Framing the Subject. Sexuality can refer to many different things. For example, sexual stirrings, sexual desire, sexual expression or relations, sexual fantasies, sexual identity, and sexual preference. It can mean sex for sale. Sex in marriage, with or without romance, pleasure, or intimacy. It can be tender, hot, rough, faked, enjoyable, tired, recreational, conjugal, experimental. Here it is important to try and frame discussion of sexuality and women’s bodies in Japanese terms, using Japanese women’s voices as much as possible. The subject was hardly new in Occupied Japan; the difficulty has been in connecting Japan’s previous history to the Occupation years. The emphasis on change, social engineering, and transformation obscures continuity in thought and values. Emphasis on continuity on the other hand mocks rebirth, regeneration, and revolution.

Postwar Baby Boom. In Occupied Japan, Japanese couples obviously got together, married or otherwise, and created a postwar baby boom. For the masses, apart from the legal and democratic reforms underway, what did procreation have to do with love, romance, equality in marriage or in common law relationships? Or with the sexual satisfaction of the woman? In modern Japanese literature, relations between men and women figure prominently. However, in much of it, sexuality is imagined and mediated by male authors. The emphasis on virginity before marriage, especially in sex manuals for the public, emanates from men as do the preferred traits of modesty, compliance, and modesty in wives and daughters in contrast to sexually titillating prostitutes, courtesans, and geisha.

Male Fantasies. Should we accept as authentic male fantasies with respect to the bodies and sexual pleasures of Japanese women? The erotic woman has long been a theme in early modern and modern Japanese art. Most of the women who populate Nagai Kafu’s fiction are prostitutes, geisha, and café waitresses. They are not virgins or middle-class housewives (an extraordinary exception is “The Scavengers,” 1947). Nagai’s fiction is compelling, but it is his—or his male characters’—vision of sexuality; an example is “Nude” (1950) on this site. It is predetermined by Nagai’s love of underclass women in modern Tokyo’s demimonde. Kawabata Yasunari’s famous novella, Snow Country, rewritten for publication in the Occupation era, looks back on a country geisha in the 1930s and the visits by her lover. Otherwise, many of the memorable women in his fiction are upper middle class wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law. He does not overlook the bad behavior of men. Tanizaki’s Makioka Sisters (Sasamyuki in Japanese or Thin Snow) is set in late 1930s Osaka. Begun during the war and interrupted by Japanese censors, the novel was completed and serialized without difficulty during the Occupation. Tanizaki’s four sisters have distinct personalities as individuals as well as a strong family identity. He has apparently given us no Japanese woman in an Occupation setting, perhaps because of censorship in early 1946 of “Mrs. A’s Letters," a late wartime story about a married woman’s idealization of young pilots lying over her house. To censors, the tale was ultranationalist. Tanizaki lost no time in publishing it once Occupation censorship ended. In modern art, too, the erotic woman was a recurring subject.

Women Writers. Since the 1880s and 1890s, Japanese women writers had re-emerged in public. In serious and popular literature, in essays and journalism, they dealt openly with sexuality and women’s bodies. They, too, wrote about geisha and prostitutes, but from a different perspective, and they portrayed unhappy wives who wanted divorces. Women writers questioned the double standard of criminalization of women for adultery, but not of men. Their characters experienced sexual desire and experimented with free love. They expected sexual pleasure. In Occupied fiction, as wartime moralistic strictures were lifted, women’s sexuality is perhaps best expressed in the stories of Hayashi Fumiko. Her last novel, Floating Clouds, published in 1952 after newspaper serialization, is a case in point with its tale of a deserted woman, who had been the lover of a married doctor during an overseas stint in wartime Southeast Asia and re-met him in Occupied Japan. Perhaps the most put-upon wife in postwar Japanese literature was portrayed by Enchi Fumiko (1905-1986) when she resumed her writing career, shifting from drama to fiction in the late 1940s, and published her prize winning novel, Onnazaka, in 1957 (translated as The Waiting Years).

Film. Women did not direct films (with the exception of Tanaka Kinuyo’s unsuccessful bid in 1952). Nevertheless, they were master actors in interpreting roles. Takamine Hideko gave a passionate performance as a rejected lover in the film version of Hayashi’s Floating Clouds (1953). Kyō Machiko did double sexual duty as the cultured wife of a nobleman in 12th century Japan (Gate of Hell, 1953), and later a fast-talking prostitute (Street of Shame, 1955). In a tale told from five points of view in the 1950 prize-winning film, Rashōmon, Kyō’ story was one of rape in a forest. Tanaka Kinuyo expressed sexuality in Mizoguchi’s Women of the Night (1948) but sublimated it in Naruse Mikio’s film about a urban lower class widow whose older daughter is influenced by American notions of romantic love (Okaasan, Mother, 1952). Takamine Hideko was desiring and desirable as a Ginza bar hostess in Naruse’s later film, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960). Otherwise, we have far too little of her film work easily available on cassette or DVD. In other ways, women became part of the film industry. Wada Natto, for example, wrote most of the scripts for her husband, film director Ichikawa Kon.

