2

Security

Policing Prostitution and Venereal Disease in
Occupied Japan

UNLICENSED PROSTITUTION: CRIMINALIZING SEX
WORKERS AND VENEREAL DISEASE

On May 10, 1946, journalist and correspondent of the Chicago Sun Mark Gayn escorted Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine of the provost marshal’s office, formerly the police commissioner of the New York Police Department, on an inspection tour of the International Palace. According to Gayn, the International Palace, housed in a former munitions plant in Funabashi at the eastern outskirts of Tokyo, was “the world’s largest brothel.” From the provost marshal’s office in central Tokyo, Gayn reported, “we drove southeast, until we could see, rising out of the paddies, a series of two-story buildings with a sign in English, ‘Off Limits—VD.’ As we came closer, we saw smaller VD signs, dabbed in red paint on the fence and gate.” After arriving at the International Palace, the inspection tour was greeted by the brothel’s manager, who showed them around the premises. “Our first stop was at the infirmary,” Gayn wrote, which “was a huge, bare room, lined with tatami (straw mats). There were about a dozen girls lying on the floor, under thick comforters. Nearly all the girls hid their faces when we entered.” The remaining rooms were apparently equally depressing: in the “ballroom . . . about a hundred girls, most of them in ugly Occidental gowns—with nothing underneath—danced with each other,” and the girls’ room consisted of “fifty cubicles to a building, each tiny room separated by a low partition, and a thin curtain for a door.” The manager only remarked, “They [the girls] are very gay, eh? . . . But inside are very sad. Very lonely. No GI friends come two, three weeks.” For Gayn it was nevertheless “a dreary place,” and “the odor was so sickening” that he had to flee the building. But before leaving the International Palace, Gayn took the chance to interview some of the sex workers. Upon questioning, they complained about their economic hardships due to their rising debts to the brothel’s management, which sold clothing, cosmetics, and food in the brothel’s own store. But they were not so much angry with the management as—echoing the manager’s comment—upset about the lack of customers and thus income. Formerly, they would have been serving an average of fifteen GIs daily. As a certain Miss Akiko Kato stated, “We were doing well for four months, making friends with the GIs and helping to establish firm cultural relations between Japan and the United States. Then, last month, the Army barred the place to the GIs. Since then only eight or ten GIs come in daily, on the sly.” Gayn and his interpreter asked the girls “if they had heard of the MacArthur directive which banned contractual prostitution. They had not.”1

Gayn’s impressions point to the changes and dynamics that occupied Japan’s sex work and entertainment business experienced as a result of the interventions made by the legislative and executive branches of the occupiers’ administration. Sarah Kovner has argued that the restrictions imposed on sex work resulted in economic limitations that impacted sex workers’ livelihood.² In this chapter, I offer additional interpretations, and by focusing mainly on the regulators’ perspectives, highlight certain structural changes in occupation Japan’s sex work. Though many in the U.S. occupying forces believed that prostitution and other forms of sexual encounters between U.S. servicemen and Japanese women were necessary, since they provided American soldiers and sailors an outlet for sexual satisfaction, the occupation regime perceived prostitution as disturbing and destabilizing. Thus, a deep ambivalence about the sexual relations between American servicemen and Japanese women is in evidence throughout the occupation period.³ Red-light districts, entertainment areas, and brothels were not only places of pleasure for servicemen, but also discredited as spaces of (venereal) disease and public disorder due to bar fights between occupiers and occupied, black market activity, rowdy rivalries between gangs, pimps, and prostitutes, and violent tensions among the servicemen themselves. First and foremost the Military Police (MP) with its Provost Marshal was in charge of maintaining public order, monitoring peaceful encounters between the occupiers and occupied outside military bases, and preventing civil and military unrest. As Richard R. Clawson, unit historian of the 720th Military Police Battalion stationed in Tokyo, put it in a somewhat ironic remark, “the activities of the company as a whole [were] great toward the occupation of Japan. The duties were to patrol and guard the Metropolis of Tokyo which includes such important establishments as the Provost Marshal Office, GHQ, Imperial Hotel and all the clubs and cabarets in that particular area.”4 The MPs thus not only protected military installations and patrolled public spaces; they were also particularly responsible for keeping an eye on the occupation servicemen’s recreational facilities. That included investigating crimes, mediating disputes, and conducting raids of red-light districts, often in cooperation with Japanese local police units.

In addition to such classic military police work, MPs were also charged with preventing the spread of venereal disease by checking up on brothels, enforcing laws of public hygiene, and repressing prostitution. This line of duty certainly predated the occupation period, and MPs had already been heavily involved in the regulation of sex work at various times and places, and were therefore able to adapt their regulatory knowledge to the conditions in occupied Japan. During World War II, when the U.S. military debated the need for female sexuality and commercial sex to sustain the war effort within theaters of war and at the home front, sexualized entertainment, which could include prostitution, was often tolerated in the proximity of military camps despite being illegal.⁵ Especially after the passage of the May Act in 1941, the military police’s jurisdiction was expanded, permitting MPs to intervene in recreational facilities close to military installations.⁶ The MPs therefore played a central role in maintaining a degree of control through their efforts to minimize tensions between servicemen and civilians. Such efforts included patrolling red-light districts, trying to prevent servicemen from trespassing off-limit regulations, and enforcing hygienic standards within bars, clubs, and brothels, among both sex workers and servicemen.⁷ In doing so, the MPs established an intimidating aura, and their presence on the streets and within recreational facilities was perceived as threatening to servicemen and civilians alike. The MPs in occupied Japan also tried to maintain a rigid net of police control through strong visibility, and their “stern demeanors, sidearms and billy clubs,” to quote Takemae Eiji, were “an intimidating reminder of Occupation authority.”⁸

This chapter explores a variety of legal debates and law enforcement practices concerning sex work, venereal disease, and intimate relationships between occupation forces servicemen and women of occupied Japan. It addresses the Supreme Commander of Allied Power (SCAP)’s Legal Section and law divisions, which were established to give legal advice to SCAP and monitor the observance of civil rights in the conduct of occupation policy, and were therefore heavily involved in providing a legal basis for the regulation of prostitution and venereal disease during the occupation period.9 The chapter also looks at the occupation army’s much vaunted military police work, such as their investigations of crimes around red-light districts, inspections of brothels and other entertainment facilities, off-limit regulation, and raids and roundups of venereal disease suspects. On many occasions, the military police’s strategies had to be negotiated and coordinated with the Japanese police force. A focus on police work thus offers possibilities for taking a closer look at the agency of both occupiers and occupied in the policing of prostitution as well as in the sexual and intimate encounters of the occupation period. First, it shows that the occupiers were not a homogenous group of almighty rulers in occupied Japan. Despite the superior attitude of some branches and individuals who considered themselves victorious conquerors and behaved quite similarly to white supremacists in colonial settings, they were nevertheless bound by law. Ambiguous debates on jurisdictions among occupation regime elites highlight the difficulties the occupiers faced in the control of prostitution, venereal disease, and solicitation between occupation servicemen and occupied civilians in general. Yet, laws and ordinances were often flouted by ordinary servicemen as well as noncommissioned officers, and military commanders could ignore ordinances and decide either not to enforce laws rigorously, or else to enforce laws even more rigidly within their particular command than SCAP expected. Second, the occupied themselves were not passive subjects of occupation policy and its enforcement. On the contrary, as assistants and translators, they were heavily involved in transmitting and implementing the regulation of prostitution and sexuality and were, to a certain extent, also responsible for the success or failure of the occupiers’ interventions, the course of which they were often able to alter. Hence, third, a focus on (military) police work within the red-light and entertainment districts points out the limits of the occupation regime’s authority to control the behavior of Japanese civilians as well as its own servicemen, and moreover calls attention to the often neglected disharmonious, tense, and sometimes overtly violent encounters between and among occupiers and occupied. These encounters, which in many cases were extremely racialized, are another reminder of the simultaneity of male complicity and male rivalry in the project to sanitize sex during the occupation period. The chapter’s analysis of debates about laws and law enforcement targeting prostitution and venereal disease thus follows the plea of Alf Lüdtke that ruling—as well as being ruled—is a social practice that is not determined by and cannot exhaustively be explained by a legal or ideological structure.10 Indeed, rulers are exposed to quarrels and inconsistencies among their own ranks, and, as has been shown for the policing of prostitution in other contexts, there was no mono-causal flow of existing laws to their enforcement in occupied Japan, either. Regulations bear the possibility of interpretation, and it is therefore necessary to take a close look at how they were interpreted by the historical agents themselves.¹¹

Ambiguous Justice: Legal Loopholes and the
Criminalization of Sex Workers

The exact legal status of sex work and the jurisdiction of executive agencies to control or even repress prostitution in occupied Japan remained unclear until the end of the occupation period and was a matter of much debate among different sections of the occupation administration. As discussed in the previous chapter, the Japanese government, bureaucracy, and police initiated a prostitution scheme to comfort the occupiers, which was legally based on imperial Japan’s licensed prostitution system. The state-supported, even semi-governmental Rest and Recreation Association (RAA) and the exclusively private-run prostitution businesses thus operated within the boundaries of Japanese law, though the law did prohibit brutal recruitment practices. Although the occupiers with their supreme commander had, under the Instrument of Surrender signed on September 2, 1945, every legal authority to make changes to Japanese policy and conduct or to bypass Japanese legislation with direct ordinances (abbreviated as SCAPIN),¹² Japanese prostitution laws remained more or less untouched for the initial months of the occupation period. One such direct ordinance to the Japanese government titled “Control of Venereal Disease” from October 16, 1945, even required Japan’s authorities to rigidly enforce all Japanese laws on the prevention of infectious and venereal disease, and, if necessary, to reenact inoperative ordinances such as the Law for the Prevention of Venereal Diseases (Home Department Ordinance No. 44, 1900).¹³

In January 1946, however, in the fourth month of the occupation, the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP) ordered the prohibition of licensed prostitution. In the directive “Abolition of Licensed Prostitution” (SCAPIN-642) from January 21, 1946, it was argued that “The maintenance of licensed prostitution in Japan is in contravention of the ideals of democracy and inconsistent with the development of individual freedom throughout the nation.” The Japanese government was directed to “forthwith abrogate and annul all laws, ordinances and other enactments which directly or indirectly authorize or permit the existence of licensed prostitution in Japan, and to nullify all contracts and agreements which have for their object the binding or committing directly or indirectly of any women to the practice of prostitution.”14 The abolition of licensed prostitution itself was celebrated as a success of America’s democratic mission to liberate Japanese women from Japan’s male chauvinism, which was, according to the occupiers, intrinsic to Japan’s “feudalistic culture.”¹⁵ However, as Yoshimi Yoshiaki and Tanaka Yuki have argued, this decision to abolish licensed prostitution was motivated by the concern to limit the compromisingly high rates of venereal disease, which had taken on epidemic proportions among the occupation personnel.¹⁶ Nevertheless, the directive against licensed prostitution from 1946 did not prohibit prostitution as such, but rather banned sex trafficking and binding contracts between sex workers and brothel owners. As if in mockery of the occupiers’ zeal to abolish prostitution due to its allegedly undemocratic nature, commercial sex in fact flourished, and the number of sex workers increased after the ordinance’s promulgation. Unlicensed brothels, sex work in hotels (so-called “avec-hotels”), clubs, and bars, and also decentralized street prostitution spread beyond the geographical boundaries of Japan’s old pleasure quarters as well as those of the new recreational districts that had been designated by Japan’s authorities immediately after Japan’s defeat. The RAA was dissolved, although some formerly RAA-run brothels, like the International Palace, continued as private businesses. Additionally, many sex workers started selling their bodies publicly in entertainment and red-light districts, but also in parks, beneath railway underpasses, and near military camps.¹⁷ According to some estimates, in Tokyo alone several thousand sex workers catered to predominantly American servicemen. In a statistical inquiry conducted by or on behalf of the Women’s Section of the Ministry of Labor in 1953, about 100,000 sex workers were in business all over Japan during the occupation period, although opponents of prostitution claimed much higher numbers.¹⁸

