Ben Chapman-Schmidt
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University, November, 2017
HUMAN TRAFFICKING UNDER THE OCCUPATION
During the summer of 1945, terror
bombings by the Allied forces—including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki—destroyed almost every major city in Japan, leaving nearly 400,000
dead, the economy in ruins, and the survivors facing starvation. In the face of
this destruction, Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 15. Two weeks
later the first of the American occupation troops arrived; they were to remain
for the next six years.[1]
As they prepared for the occupation,
the Japanese government and the general public began to worry about the
possibility of mass sexual violence at the hands of occupation forces used to
sex on demand. Although these worries were based on the government’s own
experience running the military brothels and the soldiers’ experiences of
having participated in acts in sexual violence in Asia, they were not
unfounded. American soldiers had made extensive use of brothels in Hawaii, New
Caledonia and the Philippines, including many where the women were underage.[2]
During the campaign in Germany, American soldiers are estimated to have
committed 11,000–190,000 acts of sexual violence,[3] while
in Japan American soldiers had reportedly already committed an estimated 10,000
rapes during and following the Battle of Okinawa—including the rapes of some of
the Korean ianfu.[4] And
while ultimately the landing of the American occupation forces in Tokyo was not
followed by a mass rape event similar that which accompanied the Nanjing
Massacre, it was nevertheless accompanied by heightened levels of sexual
violence.[5]
Many of these rapes were preceded or followed by offers of goods or currency,
suggesting that Allied soldiers had come to view Asian women in general as
commodified objects that could be purchased at will.[6]
Following the same governmentality
that had led to the establishment of the ianjo
overseas—a perception that rape was a problem in need of governance; that rape
was caused by an uncontrollable male sexual impulse; and that
government-sanctioned brothels were an appropriate venue for sating this lust,
thereby preventing rape—the Japanese Home Ministry proposed establishing
brothels for the occupying forces. The issue was seen as so important that Vice
Premier and former Prime Minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro personally tasked the
national police commissioner with establishing the brothels, and the budget was
established by Ikeda Hayato, head of the Finance Ministry’s Tax Bureau and future
Prime Minister. The order was passed down to local police chiefs, who under the
licensed system were in charge of monitoring and regulating the licensed
brothels, to work with existing brothels in order to enlist women with
experience in sex work to work as ianfu for
the occupying forces.[7]
However, many existing sex workers
refused to work with Americans, who were understood to be violent brutes, and
in some areas there were simply too few existing sex workers relative to the
expected size of the occupation forces. In these cases, as with the wartime
military brothels, women once again had to be recruited from the general
public. This time, however, the recruitment targeted Japanese women, rather
than Koreans, and it is unclear to what extent the process was directly
coercive. Kovner argues that as Japan was no longer an imperial power at war,
they could no longer forcibly recruit ianfu
and needed to advertise for paid sex workers,[8] while
Dower notes that in Tokyo, the full requirements of the job were explained to
applicants, who could then decline the job.[9] Tanaka,
however, reports that there were some cases of high school students being
deceived into enlisting as ianfu for
the occupation soldiers, and that yakuza from ultra-nationalist organisations were
heavily involved in the recruitment process.[10]
In August 1945, the “Association for Special Comfort Facilities” (Tokushu Ianshisetsu Kyōkai)—more commonly known by its English name, the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA)—was inaugurated. The new ianjo were often similar to the old, with poor working conditions and a lack of privacy, high rates of STI infection (90%), and a high volume of costumers (reportedly 15-60 per day).[11] With much of the country’s physical infrastructure destroyed in the war, space was made for the brothels in police and naval dormitories. Given that these brothels were not formally licensed, in doing this, the police themselves were breaking the law—and they knew it. That they proceeded anyway is a sign of how real they considered the possibility of a mass rape.[12] Whether or not these brothels succeeded in this, however, is unknowable. American soldiers at the time and at least one subsequent Japanese researcher argue that they did,[13] while Kovner notes only that the number of reported rapes may have declined after the first few months.[14]
Ultimately, SCAP (Supreme Commander
for the Allied Powers, which had a certain level of supra-governmental
authority) ordered the RAA shut down in January 1946, after less than six
months in operation, along with all the other licensed brothels. Officially,
SCAP claimed that this was because prostitution was a violation of women’s
human rights. The real reason, however, appears to have been the high rate of
disease, as well as the negative public reaction to images of Allied soldiers
“fraternising” with Japanese women back home.[15] Under
pressure from SCAP, the Home Ministry abrogated the Rules Regulating Licensed
Prostitutes of 1900 one month later, and the Emperor formalised SCAP order by
issuing the Imperial Ordinance to Punish Persons Compelling a Female to
Prostitution in January 1947.[16]
On paper, these two policy changes finally realised Japanese prohibitionists’
long-held goal of putting an end to the Meiji-era licensed system.
