1

Comforting the Occupiers

Prostitution as Administrative Practice
in Japan at the End of World War II

OVERCOME BY DEFEAT: THE CONCEPTUALIZATION AND
ORGANIZATION OF THE “FEMALE FLOODWALL”

Beginning on August 16, 1945, one day after Japan’s surrender in World War II, major railway stations in Tokyo such as Ueno and Shinjuku Station were overcrowded with people hastily boarding trains for the countryside. All over the Kantō area, people panicked and were imagining the horrors of what the “American and English devils” (kichiku beiei) might do to them upon their arrival in Japan. Rumors of violent revenge and rape by the foreign troops spread, reinforcing fear among the population and encouraging women and children in particular to hide from the arriving occupation forces far away from the metropolitan areas. In the most extreme scenarios, some rumors predicted that the foreign soldiers would violate and rape all Japanese women and force them to become their concubines, while all Japanese men would be enslaved, killed, and/or castrated.1

Japan’s authorities were equally overcome by defeat in the late summer of 1945, and their anxiety and uncertainty about the arrival of the Allied occupation forces at the end of the war manifested in official announcements and reports. In Kanagawa Prefecture, where the Allied occupation forces were initially supposed to enter Japan, civil servants of the local administration advised all citizens to evacuate women and children to the countryside far away from the landing areas. The prefectural bureau of Kanagawa released this notification in the national daily Asahi Shinbun on August 19, 1945, and then released all their female staff as a precaution.2 The city offices of Yokohama and Yokosuka and the local train services also discharged all their female employees.³ Members of the Japanese police force reported similar concerns at the end of the war. In most of the few remaining official accounts documented prior to the arrival of the occupation forces, the police sustained the possibility of “violence, looting and so on upon the invasion.”⁴ In Kanagawa Prefecture, the police also reported rumors predicting violence against women by soldiers of the foreign army and supported the Yokohama city office’s announcement that women and children would be evacuated to the countryside. To safeguard women and children more effectively, the Kanagawa Prefecture police even considered relocating them by force.⁵

The rumors, official announcements, and reports at the end of the war were all closely related to fears of physical violence, which Japanese contemporaries generally perceived as sexual violence. All statements explicitly indicated that the victims of sexual violence would be predominantly women. Mass media coverage supported such gender-biased fear. Shortly before the arrival of the occupation forces, the Yomiuri Hōchi published an “Alerting Notice About Women and Children Walking Alone,” warning women not to go out alone, especially at night, and asking them to “refrain from wearing licentious clothes.”⁶ The gendered threat posed by the impending arrival of the Allied occupation forces is deeply inscribed in the records of Japanese bureaucrats, politicians, policemen, and entrepreneurs of the entertainment industry. The traces of their discursive practices reveal that they perceived the arrival of thousands of enemy soldiers as a violent and sexual invasion, and they responded by constituting a discourse that grasped prostitution as a necessary measure for preventing rape and other acts of physical violence. The voices in this discourse were exclusively male, and the predominantly male agents of the Japanese state articulated anxiety about the sexual aggression of foreign male soldiers, echoing their fears of a complete loss of manhood after Japan’s emasculating defeat in World War II.⁷

This chapter demonstrates how Japan’s authorities, pimps, nightclub owners, and fascist organizations channeled male anxiety and uncertainty at the end of the war into the administrative practice of conceptualizing and organizing prostitution as a “female floodwall” (onna no bōhatei) to comfort the occupiers. Their zealous engagement in taking control of sexual encounters between occupiers and occupied was an effort to masculinize after defeat. Previous research has convincingly argued that the idea to set up a broad prostitution scheme to comfort the occupiers was predominantly aimed at securing the kokutai (national body) rather than at the protection of individual Japanese citizens.8 It is usually claimed that the guiding concepts of the prostitution scheme that was swiftly organized in postsurrender Japan derived more or less solely from Japan’s wartime comfort women system.⁹ Indeed, many similarities existed between the wartime and postwar prostitution systems, and some commentators have emphasized the structural conditions of patriarchal power relations in imperial Japan, which supposedly provided the foundation for the continuity between wartime and postwar prostitution—embodied mainly by the Japanese state functioning as pimp in the 1940s.¹⁰

However, prostitution as administrative practice to comfort the Allied occupiers in Japan after 1945 has to be more thoroughly historicized, for it is also entangled with longer trajectories of patriarchal power in modern Japanese history. The initial plans and the regulations implemented to set up prostitution for the occupation troops did correspond to the wartime comfort system, but they also reveal legacies of Japan’s empire beyond the parallels to the wartime military prostitution system. Concepts and governmental practices of controlling prostitution that had been developed since the nineteenth century, such as the police-controlled prostitution license system involving regular health inspections for sex workers, shaped wartime and postsurrender prostitution. These concepts and practices were closely entwined with intersecting notions of sexuality, gender, class, and race, which had been constitutive for the construction of Japan’s “national body” and its understanding of empire. As I will argue in this chapter, Japanese authorities appropriated these concepts and practices while organizing prostitution after defeat in order to instantly comfort the occupiers. However, their performative discourse in reformulating the ideals of womanhood, domesticity, hygienic regulation, and racial purity and aligning them with Japanese sovereignty and national uniqueness produced new rules of signification in the historic event of postsurrender Japan.¹¹

The Eventfulness of Postsurrender Japan and
Threats to “Public Peace”

The occupation of Japan after World War II officially started on September 2, 1945, when Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender. The first occupation troops had already entered Japan on August 28, but in September and October they were followed by the larger body of occupation personnel advancing throughout the country. The subsequent occupation period, which ended more than seven years later in 1952, has been the subject of research in various, often conflicting studies, which have often interpreted the occupation as either a benevolent and successful democratization and modernization project, or as a failure of the U.S. mission in Japan and Asia.12 Others have tried to overcome such one-dimensional perspectives by stressing a reverse course and highlighting the pivotal change occupation policy underwent when the United States turned away from its early policy of ambitious democratization and demilitarization in favor of the hegemonic Cold War containment policy of the late 1940s.¹³ In most cases, however, there is a shared belief that, first, the occupation that started in 1945 signaled a new, democratic beginning for Japan; second, they place overwhelming emphasis on the U.S. involvement in the occupation of Japan, which has had—for better or for worse—major political, economic, social, and cultural significance for U.S.-Japanese relations until today.¹⁴ In any scenario, the significance of the occupation period itself is perpetually marked by the arrival of the occupation forces on August 28 or the signing of the Instrument of Surrender on September 2, 1945, which officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Peace (San Francisco Treaty) on September 8, 1951, which went into force on April 28, 1952. Except for the atomic bombings and the radio broadcast on August 15, 1945, in which the emperor publicly announced the end of the war, the two short weeks between Japan’s surrender and the arrival of the occupation troops is hardly ever mentioned, and if it is, then often only in a footnote remarking on Japan’s devastation at the end of the war.¹⁵ Takemae Eiji’s monumental monograph on the occupation of Japan, Inside GHQ—The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy, for instance, acknowledges those two weeks—despite providing a dense description of the origins of the predominantly American occupier’s General Headquarters in the Pacific War—with almost one full page.¹⁶ Herbert Bix, who has raised the question of Japan’s “delayed surrender” by scrutinizing the sources and discussions of the imperial government and imperial court leading to Japan’s surrender, focuses only on the elite’s concerns about their own future, and especially those of the emperor.¹⁷ And John Dower in his Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, probably the most popular study on the occupation in English, has only some minor remarks on this period: He points out the confusion felt by most people upon hearing the announcement of surrender on the radio, and the frenetic destruction of files and documents by Japanese military officers and bureaucrats who “devoted themselves to obscuring their wartime deeds.”¹⁸

Nonetheless, Bix and Dower both have raised the issue of why the Japanese people, despite some minor violent incidents, were relatively docile in accepting the drastic change from wartime mobilization to peacetime occupation. Bix has argued that the emperor and the Higashikuni cabinet, established to handle the capitulation procedures, focused on “controlling the people’s reaction to defeat and keeping them obedient and unconcerned with the question of accountability” for wartime aggression.19 By presenting a simplified top-down power structure in which the Japanese people are portrayed as passive subjects who merely followed their leaders’ orders, Bix reproduces the perennial racist trope of the obedient Japanese masses.²⁰ Dower, for his part, claimed in his study on the Pacific War that the Japanese wartime propaganda helped in the transition process. He refers to Japanese depictions of the enemy as demons, which made use of rather flexible images “deeply embedded into Japanese folk culture.” These images could portray the demon’s “human face” as not entirely evil, but also as possessing powers of protection and change, and thus established features that helped Japan come to terms with its new position vis-à-vis the occupiers after the war.²¹ Although Dower is well aware of the racist stereotypes of Japan circulating in Western scholarship, quite surprisingly, he himself has depicted Japan in the same vein by articulating an “ahistorical culturalist analysis,” to quote Takashi Fujitani, that dwells on a forced explanation of Japan’s supposedly ancient, unchanging tradition and folk knowledge.²²

In any case, Bix and Dower have both failed to highlight the efforts made by Japanese contemporaries to deal with the situation after Japan’s surrender. In various attempts, the Japanese authorities tried to calm the public. An article published by the national newspaper Yomiuri Hōchi on August 20 with the title “Lapsing into dema[gogy] is foolish” aimed to convince its readers that it would be wrong to misjudge the situation at the end of the war on the basis of hearsay. The article cited a long comment by Horikiri Zenjirō, a former diplomat and member of the Kizokuin (House of Peers), explaining that a military occupation is by definition a peacetime operation, and the Japanese people, having no reason to worry, would not “become the scorn of the world by showing unnecessary confusion.” Horikiri agreed that it might not be possible to completely avoid some minor individual misbehavior by soldiers of the occupation army. Nevertheless, because a modern and well-disciplined army was conducting the occupation, and in particular because the occupation was legitimated by the Potsdam Declaration, the security of the postwar order was guaranteed, according to Horikiri.23 In another article published three days later, the Yomiuri Hōchi also pronounced an “unsubstantiated anxiety” (kiyū) concerning violence and looting by the occupation troops, and asked the people to calmly return to and protect their workstations, while further instructions would be communicated through the chairmen of the city or village council.²⁴

However, such “demagogy” and “unsubstantiated anxiety,” as the Yomiuri Hōchi called it, did not stop circulating in rumors about the arrival of the occupation forces, and it also resonated in official reports. In Tokyo, a policeman of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department noted in a secret report titled “Urgent problems concerning the tendencies of the common people” from August 20, 1945, that public opinion was dominated by a “seditious uncertainty” (fuan dōyō) based on rumors of violent acts of revenge by the arriving occupation forces. To indicate acts of violence and insults, the author of the report used the terms bōkō and ryōjoku, which simultaneously convey the meaning of rape. The implication of sexual violence is even more obviously manifest by the use of the expression fujo bōkō, which explicitly means physical sexual violence against women.²⁵ Attached to the police report, the file assembled statements by various nongovernmental actors, such as a chairman of the civil defense unit (keibōdan) of Tokyo’s Meguro ward and a factory director from Nihonbashi in Tokyo, to illustrate the “public spirit” (jinshin). The keibōdan chairman reported food shortage and a lack of drinking water, but also rumors about the violation of Japanese women by the “foreigners” (gaijin). The factory director shared the concern that women would be most vulnerable and stated that they would have a much more intense experience of the shame of the defeat of the “one hundred million [Japanese] people” (ichioku kokumin). According to him, the allegedly predictable violation of women by the American and English “beasts” (yajū) would furthermore endanger every Japanese home and family. In sum, both the keibōdan chairman and the factory director reasoned that the Japanese authorities should make preparations against the threat of sexual violence. The appeal reverberated in the concluding remarks of the police report, whose author suggested the establishment of comfort facilities (ian goraku shisetsu) for the occupation troops.²⁶

Politicians, policemen, and bureaucrats of lower rank shared the people’s fears concerning the arrival of foreign troops, but they also shared the anxiety of Japan’s elites about their future and their loss of control over the people. Thus, policemen listened closely to rumors and city councils released warning notices through mass media channels. Furthermore, police and bureaucracy, two institutions highly involved in the promotion of the war effort and the suppression of dissent, switched to producing “defeat propaganda” in the postsurrender period, with the aim of calming the public and preparing them for the postdefeat encounter with the former enemy.27 In particular the Special Higher Police (Tokubetsu kōtō keisatsu, often referred to simply as Tokkō), a highly militarized special police force with the main duties of counterespionage, repression of (mostly left-wing) political activism, and preservation of “public peace” (chian), made arduous efforts to control the postsurrender situation.²⁸ In numerous documents collected and edited by Awaya Kentarō and Kawashima Takamine, members of the Tokkō articulated their ideas about the maintenance of “public peace“ at the end of the war.²⁹ On the basis of the police work’s huge paper trail, Awaya and Kawashima have convincingly shown how the Tokkō was actively preparing a smooth transition to a peaceful postwar order, mainly through surveillance and by filing reports on the current situation for political implementation. Their reports revolved around the overwhelming fear of domestic threats, such as potential peasant uprisings, or envisioned that anarchists, socialists, and communists would take advantage of the chaos and exploit the confusion for a social revolution. Among those political movements, the Tokkō singled out the so-called chōsenjin, Koreans who were often brought to Japan as forced laborers, as a distinctive group and watched them closely.³⁰ Another major threat to the maintenance of “public peace” was believed to come from overseas: the members of the Tokkō also feared the arrival of foreign soldiers, who were—contrary to the publicly propagated ideals in official newspaper statements—thought to endanger the Japanese people and especially Japanese women.³¹ The end of the war and the postsurrender situation was thus not an insignificant passage in which the Japanese passively waited for the arrival of the occupation forces. It was, rather, characterized by efforts to control the situation. Indeed, those two weeks between Japan’s surrender and the arrival of the occupation forces played no small part in determining the course of the occupation of Japan and can be identified as an historic event in which prostitution as an administrative practice played a significant role.

