Censorship distortion of comfort women

The U.S. Occupation censored Taijiro Tamuras 1947 story The Life of an Alluring Woman (Shunpu den) for describing Korean prostitutes in a war zone. The Civil Information and Education Section with censorship power decided that identifying the nationality of the prostitutes constituted criticism of that nation.

U.S. censors ordered Korean references expunged but not the description of prostitutes in a war zone not initially anyway. They knew soldiers needed sex. Whoring to use the word the New York cultural icon Lincoln Kirstein, for one, employed in one of his poems about his experience in World War II was standard fare for them. The Japanese military at one time had done a study showing that soldiers in a war zone had a particularly high output of adrenalin.

In this regard, the Relaxation and Amusement Association and the network of special comfort stations under it that the Japanese government worked to set up for the occupying soldiers in the very month the nation surrendered, August 1945, which John Dower describes in Embracing Defeat (1999), may elicit a sneer: Look how someone with a bad conscience behaves!

But the Japanese military was starkly aware of the conduct of its soldiers. After all, it issued the Senjinkun (The Code of Conduct on the Battlefield) in January 1941 in the name of the then Army Minister Hideki Tojo because military discipline on the Chinese front had broken down; insubordination, arson, pillage, and, yes, rape had gone out of control.

But in reality the move to set up RAA comfort stations was justifiable. Holly Sanders notes in Prostitution in Postwar Japan (2005), within 10 days after Occupations soldiers started landing in Yokohama on Aug. 28, more than 1,300 rapes were reported in Kanagawa alone.

The RAA brothels were shut down in half a year because of a rampant spread of VD. During that six-month period 70,000 women are estimated to have worked in them, Yukihiro Tsukada, of Kwansei Gakuin University, has written. After they were abolished, most of those sex workers became panpan (a corruption of pompom girls perhaps), as prostitutes catering to the Occupiers were called. By the 1950s their number reached 150,000.

As journalist Soichi Oya put it with a touch of exaggeration in his 1953 book, Japan had become a nation of prostitutes.

In April 1947 NHK did street recordings interviews with men and women on the street. One of them, a panpan named Tokiko Nishida working around the Yamanote Line stations, sighed, in an aside, Whos made me a woman like this? The lament struck such a chord that it turned an existing song with that refrain into a hit. The song itself had been inspired by a former military nurse turned prostitute.

Behind it all was the devastation Japan had brought upon itself. The writer Kafu Nagai pinpointed one pressing problem when he wrote in his diary, on Aug. 25, 1945: food shortages are terrifying. The possibility of 10 million Japanese starving to death was thought serious enough for four years after Japans defeat. U.S. soldiers were a reliable source of money and food.

One reason Taijiro Tamuras story The Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon), published just before The Life of an Alluring Woman, became a runaway best-seller then wildly popular as a stage drama and a movie may well have been that it dealt with a small group of prostitutes in Yurakucho who pledged never to have sex with GIs.

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Censorship distortion of comfort women