الملخص
What can media representations of male prostitutes in Japan during the Allied Occupation (1945-1952) tell historians about the postwar period? This paper explores male sex workers in the wake of Japan’s World War II defeat to revise male-female centered historiographies of this seven-year period. While the population of male prostitutes remained stable—if not decreased—from before to after 1945, they became subjects of psychiatric case studies and popular magazine articles as unique symbols of postwar societal chaos. 1 Though Japanese lives changed dramatically after August 15, 1945, journalists and psychiatrists projected society’s “emasculation” and collapsing social norms onto male sex workers who had been part of society long before World War II began. This paper argues that postwar Japan lingered between tensions of real and perceived social instability, where psychiatrists and journalists alike wrote disorder, emasculation, and chaos into their depictions of male sex workers’ bodies.