Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan / Edition 1

by Sarah Kovner

Overview

The year was 1945. Hundreds of thousands of Allied troops poured into war-torn Japan and spread throughout the country. The effect of this influx on the local population did not lessen in the years following the war's end. In fact, the presence of foreign servicemen also heightened the visibility of certain others, particularly panpan—streetwalkers—who were objects of their desire.

Occupying Power shows how intimate histories and international relations are interconnected in ways scholars have only begun to explore. Sex workers who catered to servicemen were integral to the postwar economic recovery, yet they were nonetheless blamed for increases in venereal disease and charged with diluting the Japanese race by producing mixed-race offspring. In 1956, Japan passed its first national law against prostitution, which produced an unanticipated effect. By ending a centuries-old tradition of sex work regulation, it made sex workers less visible and more vulnerable. This probing history reveals an important but underexplored aspect of the Japanese occupation and its effect on gender and society. It shifts the terms of debate on a number of controversies, including Japan's history of forced sexual slavery, rape accusations against U.S. servicemen, opposition to U.S. overseas bases, and sexual trafficking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804788632
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	03/07/2013
Series:	Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Sarah Kovner is Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Florida.

Read an Excerpt

Occupying Power

SEX WORKERS AND SERVICEMEN IN POSTWAR JAPAN

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By Sarah Kovner

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7691-2

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Chapter One

"To Transship Them to Some Suitable Island" Making Policy in the Midst of Chaos

When American troops disembarked in Japan just after the surrender, they found something none of them had anticipated. Some had feared they would encounter die-hard defenders. After all, these men of the Sixth and Eighth Armies had fought a brutal ten-month campaign to retake the Philippines. At the very least, they expected the defeated enemy to show hostility. Instead, the reporter for Stars and Stripes happened upon an incredible scene. "Jap welcomers on the street were directing every lonesome looking American to the grand opening"—the grand opening of what appeared to be a USO club. "Inside, young Japanese hostesses with their polite bows, giggles and broad smiles waited to serve large milkshake glasses full of beer for five yen." Soon the Americans discovered something even more astonishing. Such establishments were intended to satisfy not just the thirst of U.S. servicemen, but also their erotic desires.

Hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and civilians would work, drink, and play in Tokyo, Osaka, and more remote regions of Japan as part of the Allied Occupation. In 1946, tens of thousands of Australian, New Zealand, British, and Indian troops would join them as part of the British Commonwealth occupation Force (BCOF). The Allied Occupation of Japan included commissioners, delegates, and war crimes judges from eleven countries, even if the supreme commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), General Douglas MacArthur, preferred to ignore them. But no one, not even the imperious MacArthur, could control the complex and often chaotic relations among the people who came together in this crowded archipelago, whether soldiers and settlers repatriated from overseas, Korean and Chinese laborers who had come to work in war industries, orphans and widows wandering through bombed-out cities, or an eclectic assortment of civilians and servicemen from several nations. They included Aborigines from Australia, Maori from New Zealand, and Punjabis from India.

The number of Allied servicemen would peak at 430,000 in late 1945 and early 1946. It gradually declined until 1950, when most of the BCOF forces had departed and just 115,000 Americans remained. During the Korean War, it would more than double again, to 260,000. Many thousands more Allied servicemen would stream through Japan on their way to or from the war in Korea. They trained, performed maneuvers, and came for R&R (rest and recreation) trips. As customers, they possessed unusual power because of their privileged position in occupied Japan. Local economies and whole neighborhoods were transformed to satisfy their desires, which reflected the longer history of Euro-American perceptions of the Orient. The "geisha girls" or panpan, dangling cigarettes and garbed in bright dresses, catered to their fantasies. And the Japanese also created new social spaces where they could be given free rein, far from the traditional, regulated sex-work districts. In 1955, it was estimated that one in every twenty-five women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine worked in the commercial sex industry.

As the first to arrive in Japan, the Americans would have to decide what to do with the Recreational Amusement Association (RAA, Tokushu Ian Kyokai) Japan had established for Allied servicemen. U.S. commanders came with a set of policies and practices—formal and informal—that had developed over de cades to deal with sex work and sexually transmitted diseases. Most military bureaucracies have acknowledged, explicitly or implicitly, that some soldiers, sailors, and airmen pay for commercial sex. Such behavior, particularly before the discovery in 1943 that penicillin could cure syphilis and gonorrhea, was a major threat to military efficiency. In nineteenth-century colonial India, for instance, on average no fewer than one in five British soldiers was hospitalized each year for VD. This was no less a problem for the U.S. military. In the Civil War, almost 20 percent of those fighting were infected. During World War I, U.S. troops missed 7 million days of active duty because of VD. It was the second most common illness after influenza.

