In 1953, just one year after the official end of the occupation of Japan, Bill Hume, a cartoonist whose pieces appeared in the Navy Times and Pacific Stars & Stripes and who had been stationed in Japan with the U.S. Navy since 1951, published the short booklet Babysan: A Private Look at the Japanese Occupation. The booklet consists of a series of cartoons depicting relationships between American sailors and panpan girls and was dedicated to “all Americans who have visited the land of the Fujisan and who may have learned from the Japanese how to be occupied while occupying.” Hume’s cartoons were meant to cause amusement by retelling awkward situations of transcultural encounters between occupiers and occupied. They addressed clashes of differing cultural codes in dating behavior and the creation of English/Japanese pidgins that resulted in various moments of misunderstanding and astonishment. Not surprisingly, however, Hume’s private look at the occupation is highly sexualized and orientalized, and it reproduced a discriminatory image of Japanese women. According to this image, Japanese women had always been sexually available to American servicemen during the occupation period, but they also acted as “butterflies” who indiscriminately dated a number of boyfriends and catered to multiple clients simultaneously. In doing so, they adhered to an impenetrable economic and moral logic of their own with, as Hume put it, “a graceful lack of sophistication.”1 This image culminates in the last cartoon of Hume’s series (see figure 10). It pictures “Babysan” standing on a harbor pier, waving farewell to a departing Navy vessel. Her head, however, is turned to the left and she is looking at another American sailor who is just entering the picture’s frame. The caption reads:
FIGURE 10. Cartoon by Bill Hume: “Babysan” is waving goodbye, 1953. Image provided by Bill Hume, Babysan: A Private Look at the Japanese Occupation (Tokyo: Kasuga Boeki K. K., 1954 [1953]), 123.
When the ship pulls out the boyfriend’s thoughts are with Babysan. He wonders how she will manage without him. He wonders if she feels the same sense of loss. Sure, he remembers her soothing words as she smiled up through a trace of tears, “I all time remember,” but he wonders. He wonders if she too is lonely. Since his ship is far, far away from the dock, he wonders. He never knows.2
Hume’s depiction of the farewell scene plays with the image of the “butterflying” panpan girl, who swore loyalty to so many paying and providing partners, who, for their part, were apparently unable to figure out whether they were actually loved, played, or even betrayed by their “mysterious” Japanese female companions.
However, Hume’s last cartoon can also be construed in a different vein. The occupation regime was dissolved in 1952, after Japan and the United States signed the Treaty of Peace with Japan (also called the San Francisco Treaty) on September 8, 1951. Enacted on April 28, 1952, the treaty stipulated the end of the Allied occupation of Japan and the return of Japan’s sovereignty. Piers and airfields were crowded with Japanese waving goodbye to the occupiers, whom they had first feared, then embraced as liberators and saviors from militarism and hunger, but later also despised for the many promises of reforms that were never made good during the occupation period. The farewell scene depicted by Hume, in particular the American sailor entering the picture despite the departure of his comrades, nevertheless points to the persistence of the Allied, predominantly American presence in Japan after the official end of the occupation period. Many U.S. servicemen did not leave in 1952 and military installations did not vanish. There is a long list of military bases still run by the United States in Japan, especially in Okinawa, but also throughout Asia, in countries such as South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan, all tied into the global network of American military hegemony. Given the continued presence of U.S. military bases, military prostitution has not disappeared. It is still influencing local economies, shaping security and public health issues, molding cultural production, and thus constituting the everyday lifeworlds of many people throughout Asia.3
The legacies of the encounter between occupiers and occupied are numerous. Various treaties, most prominently the security treaties of 1951–1952 and 1960, made Japan an independent but subordinate partner in the postwar Pax Americana. Politically, economically, and especially militarily, Japan stayed under the aegis of U.S. hegemony. This entailed anticommunist and capitalist commitment, close economic and diplomatic relations to the United States and its Cold War allies, and the ongoing presence of U.S. military troops on Japanese soil to guarantee security under America’s “nuclear umbrella.”4 Socially and culturally, the occupiers also left deep traces in bourgeois lifestyle and career expectations, as well as in the ways intellectuals tried to account for Japan’s twentieth-century aggressions and its future role among other nations. Furthermore, Japanese mass and pop culture was Americanized a second time, after having already been influenced during the 1920s and 1930s. For postwar Japanese academics, activists, businessmen, housewives, politicians, populists, and youth cultures, America cast a long shadow, and the shared American-Japanese narrative that saw the occupation project as a success was for Japan a constant reminder of its subordinate status throughout the long postwar era.5