Such immense growth of unlicensed sex work, particularly in the form of street prostitution, was a new social phenomenon in Japan, and most certainly also the first time the U.S. military faced such high numbers of “streetwalkers” in an overseas theater, as the sex workers were usually labeled in the military police records. From the occupiers’ perspective, the spatial dispersion of sex workers after the abolition of licensed quarters caused many problems, and the military police—as well as other sections of the occupation regime—was mandated to enforce and develop strategies to “contain” sex workers, discipline U.S. servicemen, and limit the spread of venereal disease. In doing so, as Mire Koikari has rightly pointed out, the occupiers, and in particular the MPs as the occupiers’ main law enforcement branch, usually approached the issue by criminalizing sex workers.19 Of course, sex work itself was not illegal, but existed within a certain gray area of the law. Japanese politicians did, however, debate a general, nationwide abolition of prostitution. In July 1948, the Bill for Punishment of Prostitution and Related Activities (baishuntō shobatsu hōan) was presented in the Japanese Diet. It attempted to make the exchange of sex for money illegal and to stipulate a penalty for both sex workers (shōfu) and clients throughout Japan. The occupiers’ Legal Section approved the bill’s draft before it was released and offered guidance for Japanese legislators during the discussion in the Diet. The bill did not pass the last session of parliament, however. As Sarah Kovner has pointed out, an agreement could not be reached due to various interest groups’ support of the sex industry, and although most female Diet members voted for the bill, some still argued, to quote Kovner, “that the law would be ineffective or would unfairly victimize sex workers.”²⁰

Some sections of the occupation regime, as well as Horace Robertson, commander in chief of the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF), expressed their discomfort with the failed bill and tried to push SCAP to overrule the legislature’s decision and impose an ordinance for the prohibition of prostitution and solicitation between occupiers and occupied.²¹ SCAP’s Legal Section, however, countered by stating that although SCAP had the power to intervene and bypass the Diet by releasing an ordinance against prostitution, it could not recommend doing so. According to the Legal Section, such an undertaking “would impose a new moral standard upon the Japanese and, moreover, an incongruously limited moral standard, since it proposes to make solicitation and the provision of premises for prostitution criminal only when occupation force personnel are involved.” Furthermore, using SCAP to abolish prostitution would constitute “a patent confession of inability on the part of the occupation force authorities to control our own personnel, since it resorts, by measures foreign to accepted domestic standards of the inhabitants, to force the authorities and people of the occupied nation to aid in curing the shortcomings of the occupying forces.” This was definitely not meant as a promulgation of multicultural understanding, but rather expressed the occupiers’ fear of losing their reputation. Because, as the Legal Section report continued, “It would appear more becoming to the dignity of the occupation authorities to exact more vigorous enforcement of discipline among occupation personnel than to ‘pass the buck’ by making the Japanese punish themselves to accomplish that end.” Direct involvement in an anti-prostitution law was thus “considered too delicate for a proclamation by SCAP,” and “would seem neither just nor fair to transfer solution of the problem to the Japanese Government.”22 The Legal Section’s explication legitimated itself by reference to the values of dignity, justice, and fairness, values that were firmly embedded in the occupiers’ missionary narrative about teaching the occupied the fundamental values of functioning democracy. In its rather convoluted officialese, the Legal Section argued:

Since the adoption of the new Japanese constitution and the inauguration of democratic processes of government, this headquarters, in issuing direct orders on behalf of the Supreme Commander to the Japanese government, has confined itself to matters susceptible of control by regulations or ordinances and has assiduously avoided the impairment of the democratic machinery which is obviously inherent in and consequent from a command that the Diet enact legislation. In the present case the objective sought cannot be accomplished merely by regulation, since it is proposed to create new offenses and not merely to provide new or additional controls for the prevention of activities already denounced as offenses. Accordingly, if it is desired to issue a new order to the Japanese government to attain the end in view, it will be necessary to direct enactment of legislation.²³

Members of the Government Section shared the Legal Section’s stance. Alfred C. Oppler, a legal officer who had worked in the Government Section and later served as chief of the Legal Section’s Legislation and Justice Division, had noted in his diary in August 1946 that he objected to the idea of prohibiting sex work in general, since he “did not believe that the threat of punishment would stop or reduce prostitution, which would only go underground.” He agreed with members of the Legal Section that such an undertaking “may even expose us to some ridicule.” He even added, “I also felt that to impose puritan morality on this oriental nation was beyond the objectives of the Occupation,”²⁴ by which he reproduced the common orientalist prejudice that commercial sex has deep roots in Japanese cultural traditions supposedly marked by a high prevalence and transparency of sex.

Although the bill to abolish prostitution on a national level failed, several prefectures introduced anti-prostitution laws of their own. As Howard Meyers of the Legislation and Justice Division clarified in a correspondence to Jules Bassin, the head of the Law Division, according to the Local Autonomy Law enacted in 1947, local governments on the prefectural level were allowed to pass anti-prostitution laws despite the absence of national legislation. The prefectures Miyagi and Niigata, Meyers stressed, “have passed ordinances which forbid prostitution throughout those prefectures,” and the municipal government of Tokyo had also considered such an ordinance. “These facts,” Meyers summed up, “indicate that various Japanese legislative bodies are concerned with the problem [of prostitution] with the view of extending anti-prostitution legislation to all persons, and not just limiting it to an anti-Occupation crime.”25 In Miyagi Prefecture, prostitution had been criminalized since 1948 to the extent that sex workers, clients, pimps and brothel owners could be fined between 1,000 and 20,000 yen, while the highest fines targeted those persons who employed and trafficked sex workers.²⁶ In fact, local regulation of prostitution was nothing new, and imperial Japan had a history of such diverse prostitution legislation on the prefectural level. As early as 1891, Gumma Prefecture had abolished licensed prostitution, bowing to pressure from nongovernmental groups that had formed a Prostitution Abolition League of considerable influence. Yet neither in Gumma at the turn of the century nor anywhere during the occupation period did prefectural abolition laws ever succeed in stamping out sex work completely. Instead, sex workers migrated to other prefectures where prostitution was still legal, or simply proceeded with their business under different titles, such as waitress (shakufu) or reception lady (settaifu), thereby dodging legal prescriptions.²⁷ After the abolition of licensed prostitution in postwar Japan, sex workers were often still referred to as settaifu, but also as “geisha girls,” dancers and waitresses working in cabarets and “special restaurants” (tokushu inshokuten).²⁸

In most places in occupied Japan, sex work itself was thus not illegal, but spreading venereal disease, which, according to the occupiers, inevitably went hand-in-hand with prostitution, was considered as a crime. In particular, the scenario of Japanese women infecting occupation servicemen was considered a danger to the security of the occupation forces—although servicemen were never accused of spreading venereal disease among the civilian population. Of course, Japanese laws going back to the prostitution license system, as well as most prostitution laws worldwide, were equally gender-biased to the extent that they usually made sex workers—and sometimes even all women—responsible for the spread of venereal infections.29 This logic, which occupiers and occupied shared, culminated in a new Venereal Disease Prevention Law promulgated in 1948, which defined venereal disease as including syphilis, gonorrhea, chancroid, and inguinal lymphogranuloma. The law prescribed that “Any person who in suffering from VD liable to infect others, acts so as to infect others with the disease by [sexual] intercourse, lactation or other intimate physical contact, shall be liable to penal servitude not exceeding 1 year or a fine not exceeding 5,000 yen.” Such “offenses” would still be open for discussion upon indictment. In the case of prostitution, however, the law offered no pardon for sex workers and stipulated that “any person who in suffering from VD liable to infect others, performs prostitution, shall be liable to penal servitude not exceeding 2 years or a fine not exceeding 10,000 yen.” Any person who provides assistance, solicitation or a place for the purpose of prostitution “with good knowledge of the presence of VD in the prostitute liable to infect others,” or even “without knowledge of the presence of VD by their own fault,” was, according to the law, accountable for up to “3 years of penal servitude or a fine not exceeding 20,000 yen.”³⁰ Hence, the Venereal Disease Prevention Law unequivocally deemed prostitution the primary source and cause of the spread of venereal disease, whereby prostitution was most commonly conceptualized and practiced along heteronormative patterns with female sex workers and male clients. Its text recapitulated the stigmatizing image of the diseased sex worker and of criminalized sex workers as potentially spreading venereal disease anytime and anywhere. Yet what is remarkable is that the act of prostitution remained legally undefined, providing a loophole to maintain commercial sex as such, but, as will be demonstrated later, also enabling law enforcement agencies to suppress prostitution by prosecuting sex workers. Most troublingly, under the Venereal Disease Prevention Law, any woman could be treated as a suspected sex worker, especially if found to be infected with VD.

