4

Morale

Character Guidance and Moral Purification

MORALIZING SERVICEMEN’S BODIES: CHARACTER
GUIDANCE, SEX EDUCATION, AND REHABILITATION

In a “unique manner,” General William Arthur Beiderlinden wrote in a report from November 1948 to the Character Guidance Council of SCAP’s General Headquarters, the Eighth Army Replacement Training Center in Atsugi, Japan, instructed U.S. servicemen in venereal disease control, sexuality, and hygiene. The center had built a Venereal Disease Museum that consisted of four rooms through which servicemen could tour and attend lectures with charts and posters that outlined the type and number of venereal diseases and their ways of being transmitted and treated. In one room, fifteen approximately three-foot-tall wax figures displayed the various stages of venereal diseases. In another room, according to Beiderlinden’s report, the center had set up “a typically Oriental room” with “a voluptuous figure of a Japanese women in a semi-reclining position.” Against this backdrop and with the help of various drawings, the museum’s docent explained to servicemen the characteristics of the prostitution business in occupied Japan and highlighted the high number and frequency of prostitutes’ customers. The “voluptuous figure” of the prostitute herself was personified with the name “Kimiko.” In an accompanying lecture the museum docent stressed the high chance of venereal disease infection from Kimiko, and quoted her: “Last night I had ten friends. One of them had VD, but of course I didn’t know it.” In return, the lecture continued, Kimiko infected the next ten friends. The show ended with a comic strip of “Pvt. John Doe,” who was “getting shot with a very large needle,” and a depiction of Kimiko along with nine other girls being arrested by the military police and sent to a venereal disease hospital for health inspection and treatment.1

Basically, the morale taught in the Eighth Army Replacement Training Center’s Venereal Disease Museum was that venereal disease could be acquired only through sexual contact and that servicemen should practice continence because, as the outline of the museum stated, they “don’t need a woman twice a week or twice a month or twice a year to keep healthy.” Sexual exposure was highly risky, “because: 9 of 10 Japanese women you can pick up have VD.”² As has been shown in previous chapters, similar to other branches of the occupation regime, the occupation army’s educators made women—and especially in their role as prostitutes and “pick-ups”—solely responsible for the spread of venereal disease. This perception echoed a more general image of Japan constructed in this museum in accordance with orientalist fantasies, signified by the “Oriental room” and its inhabitant—the “voluptuous” Kimiko—both of which portrayed Japan as a sexualized and promiscuous country where sexual opportunities were cheap and available anywhere and for anyone. However, according to this logic, Japan was also a threat to the occupier’s health and morale due to a supposed promiscuous carelessness and ignorance resulting from an obsolete health system and, more importantly, from a lack of public health and moral education. The dangerous consequences, however, could supposedly be controlled through certain precautions the occupation army provided: Whereas military surgeons and members of the Public Health and Welfare Section were convinced of their modern, scientific medical prophylaxis and VD contact tracing, others believed in high moral standards and spiritual defense forces based on self-discipline, continence, and character.

In the museum’s presentation of the prostitution business and its control in Japan, all the regulatory attempts and efforts by the occupation regime discussed in previous chapters came together. Educators made servicemen familiar with the police raids on brothels and red-light districts, the forced hospitalization and medical examination of prostitutes, as well as the medical procedures for venereally infected servicemen. However, educational facilities like the Venereal Disease Museum in Atsugi were adding yet another dimension of the intimate to the occupier’s regulation of sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease. They amplified the moralizing aspect of their regulatory attempts to create a desired masculine subjectivity of the occupiers. Sex education programs in the form of lectures, seminars, and exhibitions functioned for police and medical control alike as powerful mechanisms to sanitize sex. Such programs educated the occupation army’s servicemen in a specific militarized masculinity according to norms of responsibility and heterosexuality grounded in Judeo-Christian morals and American ideals of domesticity and community. The occupation army did not only expect their soldiers and sailors to be disciplined fighters. As Donna Alvah has stressed in her study of U.S. military family life abroad, the military wanted their servicemen to be “fundamentally gentle and loving people attached to families”—mostly as present or future fathers.3 Although never explicitly named, the ideals occupation educators proposed generally referred to a particular model of “whiteness” and its style in gender, domesticity, and community building, which they constructed as a supposedly safe haven for American manhood.⁴

Female, nonwhite sexuality was only indirectly of interest to the occupation army’s educators. Certainly, they regarded the sexuality of female people of color, particularly as embodied by the Japanese prostitute, as hazardous to the health and discipline of the occupation personnel, because they believed female sex workers were solely responsible for spreading venereal disease and luring servicemen into sexual adventures. Educators attributed these dangers to the prostitutes’ lack of education and moral standards—characteristics that were extended from the figure of the prostitute to the whole of occupied society. The dangers the contacts between sex workers and servicemen evoked were thus not only perceived as simple health issues, but also moralized and politicized. According to moral educators, a high visibility of venereal disease among servicemen would signify promiscuity, immorality, and vice, undermining the ideals of the occupiers’ postwar mission and potentially disturbing the general relations between occupiers and occupied.⁵ This is well apparent in the anxiety that resonated in the debates of commanding officers, military chaplains, surgeons, and public health officers from all branches and echelons of the occupation regime—all male and white—who repeatedly talked about the sexuality of their servicemen and the sexual opportunities in occupied Japan. And officials in the U.S. War Department as well as American journalists articulated deep concerns that the supposedly ubiquitous promiscuity and lack of morality in Japan was endangering the occupation project.⁶ To counter such images, the occupation administration and authorities in the United States spent much time, effort, and resources in establishing and maintaining the ideal of a mature, masculine, rational, and benevolent victor in contrast to an immature, feminine, and subordinate Japan.7

The creation of postwar images of the United States and Japan involved various regulatory strategies aimed at the occupiers’ and occupieds’ racialized sexuality that were quite similar to strategies applied in other, previous colonial contexts.⁸ From the perspective of the occupation administration, issues of racialized sexuality were not only influential in the relations between the occupiers and occupied, but to the same extent among the occupiers themselves. Occupation administrators and educators propagated particular models of “whiteness” as the desired ideals in family and community building, and perceived them as standards that they expected the occupied as well as servicemen of color to live up to. In addition, they reproduced the color line within the occupation regime by systematically specifying African American servicemen as more inclined to promiscuity and venereal disease. One striking example is the constant listing of venereal disease infection rates in racially categorized health statistics. Military commanders, administrators, educators, military police officers, and surgeons uncritically cited these numbers to affirm allegedly racial characteristics, such as the notion that black servicemen were hypersexual and immature, and thus prone to higher rates of venereal disease infection. They repeatedly emphasized such racist prejudices by relating race to insubordination and lack of discipline. This was meant to explain the incapacity of African American servicemen to comply with the standards of military conduct when it came to discipline, hygiene, and character—the supposed bulwarks against venereal disease infection.⁹

The first half of this chapter highlights the occupation regime’s regulatory attempts to sanitize the servicemen’s sexuality from a moral perspective. The main agents involved in the moral regulation of occupation servicemen were the U.S. military’s chaplains, but also members of the military command, the Special Services, and to a lesser extent even public health officers and military surgeons, whose usually social hygienic approach to venereal disease could also be influenced by a moral impetus. They shared a general consensus when it came to what they saw as sexuality’s inevitable negative underside—promiscuity, prostitution, and venereal disease—which they constantly connected to the fear of loosening certain moral standards and the erosion of personal as well as political integrity. All participants in the debates on moral control stressed, to varying degrees, the necessity of the servicemen’s self-discipline, abstinence, and character, which were the keywords commonly used to demand that they refrain from nonreproductive sex as well as excessive alcohol consumption. Of course, these debates mostly took place at higher command levels and the ideals of soldierly behavior, mind, and body outlined in this chapter might not reflect the diversity of attitudes among ordinary soldiers. Nevertheless, moral issues at play in the concepts and programs outlined and implemented to regulate servicemen’s sexuality shed light on significant dimensions of the sanitization of sex during the occupation period. They accentuate the occupation regime’s desire for strong, manly, and heterosexual men, especially in their role as soldiers and sailors, who were believed to be the backbone of national security and even the global stability of the entire “free world.” To highlight how the level of aggressiveness in the programs and evaluations of character guidance and sex education could vary across areas occupied by the U.S. military in the postwar era, a comparative look at the occupation of Korea by the USAFIK serves as an example of their broader scope beyond occupied Japan. The second half of this chapter will then turn to Japanese contemporaries and their narratives of morality and sexual danger. They were less concerned with the physical and spiritual prowess of the occupation personnel than with the Japanese sex workers who, by catering to servicemen, supposedly nourished moral decay in postwar Japan. This chapter thus highlights the astonishing similarities and differences in the pervasive, moralizing transnational discourse on the sanitization of sex among occupiers and occupied, which was grounded in a shared legacy of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century moral reform and social hygiene.

“Moral Hygiene” and Cultures of the Cold War in Occupied Japan

In Pedagogy of Democracy, Mire Koikari has argued that the “politics of sexuality that evolved in U.S.-occupied Japan,” to which moral and sex education were essential, “had much to do with the Cold War understanding of venereal disease as not simply a public health issue.” Rather, occupation authorities regarded sexual deviance and venereal infections more broadly as “a threat to national security, the American way of life, and ultimately democracy.”10 This line of argument closely relates the discourse on character and the regulation of prostitution, venereal disease, and sexuality in occupied Japan to an emerging ideology and culture of the Cold War in the United States. With regard to the content and rhetoric of the discourse, the connection neatly fits and seems to be a meaningful framework for understanding the desire for, and articulation of, a responsible masculinity—as well as the demonization of sexual and political deviance. In the postwar United States, the domestic space of the home, with its ideal of a middle-class nuclear family and heteronormative gender roles, was constructed as the last bulwark of national security, American-style democracy, and communist containment.11 On the other side of the same coin, postwar America was haunted by a homophobic panic, in which especially gay and lesbian, but also so-called promiscuous and deviant men and women—often labeled as irresponsible, weak, or perverted—were believed to jeopardize the domestic sanctum, as they were especially liable to sexual and/or communist seduction.¹² American Cold War ideologues apparently borrowed much of their language from medicine and public health, for instance when describing the probably most prominent negative foil—communism—as “the contaminated ‘Other’—a metaphorical virus that threatened to infect the world and subvert the United States where it was most vulnerable.”¹³ Using pathologizing and discriminatory medical terminology, they demonized promiscuity, homosexuality, and venereal disease in a similar way as they did communism, as alleged dangers to national security and societal stability. Moreover, since the end of World War II and throughout the 1950s, these ideologues often perceived the supposed threats of communism and illicit and “abnormal” sexuality—especially homosexuality—as tightly intertwined dangers that would undermine American society.¹⁴ A responsible, heterosexual, and strong character was hence considered necessary to guarantee their strongly nationalistic versions of the ideals of freedom, liberty, and democracy. The image of such a character, moreover, facilitated America’s self-consciousness of its global role: to lead and protect the “free world” during the era of the Cold War.¹⁵

The domestic U.S. postwar panic about homosexuality had a much smaller impact on the occupation of Japan. Same-sex relations and practices most certainly existed among the occupation troops, and male sex workers also catered to U.S. servicemen—although on much a smaller scale than female sex workers.¹⁶ In Japanese pulp mass media, male cross-dressing prostitutes, who usually had only Japanese clients, even became a popular object of curiosity, arousal, and scandal.¹⁷ SCAP’s administrators, however, hardly ever mentioned homosexuality among servicemen or among Japanese civilians, and probably systematically silenced the issue of same-sex relations. Among all the occupation records I scanned I could find only two exceptions. The first is an incident reported on March 9, 1946 by the U.S. Military Police in Yokohama, in which a Sergeant Edward Muldowney was accused of having apprehended two sailors and, according to the police report, luring them into an abandoned building for a drink of whiskey, where he instead ripped the sailors’ trousers open and offered them a “blow job.” When the military police were notified, Muldowney was imprisoned for “attempted sodomy.”18 The second case is an allegation against two servicemen, Guilberto Herrera and Tom J. Marple, who on April 23, 1950 allegedly committed the “crime of sodomy by feloniously and against the order of nature having carnal connection with [a Japanese national], a human, by placing his sexual organ in the mouth of said [Japanese national].” As far as can be gleaned from the remaining records, both of the accused servicemen refused to give a statement, and their superiors, as well as the staff judge advocate, advised calling in a trial to “eliminate” them from military service.¹⁹ The most likely disciplinary actions against Muldowney, Herrera, and Marple thus followed the U.S. military’s antihomosexual policies that did not criminalize homosexuality itself, but only the practice of sodomy, defined as oral or anal sex among same-sex partners.²⁰ Of course, other forms of discrimination against gay and lesbian members of the armed forces obviously persisted, and, to quote Francine D’Amico’s observation on the U.S. military, “men suspected of being gay were deemed mentally unsuitable for service; those already in service whose sexuality became suspect were either dishonourably discharged or forcibly ‘rehabilitated’ and retained, as military authorities feared troops would claim to be gay to avoid service.”²¹ Nevertheless, during World War II, same-sex relationships and practices had apparently been considered less dangerous to the war effort than the widespread infections with venereal disease, mostly among heterosexual servicemen, and they had consequently received less attention—an understanding that was probably perpetuated in the early postwar years.²² During the course of the occupation period, however, the occupiers’ moral educators did talk about homosexuality—if only in an implicit way—by putting such an enormous emphasis on a heterosexuality strategically constructed as the “normal” sexual behavior of American manhood. Nonetheless, the same discriminatory and polarizing language of disease and conspiracy applied in discussions of homosexuality and other “sexual perversions” in the postwar United States can be traced in the descriptions (and ascriptions) of sex work, promiscuity, and sexual immorality in many files of the occupation administration. Similarly, supposed sexual aberration and deviance were increasingly discussed in psychological terms and pathologized as “maladjustments.”23 However, there is a major distinction between the discourse in postwar America and in occupied Japan. In the discourse of the occupation forces, there is a consistently strong emphasis on the bodily rehabilitation of “sexual deviance,” whereas in postwar America, Cold War ideologues increasingly used psychoanalytical theory, psychotherapeutic methods, and psychological profiling to counter the supposedly psychological perils of homosexuality, promiscuity, venereal disease, and communism.²⁴