Kurosawa has been chastised for ignoring women in his films, but this deserves a second look. His women are in fact an interesting array of characters, though often minor until he arrived at his version of Lady McBeth in Throne of Blood (1957). An older samurai wife, played by a 1920s actress brought out of retirement, Irie Takako, though a small part, was the catalyst in Sanjūrō (1962). Ozu Yasujirō was more apt to feature the humorous and spoiled antics of young boys than girls. Concurrently, masculinity was being redefined in both subtle and flamboyant ways in Occupied film by actors in domestic roles, especially Mifune Toshirō, a young veteran of the Asia-Pacific War. His famous samurai roles would come after the Occupation. Is it possible that the sexuality expressed so magnificently on film by Iwashita Shina’s Edo courtesan in Shinoda Masahiro’s Double Suicide (1967) or by Hadari Sachiko’s maturation as a housewife and responsible citizen in Hani Susumi’s She and He (1962) was in part aided by liberating influences during the Occupation. In both of these films, the directors were their husbands. It should be added that Iwashita played two parts, the dutiful merchant wife as well as the rival courtesan. Hidari went on to become a film director herself. Especially memorable in those years is the sensual performance of Kishida Kyōko in Teshigahara’s film version of Abe Kōbo’s novel, Woman n the Dunes

Revelations from Censorship. Much of the censored fiction and poetry of the early and mid-Occupation period, written by women as well as men, has to do with dislike of Japanese women’s sexual fraternization with Occupation troops and officers. Anger would perhaps be a better word. Somehow, American newspaperman Earnest Hoberecht, head of Associated Press in Japan, thought it was his job to introduce Japanese women to the proper way of kissing in his 1947 best seller, translated into Japanese as Tokyo Romansu (Tokyo Romance). He did fire up Japanese women, who joined his fan club by the tens of thousands. On the other hand, references to Korean comfort women and sexual abuses by Japanese soldiers were forbidden by Occupation censors as likely to arouse anger among the large Korean minority in Japan.

Literature of the Flesh. An important source for postwar sexual expression is literature of the flesh or body, (nikutai bungaku), especially the stories and plays of Tamura Taijurō, on prostitutes and comfort women. Sakaguchi Ango, too, has been given credit for writing the postwar body in a number of sensual stories. But whose body? Once again, it was the woman’s body as eroticized or imagined by men, as well as photographed and filmed by men. Given the scarcity of paper, there was also a considerable amount of pornography as well as erotica. Some see this as a carry-over from the wilder moments of Japan’s 1920s, featuring not only the modern girl and modern boy, but the grotesquerie. Others attribute it to decadence fostered by war and occupation and by the bad boys of the Occupation itself.

Sexual Preference. As for sexual preference, the Edo period tradition of adult samurai male love for young boys was frowned upon in the Civil Code of 1898. What a modern male did privately, however, was not as important as carrying out his public role as husband and father. These conventions too had been questioned and flaunted in interwar Japan, perhaps more by men than women. In Occupied Japan, the young Mishima Yukio expressed homoerotic sexual yearnings in his first major work, Confessions of a Mask, 1949. He also wrote of romantic love between a young woman and man in a simple island setting in Sound of Waves, 1954. His later portrait of a woman restaurateur turned politician’s wife in After the Banquet, 1958, was superb.

Among women authors of the older generation, Nobuya Yoshiko (born in 1896) is one of the few identified as a lesbian. She lived openly with a woman, but it is unclear how much this concerned her reading public. Nobuya was important in shaping the conventions of prewar girls’ (shōjo) literature, and her popular romances were widely read. But she was out of favor in the Occupation, largely because of patriotic works during the war. Some of it was banned and confiscated by Occupation officials. She made a modest comeback in the post-Occupation period and died in 1973. Recently, Yoshiya has been given credit for influencing postmodern shōjo themes in manga and anime. In prewar Japan, Miyamoto Yuriko is known to have had a seven-year liaison with a woman during the interval between two marriages, when for a time she lived in Russia. Some scholars have read same-sex interpretations into her literary output. Otherwise, Japanese women of all ages, but especially young lower and middle class teenagers, continued to flock to performances by the all-female Takarazuka troupe. The appeal of women in men’s roles seems to have been a complex mixture of romance, tenderness, cross-dressing, and gender bending.

Passion in Poetry. The great poet Yosano Akiko died in 1942. There seems to be no immediate replacement in the Occupation period. No young woman had made as explosive a debut as the twenty-one year old Yosano in 1901 with Tangled Hair, a collection of poems in the tanka format of thirty-one syllables, many of them erotic. Shiraishi Kazuko (1931- ) emerges as a leading candidate in addressing woman’s sexuality. Born in Canada, she was taken back to Japan before the outbreak of the Pacific War. She grew up in Occupied Japan, graduating from high school and entering Waseda University, a prestigious private university which had previously been closed to women. In 1948 at the age of seventeen, she had joined a surrealist poetry group; in 1952, she published her first collection of poems, Town under a Rainfall of Eggs. Another leading woman poet who came of age in the Occupation years is Kōra Rumiko (1932- ), whose mother had earned a degree in psychology at Columbia University and was among the first women elected to the postwar Diet. Kōra, born and raised in Tokyo and a graduate of Keio University (also prestigious, private, and not previously open to women) was first recognized in the 1960s when many other women poets were also winning public attention. As yet, too little of their work has been translated into English. It is also important to note that ordinary women (and men) enjoyed writing tanka and haiku (a short form in seventeen syllables), formed local poetry associations all over Japan, and published in many kinds of outlets. In the Occupation years, there is an outpouring of such poetry. As in other literature, it was censored for ultranationalism and for sexual fraternization but not for sexuality in Japanese life and culture.