In 1948, the Venereal Disease Prevention Law went into effect and was disseminated with the expectation of enforcement. Some local commanding officers, however, enforced their own interpretations of the law, much to the displeasure of SCAP’s Legal Section. In a memorandum to local Japanese authorities from December 6, 1948, Joseph May Swing, commanding general of the I Corps with its headquarters in Kyoto, ignored the Legal Section’s concerns about the occupation regime’s reputation and supplemented the venereal disease law with a paragraph declaring that “Any person who accosts a military member, in uniform, of the occupation forces to assist or to solicit prostitution, or who provides a place for prostitution to a military member of the occupation forces shall be deemed to have committed an act prejudicial to the security of the occupation and therefore triable by occupation corps.” Furthermore, Japanese authorities were ordered to establish venereal disease clinics, “arrange for frequent examination of all known prostitutes,” and “have infected prostitutes placed in hospitals until no longer contagious and thereafter have them report to proper authorities until cured.” Names, addresses and photographs of known prostitutes and their contacts were to be reported to the local provost marshal’s office, and “immediate inspections of houses of prostitutes which soldiers have been seen entering, and of houses which soldiers are seen entering with a prostitute” should be arranged. In such cases, the memorandum continued, “A military policeman will constitute a member of the inspecting party.” Finally, “Cause persons who are picked up for violations of any law and who are suspected of being infected with venereal disease to be given physical examination, and if necessary, treatment, and be kept under control until cured.”31 SCAP’s Legal Section chief Alva C. Carpenter commented on Swing’s overeager ordinance, noting that his interpretation was “far too broad,” and that Swing did not actually have the authority to interpret Japanese law. Nevertheless, as Carpenter pointed out, occupation authorities could “define the crime [of spreading venereal disease] of an act prejudicial to the security of the occupation forces . . . and solicitation of occupation forces personnel for prostitution may be considered an act prejudicial to the security of the occupation, provided adequate notion thereof has been given to the Japanese people, and that existing policy is not contravened.” Carpenter thus insisted, again, that there was no need for a specific anti-prostitution law, and that existing laws, such as the Venereal Disease Prevention Law and the Minor Offenses Law from May 1, 1948—which stipulated that persons without a permanent place of residence and “without means of support” due to an unwillingness to work despite being physically capable of work, could be arrested by the police for vagrancy—provided a sufficient legal basis for countering prostitution.³²

Joseph M. Swing’s directive nevertheless highlights some remarkable features of the occupation period’s attempts to police prostitution, venereal disease, and sexual relationships between servicemen and Japanese women. As will be discussed in detail in chapter 3, occupation authorities appropriated the institution of venereal disease clinics and encouraged the Japanese police to enforce regular health examinations and medical treatment of sex workers, both of which were a legacy of imperial Japan’s public health system. Additionally, the regulation of prostitution entailed the collection of data on Japanese civilians in the form of lists of prostitutes and their contacts, a means of monitoring the occupied society. What is further notable in Swing’s memorandum, however, is the introduction of a denunciation system. This compelled Japanese authorities and civilians to report any occupation forces serviceman entering a Japanese house or any house that had been entered by servicemen, which alone apparently sufficed to raise suspicions that it was a place of commercial sex. Finally, Swing addressed the matter of jurisdiction. As has been already shown in chapter 1, the Japanese police were only allowed to deal with Japanese civilians and could not interfere with occupation personnel, a task for which occupation army military police had to be present. Since the spread of venereal disease was considered an offense against occupation personnel, such cases were tried in occupation courts and sentenced by occupation authorities. Alva Carpenter articulated the Legal Section’s position that “The disadvantage of this procedure is that it would place the onus of enforcement on the occupation forces. However, it is believed that the psychological effect of facing trial in military occupation courts would have a greater deterrent value in preventing acts of prostitution than trial in the Japanese courts.”³³

Carpenter’s belief that occupation courts would deter sex workers from engaging in prostitution, however, was rather naïve. Case numbers indicate that violations of the Venereal Disease Prevention Law were consistently high. In May 1949, for instance, 197 cases were prosecuted, which apparently constituted 50 percent of all cases brought to occupation courts that month in the Tokyo area. In June 1949, there was thus a discussion about transferring violations of the venereal disease law to Japanese civil courts, which, as Walter Leo Weible, commander of Headquarters and Service Group, put it at a conference in Tokyo on June 23, would need to “insure a rapid disposal of such cases, in order to keep up the good work which had been done in regard to VD rates among troops under his command.”³⁴ Although it would be speculative to judge whether Weible guilelessly believed in his work or based his argument knowingly on false statistics, venereal infection rates among occupation personnel throughout the occupation period were consistently as high as those of sex workers accused of violating the Venereal Disease Prevention Law. Nonetheless, the occupiers decided that Japanese courts should handle such violations in the future, but were advised by the Legal Section to consider “the fact that such a case is not only destructive to the maintenance of the public morals but also cannot be passed over lightly from the viewpoint of the public health.” Therefore, “the court should give a strict warning so that the accused may undergo the thorough treatment and not repeat the same act of violation in future.” The documented debate on the transfer of such cases from occupation courts to Japanese civilian courts indicates an undercurrent of paternalistic benevolence, which surfaced in the logic that male judges should offer female sex workers a chance to reflect and change their ways by not returning to prostitution. The Legal Section called it kindheartedness, “to give her [sic] an opportunity for starting her social life afresh [which] is also desirable. . . . In order to realize the above, therefore, it would be proper that a judge should . . . give her [sic] a good talking-to so that the accused may, upon recovering from the disease by taking the prompt and sure treatment, engage in any of the legitimate businesses and not repeat the same offense in future.”35 Japanese summary courts that were supposed to prioritize providing sex workers quick medical treatment and a way out of the sex business henceforth handled first offenses. Second and repeated offenses, however, were to be prosecuted thoroughly, either by Japanese courts or occupation courts, with the aim of achieving the maximum sentence.³⁶

Yet, the benevolence of the judges’ court sentences had its limits, since it is apparent that in practice, women alone, deemed prostitutes whether they were working in the sex business or not, were systematically prosecuted for violating the Venereal Disease Prevention Law. Even Alva Carpenter admitted that hardly any of the predominantly male persons who procured commercial sex were ever prosecuted for it, despite its equal prohibition in article no. 27 of the Venereal Disease Prevention Law.³⁷ Needless to say, servicemen were never prosecuted in Japanese courts and rarely ever court-martialed for contracting and spreading venereal disease. They therefore enjoyed a legal status in occupied Japan that highly resembled older, colonial forms of extraterritoriality.³⁸ The legal issues and debates concerning the policing of prostitution and venereal disease, however, still point toward some inconsistency within the occupation regime, sustaining Mire Koikari’s argument that “the occupation forces did not constitute a unified body of ruling.”³⁹ On the one hand, the logic of criminalizing sex workers for spreading venereal disease and endangering occupation personnel seems to be the common ground for all members of the occupation regime involved in the regulation of sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease. On the other hand, some occupation members’ discomfort with the failure of the nationwide anti-prostitution law and their request for stronger intervention by SCAP, or Joseph M. Swing’s eager, but solo decision—against the official occupation policy—to criminalize commercial sex for occupation personnel under his command, both underscore the complexity of tensions in occupied Japan. There were not only tensions between ruler and ruled—between occupiers and occupied—but also simultaneously within the ruling elite, among the occupiers.40

This observation gains even more traction when considered in the context of the relationship between the occupation elite in Tokyo and the authorities in the United States. The immense scale of sex work in occupied Japan was a thorn in the side of the political and military administrations in Washington, DC. On November 22, 1949, the U.S. Department of the Army released a directive for the “Repression of Prostitution” to be applied in all overseas commands and ordered a more thorough repression of prostitution “for the welfare of personnel, the development and guidance of character, and the control of venereal disease.” According to this ordinance, all “houses of prostitution” were to be declared off-limits to U.S. military personnel, and violations of the off-limits regulation were to be subject to disciplinary measures. In addition, cooperation was promised to all agencies that “engaged in the repression of prostitution and the elimination of sources of venereal diseases.” Furthermore, the department’s directive declared, “all practices which can in any way be interpreted as fostering, regulating, or condoning prostitution will be prohibited.”⁴¹ However, the ordinance for the repression of prostitution and the criminalization of sex work was platitudinous since its enactment and it is possible that no attempt was ever made to enforce it. The abolition of licensed prostitution in occupied Japan had only prohibited human trafficking and sexual slavery, not sex work in general. And SCAP’s official policy to repress prostitution legally worked only to criminalize sex workers (and women in general) as carriers of venereal disease. The army’s directive was thus ignored as far as possible, and criticism from Washington was mostly answered with extenuation by occupation authorities, who quoted whitewashed health statistics, highlighted the medical efforts, and claimed a high state of morale among the troops on duty in Japan. In an official report from February 1950, for instance, it was emphasized that “Commanders at all echelons are fully aware of the venereal disease hazards existing in these oriental areas and are constantly on the alert to counteract their effects.” Usually, it was stressed, following the biased logic that criminalized sex workers for infecting servicemen with venereal disease, that laws had been enacted in Japan which made the spread of venereal disease a legal offense while maintaining “a place for prostitution ‘with good knowledge of the presence of venereal disease in the prostitute liable to infect others.’” Furthermore, SCAP argued, probably to reassure Washington, that “All known houses of prostitution have been placed off-limits by occupation authorities and are checked by frequent military police patrols.”42

OFF-LIMITS: CONTROLLING WHORING, LOOTING,
AND SHOOTING SERVICEMEN

The military police’s most common strategy for monitoring and restricting sexual encounters, prostitution, and venereal diseases involved patrolling red-light districts and setting “notorious” brothels and other recreational facilities off-limits to occupation personnel. Ever since the arrival of the occupation forces in the summer of 1945, military police officers had been engaged in inspecting brothels and other recreational facilities, and off-limits regulations were already in place before the abolition of licensed prostitution in 1946. Upon inspection, if an establishment was found to have increasing or constantly high venereal disease infection rates, or if the military police had to raid an establishment continuously to maintain public order, the place was declared off-limits to servicemen. Off-limits signs were usually posted in front of recreational facilities, or, as Mark Gayn has depicted in the above-cited experiences at the International Palace in Funabashi, off-limits signs could even be used to demarcate whole areas, city quarters, and villages. When a particular (sex) business such as a brothel, club, cabaret, or restaurant was shut down, however, this did not necessarily mean it was being shut down as one instance of the general attempt to repress prostitution altogether. It was, rather, guided by the occupiers’ logic of protecting and securing the health of the occupation army’s servicemen, of keeping them away from the potential danger of venereal infections, in particular, and of maintaining a certain degree of control over its own personnel and the occupied terrain—or at least attempting to do so. Therefore, this section’s heading “off-limits” also indicates the excessive nature of servicemen’s behavior in occupied Japan, which was particularly conspicuous in entertainment and red-light districts. “Off-limits” thus also signifies the multiple violations of servicemen, who exceeded legal—and arguably also sexual and moral—boundaries, often manifesting in physically violent clashes, some of them marked by racist tensions.