However, although the ban eliminated
the old system of licensed prostitution, the Japanese government argued that
even if licensed prostitution was illegal, people still had a right to sell sex.
Taken together, these two moves effectively legalised unlicensed prostitution—a
category which, owing to the mass layoffs of women who had worked in wartime
industries, had included the majority of sex workers even before the ban.710
This resulted in a significant increase in the number of women selling sex in
the open, referred to either as sutorīto
gāru (from the English “street girl”) or, more commonly, as panpan. The latter term is of unknown
origin, though Dower suggests that it may have been picked up by American
servicemen in the South Seas; its usage reflects a popular perception that the panpan— many of whom were former ianfu from RAA—primarily sold sex to the
occupying forces.[17]
But while SCAP’s abrupt termination
of both the ianjo and the licensed
brothels opened up new opportunities for independent sex workers, it also posed
a severe risk to the existing sex industry, where brothel owners had
substantial sums invested in buildings that could not easily be resold as is
and where sex workers typically carried substantial debts, which were not
cancelled by either SCAP order or the Imperial Ordinance and could not easily
be paid off in other occupations. It also created problems for the police and
other officials charged with regulating the sex industry. Previously, these
officials had used the licensed system to segregate the sex industry and to
keep it at a distance from residential neighbourhoods and schools. Licensing
had also allowed them to force compliance with health-related regulations, such
as mandatory STI checks, and to monitor brothels to ensure (in theory) that
they were not employing underage sex workers or victims of kidnapping or
coercion. Finally, it helped in efforts to keep organised crime out of the sex
industry.[18]
The pragmatic solution the police
arrived at in Tokyo, which would serve as a model for the rest of the country,
was to have the brothels simply rebrand as restaurants. The pretense was that
at these “special eating and drinking places” (tokushu inshokuten) waitresses would—as was their right following
the government’s position—independently negotiate the sale of sex to customers.
Of course, the restaurants also happened to have beds on site, for whose use
they could charge the customers, while their food offerings and the
availability of tables tended to be limited. The districts where the “special
eating and drinking places” were permitted to operate had no official status,
but they were marked on police maps by red lines; as such, they came to be
known as akasen (“red line”).
Meanwhile, areas where panpan
congregated were referred to as aosen
(“blue line”) and were subject to a much greater level of police scrutiny.
Subsequently, the National Diet, local municipalities and various government
agencies put in place a wide range of laws, ordinances and regulations to
govern sex work practiced in akasen and
the aosen.[19] The
most important of these was the Fūzoku
Eigyō Torishimarihō (“Amusement Businesses law”), which restored to the
police legal authority to regulate pseudo-brothels.[20] As
this remains the main legal framework for the regulation of sex work in Japan
today, it will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.
Sex work prohibitionism also
re-emerged in force in Japan during the occupation, in a large part because sex
work was increasingly associated not with the enclosed space of the old
licensed quarters, but with the panpan selling
sex to the GIs in public.[21]
Much in the way the sale of sex by the karayuki-san
to foreign men on foreign shores had become a signifier for Japan’s status as a
lesser nation, so do did the panpan’s
sexual submission to the allied soldiers became a visual metaphor for Japan’s
military occupation by the Allied countries; this, in turn, sparked a public
backlash against sexual labour. Groups like the JWCTU and the Kakuseikai, which
had survived the war intact, sought to capitalise on these changing perceptions
in 1948 by pushing for the prohibition and criminalisation of the sale of sex.
