Panpan girls

Panpan girls (Japanese: パンパンガール, Hepburn: panpan gāru), also pom-pom (パンパン), or pansuke (パン助)^[1] were Japanese women who were either coerced or voluntarily engaged in sex work with Allied soldiers during the occupation of Japan. As the government (with the aid of police) set up unlicensed brothels, some women engaged in sex work to secure everyday officially provided necessities. Panpan girls were generally looked down upon by Japanese men, and cultural renditions of panpan girls have seen the phenomenon as a challenge to masculine identity. The reality of panpan girls is likely different from their cultural identity; since the end of the occupation, the term has shifted somewhat in understanding.

According to film historian David Conrad, the term panpan originates from a term Japanese and American soldiers brought from the southern Pacific.^[2] Contemporaneously, panpan 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.^[3] Whereas other authors use it to refer to all kinds of sex workers, including those working in clubs and brothels.^[4] 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 yōpan, women who had one client were referred to as only (オンリー, onrī), while women with multiple clients were called butterfly.^[5]

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.^[6] Due to the extreme reluctance of women wanting to work for foreign soldiers, the police of Hiroshima Prefecture provided women who signed up with guaranteed daily provisions of beef, rice, sugar, and cooking oil.^[7]

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, Kanzaki Kiyoshi, wrote in the 1950s that soldiers referred to panpan 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 were feminised by the loss of the War. Panpan girls would often escort soldiers, wearing high heels and dancing to American music.^[8]

After the occupation, some women who entered relationships with non-Japanese men voluntarily took a different attitude towards the term panpan; with changing social mores around sex, a term referring to a black panpan girl (ブラパン, burapan) was coined by Japanese women who dated black men.^[9] The term burapan has also been used disparagingly by Japanese men in hip-hop communities to refer to Japanese women who have a black boyfriend.^[1]

Most cultural renditions of panpan 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.^[10]

To Andrea Mendoza, the visibility of Allied soldiers walking around with Japanese girls established a metaphor of Western masculinity against an imagined feminine Japan.^[11] In Ango Sakaguchi's short stories, "One Woman and the War" and its sequel, the sexual experience of a woman (identified as an ex-streetwalker) is used as a prism to re-create a sense of Japanese masculine identity at the expense of the protagonist's agency.^[12] Similarly she criticises Taijiro Tamura's Gate of Flesh for reinforcing the idea of panpan girls as a kind of "double-defeat".^[13] East Asian scholar Ian Buruma identifies the absence of panpan girls in the film Drunken Angel (1948) to be conspicuous, and an intentional shift of focus away from western intrusion into Japanese life.^[14]

• Akasen
• Comfort women
• Geisha and prostitution
• Prostitution in Japan
• Rape during the occupation of Japan
• Recreation and Amusement Association
• War Brides Act

• Condry, Ian (2007). "Yellow B-Boys, Black Culture, and Hip-Hop in Japan: Toward a Transnational Cultural Politics of Race". Positions. 15 (3). Duke University Press: 637–671. doi:10.1215/10679847-2007-008. ISSN 1067-9847.
• Conrad, David A. (2022). Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan. McFarland & Co. ISBN 978-1-4766-8674-5.
• Lie, John (1997). "THE STATE AS PIMP: Prostitution and the Patriarchal State in Japan in the 1940s". The Sociological Quarterly. 38 (2): 251–263. doi:10.1111/j.1533-8525.1997.tb00476.x. ISSN 1533-8525. JSTOR 4120735.
• Mendoza, Andrea (2015). Bourdaghs, Michael; Long, Hoyt; Jackson, Reginald (eds.). "Pan Pan Girls and Transvestite Patriarchies: Performing and Recovering Masculinity in Post-1945 Literature and Film". Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies. 15: 181–191. doi:10.26812/pajls.v15i.1395. ISSN 1531-5533.
• Sakamoto, Rumo (2010). "Pan-pan Girls: Humiliating Liberation in Postwar Japanese Literature". Portal. 7 (2). Sydney. doi:10.5130/portal.v7i2.1515. ISSN 1449-2490.
• Tanaka, Masakazu (2004). "戦後日本の米兵と日本人売春婦 : もうひとつのグローバリゼーション" [American Soldiers and Japanese Prostitutes in Post–War Japan: Another Form of Globalization]. Globalization, Localization, and Japanese Studies in the Asia-Pacific Regio (in Japanese). Vol. 2. International Research Center for Japanese Studies. pp. 27–35. doi:10.15055/00001302.
• Tanaka, Yuki (2002). Selden, Mark (ed.). Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II and the US occupation. Asia's Transformations. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-203-30275-3.

• Buruma, Ian (19 November 2007). "Drunken Angel: The Spoils of War". Criterion Collection. Archived from the original on 15 February 2025. Retrieved 16 August 2025.

• Takeuchi, