nicknamed, in the usual hybrid manner, the kasutori-gencha or “kasutori-gentsia”—whose writings purported to impose a semblance of meaning and even quasi-philosophical structure on a wildly degenerate life-style. Thanks to the pulp publications and to more serious writers alike, life on the margins became intertwined with theories of decadence as the only true honesty and authenticity, of the carnal body as the only body worth venerating. In some of these formulations, sex, degeneracy, and “love” even became equated with “revolution.”
Pulp magazines, the flashiest product of kasutori culture, eventually became generically known as kasutori zasshi or “kasutori magazines,” a term that in itself captured the mordant humor of the counterculture. The label rested on an elaborate pun equating the fleeting nature of consciousness when drinking kasutori shōchū with the ephemeral existence of most of these early periodicals. The third cup of kasutori liquor, the saying went, usually rendered the drinker unconscious; and similarly, very few of these escapist magazines ever got beyond three issues. (Although written with different ideographs, “three cups” and “three issues” are both pronounced sango, thus giving rise to the pun sangome de tsubureru, “gone by the third.”) Beyond this joke lay a larger double meaning. While the “kasu-tori magazines” celebrated a fugitive world of hedonistic and even grotesque indulgence, they also evoked more sobering images of impermanence, a world of no tomorrow, the banishment of authority, the absence of orthodox or transcendent values.46
Publishers of the pulps denied having any serious purpose whatsoever. The classic formulation of their ethos was presented in the maiden issue of a magazine named Ryōki (Bizarre), whose editors emphatically declared that they had “no audacious ambition to enlighten or educate readers,” but on the contrary simply desired to provide a moment of pleasure to those who had become “totally exhausted physically and mentally in attempting to construct a nation of peace.” More often than not, the covers of the ka-sutori magazines featured illustrations of sensual women, or occasionally paired lovers, with a high percentage of Caucasians among them. The first seminude photographs of women appeared in the monthly Aka to Kuro (Red and Black) in late 1946, and drawings or paintings of nude or partially nude women became commonplace as cover designs by the summer of the following year.
The sexual fantasies in these publications, read mostly by young men, provided a kind of counterpart to the sexual encounters through which a large part of the occupation army was simultaneously viewing Japan. While hundreds of thousands of young GIs were coming to regard the accommodating panpan as representative of the conquered country, a large audience of Japanese males was being encouraged to think of the West in terms of its women—and these women, in turn, as voluptuous sexual objects. From this time on, the idealized Western female figure, long limbed and amply proportioned, became an object of male lust—and an ideal for young Japanese women to emulate.
The titles of the pulps were usually as colorful as their cover designs. Ryōki, for example, inspired such clones as Ōru Ryōki (All Bizarre), Sei Ryōki (Sex Bizarre), and even Ryōki Zeminaru (Bizarre Seminar). Borrowed and bastardized English titles included Ōru Romansu (All Romance), Madamu (Madam), Kyabaree (Cabaret), Guno (Grotesque), G-men (G-Men), Chi to Daiyamondo (Blood and Diamonds), Buinasu (Venus), Suriru (Thrill), Hū Danitto (Who Dunnit), Neo-riberaru (Neoliberal), Pinappu (Pinup), Saron (Salon), and Nanbā Wan (Number One). The last of these was produced as a sideline by some hard-up students at Tokyo University. From the French came Shikku (Chic), and from the German Riibe (Liebe).
There was also Seppun (Kiss), the perfect title for a period when even some American reformers were promoting kissing as an expression of liberation from the feudal constrictions of the past. Editors of the pulps accepted this particular gift from heaven with open arms by publishing pieces on, for example, “a theory on the rehabilitation of kissing”—and then proceeded to challenge the constrictions of the present by focusing on topics that tested the limits of the occupation’s censorship apparatus. They got away with a good deal. A study based on some sixteen hundred issues of kasutori magazines found that the “symbolic images” that tended to dominate the genre included kissing, strip shows, underpants, panpan and “leisurely women,” chastity, incest, masturbation, and lonely widows. This was not edifying, but it was undeniably a far cry from the mystique of living and dying for the emperor that had governed life until just recently.47
“The Pulps”: magazines associated with the counterculture revived a popular craze known in borrowed English as ero-guro-nansensu (“erotic, grotesque, nonsensical”) that had flourished in the 1920s and the early 1930s.