As a result, military commanders focused on keeping their troops healthy. They faced the choice between trying to prevent prostitution altogether or regulating it to reduce the risk to troops. The resulting policies ranged from strict prohibition to laissez-faire to limited regulation to actual sponsorship of brothels. The United States often regulated—rather than prohibited—sex work, especially in overseas possessions, such as Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, and the Panama Canal Zone. During General John J. Pershing's campaign against Francisco Pancho Villa from 1916 to 1917, sex work was also regulated on both sides of the Mexican border. Concerned at the incidence of VD among his troops, Pershing had the Army Medical Corps inspect and treat both sex workers and their clients. During World War II, some local commanders in central Africa, India, the Middle East, France, and the Ca rib be an also cooperated with brothel owners despite official disapproval.

Closer to home, U.S. management of sexual behavior took a different approach. In the late nineteenth century, some local governments had regulated sex work by selectively enforcing prostitution laws. But incarcerating and rehabilitating sex workers became increasingly common, finally coalescing during the progressive era and World War I into what became known as the American Plan. Social activists and the military provided positive recreational facilities, stepped up police enforcement, and supplied prophylactic treatment to servicemen—but not to sex workers. This initiative would persist through World War II, when military authorities considered the moral threat to servicemen in base areas so serious that officials pushed for national legislation.

In 1940, a meeting of the military medical services, the Public Health Service, and the American Social Hygiene Association produced the Eight-Point Agreement, which called for a ban on prostitution and medical care for the afflicted. The plan also recommended that infected individuals provide names of sexual partners so that public health officials could track them down. But contact tracing tended to be in effective, since many were reluctant to disclose their sexual history. Even when their partners could be positively identified, it was difficult to bring them in. The military did little to implement this program, and in response Congress passed the 1941 May Act, which legislated "moral zones" free of prostitution near military installations in the United States. The act also gave the Justice Department the legal authority to supersede local police in prosecuting violators.

Different state models of regulation and prohibition were therefore available to U.S. officials when they arrived in Japan. But there was no precedent for a system of official brothels. In fact, there was a clear trend in policy to prohibit prostitution altogether.

Japanese policy and practice displayed a very different tendency. Commercial sex work had been tolerated and regulated in Japan for more than three hundred years. In Japan, as in other places, venereal diseases were considered prostitutes' diseases, and therefore disease-fighting focused solely on this population. With the opening of treaty ports, this included lock hospitals that confined those found to be infected. The British helped to establish the first such institution in Yokohama in 1868. Beginning in the 1870s, Japanese authorities also adopted the French practice of making medical exams compulsory. The Japanese National Hygiene Bureau gathered statistics on the percentage infected, and Western-style newspapers reported the results. The state's focus on the health and welfare of the Japanese nation and especially its army brought even more restrictions on sex workers, although no similar measures applied to the general population. In 1927, the Law for the Prevention of Venereal Disease provided for weekly examination of licensed prostitutes, the establishment by the Ministry of Welfare of clinics to treat and examine prostitutes and anyone else who had VD, and the punishment of affected persons. Those who procured customers or owned brothels and knew that their prostitutes had VD were also subject to punishment under the 1927 legislation.

But the regulation and examination of these women did not provide an effective method of fighting VD. Poorly trained doctors pronounced sick women well. Sanitary conditions and inaccurate tests prevented even the best doctors from properly diagnosing disease or treating it appropriately. Even if diagnosed with VD, sex workers often were unable to afford expensive medicine. Bribery was also a factor, whether brothel keepers paying off doctors, or a sex worker doing so herself.

Beginning in 1933, the Japanese military overseas turned to more authoritarian methods to organize sexual services while also containing disease. They established what they called comfort stations, which, in fact, became sites of sexual slavery. Although many Japanese sex workers volunteered to go to the front—they may have either had little taste for factory labor or suffered from onerous debts—few likely understood the conditions they would face. And there is no question that women from Korea, China, the Netherlands, and elsewhere were forced to serve. The organizers intended the system not only to contain the spread of VD but also to reduce the incidence of attacks on civilians in China. Rapes occurred as early as the first Shanghai Incident in 1932, and on a larger scale with all-out war in 1937. This experience overseas led Japanese officials to fear that occupying forces would engage in mass rapes of Japanese women, so they took it upon themselves to organize comfort stations for U.S. troops.