On one of his visits to Yokohama in early November 1945, Colonel C. V. Cadwell, provost marshal of the Eighth Army, observed “that promiscuous sexual activity between personnel of the occupational forces and Japanese women is very prevalent and becoming more so.” Yet despite his worries, he did not want to completely suppress sexual activity or make it more difficult for servicemen and occupied women to meet for intimate relations or even plain commercial sexual intercourse. Rather, as Cadwell stated, “The only practicable means of controlling the venereal diseases under existing conditions is to recognize and regulate prostitution and to take all possible measures to eliminate venereal disease therefrom.”43 For Cadwell such measures included distributing modern drugs from military supplies among Japanese civilians, maintaining prophylactic facilities to treat servicemen immediately after sexual intercourse, and declaring brothels with high infection rates off-limits. Alpheus Lester Henderson, provost marshal of Yokohama, who was also on the inspection tour of Yokohama, agreed with Cadwell’s view that off-limits regulations and military police patrol were a practicable and apparently also proper means “to preserve order,” as they called it, whereby they fostered, or at least perpetuated, the male chauvinistic notion that male soldiers and sailors would be inclined to (hetero-)sexual satisfaction, which cannot be stopped anyway.⁴⁴

Other commanding officers of the occupation forces took a different stance. Kenneth Bonner Wolfe, major general of the Fifth Air Force installation stationed in Nagoya since September 1945, believed the only way to reduce the high venereal disease rates within his command would be to rigorously suppress prostitution and ban sex workers from the proximity of military bases. Based on his “past experience in the Philippines,” Wolfe argued, “an educational program and pro station operation program is not sufficiently effective to prevent a serious loss of manpower due to Venereal Disease.” Additionally, since the “Fifth Air Force airdromes are, in general, located in rural areas surrounded by numerous towns and villages,” it would make “it impracticable to enforce ‘off limits’ status of all houses of prostitution with the number of Fifth Air Force Military Police available.” To a certain extent he blamed the Army’s military police for “not enforcing the ‘off limits’ status of these houses of prostitution, thereby making it impossible for the Fifth Air Force Military Police to enforce ‘off limits’ status in towns where troops from both the Air and Ground Forces are stationed.”45 This was probably an expression of the ongoing, mostly class-based tensions between the Air Force and the Army, two often-rival branches of the U.S. military.⁴⁶ To ensure a safer environment for his command, Wolfe requested “to have all prostitutes removed from the towns and villages within a 5 mile radius of all Fifth Air Force installations, and that the subordinate Army commands be notified of this policy and their cooperation in its enforcement secured.” To reinforce his request, Wolfe argued that “The policy of suppression of organized prostitution . . . would not interfere significantly with the customs of the Japanese people, because at present these houses of prostitution are patronized exclusively by U.S. Army personnel.” Moreover, Wolfe referred to the May Act, the U.S. War Department’s directive from 1941, which prohibited prostitution for military personnel in overseas theaters.⁴⁷ However, U.S. military command never rigorously enforced the May Act either domestically or in overseas theaters. They usually silently acknowledged that U.S. soldiers and sailors (and airmen, for that matter) engaged in sexual relations with local women, which made it imperative to provide prophylaxis against venereal disease.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, although Wolfe’s request was not approved, it is an indication that different positions existed within the occupation regime concerning off-limits regulations. Moreover, it raises the general question of whether off-limits closures as a control technique were more difficult to maintain in the countryside than in an urban environment, or whether the technique itself was in fact effective enough to prevent the spread of venereal disease.

As Barbara Meil Hobson has argued in a different historical context, namely that of the legal regulation of prostitution in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, just looking at law texts and the regulatory techniques they indicate does not provide a sufficient basis for grasping the bigger picture of the interrelation between sex work, law, and law enforcement. Understanding the regulation of prostitution, in particular, a business that depends on discretion and privacy—at least for the clients—requires taking a closer look at its informal rules. For example, although strict anti-prostitution laws existed, they were not rigidly enforced or could be avoided through bribery.⁴⁹ Many studies on the history of prostitution and its regulation have suggested gaining such a closer look by integrating the sex workers’ everyday practices and experiences, and considering the encounters with police control and the administration of justice from their perspective.⁵⁰ While this approach is definitely desirable, there is no getting around the issue of available source material, and since sex workers, and in particular lower-class street prostitutes, rarely kept diaries or consistently archived their correspondence, their voices can usually only be heard through the mediation of other media, such as police reports or court files.51

Hence, I want to suggest a different approach. It involves taking a closer look at the administrators’ and clients’ voices and everyday experiences. In the legal debates on prostitution discussed above, a variety of positions taken by administrators, military commanders, and legal advisers have already been described and contextualized. In the following, I will address military police officers and clients of sex workers in order to offer some insight into the everyday life of red-light districts and the workings of sex work on the street, in the alleys and brothels of occupied Japan. Some of these historical actors’ experiences are, however, despite being firsthand, only documented in memoirs, which have to be read cautiously due to the temporal ruptures inherent in the procedure of experiencing, memorizing, and recording/writing, and because memoir narratives are situated socially and culturally.⁵² Nevertheless, despite their fictional and subjective character, memoir narratives can be precious accounts because they are, to quote Barbara Metcalf, “fictions that matter.”⁵³ They offer perspectives beyond official records and add valuable angles to get another grip on the complexity and variety of historic agency—in this case, they enable a glimpse of police control in occupied Japan’s red-light districts and brothels.

In this regard, the memoirs of an Indian Corps of Military Police (India) (CMP (I)) are quite revealing, written by the corps’ assistant provost marshal whose name is unfortunately unrecorded. Subordinate to the BCOF, which had its headquarters in Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture, this particular Indian military police corps was stationed in Okayama from 1946 to 1947. Compared to SCAP’s American-dominated guidelines, the BCOF had a stricter policy on fraternization between occupiers and occupied, although John Northcott, Australian lieutenant general and commander of the BCOF in 1946, admitted in an official memorandum to his superiors in London that a rigorous nonfraternization policy would be impracticable.⁵⁴ Such ambivalence was echoed by the author of the CMP (I) memoirs, who stated, “Strict orders had been given banning all fraternisation, however this was impossible to enforce.” To a certain extent he blamed the Americans, who had been “in the area before we arrived and they had, in true American way, fraternised with the local girls.” In an apologetic fashion, however, the author reasoned that “When you have some thousands of young, healthy soldiers suddenly put into another country and especially where many of the girls could be quite attractive, it is impossible to stop them fraternising.” Confronted with its “impossible” task, the CMP (I) developed various strategies to maneuver between their superiors in BCOF headquarters, the mass of Australian, British, Indian, and New Zealand servicemen, and their own rationales and desires. Since “it would also be impossible to police every highway and byway to check for fraternisation,” the memoirs’ author recalled, “we got round this by patrolling the main roads and the railway station with only an occasional run through the side streets. Thus any soldier who was foolish enough not to see us would be arrested. Most people did not take long to spot us in the distance.” Apparently this was not enough and, as the author stated, “The Div. Comdr. kept bearing down on the Military Police ordering that we step up patrols and arrest every man found with a woman and so on.”55 The high rates of venereal disease were of particular concern, and, following the logic of stigmatizing sex workers or any other Japanese woman who fraternized with occupation servicemen as a source of venereal disease, BCOF military commanders wanted to prevent VD infections by preventing intimate relationships between occupiers and occupied in the first place.

The CMP (I) in Okayama, however, appears to have sympathized with women who sold their bodies “in want of food and necessities of life.” In order to satisfy their superiors with decreasing VD rates but simultaneously tackle the impossibility of policing the intimate, predominantly sexual relations between servicemen and Japanese women, the CMP (I) adjusted their interventions, as they called it, “in a discreet and liberal way to control these things rather than the usual narrow minded military approach.” The first strategy was to “quietly” establish, in unofficial collaboration with BCOF medical officers, a special hospital where sex workers could be examined and treated if they were suspected of having contracted a venereal disease. “Meanwhile,” also in close cooperation with British military surgeons, the CMP (I) “selected three of the better brothels, had the medics check them regularly, and did not raid them but stepped up [their] activities everywhere else.” Servicemen apparently soon learned of the “safe” places and started to frequent only those brothels, which according to the CMP (I) significantly helped to lower the VD infection rate. Furthermore, the CMP (I) made arrangements with the three brothels’ “mama-sans,” the madams running the brothels, and would notify them in advance in case of a raid. When the CMP (I) actually inspected one of the designated brothels, the CMP (I)’s author recalled, “I would invite the padres and press to come out on our ‘raids’. . . . When we burst in with the press and padres in tow the place would be almost empty except for any soldiers who were too drunk or obstreperous and these were immediately arrested and our ‘guests’ would be pleased to have seen us in action.” Thus, the CMP (I) established its own rules of policing (and protecting) sex work and intimate relations between occupiers and occupied in Okayama, ignoring headquarters’ official policy, but still gratifying the higher command levels. Ultimately, this policy helped the CMP (I) itself take advantage of occupation Japan’s recreational facilities and intimate relationships with local women, because, as the author admitted, “In fact we did our share of fraternising just like any other unit and I made the most of it. . . . Some six years later I returned with the Australian Army for the Korean War. We had many R&R [Rest & Recreation] leaves in Japan and I made many enjoyable visits to Okayama where I now had old friends and finally came away with a Japanese wife.”56

Military Police’s lax law enforcement as well as informal but well-known rules of regulations created gaps in the net of anti-fraternization policies, which servicemen often exploited. As Theodore Cohen has noted, “GIs seeking sex just went deeper into the vast off-limits areas, which MPs never visited at all.”⁵⁷ Thus, strict orders, surveillance, and limitations did not prevent servicemen from patronizing brothels and other recreation facilities that had been declared off-limits. As one interviewee from the International Palace in Funabashi stated, after “the Army barred the place to the GIs” in April 1946, “only eight or ten GIs come in daily, on the sly.” Of course, the interviewed sex worker’s statement was embedded in a narrative of regret about the fact that fewer customers came to the International Palace after it was put off-limits. But the statement also reveals that some servicemen ignored the military police’s regulations and sneaked into banned brothels.

This tendency to visit brothels on the sly is also evident in Alton Chamberlin’s narrative of his experiences in occupied Japan, which he recorded in his unpublished memoirs titled War, Religion, and the Pursuit of Sex. Chamberlin was a second lieutenant of the 97th infantry division and stationed in occupied Japan from September 1945. In his memoirs, he dwelled on his sexual adventures, first in Europe during World War II, then in occupied Japan, and later in Korea during the Korean War. While in Japan, Chamberlin apparently enjoyed visits to “geisha houses” or “abodes of ill repute,” as he liked to call brothels in occupied Japan. Chamberlin entered Japan in Yokohama and was later posted near Nagasaki in Kyushu, where he gained considerable experience visiting Japanese brothels, sometimes alone, but also together with his companions Pee Wee and Malek. According to his memoirs, during his first experience with commercial sex in Japan, Chamberlin had been served first at the brothel and subsequently had to wait outside for his companions to finish:

While I waited for my buddies I saw some nearby kids tossing a baseball. Using sign language I offered to play with them. As I was playing catch with the young Japanese boys a military jeep drove down the narrow street. In it were two M.P.s. They stopped and asked me what I was doing in an off limits area.

“I’m just sight seeing and playing ball with Japanese kids,” I half lied.

“You’d better get back to camp before you get in trouble,” I was told.

So When Pee Wee and Malek were finished we returned to camp with smiles on our faces. We had broken the cultural barrier.58

Breaking the “cultural barrier” was Chamberlin’s euphemistic expression for having sex with women of the former enemy. By pretending to be “just sight seeing and playing ball with Japanese kids,” he was able to defuse his first encounter with the military police and dodge a possible arrest with disciplinary action for being caught in an off-limits area. On subsequent occasions, according to his memoirs, Chamberlin was equally lucky to escape occupation law enforcement agencies. He continued to frequent off-limits brothels on a regular basis at his new post near Tokyo, where his company was later transferred. Although Chamberlin could not remember the exact name of the city, he wrote, “I do recall vividly what I did during some free time during the trip [to his new post]. By now I was horny as hell, not having sex for over a week.”⁵⁹ To satisfy his pent-up desires, Chamberlin visited the next brothel, which he described in some revealing detail:

A geisha house was not hard for me to find. By this time I felt like an old pro at it. Soon I was in a nice, clean place with a mamasan and a couple of cute girls. I paid for the service and made my choice of ladies. We went into the privacy of her boudoir and were about to consummate our relationship when the sound of two American voices entered our ears.