The reference to an emerging Cold War ideology of democracy, freedom, and heteronormativity is undeniably a thought-provoking framework for scrutinizing “character building” or “character guidance,” as the moral and sex education programs were called during the occupation of Japan. The politics of sexuality were indeed more than a public health issue, and contemporaries perceived venereal disease as a trans­national threat to military personnel overseas, to American families and communities domestically, and to the aim of global democracy zealously promulgated by the occupiers. Yet a focus on Cold War ideology alone, one-dimensionally translated into the context of occupied Japan, is problematic in terms of chronology. The panic surrounding “sexual deviance” and political subversion in the United States only began to emerge in the early postwar years, and the language and methods used by American moral and sex educators in occupied Japan in fact predate the Cold War propaganda of domesticity. Moreover, Mire Koikari’s argument neglects the longer, global, imperial history of debates on prostitution and venereal disease and their relation to public health, domesticity, and community that began to develop in moral reform and social hygiene movements at the end of the nineteenth century. Their legacy, I claim, had an enormous impact on the politics of sexuality in occupied Japan.²⁵

Globally, agents of the state and nongovernmental volunteer groups campaigned against moral decay and the “vices” of alcohol and drug consumption, sex-trafficking, prostitution, and venereal disease. Probably the most prominent ones were American and American-sponsored evangelical missionary networks and transnationally communicating associations like the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).²⁶ To counter such “vices,” many moral reform groups preached evangelical faith and intended to educate the world’s populace in continence and abstinence. The aim was to create a responsible and sound character with a healthy body, mind, and spirit that would not lapse into the allegedly evil temptations of sex, alcohol, and drugs, but would instead foster the home, community, and ultimately humanity at large. To this end, political campaigns for abolitionist legislation and law enforcement supplemented their efforts with educational campaigns in literature, lectures, seminars, and, most notably, supervised athletics and gymnastics.27

The more secular social hygienists of the occupation regime, like the members of the PHW, dealt similarly with the issue of prostitution and venereal disease. Since the nineteenth century, physicians, public health officials, and legislators had extolled the advantages of a prostitution industry regulated by means of police surveillance and medical control. They believed prostitution itself to be a “necessary evil” for public health and morality, because it channeled the male sex drive and ultimately protected bourgeois women and families.²⁸ In the early twentieth century, however, physicians and social hygiene scientists began to agree that sexual abstinence was not unhealthy for men and even declared abstinence the safest way to avoid venereal infection. Furthermore, it was scientifically proven that venereal diseases had a negative influence on fertility and biological reproduction, and physicians increasingly questioned the reliability of previous medical inspections of prostitutes. Against the backdrop of this scientific knowledge, social hygienists became increasingly critical of the notion that prostitution was a necessary social institution. And similarly to moral reformist thought, social hygiene focused more and more on the social and moral conditions that favored prostitution and caused higher venereal disease rates.²⁹

Thus, although there were obvious tensions about broader aims and means that continued into the late twentieth century and even until today, moral reform and social hygiene should not be misconstrued as simply two diametrically opposed camps.³⁰ In the United States in particular, both moral reformers and social hygienists have been campaigning for a “healthier” society since the early twentieth century. They formed, according to Alan Hunt, “an uneasy alliance between ‘purity’ and ‘social hygiene’,” and “coexisted under the banner of ‘moral hygiene’, stressing the need to challenge the ‘conspiracy of silence’ that impeded frank discussion of sex and the continuing repudiation of the ‘double standard’.”³¹ To break this “silence,” both promoted sex education to an equal degree as a necessary means of enlightening the public about the dangers of prostitution, promiscuity, and venereal disease, as well as the benefits of stable families and communities. Volunteer groups like the YMCA and other nonprofit organizations such as the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) were both funded and supported by the U.S. Public Health Service to develop comprehensive sex education—although a single, centrally planned program failed to be implemented.32 Especially around the time the United States entered World War I, there was a shared desire for an “American Plan” that included repression of prostitution, rapid medical treatment, and sex education. The general idea was to protect American civilians and servicemen from venereal infections, both domestically and overseas, while also fostering civilian moral integrity and military efficiency. In this context, one pressing example of indirect collaboration between moral reform and social hygiene were the recreational programs and activities in and near military camps provided by the YMCA and the ASHA, both of which the War Department’s Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) employed.³³

Both moral reformers and social hygienists emphasized character building and shared the conviction that sex education was essential for achieving a decrease in prostitution and venereal disease. Moral reformers obviously focused more intently on morality, but also on physical fitness as the backbone of character, and they also called for an immediate and general repression of prostitution. Social hygienists, for their part, did not want to abolish prostitution for moral reasons alone, and stressed the immediate necessity of venereal disease prophylaxis, medical treatment, and other methods such as contact tracing to counter the spread of venereal disease and its negative impact on society.³⁴ Nevertheless, both groups perceived the prevention of venereal disease as necessary for protecting not only individual patients, but more importantly the family, community, and society. As Ray Lyam Wilbur, president of the ASHA, put it in December 1945, the goal of social hygiene was “a people healthy, normal [sic], well-balanced—fit to build successful families, homes, communities—as foundation-stones of national strength and progress.” Sex education, legislation, law enforcement, and medical measures were only the first step. The “high objective” of a healthy nation could “only be achieved when all of us—young and old—understand and accept full responsibility to ourselves and others for building the kind of characters and lives that will not only withstand assault by evil but will also act powerfully for the good of one and all.”³⁵ As this quote indicates, moral reform and social hygiene approaches increasingly blurred the line between religious beliefs and scientific knowledge: Social hygienists anchored their secular understanding of social hygiene in religiously inspired morality, and moral reformers relied heavily on the scientific reasoning provided by social hygiene scholars and physicians to articulate abolitionist arguments.36 In sum, both moral reform and social hygiene were part of a broader biopolitics that was concerned with the health and security of the whole population.³⁷ Controversies still remained about the most efficient tools to protect the population. These controversies, embedded in a shared belief in character as the ultimate means of attaining social and moral stability, extended also into the occupation of Japan and shaped the way U.S. servicemen were educated about sexuality.³⁸

The legacy of moral reform and social hygiene in occupied Japan is omnipresent in the rhetoric, ideals, and methods of the occupation period’s “character guidance” schemes. Traces of this legacy can be found in the biographies of occupation period moral educators, like the above-quoted General William Arthur Beiderlinden, who was the chairman of the GHQ’s Character Guidance Council. Beiderlinden was born and raised in Springfield, Missouri, where he attended Drury College, a school founded by congregational missionaries, before he enlisted in 1917. After enlistment, he served with the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I, was later stationed in the Philippines from 1934 to 1937, and commanded the 44th Infantry Division in campaigns in Europe during World War II. In 1946, he was assigned to the SCAP administration and served in the Far East Command in Japan and Korea until the outbreak of the Korean War.³⁹ It is therefore possible that in his premilitary life, Beiderlinden had been educated in the ideals of America’s moral reformers in an educational institution that was tied into the networks of evangelical missionaries. In addition, he was very familiar with the U.S. Army’s overseas operations and military life, and most definitely acquainted with the issue of venereal disease, which had been a major problem for the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I and for the U.S. Army’s Philippine Department during the 1930s and 1940s, to name two examples.⁴⁰

Social hygienic thought likewise circulated in other occupation institutions, especially among members of the Public Health and Welfare Section (PHW). The PHW claimed to be science-based in their approach to controlling venereal disease and regulating prostitution and servicemen’s sexuality. For instance, whereas exponents of solely moral “character building” condemned the very existence of prostitution, members of the PHW claimed that closely monitoring prostitution with scientific tools of surveillance (statistics and VD contact tracing), ensuring the use of prophylaxis (condoms and prophylactic facilities), and providing treatment with modern drugs such as penicillin was a more realistic way of controlling venereal disease and its epidemic spread. Hence, in their concern about the servicemen’s mental and physical health and discipline, tensions arose between different branches of the occupation regime over the most efficient strategies to tackle the problem of venereal disease and prostitution. As will be shown in the following, the occupation regime’s moral and sex educators, ranging from commanding officers to chaplains and public health officers, all tried to implement—either directly or in a modified form—certain ideals of moral reform and social hygiene, and mingled them with the rising ideology of the Cold War. There was broad consensus that a strong soldierly character grounded in military discipline, responsibility of the citizen-soldier, healthy recreation, and athletic body culture would help to limit the spread of venereal disease. However, the emphasis varied among the range of educators, and in particular the disagreement over whether to teach abstinence or medical prophylaxis gave rise to controversies, tensions, and conflicts between the military command, the Chaplain’s Association, and the Public Health and Welfare Section.41 Nevertheless, all involved branches of the occupation regime shared the conviction that moral, social, and hygienic stability—signified by the nuclear family as its supposed guarantor—would limit sexual immorality, decrease the prevalence of prostitution, and prevent the spread of venereal disease—and it was this conviction that guided their attempts to create physically, psychologically, and spiritually sanitized servicemen.

“Character Guidance”: Concepts of and Exercises
in Moral and Sex Education

Various branches of the occupation regime were involved in the campaigns for sex education and character building. The military high command assigned the main responsibility for developing a character guidance program to the Venereal Disease Council, which was established in December 1946 with the Far East Command’s (FEC) Venereal Disease Indoctrination Team and later succeeded by the Character Guidance Council in August 1948. General William Arthur Beiderlinden chaired the latter council, which consisted of the FEC’s assistant chief of staff, chaplain, special service officer, troop information and education officer, inspector general, surgeon, provost marshal, public information officer, chief of the public health and welfare section, and judge advocate.⁴² The FEC also established Character Guidance Councils on division, regiment, and battalion levels in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Marianas-Bonins, and Ryukyus Command. General Headquarters in Tokyo suggested that they meet monthly to discuss and collect new data on venereal disease cases. The collected data, actions taken, and further suggestions were to be communicated to the council in Tokyo that gathered all reports. The Character Guidance Council, however, was really an advisory board with no decision-making power. The implementation of moral and sex education as well as venereal disease control in general was still considered a command responsibility. Nevertheless, the Character Guidance Council’s plans were still highly influential through their legitimation of the GHQ’s Supreme Commander of Allied Powers and had a serious impact on what the council called the “ways of combatting the disease.”43

The Character Guidance Council provided recommendations for all units in the Far East Command and usually followed a “moral code” grounded in Judeo-Christian values of faith, respectability, family, and community. According to an outline of the council’s objectives, it proposed teaching all servicemen “an appreciation of the ideas and ideals inherent in the ‘American way of life.’” This included a broad “sense of moral responsibility for individual attitudes and behavior,” which could be achieved through military training, athletics and recreation, but also by education, community service, fostering the heterosexual nuclear family, and, of course, practicing abstinence from alcohol and sex. The result would be a healthy, stable, and efficiently functioning military, which could take on and fulfill leadership responsibility.⁴⁴ The council’s proposal focused solely on the construction of a desired male soldier subjectivity with a self-disciplined character. The council imagined that such ideal soldiers would in turn go on to influence all social relations “back home” after their return from military service. Women, the female body, and femininity were only indirectly present, either as an ideal in need of protection or—usually in the form of the prostitute or promiscuous “pick-up”—as a danger to the physical and moral health of the male body of the soldier, who needed character to protect himself.