The visual accompaniment to the “rehabilitation of kissing” initially came to occupied Japan by way of Hollywood. Films such as Prelude to Spring, starring Deanna Durbin, and Madame Curie, with Greer Garson, proved immensely popular—partly because, contrary to presurrender practice, their kissing scenes remained uncut. Emboldened by this and encouraged by the Americans, local film studios ventured to add osculation to their own repertoire. The first platonic kiss was landed in the Daiei Studio’s oddly titled He and She Go, which opened in mid-April of 1946. A friendly peck followed in the same studio’s An Evening’s Kiss, released on May 23. Film history truly was made the next day when Shōchiku’s Springtime at Twenty opened, featuring a close-up scene of hero kissing heroine. Unknown to spellbound viewers, the passion of this moment had been sanitized by a piece of gauze soaked in hydrogen oxide that the lovers placed inconspicuously between their lips. What the actor Ōsaka Shirō mainly recalled of the great event was the taste of disinfectant, whereas the actress Ikuno Michiko staunchly proclaimed that she had simply closed her eyes and done her job. Kinema Jumpō, a leading film journal, primly observed that the kiss was contextually unnecessary. Still, there was no turning back.48
The diversification of the commercialization of sex proceeded relatively smoothly thereafter. January 15, 1947 marked a dubious milestone of sorts in this regard, for on that date two signal events occurred. The first Western-style beauty contest to be held culminated in the crowning of “Miss Ginza.” (She was 158 centimeters tall, weighed 50 kilograms, and had bust and hip measurements of 95 and 88 centimeters respectively.)49 In a separate, more imaginative adaptation of Western ways, the inaugural performance of the first “picture-frame nude show” (gakubuchi nūdo shō) took place the same day in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. This featured motionless women posed inside huge mock picture frames as if they were famous Western works of art. The curtain opened; the models held their poses for several tens of seconds; then the curtain closed again while another European masterpiece arranged itself.
The nudes-in-frames show was the brainchild of a wayward scholar of German culture and translator of Goethe’s Faustus named Hata Toyokichi, and its premiere presentation was elegantly entitled “The Birth of Venus.” Lines of male devotees of Western art, the story has it, extended from the performance hall down five flights of stairs and out into the street. The star of the show was a statuesque half-Russian young woman named Naka-mura Shōko, who draped gauze over her bosom and loins. Kai Miwa, the second Venus to achieve fame, did so by being genuinely half nude. She was admired not only for being tall but also for having unusually “white” skin. The latter quality was a virtue in the old, traditional canons of personal attractiveness, although now with an obvious overlay of bringing one closer to the Caucasians. Being tall and amply bosomed were new criteria of feminine beauty.
More Pulps: Even the woman scientist (who is actually a well-known actress) serves as cover girl to a “special issue on sex problems.”
The “nudes-in-frames show,” ostensibly replicating great works of Western art, helped inaugurate the postwar culture of commercialized sex. It was the brainchild of a university professor.
Hata Toyokichi later claimed that he had charitable motives for his frozen format. Tall “Venuses” were rare, he explained, and he did not think it flattering or appropriate to ask short-legged women to dance. This was somewhat misleading, for stocky chorus girls already had kicked and hopped their way across theatrical stages in the interwar period, and disrobing sometimes accompanied the more licentious dances performed for male patrons in the private rooms of elite inns and geisha houses. In any case, other entrepreneurs were less chivalrous than Hata, and the strip show soon made its debut with a rather tame revue called “Tokyo Follies,” which climaxed with dancers striking a pose, reaching behind their backs, and unhooking the tops of their costumes. A Tokyo University student is given credit for introducing this theatrical finale. By 1948, a less academic interpretation of the strip show had emerged in Asakusa, one of Tokyo’s liveliest and earthiest “low city” amusement areas. From Asakusa, stripping spread throughout the country.
