Arts, Faculty of
Asian Studies, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Hu, Yi
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
This thesis seeks to address the question of how Okinawan newspaper articles published between 1956 to 1972 constructed journalistic discourses that posited prostitutes as the source of moral pollution. Additionally, the thesis is interested in the sociopolitical mechanisms that managed and suppressed the destabilizing effects posed by the prostitutes and their commercial-sexual relations with both American and local men. In exploring these issues, the thesis seeks to shed light on the ideological functions that such discourses served in managing the contradictions between economic dependency on the sex industry and other competing political and moral aspirations operating within Okinawan society after the end of the Asia-Pacific War under U.S. military occupation. The articles were transcribed and thematically coded manually by the author and then analyzed using methodological tools drawn from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The application of these analytical methods was primarily grounded in a critical realist perspective on Foucault’s discourse theory, as outlined in his 1970 Collège de France lecture The Order of Discourse (L’Ordre du Discours). The framework to understanding morality and morality-related sociopolitical mechanisms was drawn from Mary Douglas’s work Purity and Danger (1966). During the period specified above, the journalistic texts published in Okinawan newspapers initially identified the prostitutes working in Okinawa’s base towns as outsiders of society and cast them as the source of moral pollution that endangered the rest of the society by way of their sexual relations with the American soldiers. However, concurrently and over time, additional information and alternative moral-discursive representations emerged which destabilized this simplistic moral-discursive framework, which partially led to a refocusing on the brothel owners as the face of evil in Okinawa’s sex industry between the late 1950s up to the ratification of the Prostitution Prevention Law in Okinawa in 1972. The same discursive shift also cast the prostitutes as victims in need of rescue, thus indemnifying the governing authority and the segments of Okinawan society that had benefitted from the women’s sexual labors postwar.
BETWEEN IM/MORALITY: AN ANALYSIS OF MORAL DISCOURSES ON PROSTITUTES IN OKINAWAN NEWSPAPER ARTICLES, 1956-1972 by Yi Hu M.Sc., The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2023 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Asian Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) SEPTEMBER 2025 © Yi Hu, 2025 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: Between Im/morality: An Analysis of Moral Discourses on Prostitutes in Okinawan Newspapers Articles, 1956-1972 submitted by Yi Hu in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Asian Studies Examining Committee: Ayaka Yoshimizu, Associate Professor of Teaching, Asian Studies, UBC Co-supervisor Christina Yi, Associate Professor, Asian Studies, UBC Co-supervisor Kelly Midori McCormick, Assistant Professor, History, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract This thesis seeks to address the question of how Okinawan newspaper articles published between 1956 to 1972 constructed journalistic discourses that posited prostitutes as the source of moral pollution. Additionally, the thesis is interested in the sociopolitical mechanisms that managed and suppressed the destabilizing effects posed by the prostitutes and their commercial-sexual relations with both American and local men. In exploring these issues, the thesis aims to shed light on the ideological functions that such discourses served in managing the contradictions between economic dependency on the sex industry and other competing political and moral aspirations operating within Okinawan society after the end of the Asia-Pacific War under U.S. military occupation. The articles were transcribed and thematically coded manually by the author and then analyzed using methodological tools drawn from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The application of these analytical methods was primarily grounded in a critical realist perspective on Foucault’s discourse theory, as outlined in his 1970 Collège de France lecture The Order of Discourse (L’Ordre du Discours). The framework to understanding morality and morality-related sociopolitical mechanisms was drawn from Mary Douglas’s work Purity and Danger (1966). During the period specified above, the journalistic texts published in Okinawan newspapers initially identified the prostitutes working in Okinawa’s base towns as outsiders of society and cast them as the source of moral pollution that endangered the rest of the society by way of their sexual relations with the American soldiers. However, concurrently and over time, additional information and alternative moral-discursive representations emerged which destabilized this simplistic framework, which partially led to a refocusing on the brothel owners iv as the face of evil in Okinawa’s sex industry between the late 1950s up to the ratification of the Prostitution Prevention Law in Okinawa in 1972. The same discursive shift also cast the prostitutes as victims in need of rescue, thus indemnifying the governing authority and the segments of Okinawan society that had benefitted from the women’s sexual labors postwar. v Lay Summary This thesis analyzes articles published in Okinawan newspapers between the mid-1950s to early 1972 to understand how journalists wrote about women who worked as prostitutes in Okinawa’s sex industry after the Asia-Pacific War. At the time, the sex industry catered to both the stationed U.S. military servicemembers as well as local clientele. The thesis aims to examine how journalists’ writings during that period shaped public opinion about these women through selective representations of their lives and moral character. These representations, in turn, also shifted with changing societal attitudes of how prostitution should be managed by authorities postwar. vi Preface This thesis is original, unpublished and independent work by the author, Yi Hu. No Generative Artificial Intelligence tools were used in the research process, development, or writing of the thesis. The originally planned ethnographic fieldwork and questionnaire-based research which took place between November 1st and December 4th, 2024, in Okinawa, Japan, was covered by UBC Behavioural Research Ethics Board (BREB) Certificate number H24-02179. Dr. Ayaka Yoshimizu was listed as the Primary Investigator. However, this research plan was not carried out in Okinawa as the author pivoted to conducting archive-based research at the Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet” (2 Chōme-2-1, Central, Okinawa, 904-0004, Japan). All newspaper articles analyzed in this thesis were collected from the archive’s database. vii Table of Contents ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................................. iii LAY SUMMARY ......................................................................................................................................................... v PREFACE .................................................................................................................................................................... vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................................................................... vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................................................ ix DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................................................ xii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Research Questions and Rationale ......................................................................................................... 2 1.2 Historical Context .................................................................................................................................. 5 1.3 Literature Review of Existing Scholarship on U.S. Militarism and the Military-Directed Colonization of Okinawa .......................................................................................................................................................... 10 1.4 Chapter Outlines .................................................................................................................................. 14 CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY .................................................................................................................................... 15 2.1 Foucault’s Discourse and its Limitations ............................................................................................. 15 2.2 Mary Douglas’s Concept of Moral Pollution ....................................................................................... 23 2.3 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Its Application to Newspaper Texts ...................................... 26 2.4 Data Collection and Archive Research ................................................................................................ 30 2.5 Chapter Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 33 CHAPTER 3: SHE ARRIVES, CLOAKED IN SHAME ...................................................................................................... 36 3.1 How to Understand an Alien World? ................................................................................................... 37 3.2 Venereal Diseases as Medical-Moral Contamination ......................................................................... 47 3.3 Urban Spaces as Metaphors for Okinawan Society and the Framing of Children/Youths as Victims of Moral Pollution ................................................................................................................................................... 56 3.4 Chapter Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 64 viii CHAPTER 4: UNDERNEATH HER BED, MONSTERS UNSEEN ...................................................................................... 66 4.1 The Emergence of the Sex Industry as a Site of Victimization of Jokyū by Okinawans ....................... 67 4.2 Patronage of the Sex Industry by Okinawans ....................................................................................... 78 4.3 Economic Gains Derived by Okinawan Society From the Sex Industry .............................................. 84 4.4 Chapter Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 92 CHAPTER 5: IN HER PALM, AN EMPTY LIGHT .......................................................................................................... 93 5.1 All the Laws That Have... Already Outlawed Prostitution... ................................................................ 95 5.2 Displacing the Source of Pollution, Reorganizing the Personae Dramatis ....................................... 103 5.3 Hogo Kōsei: What Is It Seeking to Achieve? ...................................................................................... 113 5.4 Chapter Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 124 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION .......................................................................................................... 126 6.1 Thesis Summary .................................................................................................................................. 126 6.2 Future Directions and Reflections on Researcher Positionality ........................................................ 129 REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................................................... 133 APPENDICES ........................................................................................................................................................... 146 ix Acknowledgements The people I will need to give thanks to are as countless and innumerable as grains of sands on a beach and as stars splashed across the night sky. For the sake of keeping this acknowledgement at least somewhat focused and contained, my gratitude to many will remain in my heart and prayers. This thesis would not have been possible without the tireless, selfless dedications and unending patience of Dr. Ayaka Yoshimizu, upon whose insights and guidance I have relied time and again throughout the past two years. My fieldwork and archival research in Okinawa were made possible through Dr. Yoshimizu’s generous support, expertise and professional network. I remain forever grateful and indebted to you. I am also thankful for Dr. Christina Yi’s mentorship as my co-supervisor who helped ground me in the academic environment of the department after my matriculation. I will always think fondly of our conversations, from which I find myself draw inspirations on many occasions within and outside of the academia. I extend my gratitude to Dr. Kelly Midori McCormick, who has agreed to be part of my supervisory committee despite her own busy schedule and whose kindness has helped me push through the mental hurdles of the writing process. And to Dr. Renren Yang, who has volunteered to chair my defense meeting. I must also thank Ms. Tina Wong, who has kindly and patiently shepherded me through many of the administrative conundrums during my two years here, including but not limited to the hectic months leading up to my thesis defence and submission. Dr. Shirin Eshghi Furuzawa from the Asian Library and student librarian Austin Miner have responded to my last-minute request for a letter of introduction to the Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet”, as well as helping me understand access x options to other archives and resources. It is with my deepest regret that I never got the chance to thank you both in person, but I hope you know that this thesis would not have existed without you. While in Japan and in Okinawa, I was humbled by the supports that I received from Dr. Megumi Chibana of Kanagawa University, Dr. Aoki Ikehara of Koza MiXtopia Research Center, and feminist sociologist Rinda Katayani, all Okinawan scholars dedicated to studying their local community whose works have been greatly inspiring and thought-provoking for me on both professional and personal levels (in alphabetical orders based on last names). They have generously shared their insights and feedback regarding my many questions and guided me through the tumultuous few weeks as I explored alternative research method. My heartfelt thanks to my colleagues at the department who have been my network of support and whose hard works and talents I continue to find inspirational, especially Abigail Brewer, Ricky (Ruikun) Chan, Eyobe Melketsadik, Haruki Sekiguchi, Lavanya Verma, Skyler Wolf, Ai Yamamoto, Jessica Zhang, Ying Zhang, among others (all listed in alphabetical orders based on last names). I wish all of you the greatest of successes. I will forever to grateful for having Ida, my closest friend, as my steadfast supporter throughout so many things in the past seven years throughout all the joys and turmoil. You are with me as I waded through the old newspapers and typed these words on the computer screen. I also would like to thank Carl, my dearest friend and confidante, whose faith in me remained unwavering and in whom I found recognition and acceptance. Words seem to evade me. I envy the effortless talents of Sappho, Catullus and Horace. But let me say this: I would plant a hundred and a thousand sunflowers and then a thousand more so I could dwell amongst them forever as if in your eyes. xi My journey as a master’s student would not have been the same without the continued support of my family, whom I know I can always turn to for counsels and supports. Finally, and perhaps you might be able to read this in a different life, my cats, Menace and Shadow, have taught me much about love and life in ways I did not think were possible. In the meantime, I shall always do my best to provide tunas to you as a show of my gratitude. xii Dedication For M Brighter than stars ablaze. Silence in the heart of light. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction On May 14th, 1956, a twenty-three-year-old woman who worked as a jokyū (barmaid/prostitute) in Koza (now part of Okinawa City) became the first woman to be arrested and sentenced to penal labors by the U.S. military authority for being drunken and disorderly and for obstructing justice. In her inebriated state the previous night, she threw rocks at passers-by, reportedly injuring three of them. When the military police, a policing branch overseen by the U.S. military to enforce legal regulations and maintain social orders in postwar Okinawa, showed up, the woman again threw rocks at the patrol car before being arrested and taken into custody (Okinawa Times, 1956, May 15, Morning edition, 3). This was the first journalistic text I read in depth after having organized all my research materials chronologically, and in a way, the unnamed young woman became the eyes that peered back at me across the temporal and spatial distances between us, from a limbo behind the bright-white paper hosting lines of crawling texts. Like the space behind a canvas. The article repeated details of her life that I should have never known as a stranger, yet I came no closer to understanding her. Why did she do what she allegedly did? Under what circumstances did she become a jokyū at a young age? Who was she outside of that drunken adventure and outside of the courthouse? I have accepted that I will never know. But what became clear to me is that these journalistic texts, and the discourse they create, produce narratives that purport to reveal comprehensive truths about individuals and events through layers of concealments and reorganizations of the “reality” that occupy the cognitive spotlight of the readers. 2 1.1 Research Questions and Rationale The current thesis examines how Okinawan newspaper articles constructed journalistic discourses to manage the moral contradictions inherent in the postwar society’s economic dependence on the sex industry through the application of Mary Douglas’ concept of “moral pollution,” understood as social-moral liminality which motivates political mechanisms for managing its perceived threat to social order (Douglas 1966). Drawing my analysis from articles published between the early 1950s and 1972 that explicitly focus on prostitutes and the sex industry in the archipelagic region’s base towns, I endeavour to answer the following research questions: How did Okinawan newspaper discourse construct prostitutes as sources of moral pollution through journalistic texts? What ideological functions did these discourses serve in managing the contradictions between economic dependency on the sex industry and other competing political and moral aspirations operating within the society after the end of the Asia-Pacific War under U.S. military occupation? In answering these questions, this thesis pays particular attention to how seemingly contradictory representations and narratives served the political and moral agendas of segments of Okinawan society outside of the sex industry, specifically social groups who occupied positions of power. On a theoretical level, the thesis adopts a critical realist perspective on Foucault’s conceptualization of discourse and its relation to power as stated in his 1971 lecture (Foucault 1971) and examines how discourse participates in the structural and political functions of morality by leveraging the aforementioned concept of moral pollution. The thesis primarily employs analytical tools drawn from the critical discourse analysis (CDA) framework, understanding newspaper articles as a form of politically motivated media for discourse circulation. The CDA framework allows me to integrate specific textual and linguistic features 3 such as euphemism into more meta-text level analysis of discourses and the sociopolitical context that connects, animates or destabilizes them (Richardson 2007; Fairclough 1993, 2013). Understanding these discursive strategies requires careful attention to terminology. Throughout this analysis, the thesis uses the term prostitutes to describe and refer to the women who worked in Okinawa’s postwar sex industry in its base towns. Although the term sex workers emerged as an attempt to destigmatize and recognize agency, the term carries neoliberal connotations that risk overemphasizing individual choice while obscuring structural constraints. Paradoxically, the notion of sex work as freely chosen labor has been deployed to further marginalize women by portraying their participation in the sex industry as voluntary, thus absolving society of examining the social conditions that constrained their options in the first place (Kikuchi 2010). Women working in the sex industry undoubtedly possessed agency as they navigated oppressive systems, resisted when possible, and at times disrupted power structures, as evidenced by their participation in events like the Koza uprising of 1970 (Ueunten 2020). Yet the term sex worker also risks obscuring crucial historical and other structural differences important in the Okinawan context. The Okinawan women in the postwar period who provided sexual services to U.S. soldiers and local clientele did so under specific conditions of military occupation and in the aftermath of the collapse of social, economic, and legal order at the end of the Battle of Okinawa. These specific historical and structural conditions shaped both the nature of their work and the constraints they faced in ways that demand careful analytical attention. On the other hand, the Okinawan newspaper articles collected for the current thesis research often eschewed explicit, straightforward terminology, deploying euphemisms like jokyū (barmaid/waitress) and tokushu fujin (special woman) that simultaneously revealed and concealed the nature of these women’s work. Such euphemistic language is also part of the 4 discursive strategy which rendered the women as caricatured, simplified characters in moral discourses constructed by more privileged Okinawans and whose personhood remains erased during the discourse’s dissemination and circulation. By critically using the term prostitutes, therefore, this thesis hopes to acknowledge both the reality of their work and the structural violence of their marginalization, so as to avoid propagating either the euphemistic erasure of the historical sources or the neoliberal reframing that might obscure the specific conditions of oppression they faced. The analysis in the current thesis is situated in the specific historical period after the end of the Asia-Pacific War in 1945 up until Okinawa’s formal Reversion to Japan in 1972, during which time Okinawa was under extensive sociopolitical and economic control of the occupying U.S. military, occupation which continues to this day (McCormack & Norimatsu 2012). The Reversion marked the formal return of Okinawa from U.S. administration to Japanese sovereignty, though this political arrangement maintained and resumed Japan’s colonial relationship with Okinawa (Inoue 2007; McCormack & Norimatsu 2012). Broadly speaking, the analysis aims to examine how the systems of patriarchy and internal power relations which already existed in Okinawa during this period functioned to marginalize the women who worked in the sex industry through discourses. For analytical purposes, “internal” refers to the forms of power dynamics operating within Okinawan society during occupation. These social power structures operated according to their own internal logic and served the interests of local elites when circumstances aligned with elite priorities. Their working can be made visible through various institutions that wielded significant influence, including but not limited to media outlets, community organizations, and bureaucratic bodies. Concurrently, these institutions of power produced and distributed public discourses that reinforced existing power relations within the 5 community, where these discourses dialectically allowed the current systems of power to circumvent critical examination of the postwar socioeconomic and political arrangements. Consequently, the exploitative and extractive practices that characterized the sex industry in Okinawa remained entrenched and largely unquestioned. The rest of the chapter will first provide a brief overview of the historical context of U.S. military occupation and militarization of Okinawa at the end of the Asia-Pacific War in 1945, alongside discussion of relevant substrates of political movements within Okinawan society, specifically the anti-American organizations that campaigned for greater civil rights. The same section will also outline more specific policies and community movements in the context of the sex industry. Building upon this contextualization of the research question, the next section offers a review of existing critical literature looking at U.S. militarism as a globalized geopolitical and social phenomenon beyond the borders of the U.S., and specifically in terms of its de-facto colonization of Okinawa. The chapter will also end with an outline of the chapter structures of the rest of the thesis. 1.2 Historical Context The U.S. military occupation of Okinawa fundamentally transformed the island’s social, economic, and political landscape, creating conditions that shaped the emergence of the sex industry around military bases. Understanding this context requires examining how the interplay between land appropriation, governance structures, and moral frameworks characterized the occupation period from 1945 to 1972, with particular attention to how these factors influenced the development and social-moral regulation of the sex industry undertaken by both the U.S. military and the institutions of power within civilian society. 6 In the immediate aftermath of the Asia-Pacific War and the Battle of Okinawa, the archipelago was witness to the systematic internment of the local population in prisoner of war camps which also functioned as temporary shelters, primarily located in northern Okinawa (Wakabayashi 2015). Japanese soldiers and their families were held separately from Okinawan civilians by the U.S. military forces, a distinction that reflected emerging American perceptions of ethnic difference. Indeed, as early as 1944, the U.S. military’s Office of Strategic Services had published an internal document titled “Ryūkyū rettō no Okinawajin – Nihon no shōsū minzoku” (The Okinawans of the Ryūkyū Archipelago – Japan’s Ethnic Minority), suggesting that American forces entered Okinawa with the assumption that Okinawans constituted a culturally and ethnically distinct minority within the Japanese empire (Wakabayashi 2015, 32-33). Following their release from internment post-1945, the newly freed Okinawans faced a transformed landscape where vast tracts of agricultural land had been seized for military installations. The inability to resume farming, combined with reductions in U.S. aid between 1949 and 1950, created conditions of severe material deprivation (Wakabayashi 2015; Chibana 2018). Consequently, the population was forced into newly emerging base towns, which became the only viable economic centers. Women found employment as domestic workers for military families, whereas men labored on base construction projects or infrastructure development such as Naha Port, designed to facilitate the importation of military supplies and aids (Kikuchi 2010; Wakabayashi 2015; Shimabuku 2019). Concurrent with these economic transformations, the postwar governance system established by the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR) aimed to create a civilian government that would discourage Okinawan identification with Japan while promoting American democratic ideals. Beginning with the formation of the Okinawa Advisory 7 Council (Okinawa Shijunkai 沖縄諮詢会) in 1945, USCAR worked toward establishing an Okinawan civil government by 1946 (Wakabayashi 2015, 36, 40-41). This project intensified around 1948, influenced by the success of instituting mechanisms of American-style democratic elections in South Korea. The Ryūkyū Military Government Section (RMSG), established in September 1948, was given the directive of creating a conservative civilian governing body designed to foster a distinct Ryūkyūan identity separate from Japanese nationalism. By 1950, the military authority had published election laws for provisional government assemblies (minsei gikai 民政議会), following campaigns by local political organizations. These included the Okinawa Minshu Dōmei 沖縄民主同盟 (Okinawa Democratic League), which promoted the eventual establishment of an independent Okinawan republic; and Okinawa Jinmintō 沖縄人民党 (Okinawa People’s Party, or OPP), a communist party that campaigned on a platform for worker’s rights and espoused a reversionistic agenda since its founding in 1947 (Wakabayashi 2015, 79, 120-121). These governance structures would profoundly influence how local authorities approached the emerging sex industry and its regulation. The rapid emergence of prostitution around military bases as early as 1947 prompted nominally different but structurally interconnected responses from American military authorities and Okinawan communities. On the one hand, the U.S. military’s pronounced focus centered on controlling venereal disease among troops, leading to the publication of Special Orders prohibiting brothels catering to occupying forces (No. 14), proclaiming VD eradication as a military directive (No. 15), and banning sexual enslavement of women and children (No. 16). These orders were followed by mandatory VD screening for known prostitutes (Kikuchi 2010). On the other hand, Okinawan civilian discourse, produced and regulated by people occupying 8 positions of power within the emerging internal power structure, emphasized concerns about visibility and the moral contamination of innocent populations. For example, in Koza, also then known by its old name Go’eikuson 越来村 (Kikuchi 2010, 110), the local community attributed incidents of rape and home invasions allegedly committed by black soldiers to the presence of prostitutes in civilian areas (Kikuchi 2010). As early as 1949, segments of the local population and governing body initiated the dōgi kōyō undō 道義高揚運動, a moral elevation movement centered on eradicating prostitution to purify civilian spaces (Kikuchi 2010). The then village head, Shiroma Seizen, negotiated with the military government to establish prescribed areas for the sex industry, resulting in the creation of Koza Business Centre and the tokushu inshokugai (special eating and drinking district) in Yaejima. This spatial segregation was ostensibly aimed at protecting civilian women and children while obscuring the economic reality of the sex industry (Kikuchi 2010). Subsequently, in 1953, USCAR and the Okinawan civilian government jointly implemented the A-Sign system, ostensibly regulating food hygiene and safety while screening for venereal diseases among those working in the brothels or venues offering sexual services, euphemistically categorized as tokushu inshokuten. When the original system proved ineffective at curbing VD infections among troops, the military established a reformed version in 1956 with more stringent regulations. Venues serving sexual services required blue A-Signs (distinguishing them from regular eateries with red signs) and had to meet specific hygiene standards. Workers needed health certificates from local public health centers certifying their freedom from venereal disease to continue working and serving American soldiers (Kikuchi 2010). Wider political movements were simultaneously reshaping Okinawan society while these regulatory frameworks attempted to manage the practical aspects of the sex industry. The 9 reversion movement that emerged in the 1950s fundamentally influenced political discourse around prostitution and base town workers, featuring gender and race-based rationales that fundamentally marginalized and alienated prostitutes from the ethnonationalist reversion movement (Toshiaki 2003). The movement, formalized with the 1951 establishment of the Association for the Promotion of Reversion to Japan and supported by political organizations such as the Okinawa People’s Party (Wakabayashi 2015; Shimabuku 2019), broadly sought to reclaim political agency through democratic channels, particularly via the Okinawa Legislature, despite USCAR control. However, base town workers, including prostitutes who served the American soldiers, proved difficult to mobilize for pro-Reversion groups like the Okinawa People’s Party (OPP), at a time when their labors remained vital to the society’s economic structures during this period of political activism (Shimabuku 2019). More fundamentally, the economic dependence on U.S. military patronage experienced by base town workers and prostitutes on an individual level created tensions within the shimagurumi tōsō 島ぐるみ闘争 (all-island struggle). The anti-base and anti-American movement, whose agendas and political objectives were dictated largely by the aforementioned pro-Reversion organizations since its incipience in the early 1950s, consequently characterized the prostitutes alongside other base workers as pro-American elements within its political framework (Tanji 2006; Shimabuku 2019). Moreover, U.S. off-limits orders in 1953 and 1956, in an attempt to curb what the military authority saw as threats of communist resurgence, exacerbated this polarization by economically targeting base towns to deepen the political divisions between anti-Americanist/pro-reversion movements and the segments of Okinawan society who depended on the U.S. military for livelihood and politically 10 saw it as an institution that introduced stability by virtue of its status as an institution that reintroduced some form of social and legal order after the war (Shimabuku 2019). The historical context as discussed in this section outlines how the conditions for prostitution in base towns emerged not simply from military occupation but through a complex interplay of American military’s governance strategies, Okinawan political responses which were complicated by economic dependency on the military in general and more specifically on the sex industry, and the emergence and management of internal moral frameworks that sought to manage these various levels of contradictions, moral, political, and otherwise. 