The arrangement of sexual services for Allied servicemen was rapid and well-funded. It was overseen by future prime minister Ikeda Hayato, at that time director of the Tax Bureau of the Ministry of Finance. The first meeting took place just a week after surrender and before the arrival of occupation troops. By August 18, 1945, Tanaka Yuichi, Home Ministry Security Division chief, had already telegraphed the governors and police chiefs of each prefecture about establishing special comfort stations as a bulwark (bohatei) against the danger posed by foreign servicemen. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board met that same day and assigned the task to the Tokyo Restaurant Association (Tokyo Ryori Inshokugyo Kumiai), which included representatives from the geisha union as well as restaurateurs. On August 21, 1945, military envoy Lieutenant General Kawabe Kojiro discussed the "needs" of the incoming Allied forces before an audience of the most powerful statesmen in Japan. He spoke at the prime minister's residence in Nagata-cho, still the center for political power-brokering in Tokyo.

The planners of the RAA thought big, even if they were not able to enact all their ideas. And they received lavish funding, with an eventual bud get of 33 million yen provided by the Ministry of Finance through a loan from Nippon Kangyo Ginko (Japan Industrial Development Bank). Management hardly bothered with bookkeeping. Many of them came from wealthy families. They decided to set up the first bars and brothels for foreign servicemen in Tokyo. The RAA worked with former brothel owners to renovate hotels and staffed them mainly with experienced sex workers.

One RAA official, Watanabe Yasuo, later recalled that, with so few job opportunities in the immediate postwar chaos, the RAA was a good place to work. Whether these brothels and bars were a good place to work for the women—or even whether what they did can be called "work"—has become a subject of burning controversy. Historians such as Hirai Kazuko and Yuki Tanaka have argued that the RAA's establishments can be compared to the war time military comfort stations. Certainly the rhetoric surrounding the creation of the RAA would support this view. In a ceremony held outside the imperial palace, a government statement noted that it would require the "hardening of determination for selfless patriotic service (messhi hoko)," nationalistic language familiar from the war. The statement continued: "We have become conscious of a foundational undertaking for the inauguration of the reconstruction of a new Japan and the protection of the chastity of all Japanese women." The women who staffed RAA facilities in the hot-springs resort of Atami were even called female kamikaze (onna no tokkotai). The policy of operating official brothels presumed that sex workers would protect other Japanese women who were deemed more worthy of protection.

But even if Japanese officials had wished to replicate the comfort-women system, they could not have. The Japanese state was no longer an imperial power at war. Regulators could not forcibly procure colonial subjects to staff the brothels. Therefore, the RAA had to advertise for sex workers, placing ads in the major Tokyo newspapers and recruitment posters in Atami, the port of Yokohama, and the Ginza district of Tokyo. And unlike the military comfort women from Japan's colonies, RAA workers were paid.

Continuing to work in the brothels would indeed have required self-sacrifice, even if nationalistic rhetoric is not what actually induced women to become employees in the first place. The first such establishment, Komachien (Babe Garden), featured as many as thirty women at a time dressed in the thin silk undergarment normally worn under a kimono, the nagajuban. Though they entertained clients behind screens, privacy was minimal and turnover was heavy. A short-time visit cost a soldier just 30 yen, or $1.56. In Atami, some reportedly had to take in twenty to twenty-five clients in three hours.

One cabaret, likely an RAA establishment, provided GIs a quart of beer for 10 yen and the opportunity to dance with Japanese women for 2 yen per dance. Open between three and five in the afternoon, the cabaret hosted five hundred troops on a typical day. Private Wright Young of Dallas, who served on MP duty outside, observed that "guys really like this. It's a shame they don't stay open longer." In November, Sergeant Robert Cornwall described the Oasis of Ginza as "a vast room filled with a high percentage of pulchritude and a minimum of gold-and-buck teeth, and servicemen carrying out their roles as conquerors." Here the powerful metaphor of "gold-and-buck teeth" stands in for the Japanese men so notably absent from the Oasis.