One source for this rationale, which was known to the council’s chairman, Beiderlinden, was the recapitulatory essay “What Is a Tough Soldier?” by Major General John M. Devine, first published in the September 1949 issue of the Army Information Digest and reproduced in Beiderlinden’s records. In his essay, Devine argued in accordance with moral reformist rhetoric that “character guidance is not, as many still believe, merely another name for venereal disease control; it is a vital part of military training—training that is concerned with the whole man.” Devine thus promoted a sense of manhood in which “[t]oughness has nothing whatever to do with how much beer he can drink, how many obscene words he knows, how vulgar he can be, in how many ways he can show his lack of respect for himself and everybody else.” Because: “That kind of tough soldier does not win battles. . . . He won’t fight for anything, because to him there is nothing worth fighting for.” Rather, manhood derived from the trinity of “[t]oughness, gentleness, courage—indeed, all the human qualities that make the soldier.” Those are the traits Devine wanted to be part of the military’s training program, in which the “soldier must not only be built up physically and alerted mentally; he must also acquire a sense of moral and spiritual values.” Devine ascribed to the chaplain a central role in fostering such values, but he also believed that hard work, interest in hobbies, and general education would “help to make the soldier a better and more alert citizen.” Furthermore, sports, sportsmanship, and fair play were considered essential tools to build character and to “develop the well-rounded man.” Ultimately, as Devine was convinced, character guidance was “part of an integrated program for making men out of boys.”45

In the Character Guidance Council meetings, Beiderlinden promoted the ideals of responsibility, religious values, sense of community, interest in hobbies, education, and sports, all of which he believed to be necessary defenses against the “vices” of alcohol, narcotics, and adventurous, illicit, nonreproductive sexual habits. Yet throughout the meetings and discussions of the Character Guidance Council, the main focus was on venereal disease and its control—apparently the most notorious issue of the occupation period. In one session of the council’s meeting on November 29, 1949, Beiderlinden repeatedly emphasized that all these broader aspects should be approached from the perspective of character guidance, but in Japan “because of circumstances VD has become the greatest problem.” The keeper of the minutes, probably echoing Beiderlinden, explained these “circumstances” in the following way: “In certain respects we have not been able to effect our moral code upon the Japanese. Prostitutes in Japan have always had more freedom than in the ZI [Zone of Interior]. The Chairman reminded each member to be ever alert for corrective measures and to present them whenever they are encountered.”⁴⁶ Beiderlinden believed in an American-style moral code and saw it as his mission to educate the allegedly immoral Japanese people, whom he perceived as not yet capable of living up to the standards the U.S. occupiers would impose upon them. He seems to have been convinced that this lack of morality and education had a lot to do with sexuality, especially in its nonreproductive form of prostitution, which was more freely permitted by the Japanese than the Americans—“circumstances” that would only maintain low moral standards. This supposed lack that Beiderlinden attributed to the Japanese was, moreover, not only an obstacle to their own improvement, it also endangered America by way of the noxious effect of venereal diseases on American manhood. This in turn affected American families, communities, and ultimately the entire nation. Given this paranoid logic, it is not surprising that Beiderlinden insisted on being “ever alert” against all vicious dangers and on intervening immediately with what he called “corrective measures.”

The Army’s Chaplains Association availed itself of an equally strident rhetoric against the “vices” and also called for thorough character guidance guidelines. As early as January 1946, the Army-Navy Chaplains Association of the Tokyo-Yokohama Chapter filed a report to the Supreme Commander to convey its opinions and recommendations on the matter of prostitution. It believed that, especially in Japan, prostitution produced a “moral degradation that is exceptionally widespread and unusually ruinous to the character of American troops.” While the chaplains recognized that prostitution was a difficult matter, also due to the acceptance prostitution supposedly enjoyed in Japan, they criticized the occupation administration’s efforts to limit prostitution as being “unenlightened, unrealistic, directly harmful to morality and in contravention to the stated policy of the War Department.” The chaplains were trying to convince the Supreme Commander to institute a general ban on prostitution, withdraw all support and toleration, and put all houses of prostitution off-limits to military personnel. They also maintained that the notion that controlled and supervised prostitution would decrease rates of venereal disease was unrealistic and that it would merely “promote the growth of immorality.” The chaplains therefore demanded the immediate discontinuation of medical inspections of brothels, maintenance of prophylactic stations, and even educational campaigns against venereal disease, on the grounds that they put “a false emphasis upon bodily health and show[ed] little or no awareness of shamefulness of sexual immorality.” Last but not least, they suggested that those commissioned and noncommissioned officers who publicly announced the “localities and prices of houses of prostitution and . . . provid[ed] government transportation to and from such houses [and thus] facilitat[ed] the growth of sexual promiscuity” did not maintain “standards of decency and morality” and therefore needed to be severely punished.47

In order to cope with the issue of prostitution and venereal disease, the chaplains promoted certain moral standards grounded in moral strength and self-control and guaranteed by a stable, well-educated character. They further argued that combating the places of temptation by placing houses of prostitution off-limits and taking disciplinary actions against supporters of prostitution among the military ranks could only be a first step. According to the chaplains, it was more important to establish strict moral education for all servicemen. In particular, they considered lectures on sexual morality addressing sexuality, family planning, and reproduction “without addition of dirty jokes and off-color remarks,” and focusing on questions of responsibility, marriage, and community, which they considered to be invaluable for character guidance. They further demanded better access for servicemen to more recreational programs and especially emphasized athletics as well as clean eating facilities. Since recreation and entertainment would be limited “during the hours of darkness, efforts should be made to give a greater portion of authorized pass during the daylight hours.” Offering the servicemen moral education and alternative recreational opportunities would be the duty of the occupation authorities, not only for the welfare of their personnel in Japan, but also of their families and communities in America.48

The U.S. Military’s Special Services, which also often followed moral reformist models of character building, offered recreational opportunities. The Special Services provided on- and off-base activities to keep servicemen entertained during their off-duty time. Such activities predominantly included sports, sightseeing, going to cinemas or libraries, music, and arts and crafts. In their own words, the Special Services’ primary concern was to provide “a healthy, normal [sic] outlet for socially desirable basic urges.” To counter the spread of venereal disease, one report claimed, there were “subtle ways” to guide “the soldier’s leisure time; those eight hours that he isn’t sleeping or working; those bewitching eight hours during which light becomes dark; . . . a vulnerable period for gratification of basic desires.” The Special Services recommended repressing prostitution by offering on-base entertainment more attractive than privately run beer halls, restaurants, cabarets, and brothels outside the barracks, for example by opening service clubs that served large quantities of soft drinks and food. The sale of liquor should generally be strictly controlled and limited. The Special Services also put high emphasis on sports activities to keep servicemen in good physical and mental shape, and commanding officers were advised to organize sporting events to foster a sense of sportsmanship, fair play, and community. To further stimulate moral responsibility and self-discipline, servicemen were even to be actively encouraged to engage in “beautification plans of units, using Special Service craft shops.”49

Yet most chaplains and other promoters of moral reformist thought had less picturesque methods in mind. In lectures and talks, chaplains taught that venereal disease and promiscuity were signs of sexual immorality grounded in a lack of character. In one quite colorful report, Chaplain Primus Bennett of the FEC’s Chaplains’ Section argued that the goal of moral education was “an appreciative and impelling understanding on the part of the citizen that the highest service he can render his country is in being a man of character.” Character, Bennett wrote, echoing both Beiderlinden and Devine, “is the determining factor that makes a man a good soldier,” constituted through self-discipline and responsibility, traits central to the citizen-soldier’s manhood and to the chaplains’ guided character building. In almost apocalyptic terms, Bennett even maintained that the “Army must become the greatest character building organization and citizen-making institution in the world—or democracy will fail.” In practice, the chaplains’ weekly messes, regular lectures, and individual, private interviews with servicemen all aimed at character building. The content of the lectures varied, of course, but this lengthy quote from Bennett’s at times very derogatory pamphlet provides a general outline:

Promiscuity is a social maladjustment; individuals gone berserk with no regard to social responsibility, refusing to face the responsibility of asking “Is it fair or right?” Sex will always involve internal struggle and there must be self-imposed control as well as social control. The imperatively necessitous individual is the psychiatric deviate and pervert and the sex criminal. He’s the guy who has the sexual necessity. Promiscuity is a personnel management problem—or lack of management. There is no physiologic basis for the view too widely presented that the man who is not on the sex prowl is the man who won’t fight. . . . The uninstructed, the weak, and the struggling should be protected from the propinquity of alluring temptation. The vicious should be restrained and disciplined.⁵⁰

Bennett psychologically profiled frequenting brothels, contracting venereal disease, and being promiscuous as deviant, even psychopathic and criminal behavior, which he considered first and foremost irresponsible to oneself, but also to the military, which had the duty to protect the United States and democracy all over the world. While Bennett’s pamphlet drew on pathologizing language, it also strongly echoed a moral reformer’s call for individual and collective control to fight the “vices” and everything “vicious” with strong moral discipline. In particular, his emphasis on the connection between fair play, social responsibility, and citizenship, which was supposedly upheld by strong character, but capable of being undermined by the temptations of uncontrolled sex, bears a strong resemblance to the approach of the moral reform movement.51

Yet in practice, character building and moral and sex education were developed in far less rigorous terms. Furthermore, the chaplains’ demand—like that for the wholehearted abolition of prostitution and the discontinuation of prophylaxis against venereal disease—was never satisfied during the occupation period. Even the directive to repress prostitution issued in November 1949 by the U.S. Army authorities in Washington, DC, which defined the toleration of prostitution as “socially objectionable, potentially destructive of public decency, and productive of immorality and disease,” and ordered all commanding officers serving domestically and overseas “to take disciplinary action against anyone in the army fostering or condoning prostitution,”⁵² did not banish prostitution completely. Nor did it stop servicemen from patronizing brothels and streetwalkers’ patches or from socializing with “pick-ups” in a way that might lead to sexual intercourse. From 1947 on, however, the recommendations and demands of the military’s chaplains and other moral reformist advocates like Beiderlinden had a significant impact on the U.S. military’s official position on moral and sex education. A directive letter of January 1947 from the secretary of war compelled military commanders to “emphasize continence as the War Department’s primary policy in controlling venereal disease, and give secondary emphasis to the use of prophylaxis as a means of last resort.” Subsequently, military commanders had to integrate lectures by the military’s chaplains on morality and sexuality into “the regular military training schedule for instruction in citizenship and morality.”⁵³

FIGURE 5. U.S. Far East Command’s lecture material: “There’s a family in your future,” 1950. Image provided by the National Archives and Record Administration in College Park, MD.

This did not mean that sex and moral education ever abandoned medical issues such as venereal disease prophylaxis. Since the late 1940s, however, lectures on sexuality did equally highlight moral reformist and social hygienic measures to prevent venereal disease, but emphasized, as one lecture put it, that the “only positive way to avoid a venereal disease is to avoid sexual contact.” This is illustrated by an FEC’s template lecture, which in the very beginning told servicemen that “illicit sexual exposure is against the principles and teachings of every religion, and it is against God’s law.” Drawing on the Commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” the lecture continued, “illicit sexual intercourse [is on a level] with other base and sordid crimes such as stealing and murder.” Servicemen were also to keep the following in mind: “From a medical standpoint, sexual intercourse is not necessary to your physical well-being and illicit sexual intercourse can and often does do great physical harm.” The lecture did not obfuscate that “venereal diseases are a matter of grave concern here in the Far East Command.” As already discussed elsewhere, the occupiers’ sex education also repeatedly blamed sex workers and sometimes “oriental” women in general for the spread of venereal disease—as this particular lecture stated, even though they may “look both beautiful and clean.” Special precaution should be given to alcohol as a major indirect contributor to venereal disease infection. The lecture used horrific visuals of syphilitic and chancroidal infections to warn servicemen of the various venereal diseases and their physical effects. For those servicemen who “foolishly insist on sexual contact,” the lecture stressed that “there is one other way by which you MAY avoid a venereal disease.” Emphasizing it as an uncertain means, the lecture instructed servicemen in the use of condoms to avoid exposure and chemical prophylaxis to prevent infections. The lecture concluded, however, by stating that servicemen should not be naïve and blindly rely on modern “miracle drugs” such as sulpha and penicillin, but should rather see a doctor for professional treatment.54

FIGURE 6. U.S. Far East Command’s lecture material: “Mr. United States,” 1950. Image provided by the National Archives and Record Administration in College Park, MD.

