Morale

The global legacy of moral reform, its intersection with social hygienic knowledge, and its impact on the Cold War is the main theme of chapter 4. It analyzes sex education and character-guidance programs, a terrain in which moral reformers and social hygienists clashed but occasionally also cooperated, which incorporated specific ideals of masculinity, middle-class family values, and white community building that American Cold War ideology popularized and military educators propagated to occupation personnel. Secondly, chapter 4 discusses morality concerning sexuality and prostitution among Japanese contemporaries. Moral debates focused especially on the streetwalking prostitute, embodied by the panpan girl. She became a famous symbol, who vividly represented the revolutionary changes of democratizing Japan but was also perceived as incarnation of moral and social decay.

Epilogue

The occupiers and the occupied alike—following different and conflicting but sometimes overlapping or even congruent aims and means—shared a deep desire to sanitize sex during the occupation of Japan. Despite varying motivations, sex was pivotal in the occupation period’s biopolitical measurement of what was acceptable, broadly speaking, displaying an economization and socialization of the sexual and sensual. Sexuality, sexual encounters, sex work, and venereal disease—and their regulation—were entering dimensions of the intimate, in which the occupation period’s asymmetries of power and boundaries of race, class, and gender were not only affirmed and reproduced but also stretched, dodged, and resisted.

Security

Chapter 2 is mainly about agency—cooperation, complicity, and resistance—between occupiers and the occupied, reconstructing the informal strategies to police prostitution and venereal disease. It discusses legal debates on prostitution and venereal disease and its control among the occupation’s law divisions, and it closely looks at the enforcement of law by the occupiers’ military police and Japanese police units. It addresses the emergence of unlicensed prostitution after the abolition of licensed prostitution in 1946, in which the streetwalking sex worker surfaced as a new phenomenon in modern Japanese history.

Health

Bio-political regulation and its limits is the major topic of chapter 3, addressing intimacy and the transnational circulation of knowledge in the control of venereal disease. Two major regulatory tools implemented by the occupiers are at the center of this chapter: venereal disease contact tracing and prophylactic stations. Their analysis uncovers that the contact tracing system, although medically ineffective, helped the occupiers to measure, quantify, and map occupied Japan and its people—and simultaneously to maintain their internal color line by distinguishing venereal infection rates between white and black servicemen. Prophylactic stations, in which servicemen were compelled to clean and protect themselves after sexual exposure, enable insights into the most private spaces of servicemen’s lives.

Comforting the Occupiers

Chapter 1 addresses sexuality and prostitution as key elements in the emergence of postwar Japanese nationalism. It tackles the imaginary encounter of occupier and occupied in the post-surrender period before the actual arrival of the occupation forces, analyzing Japan’s authorities’ conceptualization to build a “female floodwall.” The second half of the chapter deals with the first physical encounter between occupiers and the occupied, in which nationalistic fears and desires imagined prior to the occupiers’ arrival were resurrected. It assembles accounts of sexual violence, in particular the rape and molestation of Japanese women by American and Allied servicemen, which Japan’s authorities heavily exploited and integrated into narratives of the victimizing of defeated Japan by vengeful occupiers.

Introduction

The sanitation of sex—the regulation of reproductive and nonreproductive sexualities, sexual encounters, and venereal diseases along moral, hygienic, gendered, and racial codes—was a core issue of the modern biopolitical management of bodies. Sexuality being a key issue to negotiate authority was also omnipresent in the occupation Japan. The introduction discusses the state of the art in the study of occupied Japan and integrates Sanitized Sex in a larger historiography on sexuality, gender, and race in the history of imperialism and colonialism beyond Japanese history and studies.