But focusing on the RAA as it appeared in the pages of Stars and Stripes, and later in critical histories, provides a quite limited, even misleading view of what sex work was like under the occupation. Some RAA facilities, such as Cabaret New Atami, served Japanese as well as GIs. Others quickly transitioned into private establishments. Although it is unclear how many women the RAA employed—some estimate as many as 70,000—far more participated in the sex-work industry outside these establishments. For example, it is estimated that in Tokyo in 1945–1946, 30,000 women worked in the sex industry, just 1,360 of whom were in the RAA. Moreover, most occupation authorities did not have such a tolerant (or even applauding) attitude toward the RAA or to the less institutionalized sexual-service industry that supplanted it. In fact, most U.S. military commanders considered prostitution an endemic problem that plagued their troops.

For all their power as occupiers, U.S. officials would find it impossible to mount a unified or even coherent response. Prostitution and VD fell under two jurisdictions: the U.S. Far East Command, responsible for all servicemen in East Asia, including their health, and the Public Health and Welfare (PH&W) Section, civilian officials in charge of the physical well-being of the Japanese population. Sex work would become "a source of constant conflict," as a later report observed, "resulting in a lack of cooperation and coordination in venereal disease control activities between these agencies." Even if there had been total harmony between the Far East Command and the civilian officials, there were also differences of opinion among local army, navy, and air force commanders. The long distance between Japan and Washington limited and delayed communications, making it all the more difficult to resolve these conflicts.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Occupying Power by Sarah Kovner Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

A Note on Names and Nomenclature xi

Introduction: A Special Business 1

1 "To Transship Them to Some Suitable Island": Making Policy in the Midst of Chaos 18

2 Violence, Commerce, Marriage 49

3 When Flesh Glittered: Selling Sex in Sasebo and Tokyo 74

4 Legislating Women: The Push for a Prostitution Prevention Law 99

5 The High Politics of Base Pleasures: Regulating Morality for the Postwar Era 119

6 The Presence of the Past: Controversies over Sex Work Since 1956 139

Conclusion: Beyond Victimhood 152

Appendix 161

Notes 165

Bibliography 201

Index 219

Editorial Reviews

"Rich, theoretically-informed, and based on extensive archival research in several countries, Sarah Kovner's study sheds new light on a hitherto unexplored aspect of the Allied occupation of Japan—its sexual politics."

University of Wollongong, and author of Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality - Vera Mackie

"With rich data and numerous insights, Occupying Power offers a valuable contribution on a number of levels . . . The book contains detailed descriptions of the complex history of sex work under the Allied Occupation in vivid narratives, which makes it an accessible and useful resource for anyone who is interested in Japanese history and the politics of sex work . . . Kovner's careful and nuanced analysis successfully complicates and challenges conventional approaches for understanding sex work and sex workers in Japan and beyond."

Pacific Affairs - Kimiko Osawa

"Sarah Kovner's path breaking study of the Japanese sex industry during the Allied occupation brings to light that the Japanese historical toleration of state-regulated prostitution nonetheless has its limits when confronted with a new reality . . . Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan otherwise makes a compelling case and should be regarded as an indispensable read for all students who explore the history of commercial sex in Japan, the Asia-Pacific region, and beyond."

American Historical Review - Yuma Totani

"It is well-researched, thoughtful and courageous, and provides much material for scholarly and social debate. Occupying Power nicely complicates our understanding of the power dynamics of occupation, and of the place of sexual interactions within those dynamics . . . I hope that Kovner's research inspires further interrogations of sexual relations under military occupation."

Japanese Studies - Christine de Matos

"This thorough and authoritative study enables the reader to gain a fresh understanding not only of the interactions between Japanese women and postwar occupying forces but also of the nation's view of itself at a time when Japan—despite its persistent reluctance to embrace interracial individuals—was concerned about its 'moral' standing in the international community."

Harvard University - Akira Iriye

"Relying on a range of Japanese- and English-language sources, this succinct volume offers a thick analysis of sex work in Japan from political, social, economic, and symbolic viewpoints. . . . Occupying Power is literally a powerful book that adds important insight to the fields of modern Japan, women's studies, and 'America in the world.' This study deserves a wide audience."

Diplomatic History - Hiroshi Kitamura

"Occupying Power addresses an important subject, the multiple roles and shifting statuses of sex work in occupation-era Japan. . . [P]repares the ground for global perspectives and comparisons on sex work wherever occupation has occurred. Students and scholars will find the book a welcome addition to their readings in the modern history of Japan and the still understudied occupation era in particular. . .[M]akes an exciting contribution to women's, feminist, and sexuality studies."

