Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. xi, 226 pp. (B&W illus., map.) US$50.00, cloth . ISBN 978-0-8047-7691-2.
In her thought-provoking book, Occupying Power, Sarah Kovner examines the immediate and long-term impacts of the arrival of the Allied servicemen on the Japanese sex industry and sex workers. While focusing on the specific time period from 1945 until the 2000s in Japan, this book also helps us understand the more general and ongoing issues related to the politics of sex work under occupation, which Kovner broadly defines as “a condition of compromised sovereignty resulting from a foreign military presence” (5).
The central argument that runs throughout the book is how the arrival of Allied servicemen in Japan “produced a new political configuration that finally abolished licensed prostitution,” which “[i]ronically, and tragically … made sex workers less visible and more vulnerable” (2). In exploring the process and explaining why this occurred, Kovner focuses on questions such as “how intimate histories and international relations are interconnected in ways scholars have only begun to explore” (4) and “how an influx of new buyers of sexual services, different sellers, and varied approaches to regulation shaped not just the larger political economy of Japan, but also the politics of memory and national self-perceptions” (5). Kovner’s analysis gives “equal weight to the experiences of the sex worker, client, and regulator” (5), and treats sex workers as both symbols and actors with agency without assuming “that they were powerless victims” (56).
The book is organized in a broadly chronological structure, beginning with the arrival of the Allied occupying forces in 1945. Chapter 1 focuses on the initial reaction of the Japanese government to the influx of Allied servicemen and the measures adopted by the US and British Commonwealth authorities to deal with their concerns about the spread of venereal disease infections among their servicemen, which eventually led to the deregulation of the sex industry in Japan in 1946 under MacArthur’s direction. Chapter 2 explores the relationships between Allied servicemen and Japanese women, including sex workers, paying attention to the diversity of such relationships ranging from rape to short-term sexual encounter to marriage. This chapter also analyzes the reactions of the Allied and Japanese authorities to such relationships and to the biracial children born out of these liaisons. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Japanese observers and critics attempted to impose an order on the newly deregulated sex market. Their particular concern was the phenomenon of the so-called “panpan” who sold sex on the street and who were often understood as catering to Allied servicemen. They were seen as selfish women who sold sex out of materialistic desires, and were considered social evils that could threaten social morality and have a negative influence on Japanese children. As it turned out, this way of symbolizing sex workers influenced the political effort to ban prostitution, which Kovner documents in chapters 4 and 5. These chapters closely examine the movement toward the establishment of the first national anti-prostitution law, the Prostitution Prevention Law of 1956. Female Diet members and activists played active roles in the policy making process; however, Kovner demonstrates how this coalition of women did not include sex workers. Sex workers were used as the symbol of postwar Japan’s corrupted social morality or as fallen women who needed rehabilitation, rather than as rightful workers. Chapter 6 examines what happened to commercial sex and sex workers after 1956, focusing on “diversification, outsourcing, tourism and trafficking” (144). This chapter also points out how a similar tendency, which had emerged in the 1950s, resurfaced again in the 1990s, in which “criminalizing a form of commerce made real victims both less visible and more vulnerable” (146).
With rich data and numerous insights, Occupying Power offers a value contribution on a number of levels. For example, Kovner’s claim that “the memory of the panpan may well have changed the way Japanese men and women understand the experience of occupation, to the point that they have found it all too easy to believe that military comfort women voluntarily sold sex to Japanese servicemen in occupied China” (157–158) is an interesting insight that can shed light on the ongoing and heated debate over this issue. Kovner’s analysis also makes an important contribution to the question of sex workers’ agency in Japan. Kovner includes actual experiences and voices of sex workers in her analysis, “albeit mediated through judicial proceedings, Diet hearings, and press reports” (56). Her careful treatment of these voices persuasively argues how Japanese sex workers “could actually negotiate the terms of their own relationship with the occupiers” (17). Simultaneously, Kovner also reveals how Japanese sex workers have been marginalized in public debates and political processes, which have led to regulations that could harm the interests of sex workers. Kovner’s close analysis of the complex dynamics that led to this in Japan make her final remark very persuasive: “[a]ny attempt to improve the lives of sex workers must therefore be based not merely on moral principle, but on a critical analysis of the practical and symbolic politics of such measures” (158).
The book contains detailed descriptions of the complex history of sex work under the Allied Occupation in vivid narratives, which makes it an accessible and useful resource for anyone who is interested in Japanese history and the politics of sex work. This close analysis also slightly limits the scope of the book, however, and if Kovner could more fully engage in cross-national comparative analysis, as she suggests in the Introduction (8), the book could have wider appeal to audiences with an interest in the politics of sex work more broadly. Having said that, by paying attention to the agency of sex workers, yet situating their agency in the fluid, chaotic and complex context of occupation in which power imbalances of various kinds clearly existed, Kovner’s careful and nuanced analysis successfully complicates and challenges conventional approaches for understanding sex work and sex workers in Japan and beyond.
Kimiko Osawa
Yonsei University, Wonju, South Korea
pp. 611-613