The strip show, like its “nudes-in-frames” predecessor, created new celebrities who succeeded in captivating not merely popular audiences but also some of Japan’s most accomplished creative artists. “Mary” Masubara, one of Asakusa’s star strippers, for example, became a favorite of the distinguished writer Nagai Kafū. Her charisma apparently derived not merely from her on-stage routine, but also from her wonderfully incongruous background—for she had graduated from an excellent girls’ high school and previously been employed as a secretary in the House of Peers, the upper house of the pre-1947 parliament. Another Asakusa star, Shimizu Toshiko, was heralded as Japan’s “Gypsy Rose,” after America’s most famous ecdysiast, Gypsy Rose Lee. Gypsy Rose Shimizu was almost literally worshipped for her “Caucasian” features, physical allure, and attractive personality. To the prolific wood-block artist Munakata Shikō, she had “flesh like a goddess.” The Western-style oil painter Onozawa Sanichi found the entire kasutori-culture milieu of cabarets, revues, and strip shows stimulating in the most inspirational sense. As with Toulouse-Lautrec, this demimonde would become the major subject of his art.50
By 1947, American-style strip shows, such as this in Tokyo’s Asakusa amusement district, had introduced new perspectives on “democratization.”
Despite its obvious borrowings from the West, however, the kasutori counterculture remained fundamentally indigenous. Like the black market, this was a world the conqueror could never really enter—an environment as colorful as the gaudy covers of its pulp magazines and as gritty as the black-and-white photographs that record its bars, dance halls, and hole-in-the-wall eateries, its narrow, crooked streets and cluttered backstage dressing rooms. The conqueror’s ideas had only negligible impact on this world, which seemed so awash in the glitter of American popular culture. Apart perhaps from Hollywood and popular music, “America” often tended to signify little more than an amorphous alien army of occupation, vaguely present, that in and of itself was the ultimate symbol of Japan’s degradation. Similarly, although the barroom intelligentsia often delighted in dropping names and terms from the European intellectual tradition, more often than not these were just set adrift like exotic flotsam and jetsam on a sea of self-indulgence. The term apure, for example—a contraction of the post-World War I French term après-guerre—was first applied to a small group of young existentialist and nihilist writers who argued that the wreckage of the recent war included all absolute values. Before long, however, “apure” became indiscriminately attached to any young person who defied traditional norms. The counterculture came from within.
Self-indulgence and eroticism found expression at many levels. Such distinguished writers as Tanizaki Junichirō and Kawabata Yasunari, curbed by censorship during the war, reemerged as connoisseurs of sensuality. Other literary figures in the lofty strata of the bunkajin, or “men of culture,” also became associated with the primacy of individual passions. The classical poet Kawada Jun gained lasting fame when, at age sixty-eight, he stole the much younger wife of one of his disciples, sang of his passion in a poem which declared that “to an old man approaching the grave, love holds no fear,” and then had the good karma to live for almost two more decades in close companionship with his purloined lover.51
While these literary engagements with love and sexuality resonated with the lubricious eroticism of kasutori culture, three younger writers—Sakaguchi Ango, Tamura Taijirō, and Dazai Osamu—dramatically linked degeneracy and carnal behavior to authenticity and individuality. In his short essay “On Decadence,” published in April 1946, Sakaguchi offered a impassioned critique of the “illusory” nature of the wartime experience, contrasting it to the intensely human and truthful decadence of postwar society. Sakaguchi’s public persona was as turbulent and anarchistic as his preachments. He rode through the postsurrender years on adrenaline and a variety of less natural stimulants, and left his image to posterity in several memorable photographs in which he sits at a low table, almost literally buried in trash (old newspapers, books, magazines, crumpled manuscript pages, empty cigarette packages, torn-open envelopes, and a rumpled towel or blanket). He wears an inside-out undershirt that appears sweaty; his mouth is pursed; he gazes mournfully up at the camera out of horn-rimmed glasses, which reflect the light. He is writing—almost certainly about decadence.52
Sakaguchi Ango’s 1946 essay “On Decadence” is often cited as the most succinct expression of the repudiation of traditional values that many writers and intellectuals espoused in the wake of defeat. This photo by Hayashi Tadahiko conveys some of the flavor of Sakaguchi’s talent for disruption.
