when the first foreign customers arrived on August 28, 1945.120 In no time, however, the RAA and other entrepreneurs of the entertainment industry established a flourishing infrastructure to comfort the arriving occupiers.
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The two weeks between Japan’s surrender and the arrival of the occupation forces were a significant historical event that produced new rules of signification: A new understanding of a Japanese people and Japanese belonging seems to have emerged along with the formation of a new space, “Japan.” The nationalistic imagination arose out of the fantasized confrontation with the arriving occupation forces as an intimidating other. The imaged fear of raping and looting soldiers and sailors of the occupation army fueled the idea of erecting a “female floodwall” to mediate the encounter with the occupiers. Japan’s authorities believed that the occupiers’ arrival would constitute a “sexual invasion” targeting Japanese women, who would need to be protected to guarantee survival of the “national body.” However, it was at this very moment that Japan’s authorities redrew the contours of the “national body” and its supposed core—Japan’s purity, embodied by the chaste Japanese woman—in order to secure an imagined “Japaneseness,” which had in fact not yet existed in this form. The emperor’s and ideologues’ talk of preservation, as in the expression kokutai goji, was thus misleading, since it actually signified a new essence for Japan and its people.
The signifying shift that occurred in the late summer of 1945 was a result of the traumatic experience of surrender and defeat. While this experience in itself was a referenceless rupture of despair, uncertainty, and anxiety, the predominantly male agents of the Japanese state were nevertheless forced to fictionalize the event that had precipitated the wish for cultural and racial autonomy vis-à-vis the occupiers.121 The reimagined national self and its territorial and biopolitical references were indeed, to quote Sebastian Conrad, “the product—and not the precondition—of processes of transnational interaction, exchange and entanglement.”122 The imagined terrifying presence of the Allies/Americans catalyzed Japanese identification practices transnationally, and discursive patterns prevalent in imperial Japan echoed back, were appropriated, and were renarrated to instantly fill the referenceless gap of the traumatic experience of defeat.123 Certain notions of sexuality, gender, race, and class that were deeply inscribed in imperial Japan’s health, education, and licensed prostitution systems thus affected the postsurrender desire for a decidedly Japanese identity and provided the language to articulate it. It seems conspicuous—in addition to what Leo Ching has called Japan’s “lack of decolonization,” by which he refers to the emperor’s absolution from responsibility for the war, the denial of Japanese war atrocities, the integration of Japan into the Cold War order under the aegis of the United States, and the ongoing legal struggle of former comfort women124—that the conceptualization and organization of prostitution as an administrative practice was vital to constituting the postwar myth of Japanese homogeneity and belonging.125 The conceptualization and organization of the “female floodwall” would thus become a telling example of the process of the postwar imagination and the consolidation of the Japanese nation-state and the simultaneous disintegration of Japan’s empire, or better yet, the reversion of Japan’s imperial expansion: Since the early twentieth century, Japan’s aggressive war and colonial rule in Asia involved exporting sex workers, sex work regulations, and specific notions of sexuality and hygiene—often mediated through further global entanglements with the West and its colonies—that shaped the understanding of Japan’s empire and Japanese imperial subjectivity. With defeat in 1945, Japan’s imperial dreams shattered, but imperial experiences of sexuality and prostitution continued to shape ideas of Japanese belonging. In the immediate postwar period, however, the meaning of Japan started to shift, and one of the significant—or rather signifying—arenas for imagining the formation of a new Japan and a new Japanese belonging was the conceptualization and organization of prostitution to comfort the occupiers.
FIRST ENCOUNTER: SEX AND VIOLENCE IN EARLY OCCUPIED JAPAN
The surrender ceremony, an exclusively male enterprise, was held on September 2, 1945, when representatives of the imperial Japanese government signed the Instrument of Surrender on the U.S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. General Douglas MacArthur, acting supreme commander of Allied Powers, closed the official procedure with a speech in which he expressed hope for a peaceful future for Japan and that “a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world founded upon faith and understanding—a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance and justice.”126 Despite such emphasis on reconciliation, the ceremony was nonetheless a tremendous demonstration of power: in a symbolic gesture, the Missouri was flying the same American flag that had flown over the White House on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941 as well as the thirty-one-star flag used by Commodore Matthew C. Perry when he sailed to Japan in 1853 to “open” the country with gunboat diplomacy. During the ceremony, Tokyo Bay was crowded with hundreds of American, British, and Australian warships and the sky above the bay was filled with hundreds of planes, whereas the Japanese navy and air force had been nearly completely destroyed; and after the ceremony ended, thousands of well-fed American soldiers and sailors disembarked and advanced into a Japan where the majority of people were facing hunger in bombed-out cities.127
The waves of disembarking servicemen hit the newly erected “female floodwall” in Japan’s major cities. Almost instantly, members of the occupation regime patronized the still rather scarce, but strategically well-placed brothels in Tokyo and Kanagawa prefectures. Even members of the U.S. army’s advance party, who had landed on Atsugi Airfield in Tokyo on August 28, 1945, and had been assigned to prepare the arrival of the occupation army, seem to have visited the RAA’s Komachien the very night of the brothel’s opening.128 According to Tanaka Yuki, they probably “found the comfort station on the way from Atsugi to Kanagawa Prefecture, where they had to inspect the port facilities of Yokosuka in preparation for the landing of US marines a few days later.” Tanaka further argues, “The selection of this site—on the highway linking Tokyo, Yokohama and Yokosuka—was a deft business decision by the RAA.”129 Shortly after September 2, when thousands of occupation servicemen began to move further into Japan and started establishing their first military bases, the RAA followed the occupiers and set up recreational facilities close to occupation army camps. After the occupation troops occupied Tokyo’s Tachikawa Airbase on September 3, for instance, the RAA installed a brothel called Fussa with forty-three sex workers in a nearby dormitory building formerly used by the Imperial Japanese Army.130 Close to Tachikawa, also along the banks of Tama River in western Tokyo, a unit of occupiers settled in at another airfield in Chōfu. On the night of September 9, members of the RAA are said to have visited the newly established military camp in a truck loaded with several young women. In his Japan Diary, Mark Gayn, an American and Canadian journalist and the Chicago Sun’s correspondent in occupied Japan between 1945 and 1947, described the scene according to an eyewitness report: “Long after nightfall, GIs heard the sound of an approaching truck. When it was within hailing distance, one of the sentries yelled ‘Halt!’ The truck stopped, and from it emerged a Japanese man, with a flock of young women. Warily, they walked towards the waiting GIs. When they came close, the man stopped, bowed respectfully, swept the ground behind him with a wide, generous gesture, and said: ‘Compliments of the Recreation and Amusement Association!’”131
The occupation authorities themselves initially agreed to the sexual services provided, and some members of the occupation forces even wanted to make it possible for their servicemen to enjoy supposedly safe and sanitary sexual activities. In a letter to Representative Howard H. Buffett of Omaha, Nebraska, Navy chaplain Lawrence L. Lacour, the first U.S. Navy chaplain to arrive in Japan, recalled the early “sexual contact” of American sailors and Japanese sex workers. After medical officers inspected several houses in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, it was proposed at a meeting on September 26, 1945, that “one large house be opened, that it be operated with the understanding that all women were diseased, and that a voluntary system of prophylaxis be available by placing a Navy-operated treatment station within the house. Although some medical officers and two chaplains in attendance protested,