On the basis of three documents—the Imperial Rescript to terminate the war, a radiogram by the Home Ministry (naimushō) that instructed the police to organize recreational facilities for the occupiers, and the inaugural speech of the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA)—I will highlight how Japan’s authorities’ discursive practices referred to knowledge about hygienic regulation, licensed prostitution, and racial thinking prevalent in imperial Japan and translated it into the immediate postsurrender period. The organization of prostitution and the recruitment of women to work in the newly established comfort facilities further sustain this significant and signifying shift, in which politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, and entrepreneurs of the entertainment business repeatedly articulated their nationalistic desire to protect Japan and its people. Thus, I claim, the conceptualization of prostitution to comfort the occupiers did not only play a pivotal role in transmitting such knowledge beyond 1945, it furthermore continued to influence male-dominated Japanese self-conceptions of nation and culture in the longer postwar period, and led ultimately to the possibility of imagining a “new” Japan.

Conceptualizing the “Female Floodwall”: Kokutai
Ideology and Imperial Knowledge of Prostitution

At the end of the war, material and physical devastation as well as psychological despair severely affected everyday life in Japan. Massive and even atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had destroyed Japan’s major cities while mobilization for the war effort, military discipline, police surveillance, and food shortage had created misery, suffering, and hunger. The people, especially those living in Japan’s urban centers, had hardly any access to food and were forced to sell valuable possessions like silk kimonos and jewelry cheaply in the countryside or on the black market to avoid starvation—a phenomenon that came to be known, in a metaphor derived from the image of peeling a bamboo shoot layer by layer, as “bamboo shoot living” (takenoko seikatsu) for the stripping away of all one’s belongings.32 Wartime propaganda, which encouraged fighting for the purity and survival of the Yamato race, echoed the angst about the looting and raping foreign “devils.”³³ Yet while Japan’s authorities tried to control the situation and reshape wartime propaganda for a bloodless transition to a postwar order, most people were war-weary and expressed the hope that with the war over, there would now be a chance to start over again; a feeling that, according to John Dower, led most people to “embrace defeat” in the course of the early occupation period.³⁴

At this ambivalent time of suffering and hope there was obviously far-reaching uncertainty about the impending arrival of the occupation forces and the outcome of the occupation itself.35 News from the fiercely fought Battle of Okinawa, which was the only battle in the Second World War with significant Japanese civilian casualties, frightened many Japanese as to what might happen in the Japanese metropole (naichi), and the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki also substantiated fears among the populace.³⁶ Diplomatic and political historians, moreover, have mainly argued that the vague formulations of the Potsdam Declaration issued on July 26, 1945, along with the demands postulated in the Instrument of Surrender and General Order No. 1, reinforced an uncertainty about the future of Japan and its people. All documents were received and acknowledged by Japan’s authorities prior to the arrival of the occupation forces. The Potsdam Declaration, the Instrument of Surrender, and General Order No. 1 stipulated Japan’s unconditional surrender, the forfeiture of its empire, and a military occupation by the Allied powers under the aegis of the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers and his headquarters (SCAP/GHQ), with the subsequent loss of Japan’s sovereignty.³⁷

Yet the civilian population and Japan’s authorities in particular not only rationalized the impending arrival of the occupation troops in political terms, they also imagined it as a destructive threat. Emperor Hirohito also conveyed such a notion in the famous “Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War” (Daitōa sensō shūketsu no shōsho), broadcast on radio on August 15, 1945. In the gyokuon-hōsō (literally translated as “Jewel Voice Broadcast”), as the emperor’s broadcast speech came to be called, Hirohito officially announced the “end of the war” (shūsen) and Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration without direct mention of Japan’s “surrender” or “defeat” (haisen).³⁸ Rather, he claimed: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her [Japan’s] interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”

All his subjects, the “one hundred million people,” would have to face hardships and sufferings, but, Hirohito continued, “it is according to the dictates of time and fate that We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.” The emperor thus called upon his subjects to “let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith in the imperishability of its sacred land,” and to unite the “total strength, to be devoted to construction of the future.” All Japanese should “cultivate the ways of rectitude, foster nobility in spirit, and work with resolution—so that you may enhance the innate glory of the imperial state and keep pace with the progress of the world.”39

Although Hirohito’s speech addressed the future of Japan and encouraged the Japanese people to work hard to keep pace with the world’s progress, the emperor’s rhetoric was actually deeply reactionary. This is foremost marked by the language and rhetorical figures applied by Hirohito, who spoke, as Dower has pointed out, “in a highly formal language studded with ornamental phrases.”⁴⁰ The speech was hardly understood by anyone in the audience, and radio commentators and journalists had to translate his words and explain their meaning in common Japanese in follow-up broadcasts and newspaper articles. Moreover, Hirohito’s terminology, with its strong roots in wartime and prewar propaganda promoting the sacredness of the imperial institution, the divinity of Japan’s soil, and the unity of the Japanese people, did not break with imperial Japan’s ideology—whereby the expression “one hundred million people” was a marker to encompass all subjects under imperial Japan’s rule throughout Asia.⁴¹ Another pivotal ideological umbrella term that embraced all these features is kokutai. Hirohito himself uttered the term to express the desire to perpetuate Japan’s unity and what might be called cultural autonomy toward the Allied powers after the war, and it also appeared in accompanying newspaper articles, mostly in the phrase kokutai goji, meaning the protection and preservation of the kokutai.⁴²

Kokutai, usually translated into English as body politic or national body, is a vague and multifaceted concept of modern Japanese nation- and state-building. It had been a central reference for emperor-centered state ideology and institutions since the Meiji period (1868–1912). Its meaning oscillated somewhat between the German terms Staatskörper and Volksgemeinschaft in its application until 1945, and signifies the construct of a unity of the Japanese people, the Japanese state, its institutions, and the Japanese emperor (tennō).⁴³ Of course, as Susan Burns has shown, the idea of unity and community through “a set of unique and enduring cultural values” such as language, ancestor worship, and religious beliefs had already been formulated by intellectuals in the late Tokugawa period (1603–1868) and predates modern Japanese kokutai ideology.⁴⁴ Earlier debates thus offered a vocabulary for Meiji-period ideologues to construct the kokutai as what Iida Yumiko has called an “embodiment of a timeless Japanese cultural essence” in the process of defining Japanese national identity.45 It was nevertheless the multiple meanings and flexibility of kokutai that enabled Japanese ideologues from various backgrounds to apply the term to Meiji Japan. Kokutai thus encompassed a somewhat contradictory amalgamation in which modern institutions were adapted to the image of an ancient Japanese “cultural essence,” which imperial Japan’s authorities produced and performed in state rituals, Japan’s constitution, State Shinto religion, military parades, as well as education and hygienic reforms.⁴⁶

One of the key institutional developments for building and promoting kokutai was the establishment of a modern health regime, through which Japanese ideologues attempted to establish a sense of national belonging by integrating the individual body and its health into the “national body” and conceiving the amalgam as an organic unity.⁴⁷ Of course, the interventions of state agencies also faced much resistance, which ranged from heated debates about the privacy of the citizen’s body to peasant uprisings against quarantine restrictions enacted to control epidemics. However, health manuals, the centralization of the medical system, hygienic laws, and the establishment of modern hospitals and physician training all aimed at creating a strong bond between individual patients and the modern nation-state.⁴⁸ The constitutive mechanisms of public health, but also education, had a particularly powerful effect on the state- and nation-building process through the construction of certain gender roles. Since the end of the nineteenth century, debates on public health and education had included a strong emphasis on hygiene, domesticity, and reproduction according to the ideal of the “wise mother and good housewife” (ryōsai kenbō).⁴⁹ Women’s roles were increasingly described in terms of obedience not only to father and husband, but also to the emperor and the state.⁵⁰ Accordingly, the basic functions ascribed to women were to manage the household and educate the children, both for the sake of creating loyal, obedient, and efficient imperial subjects, and the female body became a symbol for the maintenance and continuity of the “national body.”⁵¹ Such ideals intensified with the increasing militarization of Japan in the 1930s, and women were perceived more or less as breeding machines. This was reinforced in particular by the repression of birth control, the banning of abortion, and the enforcement of eugenics laws.⁵² Simultaneously, as in most nationalistic constructions of gender, women were believed to be the most vulnerable and endangered part of the nation. Especially during warfare, the female body was construed as open to violation and, to quote Ruth Seifert, conceived “as always penetrable and endangered to rape.”53 For civilian and military physicians, civil servants, politicians, and public health officials, female sexuality therefore always represented an ambivalence between security and danger, which had to be managed with proper care in order to secure the survival of the “national body.”

However, kokutai in its use until 1945 cannot be reduced to signifying a singular national entity; the vagueness and multiple meanings of the term evolved with Japan’s imperial expansion in Asia, where kokutai was also employed as an ideological slogan to construct imperial unity under Japan’s rule. The flexibility and expandability of the concept of kokutai was particularly explicit in colonial Korea, where Japan’s colonial assimilation policies (dōka) attempted to propagate under the phrase of naissen ittai (“Korea and Japan as one body”) the integration of Korea and its people into the body politics of Japan’s imperial rule.⁵⁴ In Japan’s colonies, hygiene and public health were major vehicles for legitimizing colonial rule as a benevolent civilizing process. This benevolence, as some studies have highlighted, adhered to ambivalent implications, because Japan’s colonial administrations used public health interventions to integrate Japan’s colonies into imperial Japan’s body politics, but simultaneously created a hierarchy between an allegedly more modern Japan and the countries and people of Japan’s empire on the basis of hygiene.⁵⁵

Nevertheless, in the wake of defeat in August 1945, Japan’s authorities appear to have dropped their imperial baggage instantly, and kokutai’s reference must have changed. As is evident in the emperor’s speech as well as in police reports and newspaper articles, after defeat it was only the people in the Japanese metropole (naiichi) who were supposed to be endangered by the invading foreign soldiers. This evaluation totally ignored the fate of formerly colonized people in Japan’s empire. Within this web of meanings and references, kokutai goji, as pronounced by the emperor, had quite extensive and existential dimensions. Due to the notion of kokutai as an organic body generated in close connection to public health, hygiene, biological reproduction, and sexuality, Japan’s authorities perceived military occupation after defeat as an intrusion of an alien other. Their anxious articulations of the allegedly predictable contamination of the “national body” through the occupying forces shaped the discourse that emerged concomitantly with Japan’s defeat. They imagined the arrival of the occupation forces in sexual terms and as a sexual “invasion” that would inevitably be accompanied by physical and sexual violence against Japanese women, and thus considered it a fundamental destructive threat to kokutai.