1.3 Literature Review of Existing Scholarship on U.S. Militarism and the Military-Directed Colonization of Okinawa Feminist scholars studying U.S. militarism have long argued that military institutions depend fundamentally on gendered political economies that transform civilian spaces into support systems for military objectives. Cynthia Enloe (2000, 2014) and Catherine Lutz (2001), as examples, characterize base towns as large-scale Rest and Recreation facilities, serving as critical nodes that provide care and sexual labor to maintain soldiers’ combat readiness (Enloe 2000; Lutz 2001; Katō 2009). In Okinawa specifically, urban areas like Koza and Naha emerged as direct outcomes of U.S. land appropriations and economic policies that forced Okinawans into proximity with military installations (Wakabayashi 2015). Enloe’s analysis reveals how these spaces often blur distinctions between the military and the civilian, with women’s labors becoming co-opted across a spectrum ranging from domestic work to organized prostitution, all serving to sustain militarized masculinity and hierarchical control (2000). 11 In mainland Japan, this pattern manifested through the sex industry building upon existing red-light districts and brothels to serve occupying American troops on a systematic, national scale (Katō 2009). Following the occupation, organizations such as the Tokushu Ian Shisetsu Kyōkai 特殊慰安施設協会 (Recreation and Amusement Association) actively instituted these services targeting U.S. soldiers, operating under strict regulatory frameworks designed primarily to control venereal diseases rather than protecting the women who came to work as prostitutes (Katō 2009; Tanaka 2002). Yet these scholarly works, despite analyzing the structures of organized sex industry in postwar Japan, often presented Okinawa’s sex industry within the same conceptual space without detailing the geopolitical and other local conditions that engendered the sex industry in Okinawa which differed from the mainland context, historically and politically. Conversely, critical scholarship that devotes analytical attention to the sexual and other violent crimes committed by American soldiers in Okinawa, and the entanglements between the U.S. military and the base town’s sexual economy (e.g., Sturdevant & Stoltzfus 1996, Hayashi 2014), usually focuses more heavily on the effects of U.S. military policies. As a result, the historically concurrent emergence of a postwar class of political and economic social groups in Okinawa who, comparatively, had access to more socioeconomic resources and political power, and who participated in shaping the local sociopolitical structures through various community organizations and institutions of power, did not attract the spotlight within the arguments and analyses being presented by these scholarly works. Existing literature has made significant contributions by bringing into focus the victimization of Okinawan women by the U.S. military and American soldiers in the context of the sex industry, particularly in examining the consequences of military violence and the ontology of the military as an institution of power. However, this important focus on U.S. 12 militarism has left less room for detailed discussion of the internal moral and political dynamics that also contributed to the prostitutes’ marginalization within their own communities. Furthermore, there remains an opportunity to examine more closely the systematic brutalization and subjugation these women experienced within local power arrangements that operated concurrently with the system of militarism-colonialism, extending to the functioning and structuring of Okinawan politics and power relations. While feminist scholars studying U.S. militarism have made valuable theoretical contributions by acknowledging that base towns function as complex spaces where local patriarchal norms intersect with militarized agendas of the U.S. military and nation-state governments, there remains productive space to examine how internal sociopolitical mechanisms are instituted and maintained within base town societies. This represents an opportunity to build upon existing scholarship, particularly when considering how mainstream Okinawan society and the social groups who functioned as leadership for anti-base movements also participated in stigmatizing prostitutes through moral discourses in the postwar years (Angst 2009; Kikuchi 2010; Shimabuku 2019). Additionally, expanding analytical frameworks beyond theories focusing on the binary oppositions of oppressor vs. oppressed could offer insights to address what Masamichi Inoue (2007) identifies as an epistemic trap which conceptualizes Okinawans as symbols of history and culture rather than as political actors. Such expanded conceptualizations would complement existing literature by also examining Okinawans as members of a society with complex, fluctuating networks of agencies interacting with political, economic, and social structures of power arrangements. Recent scholarship has already been gradually shifting to more in-depth analysis of these internal sociopolitical dynamics in the context of postwar Okinawa. Linda Isako Angst (2009), for instance, observes that while the 1995 Kin town rape victim, a 12-year-old girl kidnapped 13 and raped by three U.S. marines, was framed as a pure symbol of Okinawa’s collective victimization since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, women who worked as prostitutes during occupation remain sidelined, their experiences ignored by anti-base movements if not continuously stigmatized by the same groups. Such selective visibility reflects what Gayatri Spivak (1988) identifies as the structural impossibility of certain voices being heard within hegemonic discourses. Newspapers could claim to speak for Okinawan interests while systematically excluding prostitutes’ own accounts of their own experiences, creating what Spivak characterizes as epistemic violence through the distinction between political representation (vertreten) and philosophical re-presentation (darstellen). Following Carmina Untalan’s call to decenter U.S. military presence as the sole point-of-reference in academic analysis, this thesis examines how Okinawan responses to militarization involved multifaceted forms of agency and subjugations that cannot be captured through binary thinking about U.S. empire and Okinawan resistance (2021). By analyzing how Okinawan newspapers employed moral categories of purity and pollution, this study aims to show how local media constructed prostitutes in base towns as polluting figures, thereby enabling communities to benefit economically from their labor while maintaining moral distance from the violence and exploitation they experienced. Through this analysis, the thesis hopes to contribute to broaden scholarly understanding of how colonial subjects navigate impossible circumstances through the strategic deployment of moral categories, revealing the complex mechanisms through which resistance and complicity intersect in colonial contexts. 14 1.4 Chapter Outlines Chapter 2 establishes the methodological framework, beginning with a critical realist reconceptualization of Foucault’s discourse theory that enables evaluation of ideological distortion. It then introduces Douglas’s pollution framework as a conceptual tool within the discourse analysis to explain why prostitutes specifically became targets of moral scrutiny, followed by an explanation of how analytical tools drawn from CDA applies these theoretical insights for analyzing newspaper texts. Chapter 3 examines how newspapers initially constructed prostitutes as incomprehensible figures whose categorical ambiguity threatened social order. The analysis traces how medical discourse about venereal disease transformed abstract moral dangers into tangible threats, and how concerns about spatial contamination led to demands for environmental purification. Chapter 4 reveals contradictory narratives that exposed Okinawan participation in the sex industry, including documentation of debt bondage systems operated by local owners of red-light district venues, evidence of Okinawan male patronage, and the overarching economic dependencies that bound the mainstream Okinawan society to the sex industry it condemned. Chapter 5 analyzes how the Prostitution Prevention Law functioned as a purification rite, selectively amplifying victimization narratives to enable symbolic resolution of moral tensions while preserving economic and political interests. Chapter 6 concludes these findings from the previous chapters to demonstrate how the construction of prostitutes as sources of moral contamination served specific ideological functions in postwar Okinawa’s newspaper articles while obscuring more complex social and economic realities, revealing the complex mechanisms through which resistance and complicity intersected in colonial contexts under the condition of militarism. 15 Chapter 2: Methodology 2.1 Foucault’s Discourse and its Limitations In his 1971 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault presented a comprehensive conceptualization of discourse that fundamentally reshaped how scholars understand the relationship between language, knowledge, and power. According to Foucault, discourse production in any society undergoes simultaneous control, selection, organization, and redistribution through specific procedures designed to manage its dangerous materiality and unpredictable elements. He identifies three external procedures of exclusion that regulate discourse from outside. Prohibition determines what can be said, by whom, and under what circumstances, while the division between reason and madness separates legitimate from illegitimate speech. The opposition between true and false establishes authoritative knowledge through institutional support (Foucault 1971, 52-56). Alongside these external controls, Foucault outlines internal procedures through which discourse regulates itself. Commentary enables the endless recycling and reinterpretation of foundational texts, the author-function organizes meaning through attribution to speaking subjects, and disciplines constitute anonymous bodies of knowledge with their own rules for producing new statements (Foucault 1971, 56-61). Throughout his lecture, which serves as one of the only times when he systematically and extensively discusses his conceptualization of discourse, Foucault emphasizes discourse’s productive power, revealing its capacity to constitute objects of knowledge, shape subjectivities, and generate material effects in the world. The arguments outlined in the paper treat discourse not as mere representation but as a social practice that systematically forms the objects of which it speaks, operating through what he terms the “will to truth” supported by institutional networks including educational systems, publishing houses, and laboratories (Foucault 1971, 54-55). 16 For analyzing the construction of prostitutes as objects of moral scrutiny in Okinawan journalistic texts, Foucault’s conceptualization provides important insights into discourse’s regulatory procedures and material effects. The Foucauldian discourse positions newspapers, and specifically the Okinawan newspapers analyzed in the current thesis, as institutions that exercise exclusionary power, determining who could speak authoritatively about prostitution while systematically silencing the women themselves rather than neutral platforms carrying representations of social reality. It clarifies how commentary and repetition can create apparent consensus through recycling and reiterating the same narratives, and how institutional backing lends authority to particular forms of moral representations. Yet when seeking to understand discourse as a sociopolitical mechanism that structures and animates power relations with tangible and visible consequences across society, certain limitations in Foucault’s original approach also becomes apparent. His conceptualization treats discourse as operating through relatively autonomous procedures without adequately theorizing the relationship between discursive practices and the social structures within which they function, nor its relation to the authors of these discourses who occupy varied positionality within the same social structures at the intersection of various forms of powers and constraints. Most significantly, by rejecting the distinction between ideology and truth in favor of analyzing all truth claims as power effects, Foucault’s approach provides limited tools for assessing how different representations relate to the material conditions they purport to describe. Peter Miller’s observation proves particularly relevant here, as he demonstrates that Foucault’s framework describes discursive exercises without distinguishing between those that accurately represent reality and those that distort it to serve the interests of social agents with political agendas (1990, 5). 17 Applying a critical realist perspective to this Foucauldian conceptualization of discourse can address these limitations by situating discourse within the analyses of social structure and agency. Critical realism maintains that while our knowledge of reality is always mediated through discourse and therefore fallible (the transitive dimension), an external reality exists independently of our representations of it (the intransitive dimension) (Bhaskar 2013). This philosophical position has crucial implications for discourse analysis. It means that while discourse shapes how we understand and act upon social reality, it does not fully constitute that reality. Power exists not merely as an effect of discourse but as structured relations between agents occupying different social positions with differential access to material and symbolic resources. From this perspective, those who control media representations are not simply operating discursive procedures but exercising institutionally grounded power that had material sources and consequences. Their ability to shape public understanding depends on concrete factors including ownership of printing technology, access to distribution networks, and cultural capital recognized by readers, all material realities that discourse alone cannot explain. Furthermore, critical realism enables analysis of how discourse serves the political interests of social groups and institutions occupying positions of power within specific socio-historical contexts. Rather than treating truth claims as equivalent power effects, this perspective recognizes that some representations systematically misrepresent social reality to maintain existing power relations. When Okinawan newspapers portrayed prostitutes in particularized ways, these institutions and the individuals within often engaged in the process of ideological distortion, actively obscuring structural realities rather than simply exercising a different narrative perspective (Flatschart 2016). Taking into account the possibility of discourse functioning as medium of distortions, the concept of ideology itself becomes essential for 18 analyzing how discourse operates as a sociopolitical mechanism, despite Foucault’s later, explicit rejection when he states that “the notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of” (Power/Knowledge, 1980, 118). The rejection of the effect of ideology in mediating the relation between discourse production, power, and reality results in a theoretical blind spot where although Foucauldian conceptualization of discourse recognizes the possibility of multiple perspectives, his framework lacks tools for evaluating truth claims based on their relationship to social reality (Sangren 1995). Ideology, in this case, refers to forms of representations that systematically obscure the structural contradictions and power relations that generate social problems, even while potentially containing elements of reality (Sangren 1995). By maintaining the analytical distinction between more and less accurate representations of social reality, critical realism provides tools for assessing how discourse serves to legitimate or challenge existing arrangements of power. The necessity of a critical realist perspective becomes even more evident when examining how discourse produces material effects within specific social structures. While Foucault emphasizes discourse’s productive power, his analysis remains largely at the level of meaning and subjectivity without adequately addressing how discursive constructions interact with economic relations, institutional arrangements, and embodied practices. In postwar Okinawa, newspaper representations of prostitutes had concrete consequences that extended far beyond shaping understanding. These representations influenced policy decisions, affected women’s access to services, and shaped daily interactions. Analysis of these material effects requires recognizing discourse as one causal mechanism operating alongside others within complex social systems. Economic dependency on military bases, patriarchal family structures, and racial hierarchies all shaped prostitutes’ lived experiences in ways that discourse alone 19 cannot capture. Critical realism provides analytical tools for examining how discourse interacts with these other mechanisms, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes contradicting their effects. Jonathan Joseph’s analysis reinforces this point by establishing that discourse analysis as a sociopolitical mechanism requires attention to the institutional contexts within which it operates (2004, 13). Moreover, critical realism’s emphasis on stratified reality offers crucial analytical advantages through its distinction between the empirical level of experience, the actual level of events, and the real level of underlying structures and mechanisms (Bhaskar 2013). It enables recognition that while newspaper discourse shaped what could be publicly said and known about prostitution at the empirical level, the actual events of women’s lives and the real structures constraining their choices operated according to logics not fully captured by journalistic discourses. This stratified ontology thus further helps explain why discourse analysis alone cannot adequately grasp power as a social reality. The structural conditions that pushed women into prostitution existed as real causal mechanisms whether or not they were accurately represented in discourse, including but not limited to land dispossession and lack of economic opportunities. Peter Manicas clarifies this dynamic by explaining that the capacity to participate in discourse depends fundamentally on access to material and symbolic resources, creating constraints that shape what can be said and heard, and by whom (2013, 7). Critical realism also provides tools for analyzing how discourse maintains material inequalities across specific social and historical contexts. The concept of “fetishistic contradictions” developed by Elmar Flatschart argues that discourse can selectively represent certain cultural concerns as a way for masking economic realities to preserve existing power relations (2016, 38-39). In the Okinawan case, newspapers’ emphasis on moral concerns can be 20 understood as potentially masking economic realities. Recognizing systematic misrepresentation as serving class- and gender-motivated political and cultural goals is crucial to critically assess the forms of power relations and oppression operating within Okinawan society postwar concurrently under U.S. military occupation (Bhaskar 2013). Additionally, a critical realist perspective on understanding Foucauldian discourse would allow for the analysis of how multiple systems of oppression interact to shape representations that provides rationale and justifications for shaping and reshaping power relations as part of social reality. In Norman Fairclough’s assessment, for instance, Foucault’s framework benefits from supplementation with approaches that can analyze how specific institutions exercise power through discourse (2013). Intersectionality theory and Critical Race Theory (CRT) developed by feminist scholars provide exactly such supplementary frameworks for understanding how multiple axes of oppression intersect in media discourse. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality demonstrates how dominant conceptual and value systems, existing in symbiotic relations with discourse constructions across institutions of political authority, erase the specific vulnerabilities of those facing overlapping forms of oppression (1991, 1243-44). Rather than analyzing gender, race, or class as separate categories, intersectionality examines how these systems of power function together to create unique positions of marginalization. On the other hand, Derrick Bell’s notion of racial realism, which was later extended into Critical Race Theory, expands the scope of such critical analysis by revealing how media institutions embed power within discourse to shape racial and gendered hierarchies, understanding racism not as individual prejudice but as a structural feature of social systems including media institutions (Bell 1992, 2023). These frameworks prove essential for analyzing the Okinawan context where U.S. military presence has shaped both the sex industry and the racialized anxieties surrounding it. 21 Scholars applying these CRT and intersectionality-informed perspectives in their analysis of journalistic representations of prostitutes in different sociocultural and historical contexts have demonstrated how newspapers texts construct epistemological boundaries that define legitimate knowledge and authorized voices by strategically and selectively engaging with or de-emphasizing the notions of gender- and race-based subjugations and power relations. Lisa McLaughlin’s (1991) analysis, for instance, reveals how American journalistic texts reinforce moralistic and patriarchal perspectives by depicting prostitutes through limiting binaries. These representations cast women either as victims requiring rescue or criminals deserving punishment, thereby constraining public discourse on sex work (249-250) despite the invocation of feminist reframing of their positionality within the society. Similarly, Jiwani (2006) examines how Canadian newspapers reporting on violence against Indigenous women emphasize their engagement in supposedly risky behaviors like drug use or sex work, presenting them as inevitably victimized by proximity to criminal activities through racialized lenses. These representational strategies erase the complexity of these women’s agency within the sex industry alongside the forms of race-, gender-, and class-based oppressions they faced at a macro-level to varying degrees, depending on specific social and historical contexts. To this end, newspaper texts exemplify how linguistic and narrative choices in journalism obscure structural factors perpetuating marginalization. Such theoretical perspectives will meaningfully enrich and critically inform the analysis of how Okinawan newspapers’ representations of prostitutes animated through intersecting notions of power and forms of subjugations operating in Okinawa’s postwar sex industry in the current thesis by paying attention to how race and gender factor into the moral representation of these women. 22 To summarize the discussion thus far, analyzing how Okinawan newspapers constructed representations of prostitutes requires a critical realist approach that situates Foucault's insights within structural analysis. Additionally, the analytical approach must also account for power as a social reality, for which intersectionality and Critical Race Theory (CRT) perspectives would prove to be useful in illuminating how multiple systems of oppression converge within media discourse. The exclusionary procedures, internal mechanisms, and deployment conditions Foucault identifies remain essential analytical tools, but they must be understood as strategies employed by socially positioned agents operating within historically specific configurations of power that include racial, gendered, and colonial dimensions (Bhaskar 2013; Flatschart 2016). Rather than treating discourse as constitutive of reality itself, critical realism recognizes it as one powerful mechanism among many that shaped the constraints and possibilities governing prostitutes’ lives, while intersectionality reveals how these constraints operated differently at the convergence of multiple forms of marginalization. This perspective preserves Foucault’s insights into discourse’s regulatory procedures and material effects while enabling analysis of how discourse serves as a sociopolitical instrument maintaining intersecting systems of colonial, class, gender, and racial oppression. Through this integrated approach, analysts can examine not only what newspapers said about prostitutes but how these representations functioned within varying forms of domination and resistance shaped by multiple, overlapping power structures. While this combined framework of critical realism, intersectionality, and CRT provides essential theoretical backdrops for engaging with how discourse operates through materially grounded and intersecting power relations, it cannot fully explain why certain social elements become primary targets of discursive regulation rather than others. The preceding analysis has established how newspapers served specific interests through exclusionary procedures and institutional power 23 operating across multiple axes of oppression, yet questions remain regarding why prostitutes specifically became such intense objects of moral scrutiny in postwar Okinawa. Understanding this requires complementary social theories that can explain the symbolic logic guiding moral attention and anxiety in discourses that employ the language of moral judgment against prostitutes by Okinawan society. 2.2 Mary Douglas’s Concept of Moral Pollution As discussed above, the critical realist perspective complements Foucault’s conceptualization in the analysis of discourses by revealing discourse as a sociopolitical instrument serving specific interests. However, the concept of discourse alone cannot fully explain the symbolic mechanisms through which certain individuals or social groups become primary targets of moral scrutinization or the centre of moral discourse construction in journalistic texts. Mary Douglas’s theory of moral pollution, as outlined in her 1966 work Purity and Danger, provides the analytical categories that situate discourse analysis into the social and cultural processes through which societies attempt to transform structural contradictions into focused moral anxieties. Adopting the insights from Douglas’s work opens up a conceptual space for examining how journalistic discourses operate through concrete cultural categories of moral pollution (where categorical orders and boundaries are violated or obscured) and idealized concept of moral purity (where categorical orders and boundaries are maintained and adhered to) which concentrate moral attention on figures whose ambiguity threatens established boundaries. Douglas’s central thesis posits that societies maintain order through classification systems that define what belongs and what does not. Those elements that resist clear categorization within these systems inevitably become sources of anxiety and are subsequently labeled as 24 polluting or dangerous. As such, the term “pollution” here refers to a status of moral and categorical liminality concerning individuals and sociocultural phenomena. This relationship between social order and pollution operates through moral frameworks that transform structural ambiguities into individual contaminations. Douglas’s concept of pollution beliefs thus provides analytical precision for examining patterns of moral selectivity, which emerge when societies face morally charged contradictions they cannot resolve through existing categories. Rather than reflecting comprehensive moral systems, pollution beliefs emerge selectively to manage specific ambiguities and liminalities perceived as threatening to existing social orders across various domains of power relations. Confronted with irreconcilable contradictions, societies often displace their anxiety onto elements symbolically embodying these contradictions, which enables the transformation of structural problems into matters of individually animated instances of moral contamination, requiring simplified forms of sociopolitical and cultural mechanisms to manage, thereby allowing societies to maintain existing orders without addressing these fundamental tensions and paradoxes. An application of Douglas’s framework is useful in examining why and how prostitutes specifically embodied categorical and moral ambiguity, thus triggering intense pollution anxieties and morality-based scrutinization in postwar journalistic texts published in Okinawan newspapers. Her theoretical insight reveals that marginal figures generate anxiety precisely because they exist between or outside established categories. In Okinawa’s base towns, prostitutes occupied multiple liminal positions simultaneously, with each form of liminality reinforcing the others to create overdetermined sites of moral anxiety. Economically, for instance, these women participated in base economies through their labor yet remained excluded from legitimate business categories. At the same time, their sociopolitical position was often 25 equally ambiguous since they served foreign occupiers while remaining nominally part of Okinawan communities at its margin, generating paradoxes that threatened clear distinctions between insider and outsider. This convergence of multiple ambiguous positions demonstrates how overlapping systems create unique vulnerabilities for those embodying conflicting social-moral symbolism. In response, the deployment of limiting binaries attempts to contain this threatening multiplicity by reducing complex positionality to manageable categories. This process of categorical management reveals how moral discourses function ideologically to construct boundaries while obscuring the structural conditions creating such liminal positions. Building on this analysis of categorical ambiguity, Douglas’s insight that human bodies function as symbols and moral metaphors of social systems will be essential for analyzing how abstract political anxieties become transformed into visceral moral concerns in the context of the prostitutes who undertook embodied sexual labors in Okinawa’s sex industry postwar. Individual bodies function as complex metaphors for the social body in Douglas’s theoretical account, and consequently, personal vulnerability symbolically mirrors collective vulnerability. When bodies become sites of boundary violation, they represent fears about political and cultural penetration that extend far beyond individual acts. Such persistent emphasis on prostitutes’ bodies in Okinawan journalistic texts therefore serves to represent anxieties about collective sovereignty and autonomy under the condition of U.S. military occupation and economic dependencies on a larger scale. Moreover, Douglas’ concept of “purification rites” will also prove important to understanding how contemporary societies, such as Okinawa, manage pollution anxieties within the symbolic frameworks governing moral categories through policy and legal instruments (Douglas 1966). The concept refers to sociocultural and political mechanisms within a given 26 society that allows it to treat certain moral transgressions and the states of ambiguities/liminalities they create as reversible pollutions that can be managed symbolically through nominal restoration of categorical boundaries, rather than attempting to resolve structural factors embedded within the current arrangement of power relations. Unlike genuine reconciliation of moral transgressions and resolution of liminalities, purification rites promise symbolic resolution with minimal disruption to existing power relations. This distinction will prove essential for analyzing how societies frame policy interventions addressing marginalized groups in the context of this thesis. For instance, legislative proposals such as the 1972 baishun bōshihō 売春防止法 (Prostitution Prevention Law) focused on mechanisms of prohibition and punishment rather than economic alternatives for the women who worked as prostitutes, rendering it functionally as a purification rite that symbolically manages pollution while leaving existing forms of moral contradictions and structural factors that sustained the existence of the sex industry intact. Even ostensibly progressive narratives of rehabilitation operate as pollution reversal mechanisms, locating both problem and solution at the individual level while systematically ignoring systemic factors. These discursive representations consequently continue to legitimate existing power relations through systematic misrepresentation, with purification rites serving as one of the mechanisms accomplishing this ideological work accomplished through journalistic discourses. 2.3 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Its Application to Newspaper Texts The preceding sections established how critical realist epistemology situates discourse as an instrument of power operating through ideological distortion, while Douglas’s framework explains why certain figures become concentrated sites of moral anxiety through pollution 27 beliefs. Nevertheless, translating this conceptual groundwork into concrete analysis requires systematic analytical instruments that can examine how ideological and symbolic operations manifest in actual texts. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) provides precisely such instruments for answering the above-stated research question addressed in this thesis, offering systematic approaches to analyze how Okinawan newspapers constructed representations of prostitutes through key methodological components. These include meta-textual concepts such as intertextuality and presupposition; linguistic techniques encompassing euphemism, narrative frameworks, and metaphor; and analysis of legal instruments as moral-discursive mechanisms (Fairclough 1993, 2013; Bloor & Bloor 2007). Fundamentally, Critical Discourse Analysis as originally proposed by Fairclough (1993) in Discourse and Social Change sees discourse as social practice that both reflects and shapes social reality. This approach examines how language use constructs social identities, relationships, and systems of knowledge in ways that maintain or challenge existing power relations (Fairclough 1993). When applied to newspaper texts, CDA offers systematic methods to reveal how seemingly objective reporting actually participates in ideological work. John E. Richardson’s application of CDA to journalism demonstrates that newspapers maintain social structures through representational practices that appear natural while serving specific power relations (2007, 13). This analytical approach enables examination of how discursive strategies work collectively to manage contradictions between competing social interests and moral frameworks, directed by the ideological agenda of the creators of the discourses and institutions, such as newspapers, who could regulate and decide which discourses are disseminated and made visible and which remains suppressed. As stated in the earlier section concerning ideology’s effect on discourse production, discourse should be seen as forms of representations that 28 systematically obscure the structural contradictions and power relations that generate social problems, even while potentially containing elements of reality (Sangren 1995). Complementing this, Van Dijk (2013) purports treating ideology as a relevant analytical factor within CDA, seeing it as operating through discourse as shared belief systems that underpin discursive representations, their symbolic values, and shape how social groups understand their interests and positions through selective and limited representations to circumvent or otherwise simplify complex sociocultural phenomena or moral dilemmas (2013, 25). In addition to this, the concept of intertextuality emerges as another critical analytical tool for examining how newspaper discourse draws selectively upon different authoritative sources to construct legitimate representations. While traditionally focused on specific textual references (Fairclough 1993), this concept extends to patterns of discursive appropriation that serve politically dominant groups. Recent scholarship has refined this application to include the activation of existing knowledge systems and generation of discursive monopoly through presenting specific truth claims as public consensus (Farrelly 2020). Newspapers’ appropriation of medical discourse about venereal disease, for instance, transforms abstract moral anxieties into tangible threats. Such selective appropriation creates what Fairclough terms “chains of communication” that naturalize certain interpretations of individuals, events or phenomena while marginalizing others (1993, 102). Other key discursive and linguistic mechanisms identified by CDA scholarship also form part of the journalistic and narrative tactics that construct and maintain ideologically and politically motivated representations of prostitutes and the sex industry in general in Okinawan newspapers. To begin with, euphemistic language functions systematically beyond mere avoidance of explicit terminology, creating what John Richardson calls strategic ambiguity that 29 allows moral and conceptual liminality to be continuously redefined according to shifting political needs in journalistic texts (Richardson 2007). As Fairclough observes, narrative structures in journalism create “templates of understanding” that organize disparate events into coherent stories with identifiable protagonists, antagonists, and moral lessons (1993, 85). Furthermore, the discursive operations of the narrative frameworks achieve their ideological effects through presupposition, which involves embedding assumptions that construct common ground between writers and readers (Bloor & Bloor 2007, 12). When newspapers presume readers’ acceptance that certain groups threaten established moral boundaries, they build consensus around interpretations serving specific political interests without explicitly arguing for these positions. Richardson argues that presuppositions function as “ideological Trojan horses,” smuggling otherwise controversial claims into discourse under the guise of shared knowledge and beliefs inferred by the readers (2007, 64). Through systematic deployment of euphemism, narrative, and presupposition, journalistic texts published by newspapers can create a sense of ideological coherence within the discursive space where specific interpretations appear natural and alternative framings become difficult to articulate (Van Dijk 2013, 32). Additionally, this thesis draws on Fairclough’s (2013) analytical approach to applying CDA to analyzing legal instruments as moral-discursive mechanisms in the form of policy discourses. According to Fairclough, the argumentative structures of policy discourses draw its effectiveness through the process of recontextualization, whereby the discourses undergo transformation as they move between social fields and domains of knowledge, with policy discourse frequently appropriating medical, moral, or international frameworks to establish authority (2013, 180). Furthermore, these policy discourses also engage in the active constitution of idealized visions regarding the effects of the specific policy or instrument, while 30 simultaneously obscure structural contradictions through naturalizing specific understandings of social reality (2013, 191). When integrated with Douglas’s (1966) analysis of purification rites as symbolically animated social mechanisms for managing anxieties motivated by moral contradictions, Fairclough’s approach helps explain how policy discourse manages moral anxieties through symbolic solutions that appear comprehensive while leaving structural conditions generating those anxieties fundamentally intact. The gap between policy rhetoric and implementation results thus becomes not a failure but a constitutive feature of how policy discourse operates as a moral mechanism. Taken together, these analytical tools drawn from the CDA literature will collectively provide a critical framework for examining how Okinawan newspapers constructed prostitutes as objects of moral scrutiny. By integrating meta-textual concepts, linguistic mechanisms, and policy discourse analysis, they enable a systematic and critical analysis of how newspapers transformed structural contradictions into manageable moral anxieties, an in turn maintain and legitimize existing power relations in postwar Okinawa. The following section outlines the data collection methods and archival research strategies employed in this study. 2.4 Data Collection and Archive Research The primary data for this analysis consists of newspaper articles collected from the digital archive housed at Okinawashi Sengo Bunka Shiryō Tenjikan “Histreet” 沖縄市戦後文化資料展示館「ヒストリート」(Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History, “Histreet”), located in what was formerly known as Koza City. This location holds particular significance as a former base town adjacent to Kadena Air Base, which once hosted the Gate 2 Street area, a nightlife district primarily patronized by Air Base servicemembers. The archival research was 31 conducted over one month between November and December, 2024, as part of an originally planned ethnographic fieldwork focusing on the former Koza area, now incorporated into Okinawa City. The archive’s collection contains newspaper articles published between 1945 and 2011 by four Okinawan newspapers: Ryūkyū Shinpō (July 26, 1945 – December 31, 2011), Okinawa Times (June 29, 1948 – December 31, 2011), Chūbu Jōhō (January 1, 1956 – September 22, 1961), and Chūbu Nippō (January 1, 1963 – August 31, 1963). Access to these materials required on-site consultation through designated computers in the archive’s second-floor research center, where the digital collection could be systematically searched and reviewed. Off-site access to the database only permits users to browse the title of the articles but not the content. To ensure the dataset captured articles where prostitution constituted the central focus of journalistic writing rather than incidental mentions, the search strategy specifically targeted keywords appearing in article headlines. This methodological choice reflects two key considerations. First, headlines function as primary framing devices that encapsulate the main subject and shape readers’ initial perceptions. When prostitution-related terms appear in headlines, it indicates explicit centering of the topic rather than tangential reference. Second, headlines play crucial roles in attracting reader attention and reflecting dominant discursive trends. As carefully crafted elements designed to engage audiences, headline language aligns more closely with prevailing narratives and social perceptions, making such articles particularly valuable for analyzing media constructions of sex work. The search terms included tokushu fujin特殊婦人 (special women), jokyū 女給 (barmaids/waitresses), baishunfu 売春婦 (prostitutes), and tokushu inshokuten/tokuingyō 特殊飲食店・特飲業 (special dining establishments/special dining business), all commonly used Japanese terms representing various euphemistic and direct 32 references to prostitutes and the sex industry in the context of Okinawa. Querying the database with other euphemistic terms associated with prostitutes commonly used in mainland Japan, such as panpan パンパン or pansuke パン助 returned no articles in the archive’s system. Beyond individual articles, the data collection also traced series of connected reports emerging from initial search results. This approach recognizes that serialized articles generate distinct epistemological worlds wherein representations of prostitutes become shaped by recurring themes, evolving narratives, and ideological perspectives. Additionally, serial reporting structures how knowledge about prostitution is produced and circulated over time by individual journalists, creating sustained narratives that reinforce or complicate dominant discourses. Unlike isolated articles presenting snapshots of specific events, multi-part reports offer insights into how the sexual labors performed by prostitutes becomes framed in relation to societal concerns including but not limited to gendered power relations, base politics, and the U.S. military presence. Furthermore, serialized articles provide snapshots of rhetorical and metalinguistic mechanisms through which pollution discourse becomes animated and sustained across interconnected power structures. As Douglas (1966) argues, pollution discourse operates as a regulatory framework delineating moral and social boundaries. In Okinawan newspaper narratives, serial reporting played crucial roles in maintaining purity/pollution dichotomies by repeatedly invoking tropes of contamination, disorder, or victimization in varied ways motivated by the ideological stance of the authors, and the newspapers as institutions of discourse circulation. These series also served to create dramatic suspension attracting popular attention through morally or emotionally sensational narratives, particularly regarding events and phenomena related to women working in Okinawa’s sex and nightlife industry as part of base 33 town economic structures, which is part of the key features and functions of journalistic writings (Richardson 2007). The initial query yielded a total 87 articles, from which 77 were eventually selected for final analysis after careful review. These articles, originally published in Ryūkyū Shinpō, Okinawa Times, and Chūbu Jōhō, span the period from 1956 to 1972. This corpus thus provides a solid foundation for applying the integrated theoretical framework of critical realism, Douglas’s pollution theory, and CDA to examine how newspaper discourse constructed the prostitutes to be the source of moral pollution in attempt to manage the moral contradictions inherent in Okinawa’s base-dependent economy and its relationship with the sex industry. Only a part of the corpus is directly quoted in the thesis as examples and evidence, and these articles will be cited as primary sources in the bibliography. The Appendix will contain reference information for all the articles used for analysis. 2.5 Chapter Conclusion In essence, the methodology as outlined in this chapter provides the theoretical and methodological foundation for analyzing how discursive strategies adopted by Okinawan newspaper articles that thematically focused on the moral symbolism associated with prostitutes served to transform complex structural realities into manageable moral narratives which, in turn, participated in maintaining the stability of the prevailing system of power. To begin with, critical realist epistemology provides the foundational perspective for understanding discourse as a sociopolitical mechanism that bears socially and culturally mediated relations to the structuring, maintenance and restructuring of power as social reality. Building upon this conceptualization, Mary Douglas’s theory of moral pollution and anxiety 34 offers a concrete lens for analyzing how discourse operates within journalistic texts, treating pollution and purification not as psychological responses but as social mechanisms that regulate political relations through morality as a sociocultural category. Moreover, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) supplies the specific analytical tools for examining these journalistic texts as politically motivated discursive representations of reality. In combination, these approaches form a comprehensive framework for critically examining how newspaper discourses managed the moral contradictions of postwar Okinawa’s sex industry by constructing women who worked as prostitutes as sources of moral pollution and danger. These three approaches work together on multiple interconnected levels. First and foremost, critical realism provides the epistemological foundation for distinguishing between ideological distortion and accurate representation. The vantage point allows the current thesis to examine how truth claims made in the newspaper articles serve the political interests particular social groups mediated by their access to sociopolitical resources rather than emerging from neutral observation. Building upon this foundation, Douglas’s framework provides the language and conceptual structure to analyze the specific symbolic logic governing why certain figures become targets of intense moral scrutiny in discourses. Her theory also reveals how societies manage categorical ambiguities through pollution beliefs and purification rites, thereby providing insight into the selective nature of moral attention and its ability to be transformed as justifications for similarly symbolic measures in the form of policies and laws. Meanwhile, CDA offers the concrete analytical tools necessary to identify precisely how these ideological and symbolic operations manifest in actual texts. These manifestations occur through various discursive mechanisms including euphemistic language, narrative frameworks, metaphorical constructions, and presupposition-building. Furthermore, Fairclough’s policy discourse 35 framework enhances this approach by revealing how legal instruments function as practical argumentation. This perspective demonstrates how policy discourse naturalizes particular problem-solution configurations while simultaneously foreclosing structural analysis. When combined, these approaches offer the critical and analytical tools to analyze how newspaper discourse operated not merely as neutral reporting on the lives and experiences of the prostitutes or the sex industry, but as active ideological work being done through the discursive representation of these women through the social category of im/morality and moral pollution. 36 Chapter 3: She Arrives, Cloaked in Shame Between the early 1950s and 1972, Okinawan newspapers engaged in complex discursive work to make sense of, and attribute moral semiotics to, prostitutes’ presence in base towns, constructing representations that would shape public understanding of these women and their relationship to the emerging postwar social order, including both the U.S. military and the rest of Okinawan society. This discursive work exemplifies the operations of journalistic texts as institutionalized spaces of discourse construction and dissemination, where the journalists (who were never named individually) operated as a source of authoritative representation of the postwar sex industry and prostitutes and determined what was disseminated textually about these women and their lives. This chapter examines how newspaper articles from this period deployed specific linguistic strategies, narrative frameworks, and symbolic associations to position prostitutes within Okinawa’s moral landscape during a time of social transformation under U.S. military occupation. The postwar Okinawa society had to collectively navigate multiple forms of subjugations, dependencies, extractions, and political power reorganizations, all of which made establishing a stable moral framework a Sisyphean task. Base towns, with their concentration of entertainment and sex industries catering to American soldiers, became particularly fraught spaces where questions of morality, economics, and identities intersected in complex ways mediated by gender and encounters, sexual or otherwise, across racial boundaries. As a medium for public discourse during this period, local newspaper publications played a crucial role in attempting to articulate how Okinawan society should understand and respond to the presence of women working in the base town’s sex industry, and their positionality in relation to the former. 37 This chapter traces three interconnected dimensions of newspaper discourse about prostitutes. Section 3.1 examines the linguistic and narrative strategies through which newspapers represented prostitutes and their social positioning, paying particular attention to the use of euphemism, metaphor, and descriptive framing. The subsequent section analyzes how medical discourse, particularly regarding venereal disease, became incorporated into newspaper representations and what symbolic work this medicalization performed. Finally, Section 3.3 explores how newspapers articulated concerns related to prostitutes’ presence in urban spaces, especially in relation to residential neighborhoods and educational districts. 3.1 How to Understand an Alien World? This section examines how prostitutes in post-Pacific War Okinawa were discursively constructed as symbols of pollution through newspaper representations that emphasized their categorical ambiguity and transgressive nature. The analysis traces two broad discursive processes. First, the establishment of base towns like Koza as incomprehensible spaces operating outside conventional moral frameworks, alongside the women who worked as prostitutes within the sex industry located within. This was partially achieved by the systematic deployment of euphemistic language that simultaneously revealed and concealed the ambiguous moral status of women working in these spaces. Second, this section examines the discursive transformation of these women from merely liminal figures into active threats to social order through narratives emphasizing their manipulative and transgressive behaviors and elevating them to the status of social reality. The emergence of prostitutes as symbols of pollution in postwar Okinawa partially reflects the collective, societal efforts to navigate moral and economic complexities under U.S. 38 occupation. Central to this discursive construction was the notion of base towns such as Koza being represented as an incomprehensible space that existed “beyond the realm of common sense” (Ryūkyū Shinpō 1956, September 20, Morning, 3). This characterization of base town nightlife districts as fundamentally alien to Okinawan moral order established the interpretive framework through which prostitutes would be understood as liminal figures whose boundary-crossing behaviors threatened the nascent social order. This characterization directly illustrates Douglas’s theoretical insight about how societies manage the perceived threat of moral ambiguity and liminality by first marking certain elements of the liminality as something beyond normal classification, thereby externalizing the threat they represent to established categorical systems. Building upon the notion of spatial otherness, newspaper discourses consistently portrayed Koza and base town’s red-light districts in general as a space operating outside conventional moral frameworks, marked by racial and economic otherness. Another 1956 Ryūkyū Shinpō article exemplified this alienation by declaring that patrons of Koza were “foreign white and black men who used dollars” (Ryūkyū Shinpō 1956, September 12, Morning, 3). The explicit racial markers combined with the foreign currency of dollars established Koza, and other similar base towns, as spaces reserved for non-Okinawans, alienated and separated from mainstream Okinawan society along spatial and sociocultural lines. The same article also used the term achira san アチラさん (foreigner) to refer to the patrons of Koza’s red-light districts, a choice which functions as a distancing mechanism to ideologically segregate Koza from the rest of Okinawan society, marking these patrons as fundamentally other racially and culturally while simultaneously wielding the purchasing power that propped up Koza as a base town—an alienation that extends to the women who provided sexual services to them. 39 Such spatial and economic alienation as exemplified above were often further reinforced through linguistic strategies that rendered the women working in these spaces simultaneously hyper-visible in publicly circulating discourses but also socioculturally illegible. As noted earlier, postwar newspaper articles frequently employed euphemistic language to refer to women working as prostitutes in Koza and other base towns’ red-light districts, most notably the persistent use of jokyū and later tokushu fujin beginning in the late 1950s. These euphemisms obscure direct acknowledgment of morally sensitive topics, functioning as a socially understood code accessible to insiders while reflecting unease about recognizing women who exchanged sexual services for money in a society reliant on U.S. military aid and soldiers’ expenditures. The practical effects of this euphemistic framing become evident in specific newspaper descriptions. Another 1956 article in Ryūkyū Shinpō provides further examples of how euphemistic framing rendered these women both visible and illegible, describing the jokyū as working to “serve foreigners’ vigor” while “standing cheek-to-cheek with GIs in scanty shorts” (Ryūkyū Shinpō 1956, May 23, Evening edition, 2). The phrase “nourishing vigor/spirit” functions as a thinly veiled reference to sexual services, while the physical description of women “standing cheek-to-cheek” in “scanty shorts” simultaneously reveals and conceals the nature of the work through insinuations rather than outright claims. Such linguistic ambiguity and the descriptions themselves serve to obliquely condemn the women who worked in the sex industry, but this is secondary to their discursive function which is to entrench these women in moral and social illegibility, positioning them as something half-concealed, morally incomprehensible to those outside the world of the base town. Further contributing to this moral liminality associated with jokyū, as evidenced in the same article, was the hinted-at dual nature of these women’s employment in sex and nightlife 40 industry venues catering to GIs. Under the postwar A-sign system, these women often occupied positions that defied straightforward categorizations between the types of labors they performed. They were nominally employed as barmaids and waitresses while also providing sexual services as an implicit practice, a duality that complicated their social positioning. The women’s regular interactions with foreign men at societal margins, combined with covert and overt commercial sexual transactions, rendered them neither fully service workers nor explicitly prostitutes, but something in between that challenged conventional categories. The following excerpt from the same 1956 article describes the implicit nature of their work as prostitutes under the guise of barmaids or waitresses: 赤ブーの上半身がずんぐりした女の胸から上に押しつけられ「中略」門限の十一時が近つくに連れて赤ブーの青い瞳は異様に輝きだす―彼の“下心”が一番発揮されるがこの時だ。女は百も承知。 The red-haired man’s stout upper body was pressed against a woman’s chest [...] as the eleven o’clock curfew approached, the red-haired man’s blue eyes gleamed unnaturally—this was when his “ulterior motives” were most evident. The woman knew it all too well. (Ryūkyū Shinpō 1956, September 12, Morning edition, 3) The sexualized details in the above excerpt demonstrate how newspaper articles selectively present and organize specific aspects of social encounters as objective journalistic truth. Rather than focusing on countless other possible details from this purported encounter between a prostitute and a (white) American soldier, the journalist chose sexually charged language and particular observations to achieve specific representational effects. By elevating such selective narratives through their institutional platform, newspapers reinforce particular 41 portrayals of the sex industry while systematically obscuring alternative perspectives. Moreover, the emphasis on physical contact (“pressed against a woman’s chest”) can be interpreted through Douglas’s notion of body as a site of moral symbolism delineating vulnerabilities in social boundaries (1966), where individual bodies represent social anxieties about penetration/domination, as well as moral contamination alongside the liminalities it engenders. It must also be noted that all the descriptions and statements made in the excerpt above rely on indirect signifiers and metaphors while avoiding explicit acknowledgment of sexual transactions. The depiction of the foreign man through racialized features, with specific details such as “blue eyes” and “red hair,” positions him as a source of threat due to the man’s foreignness and racial otherness. At the same time, however, the author framed the woman as complicit in this transgression through the phrase “knew it all too well,” suggesting her awareness and participation in the willing association with the American soldier through (commercialized) sex. This dual positioning exemplifies the ambiguity that primed these women, the jokyū, discursively as sources of moral anxiety, placing them neither as innocent victims nor as transgressors against moral orders outright, allowing for further flexibility in continued iterations of their representations to serve ideological agendas. Furthermore, the overarching socioeconomic and political context of postwar Okinawa enabled the entrenchment of women who worked in the sex industry in illegibility and ambiguity. At the historical juncture of early 1950s Okinawa, both the reorganization of Okinawan society outside the nightlife/sex industry and the industry itself remained emergent phenomena. The inability, or unwillingness, to explicitly interpret the sex and nightlife industry using established moral and social categories in journalistic texts became the foundation for the same author’s morally righteous scrutiny of both patrons and prostitutes. Such a discursive 42 strategy of deliberately sustained ambiguity allows them to maintain a position of moral authority while simultaneously avoiding critical examination of the socioeconomic factors that enabled and necessitated the continued existence of the sex industry, as well as the conditions that left women with no other viable economic or social resources, compelling their participation as prostitutes: こうして男たちは洋の東西を問わず“楽しみ”のために時と金を浪費し彼女たちは“生きる”ため？に精いっぱいコビをーいや、サービスを売る。 Thus men, whether from East or West, squander time and money for “pleasure,” while women, to “survive” (?), do their utmost to sell their charms—or rather, their services. (Ryūkyū Shinpō 1956, September 12, Morning edition, 3) In this excerpt, the sarcastic rephrasing from “charms” to “services” and the question mark placed after “survive” reveals the author’s reluctance to interpret these women’s sexual labors as a phenomenon that was, in fact, a result of the socioeconomic and political structures within which they enacted constrained forms of agency. Instead, the article opted for representing the women as unrestrained social agents with hidden motives that are morally transgressive and incomprehensible within the implied moral framework that serves to separate the rest of Okinawan society from the sex industry. In other words, the narrative construction of the women’s social and cultural liminality also serves to ideologically overemphasize their agency in an attempt not to humanize these women but to mask and eschew any critical acknowledgement of existing structural conditions that drove these women into the sex and nightlife industry in the first place, and which entrenched them in the same industry without other social and economic recourses. 43 Having looked at how these women were discursively positioned as morally ambiguous and illegible to the rest of Okinawan society where the latter is implied to be separate and outside of the base town’s sex industry, journalistic discourses continued to position them as active threats through the overemphasis on their agency and individual actions and continued downplay of structural factors in the same discursive spaces. One 1956 article, titled “Bargaining Down 20 Yen with Her Body,” exemplifies this discursive process which animated jokyū as a category of social actors against which wider Okinawan society had to defend itself. This below anecdote, allegedly related by a taxi driver, functions as essentially a narrative construction that transforms structural issues into moral dramas with clear protagonists and antagonists: 車を止めると素早く乗りこんだ彼女は命令するような口調で“八重島迄”と一言、車はガタゴトの道を八重島に向った。車の悪口を言ったり、ガタゴトの街をくさしたり、後の席にふんぞり返って煙草をくゆらしていた彼女は車が八重島につくや“ネエー運転手さん……”甘ったるい言葉で話しかけてきた。相憎十円か持ち合わせがないというのだ。コビるような眼、アチラさんをくわえこむ時のように最上のシナをつくって……“ネエー二十円のかわりにワン・タイム遊んでいかないー”あどけないとみた顔は何時しかその道の古強者の顔に早変わり…. As soon as the car stopped, she swiftly climbed in and commanded, “To Yaejima.” Bad-mouthing about the condition of the car while cursing the uneven road, the woman, haughtily leaning back and puffing cigarettes in the backseat, cooed at the driver the moment the car reached Yaejima, “Hey, driver...,” claiming she lacked the ten-yen fare. With flirtatious eyes and the polished charm she’d use to reel in a client, she purred, “Hey, instead of twenty yen, how about a one-time fling?” Her seemingly innocent face 44 had instantly transformed into the seasoned visage of a streetwise veteran. (Ryūkyū Shinpō 1956, September 14, Morning, 7) The excerpt above depicts the jokyū as embodying shifting and conflicting social identities. Initially a commanding passenger defying implied gender norms through smoking, cursing, and assertive behavior (thus the dramatic values in describing these actions), her subsequent refusal to pay the fare violates social norms and positions her as a transgressor. The woman’s transformation from “innocent face” to “streetwise veteran” illustrates Douglas’s (1966) insight that pollution beliefs emerge when individuals or behaviours blur categorical boundaries, embodying multiple contradictory identities that resist stable classification, in this case, the boundary between a supposedly morally “pure” woman and a prostitute. Furthermore, her alleged offer of a “one-time fling” as payment emphasizes sexuality as a transactional tool for the prostitutes. The imagery of reeling in foreigner clients (achirasan o kuwaekomu) suggests both predatory and sexual connotations and even a sexual appetite for foreigners through the implicit reference to oral sex. This is immediately followed by framing the woman explicitly as a sexual commodity of the highest quality, overemphasizing her agency within a commodified role in the sex industry and her choice in participating. The narrative’s representation of the woman underscores the multiple facets of the women’s identities and immoralities that morph in and out of each other within postwar Okinawa’s socioeconomic constraints, with none clearly making her legible and definable through a single moral category. In other words, the narrative pre-emptively produces a discursive and conceptual space that allows the authors and the readers to seek moralized definitions and restricted interpretations of the women and their behaviours through known categories and narratives to dispel the threats of the symbolic instability and unknowability represented by the jokyū’s existence. 45 The author then expands this individual anecdote into a generalized social theory about these women’s moral character, through which they attempt to propagate ideological coherence by presenting subjective observations as established social knowledge. The anecdote thus serves doubly as a dramatized encounter between the familiar world of mainstream Okinawan society (the newspaper’s primary audience) and the alien world of the sex industry that catered to American soldiers, beyond the implied-to-be prostitute and the taxi driver. Through this narrative strategy, the author transforms jokyū from mysterious figures in an inscrutable underworld to active moral threats, reframing them as a homogeneous group of social agents who systematically transgress social conventions: 夜の女性といわれる彼女たちだって女性に変わりはない。特に話題の少ない彼女たちであってみれば、この十円タクシーの話が二、三日で界隈に知れ渡ったって別に不思議ではないこの前の〇〇タクシーは十円で乗せたわヨ。ネエ運ちゃん、あんたは二枚目だから二十円分サービスしてあげるシ、だから十円で良いでしょう。