In this they were initially aided by the enfranchisement of women as voters and
the election of women to the Diet, since women were more likely to be opposed
to legal prostitution than men. However, female politicians were also more
concerned with the ultimate welfare of female sex workers, and so while almost
all agreed that legal prostitution was a problem in need of governance, many
were ultimately skeptical about the merits of criminalisation. As a result, the
bill failed in committee.[22]
In the aftermath of the failure to
pass a national bill, many municipalities passed localised bans on
prostitution. Overwhelmingly these tended to be municipalities located in close
proximity to American bases, where American soldiers were thus the primary
purchasers of sex. Kovner suggests that these bans were driven by local
anti-sex worker animus sparked by the image of the GI customer.717
Fujime, on the other hand, argues that these bans were rather pushed by the American
military as part of a broader and long-term effort to control sex work around
the bases.[23]
Meanwhile, having failed in their initial push for criminalisation,
prohibitionists led by the JWCTU formed the Council for Opposing the
Restoration of Licensed
Prostitution, which successfully petitioned the Diet to convert the 1947
Imperial Ordinance—set to expire when Japan regained its independence in 1952—
into a permanent statute. Subsequently, they renamed themselves the Committee for
Promoting Enactment of Anti-Prostitution Law and began to push once again for
the full criminalisation of sex work.[24]
As direct police control of the sex
industry became politically and legally untenable, organised crime groups began
to take their place. The combination of shortages and rationing for the
Japanese and relative abundance for the Occupation soldiers led to a thriving
black market, which in turn created a strong demand for protection. Many of the
immigrant groups in Japan, fearing for their safety amidst the lawlessness and
poverty of the immediate post-war era, formed self-help groups that quickly
evolved into ethnic mafias to fill this demand. To get these groups under
control, the government and police tacitly gave the ultra-nationalists a free
hand to work with the bakuto and tekiya (itinerant peddlers)—either
freshly out of uniform or prison—to form their own gangs as a counter. These
groups, known collectively as “yakuza,” displaced Korean and Chinese groups and
came to dominate the black markets. These markets disappeared as the Korean War
fueled renewed economic growth in Japan, but the yakuza adapted by moving into
protection and racketeering in entertainment industries—including the sex
industry. Furthermore, while the government tried to restrain these groups
through new regulations, they also continued to rely on them to suppress
leftist protests during the 1950s and 60s, to provide an auxiliary security
force when needed, and more generally to help the police surveil the underworld.
This allowed the yakuza to remain a major presence in Japan’s sex industry for
the remainder of the 20th century.[25]
Finally, as part of this occupation,
Japan was subject to a number of war crimes trials. The most well-known of
these, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), focussed
exclusively on a small number of high-ranking accused war criminals—in
particular on the controversial question of whether they were guilty of
“aggression.” Some of the previously occupied
nations—the Republic of China, the People’s Republic of China and the
Philippines—held their own trials to address war crimes during the occupation.[26]
However, most of the Asian countries that had been occupied by Japan were now
either occupied or colonised by Americans, Europeans or Australians, and as a
result they had to rely on these countries to pursue justice on their behalf.
However, while some of the trials (which included separate trials conducted by
the Dutch and Australians) touched on issues of forced labour, they tended to
focus exclusively on the use of white POWs for slave labour while ignoring the
far greater number of Asian labourers.[27]
As a result, a wide range of officials
alleged to be involved in activities that might now be described as
“trafficking” never faced trial. The most prominent of these was Kishi
Nobusuke, who in his dual capacity as
vice minister of industry and deputy chief of the Office of Administrative
Affairs had overseen much of the labour exploitation. Kishi, though briefly
imprisoned, avoided being formally charged with war crimes, and, with the
blessing of the Americans, would subsequently go on to help found the Liberal
Democratic Party (LDP) in 1955—a party which would go on to rule Japan for 58
of the next 62 years. Kishi himself governed as Prime Minister of Japan from
1957-1960, and he left behind one of
Japan’s most important political dynasties, with his
grandson Abe Shinzō serving as the
Prime Minister of Japan at the time of writing.[28]
Koreans, meanwhile, found themselves