Two posters presented during the lecture further visualized the responsibility of the individual serviceman for his family, the American nation and the democratic occupation project in Japan. The first one, titled “There’s a family in your future,” depicts a young, white soldier looking at a photograph of his present or future wife at the center of the image, with an assembled family of husband, wife, and two kids in the background (see figure 5). The poster’s subtitle asks the viewer, “Will there be clean blood in your children’s veins?”, and thus recapitulates the social hygienists’ warnings of venereal disease’s effects on biological reproduction. The second poster shows “Mr. United States,” a U.S. serviceman guided by “Uncle Sam,” who tells the serviceman that “Foreign Service is a Tour of Dignity” (see figure 6). The accompanying lecture reminded servicemen that, “In the eyes of the people in this country [Japan] . . . they see what democracy means and what Christianity stands for.” The lecture continued with a surprising frankness: “We can hardly be expected to sell democracy to the people of this country when we preach one thing and openly practice another right in their own front yards.” Hence, it was “one of our primary duties as representatives of a great democratic nation . . . to set a good example for others.”⁵⁵

In Korea, the occupation regime fashioned U.S. servicemen’s character building in a less empathetic and much more aggressive manner. The USAFIK provided a detailed compilation of venereal disease lecture templates as good examples of how the different emphases of the various branches involved in “character building” were intermingled, but with a remarkably strong moral impetus. Basically, the templates informed instructors that venereal disease control was not a medical or moral-religious matter alone, but one of military discipline, character, and readiness. In military jargon, venereal diseases’ most basic cause—“promiscuity in sexual relations”—was to be “attacked.” In the attempt to foster a healthy, responsible, self-disciplined, and heteronormative masculine character, instructors were to lecture servicemen on the basics of sexuality, hygiene, morality, and citizenship. Sex itself, as the template put it, was not sinful as long as it was practiced by married couples to create an emotional bond, strengthen domesticity and family values through love, trust and honor, and to the end of reproduction. Extramarital sex, however, was denounced as selfish, unfair, and dishonest; its “momentary pleasure will usually end in disgust and disillusion.” Sex was deemed necessary neither for health nor as an affirmation of soldierly masculinity, which could only be achieved through an “inner struggle” to master one’s sexual urge. The lecture also stressed that “athletics, sports, and religious activities” could help overcome pent-up sexual desire. The aim of every man, according to the lecture, should be to live a healthy, honest, and “clean life” as a “valuable asset to the nation,” a life that would require sacrifices, but also result in a future of trust, good reputation, health, stability, strength, and leadership qualities, both for the individual and the community, because: “The new world demands character.”56

Another lecture titled “Treatment of Venereal Disease and Its Limitations” rehashed the dangers of venereal disease through uncontrolled sexual intercourse and located its predominant source again in the orientalized body of the female prostitute, because the “incidence of venereal disease among prostitutes in Korea is . . . almost 100%.” Moreover, a “survey among Kaesong [kisaeng] girls and waitresses revealed about 60% of them to be infected with one or more venereal diseases,” making an infection most likely if any contact occurred. Although the army offered protection against venereal disease to a certain extent through the provision of prophylaxis, the lecture emphasized the need for the servicemen’s self-regulatory practices: the best thing would be for servicemen to be “continent.” As an aid to continence, the lecture suggested abstinence from alcohol, which was supposed “to weaken the individual’s resistance, dull his senses, blur his judgment.” Again, it was stressed that the military masculinity of the citizen-soldier did not depend on sexual and alcoholic excess, but on honor, discipline, and character, achieved through hard work, responsibility, and self-discipline.⁵⁷

The creation of militarized masculinity in U.S.-occupied Korea was also accomplished through the language used in the lectures. Another lecture’s title, “The Eternal Fight,” can be seen as programmatic. The lecture unfolded in four subchapters titled “The Front,” “Reconnaissance,” “Casualties,” and “Weapons of Defense.” Education against venereal disease thus relied heavily on military tactical terminology to construct the image of a “tough fight” against a disease at a “front,” which “is everywhere, in front of us, behind us, and especially within us.” Accordingly, the lecture painted the picture of an omnipresent threat of venereal disease as a perfidious and sneaky enemy: “The strategy of our enemy, the forces of evil, in this battle for personal purity is usually camouflaged. Therefore we need advance patrols to seek him out and prepare for a later attack.” The lecture declared self-control, discipline, commitment to the nuclear family, religious faith, and patriotism as the “weapons of defense” and—echoing the spirit of the moral reform movement—concluded unambiguously that America “possess[ed] the best weapons of any nation on the face of the globe“ to “annihilate and destroy the forces of evil.”⁵⁸

Rehabilitation Centers: Rehabilitating and Studying
Venereally Diseased Servicemen

The effect of the strident and polarizing rhetoric used in lectures and anti-VD campaigns should not be underestimated. It most likely shaped the prejudiced way the occupiers perceived and approached Japanese sex workers as well as women of the occupied society in general. Simultaneously, it has to be kept in mind that although the occupation army constantly labeled venereally infected servicemen as foolish, deviant, or maladjusted, it nevertheless took care of them. During World War II and the early months of the occupation period, military leaders often tolerated venereal disease among servicemen, especially during combat. Of course, venereal infections could sometimes result in disciplinary actions, such as reduction of pay to make up lost duty time while on sick call or even court-martial for consciously compromising one’s health. Yet, the military put much effort and resources into campaigning against venereal disease and educating servicemen in VD prevention, and also provided prophylaxis and medical treatment for all venereally infected servicemen, usually coordinated by the Venereal Disease Control Division, newly established in 1942.59

In the course of the early occupation period, beginning in approximately 1947, however, the military put a strong emphasis on the rehabilitation of venereally diseased servicemen by means of the triad of sex education, medical treatment, and physical recovery. Similarly to the way venereal disease and sex education were discussed in increasingly moral terms at that time, the medical treatment of and recovery from venereal disease were also subject to a moralizing discourse. Rehabilitation from venereal disease thus meant not only the recovery of the soldier’s body through medical care, it also implied training his moral standards, mental attitude, and spiritual belief. As stated in the War Department’s Circular 227 of August 20, 1947, it even became a basic policy for the Far East Command to provide rehabilitation camps and rehabilitation programs as part of a general endeavor to counter venereal disease, promiscuity, and prostitution with moral responsibility and self-discipline.⁶⁰

In March 1948, the Eighth Army established such a venereal disease rehabilitation program at the Replacement Training Center in Atsugi. As shown at the beginning of this chapter, the initiators of the center showed much creativity in building the Venereal Disease Museum with its visual approach to education against venereal disease. Whereas the museum focused on education to prevent venereal infections, the center additionally developed a program to rehabilitate infected servicemen. According to a report on the center, servicemen assigned to the program were confined for thirty days to “the post and are under medical observation to make sure that their treatment for one disease has not masked the presence of another.” A thirty-day program compelled them to undergo daily basic military training and “required [them] to attend a lecture each morning conducted by the chaplain.” In addition, a chaplain interviewed the servicemen in personal sessions and asked about their “habits of drinking, the extent of his sexual promiscuity and the basic reasons underlying them. . . . The second part of the interview [was] a serious attempt to help the man face his life and as far as possible offer some solution to his problems.” This meant that servicemen should dedicate their “life to God and the church, and to apply the principles of religion to his life.”61 The center’s program thus followed the War Department’s directive to combine medical treatment with character building in the effort to rehabilitate servicemen from venereal infections as well as their supposed sexual and moral carelessness and promiscuity.

Another remarkable example of this military medical-moral rehabilitation complex is the Venereal Disease Rehabilitation Center established in Korea on November 4, 1947. It was located on a former Japanese Navy base in Chinhae (Jinhae-gu) close to Busan, and replaced a decentralized network of several smaller rehabilitation centers that various commands and divisions had formerly maintained throughout Korea. The center in Chinhae served as a major USAFIK institution to treat venereally infected servicemen’s bodies medically, train them physically, strengthen them morally, and minimize the risk of venereal disease relapse. In contrast to the rehabilitation center in Atsugi, Japan, the central facility in the camp was a “well equipped and efficiently operated” dispensary for medical services. This means that the “trainees,” as the servicemen assigned to the rehabilitation center in Chinhae were labeled, were subject to much closer medical monitoring. As Venereal Disease Control Officer Thomas D. Kelly wrote in his report of December 15, 1947, medical officers interviewed servicemen upon arrival “to determine in so far as possible the nature of his [the serviceman’s] recent disease, type and duration of treatment, mental attitude, and an inspection is made for detection of urethral discharge.” Subsequently, servicemen were either transferred to a nearby military hospital for treatment or admitted as “trainees” to the center’s rehabilitation program. The special training program was designed for about 200 to 225 “trainees” with a training schedule of forty-nine hours a week, which Kelly proudly considered “vigorous and complete.” The “trainee” had to devote most of his time to military training and athletic activity. At least six hours weekly, “trainees” were lectured on subjects such as “Venereal Disease, Control of Communicable Disease, Personal Hygiene, and Sanitation.” As Kelly affirmed, the lectures were designed by a chaplain to create a “unified program,” and covered—although to a lesser extent than in the center in Atsugi, for example—sexuality and morality.62 In practice, the rehabilitation center in Chinhae focused rather on military training, sports, and medical surveillance, and strongly emphasized the physical aspects of character building.

USAFIK’s high-ranking officers repeatedly praised the center and emphasized the well-maintained sanitary, housing, recreation, and medical installations. In a report from January 20, 1948, Robert W. Allen remarked that “the strict training schedule [. . .] is quite strenuous [but] has not exhibit any adverse effects upon the trainees’ convalescence.” Questioned “trainees” themselves favored the military training obtained in the center, “but objected to the necessity of contracting venereal disease in order to do so.” Allen further integrated this ironical comment into the general argument that every serviceman in the FEC should receive a more thorough military training upon enlistment “prior to acquiring venereal disease,” which he believed would help to limit the infection rate. He highlighted that military discipline through strict military training was the most efficient way to build stable, healthy, masculine soldierly characters. The center’s program provided such training, and Allen concluded by quoting Colonel Thomas A. Gunby, who “referred to the trainees as ‘General Hodge’s first line of defense in Korea.’”⁶³ Hence, the center’s program highlights the desire for a certain kind of soldierly body in the USAFIK. It focused on the production of physical and mentally stable soldierly bodies to demonstrate and justify the good reputation and superiority of the United States and its military—as in Japan—but it also invested strongly in the maintenance of masculine, combat-fit soldiers.

While the focus of the rehabilitation facilities was on the mental, spiritual, and physical recovery of servicemen from venereal disease, they also functioned as laboratories for research on venereal disease. Chaplains as well as military surgeons conducted surveys on the cause of venereal disease and disseminated their results in statistical data and official reports. At the Eighth Army Replacement Training Center in Atsugi, Chaplain Emil A. Zund wrote in July 1948 on the results of his interviews with servicemen at the center. His test subjects consisted of 400 servicemen in a period of about three months. His “men,” as Zund repeatedly referred to the servicemen, had an average age of 20.65 years, 8.07 years of education, were predominantly unmarried and Christian (mostly Protestant), and had their first sexual experiences at the age of sixteen; 329 of them were classified as “white” and 71 as “colored.” The most common venereal disease was gonorrhea (294 infected), followed by syphilis (89 infected) and chancroid (21 infected); only four servicemen appear to have been infected by two diseases simultaneously. The sources of infection—Zund also reasserted the prejudice that only women and not men spread venereal disease—were supposedly the regular girlfriends of the servicemen, but also “casual girls . . . picked up on the street, in Railroad Stations, dances and a few in army installations such as PXs and Snack Bars.”64

Zund regretted that less than half of his “men” attended church services and only a small proportion attended only occasionally. However, more important, Zund pointed out, were the level of education, drinking habits, and domestic situation. Almost half of the interviewed servicemen came from “broken homes . . . where one or more of the parents is dead, separated or divorced.” Over three in four servicemen drank alcohol, of which 223 persons stated that they drank moderately, and Zund described 103 persons as drinking excessively. Although only 86 “men” admitted to being drunk at the time of contracting venereal disease, Zund righteously reasoned it “is felt that some educational program should be instituted that would point out the dangers of drinking to these young men.” Because: “Too many of them seem to feel that it is the thing to do and a sign of manhood.” Even more importantly, however, Zund stressed the necessity of increasing the servicemen’s level of education in order to counter the spread of venereal disease. Medical instructions in VD prophylaxis alone were not sufficient because most interviewees stated they did not use condoms and did not apply chemical prophylaxis after sexual intercourse. According to Zund, it was therefore imperative to implement a stronger moral education program, because “Most of these men are not mentally, physically or spiritually fortified to make decisions each time they leave the army installation. No trip to a down-town theater is completed without running the gauntlet.”⁶⁵ Zund accentuated that an educated, strong, and responsible character along with family and community stability was the only guaranteed way to limit high rates of venereal disease infection and to successfully rehabilitate venereally infected servicemen.