二十円欲しけりゃ妾の所にいらっしゃい…… Even those called ladies of the night are still women. Especially for those with little to talk about, it’s no surprise this ten-yen taxi story spread like wildfire. “The other day, I got that XX Taxi for ten yen. Hey driver, you’re handsome, so I’ll give you twenty yen’s worth of service for ten yen, right? If you want the full twenty, come to my place...” (Ryūkyū Shinpō 1956, September 14, Morning edition, 7) To begin with, the opening assertion that “even those called ‘ladies of the night’ are still women” serves to signal, implicitly, the women’s fundamental moral and social abnormality in the author’s account. It entails the presupposition that the women who worked as prostitutes have 46 transgressed the boundaries of proper womanhood, as the very need to explicitly reaffirm their status as women (josei) implies they have crossed into a liminal state requiring such clarification. This process of alienation and distancing allowed the mainstream society outside of the sex industry to make sense of itself in that sociohistorical milieu by identifying what it believed it was not. Elements that do not fit the idealized order, the prostitutes in this case, henceforth become centers of pollution beliefs by triggering socially animated actions of avoidance or suppression (Douglas 1966). The concluding excerpt from the taxi anecdote quoted above seeks to catalyze these moral-social processes by extrapolating a set of theories of the prostitutes by suggesting patterns and commonalities among these individuals. It positions these women as anomalies systematically dangerous through routine exploitation of outsiders via manipulative tactics. Their sexuality appears profoundly ambiguous, oriented not toward acceptable forms of heterosexuality-based intimacy within racial boundaries or marriage but deployed as currency blurring boundaries between public rational domains of financial transactions and private irrational realms of sexual proposition. By suggesting ten-yen fares can be substituted with “twenty yen’s worth of service,” the narrative participates in the ongoing intertextual constructions and reinforcements of the notion that commercialized sex enacted by the prostitutes is a moral transgression and a pervasive disruption of expected social-moral orders. In conclusion, the euphemistic language used to construct jokyū as discursive characters encourages readers to arrive at a particular understanding of prostitutes’ lives in Okinawa’s base towns, one that obscures the emerging gender- and race-based tensions underpinned by sociopolitical factors inherent to their sexual and commercial relations with GI patrons. The emphasis on the pervasive racial and economic otherness of many aspects of the sex industry’s operations, combined with the inability to categorize the women who worked as prostitutes 47 through conventional moral frameworks, served to construct them as sources of moral pollution whose very existence challenged the emerging social order of postwar Okinawa by virtue of their symbolic liminalities. Through this discursive transformation from incomprehensible others to active threats mediated by the overemphasis of their agency and generalization of the prostitutes as a homogenous social group that was consistently illegible within Okinawan society, newspaper articles established the basis for understanding prostitutes as requiring containment and control, setting the stage for the medical and spatial interventions that would follow. 3.2 Venereal Diseases as Medical-Moral Contamination The transformation of the discursive construction of women who worked as prostitutes from ambiguous figures into concrete threats was propagated further by the deployment of medical discourse surrounding venereal disease (VD), which intertextually functioned as a mechanism for rendering abstract moral dangers tangible and visible. This section will begin by briefly outlining the U.S. military’s implementation of biomedical controls that represented an attempt at regulating the soldiers’ sexual interactions with base town women as part of its postwar occupation. The context serves as a background which saw the parallel emergence of journalistic discourses targeted at Okinawan readers of newspaper articles that transmuted and activated VD as a medicalized metaphor for moral contamination that made the abstract pollution attributed to prostitutes tangible and actionable. Foucault, in Birth of the Clinic, aptly summarizes how medical systems centralize knowledge and governance through moralized discourses: “the pathology of epidemics and that of the species are confronted by the same requirements: the definition of a political status for medicine” (Foucault 2003 [1973], 29). In postwar Okinawa, venereal diseases among base town 48 prostitutes were both a biomedical concern and a discursively constructed epidemic necessitating medical and political interventions from the U.S. military authorities (Kikuchi 2010). Operating within this framework of medicalized governance, the military prioritized measures to ensure soldiers’ physical health, thus combat readiness, while tacitly accepting their access to prostitutes as a form of necessity in base towns (Kikuchi 2010; Enloe 2014). Despite official policies prohibiting prostitution in the form of three Special Proclamations made by the USCAR on March 1st, 1947, which criminalized forced prostitution of women in service of the American troops, forbade sexual slavery of women, and instituted compulsory quarantining and treatment of any women who have been infected with VD (Kikuchi 2010), the military in practice redirected most of its regulatory and punitive efforts toward controlling VD prevalence among the women who worked as prostitutes to serve its own agendas as an institution of power, a strategy also implemented in Korean red-light districts (Moon 1997). Contemporaneous Okinawan newspaper accounts during the period of U.S. military’s occupation corroborated the practical implementation of these control mechanisms as a form of public knowledge that has entered popular discourses. A 1956 Ryūkyū Shinpō article reported that jokyū were required to carry a red passport as proof of weekly VD screening under U.S. military regulations, with non-compliant venues designated “off-limits” to soldiers: 彼女等はみんな赤いパスポート(illegible character)身離さず持っている、これは軍規定による健康診断書と共に彼女等のなくてはならない身分証明である。（中略）彼女たちは毎週一回必ず検診を受けるが、不健康者を働かした場合店はたちまちにしてオフ・リミッツになるため伝染病対策には万全を期しているので、GIさんも、ニューコザでは安心して遊べるといっている。 49 All of them carry a red passport [illegible character] at all times, which, alongside the military-regulated health certificate, serves as indispensable identification for these women. [...] The women undergo mandatory weekly checkups, but if an unhealthy worker is allowed to operate, the establishment is immediately placed off-limits, so they take every precaution against infectious diseases. As a result, GIs say they can enjoy themselves with peace of mind in New Koza. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1956, May 23, Evening edition, 2) Behind this pronounced need to regulate “infectious disease” among prostitutes lies the U.S. military’s engagement with bodily vulnerability and moral ambiguity at the intersection of soldiers’ sexual interactions with these women. Within the military’s system, prostitutes held limited legal or political agency yet posed a threat through VD transmission. One must note that the U.S. military grappled with, on this occasion, a concealed discomfort stemming from its inability to confine soldiers entirely within a masculine and combat-ready environment (Enloe 1993, 2014). The soldiers’ lives and their effectiveness within the military system were symbiotically tied to the amalgamation of substances, germs, and people seemingly separated beyond the barbed wire. At the same time, however, the public rearticulation of the military’s VD control measures in Okinawan newspapers created significant discursive effects. These newspapers, whose target readership was other Okinawans, produced a discursive foreshadowing that enabled fetishistic contradictions in how prostitutes were represented, in Flatschart’s (2016) term. The journalists leveraged medical languages and the authorities represented by medicine as a domain of knowledge to construct prostitutes’ bodies as the primary source of moral and biomedical threat. Meanwhile, the social structures and relations that sustained both the sex industry and VD transmission were obscured from view. This discursive mechanism ultimately 50 essentialized the connection between VD and the jokyū’s bodies as something natural and inevitable to produce an ideologically dominant, selective representation of the prostitutes’ bodies and their social-moral positionality (Flatschart 2016). Concurrently, the military’s perception of venereal diseases as endemic to prostitutes as a social group found parallel expression within Okinawan society itself, imbued with further moral and symbolic significance. The intertextual appropriation of medical discourse here allowed Okinawan newspapers to create chains of communication that further naturalizes and entrenches the relations between prostitutes’ bodies and venereal diseases by borrowing authority from medical institutions and, simultaneously, the U.S. military authority. This process is a notable feature of how sets of discourses could be constructed to mutually reinforce one another during the process of their productions, circulations, and struggling for narrative dominance in the representations of reality (Mikhail Bakhtin 1986, quoted in Fairclough 1993, 102). VD, in this case, thus serves as a mediating concept that transformed the abstract dangers posed by jokyū as sources of moral pollution capable of disrupting and transgressing emerging social-moral boundaries into medicalized threats to the physical wellbeing of the wider community. Through the discourse of infection and disease control, the pollution attributed to prostitutes acquired concrete, bodily manifestations that extended beyond moral transgression to encompass public health concerns. This transformation of disease into moral metaphor exemplifies how pollution beliefs make abstract dangers tangible and manageable through concrete symbols (Douglas 1966). Moreover, such discourse positioned the bodies of jokyū as the primary sites where multiple forms of contamination converged. In addition to the narrative that physical contact and proximity to these women risk disease transmission threatening the rest of the Okinawan 51 community, the women’s symbolic and sexual encounters with their American soldier-patrons forced uncomfortable reckonings with Okinawan society’s dependence on economic activities within base towns characterized by the sex industry. This very dependency itself became a source of profound moral unease, motivating the continued discursive construction of prostitutes as polluting figures through the symbolic binding of the embodied existence of jokyū to their status as carriers of venereal diseases in newspaper articles. The birth of this discourse took place almost at the same time as the women’s emergence as the symbol of moral danger qua source of pollution as analyzed in the previous section through an overemphasis of the level of social agency found within the sex industry at the margin of the mainstream society. A 1956 article published in Ryūkyū Shinpō focusing on the Fūzoku Eigyō Kumiai Rengōkai 風俗営業組合連合会 (Adult Entertainment Business Association) is the first article in the research materials collected for this thesis that explicated this connection on multiple levels of discourse construction: 風俗営業連合会という組織があり、事務所をコザ中央病院横の尺八部落に置いてある。（中略）この連合体は他団体に例を見ない診療所を持ちお抱えの医者と看護婦五名、顕微鏡係に二名を置いている。（中略）この診療所は保健所がいままでやって来た性病検査をやめて、本来の結核相談やその予防対策に本腰を入れたため会員の衛生を守るため連合会の手で設けられたもので、従業員の性病検査はもちろん、その他の病気でも相談に応じている。（中略）連合会の診療所を訪れる組合員？たちは、真赤なルージユに洋モクをくわえ、高級車でサッソウと乗り込むから、道徳観はサテオキ彼女らの懐具合もわかるというもの。 52 There is an organization called the Adult Entertainment Business Association, with its office located in the shakuhachi district next to Koza Central Hospital. [...] This association, unlike other groups, operates a clinic with a dedicated doctor, five nurses, and two microscopists. [...] This clinic was established by the Association to protect the health of its members after the public health office discontinued its venereal disease testing to focus on tuberculosis counseling and prevention measures. The clinic not only conducts venereal disease testing for employees but also provides consultations for other illnesses. […] The employees who visit the Association’s clinic wear bright red lipstick while chewing imported tobacco and dash around in luxury cars, thus making it clear the financial situation of these women who sat aside their sense of morality. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1956, September 16, Morning edition, 3) It is particularly noteworthy in the excerpt above, first of all, that the author described the Association’s head office in reference to the Koza Central Hospital, a spatial juxtaposition by choice that underscores the interplay of medical authority and oversight in managing the perceived pollution embodied by prostitutes, euphemistically referred to as “employees.” The association’s establishment of its own clinic, distinct from vague references to “other organizations,” suggests a high prevalence of venereal diseases among the women working in the fūzoku eigyō industry, which could no longer be managed through the public health system, necessitating specialized, privately funded healthcare rather than reliance on the hospital—a physical infrastructure representative of the public healthcare system, being situated across the street. This arrangement reinforces the prostitutes’ marginality within the social order while also emphasizing at the same time the industry’s resourcefulness and agencies in its operation. This is symbolically extended to the imagery of the women who worked as prostitutes as having chosen 53 to participate in the sex industry for financial gains and materialistic pursuits for foreign goods, representing them as social agents willingly being segregated from the mainstream society through an active disregard of moral values. Consequently, this segregation in medical infrastructure serves to further entrench the prostitutes as polluting figures whose bodily and moral impurities threaten the social body of Okinawa, necessitating the discursively constructed arguments for containment to restore categorical clarity. The medical-moral discourse serves to deflect attention from Okinawa’s economic and political dependence on the U.S. military, by focusing instead on the bodies of prostitutes as the locus of contamination. Illustrating this deflection, the author of a later 1959 Okinawa Times article concluded their article on the topic of the sex industry by reiterating the same moral and narrative themes as the article above. The author openly advocates for the institution of stricter legal measures against prostitution through the elevation of venereal disease to the status of shakaibyō 社会病 (social malaise) by virtue of its widespread transmission among the jokyū by quoting from a medical professional of the Koza Public Health Centre: 売春の申し子といわれる性病対策に乗り出しているコザ保健所では軍からまわされる接客業女給（一日四、五十人）の検診と治療に手一ぱい。（中略）社会制度の欠陥から生じてくる社会病（性病）を撲滅するために早期に“性病予防法”を立法化すると同時にそれまでは接客業の女に衛生知識を啓発することだと、コザ保健所の金城医師は語っている。 At the Koza Public Health Office, which has taken on venereal disease control as a product of prostitution, they are overwhelmed with the examination and treatment of hospitality workers (forty to fifty women per day) referred by the military. [...] To 54 eradicate social malaises (venereal diseases) arising from flaws in the social system, Dr. Kinjo of the Koza Public Health Office states that a “Venereal Disease Prevention Law” must be legislated as soon as possible, while in the meantime, efforts should focus on educating hospitality women about hygiene. (Okinawa Times, 1959, November 20, Evening edition, 3) Within this excerpt, prostitutes emerge as sources of literal and metaphorical contagion due to their transgression of sexual-moral boundaries. The article’s use of numerical data is intended to lend a scientific veneer and authority to the urgency of controlling the prostitutes’ bodies as the source of VD transmission and the transmission of degradations of the social-moral order that became diseased by extension. Furthermore, the author cites the clinician’s belief that the legal-political and social interventions were needed to “enlighten” women about hygiene also implies their inherent lack of such knowledge and ability to attain a status of physical and symbolic cleanliness. The quoted statement reinforces the women’s marginality by invoking medical authority represented by the clinician, and frames purity as something that can only be externally imposed on these women who worked as prostitutes. Nevertheless, the discourse above also connects the presence of venereal diseases as a sign of “flaws in the social system,” signalling the uncomfortable acknowledgement that the moral contamination attributed to prostitutes and the sex industry actually stemmed from other structural factors within Okinawan society that operated concurrently to the U.S. military’s occupation of the region. Therefore, prostitutes in Okinawa’s base towns come to represent not merely individual moral transgressors in this account, but rather the embodied manifestation of Okinawan society’s inability to achieve clear moral positioning in relation to the American military presence. The women’s perceived capacity to spread disease became a medicalized metaphor for their broader power to expose and 55 contaminate the fragile moral boundaries that Okinawan society attempted to construct around its relationship with the occupying forces in pursuit of sovereignty as a political and ideological aspiration. And ultimately, the discursive construction of VD as endemic to the women who worked as prostitutes served to entrench their status as physically and morally polluted, liminal beings whose existence threatened the integrity and security of the metaphorical social body. By positioning these women as sources of infection that endanger both individual health and collective morality, the medical discourse provides an ostensibly objective framework borrowing authority from both medical and military sources for concealing deeper anxieties about moral compromise and social disorder through a narrowing of the discourse’s focus on the prostitutes’ bodies and their actions. The metaphorical power of disease enabled Okinawan society to deflect uncomfortable questions about its own complicity in the base town economy onto the bodies of women who could be blamed for spreading contamination. To summarize, the medicalized discourse of VD functioned as a pivotal mechanism that transformed the liminal moral dangers embodied by prostitutes into concrete, scientifically verifiable threats. Through the convergence of U.S. military biomedical controls and Okinawan society’s adoption of medical-moral frameworks, venereal disease transcended its status as a public health concern to become a totalizing metaphor for the pollution that the women allegedly transmit to the social body. This transformation from abstract moral transgression to medicalized contamination established the discursive foundation for more comprehensive interventions. As the following section will demonstrate, once prostitutes were firmly established as carriers of both physical disease and moral contagion, mainstream Okinawan society, represented by Okinawans occupying positions of authorities, would begin to articulate demands for their spatial 56 containment and the “purification of the environment,” particularly in areas inhabited by children and youth who were seen as especially vulnerable to this dual contamination. 3.3 Urban Spaces as Metaphors for Okinawan Society and the Framing of Children/Youths as Victims of Moral Pollution Building upon the medical-moral discourse that established prostitutes as carriers of physical and moral contamination examined above, this section examines how the concept of kankyō jōka 環境浄化 (purification of the environment) emerged as a collective moral justification for addressing the perceived threat the prostitutes posed to Okinawan society’s moral order through the physical removal of these women from residential and civilian urban spaces. This section will begin by examining the discursive construction of urban spaces as moral environments requiring protection from the polluting presence of prostitutes. Building upon this discursive reconceptualization achieved through selectively amplified and foregrounded narratives and anecdotes, the subsequent section examines the mobilization of concerns about youth corruption to justify demands for spatial segregation between civilian society and the sex industry. Such discursive constructions further transformed the abstract moral anxieties concerning the prostitutes’ embodied moral liminality and their existence as willing agents who transgress against moral boundaries into a sense of collective need for concrete social interventions, rationalizing the physical and symbolic removal of the prostitutes from the rest of Okinawan society. The term kankyō jōka was cited as a justification of the reportedly wide-spread social demand for the prohibition of prostitution voiced by community leaders and portrayed to be a consensus among wider Okinawan society (Okinawa Times, 1964, February 13, Evening edition, 57 3). Kankyō, in this case, refers not to the natural or physical environment but to a moral framework and its manifestation through urban structures. This framework comprises symbols and values overlaid onto the urban spaces of postwar Okinawa, which emerged and developed in response to the U.S. military’s economic and political influence (Wakabayashi 2015). In this context, the concept of environment therefore denotes the moral order shaping social interactions within these new urban centers. Having been transformed through concurrent and overlapping discursive constructions in newspaper articles from liminal and exotic figures to symbols of moral and physical danger, the prostitutes were portrayed as agents embodying a moral threat against the emerging Okinawan social order through their morally transgressive behaviors mediated by their medical-moral association with venereal diseases transmission. This framing simultaneously reflected efforts to define the identity of Okinawan society in opposition to the pollution embodied by jokyū. Newspaper discourses implicitly constructed ordinary Okinawans as citizens striving to uphold moral clarity against the chaos and moral degradations symbolized by the prostitutes. This contrast is highlighted by concerns about the potential harm against children and adolescents through their being exposed to sexualized behaviors in urban spaces enacted by women who worked as prostitutes, including nightlife districts and residential areas through room-rental arrangements in private homes. For example, a 1957 Okinawa Times article presents an anecdote of a high schooler spending his evenings voyeurizing the sexual interactions between a woman and her American soldier-patrons living opposite his family home: ある高校生は、毎日、夕方、便所に行くのだが一時間近くも出てこない。不審に思った親がある日、後をつけてみると、なるほど帰らない筈だ、便所のフシ穴か58 ら、向こう側の家で特殊婦人と兵隊がいちゃついている光景に、息を殺して、じっと見いっていたというのである。性に目覚める年頃だ。こういった光景を観察することからこの高校生はどういう影響を受けたことが。 A certain high school student would go to the bathroom every evening but wouldn’t come out for nearly an hour. Suspicious, one day the parents followed him and discovered the reason he lingered: through a knothole in the bathroom, he was silently fixated, holding his breath, watching a scene where a tokushu fujin and a soldier were making out in the neighboring house. At an age when sexual curiosity awakens, what impact might observing such scenes have had on this high school student? (Okinawa Times, 1957, November 10, Evening, 1) Within the narrative cited above, details such as the high schooler allegedly “holding his breath” while engaging in voyeurism in a toilet (a marginalized space designated for unclean bodily functions), are neither verifiable facts, given the author’s inability to witness such specifics, nor outright lies, but a discursive construction designed to shape readers’ beliefs through its heightened theatricality. It also presupposes that readers of the anecdote would share the belief of youth innocence and the contaminating effects of witnessing sexual acts (Bloor & Bloor 2007). These stylistic and rhetorical elements of the excerpt also exemplify a rarefaction of discourse in Foucault’s words (1971), in which the boy’s own voice is absent, replaced by adult interpretation of his actions and the consequences of being exposed to the sexual scene. These interpretations serve the particular moral-discursive purposes of the author of the article to encourage their readers to reach a moral conclusion about the event being described. And ultimately, the 59 anecdote’s publication is underpinned by the sociopolitical epistemology of the publisher who ultimately controlled the circulations of materials in their newspaper. The excerpt above also reveals multiple layers of boundary transgression that heighten the moral anxieties engendered by such an interaction/encounter between the youths of Okinawan society and the prostitutes. Firstly, the boy’s deception and the parents’ act of stalking him to uncover his ventures underscore how the pollution associated with the women’s sexual labors threatens the normal functioning of family life. It disrupts the expected transparency between parents and children, and reveals in its stead a vulnerability in the former’s ability to protect the latter from these moral dangers. Additionally, the familial space here symbolizes moral order and purity, standing in opposition to the voyeurized, contaminating space occupied by the prostitute in the anecdote, whose sexual transactions with the soldier-customer are posited as the source of moral pollution that threatens the wider social body. And finally, the outhouse, which is already a liminal space associated with bodily waste, became the site where illicit, sexualized knowledge is acquired through borderline immoral means, marking the boy’s transition from an innocent member of Okinawan society to a victim of moral contamination. Rather than offering psychiatric or developmental insights, the author of the above passage intends for readers to draw moral conclusions that were already emerging in publicly circulating journalistic discourse around the late 1950s and early 1960s, centering on the notion of seishōnen furyōka 青少年不良化 (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1957, November 12, Evening edition, 3), literally the moral deterioration of youth. Within such an articulation, the uncontained polluting effects of prostitutes’ physical presence in urban and civilian spaces, despite their marginality and their liminal positionality within the emerging moral order, threatened to corrupt the next generation and where the social body is the most vulnerable. This fear prompted the rise of 60 public advocacy for greater regulatory measures against the sex industry and the further physical segregation of prostitutes from the rest of the Okinawan population in urbanized areas (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1957, November 12, Evening edition, 3). Explicitly articulating this perceived environmental threat which serves as a metaphor and physical effects of the moral threat posed by prostitutes and the sex industry, the title of a 1958 Ryūkyū Shinpō article represents the first example from the thesis’s research materials that directly links moral pollution to spatial concerns: “Public Opinion Solidifies for Prostitution Ban: Unchecked Special Women, Protect the Environment for Our Children” (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1958, April 15, Morning, 5). The collocation of tokushu fujin as visible threats against children as the most vulnerable members of Okinawan society essentializes the reiterated moral interpretation of these women as impure and a danger that needs to be physically banished and segregated from the civilian urban space. The evocation of protecting the children here achieves its discursive and emotional effectiveness through the symbolic linkage between the children’s innocence and the state of sociopolitical infancy of Okinawan society as it sought to define its identity and moral boundaries in the postwar period against the historical conditions of the economic and political dependence on the U.S. military. Emerging from this belief in the need to purify the residential and urban environment were more concrete proposals for urban planning that would distinguish Okinawan civilian society from the presence of prostitutes in base towns, their American soldier-customers, and the sex/nightlife industry in general. These ideas, purported by community leaders and amplified in articles published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, insisted that purification must rely on systematic spatial reorganization. For instance, the Director of the Nīzato Teachers and Staff 61 Association was quoted in a public opinion piece published in Ryūkyū Shinpō in 1958 as stating the following: われわれ教職員会は子供を守る会とともに特殊婦人対策をさけんできたことであるし、（中略）。特殊婦人の及ぼす影響は多大なもので現在全地域にこれが広がり全く野放しにされ、この周囲に生活している児童生徒たちが勤労意欲も阻害され、何の恥らいもなく特殊婦人達の生活に引ずられることは子供を守るわれわれとしてだまっておれない。人権問題から特殊婦人の保護措置、那覇、コザに婦人相談所設置、民法による家庭裁判所を強化、文教地区から不健全な建築物を排除させる、人権尊重委員会を設置するなど早急に明るい社会を築きあげたいものである。 The Teachers and Staff Association, together with the Children’s Protection Association, has been vocally advocating for measures to address the issue of tokushu fujin. […] The influence of tokushu fujin is profound, currently spreading across all regions, completely left unchecked. This situation obstructs the work ethic of children and students living in these environments, who are shamelessly drawn into the lifestyles of special women. As protectors of children, we cannot remain silent. To build a brighter society swiftly, we urge the following: protective measures for tokushu fujin grounded in human rights, the establishment of women’s counseling centers in Naha and Koza, the strengthening of family courts under civil law, the removal of unwholesome buildings from educational districts, and the creation of a Human Rights Respect Committee. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1958, April 15, Morning edition, 5) 62 Through this articulation, the presence of prostitutes emerges as a widespread, systematic, and structural danger to Okinawan society; a society ideally should become physically and morally sequestered from the sex industry, where the latter alone serve as sites of sexual and economic exchange with, and subjugation by, the U.S. military. Framed as polluting figures, these women’s physical presence is deemed by the Director an imminent threat that has been left unchecked without effective political and social mechanisms to curb its morally contaminating effects. This perceived crisis thus prompts and justifies the urgent call for legislative measures to fortify moral-legal structures, including family courts and human rights protections. Also, the Director’s written communiqué here specifically highlights the polluting influence the prostitutes could have on children and students who, according of them, are vulnerable to be drawn to the lifestyles of these women at the expense of kinrō iyoku (work ethics). The latter virtue is vaguely defined here but nonetheless idealized as an individual and social quality which Okinawa’s public education system should be inculcating in children and young people. It signifies a cultural category associated with a sense of moral uprightness opposite the lifestyle choices represented by the women who had commercialized and sexualized exchanges with the American soldiers. Along the same vein of the journalistic discourses which seek to portray the prostitutes as exercising unrestrained agencies in choosing to participate in the sex industry catering to the U.S. soldiers, the Director’s account, made publicly visible through the newspaper article, also cast the women as the sole focus of regulatory measures to change their behaviours while ignoring all other aspects of how the sex industry in Okinawa operated or why it existed in the first place. Most significantly, the call to exclude “unwholesome buildings” from educational districts is a discursive strategy that encourages the connection between physical environment 63 and moralistic perceptions of spatial features. The characterization of buildings as “unwholesome” demonstrates how metaphorical, moralistic language, as Fairclough (1993) notes, constructs social reality by transforming economic establishments into sources of moral contamination. Brothels are portrayed as embodiments of pollution and extensions of prostitutes’ bodies in the same metaphorical sense which intruded upon and threatened the social body of Okinawan society (Douglas 1966). Without this symbolic connection, the phrase fukenzen na kenchikubutsu (unwholesome buildings) would be semantically paradoxical since its meaning depends on the metaphorical extension of the threat of moral pollution centered on the prostitutes, and their sexual transactions with the soldier-patrons, to that of the physical structure of the building itself. The concept of environmental purification, kankyō jōka, emerging from and in connection with this metaphorical and moral revaluation of physical infrastructures, thus marks an emerging spatial and physical dimension of moral order, where the removal of such structures seeks to cleanse Okinawa’s social landscape and preserve the moral frameworks that organize social life, at least ideally. Furthermore, it bears noting that this opinion, and these sets of measures presented by the Director as necessary to protect Okinawan society’s physical body (the urban space) and the children/youth (symbolic victims), was expressed by a person occupying a position of authority within the civilian government’s education system, itself an institution responsible for defining and articulating moral values and categories. This institutional positioning, therefore, lends particular weight to the discourse, as it represents not merely individual opinion but a glimpse into the perspective of those charged with moral education and social reproduction in postwar Okinawa. To conclude, the discourse of environmental purification analyzed in this section reveals how Okinawan society sought to establish moral boundaries by constructing prostitutes as spatial 64 threats requiring physical containment and removal. Through the transformation of abstract moral anxieties into concrete demands for urban reorganization, community leaders articulated a vision of moral order that necessitated the segregation of pure civilian spaces, and Okinawans within, from the polluting influence of the sex industry. Yet this spatial discourse also exposed fundamental contradictions: the very economic structures that sustained postwar Okinawa depended upon the base town economies that these purification efforts sought to exclude. The concept of environmental purification thus served as both a practical framework for urban planning and a symbolic mechanism for managing the irresolvable tensions between moral aspiration and economic reality. Such pollution discourses reinforce cultural categories while simultaneously revealing the underlying ambiguities that defy clear moral categorization. These spatial interventions, framed as protecting vulnerable youth from contamination, ultimately reflected the more generalised anxieties about Okinawan society’s ability to maintain moral integrity while remaining economically dependent on the very sources of pollution it sought to expunge. 