“Or We Will Have to Break the Law”: Prostitutes’ Bodies, Gender, and Sexual Experiences in Japan’s “Self-Orientalist” Anti-Prostitution Law (1945–1967)

Abstract

At the end of the Second World War, Japan enacted the Anti-Prostitution Law (Baishun Bōshi Hō 売春防止法), declaring the complete abolition of the “public prostitution system” in 1956 as part of a broader national project to modernize the state, protect prostitutes’ rights, and reshape sexual morality. Yet the rhetoric of liberation, civilization and rehabilitation concealed a deeper reconfiguration of risk: sexual labor that had once been licensed and taxed became criminalized, pushing sex work underground and transforming women’s embodied experiences from social and geopolitical tensions into moral failures. Existing scholarship has underscored the role of the U.S. occupation in shaping the law and highlighted the tension between its proclaimed objective of protecting prostitutes and the new forms of marginalization it produced. Building on but moving beyond existing scholarship, this research revisits the prostitutes’ experiences from the overlooked lens of Japanese self-orientalism, which underpinned linear narrative of civilizing and modernizing the nation through the anti-prostitution discourse. This study reconstructs a layered picture of how law, transnational power, and ideology intersected with women’s lived realities in postwar Japan, thus moving beyond the nation-state paradigm and the hegemonic Western-centric interpretations of Japan’s postwar gender governance.