Organizer: Barbara J. Brooks, City University of New York
Chair: Michael T. Tsin, Columbia University
Discussant: Sheldon Garon, Princeton University
This panel draws together specialists of China, Japan, the United States, and Russia to look at the presence and significance of "imperial prostitution" in China—that is, we will examine women from Great Power countries in sex work and related business enterprises prior to 1949. The papers demonstrate a range of factors drawing these marginal women to China, from the abject destitution and stateless situation of the Russians to a wide range of relative opportunities for some Japanese and Americans. Imperial, even entrepreneurial, prostitutes and women in entertainment businesses were not just confined to the obvious treaty ports. Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese women, all Japanese imperial subjects, could be found plying their trades in local areas. Such diverse foreign women were nevertheless all victims of sexual exploitation and oppression within the semi-colonial culture and economy of China. At the same time, they, too, could share in imperialist status, most explicitly when they derived benefits from extraterritoriality by virtue of their national registration. This panel, in opening up for analysis critical aspects of margin and gender among the imperialists, points the way to new understanding of how categories such as imperialist and native, or colonizer and colonized, were often subverted in everyday practices and ordinary lives.
Marcia R. Ristaino, Library of Congress
Key issues in this study of White Russian prostitution in Shanghai are: the extent of prostitution during the period from 1920 until 1949; where the Russian girls came from; how and why they became involved in prostitution; and the different kinds of activities involving prostitution, including Russian dancing partners, masseuses, taxi dancers, the brothels, and street solicitation. Estimates of the size and the circumstances of participation in each of these categories is presented.
Also examined are the organizations established to monitor, help, and rehabilitate the Russian prostitute. A key one was the Door of Hope which dealt with maladies that accompanied the profession such as venereal disease, alcoholism, and drug addiction. Russian prostitution became a serious social problem to the degree that the League of Nations sponsored a Committee of Inquiry to measure and evaluate the situation. To carry out their task, members of this Committee interviewed the whole panorama of official Shanghai: Western, Chinese, and Japanese—police, political leaders, and relief officials—raising questions through both questionnaires and interviews about the nature and extent of Russian prostitution. This paper uses that Committee material, and other primary and secondary sources, as well as interview material from former Russian residents of Shanghai who could comment from their observations.
Examination is made of the official policies, their changes, and their impact over the time period considered. Attention focuses on the attitudes of various nationalities towards prostitution in multi-national Shanghai and the involvement of different population sectors with the various categories of prostitution. Finally, consideration is given as to whether Shanghai had an active White slave trade in Russian prostitutes.
Mark Driscoll, Cornell University
This paper draws on my research of the Japanese colonial newspapers in Seoul and Dairen to discuss representations of sex workers in the 1910s and early 20s. Employing Foucaultian and Marxist-feminist theory, I explore the ways in which women sex workers were one part of a regime of the commodification of women’s bodies that both tragically exploited even as it produced multiple social positions for Japanese women in colonial capitalism. These positions included both the services directly supporting sex workers and geisha including hairdressers and cosmetic distributors, in addition to the striking presence of women indirectly involved with the work of sex including small business owners, police, lawyers, and private detectives. In Dairen especially, Japanese women were both exchanged as commodities as well as operating as active agents of capital who bought in order to sell. It has been frequently argued that Japanese women sex workers operated as the first wave of Japanese imperialism, however the surplus from their work produced contradictory effects that need to be historically decoded.
Eileen P. Scully, Princeton University
During a Shanghai stop-over in his 1907 tour of East Asia, Secretary of War Taft complained that the rapid influx of Americans into China during the previous decade had as one of its unfortunate byproducts a situation where "American woman meant prostitute," and visiting the red light district was widely characterized as "going to America." The moral dilemmas prostitution poses for the historian tend to obscure the ways in which "American Girls" operated as a trademark, though not legally sanctioned, nonetheless produced, reproduced, appropriated and resisted. Indeed, if we were talking about flour, kerosene, or cigarettes, we would undoubtedly have much less trouble recognizing this distinct product identification and market niche as a tremendous accomplishment on somebody’s part, and as one of the few real entrepreneurial successes among Americans in the so-called "China Market."
This paper examines the arrival and entrepreneurial successes of the "American Girl" in Chinese treaty ports, Shanghai most particularly, into the twentieth century. European and American women in 19th-century Shanghai and Hong Kong achieved elite status in the prostitution hierarchy through the combination of: (1) a relatively small, disproportionately male foreign population; (2) omnipresent multi-national transients; (3) pervasive racialized sexual preferences and prohibitions; (4) legally sanctioned foreign colonial privileges; (5) their own energies and accomplishments. Geographical proximity, increasingly available and cheap transportation modes, the success in Shanghai of a perceived "American style" of prostitution, and the institutional weakness of the U.S. consular service, gave American women a competitive advantage over European colleagues, and they enjoyed greater access to, and purchase within, this sexual labor aristocracy.
Barbara J. Brooks, City University of New York
Into the 1920s, the comparatively high ratio of women to men among Japanese sojourners in China (especially the Northeast) helped produce a gendered colonial culture quite distinctive in the history of comparative colonialism. This paper will demonstrate and problematize this dynamic through examination of the figure of the jôshigun. Literally, the term meant "female troops," an allusion to female warriors of classical China, but it became a popular Japanese term for female imperial subjects working in the sex trades and related businesses in the treaty ports and remote areas of northern China. Colonial journals such as Seoul’s Chôsen oyobi Manshû celebrated these women as cultural and economic pioneers of Japanese expansion, while Chinese and Korean critics labeled Japanese prostitution an "overseas development policy." While Japanese jôshigun topped the hierarchy of the empire’s sex workers, the term also implicitly embraced Japan’s female colonial subjects, women from Korea and Taiwan, who also came to China to ply these trades (the Taiwanese notably in Fujian). While Japanese regulation and officialdom facilitated this movement of women and their sexual exploitation, the presence and historical agency of the jôshigun themselves often subverted multiple boundaries of prescribed behaviors—gendered, imperialist, ethnic, even economic—that prevailed throughout the Japanese empire.