For decadence was Sakaguchi’s metier; and, in the view of some critics, his essay on this subject captured the essence of its time as brilliantly as any piece of writing in Japan’s long history. “On Decadence,” according to a later commentary, “freed people from the possession of war, returned to them their rightful selves, and gave them the confidence to live.”53 Part of Sakaguchi’s appeal lay in the fact that he wrote with candor of the psychological attractiveness of the recent war—of the mesmerizing grandeur of massive destruction and the “strange beauty” of people submissive to fate—and then, in the same intense prose, repudiated it. It was in “On Decadence” that Sakaguchi observed how former kamikaze pilots who had intended to die like scattered cherry blossoms were now working the black market, while wives who heroically saw their husbands off to battle and then knelt in prayer before their memorial tablets had already begun casting around for other men. “The look of the nation since defeat is one of pure and simple decadence,” he declared—and in this lay the beginning of truth, of the return to a genuine humanity:
Compared to the banality of decadence, its banal matter-of-factness, one feels that the beauty of those people obedient to destiny, the beauty of the love in the midst of that appalling destruction, was a mere illusion, empty as a bubble. . . .
Could we not say that the kamikaze hero was a mere illusion, and that human history begins from the point where he takes to black-marketeering? That the widow as devoted apostle is mere illusion, and that human history begins from the moment when the image of a new face enters her breast? And perhaps the emperor too is no more than illusion, and the emperor’s true history begins from the point where he becomes an ordinary human. . . .
Japan was defeated, and the samurai ethic has perished, but humanity has been born from the womb of decadence’s truth. . . .
Humans don’t change. We have only returned to being human. Humans become decadent—loyal retainers and saintly women become decadent. It is impossible to halt the process, and impossible to save humanity by halting it. Humans live and humans fall. There is no easy shortcut to the saving of humanity outside this.54
Much of the shock of this critique lay in its seeming so simple and sane. Although “healthy” and “wholesome” were treasured words of the wartime ideologues and censors, the world so described had in actuality been morbidly sick. In contrast, to be decadent and immoral was truthful, realistic—and supremely human. Only by starting with a humble attitude toward decadence could people begin to imagine a new, more genuine morality. “We must discover ourselves, and save ourselves, by falling to the best of our ability,” Sakaguchi concluded. In so doing, each individual would have to create his or her own “samurai ethic,” his or her own “emperor system.” In his distinctive way, Sakaguchi was affirming something that moral philosophers and other intellectuals were also wrestling with: that no society not based on a genuine shutaisei—a true “subjectivity” or “autonomy” at the individual level—could hope to resist the indoctrinating power of the state.55
Sakaguchi’s perceptions were almost literally fleshed out in the writings of Tamura Taijirō, who had spent seven years fighting in China and was under no illusions about the horrendous realities of his nation’s “holy war.” Beginning in the latter part of 1946, Tamura published a series of novels and essays extolling the truth and honesty of nikutai, or “flesh,” as opposed to the delusions of abstract “thought” or “ideas” (shisō). The most sensational of these writings was the novel Nikutai no Mon (Gate of Flesh). The title became a popular catch phrase, and the book was made into a long-running play that premiered in Tokyo in 1947 as well as a movie that made its debut the following year.
