Open Collections

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 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.