Whereas the emperor’s speech addressed the postsurrender situation on an abstract level, Japan’s authorities in the police and the bureaucracy tackled the fears resulting from the invasion with concrete plans. On August 18, 1945, the Police and Security Section of the Home Ministry released a nationwide radiogram titled “Concerning the comfort facilities in areas where the foreign troops will be stationed” to all prefectural governors and police departments. The radiogram, which was most likely issued on behalf of the bureau’s chief, Hashimoto Masami,56 ordered police units to set up comfort facilities (ian shisetsu) as a preventive action all over Japan where the occupation forces might build their bases. The police departments were further instructed to keep this information strictly confidential, but in the case of its public exposure they were required to announce that the program had been initiated to protect Japanese citizens. In a special note, the radiogram listed specific details for the establishment of the recreational facilities, which included bars, restaurants, cabarets, and brothels. All of these facilities were to be located in special designated areas that were considered off-limits to Japanese civilians. It was the duty of the police to patrol these areas and to monitor all facilities. Furthermore, local police units were ordered to supervise and actively support the establishment of all facilities, and to oversee the recruitment of entertainers, dancers, barmaids, and licensed as well as unlicensed prostitutes.⁵⁷

In Japan, the concept of regulated prostitution as a modern form defined by police security and public health was first introduced in Nagasaki around 1860 after the encounter with foreign sailors that accompanied the opening of Japan’s relations with Europe.⁵⁸ The Japanese state installed a licensed prostitution system according to a French and German regulation model that allowed sex work only in designated areas with licensed brothels and venereal disease clinics. The police could easily patrol those quarters, and licensed brothel areas promised spatial boundaries that would limit the spread of venereal diseases as well as social and moral vices.⁵⁹ Weekly mandatory health examinations to check for venereal diseases were a major aspect of regulating the prostitutes’ bodies, a procedure focused much more on the protection of the male clientele than on the health of the prostitutes. A nationwide regulation compelling sex workers to undergo medical examinations was first introduced in 1876. Health examinations were also compulsory for receiving a license. Local police units, who often cooperated closely with civil servants of the prefectural hygiene boards, issued such licenses. Ever since, prostitution and the licensed prostitution system have received significant attention in Japan’s modern health regime, in which the body of the prostitute was incorporated into modern health, education, and military institutions, where it helped to substantiate the normalization processes of creating a modern Japanese body.60

In the Japanese metropole—similarly to many Western and Latin American countries as well as colonial contexts—debates on prostitution since the establishment of the license system were mostly concerned with public health. Yet in the twentieth century, these debates increasingly turned on issues of sexuality and reproduction, and brought prostitution and its regulation into an even closer relationship to modern nation-state and empire-building.⁶¹ Although significant influence was exerted by nongovernmental actors, such as sexologists and moral reformers who campaigned against the state-sanctioned license system by questioning state authority on matters of sexuality, or by criticizing the state for sponsoring extramarital sex, most of these individuals and groups were integrated into the governmental programs of public morality that ultimately enabled the Japanese state to intervene even more deeply into people’s everyday life. Hence, state intervention in the regulation of hygiene and sexuality rapidly intensified during the 1920s and 1930s, and licensed prostitution became a highly politicized topic.⁶² The regulation of prostitution allowed agents of the state (and those working in close relation to the state) not only to control hygiene and sexual morals, but also to define reproduction, domesticity, and gender roles. From the Meiji period onward, prostitution thereby became an integral part of the modern health and education regime, which stigmatized it as a “dishonorable trade“ (shūgyō) and used it as a reference ex negativo to the ideal of the “wise mother and good housewife” that defined middle-class domesticity.⁶³ In practice, however, Japan’s authorities perceived and maintained prostitution as an institution necessary to control the male sex drive and to guarantee healthy and safe sex for men, while supposedly also saving the daughters of respectable families from depravity and protecting the family in general as a haven of reproduction free of venereal disease.⁶⁴ Feminists worldwide have criticized this concept of prostitution as underlying a double standard that demanded that women be chaste while allowing men to have extramarital sex.⁶⁵ Nonetheless, Japanese military and public health officials were particularly keen to regulate the health of the male body that signified—predominantly in form of the manly soldier—the security and expansion of Japan to the “outer” world. Since the meaning of the male body was generated in symbolic entwinement with nation, empire, and war, sick soldiers, and especially those infected with venereal disease, were signs of disciplinary and moral weakness and were perceived as a danger to national security—the tight regulation of prostitution was supposed to limit such risks.66 Moreover, licensed prostitution also enabled the control and rationalization of civilian sexuality. It allowed men to postpone marriage and family planning without renouncing sex, while a double standard demanded that “respectable” women employ their sexuality reasonably, for biological reproduction only. Within this construction of gender, licensed lower-class prostitutes functioned as a mechanism to channel undisciplined male sexual desire and protect middle- and upper-class women to secure healthy and “proper” reproduction.⁶⁷

However, this modern form of prostitution was not limited to Japan proper, but developed along the lines of Japan’s history of imperial entanglement in Asia. During the second half of the nineteenth century, poor Japanese women, predominantly from Kyushu and later known as karayuki-san, emigrated all over East and Southeast Asia, settling as sex workers in port cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and becoming an integral part of imperial Japan’s transnational economy.⁶⁸ With Japan’s imperial expansion, the Japanese government became increasingly concerned that the magnitude of Japanese prostitution overseas could damage the reputation of the empire and tried to regulate the transnational sex trade.⁶⁹ Simultaneously, a license system was introduced in Taiwan, Korea, and China to administer prostitution and the growing Japanese population in Japan’s colonies and overseas settlements.⁷⁰ In the 1930s, during the Second World War in East and Southeast Asia, measures to control prostitution further intensified: Japanese military officers and bureaucrats organized a system of military prostitution (jūgun ian seido) and forced women, predominantly from Japan’s colonies, into sexual slavery in brothels in garrison towns and along the front lines.⁷¹ The military comfort system was supposed to prevent massacres and mass rapes, but it simultaneously functioned as an institution to discipline the Japanese troops and to control their morale and health with sanitary regulations and regular medical examinations of the comfort women.⁷² Comfort stations (ianjo) were erected not only overseas, but also within the Japanese metropole. In the wartime period, when extramarital social and sexual relations between men and women in general were increasingly controlled and restricted,⁷³ Japanese authorities established ianjo near military bases and centers of the arms industry as part of wartime mobilization. Not unlike their overseas military counterparts, predominantly Korean women were recruited to service soldiers and workers in these ianjo.74 Such measures enforced the meaning of prostitution as a heteronormative institution for social hygienic regulation, which Japan’s authorities deliberately applied to preserve public peace (chian) and morality (fūzoku), to channel male sexual desire, to protect female middle- and upper-class sexuality, and to foster biological reproduction with the aim of preserving the continuity of the Japanese “national body.”⁷⁵ As the Home Ministry’s directive shows, it was the same logic that underlay the decision by Japan’s authorities to establish comfort stations for the occupiers at the end of World War II.

The desire for national preservation and even essentialization in the program to comfort the occupiers after the war is most apparent in the founding of the Tokushu ianshisestu kyōkai around August 20, 1945, an organization commonly known under the later name Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA). It is said that Prince Konoe Fumimaro, then deputy prime minister, together with Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police chief Saka Nobuya, members of the Tokyo police’s Public Peace and Security Section (which was also highly involved in controlling prostitution in the Tokyo area), and several private entrepreneurs of Tokyo’s gastronomy and nightlife industry cooperatively initiated the RAA.⁷⁶ Authorities granted the RAA police support and financial aid, and it became a right-wing, semigovernmental association for organizing brothels and other recreational facilities for the occupation forces. The RAA’s zeal for a nationalist postwar order is documented in the inaugural speech given by Miyazawa Hamajirō, the president of Tokyo’s gastronomy association and director of the RAA, on August 28, 1945, in front of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. August 15, 1945, according to Miyazawa, marked the end of an era: “At this time, we are burdened through our previous occupation [as entrepreneurs in the entertainment industry] with the difficult task of comforting the occupation forces as part of the urgently needed national facilities for postwar management. . . . In united alliance with our beliefs we go unhesitatingly forward, and through the human sacrifice of several thousand ‘Okichis of the Shōwa period’ we build a floodwall against the raging waves, helping to defend and nurture the purity of our race, thereby becoming an invisible base for the postwar social order.”⁷⁷

The speech itself ended with cheers of “banzai” to salute the emperor and was later released as an “oath” by the RAA to defend the kokutai and preserve the “3,000 years of unchanging lineage of the emperor and the Japanese people.”78

In mentioning Okichi, Miyazawa was referring to the history of a geisha who was said to have served, under orders of the Tokugawa shogunate’s government (bakufu), the first U.S. general consul, Townsend Harris, during his residency in Japan in the 1850s—before she committed suicide. It is believed that her comforting and explicitly sexual services contributed significantly to the peaceful negotiations for diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States. The legend of Okichi therefore also helped construct an ideology of inevitable sacrifice for the well-being of the nation, a supposedly positive meaning for those women who were to function as a “floodwall” in the postwar period. The same image of the sacrifice of young, lower-class women, embedded in a narrative of progress and modernity, can also be traced in the recruitment and mobilization practices of the RAA.

Following the construction of the vulnerable female body and of prostitutes’ lower-class origins, Miyazawa called in his inaugural speech for defending and nurturing the “purity” of the Japanese race (minzoku) and thus linked postsurrender prostitution closely to notions of racial hygiene that had originated in the prewar and wartime periods.⁷⁹ According to the historian Awaya Kentarō, the fear of racial contamination through the rape of Japanese women by U.S. servicemen gave rise to the idea of setting up brothels for the occupation forces. Awaya’s analysis focused on Konoe Fumimaro, also notorious for being the founder of the para-fascist organization Taisei yokusankai (Imperial Rule Assistance Association) and three-time prime minister of Japan, who apparently argued for the establishment of a prostitution scheme to prevent the rape of Japanese women and thereby save Japan’s “purity of blood” (junketsu).⁸⁰

Taking a concept of racial homogeneity as determinative of policy, however, is to ahistorically project modern Japanese hygiene thought onto Japan’s prewar and wartime history, thereby simplifying modern Japanese racial hygiene thought. Racist thinking was not uncommon among various fascist and ultranationalist organizations, and it certainly surfaced in Japan’s often violent colonial rule in Taiwan, Korea, and China.⁸¹ Nevertheless, official statements as well as eugenic legislation and even wartime propaganda did not promote the racial superiority of Japan in the sense of biological determination.⁸² Accordingly, eugenic scholarship was never fully dominated by proponents of a “pure blood” theory, and the idea of a “mixed blood” (konketsu) heritage of the Japanese people was never abandoned.83 The Japanese empire and the Japanese nation itself were in fact commonly perceived as being multiracial, while Japanese imperial ideologues struggled with the double bind of Japan’s equal position among other imperial powers, its imperial superiority in the colonies, its simultaneous legitimation as the benevolent Asian leader of Asia and the inclusion of other Asian peoples within the Japanese empire.⁸⁴ As Oguma Eiji has argued, the idea of the Japanese self was not only quite inclusive—an implication shared by intellectual movements such as Pan-Asianism—and the concept of being Japanese also always shifted with the political environment.⁸⁵ Racial hygiene in the Japanese metropole (naiichi) was thus focused instead on the creation and reproduction of healthy and disciplined subjects of the empire. This idea also translated into the most aggressive agent of Japan’s imperial expansion, the Imperial Japanese Army, which was—despite various racially motivated killings by Japanese soldiers—nonetheless highly interested in the integration of soldiers from colonies such as Korea and Taiwan.⁸⁶ While this was surely meant to legitimate Japan’s imperialistic expansion and to ground Japan’s hegemony throughout Asia, multiracial inclusion also signaled a desire for autonomy in constant negotiation with the imaginary, omnipresent “West” as a reference for civilization and modernity.⁸⁷ Against this backdrop, racial hygienic programs and racial scaling in the prewar and wartime period functioned much more as an expression of cultural maturity than of biologically determined racial superiority.⁸⁸

Nonetheless, considering Miyazawa’s speech in front of the imperial palace and the fear shared by the Japanese emperor, politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, journalists, and entrepreneurs that the occupation forces would inevitably mass rape Japanese women and thereby contaminate and destroy the kokutai, the conceptualization of prostitution to comfort the occupiers obviously involved a certain racist and culturalist thought. The vocabulary to formulate such ideas was provided by prewar and wartime discourses of race, gender, class, and sexuality. In the immediate postwar period, Japan’s authorities and entrepreneurs of Japan’s entertainment industry appropriated these ideals and concepts of kokutai along with the image of the chaste female body, which ultimately satisfied a specifically male nationalistic desire to imagine a postsurrender “Japaneseness.” The conceptualization of prostitution to comfort the occupiers thus served not only the purpose of satisfying the sexual lust of the occupying army’s soldiers and sailors; it simultaneously comforted the soon-to-be occupied as well.

Organizing Prostitution in Postsurrender Japan:
Agents and Methods

Nationalistic ideals and desires based on gendered and racialized concepts of sexuality generated in imperial Japan surfaced in the conceptualization of prostitution as administrative practice to comfort the occupiers. Yet they also became constitutive in practice through the palpable undertaking to arrange recreational facilities and to recruit women to work in brothels, bars, beer halls, restaurants, and cabarets. John Lie has provocatively suggested viewing the Japanese state as a pimp whose agents and institutions were primarily responsible for the organization of prostitution in the 1940s—in (military) comfort stations throughout Japan’s empire during the war, as well as domestically within Japan after defeat in 1945.89 Although I do not intend to neglect the involvement and responsibility of Japan’s authorities in that matter, Lie’s vague assessment neglects the complexity of organizing sex work and recruiting sex workers in the immediate postsurrender period. Of course, the Home Ministry released an ordinance directing Japan’s national police force to set up comfort facilities and to recruit women, which was probably pushed by governmental officials and politicians, and local police units were occasionally directly responsible for carrying it out. In addition, however, a variety of agents and groups of actors such as private entrepreneurs of the entertainment industry as well as ultranationalist and fascist groups were heavily involved in and contributed to the efforts to establish the “female floodwall.” Although most individuals and groups were somehow linked to Japan’s imperial state, the recruitment itself was not planned and executed by a single, central governmental agency. Nevertheless, Japan’s authorities were highly supportive of these mostly private and semigovernmental groups and organizations, helping them financially and encouraging them politically to implement a recreational scheme. Obviously, Japan’s empire had not vanished overnight, and neither had Japan’s imperial agents, some of whom were eager to organize sex work to cater to the occupiers.