In celebrating nikutai, or the carnal body, Tamura was engaging in a potent act of linguistic demolition, for his choice of language amounted to sacrilege bordering on outright lese majesty. Ever since the late nineteenth century, all Japanese had been indoctrinated to believe that the supreme object of veneration was the kokutai, or emperor-centered “national entity”—a misty concept written with two ideographs meaning literally “country” and “body.” From the mid-1920s on, criticism of the kokutai was a major criminal offense. Glorifying nikutai, as Tamura did with spellbinding effectiveness, amounted to a complete repudiation of kokutai, a shocking inversion of the body (tai) to be worshipped. Now the only body deserving of veneration was the “flesh” (niku)—the sensual body—of the individual. The abstract “nation body” or nation state was meaningless, and all patriotic blather about it was duplicitous. What mattered—all that was indisputably real, honest, fundamental—was the solitary physical individual. For a people who had been deformed by a long tradition of so-called spiritual ideas, Tamura explained at one point, the “gate of flesh” was the “gate to modernity.”56
An entire genre of “flesh novels” (nikutai shōsetsu) emerged in mimicry of Tamura’s carnal vision, but even his extraordinary popularity did not surpass that of his charismatic and doomed colleague Dazai Osamu. In the manner of his death as much as of his life and work, Dazai came to epitomize the captivating degeneracy of kasutori culture. He, too, lives on in a small number of photographs. One captures him typically perched on not one but two bar stools, sleeves pushed up untidily, necktie loosened, cigarette in hand, a magazine half falling from his trouser pocket. He is fairly good looking, and it is easy to imagine him engaging in witty conversation before he topples off his perch.57
Dazai was well born, well regarded, and well on his way to self-annihilation through self-indulgence long before surrender—an example of exhaustion and despair years before the “kyodatsu condition” became identified as a collective malaise. He became addicted to drugs before the Pacific War even began and appears to have long courted and cultivated the mystique of the self-destructive artist. Dazai’s personal demons, however, came to seem emblematic of the confusion and demoralization of the postwar years. Gifted and tormented, he lived like a degenerate and often wrote like an angel. His 1947 novel Shayō (The Setting Sun) lamented the demise of true noblesse oblige and professed to find a philosophy for the current epoch in the motto “love and revolution.” When, the year after the novel appeared, an alcohol-saturated Dazai committed suicide with his mistress by drowning in a reservoir, he ensured himself immortality as the tragic symbol of a world without moorings.58
The Setting Sun was a flawed and uneven novel. It frequently fell into maudlin romanticism and suffered from the familiar “kasutori-gentsia” habit of scattering vacuous European terms and references about like confetti. Nonetheless, its almost immediate status as a classic came from more than just the morbid conjunction of the decadence and suicide it depicted with the decadence and suicide of the author. No other work captured the despondency and dreams of the times so poignantly. Whatever he may have lacked, Dazai was not lacking in a self-pity that resonated strongly with the deep strain of victim consciousness then pervading society. At the same time, he found beauty in decay and intimated, however feebly, that it might be possible to transcend despair through love. Although conceived in peculiarly Dazai-esque terms, this vision of “love and revolution” struck another popular chord.
Dazai Osamu, who died in a double suicide with his mistress in 1948, shortly after completing the novel The Setting Sun, lived on as a memorable symbol of the dislocation, degeneracy, and unstable romanticism of the early postwar years.
In The Setting Sun, this credo is articulated not by the artistic, suicidal younger brother who so resembled Dazai but by his sister Kazuko. Like her brother, Kazuko refuses to go on living in mindless compliance with what society demands. Unlike him, however, she resolves to live rather than die, accepting the fact that this means she must commit herself to “struggle with the world.” Kazuko expresses this in a famous passage:
I had never longed for revolution and had not even known love. Until now, the grownups around us taught that revolution and love were the most foolish and despicable things, and before and during the war we believed that to be the case. But after the defeat we became distrustful of the grownups around us and came to feel that the true way of living existed in the opposite of whatever they said. We came to believe that revolution and love in fact are the best and most delicious things in this life, and it is precisely because they are such good things that grownups perversely lied that they were sour grapes. I want to believe firmly. Humans were born for love and revolution.59
Although he had flirted with left-wing activities, Dazai showed no interest either in doctrinaire Marxism or the more liberal agenda of “democratic revolution.” In Ningen Shikkaku (No Longer Human), the novel that followed The Setting Sun, he ridiculed orthodox leftism mercilessly. Economics was hardly sufficient as a causal explanation for human behavior, Dazai’s semi-autobiographical protagonist declared. He simply found the aura of illegitimacy that surrounded the leftists more comfortable than “the world of legitimate gentlemen.”60
His attitude toward the occupation was just as caustic. Where the Americans themselves appeared in Dazai’s work, it was usually only as an unwelcome, marginal presence. Occasionally, as in a story called “Winter Fireworks,” he revealed a deeper nationalistic resentment. Although occupation censors excised the strongest line in the text, the pertinent passage (with the censored portion in brackets), spoken by a woman, went as follows:
“We say defeated, defeated, but I don’t think that’s so. We’ve been ruined. Destroyed. [From one corner to the other, the country of Japan is being occupied, and every single one of us is a captive.] Rural people who don’t find this shameful are fools. . . .”