The sexual encounters between occupiers and occupied left similarly deep traces in Japan’s long postwar history. Legal debates and campaigns against prostitution during the occupation period culminated in the first nationwide prohibition of prostitution in Japan in 1956. However, despite being made illegal, sex work did not come to an end, but has continued less visibly in hostess bars and Turkish bath parlors (toruko-buro). Since the Turkish scholar Nusert Sanjakli caused a scandal in the 1980s by pointing out how Turkey is commonly mentioned in connection with Japan’s sex business, bathhouse operators have been dodging Japan’s antiprostitution law once again by providing sexual services in renamed “soaplands” (sōpurando).6 A more direct, and arguably the most existential result of sexual relations between servicemen and Japanese women, ranging from commercial sex to mistress relationships and long-term liaisons, were the births of thousands of children. Officials in the United States and administrators of the occupation regime did not want to take responsibility for these births and considered the children of occupier-occupied couples to be a concern for Japanese authorities. U.S. immigration laws made it difficult for American-Japanese couples to move together to the United States, and military commanders discouraged U.S. servicemen from having long-term relationships with local, non-American women by means of informal obstacles, which made a stable parenting situation for the partners’ children unlikely. In Japan, the biracial children of American-Japanese couples, called konketsuji in Japanese since the 1950s (literally meaning children of mixed blood), were actively marginalized and mostly grew up in orphanages. Usually, the children’s very existence was stigmatized and perceived as an inevitable trace of their mothers’ sex work. In addition, the children often experienced racial discrimination, and the children of African American fathers experienced even stronger exclusion. Biracial children in Korea were subject to a similar fate. However, this is not to say that only Japanese and Korean societies discriminated against biracial children. In the United States as well, “occupation babies” faced many problems and were not easily integrated. The point, however, is to understand that these issues are not mere by-products of the occupation period. Allegedly more palpable effects manifest in the postoccupation era—such as America’s continuing military dominance, political and economic hegemony, and its Cold War alliances in Asia—were likewise deeply interwoven with the occupation period’s sanitization of sex.7
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Occupiers and occupied alike, pursuing different, conflicting, but sometimes also overlapping or even congruent aims and means, shared a deep desire to sanitize sex during the occupation of Japan. As viewed from the regulators’ perspectives, sex had to be safe, healthy and morally sound. Despite varying motivations, sex was central to the occupation period’s biopolitical assessment of what was acceptable. Sexuality, sexual encounters, sex work, venereal disease and its regulation were entering dimensions of the intimate, in which the occupation period’s asymmetries of power and the boundaries of race, class, and gender were not only affirmed and reproduced, but also stretched, dodged, and resisted.
The regulation of sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease during the occupation period was characterized by ambivalence. Sex workers and other women labeled as “loose women” or “pick-ups” were stigmatized and criminalized as sources of venereal disease. This simultaneously maintained the availability of heterosexual sex to sustain what Cynthia Enloe has called a “militarized masculinity.” Moreover, the sanitization of sex was an arena for predominantly male agents of the occupation regime as well as the occupied society to sustain the male-dominated character of the occupation of Japan. Male anxieties about a sexual invasion as well as fears of losing control of men’s and women’s sexual behavior nourished the idea that it was important to provide and maintain a sexual outlet. Male Japanese authorities’ struggle to stay in charge, and male American/Allied administrators’ attempts to regulate servicemen’s sexuality, are both examples of male competition and rivalry over authority, but they are also examples of male complicity in the joint efforts to minimize allegedly dangerous sexualities.