An instance of the close collaboration between officials of Japan’s imperial state and private agents of the sex industry is documented for a former amusement and brothel quarter (yūkaku) in Yokosuka, a major port for the Imperial Japanese Navy in the south of Kanagawa Prefecture. Close to the port facilities, a number of privately run brothels (ianjo) had served Japanese sailors on shore leave, which had apparently been a highly lucrative business for Yokosuka’s licensed sex workers (kōshō) during the wartime period. On August 29, 1945, a policeman and a representative of the Home Ministry came to one of Yokosuka’s brothels and, after asking the landlord to gather all sex workers, addressed them in a short speech: “From tomorrow you must partner with the Americans. This is an order coming from the gods (okami kara no meirei), and we all carefully follow them. It is your sacrifice (gisei) that will make it possible for Japan’s women to escape the fangs of American soldiers. Although this is truly painful for you, in the gods’ great will, for the country, and for the dignified imperial family’s princesses, we urge you to shed your tears. You carry the destiny of all Japanese women as a burden upon your shoulders.”90

Following the speech, the women went to their rooms to burn all pictures of Japanese warships and sailors, and the brothel owner posted a sign saying “Welcome, U.S. soldier” at the brothel’s door to greet the new customers.⁹¹ The legacy of Japan’s empire was thus twofold; it legitimated the enterprise ideologically and appropriated imperial Japan’s license system to remodel its institutions and labor for their use in the postsurrender period.

Various prefectural police departments engaged autonomously in the recruitment of sex workers beginning right away in August 1945. Although the Home Ministry had ordered them to do so, according to Japanese law, it was actually illegal for the police to organize prostitution. Units of the Kanagawa Prefectural Police Department nevertheless started to round up formerly or still licensed prostitutes and to inspect various locations in the Yokohama area with an eye to their suitability as comfort facilities. Subsequently, they chose an apartment building in Yamashita-chō in Yokohama’s Naka Ward and on August 28 opened it as a comfort facility under the name Goraku-sō.⁹² In most cases, however, the police merely supervised the recruitment of women and provided logistical support. Since it had been the police’s responsibility to monitor (and occasionally repress) prostitution in imperial Japan’s prostitution license system, they could rely on piles of files on registered sex workers to locate licensed and unlicensed former prostitutes. The police’s filing cabinet, which meticulously archived names, addresses, personal descriptions, photographs, and license records, was a most efficient tool for personally approaching women for recruitment.⁹³ Another advantage of the police’s recruitment campaigns and support was access to food stores and consumer goods such as clothing and blankets, which were strictly rationed during the war years. Additionally, the police gathered commodities like alcohol, but also sanitary products, futons, and other furniture. They attempted to convert factories and factory dormitories that had withstood Allied bombardment into brothels and beer halls, and used police trucks for transportation to furnish the facilities.

In the official histories of local police forces, Tanaka Yuki has found some credible evidence for the police’s involvement. In Hokkaido Prefecture, for example, the police department’s official history revealed: “The recruitment [of comfort women] was carried out mainly through labor brokers, but as it was a matter of great account, police officers were also directly engaged in this task. In other words, officers checked the names and addresses of [formerly] licensed former prostitutes from the list in the police stations, visited the villages in the mountain and seacoast areas where these women lived, gave them blankets, socks and sugar, and asked for their cooperation by persuading them to work again for the sake of the nation and for the [safety] of the Japanese people.”94 In this way, the police in Hokkaido apparently recruited almost 500 women who had formerly worked as licensed prostitutes to work in bars and brothels.⁹⁵

Some police officers passionately participated in the campaign to establish comfort facilities and even expressed pride in their work. Superintendent Ikeda Hirohiko of the Kanagawa police department, for instance, stated: “Although it was a sort of overstepping the bounds of the Police Act, I thought that, even if I had requested further instructions from Headquarters, I would not have got anything at all. Therefore I made up my mind to deal with the matter myself, on my own responsibility, without making any queries to my superiors. I was prepared to stand between the occupation forces and the Japanese people for general good in maintaining peace and order, and, if necessary, to bear any reprimand.”⁹⁶ Such initiatives by individual police officers or whole police units also translated into creative yet discriminatory recruitment practices. In prefectures like Akita and Toyama, for example, where the police apparently faced some difficulties mobilizing enough women, police departments and prefectural governments decided to collaborate and share recruited women across prefectural borders with the prefectures of Aomori and Iwate.⁹⁷

On other occasions, the police depended on privately operating labor brokers, who could themselves rely on their decades-old human and sex trafficking networks. Labor brokers usually maneuvered within legal limbo, because, as Fujime Yuki has argued, imperial Japan’s prostitution regulation “created a loophole through which such trafficking was permitted if based on free will.”⁹⁸ Such supposed freedom to choose sex work as a means of living, however, was in fact usually coerced through debt dependency. At the time a working contract was concluded, poor young women or their families received advance payment, which had to be repaid to brokers and brothel owners—a system that, according to Fujime, sustained “the hypocrisy that the state’s recognition of prostitution demonstrated its sympathy for the plight of the poor.”99 Such trafficking networks existed throughout Japan, and particularly poor regions in the countryside functioned as reservoirs for sex traffickers to gather young women and bring them to licensed brothels in Japan’s major cities and across the Japanese empire.¹⁰⁰ Although it is hard to prove, it is nevertheless highly conceivable that such networks were still active or were reactivated in the postsurrender period. There is evidence, however, that the police issued special travel documents to labor brokers for traveling freely through the countryside where many women and children had fled in order to find food, escape Japan’s bombed cities, or hide from the arriving occupiers. The idea was to offer food, clothing, and shelter, if women were willing to join and work in the newly established comfort centers.¹⁰¹

The police and labor brokers were not the only agents involved in the recruitment of women as sex workers, barmaids, and dancers. As Yoshimi Yoshiaki has shown, some right-wing politicians and fascist organizations were just as active in establishing prostitution for the occupiers.¹⁰² According to a report filed by the Tokkō, on September 18, 1945, Sasagawa Ryōzō, the younger brother of the Greater Japan National Essence League’s president, Sasagawa Ryōichi, established the “American Club” in Osaka together with fellow members of the Dai Nippon Kokusui league.¹⁰³ And Hishitani Toshio, the leader of the Greater Japan Sincerity Association (dai nippon sekisei-kai), a youth organization in Iwate Prefecture fashioned similarly to the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany, was apparently taking an active part in organizing sex workers for the occupiers. A report by the prefectural governor’s office stated that Hishitani “involved himself with the people establishing comfort facilities for accommodating the Allied forces currently occupying the area.”¹⁰⁴ Although it is difficult to reconstruct the actual cooperation between fascist organizations, yakuza-gangs, and most likely local police units, Japan’s authorities had a thorough knowledge of who was involved in the project to comfort the occupiers.

The most conspicuous organization in the recruitment of women was the already mentioned Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA). In September 1945, the RAA received generous funding from the Ministry of Finance (zaimushō) in the form of an instant low-interest loan of more than 30 million yen from the Nippon Kangyō Bank. Ikeda Hayatato, who at the time was the director of the ministry’s tax division and later served as prime minister of Japan between 1960 and 1964, appears to have negotiated the loan.105 Local police and military units granted access to rationed commodities such as blankets, beds, and toiletries, and also shared their prostitution licensing files to aid in recruitment.¹⁰⁶ The RAA thus had enough resources to rent or buy facilities, furnish its establishments, offer food and salaries, and to run public recruitment campaigns. They disseminated advertisements widely through various channels. In newspapers, the RAA solicited so-called “special girls,” who would receive good and advance pay, food, shelter, and, for applicants from the countryside, travel expenses.¹⁰⁷ And the RAA addressed young women on posters, too. One prominent exemplar hung in front of the RAA’s main office in the old Mitsukoshi department store on the Ginza, a major street and district in Tokyo: “Announcement to the New Japanese Woman [shin nihon josei]. For postwar management [sengo shori] of the situation of national emergency [kokka tekina kinkyūshisetsu], we require the initial cooperation [sossen kyōroku] of the new Japanese woman to participate in the great project to comfort [ian] the occupation forces. Female employees between 18 and 25 years old are wanted. Accommodation, clothes and meals will be provided.”¹⁰⁸ The plan to comfort the occupiers, conceptualized in secrecy after Japan’s defeat and tangible only in police reports and ministerial ordinances, became public knowledge through such advertisements. The fact that Ginza was the epicenter of such publicity bares a certain historical irony: Ginza was a major site where the discourse of “modern life,” with its trope of the “modern girl“ (moga)—which was produced by mass media, modern architecture and practices of consumption—manifested in the 1920s and 1930s.¹⁰⁹ At the end of the war, Ginza was destroyed along with the rest of Tokyo by Allied bombings and the fantasies of modern life could not discursively come to terms with the devastation and misery of the war. And the trope of the “New Japanese Woman,” a euphemism recapitulating the propagated, but never achieved, emancipation of women—which already signified the tragedy of modern life decades ago, and only repeated itself as farce in 1945—could never be realized in the ruins of the Ginza. The young women of Japan’s lowest classes between eighteen and twenty-five years old who were recruited were in material need of food, clothing and accommodation. They were, however, also drawn into a nationalistic, patriarchal, heteronormative project that was meant to signal the building of a new Japan. As they had in imperial Japan, women of lower-class and/or colonial background were to function in their role as prostitutes as a protective zone to regulate Japan’s sexualities. Whereas imperial Japan’s prostitutes were meant to channel male sexual desire in general to protect “respectable” reproductive sexuality, this time around, postsurrender ianfu were expected to sexually defuse the encounter between the Japanese population and the occupation forces.110

The extent to which the recruitment campaigns were actually fruitful is impossible to measure, and there are hardly any records of responses to newspaper ads or the RAA’s recruitment posters. Kobayashi Daijirō and Murase Akira have offered a rare story in which a former member of the Tokubetsu kōgekitai (“Special Attack Unit,” often referred to as kamikaze) supposedly entered the RAA’s office in anger and, armed with a sword, accused the RAA of disgracefully (keshikaran) selling Japanese women to the “American and English devils” (kichiku beiei). Somehow the present RAA members convinced him that their enterprise actually aimed at “protecting the purity of the one hundred million” (ichioku no junketsu o mamori) and “preserving the national body” (kokutai goji), which apparently helped them to avoid bloodshed.¹¹¹ There even appear to have been some women who were actually attracted to the idea of serving their country. John Dower has explained this circumstance by referring to wartime propaganda, arguing that, since the RAA’s appeal was “essentially the same message of patriotic self-sacrifice that had been drilled into them all their lives,” it helped them recruit women.¹¹²

However, this image of an unbroken continuity of wartime ideology seems rather exaggerated. Of course, there might have been some women willing to sacrifice their bodies for emperor and country, but it is hard to believe that such self-abandonment could have been widespread. Women, attracted by the advertisements’ offerings, usually entered the RAA’s office with mixed expectations. On one occasion, according to Kobayashi and Murase, a women dressed in her wartime work suit (monpe) entered the office, curious about whether any positions were left and what the job entailed. She was told she would receive a dormitory spot, clothes, food, and a salary for her efforts to comfort (ian) soldiers, notably as a dancer, and that she would be working for her country (o-kuni no tame) and the Japanese people (nihonjin toshite). The woman was apparently not instantly attracted to that kind of work and seemed puzzled by the scope of a dancer’s duties in a comfort facility (ianjo). In the end, however, the RAA persuaded her to take the job by emphasizing the prospect of food, shelter, and money.113 The decision to accept the RAA’s job offers was thus not guided by self-sacrifice, but was rather forced upon women by socioeconomically catastrophic circumstances—misery, hunger, and despair—which the RAA and other businessmen in Japan’s postsurrender sex work scene deliberately exploited.