Quickly she put her finger to my lips for me to be quiet. She opened the sliding door of a sort of large linen closet built in along the wall. She motioned for me to get in. Then she put my clothes in with me and closed the door, again signaling for me to be still.

As I lay there naked on top of clean sheets and towels in a space about six feet long, two feet deep and three feet high, I figured out that the American voices were from M.P.s checking whore houses for g.i.s who were not supposed to be there. All geisha houses were still off limits. I wondered if they had spotted my boots and would then search the house for me. The tone of their voices was very friendly. They indicated they did not have time to stay long but would be back later when they had more time.

Soon after they left my crime abetting little lady returned and let me out of my hiding place. She confirmed my suspicions about the M.P.s. We made love for quite some time. It was in the middle of the day, a slow time for their business, so she was in no hurry. Being almost caught seemed to enhance the fun of it. We giggled, caressed, held each other close, wiggled, enjoyed and relaxed.60

Chamberlin’s mention of feeling “like an old pro” at discovering brothels makes it sound as if he routinely sought commercial sex. Although he recalled falsely that all “geisha houses” were off-limits, which might have only been the case in his particular locality, his narrative nevertheless suggests that was apparently normal for servicemen to disregard restrictions and patronize brothels despite their prohibition by military police. And the “mamasan” and the sex workers also appear rather reluctant to follow the MP’s rules. They continued to provide sexual services to any paying servicemen who entered their establishment. Moreover, the sex worker catering to Chamberlin, his “crime abetting little lady,” even actively supported his hiding in the closet from the patrolling MP. Of course, this might have been to avoid trouble of her own. Chamberlin, for his part, narrates his story as if he had actually enjoyed the excitement of almost getting caught. His enjoyment continues in another part of his memoirs, where he argues, “To me, there was a certain thrill to sneaking around in off-limits areas and breaking chickenshit rules and social mores.”⁶¹ The enforcement of off-limits regulations as narrated by Chamberlin, however, does not seem to have been very strict in practice. First, servicemen were not hindered from visiting brothels in secret, and arrests by MP patrols could be avoided through prevarication and stealth. Second, the masculinist image of strict law enforcement by the military police is further emasculated in Chamberlin’s narrative by his assumption that the MP officers themselves would visit brothels “when they had more time,” which echoes the memoirs of the CMP (I) in Okayama, who also admitted to having had his share of fraternization.

Of course, both the memoirs of Alton Chamberlin and the CMP (I) have to be read with caution. Although they do offer alternative perspectives to official records, they are nevertheless only individual experiences and could have been altered in the process of remembering and narrating. Caution is also necessary on account of the nostalgic character of the so-called memoirs, which can also be described as a collection of ironic and overtly humorous anecdotes detailing—particularly in the case of Chamberlin—the servicemen’s pleasures and adventures in occupied Japan’s red-light and entertainment districts. What is completely missing in these stories is the tense climate within the occupation period’s sex work scene; a lack that silences the sex workers’ own tragedy and denounces only the ubiquity of crime and violence in postwar red-light districts.

An investigation report filed by the military police stationed in Yokohama illustrates how sex workers, but also passersby and servicemen themselves, were exposed to what sometimes proved to be lethal violence within brothels and around the streets of entertainment areas. According to the MP’s report, on the evening of January 21, 1946, the same day SCAP released the ordinance to the Japanese government to abolish licensed prostitution, Pfc Isma Lubliner was shot in the chest with a carbine in Yokohama’s Tsurumi Geisha District and died that night in the nearby 334th Station Hospital. The investigation report concluded that the lethal shots were fired by either a Cpl Billie B. Greene or Pfc Bill Harris, each of whom had accused the other of the shooting. Apparently, however, Lubliner’s shooting was a random accident. The investigation report described a rather bizarre prelude to the shooting: Greene and Harris, known as “Johnny” and “Bill” respectively, were patronizing a brothel in the Tsurumi Geisha District in the early afternoon where they forced, at gunpoint, two sex workers, Maezawa Fumiko and Sato Nosiko (probably Noriko), known as “Utiko” and “Juny,” to undress in one of the brothel’s rooms. As “Johnny” later admitted on record, he had been drinking and did fire two shots into the floor. The MPs obtained the pistol during their investigation of the crime scene that afternoon. According to some witnesses, Johnny and Bill were seen again later in the evening on their way to the geisha district, now carrying two carbines. The report does not definitely conclude why or by whom Lubliner was shot. According to witnesses, however, both Johnny and Bill apparently wanted to take revenge on Utiko and Juny for the testimonies they had given to the MPs concerning the pistol shooting earlier that day. Thus, before the shooting, Johnny and Bill entered the brothel and set fire to one of the rooms. Afterwards, they walked around the red-light district and came across a crowd of people, among them Utiko and—fatally—Lubliner. Either one or both of them fired two to three shots into the crowd and ran away. Both Johnny and Bill were arrested and charged with murder, attempted arson, assault, unwarranted firing of a pistol, and unauthorized weapon possession.62

As the report indicates, red-light districts in occupied Japan were tough turfs. They were characterized by the presence of prostitution, petty crime, and black marketeering, which could encompass sexual violence as well as violent gang rivalries. These rivalries were also not uncommon among sex workers, pimps, and brothel owners. And servicemen could be rough customers; brawls in bars, brothels, and clubs were often part of business as usual in the entertainment and sex trade. Usually, as most military police reports demonstrate, the violence was not lethal as it was in the case of Pfc Isma Lubliner. Nevertheless, the military police and the Japanese police force often needed to intervene in order to settle disputes before and after they had escalated. Violent disputes were apparently common enough to cause scandals in the American press. In a newspaper article released on July 14, 1946, the Chicago Tribune pilloried “Drunken Yanks,” who would “beat and bully the Japs.” The article was based on a letter of Robert L. Eichenberger, lieutenant general and commander of the Eighth Army stationed in occupied Japan, who spoke to his servicemen in a Fourth of July address about the intolerable behavior of what he called a “minority” of servicemen, who, to quote the Chicago Tribune’s reporter, “assaulted women, maliciously beaten Japanese men, stole, engaged in black market operations and by their ‘deliberate bullying attitude’ have made the Japanese suspicious of democracy.” The article ends with comments by Provost Marshal C. V. Cadwell, who argued that Eichenberger’s address should be understood as a warning to new, incoming servicemen to behave properly. Although it contradicts Eichenberger’s statement, as the article itself pointed out, Cadwell further said there had been “no marked increase in offenses,” probably an attempt to whitewash the servicemen’s de facto crime, offenses and disorderly conduct rates, which were constantly high throughout the occupation period. The article concluded by quoting Cadwell directly: “Col. Cadwell admitted that there ‘has been a little more carelessness on the part of the troops in the observing of the rights of others.’”⁶³

What Cadwell called “carelessness,” however, was far from being just the exceptional misconduct of some servicemen. It was in fact common behavior embedded in the asymmetric power relations between occupiers and occupied. And what the Chicago Tribune, but also the memoirs of Alton Chamberlin and the CMP (I) indirectly reveal, but ultimately fail to directly address, is the prevailing racism inherent in the often violent tensions in occupied Japan’s “geisha districts”—a label which itself already signifies the prevalent orientalist, and at least latently racist, sentiment embodied in a sexualized image of Japan. Of course, as Koshiro Yukiko has rightly pointed out, the issue of race and racism was a muted subject, and SCAP did not allow overt racism such as white supremacist ideas to be officially stated in occupation records or openly practiced. SCAP’s Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) also censored any racial or racist concepts in the Japanese press.64 On August 16, 1947, for instance, a newspaper attempted to publish an article in the Jiji Shimpō on the issue of street prostitution, but it was rejected by the occupiers’ censorship bureau because the author argued that war was “an expression of a great natural law of blood mixture,” and accused unlicensed prostitutes of “surely contributing to the mixture of blood.”⁶⁵ Koshiro’s major argument, however, is that the subject of race was “submerged into a subconscious level, never marking its presence in the vivid memory of the two [American and Japanese] people.”⁶⁶ This argument, I claim, does just as much to mute the pervasiveness of openly articulated and exercised racism, for two reasons. First, it is evident that older racist imagery persisted during the postwar period and beyond. As John Dower has shown in his War without Mercy, the encounter between America and Japan during the Asia Pacific War was deeply racialized, and the omnipresent simian image of Japan in American wartime propaganda continued long after defeat. During the war, Japanese soldiers were portrayed as perfidious enemies who would sneak monkey-like through the jungle to backstab American soldiers and sailors. In the occupation period, the simian image of the Japanese prevailed in a new form, in which it had the task of symbolizing Japan’s capacity to be curious, and copy and learn modern democratic values from the occupiers.⁶⁷ This supposed shift in image politics was deliberately exploited by postwar American ideologues to construct the image of the Japanese ally. In fact, older propaganda images of the monkey, but also of the geisha were used, and they were embedded in a long-standing narrative of an immature, nonwhite, and feminine Japan that was subservient to white, male American occupation policy.⁶⁸ Within entertainment and red-light districts, such racism manifested in the superior attitude of servicemen toward ordinary Japanese citizens, who were, as the Chicago Tribune rightly reported, perpetually beaten up and robbed by them. Furthermore, Japanese women, and in particular Japanese sex workers, were consistently perceived as Oriental sexual objects who were always sexually available for servicemen. Seemingly inconspicuous formulations by Chamberlin, who wrote of “cute girls,” or the CMP (I)’s depiction of Japan as a country “where many of the girls could be quite attractive,” making it impossible to stop male foreign soldiers from fraternizing with them, reveal the widespread racialized image of a feminine, obedient, available, and sexed-up Japan.

The second aspect the hypothesis of an “obscured” racism fails to notice is the racial policies of the occupation regime. Until 1948, and despite a large increase of African American servicemen after World War II, the U.S. military officially implemented a segregation policy. But even after integration, the military continued to maintain a color line, especially between white and black servicemen, and occupied Japan was no exception.69 In postwar Japan’s sex work scene, racist color lines were not obscured at all, but rather highly noticeable. John Russell has thus called occupied Japan “a laboratory in which whites could . . . conduct experiments in racial demonology.”⁷⁰ To illustrate his argument, Russell quotes Martin Bronfenbrenner, a Duke University economics professor who worked as a translator for the occupation administration and wrote Tomioka Stories, a collection of short stories based on his personal experiences in occupied Japan. In one such story, “Fusako and the Army,” Bronfenbrenner described the efforts of three servicemen (Bob, Joe, and Sarge) to solicit sex from a young Japanese woman (Fusako):

A burly quartet of colored troops reeled by with a scared Japanese girl half their average height and a bottle of the local sweet-potato brandy. Fusako stared after them; such creatures she had not seen before. In school she had read of American Indians; were these, she asked Joe, the Indians she had read about? Joe translated the question.