3.4 Chapter Conclusion Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Okinawan newspaper article reportages and the opinions of leaders of community organizations which came to be privileged and amplified therein constructed prostitutes in base towns as multifaceted sources of pollution through overlapping discursive strategies that transformed categorical ambiguity into tangible threat. Beginning with representations of these women as incomprehensible figures whose liminal behaviors defied moral categorizations, newspaper discourses progressively medicalized and spatialized their perceived ability to pose moral threats against the rest of the civilian society, 65 culminating in demands for comprehensive environmental purification through physical removal of the prostitutes from the urban space. Each aspect of this discursive framing reinforces the prostitutes’ status as polluting figures through an overemphasis on their agency in choosing to be part of the sex industry and sustaining it, while morally divorcing the rest of the civil society from the sex industry and the women’s sexual labors in the historical milieu of various strands of internal political movements for civilian rights, Okinawan sovereignty, and other forms of societal reorganizations. The discursive development assessed in this chapter, beginning with the conceptual exile of the prostitutes from the society to the slot of liminal otherness, then the metamorphosis of venereal diseases as medical-moral contamination, and finally ending with the open denouncement of the same women as a physically visible and tangible threat in Okinawa’s urban space requiring physical removal and ostracization, shows how pollution beliefs function as adaptive mechanisms for managing moral paradoxes. Unable to directly condemn the U.S. military presence that sustained part of the Okinawa’s postwar economy in the context of the sex industry, newspaper discourses instead focused moral anxieties on the women whose bodies became sites of uncomfortable transactions between occupier and occupied. Nevertheless, these discursive constructions, for all their rhetorical power, remained fundamentally unstable. By positioning prostitutes as externalized sources of moral pollution threatening an otherwise pure Okinawan society in this narrative framework, newspapers obscured the aspects of structural reality that these women were integral to the very economic systems upon which postwar reconstruction of Okinawan society depended. Not only that, as the next chapter will illustrate, the moral reasoning underpinning this framework is also unable to reconcile with multiple other aspects of how the sex industry operated in reality. 66 Chapter 4: Underneath Her Bed, Monsters Unseen While Chapter 3 examined how Okinawan newspapers constructed prostitutes as sources of moral pollution through overlapping discourses of ambiguity, medicalization, and spatial contamination and an overemphasis of their agency, this chapter explores the emergence of contradictory narratives that destabilized these constructions and prevented these discourses from being a hegemonic representation of reality in journalism. Between the late 1950s and early 1970s, some newspaper articles also reported on other dimensions of the base town sex industry that betrayed uncomfortable aspects about the rest of Okinawan society’s participation in the very system that some of its community leaders, and the newspapers as institutions of discourse circulation, sought to morally condemned. Rather than existing as external contamination brought by American military occupation, the sex industry operated through complex networks of local involvement that implicated multiple segments of Okinawan society in its perpetuation and profiteering. This chapter’s analysis begins with journalistic texts discussing the debt bondage system and human trafficking networks operated by Okinawan owners of brothels and sex industry venues in collusion with local gangs. The subsequent section then outlines the limited documentation of the participation of Okinawan men as patrons in racially segregated red-light districts catering to them alongside those serving American soldiers postwar. The last section examines the extensive economic dependencies on and extractions from the sex industry as structural factors with wide-reaching social implications extending far beyond the exchanges 67 between the prostitutes and their customers, fundamentally complicating any discursive attempt to establish these women as the primary source of moral pollution. 4.1 The Emergence of the Sex Industry as a Site of Victimization of Jokyū by Okinawans This section examines how journalistic discourses from the late 1950s through early 1970s produced parallel narratives concerning the violent and exploitative mechanism operating within Okinawa’s sex industry, disrupting the previously discussed narrative framework that had positioned prostitutes as primary sources of social contamination in postwar Okinawa. These journalistic accounts revealed that members of Okinawan society itself participated in and profited from the very system that public discourse had characterized as external pollution brought by the American military presence. Furthermore, as the analysis will show, the publicized circulation of these details provided the initial momentum for a discursive shift whereby the women who worked as prostitutes began to be reconceptualized not as autonomous agents embodying moral liminality but as victims of systematic exploitation orchestrated by more powerful others within the socioeconomic system of the red-light districts. The emergence of gyōsha (owners of brothels and red-light district venues) as central figures in public journalistic discourse necessitated a new narrative framework. At the same time, this shift in focus also required an accompanying reconfiguration of where the source of moral pollution was placed within the sex industry and within the social system. As early as the late 1950s, some journalistic accounts of the sex industry and the prostitutes in Okinawa provided alternative narratives that acknowledged, albeit implicitly, Okinawan participation in kanri baishun 管理売春 (organized prostitution) which was the system through which the women became entrenched within the sex industry. This system 68 operated through debt bondage mechanisms that frequently originated in human trafficking or abduction before facilitating the transfer of prostitutes between sex and nightlife industry venues. Significantly, this acknowledgment remained tellingly implicit in its treatment of local involvement. Contemporaneous newspaper articles analyzed for the thesis show journalists readily deploying terms like gaijin 外人 (foreigner), hakujin 白人 (white people), and kokujin 黒人 (black people) to racially mark U.S. soldiers as culprits of crimes and violence committed against women working in the sex industry (e.g., Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1963, October 7, Morning edition, 7; Okinawa Times, 1968, February 1, Evening edition, 3). However, within the descriptions and narratives concerning gyōsha, these explicit racial markers are notably absent. In this case, the absence of racialized language signals an implicit acknowledgment that these figures were Okinawans themselves, thereby revealing that American soldiers were not the sole source of violence and exploitation within the sex industry. Consequently, the journalistic texts could no longer discursively externalize oppressive figures as foreign threats alone in the shape of the American soldiers but had to acknowledge their existence within Okinawan society itself to some extent. This recognition simultaneously dislodged prostitutes from their previous discursive position as victimizers of mainstream Okinawan society. Such journalistic representation marked a moment where the dominant narrative framework began acknowledging aspects of reality that contradicted prevailing discursive constructions of the prostitutes’ experiences and positionalities in Okinawa’s base towns. Exemplifying the beginning of this subtle subversion of the discourse which regards the prostitutes as the source of moral threat, a 1959 Okinawa Times article highlighted how brothels in base towns operated through systems of debt bondage. The excerpt below directly and 69 explicitly stated that at least some prostitutes lived under the control of their shujin 主人 (masters), or synonymously and more commonly also referred to as gyōsha in journalistic texts, who were implied to be Okinawans. Not only that, but the women who worked as prostitutes within the organized prostitution system had also been violently victimized by the owners of the brothels/prostitution ring as a result of the fundamental power imbalance structuring the relationship between the two: 女給部屋は軍人軍属相手の娼家行為のためにつくられ、そこに住みこむ女給さんは半強制的に売春をしいられている。これ以前の女給殺し、朝山笑子さん事件で明るみに出され、笑子さんは“稼ぎか少ない”と主人と口論、殺されたということになり（中略）女給部屋の背後には人身売買に近いほど女給さんたちの自由は拘束されている。つまり住込みの女給は最低五百ドルから高いので千五百ドルの前借を背負っているからという。したがって売春は公然と行われ、業者は彼女たちの吸血鬼といっても過言ではないらしい。 The jokyū-beya were created for prostitution activities targeting military personnel and their dependents, and the jokyū who lived there were semi-forcibly made to engage in prostitution. This came to light in the previous hostess murder case, the Asayama Emiko incident, where Emiko was killed after arguing with her employer/master about “not earning enough.” (...) Behind these jokyū-beya, the freedom of the jokyū is restricted to a degree approaching human trafficking. In other words, live-in jokyū are burdened with advance loans ranging from a minimum of 500 dollars to as high as 1,500 dollars. Consequently, prostitution is carried out openly, and it would not be an exaggeration to 70 say that the gyōsha are like vampires feeding on these women. (Okinawa Times, 1959, November 10, Evening edition, 3) Within the corpus of research materials examined for this thesis, the 1959 article represents the first instance documenting debt bondage system while openly identifying shujin/gyōsha as direct benefactors operating brothels disguised as jokyū-beya (lit. living quarters for barmaids/hostesses) alongside bars and cabarets in Okinawa’s red-light districts. This documentation proves significant for its implicit characterization of these gyōsha as Okinawan rather than American military personnel. The absence of the term gaijin or other racial markers in describing these operators, combined with the Japanese terminology used throughout to describe various mechanisms and components of the system sustaining the continued existence of the sex industry and supply of women who work within, mark the gyōsha as members of the local community. Consequently, the article’s reorientation of moral scrutiny onto the gyōsha and away from the jokyū complicates prevailing narratives that positioned Okinawans primarily as moral victims of the American military presence and, by extension, the prostitutes, through the newly narrativized details of the details of how the sex industry partially operated and sustained its existence. In addition, the article’s deployment of the kyūketsuki 吸血鬼(vampire) imagery warrants analytical attention here. Through invoking this metaphor to describe the gyōsha, the text designates these figures as exploitative, otherworldly, thus externalized agents extracting profit from vulnerable women, being seen as victims with very limited to no agency within the sex industry. The vampire characterization effectively positions the gyōsha as anomalies by virtue of its supernatural connotation. They emerged, so to speak, from the obscured corners within the moral theatre that originally placed the spotlight of scrutinization on the women, as 71 the sources of systemic exploitation within the construction of an overarching moral framework that continually sought to rationalize the intersecting levels of subjugation operating between the prostitutes working in Okinawa’s base towns, local Okinawans who occupied comparatively privileged positions than these women, and the U.S. military. Such a discursive shift illustrates how pollution beliefs on the sources of moral threat must also adapt when the figures embodying categorical liminality can no longer contain the contradictions they were meant to manage (Douglas 1966). Corroborating and expanding upon these initial revelations, newspaper articles published between late 1950s up until 1972 repeatedly and consistently documented the existence of systematic debt bondage. These reports detailed how base town prostitutes were transferred among different sex and nightlife industry venues through the selling and purchasing of their debts, referred to as zenshaku 前借 (advance loans). Such transactions operated through elaborate networks involving brokers who collected percentage commissions for facilitating transfers between establishments, with women’s debts being negotiated and sold like commercial assets (Okinawa Times, 1959, November 10, Evening edition, 3). The system functioned through what some journalists began to explicitly characterize as “human trafficking in all but name,” with brokers receiving requests from business operators to transfer women along with their accumulated debts, often with added interest, to other bars, cabarets, or eateries through simple debt transfer documents (Okinawa Times, 1959, November 15, Evening edition, 3), foregrounding again the ideological transformation of the prostitutes from being the culprit of moral contaminations to victims without agency in an exploitative system with the gyōsha being the most prominent instigator of the oppressions and exploitations they faced. 72 Additionally, journalism between the late 1950s to early 1970s also reported that these aforementioned debt bondage networks were enforced through collaboration with local gangs (bōryokudan). For instance, the below excerpt drawn from a 1970 article opted to provide an overview of the geographic scope and systematic enforcement mechanisms of the exploitation within the sex industry: 業者または、いわゆる“ヒモ”が特殊婦人を管理して行なっている管理売春の場合は、ホテルや旅館、小料理店、料亭などに特殊婦人を住み込ませることが普通で、通いの特殊婦人は少ない。この形態の場合は、必然的に軍団売春を形成する。たとえば美里村の吉原、浦添村のアカムヤー、宜野湾市の新町、那覇市の栄町などがそれだ。（中略）仮に逃走でもしょうものなら暴力団を使ってつれ戻す。この費用が大きいため、また借金になるというように、かさむ借金で女の体をしばる仕組み。 In cases of organized prostitution, where operators or so-called “pimps” manage tokushu fujin, it is common to have the women live in hotels, inns, or restaurants, with few commuting from elsewhere. This arrangement inevitably forms militarized prostitution networks. Examples include Yoshiwara in Misato Village, Akamuyā in Urasoe Village, Shinmachi in Ginowan City, and Sakae-machi in Naha City. [...] If a woman attempts to escape, gangs are employed to bring her back. The high cost of this retrieval adds to her debt, creating a system where mounting debts bind the woman’s body. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1970, June 17, Evening edition, 3) The passage above is analytically significant for several reasons. First, its explicit naming of specific locations across multiple villages and cities demonstrates that these were not isolated 73 incidents but rather a territorially distributed system of exploitation spanning Okinawa’s major population centers. The geographic specificity serves as a rhetorical device to underscore how deeply embedded these networks were within the spatial organization of postwar Okinawan society. Second, the article’s use of the term gundan baishun (militarized prostitution) symbolically links this system to the U.S. military presence while simultaneously revealing its systematic operation through local actors. Third, and perhaps most critically, the description of enforcement mechanisms here shifted the moral positionality of the prostitutes almost exclusively and entirely into the moral territory of passive victims who had, in this account, little to no control over their experiences within the sex industry, or even their participations in sex work. The excerpts analyzed above mark a significant discursive shift through their explicit identification of gyōsha as those who occupied positions of power within the sex industry and who constrained the choices of the women who worked as prostitutes. It repositioned the gyōsha as central benefactors and facilitators of the system facilitating sexual services to U.S. soldiers instead of the women. Notably, this strand of journalistic discourse concerning the sex industry which continued to be active until the early 1970s also departed from earlier coverage where these same owners of brothels and other red-light district venues remained largely obscured behind institutional, commerce-focused industry organizations such as the Adult Entertainment Business Association, which maintained close contact with U.S. military authorities to operate A-sign venues (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1956, September 16, Morning, 3). Whereas articles discussed in previous sections had positioned the prostitutes and their bodies as the primary locus of pollution threatening Okinawa’s emerging moral order through their sexual relations with U.S. soldiers, later journalistic texts such as the ones examined above reoriented the moral scrutiny instead 74 onto the internal working of the sex industry. The June 17, 1970 Ryūkyū Shinpō article examined above, in particular, explicitly reframed gyōsha as active participants in human trafficking and debt bondage schemes, even deploying the term himo ヒモ(pimps) to describe them as agents central to facilitating and maintaining the operations of brothels, thus effectively decentering the moral focus on the prostitutes within newspaper discourses. Through illuminating the systematic nature of exploitation, specifically how gyōsha participated in maintaining Okinawa’s sex industry through coercive mechanisms, the discursive emergence of gyōsha disrupted the previously established moral-political framework that had located contamination and social disorder primarily within the bodies and behaviors of the women who worked as prostitutes. These articles destabilized the moral framework that overemphasized the women as autonomous agents whose morally transgressive behaviours threatened the rest of Okinawan society through various forms of contamination (social-moral, physical, and spatial). Instead, this substrate of journalistic texts and counter-narratives effected a reframing that positioned gyōsha and the system of the sex industry at large, participated in and sustained by some Okinawans, as the new center of social-moral scrutiny, identifying their activities as requiring containment and regulation to restore moral stability. Such discursive developments represent not merely a redistribution of blame but a fundamental reconceptualization of where moral pollution originates within the social system, in which the focus shifted to structural mechanisms of exploitation within the industry. The following excerpt provides an example of how this narrative transformation of the positionality and moral status of the prostitutes is further crystalized in Okinawan newspaper articles to achieve such ideological reframing: 75 チンピラ連中に誘かいされ、いたずらされた後に暴力団の手に渡っていく少女も少なくない。十五歳になる那覇市某中学の女生徒 A子さんの場合がそうだ。市内をブラついている時に A子さんの前に二十歳になる若い男が現れた。ムリやりにはずかしめられた後、美里村の特飲街に売り飛ばされた。九百ドルの借用証も書かされ、その金は男が巻き上げて、転落させられたケース。かれんな少女にとっては、とてもジメジメした借金生活にがまんができなかったのだろう。十日目に特飲街から逃げ出した。だが、業者に頼まれた暴力団に居場所を突きとめられて袋だたきにされたあと、売春を強要された。 There are also a number of young girls are lured by petty thugs, molested, and then handed over to gangs. Such was the case with Girl A, a fifteen-year-old female student at a certain middle school in Naha City. While walking around in the city, a twenty-year-old man approached her. After being sexually assaulted, she was sold off to the tokuingai in Misato Village. A promissory note for nine hundred dollars was imposed upon her, with the money pocketed by the man—a case of orchestrated downfall into the sex industry. For an innocent young girl, enduring the oppressive burden of a debt-ridden life was surely unbearable. On the tenth day, she fled the special drinking district. However, gangs hired by the gyōsha tracked her down, beat her senseless, and forced her into prostitution. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1970, June 24, Evening, 3) The text quoted above reveals a symbolic inversion challenging the established moral discourse surrounding prostitution in Okinawa discussed in the previous chapter. Earlier articles had positioned young male high school students as pure society members who fell victim to the 76 polluting influence of prostitutes through exposure to their sexual relations with the American soldiers in residential areas. However, the 1970 coverage presents a starkly different configuration: a young man in his twenties, merely years older than those supposedly innocent high schoolers, perpetrates rape and human trafficking against a middle school girl described as “innocent/pitiable” (karenna かれんな). Unlike the women who were vilified in earlier discourses propagated by community leaders and elites of the Okinawan society, this victim is portrayed as entirely blameless, having done nothing to warrant her victimization. Although this case likely represents actual events, one must recognize how the journalistic writing here functions as a form of discourse production, selecting and framing particular incidents to generate specific interpretations within existing matrices of meaning and moral systems. The young man and Girl A serve dual roles as representations of real individuals and symbolic figures activated to fulfill meaning-making functions within the text. Among numerous similar cases available for selection, this specific incident appears chosen for its capacity to illuminate two critical realizations that disrupt the moral-discursive framework that treats prostitutes as agents of moral threat. First, it compels recognition that violence sustaining Okinawa’s sex industry originates not solely from the U.S. military presence but also from within Okinawan society itself. The perpetrator’s identification as an insider of the Okinawan community is implied by the absence of the term gaijin or other racial descriptors. The event thus locates the source of sexual violence and exploitation within the mainstream community that had formerly positioned itself as socially segregated from the sex industry. Moreover, the case exemplifies the discursive shift analyzed in the current section whereby the women who worked as prostitutes were being reconceptualized as victims deserving of sympathy by journalists writing about the sex industry through a systematic de-emphasizing of their agency 77 and recentering of their perceived and essentialized vulnerabilities. The fifteen-year-old schoolgirl embodies this transformation: she was discursively constructed to represent women in the sex industry as powerless victims of systematic exploitation rather than agents of pollution, thus repositioning her in the moral calculus concerning the social, moral, political and economical symbolism of Okinawa’s base-dependent sex industry into which she was forced and from which she sought escape and redemption. To summarize, the journalistic discourses examined above reorganized the discursive and moral landscape concerning prostitution and the sex industry in postwar Okinawa. By documenting the systematic involvement of Okinawan gyōsha, debt brokers, and gangs in maintaining networks of debt bondage and human trafficking, these reports disrupted the moral framework that had previously located pollution primarily within the prostitutes themselves. This earlier framework relies on the overemphasis of the women’s individual agency while isolating the representations of their experiences and positionality from both the overarching social structures of postwar Okinawa and the financial and violence-based mechanisms that sustained their entrapment and exploitation within the sex industry. Furthermore, through the public journalistic reporting of anecdotes like the case of Girl A, the newspaper texts produced a concurrent discursive space which allowed for the possibility of repositioning prostitutes not as autonomous agents generating moral disorder, but also as victims of systematic violence perpetrated by a segment of Okinawan community. Yet these revelations about Okinawan participation in organizing and profiting from the sex industry represent only one dimension of involvement with the industry by the local population. As the following section will demonstrate, the articles published in the same historical period would occasionally provide a glimpse into an even more uncomfortable truth: that, beyond those who managed and profited from the brothels 78 and organized prostitutions, Okinawan men themselves were also part of the clientele of the sex industry, where there were racially segregated areas that catered specifically to local men alongside American soldiers. 4.2 Patronage of the Sex Industry by Okinawans The participation of local Okinawan men as well as mainland Japanese tourists as patrons within racially segregated red-light districts is a crucial yet comparatively underrepresented dimension of Okinawa’s postwar sex industry in Okinawan newspaper discourse. By tracing the differential treatment accorded to establishments based on their customer base, this section aims to demonstrate how moral scrutiny was selectively applied to prostitutes serving American military personnel while concurrent systems catering to local patrons operated with minimal critical examination in the same discursive space. This pattern exposes fundamental contradictions within the moral framework that sought to locate contamination exclusively within the sex industry’s service to foreign occupiers, revealing instead how economic participation by ordinary Okinawan men helped sustain the very system of exploitation that public discourse ostensibly condemned. Although journalistic texts as discussed in the previous section had acknowledged and accounted for the complex networks of exploitation of, and profiteering from, women’s sexual labor with (implied) American soldiers in Okinawa’s sex industry by local gyōsha, some articles from the late 1950s onward contain a notably subdued, almost whispered acknowledgment of another reality. The tokuingai 特飲街 (special drinking districts), while infamously segregated along racial lines for American servicemen, also attracted patronage from Okinawans and potentially mainland Japanese tourists. Furthermore, the continued operation of red-light districts 79 despite the U.S. military’s attempt to curb its prevalence through VD regulation measures and the use of its other administrative powers could be partially attributed to establishments in the tokuingai pivoting toward Okinawan customers after being designated “off-limits” by the US military (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1961, January 10, Morning edition, 6). The designation could be imposed for various reasons, including the presence of prostitutes who transmitted venereal diseases to soldiers and failures to pass military police hygiene inspections (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1970, June 5, Morning edition, 6). This pattern of red-light district establishments’ racial and economic reorientation towards Okinawan men as their target clients reveals how local demand absorbed venues excluded from military patronage, suggesting a pre-existing market among Okinawan men that had existed alongside the more visible military-oriented sex trade. Within this thesis’s research materials, the first concrete journalistic documentation of the existence of a subsection of the sex industry catering specifically to Okinawan men as a systematic phenomenon appears in a 1959 Okinawa Times article examining organized prostitution in brothels and nightlife venues across central Okinawa, including Koza and Ginowan (adjacent to Futenma Air Base). The article covered surrounding towns and villages identified as primarily serving clientele from these two bases, along with an unnamed naval base that supplied marines as customers to establishments in Gushikawa Village. Significantly, the author’s detailed reportage on military-oriented districts contrasts markedly with the brief, almost perfunctory mention of two other red-light districts that had come to specialize in serving Okinawans at the end of the article: 80 美里村吉原 ここは米兵の客はよりつかずもっぱら沖縄人相手、宜野湾村真栄原の裏街も吉原と同じくオフリミッツ後沖縄人で稼いでいる。 Yoshiwara, Misato Village Here, with the American soldiers staying away, the area was wholly dedicated to serving Okinawans. Similarly, the backstreets of Maebara in Ginowan Village, like Yoshiwara, have been earning income from Okinawans since the off-limits designation. (Okinawa Times 1959, November 11, Evening edition, 3) This cursory treatment of establishments serving local patrons stands in stark contrast to the extensive analysis devoted to sex industry venues and red-light districts catering to American military personnel in the same article, to which the author devoted more than three quarters of its length. The brevity itself constitutes a rarefaction of discourse, where certain aspects of reality receive minimal discursive attention not through explicit prohibition but through systematic de-emphasis (Foucault 1971). The phrase “earning income from Okinawans” employs notably neutral economic language, avoiding the morally or sexually charged terminology typically applied to establishments serving American soldiers and the women who engaged in commercialize sexual transactions with the former, as seen in the previous chapter. Here, the euphemism functions to maintain productive ambiguity that allows different readerships to interpret the same phenomena, that of the existence of red-light districts that cater to Okinawan and potentially Japanese men, differently, while avoiding direct confrontation with uncomfortable contradictions that are being made apparent through these competing discourses (Fairclough 1993; Bloor & Bloor 2007). 81 Similarly, a later 1970 Ryūkyū Shinpō article recounted a race-based organization of the sex industry across Okinawa’s main island, including urban centres such as Naha, Ginowan, Koza, and Kin, which were the same overlapping areas described as hosting red-light districts specializing in Okinawan and potentially also Japanese patrons: 売春婦は売春を“専業”にしているものと、バーやキャバレーのホステスとに大きくわけられる。またそれらの相手となる客は日本人（沖縄）と外人とに判然と分けられよう。外人（米兵）を相手としているのは那覇の波上、コザの胡屋、八重島、照屋、金武、具志川など。日本人が行くところは那覇の栄町、若狭、浦添の泉町、勝連村のアカマヤー、美里村の吉原などとなっている。 Prostitutes can be broadly divided into those who make prostitution their “full-time trade” and those who work as hostesses in bars or cabarets. Likewise, their customers are distinctly categorized as Japanese (Okinawans) and foreigners. Those serving foreigners (American soldiers) are found in places like Namiue in Naha, Goya, Yaejima, Teruya, Kin, and Gushikawa in Koza. Places frequented by Japanese include Sakae-machi and Wakasa in Naha, Izumi-machi in Urasoe, Akamayā in Katsuren Village, and Yoshiwara in Misato Village. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1970, June 16, Evening edition, 3) This geographical mapping reveals the systematic nature of racial segregation within Okinawa’s sex industry, with distinct areas designated for different customer populations that included not just the American soldiers but also local and potentially mainland Japanese men. The article’s matter-of-fact categorization of customers as “Japanese (Okinawans) and foreigners” reveals how normalized this race-based organization of Okinawa’s sex industry had become by 1970. Additionally, the parenthetical inclusion of “Okinawans” within the category “Japanese” reflects 82 an ethnonationalist interpretations of social relations promoted by pro-reversion political movements of the postwar era, which sought to emphasize commonality between Okinawans and mainland Japanese in opposition to American occupiers along racial and cultural lines, as was the case in this excerpt (Shimabuku 2019). Through the two examples examined above, journalistic texts in Okinawan newspapers demonstrate a differentiated, almost morally neutral treatment in its coverage and discursive construction of the sex industry based on clientele. While establishments serving Okinawan and Japanese customers received some acknowledgment, they escaped the intense moral scrutiny applied to venues catering to American military personnel. Notably, the women who worked in these red-light districts reserved for Okinawan and Japanese men were decentralized from such journalistic representations. This discrepancy reveals how newspaper discourse selectively constructs social values that inform moral frameworks. Newspaper reportage functions as a conduit for establishing social meanings while maintaining strategic gaps in examination, guided by the ideological and political agendas of journalists and newspapers as media institutions. Thus, selective representations found within journalistic texts also reflect unequal power relations between those producing and regulating discourse and the social groups being described within these ideological frameworks (Richardson 2007; Flatschart 2016). Compared to the treatment of Okinawan gyōsha, whose activities were explicitly characterized in terms of exploitation and violence and represented in vivid details, these local and ethnically Japanese male patrons occupied a markedly sheltered position within the moral framework dialectically constructed and reinforced by journalistic reporting. Because these men embodied a dual identity as both members of the general population and participants in a system previously identified as morally problematic, their presence created fundamental contradictions 83 for moral discourse concerning relations between the women who worked as prostitutes and the rest of Okinawan society. Consequently, the same discursive mechanism that condemned prostitutes serving American soldiers could not extend this condemnation to local male patrons without exposing its own internal contradictions and risking implosion, since such condemnation would make it impossible to locate moral pollution exclusively within the sex industry or the women who worked there. Thus, while prostitutes serving American soldiers bore the lion’s share of discursive and moral attentions and were overexposed in journalistic accounts, their counterparts serving Okinawan and ethnically Japanese patrons, along with the patrons themselves, remained largely insulated from similar scrutiny. In conclusion, the differential treatment of sex industry establishments based on their clientele exposes fundamental contradictions within the moral framework applied to prostitution in postwar Okinawa. While public discourse vigorously condemned prostitutes serving American military personnel as sources of contamination threatening social order, the systematic participation of Okinawan men as patrons in racially segregated red-light districts received only perfunctory acknowledgment. Such selectivity suggests that concerns about prostitution were shaped by factors beyond commercial sex itself, operating instead under the guise of moral concern while protecting local participants from critical examination. As the following section will demonstrate, these factors included the very real financial gains accruing to Okinawans whose lives were ostensibly removed from the tokuingai, revealing how economic interests permeated far beyond the immediate circles of prostitutes and gyōsha. 84 4.3 Economic Gains Derived by Okinawan Society From the Sex Industry This section will examine the systematic economic entanglements that bound Okinawan society to the sex industry on a scale much larger than what newspaper discourses publicly condemned. While some journalistic texts examined above focused their condemnation on the gyōsha within the industry and quietly acknowledged the local men who patronized racially segregated parts of the red-light districts, the economic ties extended far beyond these visible actors. The discussion will begin by outlining two forms of obliquely referenced and identified local economic participation, namely, individual retail businesses targeting prostitutes and their patrons in red-light districts and property owners extracting rental incomes in urban areas while enabling the sex industry’s operations by facilitating room rentals. It then looks at how the civilian government derived tax revenues from the very activities it ostensibly sought to regulate through the institution of yūkyō inshokuzei 遊興飲食税 (Recreation and Dining Tax), outlining it as a systematically underrepresented aspect of the socioeconomic relations in the context of Okinawa’s postwar sex industry. By tracing these economic-political relationships, this section aims to demonstrate how the discursive construction of prostitutes as sources of moral pollution, as discussed in Chapter 3, served to obscure widespread economic and structural dependence on their labor and ways in which the rest of Okinawan society was entangled with the sex industry. As discussed previously, the journalistic texts constructed in the postwar years revealed, at times, various points of irreconcilable moral tension within the previously proposed narrative framework centered on the discursive construction of prostitutes as embodiments of moral pollution and danger. Illustrating the complex nature of these economic relationships, a 1959 Okinawa Times article profiled Ms. K, a former prostitute who entered the industry to support her two children after being abandoned by her husband. She subsequently left the industry 85 through savings accumulated from her work, representing a case of direct financial benefit from sexual relationships with American soldiers who comprised her clientele, most notably through a more exclusive arrangement with an elderly general which facilitated her exit from the industry (Okinawa Times, 1959, November 15, Evening edition, 3). While this main narrative itself thematically aligns with discursive expectations established by the moral frameworks examined in Chapter 3, the same article provides glimpses into another form of economic participation in Okinawa’s sex industry in addition to direct sexual transactions: 特飲街で雑貨商を経営する Mさんは「彼女たち（女給）は金にしばられながら一晩に二、三十ドル儲けるのでお金の有難さを知らない。その上に頭が弱い」と前置して、大島出身の K子さん（二三）の話をしてくれた。 Ms. M, who runs a general store in the tokuingai, prefaced her remarks by saying, “While those girls (jokyū) are bound by money, they still earn twenty or thirty dollars a night, so they don’t understand the value of money. On top of that, they’re not very bright,” before sharing the story of Ms. K (23), who hailed from Ōshima. (Okinawa Times, 1959, November 15, Evening edition, 3) Rather than reading Ms. M’s dismissive remarks toward prostitutes as hypocrisy, these comments represent a subtle acknowledgment of uncomfortable economic realities. Operating as a general goods store owner in the red-light district, Ms. M likely depended on these same women and their GI patrons as primary customers for her own survival. This consumer spending would have encompassed food, drinks, clothing, and other necessities. The disparaging tone serves a crucial discursive function here. It maintains moral distance between Ms. M and the very individuals whose labor sustains her business and allowed her to present her relations with 86 these women as one marked by superiority and perhaps even pity. Additionally, her statement demonstrates what Van Dijk calls the “ideological square” in the discursive management of reality (2013, 51). The combination of implied positive self-presentation by suggesting that Ms. M herself, unlike the jokyū, appreciated the value of money, with negative other-presentation through the dismissive comment that “they’re not very bright” allows Ms. M to manage her economic dependence on the sex industry and while justifying the moral condemnation of the women who work within it. Through this rhetorical maneuver, Ms. M thus rationalized her continued participation in the sex industry through financial relations with the prostitutes, while morally and discursively distancing herself from these same women. The participation of individually owned business within the red-light districts was, however, only part of the picture. A separate article published in the same journalistic series revealed another mechanism of economic involvement operating at a different financial scale in Okinawa’s base towns: その家賃たるや一夜で二十ドルも稼ぐ女給部屋に相応してべラボーに高い。地の利を得た場所に幅三間半、奥行き六間、（八部屋）の借家があるだけで、六人家族が上流の生活をしているというから、家賃がどんなに高いか、およその想像がつく。 The rent is exorbitantly high, befitting rooms for jokyū earning twenty dollars a night. In a prime location, a rental property measuring roughly 6.4m by 11m (with eight rooms) allows a family of six to live an upper-class lifestyle solely from the rent, giving a rough idea of just how steep the rent must be. (Okinawa Times, 1959, November 16, Evening, 3) 87 This passage illuminates a secondary source of previously examined anxieties surrounding prostitutes working from rented rooms (magari 間借) in residential areas. The concern extended beyond fears about corrupting children and youths (e.g., Okinawa Times, 1957, September 14, Evening, 3). More fundamentally, the moral anxiety is implicitly related to the knowledge that some Okinawan property owners were providing these living spaces to the women and/or their gyōsha, thereby participating in and profiting from the sex industry while maintaining the ability to conceal their connection. Furthermore, the article's revelation that rental income from a single property could support an entire family in “upper-class lifestyle” emphasized the substantial financial gains available through such arrangements. This highlighted how Okinawans beyond the prostitutes and gyōsha could derive economic benefits from more oblique forms of participation in the sex industry. Property ownership allowed socioeconomically privileged landlords to extract profit from the base-dependent economy and women’s sexual labor while preserving social respectability and moral distance from contamination. Unlike Ms. M’s retail business, as exemplified above, which still required daily interaction within the red-light district, property ownership offered profit extraction at a comfortable remove. These brief textual moments represent rare instances of public acknowledgment regarding the fundamental contradictions within the moral framework being constructed in postwar Okinawa. The multilayered economic dependencies that bound mainstream Okinawan society to the prostitutes’ sexual labor remained largely unexamined by journalistic texts examined throughout the thesis. Instead, the newspaper discourses de-emphasize these structural connections while foregrounding simplistic representations of the prostitutes themselves, either as agents exercising unconstrained free will in choosing their participation or as victims of the industry. Outside of the journalistic texts, such economic realities were not openly problematized 88 by community groups advocating for civil rights promotion, nor by political groups maintaining anti-base and anti-American stances (Wakabayashi 2015). Furthermore, beyond individual shopkeepers and property owners lay an even more systematic form of wealth extraction from the sex industry, one that implicated the very governmental structures tasked with maintaining the social order underpinning moral values formulation. While the taxation system run by the Okinawan civilian government extracted tax revenue from sex and nightlife industry establishments, it did so without acknowledging either the nature of the system underpinned by women’s sexual labor or the various levels of exploitations sustaining it. Understanding the significance of these omissions requires examining what was at stake: information that, though later documented in government records, remained conspicuously absent from contemporaneous public discussion in newspaper articles between late 1950s to 1972 focusing on the political-moral symbolism associated with prostitutes and the sex industry in Okinawa. Within the research materials analyzed for this thesis, one instance was found mentioning taxes levied specifically upon sex and nightlife industry venues by the civilian government in the context of discursive construction concerning the prostitutes and the sex industry: 風俗営業には問題が多い。営業するのには、「風俗営業取締法」をはじめ、「食品衛生法」といった法律を守らなければならないうえに、税金攻勢がある。税金の中ではことに「遊興飲食税」は、税率どおりに納めていてはつぶれてしまうと、どの業者も口をそろえて語っている。ビール一本あたり十一％の税金を納めなければならないうえに、更に十五％の課税が加えられている。これでは、安心して商売出来ないとして、税金引下げ陳情中とのこと。 89 The adult entertainment business is fraught with issues. To operate, businesses must comply with laws such as the “Entertainment Business Regulation Law” and the “Food Sanitation Law,” while also facing aggressive taxation. Among the taxes, the “Recreation and Dining Tax” is particularly burdensome, with operators unanimously claiming that paying the full tax rate would drive them out of business. They are required to pay an eleven percent tax per bottle of beer, plus an additional fifteen percent levy. Unable to conduct business with peace of mind under these conditions, they are reportedly petitioning for tax reductions. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1961, January 7, Morning edition, 6) Although the article’s author, citing opinions from gyōsha who owned sex and nightlife industry venues including bars and cabarets, stated that they viewed the recreation and dining tax as a bureaucratic mechanism designed to force closures of these businesses, the 1961 zeisei hakusho税制白書(Tax System White Paper) published by the then Ryūkyū Civilian Government presents a different perspective from within the bureaucracy. As cited in Toshiki Wakimoto (2022), the White Paper indicates that the tax was “levied on recreational dining and lodging activities at establishments such as traditional Japanese restaurants, cabarets, and cafés. The operators of these establishments were responsible for collecting the tax, submitting a declaration form by the 10th of the following month, and paying the tax simultaneously” (Wakimoto 2022, 42). At that time, the newly formed civilian government had to comply with the U.S. military authority’s directive to minimize and exempt non-Okinawans from tax obligations, specifically stationed American soldiers earning income from the U.S. military (Wakimoto 2022, 40). Significantly, the recreation and dining tax levied upon tokuingai venues, whose provision of sexual services through employment of jokyū had entered public discourse at least since the early 90 1950s, was not included in the White Paper’s sozei futan no bunseki 租税負担の分析(Tax Burden Analysis) section. This particular section’s findings derived from consultations with local stakeholders aimed at reducing tax burdens on Okinawans (Wakimoto 2022, 36). The implication becomes clear when examining the euphemistically named recreation and dining tax. This revenue stream represented funds that the civilian government and its financial authorities were unwilling to relinquish. Through deliberately maintained ambiguities in written records, the government thus incorporated these extracted funds into its own operation without any critical reckoning with the socioeconomic and political subjugations and exploitations embedded within prostitutes’ sexual labors. Indeed, the financial stakes of the tax incomes generated directly and indirectly from the sex and nightlife industry was substantial. In the 1960 tax year alone, the White Paper calculated income from the category of the recreation and dining tax, recorded under indirect taxes, to be at $209,054. Additionally, three further subcategories of taxation outlined in the White Paper also merit attention as they pertain to the operations of Okinawa’s sex and nightlife industry: the gorakuzei 娯楽税 (entertainment tax), levied as a portion of entrance fees to entertainment venues including cinemas, theaters, and dance halls, generated $256,824 in tax revenue in 1960. Income from shuzei 酒税 (alcohol tax) on locally produced alcohol yielded $1,356,225, while shurui shōhizei酒類消費税 (alcohol consumption tax) on imported alcohols including beer generated $1,993,349 (Wakimoto 2022, 38)1. A conservative estimation suggests that even if only 1% of these latter three tax categories (entertainment tax, alcohol tax, and alcohol consumption tax) were derived from 1 All tax revenues were recorded in U.S. dollars. 91 revenues and sales (of alcohol) in nightlife and sex industry venues, as well as from sexualized relations between prostitutes and their American soldier customers (whose patronage of entertainment venues such as cinemas with hired prostitutes was documented as a frequent occurrence in base towns; Ryūkyū Shinpō 1956, September 26, Morning edition, 3), this would still yield a total $36,063.98 of tax revenue incomes in 1960. Combined with the aforementioned recreation and dining tax revenue from the same year, the total could reach $245,117.98 in revenue for the civilian government derived from sexual and sexualized relations between the prostitutes and their soldier-patrons, as well as other service-based labors they often performed within the context of the industry, accounting for the fact that many workers also served as actual barmaids responsible for promoting alcohol sales alongside sex work. Adjusted for inflation, this amount equals $2,638,678.60 in 2025 purchasing power (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator). It should thus be clear that the discourses surrounding the sex industry and the women who worked as prostitutes in Okinawan newspaper articles have often avoided scrutinization of how the mainstream Okinawan society systematically, rather than anecdotally and sporadically, profited from the sex industry economically while those occupying positions of power participated in moral condemnation of both the industry and the women who worked as prostitutes. The collective discursive and vocalized struggle to purify residential neighborhoods and the rest of the society from moral pollution posed by the prostitutes and the sex industry persisted partly because elimination would, in reality, mean sacrificing these multi-layered economic benefits by the civilian government itself and an explicit recognition of these mechanisms where the women’s sexual labors translated directly and indirectly into economic livelihoods for other Okinawans. 92 4.4 Chapter Conclusion The analysis presented in the current chapter seeks to demonstrate how journalistic discourse operates by naturalizing particular understandings while marginalizing others, creating apparent consensus through selective representation instead of a commitment to comprehensive truth (Fairclough 1993; Richardson 2007). Rather than representing a simple evolution or replacement of earlier discourses, this substrate of journalistic discourses coexisted with concurrent assertions of the prostitutes as sources of moral pollution and threat, shifting the discursive field through strategic silences, renewed selective scrutiny aimed at a different social group, all while continue the de-articulation of fundamental contradictions. Partially, the reason why these paradoxes that could not be resolved discursively lie in the economic reality as revealed through tax figures and fragments from journalistic texts touching indirectly upon the topic of wealth extractions from the sex industry. While publicly condemning prostitutes as sources of moral pollution, the civilian government derived tax revenue from their sexual labors and the ecosystem of sexualized entertainment surrounding U.S. military bases. This economic dependence created structural impediments to genuine moral purification, as eliminating the source of pollution would simultaneously eliminate revenue streams supporting the emerging postwar apparatus of power within the civilian society. The tension between moral discourse and economic pragmatism thus necessitated a more sophisticated solution, one that could symbolically address moral anxieties while preserving essential economic functions of the sex industry and moral indemnity of those in positions of authority within Okinawan society. 93 Chapter 5: In Her Palm, An Empty Light As Okinawa approached its 1972 reversion to Japanese administration, public discourse surrounding the Prostitution Prevention Law underwent a transformation that exemplified what Fairclough (2013) identifies as policy discourse operating through practical argumentation and hegemonic struggle. This chapter examines how Okinawan newspapers throughout the late 1950s and early 1970s generated support for the law through selective amplification of narratives. This process demonstrates the interdiscursive articulation of legal, medical, moral, and humanitarian discourses serving specific political interests. Building upon Chapter 4’s analysis of complex local interdependencies on and wealth extractions from the sex industry that implicated more than just the prostitutes and their patrons, the current chapter focuses on how the victim-villain binary between prostitutes and Okinawan owners of red-light district venues became elevated to the status of being the dominant discursive framework for justifying further legal intervention against the sex industry. While some journalistic texts had, extensively or more obliquely, revealed multiple forms of complicity and agency that complicated any simple moral categorization, public discourse increasingly consolidated around a simplified narrative that could symbolically resolve accumulated moral anxieties without requiring structural examination. The analysis in this chapter will apply Mary Douglas’s concept of “purification rites” (1966), understood as pragmatic social-moral mechanisms operating through the containment of fetishistic contradictions between social reality and its various discursive representations (Flatschart 2016). As established in Chapter 2, purification rites function to treat moral transgressions and conflicts as reversible pollutions through symbolic management rather than addressing structural factors that gave rise to the transgressions or conflicts in the first place. 94 Combined with the application of CDA to analyze policies as discursive constructs alongside their existence as legal tools, this mechanism reveals how legal discourse, and policy-as-discursive-functions, enabled symbolic resolution without requiring what Fairclough identifies as the “true descriptions” necessary for genuine social transformation in the domain of governance and bureaucracy (2013, 194-195). Within Okinawa’s discursive landscape in newspaper articles publishing on the topic of the sex industry and the women working within, the Prostitution Prevention Law emerged as precisely such a sociopolitical mechanism. Rather than resolving fundamental paradoxes inherent in the sex industry’s relationship to both U.S. military occupation and Okinawan society economically and politically, the law offered symbolic purification. This chapter traces this discursive realignment firstly through establishing why the Prostitution Prevention Law should be understood as a moral purification rite, thus a symbolic tool, beyond its stated legal and bureaucratic functions. The next section then examines how the amplification of the prostitutes as victims and gyōsha as villains within the sex industry became the key social-moral imperative justifying the law’s necessity and scope, while serving as the aegis reinforcing this simplified reinterpretation of the sex industry’s moral status and positionality vis-à-vis the rest of Okinawan society. The final section focuses on hogo kōsei 保護更生 (protective rehabilitation) social welfare measures, which symbolically enacted the rescue and redemption missions of the Prostitution Prevention Law. These measures solidified realigned moral roles within Okinawan society: the civilian government emerged as benevolent rescuer, the prostitutes as redeemed victims, and gyōsha as the clearly defined source of moral pollution deserving ostracism. The reconfigurations completed a cycle of moral distancing that allowed 95 Okinawan society and its institutions to separate themselves from their past interdependency on the sexual labor performed by women in the tokuingai outside the barbed wires of the bases. 5.1 All the Laws That Have... Already Outlawed Prostitution... As early as 1959, an article published in Okinawa Times saw its author envisioning formal ratification of a baishun kinshihō 売春禁止法 (prostitution prohibition law). The author was likely referring to a model similar to the baishun bōshihō ratified in mainland Japan in 1958. The legal instrument officially outlawed all forms of previously licensed prostitutions (sex-for-money transactions) in mainland Japan, whose presence was concentrated in red-light districts known as akasen 赤線 (Katō 2009). One must also take note that the 1958 Prostitution Prevention Law did not eradicate the sex industry in mainland Japan as the venues simply continued to offer commercial sex covertly, or other forms of sexualized services under the guise of more euphemistically named service-industry occupations such as yatona 雇仲居 (waitress) (Katō 2009). The same article also featured a clinician’s proposal for a seibyō yobōhō 性病予防法 (venereal disease prevention law), neither of which existed as actual legal instruments in Okinawa at the time. These envisioned laws reveal how legal solutions were discursively constructed as symbolic remedies for moral anxieties, regardless of their practical feasibility or specific legal provisions: この社会悪をたつには売春禁止法の早期立法化と同時に労働基準法監督署のメスが必要である。（中略）[性病]患者は七月 758人、八月 760人、九月 678人、十月 602人と次第に減ってはいるが、社会制度の欠陥から生じてくる社会病（性96 病）を撲滅するために早期に“性病予防法”を立法化すると同時にそれまでは接客業の女に衛生知識を啓発することだと、コザ保健所の金城医師は語っている。 To eradicate this social ill, the early enactment of a prostitution prohibition law is necessary, alongside the intervention of the Labor Standards Inspection Office. [...] [Venereal disease] cases numbered 758 in July, 760 in August, 678 in September, and 602 in October, gradually decreasing. However, to eliminate social diseases (venereal diseases) arising from flaws in the social system, Dr. Kinjō of the Koza Public Health Office states that a “Venereal Disease Prevention Law” must be legislated promptly, while in the meantime, efforts should focus on educating women working in hospitality about hygiene. (Okinawa Times 1959, November 20, Evening edition, 3). The article’s framing, wherein the clinician advocates for legislation to target venereal diseases, deserves careful examination here. Laws cannot, of course, cure venereal diseases. That remains the province of antibiotics and biomedical intervention. Nor can they prevent disease transmission in any biological sense. Yet this seemingly paradoxical framing reveals a symbolic and social understanding of how legal instruments operate within systems of moral symbolism. As previously discussed, venereal diseases among prostitutes carried significance beyond their medical reality: they represented a form of contamination threatening the broader Okinawan social fabric. The envisioned legislation by the doctor therefore discursively functions as moral mechanisms to metaphorically purify the social body. The collocation of the proposed baishun kinshihō with discussions of venereal disease control, furthermore, is far from coincidental. It reflects the author’s moral awareness that legal instruments serve purposes beyond their stated regulatory functions lying in the details. They also operate as sociopolitical mechanisms by virtue of their existence and ratification, thus public 97 assent, for achieving symbolic effects politically and socially. By identifying prostitution as a form of shakaiaku (social ill), the discourse positions law/legal instruments as a tool for containing and expunging a perceived moral degradation that threatens to contaminate the rest of Okinawan society. The legislation thus emerges not merely as a means of regulating commercial sex, but as a symbolic purification ritual designed to restore moral order by legally demarcating and eliminating sources of pollution. In the context of postwar Okinawa, the envisioned baishun kinshihō and seibyō bōshihō by the author and the clinician quoted by the former were not, in reality, advocated for its political or legal novelty. Existing U.S. military and civilian regulations already aimed to prohibit prostitution and its solicitation. For instance, the U.S. military’s official policy in Okinawa barred local businesses from providing sexual services to servicemembers, enforcing fines and custodial sentences against venue owners almost immediately postwar through the issuance of Special Ordinances (Kikuchi 2010). Additionally, a 1955 military ordinance on crimes against morality authorized “off-limit” designations for areas with high concentrations of known prostitutes, representing another earlier legislative measure to outlaw prostitution in Okinawa, as noted by the author in the same article above from which the excerpt was drawn. However, the effectiveness of these existing regulations instituted by the U.S. military authority were discursively undermined as ineffective and unfair in their enforcements by at least some Okinawan journalistic texts published around the late 1950s, which indirectly supported the call for a new civilian law (enforced by the civilian government) to address the persistent moral and social anxieties surrounding the existence of acts of prostitution catering to military personnel: アメリカの軍隊要員に対する売春は布令第百四十四号（五五年三月十六日）の第四章、道徳に反する罪として、罰金八十三ドル（一万円）以下もしくは一年以下98 の懲役またはその両刑に処することができるとなっていて軍人軍属相手に売春、媒合、娼家行為は罰される。 この布令による取締は民警察が当り、軍（MP）は直接にはタッチしない。軍としては例外をのぞき、売春婦を求めた軍人軍属を罰することはしない。しかし軍には軍人軍属の福祉と健康を守るために“風紀取締委員会”があって、軍人軍属に対し好ましからざる行為を取締り、売春婦の多い地域あるいは店に対して、オフリミッツをいいわたしたりする。基地の風俗業それがこわくて、売春の二字に気を配りながら法網をくぐり、売春行為によって、相当な利益を上げている。「兵隊がいる限り、売春は……」と、基地街では黙認されたかたちになり、業者は大っぴらに女をかかえ、娼家行為をやっている。 Prostitution targeting U.S. military personnel is addressed under Ordinance No. 144 (March 16, 1955), Chapter 4, as a crime against morals, punishable by a fine of up to $83 (10,000 yen), imprisonment for up to one year, or both. Engaging in prostitution, solicitation, or brothel operations with military personnel or civilians employed by the military is subject to penalties. Enforcement of this ordinance is handled by civilian police, with the military police (MP) not directly involved. The military generally does not punish personnel seeking prostitutes, except in rare cases. However, to protect the welfare and health of military personnel, a “Morals Committee” exists, which regulates undesirable behavior by military personnel and imposes off-limits designations on areas or establishments frequented by prostitutes. The adult entertainment industry of the base town, wary of these regulations, operates cautiously around the concept of “prostitution,” slipping 99 through legal loopholes to generate considerable profits from such activities. “As long as there are soldiers, prostitution will...”—this sentiment has become tacitly accepted in base towns, where operators openly employ women and engage in brothel operations. (Okinawa Times 1959, November 20, Evening edition, 3) By cataloguing ineffective measures, the article engages in what Fairclough (2013, 186-187) refers to as problematization at the political-discursive level surrounding policies and legal instruments, representing existing states of affairs as requiring urgent intervention. The phrase “as long as there are soldiers, prostitution will...” serves to naturalize military-prostitution connections through implications rather than outright argumentation while foreclosing examination of other forms structural economic dependencies that sustained the existence of the sex industry and prostitution. Such an ostensible resignation, in actuality, encourages the reader to imagine an alternative legal and social-moral solution that might succeed where military ordinances have failed. The emphasis on operators who “openly employ[ed] women” despite these regulations further reinforces the perception that current laws lack either the scope or the enforcement mechanisms necessary to contain the moral pollution associated with prostitution. Similarly, another Okinawa Times article also noted the same sentiment that the existing regulations against organized prostitutions instated by the U.S. military failed to achieve its objectives since it only targets the provision of sexual services to the soldiers but not Okinawans: 中部の五警察署で許可された風俗営業者はカフェ 574、キャバレー150、料亭280、小料理店 72 軒で計 1076 軒そこで働く女給、酌婦さんは 6000人を上回る。その大半が体をはって客をうけているわけだ。布令で軍相手の売春は禁じられて100 も、沖縄人に対しては通用されず、その取締間に矛盾をきたし、業者はそれをうまく利用して法網をくぐっている状態だ。 In the five police jurisdictions of central Okinawa, the licensed adult entertainment businesses include 574 cafés, 150 cabarets, 280 restaurants, and 72 small eateries, totaling 1,076 establishments. The number of jokyū and hostesses working there exceeds 6,000. The vast majority of them are engaging in prostitution to make a living. Although ordinances prohibit prostitution with military personnel, these rules do not apply to Okinawans, creating contradictions in enforcement. Operators skillfully exploit this loophole to slip through the legal net. (Okinawa Times, 1959, November 10, Evening edition, 3) The statistics presented in the above quote which sees the author enumerating establishments and women who worked as prostitutes are included to rhetorically lend empirical weight to the perception of prostitution as a pervasive social phenomenon, thus requiring comprehensive sociopolitical intervention. The identification of a regulatory loophole, wherein prostitution with Okinawan clients remains unregulated, emphasizes and foregrounded the incomplete nature of existing military regulations that focused predominantly on protecting American military personnel and not on curbing prostitution or the sex industry. This gap in legislative scope becomes particularly significant when considering the documentation of Okinawan patronage to racially segregated red-light districts in Okinawa’s urban centres. The author’s characterization of gyōsha who “skillfully exploit this loophole” positions them as cunning adversaries of moral orders, further justifying calls for more comprehensive legislation within the space of civilian society and governance that would hypothetically resolve the moral paradoxes accompanying these facets of the sex industry’s operation. 