This is not to say that women were recruited exclusively by the “silent compulsion of economic conditions,” as Karl Marx called the mechanisms that compel people who lack access to the means of production and vital necessities to sell their labor power.¹¹⁴ Many women were recruited by systematic coercion or even brute force (or the threat of violence), for instance by being forced into dependency through the accumulation of debts for their living expenses at the comfort centers where they lived and worked—a combination that has a long trajectory in imperial Japan’s modern history of prostitution.¹¹⁵ Coerced debt is but one legacy of Japan’s imperial past in Iwahashi Tomiko’s biography. Tomiko was born in Tokushima on Shikoku in 1929, but moved to Japanese-occupied territories in southern China. In January 1946, then seventeen-year-old Tomiko and her family returned to Japan from Guangzhou (Canton). First, they went to Kyoto, but after her father died and she and her mother had no relatives there, they moved further to Takayama on Shikoku to live with Tomiko’s uncle. Soon, her uncle passed away as well. Having no place to stay, Tomiko and her mother faced even harder times while trying to live on Tomiko’s small salary at a local spinning mill. Around September of the same year, her mother also died and Tomiko decided to leave Shikoku and find work in Osaka. As she arrived at Osaka station, a forty-year-old man approached her and offered her a housekeeping job at a place called Santō. Without a second thought, Tomiko took the job and moved into the Santō House. By December, Tomiko realized that most of the women working at the house would sometimes “take clients” (kyaku o toru), usually servicemen of the occupation forces. Around the same time, the man who offered her the housekeeping job told her that she already owed the Santō House more than 2,000 yen for expenses since moving in, and that it would be useless to either quit or run away. Thus, Tomiko saw no other option than to “take in clients” herself in order to pay off her debts and to hope for a better future.¹¹⁶

Despite the enormous effort and resources mobilized by Japan’s authorities and other agents of the entertainment industry, the organization of comfort facilities and recruitment of sex workers before the arrival of the occupiers met with little success. Although the RAA calculated that 13,000 to 15,000 ianfu would be sufficient to cater to the needs of the occupation army, in the two weeks between surrender and the beginning of the occupation they were only able to recruit 1,360 women in total.117 Additionally, the RAA apparently planned to establish a huge entertainment complex in the former Mitsukoshi department store building, with bars, restaurants, cabarets, and brothels on each floor. The Tokyo police department, however, did not sanction the plan due to security concerns, and recommended focusing on the Ōmori and Ōi districts in southern Tokyo.¹¹⁸ Ōmori was not only an old entertainment district; it had also hosted a major prisoner of war camp during World War II.¹¹⁹ Moreover, Ōmori and Ōi are located on the Keihin Tōhoku railway line and the Keihin highway, which both connect Tokyo with Kawasaki and Yokohama, and Japan’s authorities believed it would be the first route the occupiers would take to enter the capital. Although the RAA did manage to set up some beer halls and restaurants in that district, only the Komachien, a designated brothel with about forty sex workers on hand, was ready to open when the first foreign customers arrived on August 28, 1945.¹²⁰ In no time, however, the RAA and other entrepreneurs of the entertainment industry established a flourishing infrastructure to comfort the arriving occupiers.

• • •

The two weeks between Japan’s surrender and the arrival of the occupation forces were a significant historical event that produced new rules of signification: A new understanding of a Japanese people and Japanese belonging seems to have emerged along with the formation of a new space, “Japan.” The nationalistic imagination arose out of the fantasized confrontation with the arriving occupation forces as an intimidating other. The imaged fear of raping and looting soldiers and sailors of the occupation army fueled the idea of erecting a “female floodwall” to mediate the encounter with the occupiers. Japan’s authorities believed that the occupiers’ arrival would constitute a “sexual invasion” targeting Japanese women, who would need to be protected to guarantee survival of the “national body.” However, it was at this very moment that Japan’s authorities redrew the contours of the “national body” and its supposed core—Japan’s purity, embodied by the chaste Japanese woman—in order to secure an imagined “Japaneseness,” which had in fact not yet existed in this form. The emperor’s and ideologues’ talk of preservation, as in the expression kokutai goji, was thus misleading, since it actually signified a new essence for Japan and its people.

The signifying shift that occurred in the late summer of 1945 was a result of the traumatic experience of surrender and defeat. While this experience in itself was a referenceless rupture of despair, uncertainty, and anxiety, the predominantly male agents of the Japanese state were nevertheless forced to fictionalize the event that had precipitated the wish for cultural and racial autonomy vis-à-vis the occupiers.121 The reimagined national self and its territorial and biopolitical references were indeed, to quote Sebastian Conrad, “the product—and not the precondition—of processes of transnational interaction, exchange and entanglement.”¹²² The imagined terrifying presence of the Allies/Americans catalyzed Japanese identification practices transnationally, and discursive patterns prevalent in imperial Japan echoed back, were appropriated, and were renarrated to instantly fill the referenceless gap of the traumatic experience of defeat.¹²³ Certain notions of sexuality, gender, race, and class that were deeply inscribed in imperial Japan’s health, education, and licensed prostitution systems thus affected the postsurrender desire for a decidedly Japanese identity and provided the language to articulate it. It seems conspicuous—in addition to what Leo Ching has called Japan’s “lack of decolonization,” by which he refers to the emperor’s absolution from responsibility for the war, the denial of Japanese war atrocities, the integration of Japan into the Cold War order under the aegis of the United States, and the ongoing legal struggle of former comfort women¹²⁴—that the conceptualization and organization of prostitution as an administrative practice was vital to constituting the postwar myth of Japanese homogeneity and belonging.¹²⁵ The conceptualization and organization of the “female floodwall” would thus become a telling example of the process of the postwar imagination and the consolidation of the Japanese nation-state and the simultaneous disintegration of Japan’s empire, or better yet, the reversion of Japan’s imperial expansion: Since the early twentieth century, Japan’s aggressive war and colonial rule in Asia involved exporting sex workers, sex work regulations, and specific notions of sexuality and hygiene—often mediated through further global entanglements with the West and its colonies—that shaped the understanding of Japan’s empire and Japanese imperial subjectivity. With defeat in 1945, Japan’s imperial dreams shattered, but imperial experiences of sexuality and prostitution continued to shape ideas of Japanese belonging. In the immediate postwar period, however, the meaning of Japan started to shift, and one of the significant—or rather signifying—arenas for imagining the formation of a new Japan and a new Japanese belonging was the conceptualization and organization of prostitution to comfort the occupiers.

FIRST ENCOUNTER: SEX AND VIOLENCE IN EARLY OCCUPIED JAPAN

The surrender ceremony, an exclusively male enterprise, was held on September 2, 1945, when representatives of the imperial Japanese government signed the Instrument of Surrender on the U.S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. General Douglas MacArthur, acting supreme commander of Allied Powers, closed the official procedure with a speech in which he expressed hope for a peaceful future for Japan and that “a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world founded upon faith and understanding—a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance and justice.”126 Despite such emphasis on reconciliation, the ceremony was nonetheless a tremendous demonstration of power: in a symbolic gesture, the Missouri was flying the same American flag that had flown over the White House on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941 as well as the thirty-one-star flag used by Commodore Matthew C. Perry when he sailed to Japan in 1853 to “open” the country with gunboat diplomacy. During the ceremony, Tokyo Bay was crowded with hundreds of American, British, and Australian warships and the sky above the bay was filled with hundreds of planes, whereas the Japanese navy and air force had been nearly completely destroyed; and after the ceremony ended, thousands of well-fed American soldiers and sailors disembarked and advanced into a Japan where the majority of people were facing hunger in bombed-out cities.¹²⁷

The waves of disembarking servicemen hit the newly erected “female floodwall” in Japan’s major cities. Almost instantly, members of the occupation regime patronized the still rather scarce, but strategically well-placed brothels in Tokyo and Kanagawa prefectures. Even members of the U.S. army’s advance party, who had landed on Atsugi Airfield in Tokyo on August 28, 1945, and had been assigned to prepare the arrival of the occupation army, seem to have visited the RAA’s Komachien the very night of the brothel’s opening.¹²⁸ According to Tanaka Yuki, they probably “found the comfort station on the way from Atsugi to Kanagawa Prefecture, where they had to inspect the port facilities of Yokosuka in preparation for the landing of US marines a few days later.” Tanaka further argues, “The selection of this site—on the highway linking Tokyo, Yokohama and Yokosuka—was a deft business decision by the RAA.”129 Shortly after September 2, when thousands of occupation servicemen began to move further into Japan and started establishing their first military bases, the RAA followed the occupiers and set up recreational facilities close to occupation army camps. After the occupation troops occupied Tokyo’s Tachikawa Airbase on September 3, for instance, the RAA installed a brothel called Fussa with forty-three sex workers in a nearby dormitory building formerly used by the Imperial Japanese Army.¹³⁰ Close to Tachikawa, also along the banks of Tama River in western Tokyo, a unit of occupiers settled in at another airfield in Chōfu. On the night of September 9, members of the RAA are said to have visited the newly established military camp in a truck loaded with several young women. In his Japan Diary, Mark Gayn, an American and Canadian journalist and the Chicago Sun’s correspondent in occupied Japan between 1945 and 1947, described the scene according to an eyewitness report: “Long after nightfall, GIs heard the sound of an approaching truck. When it was within hailing distance, one of the sentries yelled ‘Halt!’ The truck stopped, and from it emerged a Japanese man, with a flock of young women. Warily, they walked towards the waiting GIs. When they came close, the man stopped, bowed respectfully, swept the ground behind him with a wide, generous gesture, and said: ‘Compliments of the Recreation and Amusement Association!’”¹³¹

The occupation authorities themselves initially agreed to the sexual services provided, and some members of the occupation forces even wanted to make it possible for their servicemen to enjoy supposedly safe and sanitary sexual activities. In a letter to Representative Howard H. Buffett of Omaha, Nebraska, Navy chaplain Lawrence L. Lacour, the first U.S. Navy chaplain to arrive in Japan, recalled the early “sexual contact” of American sailors and Japanese sex workers. After medical officers inspected several houses in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, it was proposed at a meeting on September 26, 1945, that “one large house be opened, that it be operated with the understanding that all women were diseased, and that a voluntary system of prophylaxis be available by placing a Navy-operated treatment station within the house. Although some medical officers and two chaplains in attendance protested, it was stated by the senior medical officer that this was to be the policy.” A subsequent, complaint submitted by the chaplains was ignored, and on Sunday, October 7, “the Yasuura house was opened to enlisted men, with geisha houses permitted to accept the patronage of chiefs and officers. Although the number of men on liberty next day was considerably under normal because of rain, I [Lacour] observed, in company with four chaplains and the officer of the day of the military police, a line of enlisted men almost a block long, waiting their turn. MP’s kept the line orderly and permitted only as many as could be served to enter at a time.”132

Although it is somewhat speculative to consider the underlying political or economical intentions of American occupiers, Japanese authorities, and RAA entrepreneurs and pimps, it is—at a first glance—rather remarkable how the first encounter between occupiers and occupied, whether at the ceremony in Tokyo Bay or in brothels organized postsurrender, appears to have been meticulously planned by both American and Japanese authorities. Both, it seems, were eager to avoid more bloodshed after the war had officially ended, and both tried to facilitate—according to their own preferred aims and means, of course—a transition from wartime antagonism to peaceful coexistence in the postwar era. Yet, both occupation and occupied authorities were eager to maintain control and to uphold their respective masculine superiority. Sex and sexual pleasure, or at least the immediate satisfaction of sexual desires, played a significant role in these attempts, and the first encounter between occupiers and occupied was arranged according to specific heteronormative patterns. The occupiers paraded their military, economic, and political power before the vanquished—itself a sexualized performance of militaristic masculine power¹³³—and allowed their personnel, who, as men, and especially in their role as (victorious) soldiers, were allegedly inclined to have sex, to seek sexual adventures in Japanese brothels.¹³⁴ The occupiers were primarily concerned with the servicemen’s security, health, and morale, and, as will be discussed in detail in later chapters, the occupiers’ military police patrolled red-light districts, medical departments provided prophylaxis against venereal disease, and chaplains offered character guidance in the longer course of the occupation period. Japanese agents under the aegis of the Japanese imperial state, for their part, furnished recreational facilities to erect the envisioned “female floodwall.” They followed every movement of the occupying servicemen in order to satisfy their imagined sexual hunger and thus protect “respectable” Japanese women from raging GIs—and tried to stay in charge despite Japan’s defeat and loss of sovereignty.