Sarge saw his chance for sociological experimentation. “Tell her no. Tell her they’re Niggers, dirty Niggers. They was born white, tell her, only they got syph and turned black. Tell her to keep away from them. Lay it on good.” Joe gulped slightly, but thought of C.I.C. and translating, laying it on—moderately good. Bob said nothing. Although no southern rebel, he agreed that the end might justify the means. Nice girls like this Fu-something had to be protected from those black apes. Fusako’s face registered disgust as her eyes followed the retreating staggerers, and Sarge was satisfied.⁷¹

In such racist and, to quote Russell, “white-spread” rumors, African American occupiers were reduced to their physical appearance, usually presented as behaving disorderly, and depicted as abusive, sexually insatiable carriers of venereal diseases. Such prejudices apparently framed the first encounter between the occupied and black servicemen. Moreover, as John Dower has argued, women serving African Americans were initially horrified, although such prejudiced fear could also turn around when those women “discovered that many black GIs treated them more kindly than the whites did.”72 But overall, many Japanese sex workers, brothel owners, and bartenders apparently believed racist rumors—such as the running trope of the black rapist—and also reproduced racist discrimination, for instance by serving either white or black servicemen exclusively.⁷³ Sex workers and other women in the entertainment business even feared depreciation upon serving African Americans, and tended to sell themselves to white customers only. Such discrimination even resulted in new labels, and sex workers catering to white servicemen came to be called shiro-pan, whereas those serving African Americans were referred to as kuro-pan—shiro being the Sino-Japanese character for white and kuro that for black.⁷⁴

Racism in occupied Japan’s entertainment and red-light districts was not only limited to racist rumors and racial demonology. It could also manifest in the policing of brothels and other entertainment facilities according to policies of racial segregation, racial profiling, and other forms of systematic racial discrimination by MPs against African American servicemen, and sometimes it escalated into violent race riots.⁷⁵ Hygienic facilities, so-called prophylactic stations where servicemen could treat themselves for venereal disease after sexual intercourse, but also brothels and other recreational facilities, were often operated for either white or nonwhite occupation personnel, as they had been in the United States during the war. It was the MP who predominantly enforced this unofficial color line in Japan’s once colorblind entertainment business.⁷⁶ In addition, military police patrols, usually consisting of white men, seem to have been much more strict in enforcing off-limits regulations and anti-fraternization policies against African American servicemen. Crime statistics and military police reports indicate that proportionally, black servicemen were arrested and court-martialed for such offenses more frequently than white servicemen. Overt violent racism, however, also occurred among common soldiers and sailors themselves. On several occasions, black and white servicemen clashed in brawls and riots in entertainment facilities and the MPs were mandated to intervene—sometimes even in incidents of armed revolt that ended lethally.⁷⁷

For instance, in a military police report from February 1946, a certain Sergeant Trilling of the 519th Military Police Battalion in Yokohama outlined such an incident of racial violence. In his report he stated, “At approx 2000 26 Feb 46 a truck load of colored soldiers (20 or 25 in a 2 ½ ton) drove up to the Shanghai Cabaret. The SPs on duty suspected trouble and immediately notified the Yokohama Police Station. One colored fellow (unknown) started into the Cabaret and a [white] Marine (name unknown) attempted to throw him out whereupon a fight began. Robert Bolen (sailor) received an arm wound from a knife wielded by Pvt. Leon E. Mitchell. Six SPs and 8 MPs . . . arrested Pvt Leon Mitchel . . . , Samule C. Rankins . . . and Ausie Jones. . . . They were confined at Yokohama MP Hq.”78 Although it is hard to tell from the report who actually started the bar fight, the racial bias in the police investigation is nevertheless obvious. Whereas all the servicemen arrested were black, many of the white servicemen mentioned in the report were transported to a nearby hospital for injuries from being hit by a knife or beer bottle, and none were prosecuted. Furthermore, as mentioned in the report, the persons present (the SPs) instantly “suspected trouble” due to the presence of African American servicemen, who were perceived as particularly threatening when appearing in a large group. This is also evident in a different incident in which black servicemen were given the sole blame for initiating violent clashes. On the evening of April 7, 1946, Sergeant Odata from the 519th Military Police Battalion in Yokohama received a radio message calling all MP patrols to the Mt. Fuji Cabaret, where supposedly a riot between white and black servicemen was raging. Several minutes later Odata arrived at the spot, “finding John Wilkeson (colored) . . . lying in the street in front of cafe entrance badly cut up.” Another (white) servicemen, Vernon Martin, was carried out of the cabaret with a gunshot wound in his leg. At least three other servicemen, black and white, were brought to the hospital with bruises, cuts, and gunshot wounds. After the riot squad cleared the cabaret, Odata investigated the incident. His report, however, relied solely on statements made by Roy M. Lowe, a white sergeant of the First Cavalry. According to Lowe’s witness report, “4 or 5 colored soldiers came to the cafe and had been told at the bar that there was no more beer and said they would be back with a mob of more (Negros). They returned and forced way into the cafe, starting a general riot. Lowe saw Tec 5 Marin falling with a wounded leg, and hit a negro who had a 45 cal pistol in his hand on the head with a full beer bottle. Lowe said other negroes dragged this man out. Lowe heard several shots. Couldn’t identify negro with the pistol.”⁷⁹ Again, Odata accused only black servicemen of initiating violence. The segregationist attempts by white servicemen, who apparently did not want to drink beer in the company of black servicemen, telling them “there was no more beer,” are indicated in the report but were not investigated any further. However, as Richard Polenberg has argued in his study of servicemen race riots in the United States in the 1940s, such riots were often “sparked . . . by rumors of an interracial assault (rumors that often proved groundless),” and “once having been ignited, were further fueled by black resentment at unjust treatment and white resistance to the loss of traditional prerogatives.”80 Regardless of who started the fighting, the military police’s reports and investigations of such incidents shed light on the prevalence of racial tensions among servicemen as well as on the racial bias of the military police in their attempts to control the whoring, looting, and shooting servicemen in occupied Japan’s entertainment and red-light districts.

Rounded-Up: Raids and Protests of Innocence

Regular military police patrols primarily enforced off-limits regulations, though the MP also conducted planned, full-scale raids of individual brothels and entire entertainment and red-light districts. From the early occupation period until the end of the 1940s, the occupation army’s military police often demanded the support of local Japanese police units and had to rely on the Japanese police force’s manpower to accomplish large police raids. In order to organize collaborate vice squads consisting of military police and Japanese police officers to raid brothels, sex work spots, and other recreational facilities, local provost marshals often claimed full jurisdiction, bypassing Japanese laws. Especially in the period between the abolition of licensed prostitution in January 1946 and the promulgation of the Venereal Disease Prevention Law in July 1948, when the legal debates on the jurisdiction of prostitution control were most ambiguous, local commanders and provost marshals frequently took the regulation of prostitution into their own hands. Raids of brothels or red-light districts initiated by the MP predominantly targeted Japanese sex workers, who were, if arrested, brought to local hospitals—which might be special venereal disease clinics near brothel areas—and forced to undergo medical examination. Women who tested positive for venereal disease were registered as “streetwalkers,” delinquents who supposedly threatened the health and security of occupation personnel, then treated as patients in the hospitals and afterwards brought before provost courts or Japanese summary courts to be prosecuted. The vice squads’ procedures could result in tense negotiations with other branches of the occupation administration. Especially on the local level, the military police forces and their provost marshal, which were attached to the tactical units of the occupation regime and thus under direct military command, had to communicate with local military government teams, who employed military as well as civilian personnel and worked under the aegis of SCAP’s staff sections. The occupiers’ public health sections were particularly critical of the military police’s conduct, and asserted their authority for raids against sex workers on the basis of their self-proclaimed proficiency in venereal disease prevention.

In the case of Kokura, an old castle town of the Tokugawa period in northern Kyushu that was later annexed to Fukuoka city as a city ward, the concept and practice of collaborative vice squads is well documented. On the afternoon of March 15, 1948, Provost Marshal Michal A. Yankowsky invited Narita Fumio, chief of the Fukuoka City Police, the local public health officer, and Glenn L. Harris, Kokura detachment commander of the Fukuoka military government team, to attend a meeting at the provost marshal’s office. According to a report on the meeting Harris filed with his superiors in Fukuoka, Yankowsky’s plans were to organize a vice squad under the command of the provost marshal composed of military police and Japanese police officers. The vice squad’s assignment was to “familiarize themselves with all known prostitution houses” and to “prepare a list containing name and the number of girls working in said houses.” Any “enlisted man seen with a girl known to be a professional prostitute or a girl suspected of having Venereal Disease . . . will be separated from his companion.” In a verbal order by the provost marshal, all side streets were declared off-limits. He directly ordered the Kokura police chief and public health officer to “have all known prostitutes and girls suspected of having Venereal Disease picked up. Girls found to have the disease will be given treatment and be kept at a hospital until cured.” Furthermore, “Reports on the number of girls picked and the percentage that have V.D. to be turned in to the Provost Marshal not later than the noon after the day suspects were picked up.” Although the local military government team had not yet approved the plans, the provost marshal took full responsibility and authority to release such ordinances.81 Simultaneously, the provost marshal dispatched written orders, encoded as “suggestions,” to the Japanese police force and the Kokura hospital. The police were told to “arrest street girls and send them to the clinic. If necessary, [the police] may enter inns and apprehend them. But communicate with MP about those street girls who are with Occupation Forces personnel and arrest them in cooperation with MP. Proceed on the above apprehension for the time being.” The hospital was instructed to “examine medically those street girls who have been delivered to . . . by Kokura police station. If they are ill with any venereal diseases, take them into your clinic at once. If some of them are not ill with the above diseases, you may return them home. If any of them are ill, take a photograph of them.”82

The provost marshal’s plans in Kokura appear to have been based on a directive issued by Joseph M. Swing, who, as has been discussed above, generally took a strong stance against prostitution and venereal disease in his command and attempted to repress sex work much more rigidly than SCAP authorities. The idea of putting together collaborative vice squads was implemented in Kokura by delegating eight military police officers to form four groups, who were mandated to patrol the city every evening between seven and eleven o’clock. The local police chief was ordered to assign twelve Japanese police officers to MP, and three of them were integrated into each vice squad.⁸³ Prior to this ordinance, the provost marshal’s office had already ordered occasional mass raids, which MP conducted and coordinated together with the local police force and Kokura Hospital. According to one report from February 1948, mass-raid vice squads usually consisted of one MP officer, one driver, and one Japanese police officer. Some groups were accompanied by nisei, in this case second-generation Japanese Americans who acted as translators. During the raid, as stated in the report, the MPs were “pointing out the girls, the policemen questioning and gesturing Yes or No as to whether she was a street-walker.” The Japanese police officers and translators thus had significant influence on the actual conduct of raids and could even draw the MPs’ attention to or away from particular persons. Of course, the MPs could ignore the Japanese police officers’ decisions, and, as the report put it, “In some cases the MPs concurred with the Policemen, in other cases they [the alleged prostitutes] were picked up anyway.” At this particular raid on February 12, 1948, the vice squads arrested sixty-six women and took all of them directly to the local hospital or to MP headquarters. The MP immediately released ten women “after establishing that they were not prostitutes.” Twenty women, however, “were found to be infected and were detained, the remaining 36 were released.”⁸⁴

