Licensed Prostitution. Well before the Occupation years, licensed prostitution had a long history in early modern and modern Japanese history. The Tokugawa period (1603-1868) is well known for its separate licensed pleasure quarters, especially the Yoshiwara area in Edo (modern Tokyo)—the home of brothels, restaurants, and popular entertainments. Geisha culture flourished in these quarters as well, although geisha were art persons in the original 18th century meaning of the term and not prostitutes or courtesans. In the late 19th century, the Home Ministry continued the practice of authorizing separate brothel districts. One estimate is that by 1930 there were approximately 50,000 professional prostitutes. In addition, Japanese prostitutes, known as karayukisan, were dispatched overseas to serve Japanese clients in various commercial ports along the China coast or in Southeast Asia. In the years of the Great Depression, many of the new recruits to prostitution at home and abroad were young girls from impoverished rural homes, including outcaste or burakumin families. Brothels followed the Imperial Japanese Army and male civilian colonists to Manchuria in even greater numbers after the incorporation of the area into Japan's empire in the 1930s. Japanese government officials and army physicians relied upon medical examinations of the women to prevent or at least to curb the spread of venereal diseases. Japanese women activists in the 1920s had a more radical solution: refuse marriage licenses to men who had VD.

Unlicensed Prostitution. Less studied is unlicensed prostitution in modern Japan. In European and American cities, in addition to houses of prostitution, some run by madams, streetwalkers solicited customers either on their own or under the control of male pimps and were vulnerable to arrest by the police. Tokugawa period woodblock prints hint at the practice of solicitation of travelers by maids working at inns along the national highways. Saikaku's fiction depicts urban street walkers, including older women. In Japan's flourishing popular culture of the 1920s, unlicensed prostitution also existed, especially in European style cafes, beer halls, and billiard parlors. Young bar hostesses, for example, might pick up additional income from customers but not necessarily.

Early Reform Efforts. From the late 19th century, Japanese Christian men and women, a very small but vocal and influential part of the population, took the lead in campaigns to ban licensed prostitution and at the same time to rescue and rehabilitate the women. The Japan Woman's Christian Temperance Union, founded in the 1880s, was the most prominent activist group. Other organizations included the Japanese Salvation Army and the Purification Society. Along with the emergence of the Women's Suffrage League in the 1920s was the League Against Prostitution. When Tokyo's most-famous licensed quarter, Yoshiwara, was destroyed in the great Kantō earthquake of 1923, Japanese women activists opposed its reconstruction, arguing that greater priority should be given to rebuilding schools or restoring housing. Although a bill to ban prostitution introduced into the Diet in March 1925, it was defeated not long before the bill for Universal Manhood Suffrage Law was passed. On the domestic front in wartime Japan, 1937-45, professional Japanese prostitutes continued to service Japanese male clients in licensed house or districts. As before, these professionals tended to come from impoverished lower class families. Saddled with clothing, food, and other expenses, it was almost impossible for them to save sufficient funds to buy back their liberty.

Military Sexual Slaves. The 1930s brought a new form of sexual exploitation to the fore. As Japan moved closer to total war with China, the Japanese military, sometimes with help from local go-betweens in colonies and conquered areas, began recruiting young women, preferably virginal, under false pretenses of legitimate jobs and turned them into military sex slaves for soldiers overseas. These women, who did not ask to be and were not in fact prostitutes per se, were euphemistically called comfort women (ianfu)—or worse, supplies. They were in a separate category from professional Japanese prostitutes whose customers were Japanese officers. It was a widely shared belief that men in war required sexual satisfaction or relief in order to function on the battlefield. There was, in addition, the practical problem of preventing soldiers from engaging in wide-scale rape and upsetting the social order in occupied territories.