101 Furthermore, the excerpt’s strategic framing of U.S. military regulations as insufficient serves a crucial discursive function. It creates a regulatory vacuum that demands filling through new legal instruments. This rhetorical move positions domestic legislation as the necessary response to moral anxieties surrounding prostitution and the sex industry, suggesting that where military authority has failed to contain pollution, laws internal to the Okinawan civil society must intervene. Yet this turn towards legal solutions reveals a persistent collective penchant for ostensibly straightforward and targeted remedies with uncomplicated moral reasonings that would justify its legitimacy. While the advocacy efforts and bureaucratic processes required to institute legal measures might appear laborious, they nonetheless offer a convenient means of circumventing deeper structural issues at a moral level. Legal reform allows society to avoid confronting the moral paradoxes and internal tensions arising from Okinawan economic co-dependency with the very same women who worked as prostitutes which they had sought to purge from the social landscape and the social body. This continued attraction to legal solutions becomes particularly intriguing when one considers that a piece of civil law targeting prostitution, proposed and enforced by the civilian governing body, already existed by the early 1950s. The civilian government had passed legal measures in 1953 targeting those who prostituted women, though these regulations applied only to gaishō 街娼 (streetwalkers) operating outside licensed sex and nightlife venues and unlicensed brothels. Among the materials assessed for this thesis, this existing legislation received no written attention until 1970, when the following Ryūkyū Shinpō article mentioned it: 沖縄には『婦人に売淫させた者等の処罰に関する法律』（一九五三年立法）があるせいか通りすがりの人をそで引きするような街娼は少ない。話はバーやキャバ102 レーでホステスと交渉するか、あるいは“置き屋”の場合だと、玄関にズラリと並んだ女を客が選ぶというやり方だ。 In Okinawa, due to the “Law Concerning the Punishment of Persons Causing Women to Engage in Prostitution” (ratified in 1953), streetwalkers soliciting passersby are rare. Instead, arrangements are negotiated with hostesses in bars or cabarets; or, in the case of “okiya,” customers choose from women lined up at the entrance. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1970, June 17, Evening edition, 3) This brief acknowledgment of the 1953 law provides important discursive context by establishing a backdrop of existing legal precedent within public discourse. First, the law’s existence demonstrates that legal instruments targeting prostitution were not political or social innovations but recurring attempts to manage moral anxieties through regulatory frameworks that were rationalized through selectively applied moral and social scrutinization. The article’s observation that streetwalkers became “rare” while organized prostitution flourished in bars and cabarets illustrates how legal interventions merely displace rather than eliminate commercial sex, pushing it into more structured venues where it could operate under the guise of legitimate entertainment businesses in this instance. More significantly, the strategic invocation of this briefly mentioned 1953 law specifically serves to emphasize the exploitative nature of the debt-bondage-based organized prostitution system (kanri baishun 管理売春) taking place in the aforementioned regulated venues, demonstrating how policy discourses become symbolic arenas for articulating moral positions, regardless of their legal and social effects upon enforcement by authorities. And consequently, the call for a new Prostitution Prevention Law in Okinawa emerges not from an absence of legal tools, but from the need to performatively demonstrate 103 mainstream Okinawan society’s ideologically motivated aspiration for moral purification and increased sociopolitical distance from the sex industry, even as underlying structural dependencies remain deliberately underexamined in these same journalistic texts. To summarize this section’s discussion, the extant legal-moral mechanisms predating the calls for, and eventual ratification of, the 1972 Prostitution Prevention Law were discursively framed as inadequate. Journalistic texts published during that period selectively problematized the gaps in military-directed measures with only oblique mentions of the one previous attempt at a civilian legal instrument in 1953 that had also failed to suppress prostitution. Furthermore, these policy-oriented discourses focusing on legal instruments and their stated functions belie fundamental moral tensions wherein the continued existence of the sex industry postwar was a phenomenon produced through complex forms of local participations and acquiescence at the level of the civilian government. As the following section will argue, these continued moral conflicts necessitated a restructuring of the discursive-moral framework that would produce an extrapolated model of beliefs concerning the prostitutes, the sex industry, and the roles occupied by the rest of Okinawan society in relation to them. This restructuring began with the amplification of a previously acknowledged point of internal tension: namely, the victimization of the prostitutes by Okinawan gyōsha within the sex industry. 5.2 Displacing the Source of Pollution, Reorganizing the Personae Dramatis Following the announcement of the details of the Prostitution Prevention Law by the civilian government and its legal branch in 1971, Okinawan newspaper discourse witnessed what Fairclough (2013) describes as a hegemonic reconfiguration of policy discourse. The process is achieved by persuading readers that newly identified social, political or moral issues or 104 categories are the primary cause of concerning social phenomena that have previously attracted public attention. The invocation of human rights represented not a novel emergence but rather the political elevation of an existing narrative that had long competed with depictions of prostitutes as sources of moral contamination. As established in Chapter 4, prostitutes were already sometimes framed as helpless victims of the owners of the sex and nightlife industry venues as well as local gangs in journalistic accounts. In this case, the concept of human rights in journalistic writing was drawn from vaguely universalist and humanitarian epistemology. Such an expropriation represented a process of recontextualization (Fairclough 2013) whereby these external and fundamentalist ideas were selectively appropriated and redefined to transform how prostitutes were represented in public discourse in the Okinawan context: 今後は、売防法の基本理念である人権擁護の思想を徹底的に普及させる必要がある。 Moving forward, it is necessary to thoroughly promote the concept of human rights protection, which is the fundamental principle of the Prostitution Prevention Law. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1971, May 11, Morning edition, 9) This example of a declaration concerning the moral grounding of Prostitution Prevention Law in human rights marks a crucial moment in moral discourses constructed by journalistic texts. The author elevates prostitution and the sex industry from a localized moral concern to a violation of fundamental human dignity. This rhetorical move demonstrates how policy and legal instruments function beyond their practical applications, serving also as discursive symbols that authors can invoke for particular political and ideological purposes (Fairclough, 2013). Rather than addressing underlying issues such as economic dependencies, the discourse legitimizes legal intervention as the protection of universal values rather than mere moral policing. As such, the 105 framing insulates the law from potential criticism as social conservatism while providing a framework for reconceptualizing the relationship between Okinawan society, the state, and the sex industry itself, including the prostitutes. Concurrently, other newspaper publications between 1970 and 1972 also repeatedly echoed and reinforced this new legal and moral vantage point of reassessing the structure of the sex industry and the positionality of the prostitutes: 「売春が人としての尊厳を害し、性道徳に反し、社会の善良な風俗をみだすものであることにかんがみ、売春を助長する行為等を処罰するとともに、性行または環境に照らして売春を行うおそれのある女子に対する補助処分および保護更生の措置を講する」と規定されている。 Considering that prostitution harms human dignity, violates sexual morality, and disrupts society’s good mores, it is stipulated that acts promoting prostitution shall be punished, and supplementary measures and protective rehabilitation shall be implemented for women who, based on their sexual behavior or circumstances, are at risk of engaging in prostitution. (Okinawa Times, 1971, September 29, Morning edition, 9) To begin with, the tripartite formulation at the start of the excerpt creates an ideologically coherent framework discursively bridging the idea of individual human rights (i.e., “human dignity”) and the collective social order of Okinawan society (“sexual morality” and “good mores”) in the context of condemning prostitution and the sex industry. It enables the author to subtly shift moral blames away from the prostitutes by reframing them through a generalized notion of their inherent vulnerability: “women who, based on their behavior or circumstances, are at risk” suggests external conditions placing them in vulnerable positions rather than 106 individual moral failings. This linguistic construction prefigures the victim narrative by conceptualizing prostitution as a result of circumstances rather than choice. The promise of hogo kōsei 保護更生 (protective rehabilitation) instead of custodial or financial punishment signals the government’s envisioned role as benevolent guardian rather than disciplinary authority when it comes to the women. The law thus renews the governing bureaucratic instrument’s moral legitimacy despite the fact that as an institution of power, the same government has previously profited from the sexual labors and the violations of these women’s human rights which it is now seeking to addressing. Nevertheless, instead of critical scrutiny of these historical and economic relations that, at the very least, enabled the continued existence of Okinawa’s base town sex industry, the same human-rights-based journalistic discourses continued to magnify and centre the notion of these women’s inherent vulnerability and victimhood: 『すべての人間を生まれながらにして自由であり、尊厳と権利において平等である』―支配され、踏みつけられた世界中の男女を力強く開放した世界人権宣言が国連総会で採択されて満二十三年。四日から人権週間が始まる。（中略）女給が「前借金」のクサリにつながれ、ドロ沼からはい上がれず、あえいでいる。「人権ってなあに？」沖縄の片すみでつぶやいている。 “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”—twenty-three years have passed since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which powerfully liberated oppressed men and women worldwide, was adopted by the UN General Assembly. Human Rights Week begins on the fourth. [...] The jokyū, bound by the chains of “zenshakkin” and unable to escape the quagmire, gasp for breath. “What are human 107 rights?” they murmur in a corner of Okinawa. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1971, December 4, Morning, 9) Through this dramatic juxtaposition, the discourse serves multiple functions. The imagery of “chains” and women who “gasp for breath” transforms abstract rights violations into visceral physical suffering, making intervention emotionally compelling. Furthermore, the author’s use of the rhetorical question “What are human rights?” placed in the mouths of the imagined prostitute creates an imagery and discursive framing that positions them as victims of oppression who sought their own redemption through the notion of human rights. Taken together, these excerpts collectively exemplify how prostitution in Okinawa was rearticulated through an abstract moral vocabulary rather than as embodied acts in journalistic texts around 1972. Individual women’s violated dignity becomes metonymically linked to social corruption, instead of the prostitutes’ commercialized sexual relations with their patrons. Consequently, such a reframing effectively dislocates prostitution from the physical bodies of these women and their commercialized sexual encounters. In its stead, this freshly disembodied and depersonalized system of prostitution comes to be regarded as a semi-autonomous force, or a system of dehumanization and degradation, imposed upon otherwise morally pure but helpless women by external factors. Importantly, this discursive step of abstraction and disembodiment serves a particular function within the social and historical context examined throughout this thesis. It allows for the repositioning of the prostitutes into the victim slot within the sex industry, conceptually separating their personhood and moral standing from the acts of commercial sex these women have performed. This separation is sustained in journalistic texts through the reiterations and intertextual references by newspaper writers by continuous magnifying the victimization discourse. Their narrative strategies include, but are not limited to, 108 explicit descriptions of violence committed against prostitutes by operators, as discussed in the previous section (e.g., Okinawa Times, 1959, November 10, Evening edition, 3). For instance, the victimization discourse also emphasizes the women’s marginalization and inherent vulnerability: 管理売春の特殊婦人はその全体の六割が離婚した婦人。内縁関係や別居が一割、残り三割が独身。転落の理由は離婚などによる生活苦やだまされたこと。学歴は義務教育の中学を終えたものがほとんどで九割におよぶ。残りは高卒であったり、ロクに学校に行けなかった者。離婚して子どもかかえているような者も別れた相手から慰謝料を取っている例はまずない。教育程度が低いことや知能も低いと推定される者が多い。そのため業者の誘惑を拒むことができずにだまされて売春をさせられていることも推測される。特殊婦人の平均年齢は二十六、七歳。三―四割が子持ち（ママ）。 In organized prostitution, sixty percent of tokushu fujin are divorced women. Ten percent are in common-law relationships or separated, and the remaining thirty percent are single. The reasons for their downfall include financial hardship due to divorce or being deceived. Educationally, nearly ninety percent have only completed compulsory middle school education, with the rest being high school graduates or those who barely attended school. Divorced women with children rarely receive alimony from their former partners. Many are presumed to have low education levels and are often estimated to have lower intelligence. As a result, it is inferred that they are unable to resist operators’ temptations and are deceived into prostitution. The average age of tokushu fujin is twenty-six or 109 twenty-seven, with thirty to forty [sic] percent being mothers. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1970, June 17, Evening edition, 3) Particularly noteworthy in the excerpt above is how the speculative characterization of tokushu fujin as inherently vulnerable due to “lower intelligence” forms a crucial component of the amplified victimhood narrative. The statistical precision creates what Richardson (2007) calls pseudo-empiricism, lending authority to ideological constructions of inherent vulnerability and thus entrenched victimhood of these women. This framing positions them as individuals incapable of resisting exploitation by gyōsha, depicted as deliberately luring women through deception, or even of defending themselves in general. The presupposition that “lower intelligence” explains exploitation demonstrates how discourse inculcates new aspects of identities of the subject of discursive construction (Fairclough, 2013, 192). Here, the prostitutes are discursively produced as subjects lacking agency and requiring social and state intervention. This construction enables the crucial ideological work of transforming structural problems into a matter of individual deficiencies. The article’s re-identification and re-presentation of the prostitutes as primarily being divorcees and single mothers reinforces the notion of vulnerability by positioning them as women pushed into financial hardship through loss of husbandly protection that would otherwise shelter them from others’ exploitations of their vulnerabilities and weaknesses. The underlying assumption reveals itself through a belief that a well-functioning family-based social system should naturally prevent women from entering prostitution. Marginalization from this family structure thus becomes both explanation and exculpation for their circumstances. Similarly, other articles published around the same time also discursively highlighted other aspects of the financial arrangements and economic system within the sex industry. 110 According to another 1970 article, for instance, the gyōsha maintained systematic control over the women’s earnings through carefully calibrated pricing and commission structures. The women charged $3–$5 for a “short session,” $5–$7 for a “long session,” and $8–$10 for an “overnight” with clients, with earnings split evenly or at best, six parts to the women and four to the operator. This system ensured they had to take as many clients as possible to survive, with monthly income reported around $90 to $100. The same article concluded that without substantial earnings, leaving the sex industry was nearly impossible for the women, as the setup ensured that operators never lose out (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1970, June 18, Evening edition, 3). While emphasizing systematic and pervasive victimhood, the same narrative framework also constructed the imagery of women who desire to leave the sex industry but face insurmountable economic barriers and thus could not. The precise numbers reported in this account creates the impression of impartial and authoritative journalistic reporting, which further lends rhetorical strength to the reframing and generalization of all gyōsha as calculating exploiters. The discourse thus reconstructs the women as economic actors trapped by structural constraints, further distancing them from earlier characterizations as willing transgressors of moral boundaries. In the meantime, journalists writing in support of the law in the two years immediately preceding its ratification systematically co-opted this selective generalization of the ontological structure of the sex industry, and argued for a specific legal focus to align with the restructured moral landscape concerning the sex industry and the prostitutes: 売春をしている婦人はあくまで被害者であり、業者の責任の追及、あるいは話し合いを持つ必要がある。 111 Women engaged in prostitution are ultimately victims, and it is necessary to hold gyōsha accountable or engage in discussions with them. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1971, May 11, Morning, 9) Ultimately, the definitive statement made in the above article crystallizes the discursive metamorphosis of prostitutes into victims, and victims alone. The phrase akumade higaisha (ultimately victims) brooks no ambiguity or exception, claiming, essentially, that all prostitutes are victimized women regardless of individual circumstances or how they participated in the operations of the sex industry. The juxtaposition of the statement with the author’s call for “[holding] gyōsha accountable” establishes a clear moral binary in the legal realm that, at the same time, discursively and politically creates maximum polarization between innocent victims versus their culpable exploiters (van Dijk 2013, 26). This formulation enables the law to function as a rescue operation rather than a punitive measure, aligning with the human rights framework that positions the state as protector rather than prosecutor. In addition, the reconceptualization and ideological rearticulation of the relations between the prostitutes and the gyōsha, where the latter exploits and profits from the former’s weakness and entrenched vulnerability, becomes further cemented through articulating baishun 売春 as a social-financial arrangement from which the women cannot escape even if they desire to do so. Note that the author syntactically divorces the word baishun from the word fujin to reflect this discursive and epistemological space sustained by the notion of inherent and generalized victimhood of these women. Within this new discursive framework, gyōsha thus emerge as the group maintaining this exploitative system purely out of greed, becoming primary targets of moral condemnation. However, as earlier discussions revealed, the relationship between gyōsha and prostitutes was mediated by economic and other forms of participations by other Okinawans. By 112 extrapolating and emphasizing certain aspects of this social world while obscuring others, the discursive modeling of reality exemplifies what Fairclough (2013, 186-187) identifies as problematization occurring at multiple levels in the discursive rationalization and representation of policy and legal instruments. At the lay level, newspaper reports heightened public anxieties about the exploitation of prostitutes now seen as women who could not defend themselves, all while government officials at the political level constructed the need for targeted intervention but not of reformation of the sociopolitical and cultural structures underlying the sex industry. The convergence of these two levels of problematization enabled the hegemonic selection of the victim-villain narrative over more complex understandings of the sex industry’s operation and the relations between the prostitutes and the gyōsha, while completely sidestepping critical appraisal of the roles played by other social groups within Okinawa. As such, the two characters in the moral theatre, that of victimized women and exploitative gyōsha, loomed large in their reiterations in publicized newspaper articles which propagated the views of those Okinawans who unlikely worked in the sex industry itself. Consequently, this simplified victim-villain narrative ascended to the status of a hegemonic interpretation of social reality with bearings on the moral functions of laws and, by extension, the civilian institutions of power that wield them. Within the same discursive paradigm, the reframing also made it possible for the rest of Okinawan society to position itself as the benevolent outsider who was ready to undertake a collective rescue mission of the victimized women from the gyōsha. The reorganization of the moral, social, and political relations in journalistic texts as described, therefore, essentially represents an ideological maneuver which allows the mainstream society to relocate all the sources moral pollutions back within the boundary of the sex industry itself. Simultaneously it 113 also expels previously acknowledged connections and forms of interdependencies between Okinawan society and the prostitutes from the same discursive space. 5.3 Hogo Kōsei: What Is It Seeking to Achieve? Hogo kōsei 保護更生 (protection and rehabilitation) refers to a comprehensive welfare strategy involving financial aid, shelter establishment, and dedicated bureaucratic teams conducting outreach and consultation programs as part of the legal package accompanying the Prostitution Prevention Law. The system existed in a dialectical relationship between discourse and material reality in policy implementation, in which the discourse becomes “enacted” in institutional practices, “inculcated” in reformed identities, and “materialized” in physical rehabilitation spaces (Fairclough 2013, 192). The hogo kōsei system’s stated objective was to restore former prostitutes as legitimate members of Okinawan society in the form of morally purified women within the newly configured discursive and legal framework of the legal instrument outlawing prostitution. Concomitantly, as a moral mechanism based on a particular discursive articulation of Okinawa’s sex industry structure, the legal instrument and its rehabilitation ideology shifted the source of moral pollution away from individual prostitutes. This ideological framework, at its heart, derived its legitimacy by treating these women as blameless due to their inherent vulnerability and powerlessness, characteristics generalized through the victim narrative underpinned by the discursive reconfigurations as outlined in the preceding section. Rather than requiring the physical and symbolic removal of prostitutes and brothels from Okinawan society, as earlier moral-discursive framework demanded, the new paradigm envisioned and emphasized the prospect of the prostitutes’ eventual reintegration through rehabilitative measures, and thus purification of the women themselves: 114 社会の暖かい理解が必要 施設の内容は今後検討されるが、だいたい一時相談所で婦人たちの各種の相談、身元調査などのほか専門家や医師による各種の調査が行われ、更生までのコースの分類をする。保護施設には宿泊所はもちろん援産施設もあり洋裁、編み物などの技術も教える方針。（中略）本人がその気でいても社会が“施設出身”(ママ)のらく印押し白眼視すれば、更生はさらにむつかしくなるだけに、彼女らに向ける社会の理解も強くのぞまれる。（中略）被害者としている特殊婦人を政府の手で本当の被害者にしないよう、厚い保護指導策を望む声は多い。 Warm Social Understanding Needed The details of the facilities will be considered going forward, but generally, temporary consultation centers will handle various consultations for women, conduct background checks, and perform assessments by specialists or doctors to categorize their rehabilitation paths. Protective shelters will include not only dormitories but also childbirth support services, and plans are in place to teach skills such as sewing and knitting. [...] Even if the women are motivated, if society labels them as “shelter graduates” and views them with disdain, rehabilitation becomes all the more difficult. Thus, social understanding toward these women is greatly desired. [...] There are many voices calling for robust protective guidance measures to ensure that the government does not turn these tokushu fujin, who are victims, into true victims. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1970, June 26, Evening edition, 3) Notably, this articulation of hogo kōsei here reveals its dual operational logic. On the practical level, the discourse outlines some concrete institutional mechanisms to realize the envisioned 115 objective of restoring the prostitutes as morally legible and purified members of Okinawan society. Yet the passage simultaneously acknowledges the symbolic dimensions of this project through its anxious anticipation of social stigma associated with their former marginalization and moral ambiguities. The introduction of the notion of “shelter graduates” as a potential source of continued stigmatization suggests awareness that institutional processing might create new forms of marginalization. Additionally, the paradoxical formulation about preventing victims from becoming “true victims” of the very system seeking to rescue these women exposes the tension between the program’s material provisions and its symbolic function of moral purification which ultimately imbues moral and social meanings to these legislative measures. Furthermore, the emphasis on “warm social understanding” underscores how hogo kōsei operates as much through collective social-moral perception as interventionist measures. Society must participate in the same process of symbolic transformation by accepting these women’s reintegration, suggesting that the success of purification depends not merely on institutional processing but also on communal recognition of restored moral status. The specific mention of teaching sewing and knitting reveals assumptions about proper feminine roles these women should inhabit post-rehabilitation, effectively promising to transform prostitutes into respectable working women engaging in appropriately gendered labor. On the other hand, journalistic texts published in the aftermath of the formalization of the Prostitution Prevention Law also articulated financial mechanisms to facilitate the prostitutes’ seeking alternative forms of labors outside the sex industry to complete their moral redemption: 売春防止法は、昨年七月公布された。同法は、長い間社会の必要悪とて黙認されてきた“売春”の被害者ともいえる売春婦の保護更生をはかることを主眼として116 いる。しかし、まだまだ一般の関心は薄い。厚生局は、売春対策沖縄県総協議会（箭野清作会長）とタイアップし各地で婦人福祉懇談会を開く一方、婦人相談所、一時保護所、婦人保護施設、婦人相談員の配置など、保護更生事業を来月から来年一月かけて実施できるよう準備を進めている。（中略）売春を行うおそれがあるとして保護の必要な女子を対象に、生業資金（四百五十ドルまで）、支度資金（六十ドルまで）、技能修得資金（月十ドル）、生活資金（月十ドル）、転宅資金（五十ドルまで）を貸し付ける“婦人更生資金貸し付け制度”は来月中に発足する。（中略）婦人保護施設（八十人収容）はすべて来春一月から開所の予定。それにても、七千人を越えるという売春婦。対策はすべてこれからだ。 The Prostitution Prevention Law was promulgated last July. This law primarily aims to protect and rehabilitate prostitutes, who can be considered victims of “prostitution,” which has long been tacitly accepted as a necessary social ill. However, public interest remains low. The Welfare Bureau, in collaboration with the Okinawa Prefecture Prostitution Countermeasures Council (Council leader Yano Seisaku), is holding women’s welfare forums across various locations while preparing to implement protective rehabilitation programs from next month through January next year. These include establishing women’s consultation centers, temporary shelters, women’s protective facilities, and appointing women’s counselors. [...] The “Women’s Rehabilitation Fund Loan System,” which provides loans to women at risk of engaging in prostitution who require protection—covering business startup funds (up to $450), an outfit allowance (up to $60), skill acquisition funds ($10 per month), living expenses ($10 per month), and relocation funds (up to $50)—will be launched next month…The 117 women’s shelter (capacity for 80 women) is scheduled to open in January next spring. Even so, with over 7,000 prostitutes reported, all measures have yet to be implemented. (Okinawa Times, 1971, September 29, Morning edition, 9) Through its bureaucratic articulation of financial aid structures and scope, the excerpt above reveals how the hogo kōsei welfare measures functioned as both practical intervention and symbolic mechanism. The enumeration of specific facilities, loan amounts, and timelines created an ideological space where comprehensive governmental action appeared to address all aspects necessary to rescue prostitutes from (forced) sexual labor. Yet significantly, the hasty acknowledgment that “all measures have yet to be implemented” exposed the gap between symbolic ambition and practical capability. This discrepancy suggests these measures served primarily as demonstrations of moral commitment rather than actionable plans scaled to accomplish their stated goals. Moreover, the financial structure’s design as government loans rather than grants reveals a particularly striking contradiction. While positioning itself as benevolent rescuer, the state expected repayment from former prostitutes through income from new employment, effectively continuing economic extraction from these women. Furthermore, this dialectically created fantasy of state benevolence obscured how the government had profited from yūkyō inshokuzei and other sex industry-related taxes until at least 1960, meaning systematic wealth extraction from prostitutes’ labor lasted over a decade after the Asia-Pacific War (Wakimoto 2022). In this way, the loan system exemplified how ideology legitimates existing power relations through newspaper discourse (Bhaskar 2013), allowing the government to disregard its complicity while maintaining moral legitimacy. Lastly, the characterization of prostitution as a “necessary social malaise” that had been “tacitly accepted” acknowledges Okinawan society’s longstanding complicity while simultaneously declaring that this is now 118 bygone history for which only gyōsha should be held accountable. Through the law’s ratification, this reassignment of moral blame enabled mainstream society, its elites, and institutions of power to distance themselves from their interdependency with the sex industry and U.S. military. Notably, newspapers themselves had generated sales revenue through publishing accounts of prostitutes and the sex industry, yet they too could now claim moral distance. At the same time, the writer’s highlighting of public disinterest confirms that moral concern had shifted from the women themselves to baishun as an abstract political-legal matter. Ultimately, the Prostitution Prevention Law achieved its symbolic function of helping society avoid confronting these deep-rooted moral contradictions. Alongside the bureaucratic measures that were designed to morally purify and rehabilitate the prostitutes, the civilian government and its bureaucratic agencies also positioned itself as mediators for restoring justice to the exploited and victimized (former) prostitutes under the hogo kōsei framework. Journalistic texts, such as the excerpt below, recounted how bureaucrats encouraged and compelled the forgiveness of the women’s debts through negotiation with, and pressuring of, the gyōsha. Such bureaucratic mediation serves to maintain the government’s moral distance from direct financial transactions with former prostitutes while reinforcing the narrative of gyōsha as the sole direct beneficiary of the women’s exploitation within the sex industry: 「あなたが前借りしたお金を返済する必要はない」。管理売春業者からの前借金に苦しめられた特殊婦人二人がこのほどコザ福祉事務所特殊婦人相談員、行政府売春対策推進委員会、コザ署のあっせんで前借金の無効に関する示談成立、めでたく社会復帰することになった。五月十五日の売春防止法の施行で売春にからん119 だ特殊婦人の前借金が無効になるということで、管理売春業者は前借金の取りたてにあせりの色を見せているが、特殊婦人の前借金の無効が成立したのはこれが初めて。今後、管理売春業者らに大きく影響しそうだ。 示談の成立した一人は本土出身の女性で、前借金にくくられ五十五歳になるまで沖縄の売春街をたらい回しにされているが、このほどやっと本土に帰ることができた。他の一人は二十七歳の離島出身女性で、前借金から解放されて結婚、新しい人生に再出発した。 “You don’t have to repay the money you borrowed.” Two tokushu fujin, tormented by zenshaku from gyōsha behind organized prostitution, have recently reached settlements declaring their debts void through the mediation of the Koza Welfare Office’s prostitution counselor, the Government’s Prostitution Countermeasures Promotion Committee, and the Koza Police Station, enabling them to joyfully return to society. With the enforcement of the Prostitution Prevention Law on May 15, zenshaku tied to prostitution for tokushu fujin have been rendered void, causing gyōsha behind organized prostitution operations to show signs of urgency in collecting these debts. This is the first instance where the invalidation of such debts for tokushu fujin has been established, and it is likely to significantly impact controlled prostitution operators in the future. One of the women who reached a settlement is from mainland Japan, bound by zenshakkin and shuffled around Okinawa’s red-light districts until the age of fifty-five, but she has finally been able to return to the mainland. The other is a twenty-seven-year-old woman from an outlying island, who, freed from her advance debt, has married and embarked on a new life. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1972, May 9, Morning edition, 9) 120 To begin with, the phrase shakai fukki (return to society) in this excerpt solidifies the symbolic work of the hogo kōsei welfare measures. Through governmental and bureaucratic intervention, the two women’s cases served as success stories that validated the framework’s internal logic: prostitutes were victimized women requiring rescue from moral pollution, while gyōsha embodied the source of that pollution as direct beneficiaries of the prostitution system. Notably, the voiding of debts reported above functioned as discursive proof of the law's efficacy. The mainland Japanese woman’s return after decades and the younger woman’s marriage both signified restoration to legible social categories—one through geographic belonging, the other through heterosexual marriage that purified her sexuality. Yet such discourse of “return” also retrospectively affirmed that prostitutes had been previously ostracized from civil society, only now eligible for restoration as purified and legitimate members through their transformation from prostitutes to women. Furthermore, the moral narrative necessarily required a clearly identified villain to complete its arc. The gyōsha, cast as the new source of moral pollution, occupied the space once held by the prostitutes and became targets of moral condemnation. Their punishment and removal from the welfare system were discursively demanded to achieve symbolic resolution, as exemplified in the excerpt below: だが行政政府内部の中には「これまで婦女子を食い物にしてきた売春業者をいったい救済する必要があるのか。