Similar measures were taken in other parts of occupied Japan. In Kyoto the provost marshal also organized vice squads with the local Japanese police force. However, John D. Glismann, the public health officer of the local military government team, who accompanied and witnessed some of the vice squad’s raids, severely criticized their actions. According to a complaint filed by Glismann, on the evening of February 12, 1948, a vice squad raided several homes suspected of being homes of “girls of ill-fame” based on the information given by Japanese police officers. They kicked in the doors and, Glismann reported, “Upon entering, Japanese and Military Police literally swarmed over the house, awakening all occupants. Any objection or complaint was met with abuse and intimidation. Regardless of whether an arrest was made or not, the occupants were thoroughly frightened and no apology was offered for the unwarranted entry.” The vice squad arrested another group of women the same night at Kyoto Station, where they had been waiting for their train back to their homes in Nara. They suspected the women of being “girls who at one time or another associated with G.I.s,” although “in no case was there evidence of a misdemeanor being committed.” Subsequent to the arrest, the police brought the women to Kyoto’s Heian Hospital for venereal disease examination. In this case, none of the women were found to be infected and, as Glismann put his observation in Heian Hospital, “There was considerable doubt, however, in the minds of Dr. Kimura, interpreter, Dr. Tsuchiya, chief of the Kyoto Prefectural Public Health Department, and Dr. Azumi, chief of Heian Hospital, as to whether [the women] could actually be classified as ‘street-walkers’.” Glismann concluded, “During this period in which I observed the operation of the vice squad, no girls without a previous record were arrested, although many law-abiding citizens were frightened and intimidated.” The military police’s involvement in the “forcible entry without warrant and in the absence of probable cause, and active participation by Military Police in making arrests” was a direct violation of army regulations.85

In this case, Glismann’s criticism was taken seriously. The following day, February 18, 1948, Provost Marshal Major Clap addressed his subordinates and reminded them to “be gentleman.” In the future, all military police activity should be coordinated with the Military Government Team. Moreover, the “military police will not go out with the Japanese police on raids and pick up, but . . . will ride them hard to make them clean up their own city. . . . When you locate an area or house of prostitution, get in the chief of police and tell him to clean it up. Do not touch any of the girls yourself.” Nevertheless, the military police would still have the authority to enter Japanese houses to arrest occupation army servicemen, and “Women who are seen propositioning soldiers can be apprehended by the military police.” In general, however, the arrest of suspected sex workers, who were Japanese civilians, would be the responsibility of the Japanese police. Thus, Clap informed Kyoto’s chief of police, “The Military Police will not accompany the Japanese Police on any raids or pick-ups. Effective immediately.” In a patronizing way, Clap instructed the police chief that it would be his job “to clean it up, and we are telling him to do it. . . . If he can’t do it, we will have some one put in who can do the job.” Clap’s patronizing stance similarly surfaced in his orders to his subordinates, who were told that their “job is to set up a training program to show these kids [the Japanese police] how this thing is to be handled.”86

As the two cases of Kokura and Kyoto indicate, the concepts and practices of military police work that guided the collaborative organization of raids and vice squads could differ. It usually depended on personnel constellations, whether local commanding officers and members of the Military Government Teams as well as Japanese authorities and civilians were willing to cooperate, or whether members of different branches were eager to quarrel or silently comply with initiatives taken by individuals. In any case, such variety in the police control of sex work and venereal disease does point to general trends in the policing of prostitution in the occupation period, and significant shifts seem to have occurred during the late 1940s. On the one hand, this was due to the changes within the sex business, which, in developing from brothel-centered to street prostitution, had experienced a dynamic change in its spatial coordinates: street prostitution was no longer limited to imperial Japan’s old pleasure quarters or the districts designated by Japan’s authorities. Sex workers could also gather in other places—although the majority of sex work still took place within previous red-light and entertainment districts. These changes were probably caused by the abolition of Japan’s licensed prostitution system, and to a lesser extent by the repression of brothel business through off-limits regulations. It is debatable, however, whether the development of street prostitution as the major form of sex work in occupied Japan after 1946 directly resulted from legal and law enforcement interventions, or, vice versa, whether the policing of prostitution had to adjust itself to changes in the sex business. In either event, it is safe to say that the dynamics of sex work and the policing of sex work were tightly entwined and mutually responsive. On the other hand, the occupiers gave the Japanese police force more authority to enforce Japanese laws among Japanese civilians and simultaneously attempted to gradually reduce the influence of occupation law enforcement agencies on the Japanese population.

The process of re-empowering Japan’s authorities to police prostitution, as the case of the Kyoto military police shows, was already underway in certain localities. Yet it was several years before the initiative was officially announced. In a memorandum from January 1950, the Far East Command tried to clarify “a certain amount of confusion as to what measures may properly and legally be taken, in Japan, by military police to cooperate with and assist Japanese law enforcement agencies in measures designed to reduce venereal disease among the groups of prostitutes.” Although the military police’s work to reduce the high rates of venereal disease was still considered very important, the FEC remarked “that the military police [should] stay strictly within the laws themselves.” Moreover, “It is also important that [the military police] refrain from asking the Japanese police to act beyond the scope of applicable Japanese law in this matter.” The military police were still allowed to declare certain establishments off-limits to occupation personnel and to arrest violators. However, raids in brothels or so-called “pick-up areas,” as well as the questioning and arresting of sex workers, were to be conducted by the Japanese police with official warrants issued by Japanese judges or prefectural governors. Ultimately, the military police were told to assist the Japanese police only upon request and “to accompany the Japanese police to prevent interference by Occupation personnel. In such cases military police must be carefully instructed not to make arrests of such suspected prostitutes and not to ask the Japanese police to do so.”87

From the occupiers’ perspective, they were progressively modeling the Japanese police into a democratic law enforcement agency. Under close supervision, they assumed, Japanese police officers would first act as supernumerary assistants, but gradually they would be integrated into legally sanctioned, democratic police work. Such a vision, however, was quite naïve, since, to paraphrase Christopher Aldous, Japan’s police force was rather reluctant to reform its structure or personnel, and, as has already been argued in chapter 1, it continued to interfere gravely in the everyday lives of Japanese civilians from the prewar through the postwar period.⁸⁸ In addition, as Glismann’s complaint highlights, military police officers were not always shining models of reason-guided, nonarbitrary police work, but often transgressed legal boundaries themselves.

During the occupation period, Japanese police officers had to negotiate with the occupier’s military police and were usually in a disadvantaged position in direct encounters with MP officers. The Japanese police themselves developed various strategies to deal with their supposedly limited power vis-à-vis the occupiers, some of which can be highlighted in the policing of prostitution. As is evident in both above-cited cases from Kokura and Kyoto, Japanese police officers took part in collaborative vice squads, were involved in conducting raids, and could at least try to direct the vice squads’ actions, for instance by pointing out which houses were to be raided, who was to be interrogated, and who was to be arrested. On several occasions, Japanese police officers showed a high degree of confidence in their work and experience, and claimed better judgment in identifying sex workers and better knowledge of the terrain than the occupiers, which supposedly meant more efficient policing of prostitution.89 To a certain extent, their claims proved correct, since Japanese police officers had no language barrier in dealing with the civilian population and could thus more easily gather information on the habits and whereabouts of sex workers by questioning arrested sex workers and residents in entertainment and red-light districts. In addition, the Japanese police maintained their own records on sex workers and could refer to archived data to identify postwar sex workers, if, for instance, a previous professionally working licensed prostitute—licensed in imperial Japan or before the prohibition of the license system in 1946—was still in the business. Moreover, the police attempted to produce a detailed topography of postwar sex work after the abolition of licensed prostitution. To this end they produced special maps on which they marked the specific locations of brothels or street prostitutes’ gathering spots. Usually, they drew red lines (akasen) on city maps that simultaneously demarcated those areas (akasen chiku) in which police were more likely to tolerate prostitution.⁹⁰ Akasen, as Katō Masahiro has argued, was a term first used internally by the Japanese police, hardly known to the occupiers, and popularized much later to signify postwar prostitution in general. During the occupation period, these akasen-maps usually encompassed the entertainment and red-light districts as designated before the abolition of the license system, but also included the new “special restaurants” in which commercial sex was offered.⁹¹

Better knowledge of the Japanese sex work scene, however, did not inevitably mean that the Japanese police were more efficient or successful in the policing of sex work—nor that they were spared criticism for their interventions. In a newspaper article published in the Tokyo Shinbun on November 9, 1948, it was reported that the Public Security Section of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police was conducting surveys on the amusement centers in Tokyo and would be rather helpless when it came to altering the actual situation of prostitutes, whose numbers had increased to the point that they exerted a “very big evil influence.” Attention was drawn to the “fact that waitresses of 50 to 60 special tea shops each call in guests and commit prostitution in the back streets of amusement centers,” which was “a big problem from the standpoint of public sanitation.” “Moreover,” the article claimed, “most of these girls have their paramours in the ‘gurentai’ [petty gangsters] who are continually fastening quarrels,” and thus both would create “a dark street where the police is powerless.”92

Japanese civil society groups also complained about the Japanese police’s indiscriminate practices and campaigned particularly against police raids and roundups of Japanese women that were considered to focus only on “streetwalkers,” but could actually target any Japanese woman. Although Japanese police officers claimed they were able to identify sex workers, either on the spot or through their files, and distinguish them from ordinary citizens, many young Japanese women were falsely accused of “streetwalking,” arrested, and forced to undergo invasive medical examinations. Despite the fact that some of the roundups were actually performed collaboratively by the occupier’s military police and Japanese police units, public criticism of the occupiers was prohibited and often silenced, whereas the Japanese police and Japanese authorities in general could be publicly accused of wrongdoing.⁹³

