Panpan girls
lead=yes, also pom-pom or pansuke, were Japanese women who were either coerced or voluntarily engaged in sex work with Allied soldiers during the occupation of Japan. As the government set up unlicensed brothels, some women engaged in sex work to secure everyday officially provided necessities. girls were generally looked down upon by Japanese men, and cultural renditions of girls have seen the phenomenon as a challenge to masculine identity. The reality of girls is likely different from their cultural identity; since the end of the occupation, the term has shifted somewhat in understanding.
Definition
According to film historian David A Conrad, the term originates from a term Japanese and American soldiers brought from the southern Pacific. Contemporaneously, girls were considered a form of sex worker or escort. Sometimes the term was used to imply an exclusivity to the relationship or arrangement between the woman and the soldier, while some authors used it to refer to all kinds of sex workers, including those working in clubs and brothels. Those who engaged in private sex work were often not coerced into any vertical structure by pimps or police because they formed self-defence groups. Women who worked only for Americans were called, women who had one client were referred to as only, while women with multiple clients were called butterfly.History
Following Imperial Japan's surrender at the end of the Second World War, but before the arrival of the Allied occupation forces, the interim Japanese government—with the help of police—set up a series of officially sanctioned, but unlicensed, brothels out of anxiety that the military forces would commit mass rape. Due to the extreme reluctance of women to engage in sex work, the police of Hiroshima Prefecture provided women who signed up with guaranteed daily provisions of beef, rice, sugar, and cooking oil.Following the American arrival in Japan, the women who were sex workers or hung around with Allied soldiers were viewed pejoratively by Japanese men. A contemporary public intellectual,, wrote in the 1950s that soldiers referred to girls and sex workers as "yellow stool". According to scholar Masakazu Tanaka, this language of Japanese men describing Japanese women who worked for Allied soldiers at cabarets, clubs, and brothels as 'public toilets' was created as an image of disgust by Japanese men who felt feminised by the loss of the War. girls would often escort soldiers, wearing high heels and dancing to American music.
After the occupation, some women who entered relationships with non-Japanese men voluntarily took a different, more accepting attitude towards the term ; with changing social mores around sex, a term referring to a black panpan girl was coined by Japanese women who dated black men. The term has also been used disparagingly by Japanese men in hip-hop communities to refer to Japanese women who have a black boyfriend.
Culture
Most cultural renditions of girls have common signifiers of appearance, i.e., lipstick, perfume, chewing gum, and speaking a hybrid of Japanese and English. Despite the image of them as hyper-sexual, Rumi Sakamoto argues that many existing photographs of them don't frame them as such, and that they were likely just young women with more access to commercial goods than others.To Andrea Mendoza, the visibility of Allied soldiers walking around with Japanese girls established a metaphor of Western masculinity against an imagined feminine Japan. In Ango Sakaguchis short stories, "One Woman and the War" and its sequel, the sexual experience of a woman is used as a prism to re-create a sense of Japanese masculine identity at the expense of the protagonist's agency. Similarly she criticises Taijiro Tamuras Gate of Flesh for reinforcing the idea of girls as a kind of "double-defeat". East Asian scholar Ian Buruma identifies the absence of girls in the film Drunken Angel to be conspicuous, and an intentional shift of focus away from western intrusion into Japanese life.