The U.S. Occupation censored Taijiro Tamura's 1947 story "The Life of an Alluring Woman" (Shunpu den) for describing Korean prostitutes in a war zone. The Civil Information and Education Section with censorship power decided that identifying the nationality of the prostitutes constituted "criticism" of that nation.
U.S. censors ordered Korean references expunged but not the description of prostitutes in a war zone — not initially anyway. They knew soldiers needed sex. "Whoring" — to use the word the New York cultural icon Lincoln Kirstein, for one, employed in one of his poems about his experience in World War II — was standard fare for them. The Japanese military at one time had done a study showing that soldiers in a war zone had a particularly high output of adrenalin.
In this regard, the Relaxation and Amusement Association and the network of "special comfort stations" under it that the Japanese government worked to set up for the occupying soldiers in the very month the nation surrendered, August 1945, which John Dower describes in "Embracing Defeat" (1999), may elicit a sneer: Look how someone with a bad conscience behaves!
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