Members of the occupation regime chose not to fight high rates of venereal disease infection by suppressing prostitution, fraternization, and sexual encounters by means of laws or repressive policing. Instead, servicemen were educated in self-restraint or self-policing to build morally stable and responsible soldierly characters. For those who did not possess the “character” to control themselves, however, the military provided a hygienic infrastructure to secure servicemen’s sexual recreation. This ambivalence uncovers, to quote Seungsook Moon’s work on sex work in U.S.-occupied Korea, a “consistent system of regulated prostitution,”8 following an androcentric, heteronormative logic according to which male soldiers were supposedly inclined toward heterosexual sex. This sex was consistently seen as a potential “danger” due to the likelihood of contracting venereal diseases, which would lead to increasing military inefficiency, loss of reputation, and moral corruption. Sex, however, did not have to be renounced completely. To keep sex available, the occupation regime facilitated “loopholes” for servicemen by informal ways of policing red-light districts, teaching effective prophylaxis, building prophylactic stations, enforcing a broad system of medical surveillance, and guaranteeing medical and spiritual recovery.
Although the regulation of prostitution displays some consistency on an abstract level, the array of the occupiers’ regulatory practices were not centrally planned, nor were they uniformly implemented. Rather, as has been shown throughout this book, the range of regulation was usually limited. Regulation also created tensions among various sections of the occupation administration and opened up possibilities for cooperation with the occupied. But it could also take the regulators down unforeseen paths. The compulsory sex education and character guidance classes were hardly effective in discouraging servicemen from hanging out with panpan girls, and the vast amount of resources mobilized for prophylaxis did not significantly decrease venereal infection rates during the occupation period. Advocates of moral reform, social hygienists, and guardians of public safety argued over the legitimate and most effective ways of regulating (or not regulating) sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease. Nevertheless, venereal disease control, for instance, helped to reform Japan’s public health system. Yet the new methods of diagnosis, treatment, and documentation also helped the occupiers to deeply penetrate the occupied society and make it more transparent for military occupational rule. The occupied learned from the occupiers’ new technologies, but were also responsible for the successful dissemination and implementation of regulatory practices as assistants, administrators, or translators. Hence, they could also ignore, obstruct, sabotage, or distract the occupiers’ interventions according to their own purposes. The detention of sex workers and the tracing of venereal disease contacts were most successful with the help of Japanese police officers and public health assistants with local knowledge of language, people, and neighborhoods. Health reforms could only be introduced with the support of local health administrations, and the stubbornness of members of the Japanese bureaucracy could doom them to ineffectiveness. An antibacterial lotion from servicemen’s pro kits meant to be injected into the urethra to prevent venereal disease could circulate on the black market as a popular cure for fungal infections. And the discourse on sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease enabled Japanese contemporaries to dodge the occupiers’ censorship and articulate their nationalistic and patriotic desires for a pure Japan that otherwise would have been banned from textbooks, newspapers, and public debate.
Most of the concepts employed in the regulation of sexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease during the occupation of Japan derived at least in part from an older body of knowledge that was deeply rooted in one way or another in a global history of empire. The occupiers’ and occupied’s biographies alike were trajectories of imperial histories, and both were able to mediate imperial knowledge, appropriate it, and mold it to suit the particular situation of occupied Japan. Japan’s authorities translated notions of prostitution from the wartime and prewar eras into the immediate postsurrender period, drawing on familiar ideals of sexuality, gender, class, and race to conceptualize the “female floodwall,” a broad recreational program to comfort the occupiers. Elite occupiers had often served in overseas operations prior to the occupation of Japan, for instance in the Philippines, and were able to import the regulatory techniques they had learned there. Most interestingly, some occupiers and occupied shared similar experiences, because they had worked for globally active organizations such as the WWCTU or other moral reform groups. Ideals of moral reform, for instance, were simultaneously influential in the attempts to strengthen servicemen’s characters by means of moral and sexual education, but they were also a point of reference for Japanese feminists who promoted postwar moral purification campaigns. Indeed, transnational entanglements had a significant impact on everyday life in occupied Japan and shaped the asymmetries of power in ways that reached deeply into the intimate realms of occupiers and occupied alike.