The Venereal Disease Rehabilitation Center in Chinhae also made U.S. servicemen a subject of their research. However, they focused less on moral issues and instead followed scientific claims based on social hygiene. Lieutenant William L. Minton, surgeon of the rehabilitation center in Chinhae, filed a medical report on July 30, 1948, in which he portrayed his investigation as an analysis of how venereal disease exposure relates to social background, personality, and mental attitude. His general results were quite similar to Zund’s in Atsugi, claiming infection rates were closely connected to social background and especially to level of education. Yet Minton stressed deeper and diversified sociopsychological reasons for venereal infections. According to statistics, USAFIK’s servicemen completed on average 9.36 years of schooling, with most falling into the two major groups of eight or twelve years of schooling. Servicemen from the second group, Minton argued, were not among the center’s venereally infected “trainees.” Moreover, 50 percent of all “victims” of venereal disease infection were young (18.5 years old on average), and Minton characterized those with just a single infection as immature and adventurous. He believed that another group of “trainees” with multiple infections (25 percent) had had a difficult childhood and/or had come from “families of modest poor circumstances.” The majority of “trainees” should receive more education in “sex morality,” while there was “little hope of rehabilitation” for a third group (25 percent) that also presented with multiple infections and who sought sexual satisfaction regularly because, as Minton put it, “these men are allowing an animal instinct to predominate over the mind which governs normal [sic] human moral behavior.” Thus, Minton summed up, “Men with the most education have a lesser tendency to contract venereal disease” and even stated that men from the multiple infection group had a lower intelligent quotient.66

Furthermore, Minton stressed the influence of race in venereal disease exposure. The fact that of all the “trainees,” 75 percent were classified as “white” and 25 percent as “colored,” but that among those with multiple infection histories 63 percent were “white” and 37 percent were “colored,” indicated according to Minton “that the colored race has a greater tendency toward the contracture of venereal disease than the white race.”⁶⁷ Without any remarks on racial (and class) boundaries within the U.S. military or on the relation between racial inequality and access to education, Minton presupposed a racial inclination for being less educated and hence having higher venereal disease infection rates.⁶⁸ This reflects the strictly observed color line within the U.S. military, which was highly visible in the racialized reports on and control of venereal disease. Additionally, since Minton related venereal disease infection to education and morale, he portrayed nonwhite troops as generally less educated, less motivated, and less responsible, repeatedly portraying them according to racial stereotypes as infantile, primitive, and hypersexual. The rehabilitation programs and surveys highlighted here reproduced and reaffirmed racialized stereotypes while also connecting the communicability, spread, and treatment of venereal disease closely to education, morality, race, and class. Minton admitted, however, that the cause of venereal disease is not reducible to one factor alone, and he pleaded for more extensive scientific research that would consider all the factors and circumstances relevant to venereal infections. He was even quite critical of the success of sex education and preferred a “careful psychiatric approach with psychological study followed by mental therapy and vocational guidance [that] will probably be necessary before positive educational advancement is possible.” Nonetheless, despite his doubts about education’s short-term prospects of success, Minton summed up his research report with the suggestion, which echoed a broader moral-hygienic claim, “that an extensive, thorough, sane and correct program of sex morality education will aid markedly in lowering the incidence of venereal disease infection and lay the foundation for good character building.”69

• • •

It is impossible to determine the exact effects and results of the moral and sex education and rehabilitation programs conceptualized and implemented for the occupation personnel in occupied Japan and Korea. It is even more difficult to provide verified numbers. Yet, the amount of resources the occupation administration mobilized for sex and moral educational programs to sanitize sex during the occupation period is remarkable. The lectures, campaign materials, and exhibitions blamed women of both occupied countries for being the sole sources and transmitters of venereal disease and depicted them as bearing an especially high risk of venereal infection due to low sanitary standards as well as lack of morality and education. Moreover, Japan and Korea were both portrayed along the lines of established orientalist clichés as highly sexualized countries providing unlimited and ubiquitous sexual opportunities that were simultaneously adventurous and hazardous: the alluring nature of both countries endangered the troop’s health, morality, and discipline, while also posing a danger to American families, homes, and communities. Through lectures and seminars, these images of occupied Japan and Korea circulated widely among all members of the occupation forces and were not limited to the records of the occupiers’ elites.

To control the sexual opportunities in the occupied countries, the occupation regime preached continence to its servicemen as the safest method of staying “clean,” but conceded that in case of “sexual exposure” one should make thorough use of all medical prophylactic tools available. It repeatedly emphasized abstinence from alcohol and a focus on athletics and religious practices as ways to build a manly, self-disciplined, responsible, and efficient character. This approach resonated with a broader attempt to develop and celebrate a desired trustworthy and stable male body grounded in the American values of a supposedly Judeo-Christian morality, middle-class domesticity, and democracy. Stability, responsibility, and good health were repeatedly stressed as commonsense virtues of the soldier, which had the normalizing effect of establishing a heteronormative subjectivity of the male soldier, who should act responsibly toward his present or future wife and family while also taking on responsibility for the reputation of the army, the United States, and the “free world” in general.

In practice, however, the success of the overall character guidance program seems to have been quite limited. Servicemen were very likely well aware of the dangers venereal disease was said to pose to their health, the efficiency of the military, the success of the occupation projects, and the reputation of the United States and its ideals. A sample of questionnaires forwarded by Chief Warrant Officer W. M. Dickerson to the FEC’s commander in chief on March 5, 1949, is quite telling. It presented the results of interviews with servicemen upon leaving their posts in Japan and Korea to return to the United States. In his general remarks, Dickerson pointed out that servicemen were well informed about venereal disease control and that 93 percent of all interviewed servicemen had received character guidance instruction. However, while most servicemen stated that they knew much more about the various types of venereal disease, its contraction, dangers, prophylaxis, and treatment after receiving character guidance instructions in the army, “only 18% were familiar with and knew the meaning of the word ‘continence’.” After being told what continence means, “63% believed that it was not injurious to the body, 12% believed that it was injurious to the body, 12% not injurious to the body but to the mind, and 12% did not know.”70 Still, most servicemen stated that they believed the information provided in character guidance lectures.

In sum, the education and rehabilitation programs were, despite their ineffectiveness, part of a powerful discourse in which the relation between occupiers and occupied was repeatedly narrated in sexual terms that intersected with specific notions of race, gender, and class. The image of Japan and Korea as lands of sexual opportunity, lacking education and morality, contrasted starkly with the image of a scientifically and morally advanced America, and this contrast—it is needless to say—constructed a hierarchy quite similar to that evinced in previous colonial encounters.71 An analysis of the lectures, exhibitions, and campaigns of moral and sex education thus sustains the argument that the occupation of Japan should be assessed in a genealogy of a longer history of imperialism. This becomes even more apparent when the impact of moral reformist as well as social hygienist thought on the education and rehabilitation programs is acknowledged. It was not the import or development of a Cold War ideology alone that shaped this discourse. Rather, a mixture of moral reform and social hygiene rhetoric, focused on purity and efficiency through character building as ways of avoiding moral and societal decay at the hands of the “evil forces” of sex, drugs, and alcohol, was intermingled with a Cold War desire for national security and extreme anxiety about political and sexual subversion.

JAPANESE CAMPAIGNS AND AGENTS OF MORAL PURIFICATION

For Japanese contemporaries, sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease were just as serious matters of morality as they were for the occupiers. Although they tackled the issue from various different angles, their campaigns and criticisms generally focused on a notion of moral purification that was deeply embedded in prewar and wartime discourses of morality and sexuality and shaped by structures of “social management” developed during imperial Japan’s nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁷² The variety of moral impulses manifested quite colorfully in the naval port city of Sasebo in northern Kyushu. “Around in November 1950,” complained the mayor of Sasebo City, Nakata Masasuke, “several thousand prostitutes were wandering about the main streets in Sasebo. Public morals were corrupted by them. In addition, it was feared that they would spread venereal disease all over the city.”⁷³ The Kyushu Civil Affairs section, a regional subdivision of SCAP’s Legal and Government Section, filed Nakata’s remarks. With his report, Nakata pushed the occupiers for recognition and approval of the Sasebo Public Morals Purification Committee (fukishukusei-iinkai), founded on November 29, 1950 by Japanese civilians and civil servants from various echelons of local politics, bureaucracy, and private business in Sasebo City. Its members were affiliated with the local tourist association, women’s association, hotel association, public bath association, the Sasebo District Social Association for Occupation Powers, the council of children and youth affairs, as well as the local newspaper agencies of all major national dailies (such as Asahi, Mainichi, Nichinichi, etc.). The committee’s chairman was Maki Kenichi of the Sasebo Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Mayor Nakata was the committee’s official spokesman. On December 1, 1950, the committee released “An Appeal to Young Girls,” which was posted on Sasebo’s streets:

To Young Girls!!

To you young girls who work in Sasebo during the night!! You are the people of a defeated country, but you are also the Japanese women who once had pride in “your quiet manners” [shitoyakasa]. Stop behaving indecently on the street. Even the Americans are disgusted with you. Thoughtful foreigners say that they feel uneasy and detest walking about the streets. Street-girls [yoru no onna] in New York, London and Paris are more graceful and prudent in their manners than you are. Eliminate this night view of Sasebo which we cannot bear to look at and which can never be seen in any other part of the world, by reflecting upon your personal conducts. For the sake of the future of Sasebo!! For the sake of education of younger generation! Stop clinging to foreigners on the street! For the glory of Japan [nihon no hokori no tame ni]! For a greater prosperity of Sasebo! It is evident that in case you do more shameful things annoying foreigners, all personnel of the UN Forces will be unable to come ashore, as in the case of Kobe. We request reconsideration by you young girls, especially those working during the night. Correct your personal conducts and stop acting shamefully on the street.

This is a sincere request by all citizens of Sasebo.

December 1, 1950

Sasebo Public Morals Purification Committee74

In early 1951, after the occupation regime began to discuss a nonfraternization policy in Sasebo and considered restricting its servicemen’s shore privileges due to high venereal disease infection rates and declining military discipline, the Sasebo Public Morals Purification Committee also requested the full cooperation of all Sasebo City’s citizens in remodeling their city, announcing on a similar poster:

Request to all citizens! Military and civilian personnel of the United Nations Forces are finally not allowed to go ashore anymore in Sasebo. This is due to problems of public morality and related to venereal disease. At this point, all citizens critically reflect and if we do not turn Sasebo into a pure and clean city, the permission to go ashore will not be granted from now on, which will become a problem for all citizens.

Sasebo Public Morals Purification Committee⁷⁵

The several thousand sex workers in Sasebo were apparently a cause of much concern among its citizens. “Street girls” were stigmatized as carriers of venereal disease and as the embodiment of public indecency: shameful not only “for the glory of Japan,” but also hazardous for the social, economical, and moral stability of Japan’s future. As Sarah Kovner has argued, there might have been economic reasons for the Sasebo Public Morals Purification Committee’s interventions.76 The development of Sasebo lends some weight to Kovner’s argument: Sasebo had once been a small fishing village in Nagasaki Prefecture, but was turned into a major naval base for the Japanese navy from the Meiji period until the end of World War II. The U.S. occupation administration annexed the base after the war and established the U.S. Fleet Activities Sasebo, a U.S. Navy base with up to 20,000 stationed sailors and soldiers. The high personnel numbers peaked during the Korean War, when Sasebo became an enormous hub for American and United Nations troops, and thousands of servicemen transferred from occupied Japan through Sasebo to fight in Korea. And similarly high numbers of servicemen came to Sasebo from Korea for rest and recreation while on leave. Sasebo was therefore subject to a constant flow of military personnel and an equally constant flow of American dollars, which significantly structured the local economy by providing substantial revenue for the local gastronomy, entertainment, and sex industries.⁷⁷

Nevertheless, the Sasebo Public Morals Purification Committee’s appeal for public morality transcended economic reasons alone and was embedded, and only articulable, in a broader discourse on sexuality, prostitution, and morality in occupied Japan. Contemporary criticism concerning prostitution and its regulation was multifaceted and covered economic desires as well as concerns about the public display of sex and its availability, and could include strong nationalist pleas for female dignity. This broad range of criticism is well apparent in the Sasebo committee’s rhetoric, which referred not only to the “prosperity of Sasebo” but also to “the glory of Japan.” Its signifiers of purity and cleanliness are obvious reminders of Japan’s imperial propaganda, resonating as they do with the image of proud, well-mannered, obedient, and selflessly serving Japanese women. This oratory and imagery of the pure Japanese woman in contrast to the sex worker as a “fallen woman” was especially prevalent among Japanese middle- and upper-class feminists. Some feminist activists had been deeply involved in imperial Japan’s moral purification programs, but simultaneously had transnational contacts in organizations such as the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU). They were thus able to transfer imperial Japan’s political knowledge as well as concepts of moral reform to postwar campaigns against prostitution, for instance in promoting the rescue of “street girls.” Several Japanese bureaucrats took a similar stance, still struggling to stay in control and to maintain a strong, masculine image of a bureaucracy protecting and serving the Japanese state and the people. They tackled those “women on the street” as a serious social problem and discussed programs to rehabilitate them, which gave significant political encouragement to nongovernmental antiprostitution activists. Simultaneously, debates on sex work and sex workers could also encompass apologetic arguments that those women catering to the occupiers had been driven into prostitution by Japan’s postsurrender misery and despair and were thus a constant reminder of imperial Japan’s errors and the lost war. On some occasions, the postwar street prostitute even became a revolutionary yet still ambivalent agent of emancipation, who not only symbolized a possible liberation of Japanese women but demarcated a space of unbound sexual and moral freedom in postwar, posttotalitarian Japan.78 Despite their liberating potential, sex workers were nevertheless portrayed as outcasts, and the figure of the streetwalking prostitute recurred in feminist petitions, political debates, sociological surveys, ethnographic studies, investigative journalist articles, short stories, cartoons, and iconographic image collections by Japanese feminists, politicians, academics, journalists, literary critics, and photographers.

