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Chapter 1 presents a genealogy of sexual labor in Japan from licensed prostitution and the so-called “comfort woman” system of sexual slavery in the imperial period, through the state-organized system of prostitution for the Allied forces in the immediate postwar, and to the full-fledged emergence of independent streetwalkers thereafter. It links protest against private prostitution in the interwar period to aversion toward the streetwalker in the postwar period through an examination of Tosaka Jun’s Japanese Ideology. There, he defined Japanism as the symbolic communion between the family and state and showed how Japanists attacked private prostitution for purportedly interfering with the integrity of both. What was at stake was the ability of a budding middle class to manage the reproduction of labor power for the biopolitical state. Through Tosaka, this chapter delineates a mechanism of social defence amongst the middle class that targeted life thought to be unintelligible to the state such as the streetwalker and her mixed-race offspring. Further, it shows how this occurred through cultural productions such as anti-base reportage that focused obsessively on the figure of the streetwalker.

Chapter 2 gives a brief biopolitical prehistory to Okinawa. From the perspective of economic development, it was not treated like a national or colonial territory by the Japanese state, but ambiguously suspended in between both. This foregrounded the sexual politics surrounding the U.S. military in Okinawa because unlike mainland Japan, there was no development of a middle class equipped to reject the formation of a sex industry in base towns on the basis of an established ethno-nationalism. Hence, in contrast to the symbolic structure of Japanism presented in Chapter 1, this chapter positions Okinawa’s alegality in terms of Benjamin’s notion of allegory, or that which constantly fails communion with a totality. It argues that debates surrounding the establishment of a sex industry were driven by the sheer fear of exclusion from the biopolitical order, not by an identification with it, and were subsequently absent of discourses lamenting the racial contamination of the population. It traces the omnipresence of this fear through the Okinawan reception of so-called “comfort women” during the war, the experience of sexual violence and exploitation in the immediate postwar, and the formation of the sex industry after the “reverse course” of occupation in 1949.

Chapter 8 reads Andrew X. Pham’s grief-stricken memoir Catfish and Mandala as an exposé of sordid friendly attachment that ultimately detaches him from Vietnam. His memoir uncovers the secret family business that funded their escape from Vietnam after the war: a brothel that served American GIs. Upon his return to Vietnam, Pham finds himself indicted as a profiteer of the war. This chapter reads Pham’s horror at this order of friendly alliance against two subsequent literary returns to Vietnam, in which he finds healing modes of writing from a post–Cold War vantage point. These later works offer new modes of alliance: Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, a translation of the diaries of a North Vietnamese Army doctor and Under the Eaves of Heaven, an elegiac rendering of his father’s past in Vietnam—both products of active collaboration with his father.