Three months after being censored, Dazai enjoyed a small measure of revenge by smuggling the following implicitly anti-American ditty into a short play titled Dry Leaves in Spring:
Not you
Not you
It was not you
we were waiting for.
In a later story, he got another dig in with the observation that “from now on in Japan there’s equality of the sexes even for horses and dogs.”61
Since Dazai had turned his back on both the Marxist and the American versions of radical change, it was entirely in character that the “revolutionary” vision he did offer in The Setting Sun was highly idiosyncratic. In the final analysis, his heroine Kazuko declares in her rambling way, revolution is nothing more than a defiant love that repudiates the “old morality,” a passion beyond understanding, or even the sorrow that comes from such passion. Revolution and love are the same thing. In Kazuko’s case, to be a revolutionary meant to bear and raise the illegitimate child of her disreputable elderly lover. That, she declares in the letter that concludes the novel, “will be the completion of my moral revolution.”62
This was not a revolutionary credo for everyone, nor did Dazai pretend that it was. He was not in the business of politics, after all, but of expressing emotions—and, as it emerged, of being obsessed with victimization. This was anything but a subtle leitmotif in the novel. Kazuko’s suicidal brother was a “little victim” of life. Her seedy, alcoholic lover had “the face of a victim. A noble victim,” and she herself spent much of her time murmuring about the “extreme desolation of being alive.” Indeed, the novel ends on a ghastly note—a letter from Kazuko to her sodden lover in which revolution becomes equated with victimization, and victimization with beauty.
A bastard and its mother.
Nevertheless, we intend to struggle against the old morality to the end, and live like the sun.
Please, you too continue to fight your battle.
The revolution still hasn’t taken place to the slightest degree. Many, many more precious, noble victims seem to be necessary.
In the present world, the most beautiful thing is a victim.63
The passage is not only mawkish, but also redolent of the sort of wartime rhetoric that extolled the beauty of falling victim to causes greater than oneself. Like so much else, Dazai’s celebrated novel revealed tortured, twisted links between the “old” and “new” Japan.
Many commentators were appalled by the literary developments exemplified by popular writers such as Dazai, Sakaguchi, and Tamura. The critic Kawakami Tetsutarō savaged The Setting Sun as a novel by an effete author about effete characters that appealed to effete readers.64 Sakaguchi’s affirmation of the compelling passions of war led him to be denounced for espousing violence. Tamura, whose Gate of Flesh included graphic scenes of the slaughter of a bull and the torture of a prostitute, was similarly condemned for displaying an attraction to violence that was not fundamentally different from the brutality of the war years. In a free-flowing and highly abstract discussion published in 1949, the political scientist Maruyama Masao managed to equate “carnal literature” not only with both the abindentity of war writings and the sensual preoccupations of the more traditional “autobiographical novel,” but also with the bankruptcy of contemporary “carnal politics.” Although carnal literature might appear to be “soaring away in unhampered freedom” with its exaggeration of the sordid, Maruyama observed, “actually it’s grubbing around on its hands and knees in quite a commonplace world.” For him this situation had dire implications. “If we don’t control carnal literature and carnal politics in one way or another,” he concluded, “then it’s senseless to talk about Japan as a democratic and cultured nation.”65 The influential literary critic Nakamura Mitsuo had these trends in mind when, at the end of occupation in 1952, he declared that nothing of originality or value had been written in Japan since the surrender.66
Nakamura’s cranky judgment can be disputed. Whatever their literary stature, however, the writers of escapist stories and carnal literature, the apostles of “decadence” and philosophers of the flesh, the sodden romanticizers of love and revolution, the après-guerre existentialists and nihilists all roiled popular consciousness and called doctrinaire modes of thinking into question in ways their intellectual critics rarely succeeded in doing. They were spirited, iconoclastic, and influential to a degree the academic elites were loath to acknowledge. They might not have constituted the basis for a genuinely revolutionary transformation of Japan, but their challenge to old verities proved unforgettable.
The carnal body remained, for most people, a literary construct. Sensuality, on the other hand, did not. A mainstream reconsideration of sexuality in conjugal relations led not to ridicule of “wholesomeness,” as in kasutori culture, but rather to reconsideration of what a healthy sensuality between marriage partners might involve. Ancient Japanese poetry and prose had embraced an ideal of reciprocal love in which men and women shared sexual pleasure. In medieval times, however, the feudal elites had drawn an increasingly strict distinction between love and marriage, and certainly between sensual pleasure and marriage. “Good” women were taught that they were inherently inferior to men; that their entire lives were to be subordinated to the patriarchy of three generations of males (father, husband, and, in old age, son); that although men might find it natural to indulge in erotic lovemaking, such desires and behavior were utterly improper for a well-bred woman. The ideologues of the modern state carefully reformulated these feudal prescriptions as a code of behavior for “modern” married couples. In their hierarchical subjugation of private worlds, women bore by far the heavier burden. A woman’s destiny was to become ryōsai kenbo, a “good wife and wise mother.” Her overriding duty was to serve the male-dominated family—and the duty of the family, in turn, was to serve the imperial state.
Not surprisingly, to esteem genuine reciprocity in the conjugal relationship, including not only “love” but also mutual sexual gratification, became one way of defying authority and elevating the primacy of individual feelings and private worlds. In the wake of the defeat, such sentiments emerged in many guises, including a variety of popular publications emphasizing not only the appropriateness of enjoyable sex in marriage, but also appropriate techniques for achieving this. In time, the kasutori magazines would turn promoting a sexually satisfying “married life” into a distinct commercial genre. The impetus to this trend, however, was the remarkable popularity of a serious text on conjugal relations that rose onto the “top-ten” bestseller list in 1946 and remained there for over a year.
Titled Kanzen naru Kekkon (The Complete Marriage), this surprising publishing phenomenon was a translation of a clinical manual originally published in German in 1926 by the Dutch obstetrician T. H. Van de Velde. A portion of Van de Velde’s long opus had actually been translated into Japanese in 1930 under the title Kanzen naru Fūfu (The Complete Couple). Its first translator was a Communist; its original publisher churned out erotic books; and it was quickly banned as “unwholesome” by prewar authorities. Despite the book’s suppression, its reputation as a work of “sexual liberation” remained alive among the left-wing intelligentsia. The German edition as well as an English translation also remained popular among medical students and young doctors in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Van de Velde’s work was retranslated in its entirety by a group of medical students at Tokyo Imperial University after an inquiry in the Asahi asking if anyone would be interested in such a book elicited one hundred or more responses in a single day. According to one of the translators, the students drew lots to determine who would get to do the most explicit chapters on sexual techniques. Their translation was quickly followed by a cheaper, less academic, abridged version that soon hit the number-three spot on the bestseller list.
Many readers undoubtedly were attracted to The Complete Marriage because of its “erotic” reputation, an allure heightened by its earlier suppression. This had been Van de Velde’s first book, written when he was in his early fifties after twenty years of medical practice. Its intended audience had primarily been medical practitioners and educated husbands, and one of its basic premises—impressively enlightened for its time—was that “sex is fundamental to marriage.” The book’s major contribution to Japanese sexual consciousness lay in the way it called attention to a “sexual sensibility curve,” especially in women, and stressed such concepts and practices as foreplay, afterplay, and orgasm. Van de Velde’s notion that “man is the teacher” in sexual intercourse may appear now old fashioned, but in these years his sensitivity to women’s sexual feelings and needs in the conjugal relationship seemed startling.67
The popular appeal of such a frank discussion of conjugal sex was exploited in 1949 by a new monthly magazine, Fūfu Seikatsu (Married Life). Its first issue followed the prescribed pattern for a legendary publication. The first printing of seventy thousand copies sold out in a day. A second printing of twenty thousand was snapped up immediately. With a wayward touch usually reserved for postage stamps, that printing was rushed out in such haste that many covers had only the magazine’s name on a blank white background, thereby becoming collector’s items. Fūfu Seikatsu soon reached a monthly printing of over three hundred thousand copies. So sensational was its success that it is sometimes said to have marked the end of the “kasutori magazine” genre and the beginning of a new epoch in mass publishing. Although a substantial portion of its articles were devoted to explicit discussions of sexual techniques, it differed from its pulp predecessors in a fundamental way. By linking sex to marriage, Fūfu Seikatsu made sex a legitimate rather than a furtive activity—and turned sexual reciprocity and mutual pleasure into symbols of gender equality.68
Although the publishers of Fūfu Seikatsu drew on such American periodicals as the journal Sexology as models, they were not charting entirely new territory. Hanashi (Story), a prewar magazine backed by the well-known writer Kikuchi Kan, had attempted to introduce serious articles on sexual practices as early as 1933. In essentially resurrecting this unsuccessful prewar venture, Fūfu Seikatsu also took up and transformed some familiar rhetoric from the recent past. Thus, the new magazine emphasized that the family was the fundamental unit of society, which sounded very much like what ideologues of the patriarchal “family system” and “family state” had long said. By going on to identify compatible, reciprocal sexual relations between husband and wife as essential to the family, however, the magazine undermined the old ideology. As would happen again and again in postdefeat Japan, words and phrases seemed to remain little changed, but what they signified altered dramatically.