As will be argued in this section, the debates on the streetwalking sex worker were crucial for various Japanese contemporaries who articulated national, cultural, and racial desires for a “new” Japan and Japanese belonging in the postwar era. The arguments in these debates continued—consciously or unconsciously—the postdefeat discourse on the “female floodwall” already discussed in chapter 1. Sharalyn Orbaugh has convincingly argued that the “presence of the Occupation forces acted as a mirror in which previously occluded elements of Japanese racial and cultural identity became visible, and were then incorporated—sometimes in exaggerated or distorted forms—into the efforts of writers (and readers) to use narrative in reorienting themselves to the drastically changed social and political environment.”⁷⁹ I want to suggest, however, that in debates on street prostitution and moral purification, the occupier was if anything only lurking in the background, and it was rather the street prostitute who functioned as an other—an other within, so to speak—enabling her critics (and sometimes admirers) to articulate a Japanese identity imaginatively rooted in Japan’s past. In this discourse’s narratives, the representation of the sex worker in occupied Japan conformed to quite similar mechanisms and imagery as those postulated by Judith Walkowitz in her City of Dreadful Delight. The figure of the lower-class streetwalking sex worker, mostly referred to as panpan, was the object of a spectatorship oscillating between interest and anxiety, fascination and repulsion, desire and stigma, which ultimately “emulated the privileged gaze of anthropology constituting the poor as a race apart, outside the national community.”80 Japanese elites—middle- and upper-class feminists, middle- and high-ranking bureaucrats, and the intelligentsia—developed a privileged and, I would add, reflexive gaze that attempted to control prostitution and sanitize sexuality. They looked at prostitution and prostitutes through a culturalistic and nationalistic lens, grinded and polished by ideals imagined as essentially Japanese. The sex worker, under the labels of “fallen woman,” “street girl,” “gaishō” (street prostitute), “panpan (girl),” and “yoru no onna” (woman of the night), thereby became a conspicuous marker of contemporary and future Japan’s moral decay and sexual peril, in stark contrast to the glorified image of a morally pure, sexually chaste, and socially stable Japanese past.

Building a “New Japan”: Rehabilitation of
“Fallen Women” to Restore Public Morality

Around December 1948 and January 1949, a women’s organization of the Minato ward in central Tokyo complained about the “rampancy of the street girls who are having bad influence on the children by taking in men to the ordinary homes and ‘avec hotels.’” They would “knock at ordinary people’s doors asking them to lend them a room and on Christmas eve they went so far as to force themselves into a house in the Kanasugi District refusing to be stopped.” Moreover, due to the public visibility of sex work, “corrupted moral conducts are openly seen by the children and it might be because of this that there are games of being a street girl that are played by the children and there are some children about 11 or 12 who act as touts.” Over a hundred women of the Federation of Housewives gathered in January 1949 to consult the Tokyo Military Government’s Women’s Affairs’ officer as well as the local commissioners of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police and demanded stricter control of street prostitutes.⁸¹

Japanese middle- and upper-class feminists were probably the most powerful group of antiprostitution activists and moral purification promoters in occupied Japan. As the incident in Minato ward shows, feminists relied heavily on established tropes that cast the maternal responsibility, dignity, and chastity of the Japanese woman as a guarantor of social stability and morality, which was contrasted with the lower-class prostitute as a “fallen woman” who allegedly embodied sexual danger and moral decay. They rallied against commercial sex in red-light districts, organized roundtable discussions, and submitted petitions, which eventually culminated in Japan’s antiprostitution law in 1956.82 Moreover, Japanese feminists negotiated with the occupiers as well as with Japanese administrators to perpetuate the image of the chaste Japanese woman, and thereby carried nationalist, social, and racial ideals of imperial Japan over into the postwar era. A major vehicle for such continuing ideology was the debate on prostitution, in which middle- and upper-class Japanese women were able to articulate the need for national purification through the rehabilitation and regeneration of so-called unrespectable “fallen women,” who were portrayed as endangering the supposed respectability of the Japanese woman and threatening Japanese society in general.⁸³

Prominent leaders of the postwar feminist antiprostitution movement such as Ichikawa Fusae and Gauntlet Tsuneko had often had influential positions in imperial Japan’s administration, and were not mere passive subjects of state authority, but had gained much political, social, and cultural influence.⁸⁴ Since the prewar era, feminist activists had been campaigning for women’s suffrage and against prostitution, and were usually organized in Christian groups and connected to internationally operating organizations like the WWCTU.⁸⁵ As a constitutive member of the prewar League to Abolish Licensed Prostitution, the Japanese WCTU had been strongly involved in campaigns against prostitution since the Meiji period. On the one hand, the WCTU had engaged in heated debates with state authorities and demanded the abolition of the licensed prostitution system. On the other hand, its organization also helped state agencies to survey the Japanese population and to educate the public on behavior, morality, and sexuality during the war.⁸⁶ In 1935, the league even changed its name to the National Purification Federation (kokumin junketsu dōmei) and its “nationalistic, eugenic emphasis on ‘purification of blood’ (junketsu) complemented the state’s needs for healthy recruits and mothers who were untouched by venereal disease.”⁸⁷ Throughout the war, the National Purification Federation had the state’s full support to conduct sexual and moral purification domestically and overseas, and was therefore an active agent in imperial Japan’s authoritarian domestic rule and aggressive colonialist expansion. However, imperial Japan’s feminism was not solely reduced to and not only effective because of its overwhelming state support. Most feminist activists were upper-class women and their campaigns against prostitution and for the chastity of the Japanese woman should also be read as class-concerned self-affirmation, in which feminists, while far from being innocent bystanders to imperial policy, invested much to maintain their class privileges vis-à-vis the lower-class position of sex workers and working-class women in general, who allegedly all had the potential to “fall” into prostitution.88

Members of the National Purification Federation, such as former Japanese WCTU president Gauntlet Tsuneko, were strongly involved in founding the Central Co-ordinating Committee for Women’s Welfare in 1946. One decisive goal of this committee was the abolition or at least rigid regulation of street prostitution. In a petition from December 1947, the committee expressed the need to rehabilitate “fallen women” and to prevent women from “falling” in order to build up a “New Japan.” “The social evil,” the petition stated, “created by such fallen women should be controlled most strictly by competent authorities,” and “the rescue work and the prevention of the spread of venereal disease should unquestionably go side by side.” The committee pushed the occupation regime to give Japanese authorities more authority to enlighten, control, and protect “fallen women,” and to create “a policy relative to the prevention and treatment of social disease.” The committee envisaged a nationwide campaign to educate the public through newspapers, magazines, lectures, radio broadcasts, and—in cooperation with religious, educational, and social organizations—“to give purity and sex education at home and at school.” The “fallen women” themselves should be given “moral and religious education to build up their character,” “purity and sex education,” “natural and physical education,” “vocational training,” and “facilities for recreation.” Admission to such facilities was often only granted upon a medical examination for venereal disease, and occasionally even intelligence tests were required from former sex workers, echoing early twentieth-century notions that promiscuity and venereal disease affected cognitive capacities. In general, the committee demanded a stronger state whose authorities would have the right to rigorously investigate and contain venereal disease infection and enforce medical examination and treatment. In sum, the committee called for investing the state with the authority to exercise “unstinted exertion in exterminating venereal disease.”⁸⁹ The demands made and the rhetoric used by the Central Co-ordinating Committee for Women’s Welfare in the postwar period hardly differed from those of the prewar- and wartime period, when Christian feminists had already maintained shelter homes for impoverished prostitutes even as they also called for and supported strong state interventions to accomplish a shared vision of a purer society.90 In occupied Japan, feminists of the committee continued to campaign for a morally pure, hierarchical, and stable social order, whereby the polarizing logic of contrasting “respectable” sexuality with the sexuality of the lower-class prostitute was not limited to moral issues, but simultaneously fostered desires for clear-cut racial and class boundaries.⁹¹

Campaigns waged by Japanese feminists against street prostitution apparently had a significant effect on Japanese administrations as well as the occupation regime, and both committed to social work for rehabilitating “fallen women” as proposed by the Central Co-ordinating Committee for Women’s Welfare. On November 14, 1946, Japan’s vice-ministers met at a conference in Tokyo to discuss the “measures for prevention of appearance and relief of women on the street.” According to their official statement, the objective of the conference was to determine “measures for public morals after the abolition of licensed prostitution.” The statement stressed that the licensed prostitution system was abolished in accordance with SCAP’s directive of January 21, 1946, and henceforth all contracts and debts of prostitutes and other “entertainment-women” were nullified. The vice-ministers, however, acknowledged that sex work itself and other services in the entertainment business had not disappeared, but continued to exist, for example, in the form of street prostitution. Those “women on the street,” as the vice-ministers referred in general to prostitutes, dancing hostesses, barmaids and waitresses, were believed to endanger public morals and societal stability. On the one hand, the vice-ministers reassured, these dangers could be limited through police enforcement of control protocols in red-light districts and entertainment facilities. On the other hand, they emphasized the necessity of social work for those “women on the street.” The vice-ministers decided to “make a public welfare commissioner active part in order to prevent them from falling into prostitution caused by poverty.” In addition, they intended to “give aid to public bodies let them establish ‘women’s welfare houses’ or ‘women’s dormitories’ (provisionally named) in the main cities and other necessary districts and let them carry the following work out.” This meant providing a safe space for the “women on the street” to rehabilitate themselves and to start a new life. These “women’s dormitories” would accordingly offer counseling on personal matters, life guidance, discipline, employment, and job placement for “light work.” The return to wage labor especially, the vice-ministers were convinced, would revivify the women’s lives in the future and contribute to the social and moral stability of what the vice-ministers—quite similar to feminist activists—envisioned as a “new Japan.”92

The vice-ministers’ conference was an important political attempt to provide governmental assistance to those “women on the street.” It outsourced social work to civil society organizations, which the Ministry of Welfare heavily subsidized with a budget of about seventeen million yen. Social work for sex workers was mostly conducted in women’s welfare houses, which in the occupiers’ records were usually referred to as “rehabilitation homes,” but Japanese administrators often bluntly meant them to be detention centers for delinquent street girls. By summer 1950, eighteen rehabilitation homes had been established in Japan’s largest cities, Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya, Fukuoka, and Sendai, either as public institutions or as subsidized, privately organized facilities. One such home, the Jiai Ryō in Oku, Arakawa Ward in northeastern Tokyo, was run by the Japanese WCTU, directed by Fukuda Katsu, and supervised by Gauntlet Tsuneko. It housed forty young women who did light handicrafts in the facility or worked at a nearby factory.⁹³ The Jiai Ryō was partially financed by the sale of handcrafted products (8,935 yen/1949) and private donations (201,635 yen/1949), but it was mainly subsidized by funds from the Welfare Ministry (741,848 yen/1949) and the Daily Life Security Assistance grant provided by Tokyo’s metropolitan administration (185,462 yen/1949).⁹⁴

The Japanese press celebrated the vice-ministers’ commitment to social work as a success. On January 18, 1947, the Children’s Section of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government announced through Jiji Press that it planned to enforce a “street walker control policy” by establishing four rehabilitation homes for “streetwalkers,” with space for around one hundred women each. These homes were meant to shelter former sex workers and to provide a safe institution where they could “learn some sober jobs, avoiding such gay jobs as dancer and beautician.” The note explicitly stated that the program aimed to prevent the “degeneration of young girls.”⁹⁵ In March 1947, the Yomiuri Hōchi published a similarly lauding article on two distinct types of “homes for prostitutes,” which were both run by Christian groups. One such home was the Shiragiku House located in Kawasaki, newly opened in February that year and integrated into a monastery. According to the reporter, it resembled a “woman’s world, ‘no men admitted,’ separated from the world by [a] high board wall to prevent the escape.” It was led by a Catholic “Spanish woman assisted by several German and Japanese women in black robes.” The daily routine at the Shiragiku House was strictly regulated from quarter past six in the morning to quarter past nine in the evening and consisted of a “stern life of worship, silence, reflection and preach,” which was supposed to “lead the girls either to be other characters or to escape.” The reporter expressed astonishment that the twenty-three “girls” living at the Shuragiku House were not depressed and even enjoyed their stay, for example during their “noon time walk with the [German] woman with such happy laughter.” Additionally, they remained happy on account of the “embroidery lesson . . . , typewriting, snack at 3 o’clock, English class etc.” In conclusion the reporter claims that “After 3 years of this life their impurity of [their] previous world will be wiped away.” In Yokohama, the newspaper article continues, the Matsukaza House was under construction along with the National Totsuka Hospital. Until its official opening, a certain Mr. Nagashima, head of the Kanagawa branch office of the Protestant Relief Society, housed former sex workers. In this institution there was “no preaching at all,” and the “girls” were treated just as if they were at home. They were even allowed to go out in public after they had become “mild,” talking walks, entering the public bath and going out to watch movies.96 More secular houses, like the WRC in Miyagi Prefecture’s capital, Sendai, were reported to use music as an important tool for rehabilitation. On June 23, 1950, the Kahoku Shinpō reported that the inmates were “bidding farewell to the ‘dark’ life into which they once plunged themselves,” and “now enjoy[ed] playing the guitar, accordion or the organ during their leisure time.” Several years earlier, when the house was first opened, the “street girls” who lived there often tried to escape, apparently due to the unattractive geographical location of the facility. “At present,” however, “the center has nine inmates who are busy studying dress-making and handicraft for their future calling.” Especially the “possession of some musical instruments as a means of soothing their lonely hearts” turned them into “happy inmates” and “put an end to their escape from the institution.”⁹⁷

