Alegal

Biopolitics and the Unintelligibility of Okinawan Life

Annmaria M. Shimabuku

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823282678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Okinawan life, at the crossroads of American militarism and Japanese capitalism, embodies a fundamental contradiction to the myth of the monoethnic state. Suspended in a state of exception, Okinawans have never been officially classified as colonial subjects of the Japanese empire or the United States, nor have they ever been treated as equal citizens of Japan. As a result, they live amid one of the densest concentrations of U.S. military bases in the world. By bringing Foucauldian biopolitics into conversation with Japanese Marxian theorizations of capitalism, Alegal uncovers Japan's determination to protect its middle class from the racialized sexual contact around its mainland bases by displacing them onto Okinawa, while simultaneously upholding Okinawa as a symbol of the infringement of Japanese sovereignty figured in terms of a patriarchal monoethnic state. This symbolism, however, has provoked ambivalence within Okinawa. In base towns that facilitated encounters between G.I.s and Okinawan women, the racial politics of the United States collided with the postcolonial politics of the Asia Pacific. Through close readings of poetry, reportage, film, and memoir on base-town life since 1945, Shimabuku traces a continuing failure to "become Japanese." What she discerns instead is a complex politics surrounding sex work, tipping with volatility along the razor's edge between insurgency and collaboration. At stake in sovereign power's attempt to secure Okinawa as a military fortress was the need to contain alegality itself—that is, a life force irreducible to the legal order. If biopolitics is the state's attempt to monopolize life, then Alegal is a story about how borderland actors reclaimed the power of life for themselves. In addition to scholars of Japan and Okinawa, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonialism, militarism, mixed-race studies, gender and sexuality, or the production of sovereignty in the modern world.Alegal is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

CHAPTER 1

Japan in the 1950s: Symbolic Victims

This chapter addresses sexual labor in service to the Allied forces in postwar Japan through the 1950s. Although the Japanese government organized prostitution for the Allied forces in 1945, it was abolished in less than six months because the U.S. military favored its operation in the sphere of the free market. So-called private prostitution, however, was already fraught with a history of controversy stemming from its operation during the Japanese empire. Here, this controversy is read through a 1935 essay written by Kyoto School philosopher, Tosaka Jun, entitled “An Analysis of the Restoration Phenomenon.” In this essay, Tosaka showed how ethnic nationalists considered private prostitution inimical to the Japanese family system that formed the basis of the middle class. In fact, it was in this context that he theorized fascism as the logic of substitution, whereupon the family came to symbolically stand in for the larger society or state through quasi-religious feelings of “primitivism” or “mysticism.” This chapter examines the postwar reincarnation of this kind of ethnic nationalism through reportage that focused almost obsessively on the private prostitute and repeated the logic of substitution of the Japanese family for the state. That is, the sex worker, again, came to symbolize the victimization of Japan by “Western” capitalism, this time figured in terms of the imperialism of the U.S. military basing project in Japan. This reactionary ethno-nationalism registered on various points of the political spectrum and informed a largely successful anti-base movement in the late 1950s. Concerned with the social stability of Japan, the United States shut down many mainland bases and concentrated them in Okinawa.

Unmanageable Sexual Labor

The question of postwar sexual labor in service of the U.S. military was a question about the emergence of a postwar biopolitical Japanese state. How would the state care for its population in service to the U.S. military while not only recuperating lost economic power, but also taking it to new heights? Both states were unsatisfied with their respective solutions: The United States would not be managed by Japan’s state-licensed system of prostitution, and Japan would not be liberalized by America’s regulatory system of private prostitution. In other words, this story starts with the rapid rise and fall of the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) in 1945 that followed the prewar model of state-licensed prostitution and continued with the privatization of sex work through the emergence of streetwalkers, called “panpan,” before ending with a large transfer of U.S. military bases to Okinawa.