Protests and campaigns against roundups were mostly launched by women activists, mostly members of liberal and left-wing parties and unions. Their critiques were later integrated into broader debates on democracy, human rights, and the role of Japan’s authorities. Nevertheless, as Mire Koikari has cogently argued, quite often such debates were centered around the image of Japanese womanhood, which was informed by nationalistic and class-based sexuality agendas that fostered the image of the innocent and respectable Japanese woman in contrast to the diseased, “ill-reputed,” lower-class street prostitute.⁹⁴ This is evident in a scandal prompted by an incident at Ikebukoro Station in Tokyo that lasted for several weeks in the winter of 1946. According to a series of testimonies, supporting statements, and newspaper articles, Iwasa Kazue and Sanami Teiko, two young members of the Nippon News-Reel Company’s labor union, left their office together on the evening of November 15, 1946, to take a train home from Ikebukoro Station. At the station, MPs, Japanese police officers, and railway employees arrested them despite the women’s protest and took them to Itabashi Police Station. Repeatedly, Iwasa and Sanami showed their union membership certificates to Japanese police officers and insisted that they were not prostitutes. At the police station were 200 to 300 women the police had arrested that night. The police harassed many women. For example, police officers asked the women how often they had had intercourse or they expressed amazement when some women claimed to be virgins, saying that they should have had sex by now. Another woman, a stage dancer, was asked to perform in front of the police officers and as Iwasa reported, “They [the police] seemed to enjoy the examination.” According to Iwasa’s testimony, the Japanese police released some women “who did not seem to be prostitutes through the back door behind the MP’s back.” Iwasa and Sanami, however, were not that lucky and were brought to Yoshiwara Hospital for venereal disease examination where they were forced to pay the examination costs themselves upfront. Apparently, one of the nurses present in the examination room told Iwasa that she should consider herself lucky this time, because “sometimes 5 or 6 MPs are present at examination.” At around 1:30 a.m. the police released both women, who had to spend the rest of the winter night in an unheated room before catching the first train home in the morning. Several days later, Iwasa reported the incident to her fellow union members, who recorded her testimony and took action by filing complaints against the police at Itabashi Police Station. The union also contacted reporters, organized protest rallies, and called on female Diet members of the Social Democratic Party and Communist Party to investigate the incident.95

What the documentation and the follow-up reports of the incident at Ikebukoro Station show are the various levels of agency of the various actors and groups of actors involved. Iwasa’s testimony helps to reconstruct the actions of Japanese police officers, who, first, dodged the MP’s authority by letting some women sneak out of the police station “behind the MP’s back,” and, second, apparently enjoyed their power in apprehending, interrogating, and demeaning the arrested women. In response to complaints and accusations they later made against the police, Iwasa’s fellow union members were told “that the round-up of prostitutes is done by the directive of MP.” Although this response also expressed the police’s sympathy for the “innocent women,” full responsibility was transferred to the occupiers’ military police and the misbehavior of some “impertinent policemen,” who had not yet learned their lesson in democracy.⁹⁶ In a subsequent statement, Takekawa Renko, a close friend of Iwasa’s family, declared that in private she had been told more details of the incident, which sustained the impression that Japanese police officers took no responsibility for their actions. When falsely arrested girls protested, the police officers are said to have told them they were “very sorry, but please follow the MP. We were defeated by the war.” Yet as Takekawa also testified to the Women’s Branch of CI&E’s Information Division, Japanese police officers were nonetheless thoroughly involved in the arrest. At Yoshiwara Hospital, according to Takekawa’s report, “One girl ran away just before entering the hospital. Upon finding her missing, policemen there got mad and ran out to catch her. The girl was caught and taken to hospital. The policemen beat her with a stick several times in the next room. The girls all heard the noise and screams. They were so scared that they made up their mind to follow the order of the policemen.”97 The military police were also personally approached by the labor union, but rejected any criticism altogether and apparently told the union members: “You have no right to lodge a protest with us. . . . It is up to us to decide how [to] treat women we have rounded up. You [have] no right to say anything about it.”⁹⁸

The union members, not satisfied with the official or unofficial responses, organized protest rallies, contacted Diet members, and also turned to Ethel B. Weed, chief of the CI&E’s Women’s Information Branch. The CI&E’s Women’s Information Branch recorded the above-cited testimonies and circulated Weed’s report among occupation authorities.⁹⁹ Even a petition that complained of arrests of “innocent girls,” who “were compelled to submit to a medical examination at a special hospital built for venereal examination of prostitutes” was composed and sent directly to General Douglas MacArthur. The petition called on MacArthur to judge for himself, since “not all women who have to walk on the streets of Tokyo are prostitutes,” and that “to the pure, young women . . . being suspected of being prostitutes is a great shame to them.”¹⁰⁰ There is no record of MacArthur’s response, or any indication that he actually read the petition. The accusations, however, became popularized and the American press also published articles on police raids that erroneously picked up nonprostitutes. Through Pacific Stars and Stripes, United Press reported on women protesting against “alleged indiscriminate round-ups of ‘clean working women as well as virgins’ in periodic drives against ‘street girls.’”¹⁰¹

On May 4, 1948, an incident similar to the one in Ikebukoro occurred at Yurakucho Station, a popular Tokyo spot for sex workers during the occupation period. According to the Nippon Times, at about 8 p.m., Ogura Keiko and Funakoshi Michiko, both nurses at St. Luke’s Hospital, and Nomura Toshiko, an English-language teacher at Ginza Church, were on their way home from work, probably trying to catch a train, when Tokyo police raided Yurakucho Station to round up prostitutes. On that evening, the police rounded up almost 200 alleged sex workers at the station and in the nearby area, and brought them to Toyotama Hospital for venereal disease examination. Among the arrested were Ogura, Funakoshi, and Nomura along with twenty other women who asserted that they were not sex workers. All of them protested their arrest and tried to prove the police’s accusations false by supplying credentials from their legitimate workplaces and claiming that they were only passing through Yurakucho Station on the way home from work. The police ignored their protests, kept them detained overnight in the hospital, and forced them to undergo a medical examination. Nomura described Toyotama Hospital to the newspaper as a “filthy” place where she was examined for venereal disease despite her “tearful protest” before leaving with a skin infection. “For the detention and examination,” the Nippon Times stated, “each of the women were made to pay 200 yen.”102

After Sato Tsukichi, a member of the Democratic-Liberal Party, and other Diet members heard of the incident, they started to organize a protest against the Tokyo police. Among the protestors was Oishi Yoshie, a socialist Diet member of the Social Reform Party (shakai kakushitō) who, according to the Nippon Times, called the police’s attitude in rounding up innocent women “unreasonable and malicious, and an insult to Japanese womanhood.” The newspaper also reported that Chief of Police Tanaka Eiichi had been “called before the Diet Committee [and] expressed his regret and promised a full investigation of the alleged cases.”¹⁰³ Whether any police officers were ever charged or suspended from duty for their misconduct is not recorded. In following up on the accusations, however, Yosano Hikaru, head of the Contagious Disease Control Section in Tokyo’s Health Bureau, did inspect Toyotama Hospital. In his report Yosano stated, “I regret deeply that there was some misunderstanding about innocent girls, to cause trouble.” Moreover, he took full responsibility for what he called a “misunderstanding,” which he based on his failure to clearly instruct the clinic staff on “the definition of innocent girls.” According to Yosano, the innocence of women brought to the clinic could be proven by their virginity, which led him to the charitable act of waiving the examination fees for Funakoshi and Nomura—in Yosano’s words: “no charge due virgin.”¹⁰⁴

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As the reported incidents at Ikebukoro and Yurakocho Station highlight, the occupation army’s military police as well as the Japanese police discriminatorily arrested women on false accusations of streetwalking. The police officers’ conduct was often quite brutal, both when it came to intimidating arrested women and in acts of immediate physical violence. One reason for such transgressions might be the ambiguities of legal definitions. However, since it was usually only women who were accused of prostitution and spreading venereal disease, although no national law in occupied Japan prohibited prostitution as such, and sex workers were only prosecuted under the Venereal Disease Prevention Law and Minor Offenses Law, which lacked an exact definition of prostitution and of the persons engaging in sex work, the police’s perception that every woman was a potential streetwalker and carrier of venereal disease unravels as a systemic feature of the policing of prostitution during the occupation of Japan. No doubt, the discriminatory approach of arresting any female “suspect” obviously engendered criticism among those women the police had falsely accused and arrested, and the treatment they received by the police and at hospitals was unacceptable and inexcusable. Of course, sex workers were just as critical of the police’s actions, yet their complaints were not recorded, usually ignored, and thus silenced by Japan’s authorities and civil society activists. However, it is also remarkable how the often traumatic individual experiences of those falsely accused, which have to be taken seriously, were collectivized in the critique of and protest against roundups. Initially, it was mostly women activists speaking out and Japanese officials responding. But both of these supposedly opposite, contradictory sides’ articulations were beholden to the same discourse on chaste, pure, and respectable Japanese womanhood—and this is where the debates among the occupiers significantly diverged from those among the occupied. Echoing the legitimization of the licensed prostitution system in imperial Japan as well as the concept of the “female floodwall” in postdefeat Japan, the latter discourse actually reproduced the older dichotomy of the innocent and respectable woman versus the lower-class, “ill-famed” streetwalking sex worker who undermined military security, public health, and societal stability. Arguably, it was the false accusations against “innocent” women and the confusion between them and the “unrespectable” sex workers that motivated and perpetuated the roundup scandals. All participants in this discourse—from the “innocent” women who were arrested, the female activists and Diet representatives, and the left-wing and conservative union and party members up to Japan’s police and public health authorities—seem to have shared a similar notion of what kind of sexuality had to be protected and which one had to be contained: the ultimate signifier, the irrevocable proof of innocence, was the virginity of the Japanese woman, which was apparently the basis of her and ultimately Japan’s purity. Or, as the labor union’s report with Iwasa Kazue’s testimony put it:

Thus all the Japanese women are exposed to the danger of being arrested as prostitutes at any time at any place. Japanese women regard it most terrible disgrace to receive a medical examination for such a reason and it can be a good cause for suicide and might prevent some women from getting married. Moreover, it means infringement upon people’s rights that they give girls medical examinations against the will of them and in spite of their proving by every possible means that they are not prostitutes. Our union thinks this is not a mere personal question of its members and that it is the problem of all the Japanese women and wants to appeal to public opinion.105

It is difficult to determine whether a clearly defined legal status of prostitution, or a general prohibition of prostitution for that matter, would have helped those women falsely arrested or the sex workers themselves. Previous studies have shown that strict systems of prostitution regulation did not always result in protection for sex workers or prevent women from being stigmatized as potential sex workers and carriers of venereal disease.¹⁰⁶ It is at any rate evident that the interventions imposed by the occupiers, often in cooperation with the occupied, such as the criminalization of sex workers, off-limits regulations, raids and roundups, had little success in suppressing prostitution or even in limiting sexual encounters between occupier and occupied. Nonetheless, the debates among the occupiers’ legal sections and the control practices of commanders, law enforcement agencies, and local authorities did influence the intimate encounters between occupiers and occupied. They sanitized sex in a way that promoted informal regulations and arrangements between police and the sex business that tolerated sexual encounters between occupation army servicemen and women of occupied Japan—so long as they were free of venereal disease. The perceived excesses of servicemen and sex workers, whether in the form of hygienic carelessness, intemperate violence, or transgressions of racial boundaries, however, were severely countered and prosecuted. Most significantly, the policing of prostitution and venereal disease had an impact on the spatial configurations of sex work in occupied Japan. Instead of moving underground, as many opponents of strict repression had anticipated, sex work became overtly public, but was restricted to specific localities. Back alleys, certain brothels, “avec-hotels,” railway stations, and “special restaurants” were places where commercial sex was offered and bought. Sex work thus never vanished, but was organized and practiced in an ongoing dance with the police interventions of the occupiers’ and occupied’s regulators alike.