Sex slaves served close to the battlefield, had little food or income, and experienced what can only be called gang rape on a daily basis. Although the majority of the estimated 100,000 women pressed into sexual exploitation were young Koreans, recent scholarship has turned up more information about Chinese and Southeast Asian sex slaves, including a few Western women. The number who died is unknown. Those who did survive generally were too ashamed to reveal their experiences to their families or were shunned by their home villages. Up to the early 1990s, when the issue became highly political internationally, the Japanese government denied complicity in this atrocity. As of the early 21st century, the surviving women have received neither official apologies nor government reparations, although Korean men who had been pressed into military service by Japan received a modest settlement under the Japan-South Korea Treaty of 1965. Too much evidence has turned up in archives and in oral histories for continued denials of sexual slavery. Although the Japanese government has finally, and grudgingly, admitted direct involvement in this war crime, it still balks at full disclosure of the truth and has yet to pay indemnities. The same is true for forced labor of colonial men and women—and Allied and American Prisoners of War—in wartime Japan's mines and heavy industries.

Occupied Japan. Prostitution existed in various guises in early post-surrender Japan: (1) licensed brothels catering exclusively to Japanese men; (2) officially sponsored special halls or cabarets set aside for foreign military clientele and staffed by a mixture of amateur and professional women; and (3) unlicensed prostitutes, some of them teen-agers. The latter were called pan-pan girls (also, angels or women of the night) and solicited openly on the streets. Their customers were generally GIs, and the sight of these Japanese women and American men together was especially galling to Japanese males but unwelcome to middle and upper class Japanese women. In the Gordon W. Prange Collection at the University of Maryland, there are many examples in magazines and other print materials of Japanese disgust, exasperation, and anger at sexual fraternization. Much of it caught by censors and deleted before publication. The phenomenon of streetwalkers attracted the attention of foreign and Japanese professional photographers as well, but few of the images made it into Japanese newspapers and magazines during the Occupation.

Recreation and Amusement Association. As early as mid-August, in the first week after Japan's surrender, the Japanese cabinet of Prime Minister Suzuki Kantarō expressed great concern about the fate of Japanese women at the hands of the Occupiers. Its chief worry was how to protect the "bloodline" and the bodies and reputations of respectable Japanese women. Besides warning Japanese women to dress modestly or stay in the countryside, its solution was to ask the Home Ministry and the entertainment industry to recruit prostitutes to meet the influx of victorious occupiers. Segregated brothels for GIs, masked as dance halls or cabarets, were quickly set up in central and suburban Tokyo and near Yokohama under the auspices of the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA). Ads would begin to appear in the English language Nippon Times as early as September 29 and continue to run for months. In essence, less respectable or so-called base Japanese women were expected to act as a floodwall or breakwater for the Japanese people. They were to sacrifice themselves to protect the chastity of the good wives/wise mothers and their daughters. The RAA attempted to recruit professionals but also turned to amateurs and allegedly low level geisha to serve the many anticipated customers. In this way, the Japanese contributed to a common Western misunderstanding of the person and institution of geisha. To GI's, all too often a geisha “girl” was a synonym for prostitute. U.S. base commanders gave implicit support, though evidence is difficult to find in the official records.

Crackdown.The popularity and proliferation of the new bars, casinos, and brothels catering to GIs raised questions about fraternization as an official military policy. At first, General MacArthur had issued stern orders for good behavior by U.S. officers and troops but did not directly ban fraternization as had the American military in Germany (see separate theme on fraternization). Senior officers made sure that prophylactics were supplied to their men and looked the other way. Besides, it was thought that friendly interaction or social fraternization between Americans and Japanese might help the cause of peace and democracy after a bitter war, featuring atrocities on all sides. Alarmed, however, by rising VD rates among U.S. troops, MacArthur not only banned the RAA but also insisted upon the abolition of all licensed brothels in February 1946. The new magic bullet—penicillin shots—could not provide adequate protection against sexual diseases. As further reason, MacArthur viewed Japan's system of prostutution as little more than female bondage or slavery and an obvious denial of equal rights.