In preparation for the arrival of the occupation troops, sex topped the Japanese political agenda directly after the war. Japanese frightened of the “ghosts of the ‘Nanjing Massacre’ ”¹ now feared not only the same sexual violence they unleashed onto the conquered in China, but also the precedent set by territories Japan left vulnerable to American invasion, such as Okinawa and Manila, that would translate into sexual violence for Japanese women. Accordingly, on August 18, 1945, just three days after surrender, the Police and Security Section of the Home Ministry sent a message to all police departments “Regarding the Establishment of Special Comfort Facilities for the Occupying Forces.”² This resulted in the formal establishment of the RAA on August 29, 1945,³ backed by a 100 million-yen budget equally split between business investors and the Japanese government.⁴ Ikeda Hayato, then director of the Finance Ministry’s tax bureau and later prime minister credited for realizing Japan’s “economic miracle,” approved the budget with the statement “100 million yen is a bargain if it can protect the pure blood of the Yamato race.”⁵

In many respects, the RAA was an extension of the system of state-licensed prostitution (kōshō seido)⁶ instituted shortly after the establishment of the Meiji state. The Japanese government issued licenses to establishments engaged in the sex trade from which it then collected taxes. The women often came from the poorest sectors of Japanese society and were circulated throughout Japanese empire along with its expansion. No different from other empires, Japan exported this system to its colonies where not only Japanese women, but also colonized Taiwanese and Korean women were pushed into the trade. After the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, Japan’s system of state-licensed public prostitution quickly organized into the so-called “comfort woman” system in which Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese, Southeast Asian, Japanese, and Dutch women were forced into brutal sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Pacific War. Then shortly following defeat, the RAA replaced its precursor and forced Japanese women to serve not the Japanese, but now the Allied forces. Instead of coercing mostly colonized women to serve a multiethnic Japanese empire, Japanese women were now mobilized as a “breakwater of flesh” (nikutai no bōhatei)⁷ to protect the “racial purity” of the Japanese population. Class also became a factor as Japanese officials targeted destitute women⁸ who had lost their families and homes as a result of selective air raids that gutted poor neighborhoods while leaving wealthy homes and buildings available for the incoming occupation forces.⁹ In an official RAA statement, recruits were “to protect and cultivate the racial purity (minzoku no junketsu)” of the Japanese people for “a hundred years in the future” and become the “unseen subterranean pillar that holds up the foundation of the postwar social order.”¹⁰ Deputy Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro had similarly requested the superintendent general to “Please protect the daughters of Japan.”¹¹

At its height, about 70,000 women serviced the RAA.¹² Despite its popularity amongst the soldiers, the RAA was short-lived. In January 1946, less than six months after its establishment, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) issued a memorandum stating “The maintenance of licensed prostitution in Japan is in contravention of the ideals of democracy and inconsistent with the development of individual freedom throughout the nation.”¹³ That same month, the Police and Security Section of the Home Ministry ordered that RAA be officially disbanded with 55,000 prostitutes in service.¹⁴ SCAP was reluctant to participate in state-licensed prostitution because, simply put, it looked bad. As Lisa Yoneyama has convincingly argued, managing the trans-Pacific politics of sex was integral to the emergence of a Cold War regime centered on a system of “Anglo-American-centered international security,” whereupon the U.S. touted democratic norms of a free nation in order to justify its elimination of an “absolute evil.”¹⁵ Patronizing organized prostitution was difficult to pass off as a moral virtue. And, as if to corroborate this point, Michiko Takeuchi has similarly shown how the RAA was damaging to the United States, which was engaged in ideological warfare with the Soviet Union as it jockeyed for the role of global leader.¹⁶

In addition to ideological concerns, RAA was also taxing the health of the soldiers with venereal disease (VD) sharply on the rise. But, in economic terms, the abolition of state-regulated military prostitution paved the way for the privatization of the sex industry. As John Lie writes, “[p]rostitution was … not abolished but simply continued in a new privatized form.”¹⁷ The U.S. military needed prostitution to occur in the sphere of the free market where it could wash its hands of institutional responsibility.

First, in response to the prohibition of sexual slavery, the security chief of the Home Ministry reiterated on February 22, 1946, that “lewd acts committed by an individual’s free will” were a “different matter.”¹⁸ On November 14, 1946, the Yoshida cabinet designated “special areas for restaurants” (tokushu inshokuten no chiiki) which were really a cover for prostitution without formal legal recognition.