As MacArthur announced in his initial speech on deck of the Missouri, the overall goal of occupation policy was a peaceful future for Japan within a “better world” based on “freedom, tolerance and justice,” usually expressed throughout the occupation period in mantra-like repetition of the catchwords democratization and demilitarization. In a broader perspective, as John Dower and Takemae Eiji have convincingly argued, these goals were definitely accomplished, since after 1945, Japan never again threatened its Asian neighbors as imperial Japan’s militarist aggression had in the first half of the twentieth century.135 Nevertheless, the occupation of Japan was more than a mere lesson in American-style democracy, and the anticipated transition from warfare to peaceful liberation was far from going smoothly according to either American or Japanese planning. In particular, the first encounter between occupiers and occupied—but also the occupation period in general—was not entirely harmonious and was marked by high tensions that could erupt in physical and sexual violence. Sexual assault, theft and robbery, and in the worst scenarios rape and murder did occur despite the “gifts of the defeated” (haisha no okurimono), as Masayo Duus has called the sexual offerings—or “sacrifices,” in the language of Japanese ideologues—provided by Japan’s authorities.¹³⁶ Contrary to the logic of male agents of the Japanese state and entertainment industry, who initiated brothels and other recreational facilities to comfort the occupiers and prevent them from engaging sexually with “respectable” Japanese women, the first encounters did not generate their desired results. And furthermore, the occupiers’ praise of democracy—as in MacArthur’s “freedom, tolerance and justice”—likewise failed to prevent servicemen of the occupation army from attacking and molesting Japanese civilians. For Japanese women in particular, who were the predominant targets of U.S. servicemen’s sexual violence, it is thus rather questionable whether September 2, 1945 truly marks the groundbreaking beginning of freedom and peace, as proposed by MacArthur, or whether it simply meant that a new type of conflict had arrived at their doorsteps.¹³⁷

This chapter assembles a variety of tragic testimonies of sexual violence and other crimes from the first weeks and months of the occupation in 1945. This was a time when sex work was practiced more or less along the model of imperial Japan’s licensed prostitution system; albeit the term “system” distorts the very chaotic nature of this period in which—despite their efforts and claims—neither Japan’s authorities nor SCAP were fully in control of the situation. It will be shown how the imperial encounter between Japan and the United States/Allies and their struggle over authority and masculinity translated into the sexual encounters of servicemen and women of occupied Japan. The occupiers seemed rather lax about, or incapable of, controlling their personnel, and many occupation army servicemen took advantage of the sexual opportunities in postsurrender Japan without reservation. Indeed, they engaged not exclusively with those women “provided” by Japan’s authorities, but some—similarly to many white men in colonial settings—perceived all women in Japan as sexually available.138 Sexual encounters, however, could vary, and they ranged from sexual services in exchange for pleasure or payment to the sexual violence of soldiers and sailors who used threats and physical force to coerce women into sex.¹³⁹ In all available documented cases from this particular period, the practices of sexual violence were deeply gendered, with male perpetrators and female victims of (sexual) harassments, assaults, and rape.¹⁴⁰ The aim of this clear-cut gender distinction is not to reproduce rape as an ahistorical anthropological constant, in which, to quote Susan Brownmiller’s classical feminist critique of rape, men deliberately use their “penis as weapon,” and rape is only possible due to “[m]en’s structural capacity to rape and woman’s corresponding structural vulnerability.”¹⁴¹ On the contrary, I am reading Brownmiller’s suggestion that “rape has a history” in a different, de-essentializing way. This involves portraying the power relations in which sexual violence was practiced, officially and unofficially ignored, sanctioned or persecuted, and how it was spoken of or silenced.¹⁴²

Sexual violence in early occupied Japan was embedded in a culture of what Cynthia Enloe has labeled “militarized masculinity.” Militarized masculinity and patriarchal power structures peaked during the war but still reverberated, to quote Enloe again, in the “militarized peace” of the postwar era and were significant in shaping and facilitating sexual violence.¹⁴³ Nevertheless, in order to grasp the multiple experiences and dynamics of violence, Thomas Lindenberger and Alf Lüdtke have reminded us to “watch closely” and have called for necessarily thick descriptions of practices and contexts of physical violence beyond meta-theoretical, political, and ideological claims.¹⁴⁴ The same holds true for sexual violence.¹⁴⁵ However, the documentation of sexual violence is rather limited in the case of early occupied Japan. Sexual violence is for the most part only visible in police reports and memoranda filed by Japan’s authorities, which often overdetermine the everyday experiences of victims and perpetrators and do not permit detailed reconstructions of the incidents.¹⁴⁶ Despite the scarcity of source material, the agency of perpetrators and victims as well as political, bureaucratic, and law-enforcing agents of the Japanese state will be taken into account as much as possible. The analysis of sexual violence is thus not limited to the possibility and practice of acts of rape or other sexual assaults perpetrated by men against women, or, as in this case, by soldiers of a winning army against civilian women of a defeated foe; the aim is rather to address the complexity of sexual violence in the context of broader power relations. In early occupied Japan, it was Japan’s male authorities, mainly police officers and bureaucrats of the Home Ministry, but also ordinary citizens, men and women, who developed various strategies to limit, control, dodge, prevent, articulate, and instrumentalize sexual and other assaults by the occupiers. Their efforts in the occupation period’s first days, weeks, and months are at the center of this chapter.

Investigative Measures: Reporting Sexual Assaults

The first sexual assault officially reported after the arrival of the occupation forces occurred on August 30, 1945. In a report, the Kanagawa Prefectural Police stated that at around 11 a.m. in the morning, two U.S. servicemen entered a Japanese house in Yokosuka. “Two American soldiers who were searching the neighborhood invaded the house, left it shortly for five minutes, and upon return one [soldier] forced [a] 36 years old wife . . . into the small room next to the kitchen’s entrance on the ground floor, the other [soldier] forced [her] 17-year-old daughter . . . to go upstairs, both above-mentioned [women] were threatened with drawn pistols and raped.”147 Another, even more violent incident is reported for the following day. On the early evening of September 1, two American soldiers drove around Yokohama City in a stolen truck and coerced two Japanese civilians to show them around the city. Later on, they picked up twenty-four-year-old Miss Y. at Eirakuchō, Naka Ward, and brought her to a U.S. servicemen’s dormitory in Nogeyama Park. At the dormitory, Miss Y. was gang raped by twenty-seven men, who violated her in turn until she lost consciousness. On the morning of the next day, some servicemen took care of her and sent her home.¹⁴⁸

Similar incidents took place over the next days and weeks. Tanaka Yuki has gathered 119 officially reported rape cases between September and October, but Masayo Duus has counted up to 1,326, including incidents of rape for the period between August 30 and September 10, 1945 that were not officially reported.¹⁴⁹ Duus’s numbers are exceedingly high and there is no evidence documented in the official records supporting her calculations. However, Tanaka’s and Duus’s statistics both indicate a certain decrease of sexual violence after the first few days of the occupiers’ presence in Japan. Nonetheless, a constant ratio of rape and attempted rape of Japanese women by servicemen can be established on the basis of the occupiers’ and Japanese police’s statistical records throughout the occupation period. In Tokyo, for example, the Metropolitan Police Department documented fifteen to thirty cases a month in 1946, and the Eighth Army’s Provost Marshal listed one to ten investigations a month for 1948 in the Tokyo-Yokohama area.150 Of course, these numbers indicate only the officially reported incidents, and most reports on sexual assault and rape described only cases of attempted rape. The official records thus do not reflect the whole extent of sexual violence that actually occurred, and may silence many incidents. One reason might be that rape victims do not typically press charges due to shame or social stigmatization within their community; another one may be the indifferent responses by occupation authorities, who did not pursue reports wholeheartedly.¹⁵¹ Nevertheless, the existing official numbers still suggest that sexual assaults did occur despite the erection of the “female floodwall,” and that both Japanese and American officials were keeping records on the problem. At the very least, this indicates that the occupation period’s authorities were aware of sexual violence and regarded it as a serious issue. Moreover, it is notable that the occupiers’ and occupieds’ statistical data differed, and that Japan’s authorities reported more cases than those actually investigated by the occupiers’ law enforcement and investigative agencies; even fewer cases made it to trial.¹⁵²

Incidents of sexual violence obviously prompted Japan’s authorities to develop various measures to prevent and monitor assaults on Japanese citizens. Since under occupation law, Japan’s law enforcement agencies had lost all jurisdiction to bring crimes conducted by the occupiers to trial, the Japanese authorities’ ability to intervene was largely limited to collecting information on criminal cases and filing reports with occupation authorities for further investigation. In this regard, the Peace Preservation Section of the still active Home Ministry released a directive on September 4, 1945, to the police departments in Tokyo, Osaka, and all other prefectures. The directive was headed “Concerning the documentation of and counter-measures against illegal acts by American soldiers” and ordered all police departments to report the occupiers’ crimes and sexual assaults in particular.¹⁵³ Apparently, the members of the Peace Preservation Section were well aware that American civil and military law outlawed sexual assault and considered the reporting of servicemen’s illegal acts to be the most effective way to limit crimes. Incidents could be reported at every police station or kōban, small police stations in Japanese neighborhoods that had been popular since the mid-Meiji period and through which the police managed to maintain a high level of surveillance while simultaneously interacting with residents on a more personal and casual basis.154 The police were ordered to forward the reports to the Central Liaison Office (CLO), which was attached to Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and had been newly established to handle all communication between the Japanese government and SCAP’s General Headquarters. Reports were required to be compiled with the greatest possible detail, and, to aid in identification of the perpetrators, the Peace Preservation Section advised noting the place and date of the crime as well as characteristics of the suspects. These included name, age, appearance, “social status” (mibun), and military rank.¹⁵⁵ In order to enable Japanese civilians to identify American military ranks, the Asahi Shinbun printed a short explanatory article with images of American military insignia on the very same day the Home Ministry released its directive.¹⁵⁶

Upon reviewing a number of the reports, however, it seems reasonable to conclude that of the criteria which the Home Ministry’s Peace Preservation Section proposed using to identify suspects, it was bodily features that constituted their primary concern, and that fuzzy classifications such as “social status” should in fact be read as racial categorizations. In a memorandum submitted by the CLO on October 12, 1945, for instance, it is reported:

About 11 p.m. September 19, three United States negro soldiers stationed in the area of Iwaimachi, Hodogaya-ku, forced their way into the home of . . . a conscripted Japanese soldier who has not yet been demobilized. One of the negro soldiers was posted outside as a lookout. The other two going inside while holding a jack knife demanded sexual intercourse with [the] wife of the Japanese soldier. [She] ran outside but was caught by the other negro soldier who was stationed outside. She was then dragged to the bushes and raped by the three negro soldiers. Three other negro soldiers passing there also assaulted her.¹⁵⁷

Besides place and time, the term “negro soldier” is the only explicit description of the suspects given in the report. Of course, the reporting rape victim cannot be expected to memorize the specifics of such a traumatizing experience, but no other features such as military insignia or personal appearance were reported by the CLO. Compared to other, quite similar reports, it is conspicuous that “negro,” and occasionally “coloured,” were generally used as umbrella terms to categorize nonwhite American soldiers. Although it is hard to prove any racist sentiments on the part of the CLO or the reporting Japanese police, racial categorizations and even racial profiling appear as a recurrent trope in the reports. This is particularly apparent in the reverse case, when skin color is totally absent in a report, for example in reports on crimes apparently committed by white servicemen. This sustains the notion that Japan’s authorities deliberately used the marker of race to report the crimes of nonwhite servicemen.158

Beginning in mid-September 1945, the CLO submitted almost daily reports to SCAP’s General Headquarters concerning crimes presumably committed by members of the occupation forces. In one of the first reports, a twenty-one-page memorandum dated September 19, the CLO listed all incidents between August 31 and September 5, covering six cases of burglary in Tokyo; thirty-three cases of extortion and one attempted rape in Yokohama; one extortion in Kawasaki; two extortions, one burglary, and one manslaughter resulting from a traffic accident in Fujisawa; four cases of burglary, one attempted rape, and four extortions in Yokosuka; two extortions in Kamakura; one extortion in Odawara; three extortions in Isuki; and one kidnapping with rape in Miura, Kanagawa Prefecture.¹⁵⁹ The stolen and extorted goods were mostly cars or trucks, watches, money, Japanese swords, clothes (kimono), food, and/or alcohol. Stolen vehicles were often used for further crimes such as kidnapping young women, stealing large amounts of alcohol, or committing serial burglaries. On September 10, for example, the CLO reported that three American soldiers had been driving around in “a car belonging to the Meguro Second Office of the Yamato Motor Car Company situated in Shimizu-machi, Meguro-ku.” According to the report, the soldiers went on a “spree” with the car and forced its chauffeur, Unichiro Shishido, to accompany them. Unichiro later reported to the police that the three soldiers committed “about thirty counts of burglary and intimidation” and later spent the evening with “Geisha girls and passed their time pleasantly until the small hours of the next day.” Upon questioning by the police, the “Geisha girls” also attested that the three soldiers were trafficking various stolen items they had obtained that night, such as several watches and Japanese yen-notes.¹⁶⁰

Public flaunting of criminal behavior was not uncommon, and most American servicemen made no significant attempt to cover up their criminal activities. Occasionally, some servicemen even bluntly showed off their intentions. A certain “G.I. Jopha,” for instance, stopped a Japanese truck driver somewhere in the Tokyo-Yokohama area on September 19, took his vehicle, and left an “obligation letter” that said:

One car (Buick) Model ‘1930’.

To be used by the U.S.Gov. for purpose of transporting high ranking officers on official business. After all who won the war, you or me? This certified that this car is to be used to pick up any girls who fuck, and further more who cares what the hell is it to you.

G. I. Jopha (signed)

17-fort soldiers of the winning army, U.S.A.

on this date 19. Sept. 1945.161

Such statements vividly demonstrate the general attitude of superiority of U.S. servicemen in occupied Japan. Especially in the first few weeks, before the whole bureaucratic apparatus of the occupation regime was established and the presence of the victorious military was still totally new to the occupied, the occupation army’s servicemen appeared to be under no strict regimentation. Apparently, this translated for some servicemen into wholehearted engagement in all the various criminal activities occupied Japan seemed to have to offer.¹⁶² The dimension of sex in the above-cited reports is particularly apparent, and the references to a night out with “geisha girls” and the truck “to be used to pick up any girls who fuck” substantiate the impression that American servicemen sought sexual adventures and exploited opportunities for them in occupied Japan.