Letters to Fūfu Seikatsu suggested that, unlike the pulps, this new periodical was attracting female as well as male readers. Although the magazine received many critical letters in its early days—especially, one editor recalled, from “intellectuals”—positive letters of support poured in from wives as well as husbands. Among other things, such letters revealed that, like people everywhere, many Japanese were troubled by fears of sexual inadequacy. The two most common anxieties expressed by male readers involved small penises and premature ejaculations, while the most common inquiry from women was whether it was possible to have an operation to make their vaginas smaller.
Despite its serious objectives, Fūfu Seikatsu proved susceptible to the kasutori-magazine disease. The line between seriousness and sensationalism soon blurred, and erotica increasingly took the place of genuine concern with the physical and emotional complexities of sexual reciprocity and marital happiness. At the same time, the magazine’s success inspired the birth of copycat periodicals that rarely added anything of a substantial nature to the genre, but certainly reinforced in popular consciousness the desirability of physical intimacy in marriage. Newsstands were flooded with magazines whose titles and contents picked up the romantic new outlook on married couples (fūfu) and, indeed, on daily life (seikatsu) itself. Typical titles included Fūfu Nikki (Couples’ Diary), Modan Fūfu jitsuwa (Modern Couples’ True Stories), Fūfu Sekai (Couples’ World), Shin Fūfu (New Couples), Fūfu no Shinshitsu (Couples’ Bedroom), Fūfu no Seiten (Couples’ Sex Manual), Kanzen naru Fūfu Seikatsu no Tomo (Complete Couples’ Life Companion), Aijō Seikatsu (Love Life), and Romansu Seikatsu (Romance Life).69
The blurred boundary between escapism and engagement with serious issues was typical of kasutori culture as a whole, and some critics, particularly on the political left, offered a Machiavellian interpretation of such developments. In their view, sex was part of a broader “three-S” policy encouraged by occupation authorities and conservative politicians to divert popular energies and resentments away from genuinely radical politics and protest movements—the other two “S’s” being sports and “screen,” that is, both domestic and imported movies of an escapist nature.70 As this austere conspiracy thesis had it, the commercialization of sex was given tacit if not overt encouragement because, like sporting events and films, it was seen as an effective safety valve for a society beset by hunger and scarcity, confusion and despair. What seemed a revolutionary counterculture to some was deemed a counterrevolutionary conspiracy by others.
As theories go, this was unusually harsh, priggish, elitist, and paranoid. A more enduring comment on kasutori culture could be found in a posed photograph taken by Hayashi Tadahiko in 1947, depicting a model in a white two-piece bathing suit lying on a filthy balustrade high above the grimy train tracks and smutty city streets. The hardship of those days is readily apparent, but so also is the esprit of hardship and a humorous, even defiant elan. The photo is witty and sad, naturalistic and contrived, erotic and strangely innocent. Decades later, it remains an icon of the cultures of defeat as memorable for what it excludes as for what it depicts. We see no Americans here, no politicians preaching democracy, no figures in military uniform, no hints of nostalgia for the past, no vestiges of the state—just the bittersweet ambiance of life on the margins in a defeated land.71
Hayashi Tadahiko’s “kasutori culture” photograph of a young woman in a white bathing suit, lying on a balustrade high above the shabby streets of Tokyo, captured the ambience of the cultures of defeat.