Second, the privatization of the sex industry further shifted from management by private industry to self-management. The attempt to manage and contain the mobility of sexual labor gave way to the iconic “panpan” or sex worker who took to the streets. In contrast to the history of socioeconomically and geographically limiting prostitution to certain sectors of Japanese society, these streetwalkers came from more diverse backgrounds and were afforded more liberty to navigate the terrain on their own accord. As Sarah Kovner assesses in her study on sex work in postwar Japan, “One reason the panpan phenomenon was so disturbing was that it appeared to mean that any woman—even an educated, middle-class mother or daughter—could find a place in the sex industry.”¹⁹ Surveys conducted during occupation corroborate this assessment as well. According to a 1948 survey of two hundred streetwalkers, those who had either started or graduated from elementary school, middle school, high school, and post-secondary school figured in at 27.5 percent, 18 percent, 47.5 percent, and 5.5 percent respectively.²⁰ As the survey notes, different from sex workers confined to brothels, the entrepreneurial streetwalkers capitalized on a high level of intellectual and English language skills to manage negotiations directly with patrons. The streetwalkers’ self-cultivated abilities yielded higher profits that were retained by the worker. Making more than their brothel counterparts,²¹ they took their profits and reinvested in themselves by buying the latest fashion and cosmetics. Robert Kramm estimates that there were between fifty thousand and seventy thousand sex workers who catered to U.S. military personnel in Tokyo alone during the occupation period.²²

Certainly, the streetwalker was a nuisance to public sanitation as the U.S. military and the Japanese police attempted to crack down on them by hunting them down and subjecting them to forced VD inspections. But while much has been said about the brute institutional power that bore down on the lives of these women, there is also an argument to be made about the bottom-up formation of a Japanese middle class that saw the streetwalker as a social threat. This was not an entirely new phenomenon, but as discussed in the next section, Tosaka Jun had already started to consider how the so-called private prostitute was targeted by Japanist ideologues integral to the formation of a middle class in the mid-1930s.²³

The Family as the State

In 1935, Tosaka Jun published a piece of social commentary on prostitution that would go on to become part of his well-known Japanese Ideology. Earlier that year, a group of brothel owners attacked abolitionist forces who worried that the state’s public involvement with licensed prostitution (kōshō seido) looked bad in the eyes of “Western civilization.”²⁴ The brothel owners instead praised the glory of preserving this purportedly native tradition, pitched as an extension of the traditional Japanese family system (kazoku seido),²⁵ and gestured toward the criminalization of private prostitution.

In his commentary, Tosaka was not shy to point out the “comical” irony of this nostalgia for a precapitalist past when it was not only produced by, but was also an aid to, monopoly capitalism in Japan.²⁶ For him, there was no temporal continuity from the feudal family system of the Tokugawa era to Japan in 1935, but only an attempt to force social cohesion amongst the multitudinous masses whose communities had been cataclysmically uprooted by capitalism. Far from antagonizing capitalism, their collective fantasy of the days past actually enabled it by providing a logic of social cohesion as servitude to the state that not only aided in the organization of labor power for consumption, but also provided foot soldiers from the countryside to fight in its imperialist wars. Hence, instead of examining the contradictions of capitalism through historical materialism, an emerging middle class indulged in a historical idealism that assumed a “transhistorical” (chōrekishitekina) Japanese essence rooted in a primitive past.²⁷ Whereas prostitution should have been addressed as a problem of poverty amongst “proletarian farmers in shackles,”²⁸ it was instead recuperated as the patriarch’s ability to manage his family as a “symbol” (shōchō) or “metaphor” (hiyu)²⁹ of the state’s ability to manage its people.

Here, Tosaka’s evocation of symbol is closely linked to Schmitt’s concept of sovereign power. If the sovereign, as defined by Schmitt, is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on Translations and Romanizations
• List of Commonly Used Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Japan in the 1950s: Symbolic Victims
• 2. Okinawa, 1945–1952: Allegories of Becoming
• 3. Okinawa, 1952–1958: Solidarity under the Cover of Darkness
• 4. Okinawa, 1958–1972: The Subaltern Speaks
• 5. Okinawa, 1972–1995: Life That Matters
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index