These sentimentalized images of “women of the dark” left a great deal unsaid, and necessarily so; for a great part of the prostitute’s trade involved catering to the huge army of occupation. The sexual implications of having to accommodate hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen had been terrifying, especially to those who were aware of the rapacity their own forces had exhibited elsewhere as well as of the huge numbers of non-Japanese women who had been forced to serve the imperial troops as ianfu or “comfort women.”
