Female floodwalls
Michael S. Molasky. The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa (London: Routldge, 1999). Ch. 4 Female floodwalls.
Yamada Meiko observes in her book on the RAA [the Recreation and Amusement Association, i.e. postwar comfort woman system] that once Japan had lost its colonies in Korea and Taiwan, the government decided to recruit military sex-workers from among the nation's own lower classes. Lower-class Japanese women were thus consigned to a status akin to that of Okinawans and Japan's prewar colonial subjects... the RAA did, in fact, concentrate on recruiting women from the water trade [Japan's vast service industry encompassing prostitutes, geisha, bar hostesses etc]. Once the brothels opened, however, it became apparent that the demand far outweighed the supply of women deemed "suitable" for the job, and RAA organizers decided to modify their approach in hope of attracting a larger applicant pool. They relied on unscrupulous recruiting strategies, including posters with advertisments such as that translated below, which appeared throughout Tokyo and Yokohama during the weeks after the war:
TO THE NEW WOMEN OF JAPAN
We seek pioneers from the new women of Japan to help establish and participate in a major undertaking related to the well-being of the occupation troops. Our organization has been established to resolve matters of national urgency presented by the postwar situation.
Wanted: Female office workers. Ages 18-25. Room, board, clothing and other amenities provided. (107)
Today there are few outright brothels catering solely to American servicemen in mainland Japan or Okinawa... Besides the lack of customers, the most notable change is that since the 1980s "dancers" from the Philippines have replaced local women in the sexual labor pool servicing the American military...
In 1993 I interviewed the most notorious club owner in Kin [a town located across from Camp Hansen, a large Marine base in Okinawa]. The man, a native of Miyako Island, agreed to speak with me only because I was accompanied by a newspaper reporter from his home island with whom he had met before. After climbing the stairs from the first-floor club to his family home on the third floor, I caught a glimpse of the dancers' living quarters. The rooms were located near the roof, which was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence topped with rows of barbed-wire, similar to that surrounding American military bases on the island. When I asked him why the fence was placed atop the roof of the three-story building, he replied that it was "to keep the GIs from climbing into the girls' quarters." Perhaps he hoped I wouldn't notice that the rows of barbed-wire were angled inward. The newspaper reporter accompanying me later explained that the fence had gained notoriety when one of the women died in a fire on the premises because she was unable to escape. No one was prosecuted in the case. Surely, this fence is among the most convoluted legacies of the occupation era: a barbed-wire fence - the most salient symbol of America's continuing control over Okinawa's social and physical landscape - placed atop a three-story concrete building by an Okinawan man in order to enclose foreign women brought to serve the former occupiers two decades after the region's reversion to Japan. Kin also happens to be the town where the September 1995 rape incident [in which a 12-yr-old school girl was abducted and raped by three US servicemen] ocurred. (113)
Yamada Meiko observes in her book on the RAA [the Recreation and Amusement Association, i.e. postwar comfort woman system] that once Japan had lost its colonies in Korea and Taiwan, the government decided to recruit military sex-workers from among the nation's own lower classes. Lower-class Japanese women were thus consigned to a status akin to that of Okinawans and Japan's prewar colonial subjects... the RAA did, in fact, concentrate on recruiting women from the water trade [Japan's vast service industry encompassing prostitutes, geisha, bar hostesses etc]. Once the brothels opened, however, it became apparent that the demand far outweighed the supply of women deemed "suitable" for the job, and RAA organizers decided to modify their approach in hope of attracting a larger applicant pool. They relied on unscrupulous recruiting strategies, including posters with advertisments such as that translated below, which appeared throughout Tokyo and Yokohama during the weeks after the war:
TO THE NEW WOMEN OF JAPAN
We seek pioneers from the new women of Japan to help establish and participate in a major undertaking related to the well-being of the occupation troops. Our organization has been established to resolve matters of national urgency presented by the postwar situation.
Wanted: Female office workers. Ages 18-25. Room, board, clothing and other amenities provided. (107)
Today there are few outright brothels catering solely to American servicemen in mainland Japan or Okinawa... Besides the lack of customers, the most notable change is that since the 1980s "dancers" from the Philippines have replaced local women in the sexual labor pool servicing the American military...
In 1993 I interviewed the most notorious club owner in Kin [a town located across from Camp Hansen, a large Marine base in Okinawa]. The man, a native of Miyako Island, agreed to speak with me only because I was accompanied by a newspaper reporter from his home island with whom he had met before. After climbing the stairs from the first-floor club to his family home on the third floor, I caught a glimpse of the dancers' living quarters. The rooms were located near the roof, which was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence topped with rows of barbed-wire, similar to that surrounding American military bases on the island. When I asked him why the fence was placed atop the roof of the three-story building, he replied that it was "to keep the GIs from climbing into the girls' quarters." Perhaps he hoped I wouldn't notice that the rows of barbed-wire were angled inward. The newspaper reporter accompanying me later explained that the fence had gained notoriety when one of the women died in a fire on the premises because she was unable to escape. No one was prosecuted in the case. Surely, this fence is among the most convoluted legacies of the occupation era: a barbed-wire fence - the most salient symbol of America's continuing control over Okinawa's social and physical landscape - placed atop a three-story concrete building by an Okinawan man in order to enclose foreign women brought to serve the former occupiers two decades after the region's reversion to Japan. Kin also happens to be the town where the September 1995 rape incident [in which a 12-yr-old school girl was abducted and raped by three US servicemen] ocurred. (113)
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