Panpan: Streetwalking in Occupied Japan

This article explores sex markets in Occupied Japan. These operated under a legal regime distinct from traditional pleasure quarters and provided wage labor. There, streetwalkers, or panpan , had unprecedented control over their work. Many came from the middle class and formed women-led gangs that resembled criminal syndicates. The former especially concerned social scientists and mothers in postwar Japan. Calls to sanitize public space to protect Japanese children increasingly dominated public discourse about the U.S. military bases. By 1953 new regulations forced panpan into brothels where they lost the control over their labor they had enjoyed during the Occupation (1945–1952). This article also suggests that reactions to base prostitution in Occupied Japan paralleled those in the United States during the war.