As many of the reports indicate, most sexual assaults were committed along similar patterns. Tanaka Yuki has argued that many servicemen pretended to patrol Japanese neighborhoods to search the area for accessible women. “In many of these cases,” Tanaka highlights, “small groups of G.I.s would intrude into a Japanese civilian house while the family members were asleep to rape the women. Typically, while a few of the soldiers were inside the premises, others were on watch outside the house.”¹⁶³ In addition, rape or attempted rape often followed the distribution of food or other goods. On many occasions, servicemen offered chocolate, cigarettes, or money in exchange for sexual services. Upon rejection, however, perpetrators often forced women into sexual intercourse by beating and/or threatening them at gunpoint.¹⁶⁴ Tanaka’s interpretation thus echoes the evaluation given by the Home Ministry’s Peace Preservation Section in September 1945. The ministry’s analysis and suggestions were explicated in their memorandum about two rape cases in Yokosuka and Tateyama, which both occurred on September 2, 1945. In the first case in Yokosuka, two sailors of the U.S. Navy acted as if they were inspecting the neighborhood. According to the memo, the sailors were purposely ranging the area on midday when most men were at work and the women alone at home. After entering a house, they are supposed to have communicated through unmistakable gestures that they were seeking sexual intercourse and even offered payment. After the women rejected the proposal, the sailors drew their pistols and forced the women to have sex. In Tateyama, located in Chiba Prefecture, another group of two soldiers from the U.S. Eighth Army acted quite similarly. In this case, the memo concluded, it was apparent that the soldiers had knowingly broken the law, because they tried to rape the women “in secret” (hisoka ni) and always posted one man outside as a lookout (mihari ni tatsu).165

The occupiers’ responses to the many and continuing reports of the occupied were rather sobering and probably disappointing for Japan’s authorities as well as for the victims of sexual assaults. Usually, SCAP’s reaction was simply to demand more detailed evidence for the crimes reported and to respond that the scarce information Japan’s authorities provided on the suspects was insufficient for further investigation. Quite often, occupation authorities stated that victims and witnesses should give more comprehensive testimonies and more accurate descriptions of the suspected perpetrators, who should be easy to identify due to their uniform and military insignia.¹⁶⁶ As Sarah Kovner has argued on the basis of statistics compiled in 1950 by the Far East Command (FEC), throughout the occupation period a discrepancy existed between cases of rape reported and cases investigated and put to trial. Apparently, 422 servicemen were arrested on rape charges between 1947 and 1949, but only 104 were court-martialed, and only 53 were actually convicted.¹⁶⁷ SCAP also responded to newspaper articles that addressed sexual assaults and other crimes against Japanese civilians committed by occupation personnel. On September 19, 1945, SCAP released an often-criticized press code, which prohibited among other things criticizing SCAP as well as its policies and personnel. Under the press code’s censorship guidelines, reports on harassments, assaults, and other crimes committed by American soldiers and sailors were deemed direct critiques of the occupation and the occupiers, and their publication was therefore prohibited.¹⁶⁸ Both strategies, then, first, that of suspending or even declining to conduct investigations due to an alleged lack of information, and second, that of releasing the press code to censor news reports on servicemen’s crimes, were significant attempts by the occupation regime to officially silence sexual violence in early occupied Japan.

Preventive Measures: Police and Civilian Efforts and Agency

The Japanese police were in an ambivalent position in postsurrender Japan. As an integral institution of Japan’s defeated imperial state, the police had lost much of their sovereignty as the former legitimate agent of the state’s monopoly on physical force. The Japanese police had no right to intervene in or even investigate crimes committed by members of the occupation regime. In particular, crimes committed within the premises of the occupation army’s bases, such as black marketeering with U.S. army supplies, but also assaults on Japanese civilians working for the occupiers as translators, typists, caretakers, and cooks, were totally unascertainable by Japanese police officers. In the early days and weeks of the occupation period, much of the police work concerning the occupiers was thus limited to paperwork such as gathering information, securing evidence, and filing reports. Nevertheless, the police were still obligated to enforce Japanese law and maintain order among Japanese citizens. The Home Ministry directly ordered all police units to endure defeat by memorizing Emperor Hirohito’s call for a “grand peace for all the generations to come” (bansei ni taihei o hirakamu) in his radio broadcast of August 15. They were further ordered to maintain “pride” (kinji) in their work as representatives of the Japanese people and to embody additional values such as “open-heartedness” (kyoshin), “kindly, cordial manner” (konsetsu), and “speedy management” (jinsoku shori).169 Hence, during the first encounter of the early occupation period, a tense and uneven space in which to maneuver emerged for the Japanese police, who had to engage with Japanese civilians on the one hand, and with servicemen of the occupation army on the other.

One of the police’s efforts to maintain public order without interfering with the occupiers was to control red-light districts along police guidelines developed in imperial Japan. This encompassed all brothels and recreational facilities deliberately erected for the occupiers, and some police units made no distinctions as to whether the facilities were managed privately or semiprivately, as was the case with RAA establishments. In Yokohama, for instance, the local police had much trouble in maintaining public order in and around the brothel Goraku-sō, which had in fact been directly organized by the police. The facility was overcrowded, with thousands of servicemen often fighting among themselves over what were still too few sex workers at the brothel. Drunkenness in particular appears to have facilitated recurring brawls on Goraku-sō’s premises as well as riots in the neighborhood. The Kanagawa Prefectural Police Department thus decided to shut down the Goraku-sō due to its mass of customers, arguing that the police could not control the situation and were unable to guarantee public safety.170 A comparison to other brothels like the RAA-run Komachien in Ōmori, which was as popular as the Goraku-sō but gave rise to fewer fights and less unrest in the surrounding neighborhood, suggests that the police’s interest in maintaining public safety was focused only on the quarrels outside the brothel, and that the police mostly ignored instances of harassment and sexual assault against lower-class sex workers within the servicemen-centered entertainment facilities.¹⁷¹

Following this logic, the police made some efforts to maintain public morality and to control the finances of the privately and RAA-managed prostitution businesses. In a memorandum dated October 3, 1945, for instance, the director of the Section for Economic Crime (keizai keisatsu) addressed all subdivisions of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department on his section’s concerns about the threat to public morality resulting from illegal recruitment of women for sex work. The critique referred mainly to the vague recruitment ads of the RAA, which did not clearly state the exact type of the advertised jobs. Labor brokers who recruited young women in the countryside for brothels in the cities were criticized in particular for being potentially ruthless. In addition, the Section for Economic Crime attached a form sheet entitled “shinchūgun yūkyō ryōkin seikyūsho” to the memorandum, which was meant to be an income receipt for sexual services. The section’s idea was to make it compulsory for brothel owners and sex workers to declare their name and address, as well as exact date, number of customers, and hours and rates of service. On the one hand, the receipt was meant primarily as a labor and tax certificate. On the other hand, the data gained through the service declaration enabled the police to obtain more detailed information on the prostitution business and insights into specific brothels.¹⁷²

In stark contrast to the Kanagawa police, the Section for Public Morals (fūki kakari) of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department positively evaluated the presence of the occupation army’s servicemen, claiming they were no potential threat and would not endanger public security. In a memorandum to the Home Ministry, the Section for Public Morals reported that entertainment facilities were experiencing increasing numbers of customers, who were described rather euphemistically as “revelers” (yūkyōsha). Although the increase of such “revelers” might result in possible incidents of petty crime, such as theft of kimonos or money from the brothel’s cashier, the authors of the memorandum did not speak of an overall negative effect on the general public. Rather, the authors believed, all people working in entertainment facilities should watch out and be a bit more careful, which would help to avoid minor incidents. What is distinct in this report is the authors’ emphasis on cooperation between local police units and the U.S. military police. Together they had started patrolling red-light districts and monitoring the brothels Mukōjima-settaijo, Mukōjima-terashima, and Terashima-ianjo in Mukōjima and Honjo, Sumida Ward, the Komachien, the Rakuraku-ianjo, and the area around the Ōmori-kaigan in Ōmori and Ōi districts, the Kashizashiki-settaijo in Samezu, Shinagawa Ward, and the Hakusan-settaijo in Sasugaya, Koishikawa Ward. According to the Section for Public Morals, Japanese police officers also collaboratively engaged in public health inspections. Those mentioned in this particular report were conducted on September 20, 1945 due to worries (shinpai) of a U.S. military surgeon about widespread “virus contamination” (byōdoku osen). Apparently, of forty-two diagnosed sex workers—the report’s authors call them settaifu—six were found to have syphilis.173

According to the terminology and the phrasing of the above-cited report, the Section for Public Morals’ authors seemed convinced that the Japanese police were capable of successfully controlling postsurrender Japan’s entertainment facilities. Moreover, certain expressions and activities mentioned in the report underscore the police’s long history of responsibility for monitoring red-light districts. The labels yūkyōsha and settaifu were most likely nostalgic references to clients and “welcoming” or servicing women in the old pleasure quarters (yūkaku) of the Tokogawa period; and health inspections of brothels and sex workers had been among the duties of some police since the early Meiji period.¹⁷⁴ However, although the report evinces a certain pride and self-assurance among police officers in their work, it still cannot hide the extent to which the Japanese police were dependent on the occupiers’ military police when it came to the problem of fully supervising the brothel business that had been set up for the occupiers in immediate postwar Japan. And as much as the report euphemistically emphasized the cooperation between Japanese police units and the U.S. military police, it misconceived the desperate position of the Japanese police, who could not interfere autonomously in quarrels among servicemen or between occupiers and occupied. Usually, crimes committed by members of the occupation forces could only be stopped and investigated by Japanese police officers with the help of the U.S. military police. Of course, Japanese police officers often took the situation into their own hands, but they nevertheless had to call the local U.S. military police for help. In a CLO-report from September 10, 1945, for example, it was reported that on the previous day: “On September 9, around 5:25 p.m. two American soldiers broke into the house of [a male], Yokosuka City and attempted to rape his 48-year-old wife, after giving her a handkerchief. When her husband appeared from the inner room in response to her call for help, one of the American soldiers struck him with a fist. They decamped without accomplishing their object. On receiving report from policemen stationed near the scene of the incident, the Foreign office lost no time in communicating the matter to the U.S. Gendarmerie, which immediately arrested the American soldiers.”175

And several days later in the Yokohama area, local Japanese police officers also had to rely on the nearby U.S. military police: “[A] 55 year old mother, was walking [in] Totsukamachi, Totsuka Ward at about 9:40 p.m. September 14 together with her two daughters, . . . 26 years old, and . . . 23 years old. They were stopped by four American troops at the point of pistols. The Americans took away the two daughters. The Totsuka Police, upon receipt of the report of the kidnapping by the mother, immediately sent a message to Sub-Lieutenant Witson, American M.P., and started to search for the kidnapped girls. They were found taking refuge in a nearby civilian house and escaped raping.”¹⁷⁶

Many of the CLO’s reports also reveal that it was not only the crimes of servicemen against Japanese civilians that caused considerable trouble for the police, but also direct attacks on Japanese police officers, who were just as helpless against servicemen’s assaults. Police officers’ swords in particular appear to have been highly coveted trophies for American soldiers and sailors. Several incidents were mentioned in a CLO report from September 19, 1945: “About 11 am, September 4th, 3 American soldiers came to the Yoshikura police station of the Yokosuka police bureau, and robbed on-duty policeman Kawashima of his saber.” Later that day, “About 11 pm, September 5th, 2 policemen guarding the International Friendship Association Building, Yamato-cho, Naka-ku, Yokohama, . . . Haneate and Okuno by name, were robbed of their sabers by 6 American soldiers.” Sometimes, as an incident on the same day shows, servicemen even openly ridiculed and undermined Japanese police officers’ authority: “About 9:30 am September 5th, one American officer with 3 negro soldiers came to the garage of the Ooka Police bureau, located at 1, 184, Ooka-machi, Minami-ku, Yokohama, and seized a Chevrolet, No. 186 and dragged it back [with] their car (No. 1140). In committing this action, they handed a piece of paper to Police Saiki, on which was written ‘Dollar’.”177 Other reports reveal much more violent assaults on Japanese police officers. On November 22, for instance, Fukumoto Isao, a police officer in Yokosuka, was attacked while on patrol.

