Sexuality under the Allied occupation covers the sex work, venereal-disease policy, publishing censorship and mixed-race-child problem that developed through contact between occupation troops, overwhelmingly American, and Japanese society, from Japan’s surrender in August 1945 to the entry into force of the San Francisco Peace Treaty in April 1952. Taking the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) established under the occupation as its starting point, the article surveys the pan-pan street workers, the sex industry around the bases, the spread of venereal disease and the public-health response, the social problem of the mixed-race “occupation babies”, and the effect of GHQ censorship on sexual expression, at the crossing of gender history, international relations and public-health history.

Overview

The Allied advance began in earnest with the arrival of the advance party on 28 August 1945 and the signing of the surrender aboard the USS Missouri on 2 September. Troop numbers on the mainland reached some 430,000 at the end of 1945, concentrated in Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Sasebo and Kure. The occupation shifted from an early punitive conception to indirect rule, but on sexual matters it had a peculiar character: the Japanese government actively set up facilities to “control” the sexual behaviour of the troops. As a logical extension of the wartime comfort-station system, the Japanese bureaucracy supplied particular women as a “breakwater” to protect “ordinary women”, a grave human-rights violation at the very start of the postwar.

Terms

“Shinchūgun” (advance-stationing army) was the Japanese name for the occupation forces. On 17 August 1945 the Higashikuni cabinet decided to call the Allied arrival a “stationing”, and the term took hold under press control; legally they were occupation forces, but the word softened the fact of being occupied. “Pan-pan” was slang for street workers serving the troops; its origin, whether a South Pacific word or an onomatopoeia, is unsettled. A woman serving only one soldier was an “only”; one serving many, a “butterfly”.

The Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA)

On 18 August 1945, before the surrender was even signed, the Home Ministry’s police-affairs chief telegraphed prefectural police heads to set up “comfort, dining and amusement facilities” for the occupation troops. The Tokyo trade associations gathered at the Metropolitan Police’s lead, and on 28 August the Recreation and Amusement Association was established. The RAA posted a recruiting notice headed “To the new women of Japan” at the plaza before the Imperial Palace, gathering women under the name of clerical staff while in fact securing sexual-service workers for the troops.

The RAA opened first at the Komachien in Ōmori, Tokyo, and spread to Yokohama, Yokosuka, Kure and elsewhere. It is said to have had some tens of thousands of women under it at the peak, though the true figure is debated. Management was by private operators, backed by the Home Ministry and the Metropolitan Police in a public-private arrangement. Its operation was halted on 25 March 1946 by order of the GHQ Public Health and Welfare Section, in parallel with the abolition of licensed prostitution (SCAPIN-642, 21 January 1946). The order was framed as “democratisation”, but the direct motive was that the venereal-disease rate among American troops had reached a level the military could not overlook. After the closure many of the women turned to street work, and the number of pan-pan rose sharply.

The pan-pan

With licensed prostitution abolished and the RAA closed, prostitution serving the troops lost its regulated space and spread to the streets, parks and lodging districts. Yūrakuchō, Shinbashi and Ueno in Tokyo, Isezaki-chō in Yokohama and Honchō in Yokosuka were known concentrations. The national number of street workers in 1947 was estimated at forty to seventy thousand. Their presence symbolised the postwar urban scene and was depicted in media, literature and film; Sakaguchi Ango’s “Discourse on Decadence” (1946) and Tamura Taijirō’s “Gate of Flesh” (1947) represented the pan-pan as the exposure of bare life under defeat. The reality, however, was a compound oppression of poverty, violence, infection and stigma. Recent gender history consistently notes that the very discourse representing them as the “symbol of defeat” doubly excluded the women as individuals.

The sex industry around the bases

The occupation formally ended with the peace treaty and the security treaty of 1951, but the bases remained across Japan. Around Yokosuka, Sasebo, Iwakuni, Misawa and Okinawa, sex-industry districts built on the “A-sign” (US-military-approved facility) system formed in continuity with the occupation period. In Okinawa this structure continued until the 1972 reversion to Japan, and after reversion the dependence on the base economy and the concentration of the sex industry remained a central issue for local society. This shows that occupation-period sex work was not a passing phenomenon but a long-term feature built into the structure of postwar US-Japan relations.

Venereal disease and public health

The venereal-disease rate among occupation troops was at times said to exceed two hundred per thousand in the early period, a serious problem for the military. The GHQ public-health section prompted a venereal-disease prevention law in 1946, providing for notification, compulsory examination and treatment. Street workers were subjected to mass round-ups and forced examination, and those found infected were isolated. The forced examination was in practice limited to women, while prevention among male soldiers was managed separately within the military, so the responsibility for infection was institutionally skewed onto the women’s side. The rate fell from 1948 with the spread of penicillin, but the human-rights violations of the forced examination were repeatedly questioned in later cases and research.

The mixed-race-child problem

Children born to occupation soldiers and Japanese women were called “mixed-race children” or “occupation babies”. Exact numbers are hard to fix; estimates range from twenty to fifty thousand. Many were abandoned after the father’s return or transfer, and were raised in single-mother households, placed in care institutions, or sent abroad for adoption. The Elizabeth Saunders Home, opened by Sawada Miki at Ōiso in 1948, is known as a pioneer of mixed-race-child care. The children faced discrimination in schooling, employment and marriage, and the matter resurfaced as a human-rights issue from the 1960s, against a compound of US military marriage restrictions, the patrilineal bias of Japanese nationality law, and social prejudice.

GHQ censorship and sexual expression

GHQ established the Civil Censorship Detachment and conducted wide censorship of newspapers, magazines, books, film, broadcasting and private mail, shifting from pre-censorship to post-censorship before formal abolition in 1949. Censorship of sexual expression was nominally based on “the prestige of the occupation troops” and “public morals”, but its application was tangled. Works depicting relations between occupation soldiers and Japanese women were strictly limited, while the kissing and love scenes suppressed in wartime were partly released in the early occupation as a symbol of “democratisation”; the Shōchiku film Hatachi no seishun (1946) is held to be the first Japanese film to depict a kiss openly. The cheap-paper entertainment magazines collectively called kasutori proliferated in this period, the starting point of an erotic-grotesque postwar mass culture.

Assessment

Sex under the occupation stands at a historical node where several axes cross: continuity and rupture with the wartime comfort-station system, the surface and underside of postwar democratisation, the asymmetry of US-Japan relations, and the reordering of the gender hierarchy. The RAA shows that the wartime idea of state mobilisation of sex survived just after defeat; the chain of its closure and the turn to street work forms one cross-section of the dismantling of the licensed-prostitution system from the prewar regime to the Anti-Prostitution Law of 1956. The occupation experience left issues that continue today, in the base problem, the status-of-forces agreement and the relief of sexual-violence harm. In historical writing it is essential to leave behind the old frame that represents the women as “symbol” or “deviance” and to face directly the structure of economic, institutional and bodily coercion under which they were placed.

See also

• Postwar sexual culture
• Kasutori magazines
• Licensed prostitution system
• Anti-Prostitution Law
• Modern history of venereal disease