Journal of Japanese Studies Sabine Frühstück

"With rich data and numerous insights, Occupying Power offers a valuable contribution on a number of levels . . . The book contains detailed descriptions of the complex history of sex work under the Allied Occupation in vivid narratives, which makes it an accessible and useful resource for anyone who is interested in Japanese history and the politics of sex work . . . Kovner's careful and nuanced analysis successfully complicates and challenges conventional approaches for understanding sex work and sex workers in Japan and beyond."—Kimiko Osawa, Pacific Affairs

"Occupying Power offers the academic researcher a treasure trove of facts, materials, and provocative interpretations."—Franziska Seraphim, Journal of Asian Studies

" Sarah Kovner is to be highly commended for writing a book that should be required reading for all those interested in the Allied Occupation and the social and political history of modern Japan."—Hamish Ion, Monumenta Nipponica

"Kovner's detailed analysis of this movement and the politics of prostitution is illuminating, explaining how sex industry bribery of Diet members facilitated crucial compromises ensuring that outlawing sex work in 1956 had limited practical impact."—Jeff Kingston, The Japan Times

"Occupying Power addresses an important subject, the multiple roles and shifting statuses of sex work in occupation-era Japan. . . [P]repares the ground for global perspectives and comparisons on sex work wherever occupation has occurred. Students and scholars will find the book a welcome addition to their readings in the modern history of Japan and the still understudied occupation era in particular. . .[M]akes an exciting contribution to women's, feminist, and sexuality studies."—Sabine Frühstück,Journal of Japanese Studies

From the Publisher

"Sarah Kovner has written a path-breaking work of Japanese history using a broad range of sources from Japanese, American, and British Commonwealth archives. This book will serve as the base line for studies in the history of sex work in postwar Japan for many years to come. Beyond that, it is an important study of women's history, sexuality, and military occupation in the twentieth century, and should be of interest to scholars in these fields worldwide."

Wesleyan University - William Johnston

"Occupying Power offers the academic researcher a treasure trove of facts, materials, and provocative interpretations."

Journal of Asian Studies - Franziska Seraphim

"Kovner's detailed analysis of this movement and the politics of prostitution is illuminating, explaining how sex industry bribery of Diet members facilitated crucial compromises ensuring that outlawing sex work in 1956 had limited practical impact."

The Japan Times - Jeff Kingston

"[Kovner] reaches for and firmly grasps interconnections, whether across national boundaries or periods of time, and frequently with an eloquence that requires rereading and sharing. . . . The rave reviews coming in from leading scholars suggest that Kovner already has vaulted into the front ranks of Japanese scholarship. Summing Up: Essential."

CHOICE - R. B. Lyman Jr.

"Overall, Occupying Power is a new and important addition to the recently growing literature of the social and grassroots history of postwar Japan . . . The book further deserves praise for incorporating up-to-date developments in the fields of women's, feminist, and sexuality studies, as well as empire and nationalism studies, into the study of occupied Japan, making the book multidisciplinary by nature. Without doubt, therefore, Occupying Power should attract a wide audience in diverse fields."

H-War - Hajimu Masuda

"Sarah Kovner has tackled a delicate subject with tact, thoughtfulness, and academic rigor. Her important book will be of great interest not just to specialists in Japanese history, but to anyone interested in the consequences of war, occupation, and indeed human relations across cultures."

Bard College - Ian Buruma

"Occupying Power addresses an important subject, the multiple roles and shifting statuses of sex work in occupation-era Japan. . . [P]repares the ground for global perspectives and comparisons on sex work wherever occupation has occurred. Students and scholars will find the book a welcome addition to their readings in the modern history of Japan and the still understudied occupation era in particular. . .[M]akes an exciting contribution to women's, feminist, and sexuality studies."

Journal of Japanese Studies Sabine Frühstück

"Occupying Power addresses an important subject, the multiple roles and shifting statuses of sex work in occupation-era Japan. . . [P]repares the ground for global perspectives and comparisons on sex work wherever occupation has occurred. Students and scholars will find the book a welcome addition to their readings in the modern history of Japan and the still understudied occupation era in particular. . .[M]akes an exciting contribution to women's, feminist, and sexuality studies."

Journal of Japanese Studies Sabine Fr hst ck