in the form of an instant low-interest loan of more than 30 million yen from the Nippon Kangyō Bank. Ikeda Hayatato, who at the time was the director of the ministry’s tax division and later served as prime minister of Japan between 1960 and 1964, appears to have negotiated the loan.105 Local police and military units granted access to rationed commodities such as blankets, beds, and toiletries, and also shared their prostitution licensing files to aid in recruitment.106 The RAA thus had enough resources to rent or buy facilities, furnish its establishments, offer food and salaries, and to run public recruitment campaigns. They disseminated advertisements widely through various channels. In newspapers, the RAA solicited so-called “special girls,” who would receive good and advance pay, food, shelter, and, for applicants from the countryside, travel expenses.107 And the RAA addressed young women on posters, too. One prominent exemplar hung in front of the RAA’s main office in the old Mitsukoshi department store on the Ginza, a major street and district in Tokyo: “Announcement to the New Japanese Woman [shin nihon josei]. For postwar management [sengo shori] of the situation of national emergency [kokka tekina kinkyūshisetsu], we require the initial cooperation [sossen kyōroku] of the new Japanese woman to participate in the great project to comfort [ian] the occupation forces. Female employees between 18 and 25 years old are wanted. Accommodation, clothes and meals will be provided.”108 The plan to comfort the occupiers, conceptualized in secrecy after Japan’s defeat and tangible only in police reports and ministerial ordinances, became public knowledge through such advertisements. The fact that Ginza was the epicenter of such publicity bares a certain historical irony: Ginza was a major site where the discourse of “modern life,” with its trope of the “modern girl“ (moga)—which was produced by mass media, modern architecture and practices of consumption—manifested in the 1920s and 1930s.109 At the end of the war, Ginza was destroyed along with the rest of Tokyo by Allied bombings and the fantasies of modern life could not discursively come to terms with the devastation and misery of the war. And the trope of the “New Japanese Woman,” a euphemism recapitulating the propagated, but never achieved, emancipation of women—which already signified the tragedy of modern life decades ago, and only repeated itself as farce in 1945—could never be realized in the ruins of the Ginza. The young women of Japan’s lowest classes between eighteen and twenty-five years old who were recruited were in material need of food, clothing and accommodation. They were, however, also drawn into a nationalistic, patriarchal, heteronormative project that was meant to signal the building of a new Japan. As they had in imperial Japan, women of lower-class and/or colonial background were to function in their role as prostitutes as a protective zone to regulate Japan’s sexualities. Whereas imperial Japan’s prostitutes were meant to channel male sexual desire in general to protect “respectable” reproductive sexuality, this time around, postsurrender ianfu were expected to sexually defuse the encounter between the Japanese population and the occupation forces.110
The extent to which the recruitment campaigns were actually fruitful is impossible to measure, and there are hardly any records of responses to newspaper ads or the RAA’s recruitment posters. Kobayashi Daijirō and Murase Akira have offered a rare story in which a former member of the Tokubetsu kōgekitai (“Special Attack Unit,” often referred to as kamikaze) supposedly entered the RAA’s office in anger and, armed with a sword, accused the RAA of disgracefully (keshikaran) selling Japanese women to the “American and English devils” (kichiku beiei). Somehow the present RAA members convinced him that their enterprise actually aimed at “protecting the purity of the one hundred million” (ichioku no junketsu o mamori) and “preserving the national body” (kokutai goji), which apparently helped them to avoid bloodshed.111 There even appear to have been some women who were actually attracted to the idea of serving their country. John Dower has explained this circumstance by referring to wartime propaganda, arguing that, since the RAA’s appeal was “essentially the same message of patriotic self-sacrifice that had been drilled into them all their lives,” it helped them recruit women.112
However, this image of an unbroken continuity of wartime ideology seems rather exaggerated. Of course, there might have been some women willing to sacrifice their bodies for emperor and country, but it is hard to believe that such self-abandonment could have been widespread. Women, attracted by the advertisements’ offerings, usually entered the RAA’s office with mixed expectations. On one occasion, according to Kobayashi and Murase, a women dressed in her wartime work suit (monpe) entered the office, curious about whether any positions were left and what the job entailed. She was told she would receive a dormitory spot, clothes, food, and a salary for her efforts to comfort (ian) soldiers, notably as a dancer, and that she would be working for her country (o-kuni no tame) and the Japanese people (nihonjin toshite). The woman was apparently not instantly attracted to that kind of work and seemed puzzled by the scope of a dancer’s duties in a comfort facility (ianjo). In the end, however, the RAA persuaded her to take the job by emphasizing the prospect of food, shelter, and money.113 The decision to accept the RAA’s job offers was thus not guided by self-sacrifice, but was rather forced upon women by socioeconomically catastrophic circumstances—misery, hunger, and despair—which the RAA and other businessmen in Japan’s postsurrender sex work scene deliberately exploited.
This is not to say that women were recruited exclusively by the “silent compulsion of economic conditions,” as Karl Marx called the mechanisms that compel people who lack access to the means of production and vital necessities to sell their labor power.114 Many women were recruited by systematic coercion or even brute force (or the threat of violence), for instance by being forced into dependency through the accumulation of debts for their living expenses at the comfort centers where they lived and worked—a combination that has a long trajectory in imperial Japan’s modern history of prostitution.115 Coerced debt is but one legacy of Japan’s imperial past in Iwahashi Tomiko’s biography. Tomiko was born in Tokushima on Shikoku in 1929, but moved to Japanese-occupied territories in southern China. In January 1946, then seventeen-year-old Tomiko and her family returned to Japan from Guangzhou (Canton). First, they went to Kyoto, but after her father died and she and her mother had no relatives there, they moved further to Takayama on Shikoku to live with Tomiko’s uncle. Soon, her uncle passed away as well. Having no place to stay, Tomiko and her mother faced even harder times while trying to live on Tomiko’s small salary at a local spinning mill. Around September of the same year, her mother also died and Tomiko decided to leave Shikoku and find work in Osaka. As she arrived at Osaka station, a forty-year-old man approached her and offered her a housekeeping job at a place called Santō. Without a second thought, Tomiko took the job and moved into the Santō House. By December, Tomiko realized that most of the women working at the house would sometimes “take clients” (kyaku o toru), usually servicemen of the occupation forces. Around the same time, the man who offered her the housekeeping job told her that she already owed the Santō House more than 2,000 yen for expenses since moving in, and that it would be useless to either quit or run away. Thus, Tomiko saw no other option than to “take in clients” herself in order to pay off her debts and to hope for a better future.116
Despite the enormous effort and resources mobilized by Japan’s authorities and other agents of the entertainment industry, the organization of comfort facilities and recruitment of sex workers before the arrival of the occupiers met with little success. Although the RAA calculated that 13,000 to 15,000 ianfu would be sufficient to cater to the needs of the occupation army, in the two weeks between surrender and the beginning of the occupation they were only able to recruit 1,360 women in total.117 Additionally, the RAA apparently planned to establish a huge entertainment complex in the former Mitsukoshi department store building, with bars, restaurants, cabarets, and brothels on each floor. The Tokyo police department, however, did not sanction the plan due to security concerns, and recommended focusing on the Ōmori and Ōi districts in southern Tokyo.118 Ōmori was not only an old entertainment district; it had also hosted a major prisoner of war camp during World War II.119 Moreover, Ōmori and Ōi are located on the Keihin Tōhoku railway line and the Keihin highway, which both connect Tokyo with Kawasaki and Yokohama, and Japan’s authorities believed it would be the first route the occupiers would take to enter the capital. Although the RAA did manage to