Pan-pan girls: Humiliating liberation in postwar Japanese literature

The relationship between gender and militarism has become an important subject for feminists globally in recent years. In particular, numerous studies exist on the sexual violence of women that seems to go hand-in-hand with militarism and war. The 'comfort women' of the Japanese military during the Pacific War is a case in point; as the victims of military, colonial, and gender violence, the comfort women seem to embody the harrowing brutality that is mobilised when hierarchical colonial relations are expressed through another such hierarchical relation - that of gender. Less discussed in this context, however, is the case of the so-called pan-pan girls. This is the derogatory term for the street prostitutes who served the soldiers of the Allied forces, mostly from the USA, during the occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952, and who sometimes became the local girlfriends of GIs. Extending our consideration of military apparatuses and gender hierarchies to the pan-pan girls, I hope to add to the existing work on comfort women and the sexual exploitation of women by the military in postwar Japan. In particular, I draw attention to how 'pan-pan girls' resist being reduced to pure signs of 'victim' or 'sacrifice,' given that they embody complex articulations of interracial desire, material ambition and opportunism, as well as victimhood.