further victimised by their liberators. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Koreans
constituted a disproportionately high percentage of victims of the atomic
bombings—horrific war crimes in their own right—with 40,000 deaths and 30,000
surviving Korean hibakusha (“atomic
bomb victims).724 Meanwhile, their country had been divided in two
by the victorious “Allies,” and many of the oppressive elements of the Japanese
colonial state (the secret police, the commercial monopolies, etc.) were
deliberately left in place to be exploited by the new regimes.725 As
a result, many of the Korean labourers in Japan found themselves unable (or at
least very unwilling) to go home on account of the ongoing violence, repression
and political persecution; to this day, they represent the most significant
minority group in Japan.726
As for the military brothels, the
Dutch government brought some charges related to the rape and sexual coercion
of ethnically European women. However, they largely ignored the ethnically
Asian comfort women—some of whom may have been sex workers for the Dutch before
the arrival of the Japanese.727 And although the Americans were
aware of the existence of Korean sex workers, they did not pursue any war
crimes charges related to them—probably because the Americans, too, had made
extensive use of Asian sex workers.728 As a result, the “comfort
women issue” would go largely unaddressed until the 1990s.729 And
meanwhile, Nakasone Yasuhiro—who in his capacity as a lieutenant paymaster in
Japan’s Imperial Navy had established a military brothel at Balikpapan on
724 Michael Weiner and David Chapman, “Zainichi Koreans in History and Memory,” in Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, ed. Michael Weiner, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2009), 166–71.On the immorality and criminality of the bombings, see Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 111–16, 251–67.
725 Alexis Dudden, Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010), 69–70.
726 Araragi Shinzō, “The Collapse of the Japanese Empire and the Great Migrations: Repatriation, Assimilation, and Remaining Behind,” in The Dismantling of Japan’s Empire in East Asia: Deimperialization, Postwar Legitimation and Imperial Afterlife, ed. Barak Kushner and Sherzod
Muminov, trans. Sherzod Muminov (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017), 66–83; Weiner and Chapman, “Zainichi Koreans in History and Memory.”
727 Nicola
Henry, “Silence as Collective Memory: Sexual Violence and the Tokyo Trial,” in Beyond Victor’s Justice?, 263–82.
728 Stephanie
Wolfe, The Politics of Reparations and
Apologies (New York, NY: Springer, 2014), 239– 40; Tanaka, Hidden Horrors, 103.
729 Ustinia
Dolgopol, “Knowledge and Responsibility: The Ongoing Consequences of Failing to
Give Sufficient Attention to the Crimes against the Comfort Women in the Tokyo
Trial,” in Beyond Victor’s Justice?,
243–61.
[1]
Dower, War without Mercy, 293–317.
[2] Peter Schrijvers, The GI War Against Japan: American Soldiers
in Asia and the Pacific during World War II (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK,
2002), 42–58, 154–55.
[3] The lower estimate comes
from J. Robert Lilly, Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in
Europe during World War II (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2007). The
higher estimate comes from Miriam Gebhardt, Crimes
Unspoken: The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War,
trans.
Nick Somers (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).
[4] Gavan McCormack and Satoko
Oka Norimatsu, Resistant Islands: Okinawa
Confronts Japan and the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2012); Tanaka, Japan’s
Comfort Women; Schrijvers, The GI War
Against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific during World War II,
211–12.
[5] Eiji Takemae, The Allied Occupation of Japan, trans.
Robert Ricketts and Sebastian Swann (London: Continuum, 2002), 67; Yuki Tanaka,
Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in
World War II (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 100–109.
[6] Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women, 120–21.
[7]
John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in
the Wake of World War II (New York, NY: WW Norton & Company, 2000),
124–27; Takemae, The Allied Occupation of
Japan, 67–68.
[8] Sarah Kovner, Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 23.
[9]
Dower, Embracing Defeat, 126–27.
[10]
Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women,
138–41.
[11] John Lie, “The State as
Pimp: Prostitution and the Patriarchal State in Japan in the 1940s,” Sociological Quarterly 38, no. 2 (March
1, 1997): 251–63, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15338525.1997.tb00476.x; Dower, Embracing Defeat, 128–30.
[12] Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women, 134–38.
[13] Kovner, Occupying Power, 29; Yoshimi Kaneko, Baishō no Shakaishi (Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 1984), 198.
[14] Kovner, Occupying Power, 55–56.
[15] Dower, Embracing Defeat, 132; Kovner, Occupying Power, 25–30;
Yuki Fujime, “Japanese Feminism and Commercialized Sex: The Union of Militarism and Prohibitionism,” trans. Suzanne O’Brien, Social Science Japan Journal 9, no. 1 (April 1, 2006): 33–50, https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyl009; Mark McLelland, Love, Sex, and Democracy in Japan During the American Occupation (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 55–59.
[16] Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, 197; Minoru Yokoyama, “Emergence of
Anti-Prostitution Law in Japan—Analysis from Sociology of Criminal Law,” International Journal of Comparative and
Applied Criminal Justice 17, no. 1–2 (January 1993): 213,
https://doi.org/10.1080/01924036.1993.9689017. 710 Fujime, “The
Prostitutes’ Union and the Impact of the 1956 Anti-Prostitution Law in Japan,”
7–8; Fujime, “Japanese Feminism and Commercialized Sex”; Kovner, Occupying Power, 24.
[17] Holly Sanders, “Panpan: Streetwalking in Occupied Japan,” Pacific Historical Review 81, no. 3 (August 1, 2012): 404–31, https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2012.81.3.404;
Rumi Sakamoto, “Pan-Pan Girls: Humiliating Liberation in Postwar Japanese Literature,” PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 7, no. 2 (2010), http://epressdev.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/1515; Dower, Embracing Defeat, 132–39.
[18] Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, 88–114, 198; Minoru Yokoyama, “Analysis of
Prostitution in Japan,” International
Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice 19, no. 1 (March 1995):
47– 60, https://doi.org/10.1080/01924036.1995.9678536.
[19] Mamoru Iga, “Sociocultural Factors in Japanese Prostitution and the ‘Prostitution Prevention Law,’” The Journal of Sex Research 4, no. 2 (May 1, 1968): 127–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/00224496809550564;
G.G. Rowley, “Prostitutes against the Prostitution Prevention Act of 1956,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal. English Supplement, no. 23 (2002): 45; Kovner, Occupying Power, 84–86; Dower, Embracing Defeat, 132.
[20] Fūzoku eigyō torishimarihō
[Amusement Businesses Regulation Act] Act No. 22 of July 10, 1948. See also
Kovner, Occupying Power, 85; Nagai
Yoshikazu, Fūzoku Eigyō Torishimari
(Tokyo: Kodansha, 2002).
[21] Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, 197.
[22] Yokoyama, “Emergence of
Anti-Prostitution Law in Japan—Analysis from Sociology of Criminal Law,”
213–14; Kovner, Occupying Power,
104–6; Sanders, “Panpan.” 717 Kovner, Occupying Power, 106–7.
[23] Fujime, “Japanese Feminism
and Commercialized Sex.”
[24] Yokoyama, “Emergence of
Anti-Prostitution Law in Japan—Analysis from Sociology of Criminal Law,”
213–14; Kovner, Occupying Power,
109–10; Garon, Molding Japanese Minds,
199–202.
[25] Hill, The Japanese Mafia, 42–45, 113–14; Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, 2003, 31–82; Eiko Maruko Siniawer,
“Befitting Bedfellows: Yakuza and the State in Modern Japan,” Journal of Social History 45, no. 3
(March 1, 2012): 623–41, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shr120.
[26] Barak Kushner, Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Ōsawa Takeshi, “The People’s Republic of China’s ‘Lenient Treatment’ Policy towards Japanese War Criminals,” in Trials for International Crimes in Asia, ed. Kirsten Sellars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 145–66, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316221754.008; Yuma Totani, Justice in Asia and the Pacific Region, 1945-1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 21–55.
[27] O-Gon Kwon, “Forgotten Victims, Forgotten Defendants,” in Beyond Victor’s Justice? The Tokyo War Crimes Trial Revisited, ed. Yuki Tanaka, Timothy McCormack, and Gerry Simpson (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2011), 227–39.
[28] Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 263–70.
See more generally Tomohito Shinoda, Contemporary Japanese Politics: Institutional Changes and Power Shifts (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2013); Jeff Kingston, Contemporary Japan: History, Politics, and Social Change since the 1980s, 2nd ed. (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
[29] Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women, 78–79; Mindy Kotler, “The Comfort Women and Japan’s War on Truth,” The New York Times, November 14, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/opinion/comfort-women-and-japans-war-on-truth.html.
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