This chapter examines the gender politics at play in the cinematic imagination of post- Occupation Japan through the analysis of the controversial film Akasen kichi (Red-Light Bases, Taniguchi Senkichi, 1953). To this end, it focuses on the film’s depiction of the panpan sex worker and the returned soldier—arguably the most symbolic figures of early postwar Japan—and their interactions with other members of the community in a town marked by the presence of an American military base. It argues that, while Taniguchi’s film critically depicts the complex power dynamics at play in this sexual “contact zone,” it also works to disavow Japanese men’s responsibility for the war by translocating their moral accountability and trauma onto “fallen” women and the Occupation.

Introduction

In a 1990 keynote address, Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept of “contact zones,” which she defined as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths” (Pratt 1991, 34). Since then, the term has been adopted and developed across the humanities, and especially in postcolonial studies, feminist theory and critical race theory. The notion of a contact zone encourages thinking beyond the dichotomy of vanquisher versus victim and rejecting the image of a community as a homogeneous entity. It calls attention to multi-directional and multi-layered discourses that co-exist in tension with each other. A contact zone is a creative space in flux where instances of bilingualism, miscomprehension, parody, denunciation and appropriation take place under vernacular and imposed forms of expression as well as under new hybrid forms of communication (Pratt 1991, 1992).

For its potential to unearth disregarded voices and to problematize what may appear as absolute positions of domination and subordination, Pratt’s concept has been applied to the study of interactions of Japanese subjects, as both colonizers and colonized (Ballantyne and Burton 2005; Tanaka and Funayama 2011; Kramm 2017). In his study of prostitution under the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952), Robert Kramm emphasizes both conflict and cooperation between and among Japanese and American institutions and individuals when he argues that prostitution and its regulation constituted a contact zone “for both occupiers and occupied to negotiate, reproduce, but occasionally also undermine the asymmetric power relations between and among them” (2017, 22–23).