female middle- and upper-class sexuality, and to foster biological reproduction with the aim of preserving the continuity of the Japanese “national body.”75 As the Home Ministry’s directive shows, it was the same logic that underlay the decision by Japan’s authorities to establish comfort stations for the occupiers at the end of World War II.
The desire for national preservation and even essentialization in the program to comfort the occupiers after the war is most apparent in the founding of the Tokushu ianshisestu kyōkai around August 20, 1945, an organization commonly known under the later name Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA). It is said that Prince Konoe Fumimaro, then deputy prime minister, together with Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police chief Saka Nobuya, members of the Tokyo police’s Public Peace and Security Section (which was also highly involved in controlling prostitution in the Tokyo area), and several private entrepreneurs of Tokyo’s gastronomy and nightlife industry cooperatively initiated the RAA.76 Authorities granted the RAA police support and financial aid, and it became a right-wing, semigovernmental association for organizing brothels and other recreational facilities for the occupation forces. The RAA’s zeal for a nationalist postwar order is documented in the inaugural speech given by Miyazawa Hamajirō, the president of Tokyo’s gastronomy association and director of the RAA, on August 28, 1945, in front of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. August 15, 1945, according to Miyazawa, marked the end of an era: “At this time, we are burdened through our previous occupation [as entrepreneurs in the entertainment industry] with the difficult task of comforting the occupation forces as part of the urgently needed national facilities for postwar management. . . . In united alliance with our beliefs we go unhesitatingly forward, and through the human sacrifice of several thousand ‘Okichis of the Shōwa period’ we build a floodwall against the raging waves, helping to defend and nurture the purity of our race, thereby becoming an invisible base for the postwar social order.”77
The speech itself ended with cheers of “banzai” to salute the emperor and was later released as an “oath” by the RAA to defend the kokutai and preserve the “3,000 years of unchanging lineage of the emperor and the Japanese people.”78
In mentioning Okichi, Miyazawa was referring to the history of a geisha who was said to have served, under orders of the Tokugawa shogunate’s government (bakufu), the first U.S. general consul, Townsend Harris, during his residency in Japan in the 1850s—before she committed suicide. It is believed that her comforting and explicitly sexual services contributed significantly to the peaceful negotiations for diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States. The legend of Okichi therefore also helped construct an ideology of inevitable sacrifice for the well-being of the nation, a supposedly positive meaning for those women who were to function as a “floodwall” in the postwar period. The same image of the sacrifice of young, lower-class women, embedded in a narrative of progress and modernity, can also be traced in the recruitment and mobilization practices of the RAA.
Following the construction of the vulnerable female body and of prostitutes’ lower-class origins, Miyazawa called in his inaugural speech for defending and nurturing the “purity” of the Japanese race (minzoku) and thus linked postsurrender prostitution closely to notions of racial hygiene that had originated in the prewar and wartime periods.79 According to the historian Awaya Kentarō, the fear of racial contamination through the rape of Japanese women by U.S. servicemen gave rise to the idea of setting up brothels for the occupation forces. Awaya’s analysis focused on Konoe Fumimaro, also notorious for being the founder of the para-fascist organization Taisei yokusankai (Imperial Rule Assistance Association) and three-time prime minister of Japan, who apparently argued for the establishment of a prostitution scheme to prevent the rape of Japanese women and thereby save Japan’s “purity of blood” (junketsu).80
Taking a concept of racial homogeneity as determinative of policy, however, is to ahistorically project modern Japanese hygiene thought onto Japan’s prewar and wartime history, thereby simplifying modern Japanese racial hygiene thought. Racist thinking was not uncommon among various fascist and ultranationalist organizations, and it certainly surfaced in Japan’s often violent colonial rule in Taiwan, Korea, and China.81 Nevertheless, official statements as well as eugenic legislation and even wartime propaganda did not promote the racial superiority of Japan in the sense of biological determination.82 Accordingly, eugenic scholarship was never fully dominated by proponents of a “pure blood” theory, and the idea of a “mixed blood” (konketsu) heritage of the Japanese people was never abandoned.83 The Japanese empire and the Japanese nation itself were in fact commonly perceived as being multiracial, while Japanese imperial ideologues struggled with the double bind of Japan’s equal position among other imperial powers, its imperial superiority in the colonies, its simultaneous legitimation as the benevolent Asian leader of Asia and the inclusion of other Asian peoples within the Japanese empire.84 As Oguma Eiji has argued, the idea of the Japanese self was not only quite inclusive—an implication shared by intellectual movements such as Pan-Asianism—and the concept of being Japanese also always shifted with the political environment.85 Racial hygiene in the Japanese metropole (naiichi) was thus focused instead on the creation and reproduction of healthy and disciplined subjects of the empire. This idea also translated into the most aggressive agent of Japan’s imperial expansion, the Imperial Japanese Army, which was—despite various racially motivated killings by Japanese soldiers—nonetheless highly interested in the integration of soldiers from colonies such as Korea and Taiwan.86 While this was surely meant to legitimate Japan’s imperialistic expansion and to ground Japan’s hegemony throughout Asia, multiracial inclusion also signaled a desire for autonomy in constant negotiation with the imaginary, omnipresent “West” as a reference for civilization and modernity.87 Against this backdrop, racial hygienic programs and racial scaling in the prewar and wartime period functioned much more as an expression of cultural maturity than of biologically determined racial superiority.88
Nonetheless, considering Miyazawa’s speech in front of the imperial palace and the fear shared by the Japanese emperor, politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, journalists, and entrepreneurs that the occupation forces would inevitably mass rape Japanese women and thereby contaminate and destroy the kokutai, the conceptualization of prostitution to comfort the occupiers obviously involved a certain racist and culturalist thought. The vocabulary to formulate such ideas was provided by prewar and wartime discourses of race, gender, class, and sexuality. In the immediate postwar period, Japan’s authorities and entrepreneurs of Japan’s entertainment industry appropriated these ideals and concepts of kokutai along with the image of the chaste female body, which ultimately satisfied a specifically male nationalistic desire to imagine a postsurrender “Japaneseness.” The conceptualization of prostitution to comfort the occupiers thus served not only the purpose of satisfying the sexual lust of the occupying army’s soldiers and sailors; it simultaneously comforted the soon-to-be occupied as well.
Organizing Prostitution in Postsurrender Japan: Agents and Methods
Nationalistic ideals and desires based on gendered and racialized concepts of sexuality generated in imperial Japan surfaced in the conceptualization of prostitution as administrative practice to comfort the occupiers. Yet they also became constitutive in practice through the palpable undertaking to arrange recreational facilities and to recruit women to work in brothels, bars, beer halls, restaurants, and cabarets. John Lie has provocatively suggested viewing the Japanese state as a pimp whose agents and institutions were primarily responsible for the organization of prostitution in the 1940s—in (military) comfort stations throughout Japan’s empire during the war, as well as domestically within Japan after defeat in 1945.89 Although I do not intend to neglect the involvement and responsibility of Japan’s authorities in that matter, Lie’s vague assessment neglects the complexity of organizing sex work and recruiting sex workers in the immediate postsurrender period. Of course, the Home Ministry released an ordinance directing Japan’s national police force to set up comfort facilities and to recruit women, which was probably pushed by governmental officials and politicians, and local police units were occasionally directly responsible for carrying it out. In addition, however, a variety of agents and groups of actors such as private entrepreneurs of the entertainment industry