However, semi-licensed prostitution soon returned. Brothels for the occupiers sprang up, as before, in designated areas called “red-line districts” and operating under such innocuous labels as “special eating and drinking shops.” Otherwise, and this is an important point, prostitutes and brothels continued to service Japanese males as their the main customers in separate areas or designated red light districts. A popular Japanese film of 1948, Women of the Night, directed by Mizogushi Kenji, was a grim portrayal of street solicitation set in Osaka. Its male characters were exclusively Japanese. Tamura Taijirō's tales of the flesh, including his hugely successful novella and play, Gate of Flesh, and Sakaguchi Ango's sexually explicit fiction had only Japanese protagonists. Nagai KafŪ, one of the most distinguished of prewar authors, continued his love affair with the demi-monde. Although Occupation censorship dictated that writers and artists refrain from negative depictions of Americans or their Allies and undoubtedly played a role in creative choices, the reality of Japan's night life of sake bars, cabarets, dance halls, strip shows, and brothels was primarily one of Japanese women in service to Japanese men. A new stage thrill in 1948 was nude women posing artistically inside picture frames. The sports industry descended to showcasing nude women playing baseball. In addition, Japanese women were crudely objectified in a flourishing pornographic literature, and art reminiscent of the kasutori culture of the 1920s. In short, as before, Japanese men, far more so than GIs, were lovers, husbands, teachers, friends, employers, exploiters, and protectors of the women of Japan. American and Allied wives and mothers in Occupied Japan shared some of the same objections—moral and racial—as their Japanese counterparts to illicit relations between Western men and Japanese women, extending to dating and marriage.

Korean War. After the Korean War broke out in June 1950, U.S. expenditures included large sums in Japan for GI rest and recreation purposes. Though much of the contact was sordid and exploitative, more marriages took place under the War Brides Act. Japanese women who had to solicit anew every night were called "butterflies;" the more fortunate were "only ones,"&151;secure mistresses of one GI partner until he went home or abandoned them. At the end of the Occupation in April 1952, a bar and brothel culture was firmly established around U.S. bases, which, in turn, remained in Japan under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and Status of Forces Agreement.

As soon as Occupation censorship was lifted, the movie industry made several lurid films alluding to military prostitution. Important Japanese authors toured the U.S. bases and wrote exposes for newspapers and magazines. Among them were such well-known women writers as Hirabayashi Taiko and Nakamoto Takako. Fearing censorship and publishing anonymously, Nakamoto wrote an incisive story in July 1953 entitled, "Woman of a Base Town," but translated as "The Only One." In the mid-1950s, famous male author and future Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari wrote a novel, untranslated as of yet, featuring a military base town. U.S.-Japan relations were marred by periodic incidents of rape and misbehavior, especially in Okinawa where the majority of American military personnel in Japan were stationed and which remained under direct U.S. control until 1972. Post-reversion incidents were frequent in Okinawa, culminating in mass protests in 1995 after the rape of an eleven year old girl by three U.S. marines.

Banning Prostitution. More to the point was the on-going the struggle of Japanese women to ban licensed prostitution. Bigger than military prostitution was the domestic sex trade which serviced Japanese men. Women's groups sent petitions to the Diet and wrote letters to magazines. They organized protests and marches. Long-time socialist critic Kamacrika Ichiko, who was elected to the Lower House of the Diet in 1953, took a leading role in this crusade. In common with most Japanese, she distinguished between respectable women and prostitutes. "The spread of evil throughout society," she said in 1955, "is the result of so many practicing prostitutes openly today. We must punish the estimated five hundred thousand prostitutes to protect the life-styles of forty million housewives." It was an interesting stance for someone who in her younger years had served two years in jail for stabbing her lover. Aiding the cause was Mizoguchi's last film, Street of Shame (1956) a mixed tale of prostitutes, including a married women secretly caught up in prostitution so that her husband and son could survive and another who liked the sex business and was a manipulative money lender. After a few stumbles, the Diet came through and banned prostitution in 1956, effective one year later. Famous Diet women Katō Shizue, Ichikawa Fusae, and Oku Mumeo helped Kamichika Ichiko to collect votes from fellow legislators. The final bill gave insufficient attention to rehabilitation of prostitutes or help in finding employment. To no avail, the Prostitutes' Union voiced strong objection. Although licensed prostitution ended in Japan, the sex industry thrived in other ways and forms, among them massage parlors, nude photography, and strip clubs.