While he was patrolling on duty in the vicinity of [Choja-machi, Kaga-cho, Yokosuka], Mr. Fukumoto found two coloured soldiers approaching and accosted them with ‘halloo’. But when he was going to pass by, they ordered him to halt, blocked his way and demanded his sword. On his refusal, however, the one who stood in front of him suddenly drew out his knife and stabbed him into the breast. As he was unable to resist any more, he handed over his sword to them. Thereupon they demanded money [of him], but when he refused, the other, standing behind, gave him a cut with the stolen sword and both fled. [Fukumoto] died at 5.30 p.m. the following day.¹⁷⁸

Two days later, on November 24, also in Yokosuka, “two American soldiers demanded money” of the police officer K. Shigeru. “When he refused, they fired their revolvers and injured him in the abdomen. He was immediately carried to a hospital in the neighborhood and given medical treatment but died at 9 p.m. the following day.”¹⁷⁹

The powerlessness of Japanese police officers vis-à-vis the occupiers manifested itself especially in their limited authority to directly intervene or investigate crimes committed by servicemen. The only opportunities seemed to be to secure evidence and to record testimonies of victims and witnesses. Japanese police officers were only allowed to assist the U.S. military police personnel in law enforcement against occupation personnel. However, as the above-cited CLO reports indicate, crimes such as rape and other assaults were usually only properly investigated and prosecuted if the perpetrator was caught in the act.¹⁸⁰ Japanese police officers therefore shared the helplessness of the Japanese population in general, and not even bearing arms prevented them from being attacked. The balance of power between Japanese police and civilians, however, hardly changed. As Christopher Aldous has noted, the Japanese population in the postwar period was still confronted with the police’s interference in every aspect of daily life, just as it had been in the wartime and prewar period. This included neighborhood surveillance, random identification checks, and personal surveys on households, which were justified as crime investigation and prevention measures.¹⁸¹ Thus, despite the Japanese police’s loss of authority in early occupied Japan, the police were still keen on maintaining control over the Japanese population. Although they had no power over the occupiers and could only intervene when assisting the occupiers’ military police, the Japanese police continued to enforce Japanese law among Japanese citizens and to act as far as possible according to established patterns of police work in patrolling neighborhoods, checking communities, and inspecting brothels.

In addition to filing reports and attempting to maintain public order, Japan’s authorities also tried to actively involve Japanese civilians in avoiding and preventing sexual assaults against Japanese women. As stated above, the Home Ministry asked Japanese citizens to report any crimes at local police stations, and newspapers circulated articles educating the public about U.S. military insignia in order to identify perpetrators. In the memorandum “Concerning the documentation of and counter-measures against illegal acts by American soldiers,” the Home Ministry’s Peace Preservation Section released further guidelines meant to be disseminated by police among the Japanese populace in order to prevent crimes and assaults. According to the memorandum, the ministry recommended that Japanese women always be accompanied by a man, and that they should remain at home if at all possible. The memo’s recommendations also echoed newspaper articles from late August 1945, which had advised Japanese women and children not to go out alone and to refrain from wearing “licentious clothes.”182 There was even a discussion about whether to prohibit women and children from going outside the house at night altogether. Such paternalism also extended to dress codes, and the ministry addressed neighborhood associations to advise their female residents to take special precautions by wearing their wartime work dresses, called monpe, over several layers of underwear to protect against sexual assaults and to disguise their female figures. Drawing on wartime propaganda, the ministry called for strong mutual assistance among community members and for the spiritual strengthening of women. Women were told to call out loudly for help in case of emergency and to assemble nearby residents to act in “cooperative defense” (kyōdō bōei) against offenders. In order to do so, the memo’s authors argued, women in particular would need to receive adequate “spiritual education” (seishin kyōiku) to be prepared for sexual assaults. Calling for help and gathering in defensive crowds, however, did not cover all aspects necessary for women’s spiritual strength. Women were furthermore asked to not be passive in the event of a sexual assault, but to protest and resist rape as strongly and violently as possible “to protect female chastity” (teisō o mamoru). After a sexual assault, women should also have the courage to report it to the police so that Japan’s authorities could forward the information to the occupiers for further investigation.183

It is impossible to prove whether Japanese civilians actually behaved according to the Home Ministry’s guidelines or whether the guidelines were even disseminated publicly. Nevertheless, some of the ministry’s suggested modes of behavior surfaced in CLO reports on sexual assaults. The recommendation for rape victims to scream and call for help, for instance, helped three women in Yokohama to escape being raped. According to a report, “At about 11 p.m. on September 13, one American negro troop invaded the home of [a female in] Nishi Ward. The negro troop tried to rape her by pushing her throat, but fled away when she screamed loudly.”¹⁸⁴ On the same day, just a few blocks away, it is reported that “Two American negro troops invaded the house of [a female] Nishi Ward, at about 11:40 p.m. September 13. They attempted to rape [her] and her son’s wife, . . . but fled away when the two screamed loudly.”¹⁸⁵ The ministry’s gender-biased assertion that the presence of males would limit sexual assaults against women, however, usually misjudged the situation and did not help the victims. On many occasions, husbands and other male relatives or friends who were present were chained, hit, or held at gunpoint while the wife, daughter, or sister was kidnapped, raped, or otherwise assaulted. In Yokohama on September 4, for example, a report stated, “4 American soldiers went into the house of . . . a laborer, and forced his wife, . . . at gunpoint to come outside with them, and were about to kidnap her in the Datsun in which they came, but she managed to escape by running away from them.”¹⁸⁶ Similarly, on the same day on Miura Peninsula close to Yokosuka, it is said that “American soldiers, riding in a motor car, stopped at the Nagai Village, Mura-gun to force [a male] (age 51, . . . Yokosuka) and his [female] companion, . . . (age 27 or 8) into the car. They soon discarded the man and kidnapped the girl.”¹⁸⁷

According to a number of reports filed by the CLO, in some instances Japanese civilians reacted against sexual assaults as recommended by the Home Ministry. This is not to say that they were in fact implementing the ministry’s guidelines. Rather, the reported actions of Japanese civilians are historical artifacts of the agency of sexually targeted women, relatives, friends, neighborhood associates, and Japanese police officers, who all left traces in the CLO reports of their practices in preventing, dodging, and resisting sexual assaults. Screaming and running away were the most common practices, but other strategies were developed that sometimes proved just as effective in preventing being raped. In a report from Yokohama, for instance, it was stated:

On September 15, about 9:30 p.m., two American soldiers entered into the home of [a female in] Fujisawa City. While the father entertained the American soldiers, her mother fled outside. [She] was taking a bath and quickly concealed herself with the lid of the bath and so was not discovered. Again on September 16, about 1:30 a.m., two American soldiers forced their way into her home. [She] and her mother who were sleeping inside a mosquito-net were discovered when the pocket flashlight of an American soldier was flashed on them. The mother fled outside through the front door but [her daughter] attempting to escape through the window was captured by three American soldiers posted at the back door. [She] yelled out and she was hit in the face. The American soldiers attempting to rape her ripped of her clothes. But they were frustrated in their attempt as police officers and men who were informed by the mother came running toward the house. The American soldiers escaped.188

In the same report, it was noted that two days later, “During the absence of [a male in] Kooza-gun, on September 17, an American soldier under the pretense that he desired a Japanese flag, approached the Japanese home and seeing that not a man was around tried to force himself upon the wife, . . . 34 years old. However, she cried out ‘The MP is coming,’ which scared the American soldier away.”¹⁸⁹

In the first case, the collective help of police officers and other men in the neighborhood, who had been informed by the escaped mother, appears to have “frustrated” and chased off the group of American servicemen. In the second case, the rapist was “scared away” by the woman’s shouting that the military police would come. Both cases highlight the importance of what Shani D’Cruze has called the “informal strategies” employed by rape victims to gain support from friends, family members, or neighbors, which often bypassed law enforcement and legal institutions such as police and courts.¹⁹⁰ However, in the case of early occupied Japan, it was the interplay of victims, relatives, neighbors, and official agents of the Japanese state and the American military police that could help to prevent sexual assaults. Although it is important to note that the physical or imaginative presence of the occupation authorities—embodied in this case by the military police—was as significant for the prevention and investigation of sexual assaults as it was for any other crimes committed by the occupation personnel, the interventions by Japanese police officers, the recommendations envisioned by the Home Ministry, and the strategies developed and exercised by Japanese civilians nevertheless have to be acknowledged as sometimes effective measures to prevent sexual assaults.

• • •

The many incidents of rape and other sexual or nonsexual violent assaults in early occupied Japan occurred within a pervasive culture of militarized masculinity. Patriarchal power relations prevalent in imperial Japan enabled the conceptualization and organization of a “female floodwall” designating lower-class sex workers to protect “respectable” Japanese women from the invading foreign soldiers. However, U.S. and other Allied servicemen themselves treated all Japanese women as members of the defeated enemy. Allied servicemen usually perceived Japanese women as sexualized “Orientals” and as sexually available, and they often coerced women by force or threat thereof to have sex. Japan’s authorities attempted to limit sexual assaults and other crimes committed by occupation personnel by filing reports of incidents with the occupation regime and attempting to regulate sex work as it had been regulated in imperial Japan’s licensed prostitution system—albeit without much success. The occupiers’ response was usually to require more information from Japan’s authorities in order to start further investigation of crimes and accused suspects, which—especially considering the press code that prohibited the publication of occupiers’ crimes and trespasses—reads as a systematic strategy to silence sexual violence. And the servicemen themselves also seem to have cultivated a culture of silencing, with hardly any denunciation among soldiers.191 This is evident in the Nogeyama Park incident, in which some servicemen must have known of the gang-rape of Miss Y, despite not being involved themselves. Although they cared for the victim, they apparently chose not to report the incident to their superiors.¹⁹²

At first glance, then, the sexual encounters between occupiers and occupied appear to fit the pattern of a clear dichotomy in which the occupation army’s servicemen were the perpetrators and Japanese women were the victims of sexual violence, while Japan’s authorities looked on as rather helpless spectators. Of course, the perpetrators of the offenses in all documented cases were unquestionably male. However, it would be oversimplified to conclude that only the occupiers were perpetrators and that the occupied were only victims. An incident in Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture, where the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF) established their occupation headquarters, gives the subsequently recorded testimony of a rape victim and exemplifies the complicity of both Allied and Japanese men in sexual violence in early occupied Japan. A group of young women mobilized during the war in the Women’s Youth Corps (joshi seinendan) had worked at an armament factory and became war orphans due to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. They were thus staying at the factory’s dormitory. On September 14, a Japanese male in a British army truck came by the factory and identified himself as Yoneyama Genjirō, the executive secretary of the Association for the Maintenance of Public Order in the Chūgoku Region assigned by the Home Ministry (naimushō shitei/chianijikai chūgoko chihō kanji). After handing food and cigarettes from British army supplies to the factory manager, he told nine of the women that he had come all the way from Osaka to seek the help of “ideal Japanese women” (yamato nadeshiko to han) to “protect the chastity of Japanese women from the evil influence of the occupation army” (nihon no fujin no misao o shinchūgun no mashu o mamori), a task he claimed to be of “divine will” (shini). Yoneyama put the scared women into the truck and brought them after a long ride to two different places where they were gang-raped each time by a different group of foreign soldiers. Subsequently, a Canadian medical officer examined the women for venereal disease before Yoneyama brought them to a comfort facility (ianjo).193

Male dominance, however, did not stop at the immediate physical violence of harassing, assaulting, raping, and pimping women. Although nothing exceeds the pain and suffering experienced by victims of sexual violence, the subsequent instrumentalization of the victims’ experiences by Japan’s authorities is nonetheless also worth noting for what it tells us about the wide range of masculine power relations. Based on the sources at hand, which are predominantly police and CLO reports, it is conspicuous that victims of sexual violence were often overpowered twice.¹⁹⁴ Japan’s authorities argued that it was be imperative for women to report sexual assaults, and even advised special “spiritual education” to strengthen women for testifying. They thus forced women to express their experience of sexual violence in a rather public setting. In addition, women could only articulate themselves in male-dominated channels of communication, such as police reports and ministry memoranda. Female victims of sexual violence in early occupied Japan therefore often experienced what Gayatri Spivak has called “epistemic violence,”¹⁹⁵ because male-dominated possibilities to communicate reduced the individual, tragic, and painful experience of sexual violence to male interest, and the women were not able to speak on their own terms. Male advocacy embedded rape and other assaults against Japanese women into a narrative of the violation of Japan’s women by the raging occupiers, a narrative dominated by a male prerogative on what sexual violence is and how it can be uttered. In the trope of the violated Japanese woman, male Japanese police officers, bureaucrats and politicians deliberately exploited the tragedies of rape victims to position themselves vis-à-vis the occupiers. It helped Japan’s male authorities to legitimate the existence of the “female floodwall,” and sometimes they even proclaimed that the number of brothels and sex workers would not be sufficient to protect all Japanese women. Simultaneously, it aided their attempts to resist or undermine the occupiers’ very concepts of modernity and democracy by pointing out the trespasses of occupation personnel. This, ultimately, allowed Japanese men, and in particular male agents of the Japanese state, to satisfy their own masculine, nationalistic desires in immediate postwar Japan. The reporting of rape substantiated the discourse that had been in development since defeat on a new understanding of Japan and Japanese belonging. The trope of the vulnerable, yet nationally significant body of the Japanese woman at risk of being violated by the occupiers had already been fictionalized and translated into the conceptualization and organization of prostitution to comfort the occupiers. Starting with the first sexual encounter, the same trope would also become ubiquitous in official statistics and memoranda as alleged evidence of the numerous cases of sexual violence the occupation servicemen committed against the Japanese people. In this way, the trope also fostered Japan’s postsurrender nationalist narrative of belonging.