政府がそこまで手を差しのべることには、むしろ一般住民からの反発が大きい」とみる向きもある。（中略）さらに、一般住民の声を聞いてみると「売春宿で働いている婦女子は当然、政府が保護、更生を考えてあげねばならない。だが、売春業者を救済する必要は、さらさらない。これま121 でさんざん女を食いものにしてきていまさら何を」と十人が十人とも、業者の救済には反発する。 However, within the administrative government, some argue, “Why should we rescue gyōsha of the brothels who have preyed on women and girls all this time? Extending a helping hand to them would, in fact, provoke strong opposition from ordinary residents.” [...] Moreover, when listening to the voices of ordinary residents, they say, “Of course, the government must consider protecting and rehabilitating the women and girls working in brothels. But there’s absolutely no need to rescue prostitution operators. After exploiting women so shamelessly, what are they complaining about now?” Almost every single one of them—ten out of ten—opposes any aid for operators. (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1970, June 27, Evening edition, 3) What is striking about this public response as represented and discursively constructed in newspaper reportage is the vehemence with which the discursive transformation has taken hold. The repeated imagery of gyōsha who “prey on” and “feed off” women establish them as parasitic entities whose very existence threatens social-moral order, the animalistic languages signalled to the readers that they were seen as less-than-human, such that the gyōsha deserved no place in the civil Okinawan society as one of its morally legible members. The phrase kuimono ni shite kita (have been feeding on/preying upon) also carries visceral and violent connotations of consumption and exploitation, positioning gyōsha as predators who have violated fundamental human relationships. This unanimous rejection represented statistically (“ten out of ten”) constructs a rhetoric that consolidates the moral binary established through the baishun bōshihō’s moral underpinning, namely innocent victims deserving protection versus irredeemable exploiters deserving only punishment. Through this moral division, the discourse accomplishes 122 several symbolic functions simultaneously. It channels collective guilt and moral anxiety about societal complicity in the sex industry toward a clearly identified group of villains. Most significantly, it forecloses any possibility of examining the structural conditions that created and sustained the sex industry by focusing moral outrage exclusively on individual bad actors. Consequently, given this overwhelming public condemnation, the exclusion of gyōsha from governmental aid emerges as a logical conclusion from their discursive construction as the new cause and embodiment of the sex industry’s morally contaminating effects that threatened the rest of Okinawan society, once again secure in its positionality as segregated from the industry itself. Cast as the human face of the prostitution system, the gyōsha thus became ineligible for redemptive measures available to their erstwhile victims. However, this exclusion creates significant practical obstacles to the law’s stated objectives. Without financial incentives to transition away from operating brothels or prostitution rings, and facing potential financial ruin without knowledge of alternative industries, gyōsha had, in reality, little motivation to genuinely close their businesses or forgive the debts binding prostitutes to them, and many of them did in fact adopt financial strategies to maintain control of the debts and the prostitution operations (e.g., through real estate agencies or other financial professionals) or sold the debts to local gangs (Okinawa Times, 1972, May 19, Morning edition, 9). This pragmatic contradiction reveals the symbolic rather than substantive nature of the legislative interventions as it is more concerned with preserving the integrity of the moral-discursive logics underpinning the solutions proposed as part of the Prostitution Prevention Law (Fairclough 2013). Nevertheless, even as this reconfigured moral narrative buttressed by the concept of human rights and welfare-based rehabilitation achieved widespread consensus, journalistic accounts from the same period up until the reversion in 1972 reveal further complexities that 123 resist this binary categorization of victims and villains. One must see that the relations between the earlier discursive alienation that articulated the prostitutes as sources of moral liminality (Chapter 4) and the revelation and subsequent magnification of their victimization by an exploitative system (Chapter 5 and the current chapter) is not one where the latter represents truth excavated from the former. Rather, both facets reflect the complex entanglements of multiple forms of agencies and subjugations operating at various scales in postwar Okinawa’s sex industry. This provides further evidence that discourse can only form a partial and incomplete hypothesis of reality. As a point of illustration, one journalistic text from 1970 described how the activities of local gangs, gyōsha, and debt brokers were at times facilitated by some prostitutes who recruited other women into the very system that exploited them. As one report noted, when women were “persuaded by a colleague” to become tokushu fujin, the absence of a direct “sale” transaction (meaning the involvement of a debt agent who purchases and resells the women by virtue of owning their debts) made it “less burdensome,” though the recruited women often found themselves borrowing heavily from brothel owners, becoming “prime material for debt bondage” (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1970, June 18, Evening, 3). More strikingly, some of the women, as reported in another article from the same journalistic series published in Ryūkyū Shinpō, even collaborated with local gangs to defraud the gyōsha positioned as their exploiters. The sunsagi寸詐欺 fraud scheme, likely a period-specific term for sunshaku sagi 寸借詐欺, usually involved a woman securing advance payments from a gyōsha for the gang pretending to traffic her into the brothel, before the woman disappearing after only a few days of work, “swindling gyōsha one after another” (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 1970, June 24, Evening edition, 3). 124 Fundamentally, the above examples reveal a fundamental volatility underlying any moral-discursive rationalization seeking to institute a clear boundary between the oppressor and the oppressed in Okinawa’s sex industry, where individual agencies intersect with structural constraints in ways that were unpredictable across contexts. The actual social reality thus possessed complications far exceeding these journalistic accounts, particularly since the prostitutes themselves likely never authored these pieces. Instead, their lives were always represented and repackaged by others social agents, the journalists in this case, to justify interpretations of their social-political positionality (Spivak 1988). Yet despite these instabilities, or perhaps because of them, the newspaper’s reporting of unanimous public opposition to aiding gyōsha became the final piece completing the framework necessary for the Prostitution Prevention Law to function as a purification rite. The moral framework and the law dialectically reinforced and justified each other, creating a discursive space that left no room for reckoning with the complexities of prostitutes’ lives and how their sexual labors were interconnected with the socioeconomic structures of Okinawa then. Ultimately, these women remained characters serving the narrative and ideological agendas of journalistic writers and newspapers’ institutional political goals within the discursively circumscribed moral theater of postwar Okinawa’s red-light district. 5.4 Chapter Conclusion Throughout the postwar period leading up to Okinawa’s Reversion to Japanese administration in 1972, the Prostitution Prevention Law emerged as a sophisticated purification rite instituted as a sociopolitical mechanism to symbolically resolve moral tensions while preserving underlying power structures. To this end, Okinawan journalists created and amplified 125 human-rights-based discourse as a universalist and fundamentalist moral principle, which elevated prostitution from a localized moral concern to a violation of universal human dignity by iterating and reiterating the moral-legal reframing of the nature of the sex industry and the experiences of prostitutes who worked in Okinawa’s red-light districts. This rhetorical transformation served multiple functions. It legitimized state intervention as protection rather than moral policing through reincorporation of the previously marginalized prostitutes into the moral system as victims rather than transgressors through the hogo kōsei social welfare system. More broadly, the notion of human rights provided the linguistic and conceptual space in newspapers to historicize the sex industry, alongside the host of moral conundrums and paradoxes inherent to its interdependency with the rest of Okinawan society. The temporal and discursive distance further obscured the structural conditions that had sustained the sex industry. 126 Chapter 6: Conclusion and Discussion 6.1 Thesis Summary This thesis has traced the development of moral discourses surrounding prostitutes in postwar Okinawa through critical discourse analysis of Japanese-language journalistic articles published between the late 1950s up until 1972 in local newspapers. The findings reveal how journalistic representations shifted from constructing prostitutes as sources of moral pollution threatening social order to recasting them as victims requiring bureaucratic intervention and collective rescue. Importantly, this transformation managed rather than addressed the fundamental contradictions of a society economically dependent on U.S. military bases. This concluding chapter discusses these findings and repositions them within the theoretical framework of discourse analysis as well as the historical context of postwar Okinawa to illustrate the complex operations of power that shaped women’s marginalization in the sex industry. To fully comprehend these discursive patterns, one must first resituate them within the specific historical context of U.S. military occupation and the construction of an extensive network of bases throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The American military presence created the economic and social conditions that fundamentally altered Okinawan society through violent land expropriations and political-economic restructuring of local communities left impoverished in the process (Lutz 2009; Hayashi 2014). Understanding how dominant discourses emerged and achieved the status of a hegemonic narrative framework requires examining factors beyond external military forces. These discourses existed in a dialectical, mutually reinforcing relationship with the perception of social reality itself. Furthermore, certain aspects of the morality-centered discourses of the prostitutes and the sex industry examined in preceding chapters also functioned to bolster the ethnonationalist 127 rearticulation of a Japanese-Okinawan society that aimed to resist the U.S. military while simultaneously alienating and diminishing alternative perspectives and demands (Akibayashi & Takazato 2009; Angst 2009). The prostitutes themselves were systematically erased from the process of discourse production and had little control over its disseminations and transformations, yet their bodies and experiences were selectively deployed as moral symbols within journalistic discourses. Meanwhile, the internal structural factors that sustained the sex industry in postwar Okinawa, beyond the U.S. military occupation itself, remained unexamined in these narrative frameworks.2 These sociopolitical mechanisms operating within Okinawan society functioned with their own logic and served the interests of local elites. By examining these internal dynamics, the thesis does not diminish the role of external and historical forces, including both prewar Japanese colonial legacies and the subsequent U.S. military occupation. Instead, it seeks to shed light in the complex interplay between occupation power and local participation in maintaining systems of gendered oppression. To this end, the concept of internal patriarchy can prove instrumental in understanding how the construction and transformations public discourse about prostitution and women’s identity more broadly in postwar Okinawa came to be. Recent critical scholarly attention has begun to examine these gendered power dynamics within the postwar Okinawan society that were not controlled by or fully determined through the occupying forces (Shimabuku 2019; Takauchi 2021). Through various mechanisms, Okinawan patriarchal power structures influenced the production, regulation, and dissemination of discourses that created a matrix of 2 To reiterate, for the purposes of the analysis for this thesis, “internal” refers specifically to sociopolitical structures and power dynamics operating within Okinawan civil society. 128 moral symbols and values. These values, in turn, served a specifically male-defined vision of Okinawan identity (Takauchi 2021). Within this framework, the discursive construction and reconstruction of prostitutes conversely became a key mechanism for defining acceptable femininity, hence its moral and sociopolitical significance in warranting journalistic attentions in the first place. As such, the transformation from pollution metaphors to victim narratives reflected not merely changing attitudes but also strategic deployments of discourse to manage threats to patriarchal order. Finally, it should also be noted that this thesis’s focus on the discursive construction of the women who worked as prostitutes does not deny these women’s agency within the oppressive system of the sex industry. Although their voices may be absent from journalistic accounts, their actions shaped the very circumstances and phenomena that media discourses sought to manage, contain, and at times mis/represent. The current analysis, instead, focuses on how dominant discourses constructed these women in an effort to shed light on the social and political structures that the women who worked in the sex industry had to navigate, negotiate, and contend with in their lives. As the preceding chapters have shown, journalistic discourses that encourages particularized moral scrutiny of the prostitutes were concerned not with the reality of the prostitutes’ lives and the structural conditions under which they performed these sexual labors. The women were vertretet, in Spivak (1988)’s term, but their voices were nonetheless consistently erased from these discursive constructions and epistemological framing of their moral positionality and personhood. To this end, the next section engages with emerging literature that examines gendered power relations within Okinawan society as a way to point to potential directions for future research, as well as reflecting on how these academic endeavours 129 should be undertaken in an ethical manner to avoid perpetuating marginalizations of a region and its people living under the condition of militarism-colonialism. 6.2 Future Directions and Reflections on Researcher Positionality Recent scholarship has begun exploring how Okinawan patriarchy intersected with U.S. occupation and later Japanese nationalism to shape which voices were heard, how women were categorized, and what aspects of the sex industry became visible in public discourse. Yuki Takauchi (2021), for instance argues that patriarchal structures created three primary categories for women: victims deserving sympathy, collaborators warranting punishment, or maternal figures representing virtue. Women who defied these categories, particularly prostitutes, faced systematic exclusion as “fallen women” outside respectable Okinawan womanhood (260). Furthermore, as Angst (2001) demonstrates, Okinawan prostitutes who supported families through sexual labor during occupation were systematically excluded from the revered “sacrificed daughter” narrative epitomized by the Himeyuri students.3 This exclusion operated through puritanical ethnonationalism that constructed an idealized, male-defined Okinawan identity while vilifying anyone with U.S. military connections who violated ideals of women's sexual purity. 3 The Himeyuri Student Corp were comprised of students who enrolled in the Okinawa Shihan Women’s School and Okinawa Daiichi Women’s Higher School before 1945. A total of 240 students aged between 15 and 19 as well as some teachers were mobilized on March 23, 1945, to serve in the Okinawa Army Field Hospital in Haebaru as a nursing corp for the Japanese army. The corp was deactivated on June 18th, 1945. A total of 136 of the students and teachers died or went missing (Koga, Nakada, Maedomari, Onabe, & Futenman, 2023, 12, 32, 66). The mobilization of the Himeyuri students was part of the wider mobilization and de-facto forced conscription of high school students across Okinawa by the Japanese military between 1944 and 1945 (Koga et al., 2023, 2024) 130 Moreover, critically theorizing the patriarchal sociocultural structures within Okinawan society can open up the possibility of enriching the academic engagement with the effects of various anti-base and anti-military political movements in Okinawa which continue to this day. New Japan Women’s Association Okinawa prioritized issues affecting “respectable” women while actively excluding prostitutes from their political agenda (Takauchi 2021, 256-257) (Takauchi 2021). Additionally, when prominent feminist Takazato Suzuyo described Okinawa as Japan’s “prostituted daughter,” her anti-militarist critique inadvertently reinforced the stigmatization marginalizing actual prostitutes (Angst 2001, 251). Such selective solidarity created hierarchies of deserving and undeserving victims based on perceived purity and alignment with anti-base narratives which operated in parallel with the structure of militarism-colonialism imposed upon Okinawa by the U.S. military and mainland Japanese government (McCormack & Norimatsu 2012). Understanding these internal patriarchal dynamics can provide valuable critical insights for comprehending how conditions of military occupation and colonial domination are sustained within the broader milieu of U.S. militarism. These local sociopolitical phenomena reveal how military-colonial power operates not merely through external imposition but through complex interactions with existing social hierarchies and moral frameworks. Acknowledging local complicity does not diminish the more prominent and disruptive effects of U.S. military power exercised over base towns. Rather, it recognizes that secondary dynamics produce meaningful effects on local communities’ lives that deserve scholarly attention. However, pursuing such investigations demands careful reflection on the moral implications of examining internal dynamics, histories, and social realities that might otherwise remain obscured by focus on larger geopolitical factors. Scholars must, in addition, grapple with a fundamental ethical question 131 regarding communities already experiencing marginalization. Specifically, what constitutes an ethical approach to investigating internal sociopolitical and moral mechanisms that may sustain systems of exploitation under the condition of militarism and colonialism? The answer cannot be avoiding such investigations entirely, as this perpetuates incomplete understandings serving neither scholarship nor affected communities. In the case of the current thesis, I planned and eventually conducted the research and analysis from my position as a student in the Canadian academy. Initially conceived as ethnographic fieldwork with questionnaires distributed for women in Koza’s sex industry, my research method underwent a radical transformation upon my arrival in Okinawa in 2024. Through guidance from Okinawan scholars including Dr. Megumi Chibana, Dr. Ariko Ikehara, and feminist sociologist Rinda Katayani, I recognized how the questionnaire method would have imposed an extractive relationship, asking women in vulnerable, if not precarious, conditions to entrust their experiences to a distant researcher insulated from consequences. The shift to archival research at the Okinawa City Museum avoided the risk of extracting “pain narratives” from these women (Tuck & Yang, 2014, 813), while allowing for a systematic examination of public discourse that has partially shaped the structural conditions enabling the continued operations of sex industry in Okinawa. These methodological considerations, together with the ethical complexity of critically engaging with internal dynamics in militarized and colonialized contexts like Okinawa, underscore the critical importance of supporting local and Indigenous scholars conducting research on their own communities. Locally positioned researchers possess on-the-ground understanding of complex intersections between internal power dynamics and colonial contexts, enabling them to bridge gaps between academic analysis and community needs. Their work 132 ensures research serves meaningful social transformation rather than merely advancing scholarly careers. Furthermore, their embedded knowledge allows them to navigate sociocultural and political nuances and historical sensitivities that external researchers, regardless of linguistic competence or archival access, may inadvertently misinterpret or overlook. This is particularly crucial when examining topics like the sex industry, where layers of stigma, trauma, and ongoing community tensions require deep contextual understanding that transcends what can be gleaned from textual sources alone. Fundamentally, moving beyond extractive research paradigms requires fundamental shifts in how academic institutions value different forms of knowledge production. Universities must recognize community-based research as equally rigorous as traditional approaches, provide funding opportunities for collaborative models, and create publication venues prioritizing accessibility and community engagement over academic gatekeeping. In Okinawan studies specifically, this means elevating scholars who maintain deep community connections and engage in reciprocal research amplifying Okinawan voices within a field sometimes dominated by Western academia. During my fieldwork, conversations with Okinawan researchers revealed how locally grounded perspectives can illuminate dimensions of Okinawan experiences, both historically and concurrently, that external scholarship might overlook. Their insights, whether through formal publications or community engagement, demonstrate the value of sustained, place-based knowledge production that prioritizes long-term relationships and contextual understanding over extractive data collection. Supporting such work requires creating institutional spaces where diverse forms of scholarship are valued, funded, and disseminated. 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ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/okinawan-borderlands-history-u-s- occupation/docview/2781189055/se-2 144 Tanaka, Y. (2002). Japanese comfort women for the Allied occupation forces. In Japan's comfort women: Sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II and the U.S. occupation (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203302750. Tanji, M. (2006). The first wave. In Myths, protests, and struggles in Okinawa (pp. 53–76). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203016121 Toshiaki, F. (2003). Considering Okinawa as a frontier. In G.D. Hook, & R. Siddle (Eds.). Japan and Okinawa: Structure and subjectivity (pp. 21–38). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203222690 Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). Unbecoming claims: Pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 811– 818. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800414530265 Ueunten, W. I. (2010). Rising up from a sea of discontent: The 1970 Koza uprising in U.S.- occupied Okinawa. In S. Shigematsu, & K. L. Camacho (Eds.), Militarized currents (pp. 91–124). University of Minnesota Press. Untalan, C.Y. (2024). Beyond empire: Okinawa and the politics of American military bases in Japan. Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences, 5(2024), 62– 80. https://doi.org/10.1163/25903276-bja10056 Van Dijk, T. A. (2013). Discourse and ideology. In Van Dijk, T. A. (Ed.) Discourse studies: A multidisciplinary introduction. SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446289068 Wakabayashi, C. 若林千代. (2015). Jīpu to sajin ジープと砂塵. Yūshisha 有志舎. Wakimoto, T. 脇本利紀. (2022). Beigun tōchika no Okinawa ni okeru zeisei to zeimugyōsei: 145 Ryūkyū seifuhen “zeisei hakusho” (1961nen 11gatsu) no igi米軍統治下の沖縄における税制と税務行政: 琉球政府編「税制白書」（1961年 11 月）の意義. Keizai Shūshi 経済集志, 91(3), 35–47. 146 Appendices The appendix contains the reference information of all the newspaper articles used for analytical purposes but not cited as examples in the body of the thesis. Appendix A Chūbu Jōhō. (1957, November 9). Chiwa kenka de tonari kinjo meiwaku, jūtakugai ni tokushu fujin habikoru, seishōnen ni akueikyō o ataeru 痴話喧嘩で隣り近所迷惑、住宅街に特殊婦人はびこる、青少年に悪影響を與える [Morning edition, p.1]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1956, July 13). Kozashi ni ofurimitto no keikoku, bōshisaku ni gaishō shimedashi e コザ市にオフリミツトの警告、防止策に街娼締出しへ [Morning edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1956, August 10). Himei ageru kichi no machi悲鳴あげる基地の街 [Evening edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1958, March 12). Tokushu fujin ga gosennin, zentō no gakkō shūhen dake demo 特殊婦 人が五千人、全島の学校周辺だけでも [Evening edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1958, March 12). Fueru neon, marude Amerika, yoru no sentādōri ふえるネオン、まるでアメリカ、夜のセンター通り [Morning edition, p.6]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. 147 ——— (1959, November 12). Kichi no jokyū-beya (2) Hidarimae ni naru tokuingai, “nurete ni awa” wa sūnen mae no hanashi, warui shirinagaramo kanri baishun基地の女給部屋 （2）左前になる特飲街、”濡手に粟”は数年前の話、悪い知りながらも管理賣 春 [Evening edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1959, November 18). Kichi no jokyū-beya (7) Jokyū no kōdō o kanshi, gaishutsu kaisū no chekku de pinhane, kōmyō-ka suru kanri baishun 基地の女給部屋（7）女給 の行動を監視、外出回数のチェックでピンハネ、巧妙化する管理賣春 [Evening edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet”, Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1959, November 19). Kichi no jokyū-beya (8) “Yoru no chō” ni sūki na unmei, sandantobi de gōka na seikatsu e aware na matsuro o tadoru haisha mo基地の女給部屋 （8）“夜の蝶”に数奇な運命、三段跳で豪華な生活へ哀れな末路を辿る敗者も [Evening edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1960, August 5). Sozoro aruki (40) Koza, kichi no naka no kichi no machi, shōten/bā/shitsuya ga zurari そぞろ歩る記(40)コザ、基地の中の基地のまち、商 店・バー・質屋がずらり [Evening edition, p.4]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1961, January 24). Chūbu no ofurimittsu senpū, Koza de sudeni jūrokken, bā-kumiai, 148 taisaku ni ugoku 中部のオフリミッツ旋風、コザですでに十六軒、バー組合、対策 に動く [Evening edition, p.4]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1961, February 9). Kichi no machikado, nomiya mo jinshubetsu, ofurimittsu ni hiyahiya 基地の街角 飲み屋も人種別、オフリミッツにひやひや [Morning edition, p.6]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1961, April 27). Kichi no machikado, MP no katsuyaku butai, gunmin kyōdō patorōru 基地の街角 MPの活躍舞台、軍民共同でパトロール [Morning edition, p.6]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1962, May 21). Raosu shutsudō de kyakuashi heru, natsu jikan mo sappari, chūbu kanrakugai “kinchō” no kanwa machi ラオス出動で客足へる、夏時間もさっぱり、 中部歓楽街“緊張”の緩和待ち [Evening edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1962, August 5). Okinawa no tabi kamera fūdoki (56) Koza-shi, kakkizuku kichi no machi 沖縄の旅カメラ風土記 (56) コザ市、活気づく基地の町 [Evening edition, p. 2]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1962, August 8). Yaejima no tōri o hosō 八重島の通りを舗装 [Morning edition, p.6]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1969, January 3). Kokujinhei ga bōkō, hosutesu gonan黒人兵が暴行、ホステスご難 [Morning edition, p.11]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. 149 ——— (1970, January 23). Awaya shōtotsu sunzen, kichi kankei gyōsha, piketai ni ba koe ya tōseki, dai ni gēto あわや衝突寸前、基地関係業者、ピケ隊にば声や投石、第２ゲ ート [Morning edition, p.9]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1970, December 5). Anna bā konna bā Michikusa mama Yūko san あんなバーこんな バーみち草 ママ 侑子さん [Evening edition, p.4]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1971, June 26). Anna bā konna bā Arabian Naito manējā Iha Hiroshi あんなバーこん なバー アラビアン・ナイト マネージャー伊波博 [Evening edition, p.4]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1971, July 17). Anna bā konna bā mama Motome Kumiko あんなバーこんなバー マ マ 求久美子 [Evening edition, p.4]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1971, July 17). Anna bā konna bā mama Mitsuko san あんなバーこんなバー ママ 光子さん [Evening edition, p.4]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1971, August 21). Anna bā konna bā mama san dairi Moromikawa Junko あんなバー こんなバー ママさん代理 諸見川純子 [Evening edition, p.4]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1971, December 3). Baibōhō wa shikō sareta ga, tokushu fujin chūbu shūchū, kichi aru ga yue ni 売防法は施行されたが、特殊婦人中部集中、基地あるがゆえに [Morning 150 edition, p.9]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. Ryūkyū Shinpō. (1956, September 9). Koza o mita mama kiita mama (ichi) kanemochi ga shichiya kayoi コザを見たまま聞いたまま（一）金持ちが質屋通い [Morning edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1956, September 15). Koza o mita mama kiita mama (go) ninen mae kara tachiiri kinshi, muragaru sanbyaku no gaishō コザを見たまま聞いたまま（五）二年前から 立入禁止、むらがる 300 の街娼 [Morning edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1956, September 17). Koza o mita mama kiita mama (nana) gure dashita konketsu jidō, bunkyōkyoku wa musaku no saku de taiō コザを見たまま聞いたまま（七）ぐれ出した混血児童、文教局は無策の策で対応 [Morning edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1956, September 18). Koza o mita mama kiita mama (hachi) hōki sokonoke de hanjō, ikiteiru bingo hausu コザを見たまま聞いたまま（八）法規ソコノケで繁昌、生き ているビンゴハウス [Morning edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1956, September 19). Koza o mita mama kiita mama (kyū) haku/koku sokai, chi no ame de kizuita nawabari, seito no mae de haji o kaita onnakyōshi コザを見たまま聞いたま ま（九）白・黒租界、血の雨で築いた縄張り、生徒の前で恥をかいた女教師 [Morning edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History 151 “Histreet”, Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1956, September 21). Koza o mita mama kiita mama (jūichi) hausu boi, sentaku no tsukigime roppyaku en nari, ikkatsu keiyaku no oshibore kasegu コザを見たまま聞いた まま（十一）ハウス・ボイ、洗濯の月ぎめ六百円也、一括契約のおしぼれかせぐ [Morning edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1956, September 24). Koza o mita mama kiita mama (jūni) kichi no sutairu, bijin de nakunatta hattōshin, yo wa kontora basu jidai コザを見たまま聞いたまま（十二）基 地のスタイル、美人でなくなった八頭身、世はコントラ・バス時代 [Morning edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1956, September 25). Koza o mita mama kiita mama (jūsan) onri ichizoku, te nabe sagetemo, mei jitsu tomo ni beiryū shinzen コザを見たまま聞いたまま（十三）オン リ一族、手なべさげても、名実共に米琉親善 [Morning edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1956, September 25). Koza o mita mama kiita mama (jūgo) nijū en takushī, abureta takushi ichigun, Naha Koza kan tatta no nijū en コザを見たまま聞いたまま（十五） ２０円タクシー、あぶれたタクシ一群、那覇コザ間タッタの２０円 [Morning edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1961, January 7). Kichi keizai (5) fūzoku eigyō, gyōsha ni karu MP no me, ofurimittsu 152 bōshi ni kenmei 基地経済（５）風俗営業、業者にかる MP の目、オフリミッツ防 止に懸命 [Morning edition, p.2]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1962, May 24). Kyō kara shinjō chōsa, A sain, jokyū no shashin daichō tsukuru きょう から身上調査、A サイン、女給の写真台帳作る [Morning edition, p.7]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1969, March 1). Beigun ga sairuidan nagekomu, Koza-shi no bā gai daikonran 米軍が 催涙弾投げ込む、コザ市のバー街大混乱 [Morning edition, p.7]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1970, June 25). Hi no me o mita baishun bōshihō, sono mondaiten to taisaku (7) kakeru kinrō iyoku, hōmō kuguri jiyū baishun ni hashiru? tokushu fujin no kōsei ni 日の 目を見た売春防止法、その問題点と対策（７）欠ける勤労意欲、法網くぐり自由 売春に走る？特殊婦人の更生２ [Evening edition, p.3]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1971, October 30). Anna bā konna bā Gurando Ōsaka mama Teruya Aiko-san あんな バーこんなバーグランド大阪 ママ照屋愛子さん [Evening edition, p.4]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1971, December 24). Wakai josei no tenraku bōshi ga taisetsu, Misato baishunfu mondai kondankai hiraku 若い女性の転落防止が大切、美里売春婦問題懇談会開く [Morning edition, p.7]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. 153 ——— (1972, February 12). Anna bā konna bā Sabanna mama Yuriko-san あんなバーこんな バーサバンナ ママユリ子さん [Evening edition, p.4]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1972, April 27). Tokushu fujin wa 1831nin, Koza-shi ga jittai chōsa, kanri baishun gyōsha wa 170nin, kojin baishun fueru keikō ni 特殊婦人は１８３１人、コザ市が実態調査、管理売春業者は１７０人、個人売春ふえる傾向に [Morning edition, p.8]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan. ——— (1972, May 26). Yoru no "Yoshiwara," baishun no jittai saguru, baibōhō shikō de kyaku heru, kōsei hogosaku mo naku seikatsu mo kurushii, tokushu fujin wa taihan ga moguri baishun 夜の「吉原」、売春の実態探る、売防法施行で客減る、更生保護策もな く生活も苦しい、特殊婦人は大半がもぐり売春 [Morning edition, p.9]. Okinawa City Museum of Postwar Culture and History “Histreet,” Okinawa City, Japan.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Asian Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Yi, Christina
Yoshimizu, Ayaka
Between im/morality : an analysis of moral discourses on prostitutes in Okinawan newspaper articles, 1956-1972
Text