Such high praise of rehabilitation homes for streetwalking prostitutes was rather euphemistic. Most of these homes definitely offered shelter to women, especially to pregnant women and rape victims, provided food, and could become a stepping-stone to a future life off the streets. However, many rehabilitation homes were in bad shape, most had no trained social workers, and some of them were even overtly exploitative, for instance those whose owners collected federal and private funds for social work but were actually maintaining pools of cheap female labor. Marta Green, a welfare service adviser from SCAP’s Public Health and Welfare Section, repeatedly reported on such deficits. From 1947, Green engaged in women’s welfare programs that focused particularly on the rehabilitation of prostitutes. She organized conferences with representatives of Japan’s Ministry of Welfare and Ministry of Labor, drafted vocational training programs for women, and toured all over Japan to inspect rehabilitation homes. In one of her early visits in 1949, she stopped by at the Jiai Ryō and remarked: “The physical condition of the building is bad and sanitation throughout is very poor. . . . Girls in the home were apathetic and seemed to be of low intelligence. The opinion of the undersigned, from the foregoing inspection, is that the whole place is in a deplorable condition both as to physical set-up and morale. The establishment needs a definite program and professional supervision.”98 Green gave similar assessments to most of the homes she inspected and made no distinction between operators who were Christian welfare organizations like the WCTU or Salvation Army, public agencies, or those connected to local Buddhist temples. She claimed that most institutions lacked resources and trained staff, but were also in need of moral education and vocational training programs in order to provide adequate social services. Green also raised the issue of transparency. On the one hand, there was no oversight of government funds or regular inspections by welfare officials. On the other hand, she believed the public should be made more aware of the social work being done at the rehabilitation homes, in order to foster a deeper acceptance of the homes in the neighborhoods where they were located and among the taxpaying citizens in general. Marta Green agreed, however, that such rehabilitation homes for prostitutes were a key institute for the rehabilitation and social and economic integration of “street girls.” She also portrayed them as key to the implementation of anti–venereal disease campaigns, because some homes made it possible to provide former sex workers with medical treatment while also facilitating social hygienic venereal disease surveillance programs.⁹⁹

Despite Marta Green’s critical evaluation of existing social work institutions, the debates on rehabilitating “fallen women” nonetheless enabled Japanese antiprostitution feminist activists to successfully negotiate between representatives of the Japanese state and members of the occupation regime to uphold the image of respectable Japanese middle- and upper-class sexualities in contrast to lower-class prostitutes’ allegedly degenerative, nonreproductive sexualities. In their own attempt to sanitize sex during the occupation period, Japanese feminists carried over nationalistic ideals of moral purity from Japan’s imperial past into the postwar era and reproduced class and race-based concepts of sexuality despite the occupier’s efforts to ban and censor every sort of patriotism that might be grounded in imperial Japan’s propaganda. Ultimately, feminists’ demands for tighter control of street prostitutes through stronger state intervention in social affairs empowered the agencies of the defeated Japanese state.

Spectatorship of “Sexual Danger”: Sociological Surveys, Popular
Culture, and Ethnographies of Prostitution

Japanese feminists were by no means the only ones concerned with the issue of sex work after the abolition of the prostitution license system in 1946 led to the development of the danger to society allegedly posed by streetwalking prostitutes. These young women also became recurring figures in various studies, surveys, journals, periodicals, short stories, and novels, and they were the subject of much debate in occupied Japan’s academic and popular culture.100 Many contemporaries at first struggled to find a word to refer to sex workers who worked outside of Japan’s old pleasure quarters, and a variety of neologisms came into circulation to describe the phenomenon of street prostitution in occupied Japan. Japanese feminists and administrators referred to them as “fallen women” and “women on the street”; the occupiers in their records usually labeled them “streetwalkers,” “geisha girls,” or simply “prostitutes.” In most academic, journalistic, and artistic writings, however, the terms gaishō (street prostitutes), yoru no onna (woman of the night), and panpan or panpan girl became widely and often interchangeably used. When and where the term panpan originated is uncertain, but it is very likely that both American and Japanese World War II veterans brought the expression to Japan from their service in the South Seas, where panpan apparently referred to sexually available women.¹⁰¹ In postwar Japan, panpan had come to mean women who offered their sexual services publicly, mostly to American soldiers and sailors, but on a smaller scale also to Japanese clients. They usually wore Western clothes and thick makeup, walked down the street chewing gum and smoking American cigarettes, and thus flaunted the access they enjoyed to imported consumer goods owing to their intimate engagements with the occupiers. Some panpan could become servicemen’s girlfriends with benefits as long as they were stationed in Japan; very few even married their boyfriends and moved to the United States. Most panpan, however, dwelled on the streets, in parks, in red-light and nightlife districts, and developed a subcultural, no-future lifestyle.102

At the forefront of academic research on prostitution were social scientists, who eagerly attempted to define, count, and classify sex workers. In most cases, Japanese scholars were puzzled by the new phenomenon of the panpan and tried to grasp it by referring to known legal and social concepts of prostitution that existed in Japan prior to World War II. Among others, the sociologist Watanabe Yōji discussed the various Japanese labels for sex work and sex worker at length. The general term baishun, according to Watanabe, simply referred to men and women who exchanged money or any other reward for sexual services, whereas a shōfū was a professional female prostitute. Watanabe’s most significant source was the prewar licensed prostitution system, which basically distinguished between licensed prostitutes (kōshō) and illegal, nonlicensed prostitutes (shishō). After the abolition of the license system in 1946, however, licensed prostitutes vanished and a new form of street prostitutes (gaishō) emerged. They did not work in brothels within officially confined quarters, but in public, and they lured their clients into exchanging money for sex, sometimes with the mediation of a third person (such as a pimp or rickshaw driver). The spatial configurations of street prostitution were important to Watanabe, who claimed that gaishō worked, similarly to licensed prostitutes, within particular “red-light areas” (kōtō no chimata), which, however, were not designated by a higher authority. Rather, gaishō themselves would deliberately gather in and dominate these quarters.¹⁰³

Moreover, Watanabe, like other scholars, asserted that although street prostitution was new to Japan, it had been around in other cultures outside Japan for centuries. Since ancient Babylon, Greece, and Rome, prostitutes had been integral members of society, but always subject to a certain amount of legal and spatial control.¹⁰⁴ In many academic studies, prostitution was constructed as an anthropological constant with a prominent place in world history, and there seems to be a certain amount of nostalgia for ancient history and melodramatic investment by Japanese social scientists who wanted to reconnect defeated Japan to the world. Many academics pleaded that sex work should not be condemned as such, and their arguments most certainly functioned as a legitimating strategy to normalize street prostitution in the postwar period. Such notions can be detected in Watanabe’s outline, for instance, where he fervently points out that street prostitutes (gaishō) should not necessarily be mistaken for illegal prostitutes (shishō).105 According to Watanabe and others, however, the panpan girl in postwar Japan constituted a totally unique form of street prostitution. She could work and behave as gaishō, selling her body to any paying customer, but she could also be an “only one,” serving only one customer for a longer period of time, or acting as a “butterfly” by switching among regular long-term customers.¹⁰⁶ But her conspicuous distinctiveness from other forms of street prostitution derived primarily from the fact that she was predominantly serving a “foreign people” (iminzoku)—the servicemen of the occupation army—which meant she transgressed social, cultural, and racial boundaries.¹⁰⁷

Japanese novelists, literary critics, and photographers showed particular interest in the panpan girl. She became a reoccurring figure and sometimes even the central protagonist of novels and short stories, usually written by men for a male readership. The works of the “literature of the flesh” or “carnal literature” (nikutai bungaku), in particular, were often set in postwar Japan’s lowest social strata, a milieu literally and literarily characterized by everyday economic distress, petty crime, and prostitution, and they usually featured a panpan girl as one of the main protagonists.¹⁰⁸ Authors of nikutai bungaku considered the material human body and carnal experience to be the only true facets of human existence, in contrast to thought (shisō) and spirit (seishin). This engagement with wartime and postsurrender privations functioned as a remedy against the prewar and wartime propaganda, and constituted a paradigmatic shift in postwar Japanese literature. It was meant to undermine wartime censorship, which had permitted hardly any publishing on eroticism and physical hardship.¹⁰⁹ The most prominent exemplar of the genre was Tamura Taijirō’s Nikutai no mon (“Gate of Flesh,” probably the origin of the genre’s name), first published in March 1947 in the journal Gunzō.¹¹⁰ Tamura’s novel portrays a gang of young sex workers and their animalistic struggle to survive in the ruins of postsurrender Tokyo. The group of girls functions as a sort of surrogate family, who are ultimately bonded together by the fundamental rule of not having sex without payment. This reduction to unfeeling physicality and dedication to carnal work supposedly helps them to survive against American punters and yakuza pimps. The idealized, “primitive” solidarity painted by Tamura is undermined, however, at the very moment individual members of the community develop liberating emotions, such as love and pleasure in sex. Having unpaid sex is subsequently punished by the group, and falling in love leads to banishment from the community. Liberating experiences and emotions are thus portrayed as pitfalls of existence, highlighted by the story’s end in the desperation, loneliness, and despair of a panpan girl who sought but failed to escape her present life through a love affair.111

FIGURE 7. Takekawa Masayuki’s photograph of a panpan girl entitled “Tenraku” (“Degeneration”), 1949. Image provided by the Prange Collection, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

Photographic images of the panpan circulated in Japanese newspapers and journals. It is often claimed that these images usually depicted the panpan turning their back to the camera, not to protect their privacy, but to create anonymity and interchangeability.¹¹² On the contrary, however, various images do exist of the panpan in which their faces are also visible in detail.¹¹³ In some images she is represented as an ambivalent figure. One good example is a photograph by Takekawa Masayuki that was published in 1949, which shows a young woman in a Western dress, her arms crossed, a cigarette nonchalantly dangling from the left corner of her mouth, her intent gaze directed just past the viewer (see figure 7). On the one hand, the photo, with its title “Degeneration” (tenraku), obviously addressed the decline of Japanese public morality due to the panpan’s sexual services and appearance. On the other hand, the image’s title also related to the philosophical debates of skeptical writers like Sakaguchi Ango, who were convinced that only degeneration could lead to regeneration after war, defeat, and occupation, and fully restore human existence—a similar stance as the one articulated by nikutai bungaku authors.¹¹⁴ The title and the photograph itself played with such ambivalence by presenting an object of desire and male sexual lust that is simultaneously an empowered, self-confident young woman who appears to be strong enough to survive despite the misery of postsurrender Japan.¹¹⁵

The existence of such images, however, does not mean that the panpan were in fact liberated and emancipated women. Most of them were poor and starving, without any social security or health care, and often subject to sexual violence and harassment by the police, gangsters, pimps, clients, and also other sex workers.¹¹⁶ In a roundtable discussion chaired and subsequently edited by Minami Hiroshi from Japan’s Women’s University, the twenty-three-year-old panpan Fujisawa Nanao recalled being raped as the worst psychological and bodily experience, whereas twenty-six-year-old Itō Akiko emphasized the brutal experience of being an outsider in society.¹¹⁷ As discussed in the first chapter, some women were brutally forced into prostitution, occasionally raped, and sometimes not paid for their services. The prostitution scene itself was quite dangerous. Groups of panpan usually claimed and violently defended a certain territory, which could result in bloody rivalries among panpan that even ended up in abuse or torture for those women who transgressed territorial claims.¹¹⁸ And, as has been shown in chapter 2, the police, often in cooperation with the occupier’s military police, frequently raided streetwalking spots and brothels, and compelled the rounded-up panpan girls to undergo medical examinations. Panpan girls lived in a rough environment and their everyday lives were mostly dominated by misery. Occupiers and occupied alike tended to look down on them, usually perceiving them as sexual objects and as incarnations of disease and immorality, and stigmatizing them as the main source of venereal disease and as a symbol of postwar moral decay.

The prejudices against the panpan reverberated in public opinion polls conducted by the Japanese government’s National Public Opinion Research Institute on behalf of the occupier’s Civil Information and Education Section. The upshot of a survey published in June 1949 was that most people felt licensed prostitution was necessary for channeling male sexual desire and maintaining public order, but that a majority also despised the streetwalking panpan girls.119 Their public visibility in particular appears to have disturbed many people. For most of the survey’s respondents, as the research group summed up, “the panpan girl, with her brazen painted face and manners, her frizzy hair, her garish Western clothes, is unfamiliar, obtrusive, conspicuous, an eyesore.” For example, a thirty-five-year-old worker in Kawaguchi City reported getting “a feeling of dirtiness” from the panpan, and a thirty-two-year-old farmer from Kumagaya City bluntly described the panpan as “disgusting.” Seventy-two percent of the respondents expressed a wish for more control of prostitution and most favored a licensed prostitution system, which they believed would help to diminish the public visibility of streetwalking. A fifty-six-year-old postal worker in Tokyo expressed such an opinion by saying, “It would be all right if it were tacitly recognized that they [the panpan] have a regular place to gather, like Ueno-no-yama. But I see that they can go around anywhere disrupting public morality. Under present conditions, when there are no publicly recognized licensed quarters and control is rather lax, they can disrupt public morality before the very eyes of the people.”¹²⁰

In mentioning Ueno-no-yama as a regular place to gather, the above-quoted postal worker was probably referring to Ueno Park, a hotspot of sex work in occupied Japan.¹²¹ Many Japanese investigative journalists and hobby ethnographers of postwar prostitution became particularly interested in this site. Ueno is a district in eastern Tokyo famous for its major railway station and Ueno Park, in which Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Nature and Science, and the oldest and largest zoological garden in Japan are all located. Historically, Ueno was part of the Shitamachi, a working-class neighborhood in eastern Tokyo close to Asakusa and Tokyo’s pleasure quarter, Yoshiwara. Since the mid-Meiji period, however, Ueno had become a famous national cultural site featuring various schools, temples, museums, a library, and a zoo, but it was also a major logistic hub, its station serving all transportation from Tokyo to northern Japan.¹²² Ueno also attracted Japanese ultra-nationalists shortly after defeat, when a unit of about 400 men seized the park in a last desperate attempt to defend Japan against the occupiers. Upon being disregarded by the imperial government, however, the unit’s officers committed suicide and their revolt against surrender vanished.123 In the immediate postwar period, Ueno remained a tragic site, as Ueno Station became the final destination for numerous repatriated soldiers, settlers, and families from Japan’s empire. They arrived in Tokyo broke, without family ties, and with no place else to go. Many of them gathered in the station’s underpasses to seek shelter. Japanese newspapers like the Mainichi Shinbun reported regularly on the situation at Ueno Station and circulated photographs depicting people packed into its underpasses.¹²⁴ The issue of homelessness and subcultural living in Ueno became highly problematic for various reasons: Repatriated soldiers and especially disabled ex-servicemen—material signs of the war’s destruction—were a constant reminder of Japan’s defeat, which most people, and especially Japan’s authorities, would have preferred to forget.¹²⁵ The homelessness and despair of repatriated soldiers was proof they were being neglected by the state, and they thus signified the incompetence of the Japanese state to care for its soldiers. In addition, repatriated soldiers and women became objects of defamation and were accused of carrying various “foreign” contagious diseases. Women in particular were believed to pose a threat to Japan’s future by bearing “mixed-race” children or spreading venereal disease.¹²⁶ The running tropes of disease, dirtiness, and despair were constitutive for the representation of Ueno and omnipresent in the discourse on postwar street prostitution.

