Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific

9. On Romantic Love and Military Violence: Transpacific Imperialism and U.S.–Japan Complicity

205 9 On Romantic Love and MilitaryViolence Transpacific Imperialism and U.S.–Japan Complicity Naoki Sakai From the perspective of colonialism, the international encounter between individuals is first brought about by the presence of the colonizing military . It is normally expected that the relationship between the dominating and the dominated ought to be governed by military administration and technology. In the twentieth century, colonial governance required new systems of administration, and the contact between individuals brought about by colonial rule occurred more and more within a militaristic administration , as the sphere of the military has become increasingly multilateral . That is to say that the system of total war was implemented into all spheres of citizens’ lives concomitant with the expansion of the military. In regimes in which militaristic dominance is put into practice, contact between soldiers of the colonizing military and residents of the colonized territory is most frequently symbolized by the model of sexual encounter. Social relations between the colonial military and the local population are, in due course, administered through the increasingly rationalized management of sexual encounters. The military comfort station system1 introduced by the Japanese Navy and Army can be seen as an instance of this kind of rationality carried to its natural conclusion. Under this administrative system, an extensive structure of hygiene and welfare management was installed in order to control the points of contact between natives and soldiers, and organized efforts were made to ensure that the lives of the soldiers were nurtured and controlled. In other words, the military system of the colonized territories, too, was integrated into the totalitarianism of the suzerain state via biopolitics. This is why the issue of comfort women cannot be thought 206 · NAOKI SAKAI of as particular to Japanese imperial nationalism. In view of the fact that the comfort station system survived, albeit in a more privatized and voluntaristic form, after the demise of the Japanese Empire, one cannot overlook the regimes of the trans-Pacific security rule that lie at the foundation of the neocolonial relationships between the United States and countries like Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea in post–World War II East Asia. As is more and more widely known, many aspects of the Japanese comfort station system were adopted and conserved in the U.S. military’s management in Asia. I suspect that, as Chalmers Johnson recently observed,2 the U.S. international strategy is supported by a network of military bases, not only in East Asia, but also on a worldwide scale; and that the U.S. military’s dominance inherited many aspects of the system of colonial dominance from the Japanese Empire. Evidently, Japanese imperialism was grafted onto American imperialism, and we will remain enslaved to the legacies of past colonialisms in East Asia unless we are fully aware of the continuity between Japanese and the U.S. colonialisms and the complicity of the postwar Japanese particularism and American universalism.3 It is best, almost without exception, to consider the plot of commercial movies that portray international love affairs between characters of differing nationalities, ethnicities, or races as allegories of diplomacy or international politics, and undoubtedly this truism derives its legitimacy from the actuality of U.S. postwar military dominance. Parallel to the scenario of commercial films that portray international love and romance is the dramaturgy that unfolds within the sex industry, which is intertwined with various military facilities, and the “intimate” relationships consummated there between individuals. Perhaps it is more precise to say that, within the overt framework of man as the dominating and woman as the dominated, an international relationship of domination and subordination acquires an extremely intensive symbolization through the trope of romantic love because the latent scenario that is conveyed is the confirmation of the explicit supermasculinity of the colonizing man, on the one hand, and of the implicit demasculinization of the colonized man, on the other. Furthermore, the fact that we rarely encounter a reverse framework in which a woman dominates and a man is dominated suggests that, normally, nationalism does not put up with such an arrangement of gender roles. It follows that, in respect to the forms of desire, nationalism inevitably presents itself as an ideology of homosociality. ON ROMANTIC LOVE AND MILITARY VIOLENCE · 207 In the general scenario of romantic love, the woman plays the phallic role that supports the ethnic, racial, or national identity of the male, or the dominator...