In 1948, Ōtani Susumu, a postwar ethnographer of Ueno Park, published a literary miniature of defeated Japan entitled “Ikite iru: Ueno chikadō no seitai,” which was meant, as the title suggests, to investigate life in postsurrender Japan and in particular the modes of life in Ueno’s underground passageways and surroundings. In addition to repatriated veterans, Ōtani focused on the hundreds of streetwalking sex workers residing in and around Ueno Park, whom he interchangeably called “women of the night” (yoru no onna) or panpan girls. He was curious who these panpan girls were, where they came from, and what their lives were like. According to his observations, the majority of panpan were war orphans who were either repatriated from Japan’s former colonies or had lost their work, homes, and families in Japan. Some panpan had formerly worked as dancers in Tokyo’s entertainment industry, as professional prostitutes in licensed brothels, or had histories of juvenile delinquency. To grasp the panpan as a homogeneous social group, Ōtani searched for objective markers that could be applied to all panpan girls. The first marker was a lack of family ties, which meant panpan girls were independent, but also on their own. The second marker was age, and Ōtani counted that 60 percent were twenty to twenty-five years old, 20 percent were between the ages of seventeen and twenty, and only a few were older than thirty or younger than seventeen years old. The third and not insignificant marker was education, and Ōtani stressed the panpan girls’ low level of formal education; most had graduated from elementary school but hardly any had even attended secondary school. Hence, Ōtani’s intermediate finding was that neither sexual drives nor criminal energy played a role in driving girls into prostitution. Rather, he fostered the image of the “fallen woman” or “innocent girl” who was driven into prostitution by ignorance, misery, and despair: the panpan girls were victims of postsurrender Japan’s social and economic catastrophe.127

However, Ōtani did not stop at such overt generalizations; he was highly interested in the panpan girl’s “distinction”—to borrow a term from Pierre Bourdieu.¹²⁸ On his visits, Ōtani documented Ueno Park’s sex work culture in pedantically drawn maps in an iconography that noticeably resembled earlier Japanese ethnographic studies of the prewar period, in which ethnographers like Kon Waijirō had attempted to visualize the dynamics of everyday modern life.¹²⁹ Maps were widely used in ethnographic studies in Japan and elsewhere as a method to discover, measure, represent, and thereby produce a new body of knowledge about the unknown, a practice that has often been criticized for its controlling and colonizing power, particularly in imperial settings.¹³⁰ Simultaneously, mapping nonetheless makes it possible to follow the routes of, and traces left behind by, the ethnographer’s spatial practices. The “operations of walking,” as Michel de Certeau called them, visualize the creation of new social spaces by acknowledging their production by the practitioners.¹³¹ Ōtani’s new spatial configurations of Ueno Park’s sex work scene displays a hierarchy of sex workers divided into three spatially distinct classes (see figure 8). Ōtani labeled as class A panpan those girls who gathered between Ueno Station and the first pair of stairs leading up to the statue of Saigō Takamori. These women were the actual panpan who dressed in Western clothes and catered to mostly foreign customers, frequenting the nearby nightlife areas and—if money was available—lodging in guesthouses close to Ueno Station. The second class, B, was located between the Shinobazu Pond (Shinobazu-no-ike) and Kiyomizu-Temple. The women of category B supposedly wore slightly dirtier and torn clothes, hid their faces, and preferred to stay in the dark corners of the park, where they sometimes also slept in self-constructed tents. The third group, C, lived on the top of the hill between Kiyomizu-Temple and a Saigō Takamori statue. They wore very dirty clothes, did not comb their hair, and, to paraphrase Ōtani, lived a life of public indecency in a wild and uncontrolled community. Class distinctions obviously also materialized in the rate of payment for sexual services. Whereas sex workers of category A could make up to 600 yen for an hour or 1,500 yen for a full night’s service, sex workers from category B and C would only earn a maximum of 300 yen, which at the time of Ōtani’s inquiry was the cost of a meal or half a packet of cigarettes on the black market. Money and spending were especially significant criteria for Ōtani, which led him to the concluding remark that the “fallen women” lacked education and never thought about the future, but lived only for the moment, spending money wastefully on drugs, alcohol, food, and sometimes lodging. Such a lifestyle was indeed wasteful from the perspective of a middle-class intellectual like Ōtani, who seems to have been bewildered by a phenomenon he simply could not understand. But read between the lines, there is also a certain amount of admiration for the careless lifestyle of the panpan, who had their own ways of dealing with the hardships of postsurrender Japan.132

FIGURE 8. Map of Ueno Park’s sex work scene drawn by Ōtani Susumu, 1948. Image provided by the Prange Collection, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

Kanzaki Kiyoshi, another self-proclaimed ethnographer of postwar Japanese prostitution, made observations quite similar to those of Ōtani—although his evaluation was notably different. Born in Kagawa Prefecture in 1904, Kanzaki graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s department of Japanese language and literature, was the chairman of the council for youth culture of the Education Ministry (monbushō), and after defeat worked on women’s and youth issues for the newly established Labor Ministry.¹³³ In the postwar era, Kanzaki became a social activist and scholar investigating the sex work scene. According to Sarah Kovner, he “soon skyrocket[ed] to national fame as an anti-prostitution crusader.”¹³⁴ One of Kanzaki’s many articles was published in 1949 in the journal Jōsei Kaizō under the title “Cageless Zoo: A Current Report on Ueno by Night.” By giving his article this title, he probably wanted to draw a connection between Ueno Park’s prostitution culture and Ueno’s zoological garden, which is located only a few hundred meters from the sex workers’ meeting point.¹³⁵ To visualize his observations, Kanzaki appears also to have been a big fan of mapping Ueno Park’s prostitution scene—a method widely used by postwar Japan’s sex work ethnographers (see figure 9).¹³⁶ Unlike Ōtani, however, Kanzaki only identified two groups of female sex workers, the “yama-pan” and “shita-pan,” but he also recognized a small group of cross-dressing male prostitutes (danshō).¹³⁷ Yama-pan seem to correspond roughly to Ōtani’s category C sex workers, who lived on top of the hill, wore the Japanese wartime monpe dress, and served customers cheaply and “primitively” on straw mats. The “shita-pan” at the bottom of the hill were much more modern, dressed in Western clothes, and offered their services overtly in public.¹³⁸

The public visibility of sex and its availability apparently offended Kanzaki and induced him to portray Ueno Park’s prostitution scene as a zoo where human-like beings dwelled in boundless, animalistic sexual immorality. In his narrative, he strategically contrasted the present immoral and ignorant lifestyle of the panpan with the glory and beauty of Ueno’s past. All the prewar high cultural accomplishments embodied in museums, libraries, temples, schools, and gardens had now degenerated into “an underpass reeking of ammonia, a busy black market.” Ueno Park had become a gathering place for gangsters, homeless people, and sex workers, “who instantly formed an anti-social group that turned Ueno into a frightening criminal area.” Especially those “morbiferous panpan,” whom Kanzaki bluntly called a virus (byōdoku) because 60 percent were supposedly infected with a venereal disease, were constructed as a serious menace to the city. His logic of sexual danger even led him to the ironic yet derogatory remark that “although the girls pollute every corner of the park, it is mysterious that they did not wither the trees yet.”139

FIGURE 9. Map of sex work scene in Ueno Park and around Ueno Station drawn by Kanzaki Kiyoshi, 1949. Image provided by the journal Josei Kaizō, Vol. 4, 1949.

Kanzaki and Ōtani obviously had some differences in their evaluation of Ueno Park’s sex workers. Whereas Kanzaki perceived the panpan girl as a disgusting perpetrator who—probably out of ignorance—undermined the glorious legacy and social structure of Japan’s imperial era by publicly promoting sexual immorality, Ōtani took a much more apologetic stance. He portrayed the “fallen women” as victims, and he accounted for the new phenomenon of the panpan by looking at the social and economic environment from which she emerged. Although the perspectives and judgments differed significantly, there are also some intriguing similarities between Kanzaki and Ōtani: both articulated a certain nostalgia for a previously better Ueno as a place of high culture and dignity. Moreover, both seem to share not only a desire for a supposedly sound and wholesome past, but also the fear of the sexually immoral and uncontrolled panpan, who allegedly threatened Japan’s most valuable cultural essence, as represented by Ueno Park’s sites of cultural preservation and learning. The municipal administration shared or was at least responsive to these fears and released various ordinances to shut down public prostitution in Ueno Park, for example with police raids and by closing the park’s gates after dark.140 While sex work in Ueno Park never vanished completely, most panpan girls did move to other parts of the town such as Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Yurakucho, which had similarly sprawling commercial sex and nightlife scenes.¹⁴¹

• • •

As a key figure in the discourse on morality and sexuality in occupied Japan, the panpan as “fallen woman,” “street girl,” “gaishō,” and “yoru no onna” was constructed as haunting the mostly devastated urban landscape of postwar Japan, and her social space was perceived as what Judith Walkowitz has called a “perverse sexual jungle.”¹⁴² This could be articulated metaphorically as it was in the primitive, animalistic communities depicted in Tamura Taijirō’s Nikutai no mon, or stated literally in the ethnographies of Tokyo’s Ueno Park. The panpan was a personification of sex and its availability, and she simultaneously signified sexual danger, because her sexual encounters with black and white servicemen and Japanese clients transcended established social and racial boundaries. And especially the trope of the panpan girl’s venereally diseased body that circulated in feminist petitions, Japanese mass media, as well in the occupiers’ records portrayed her as a threat to “respectable” reproductive sexualities and a danger to the health of the whole population. However, it was not sex work per se that caused so much excitement in the Japanese public sphere. Most people still considered prostitution a necessary evil, and even feminist antiprostitution activists reluctantly joined the chorus of those demanding strong state intervention and control to regulate sex work as it had once been regulated under imperial Japan’s licensed prostitution system.143

Publicity, spatial confinement, and social stability were core issues in this discourse, and visible, spatially dispersed, and venereally diseased sex work transgressing social, cultural, and racial boundaries generated fear of sexual danger. The gaze of postwar Japan’s spectatorship of sexual danger, however, also attempted to control the threat it claimed to perceive. First, it turned the panpan into an outcast living a disorderly life in the slums of postsurrender Japan, a socially and sexually dangerous Other to the Japanese community—a “race apart” in Walkowitz’s words. Second, the gaze attempted to control the threat of sexual danger by collecting data on sex work and its milieu through surveys, categorizations, quantifications, maps, and evaluations, which wove a net of surveillance around the panpan. Third, the gaze simultaneously involved a reflexive mechanism that collected nostalgia for a healthy and chaste Japan; this mechanism can even be seen at work in the celebration of the panpan in subcultural literature and photography as the pitiful heroine of postsurrender Japan.¹⁴⁴ The rhetoric of postwar nostalgia relied on a linear temporal grammar of past and present embedded in dichotomies of whole and shattered, clean and dirty, healthy and diseased, and respectable versus unrespectable sexualities, which obviously echoed wartime propaganda as well as prewar narratives of sexology, moral reform, and social hygiene. Within this framework, the panpan incarnated the loss of an imagined pure past, and the desire to control, confine, regenerate, and rehabilitate her body signified the desire to regain an imagined Japan that had never actually existed. Crude patriotism that echoed the wartime emperor-centered ideology was strictly censored by the occupation regime. Yet by speaking of sexual danger and mobilizing the trope of the panpan who was imagined as irrevocably destroying Japan and its future by spreading venereal disease, threatening public health, security, morality, and male superiority, Japanese writers and intellectuals were able to express their patriotic fears and reactionary desires for purity.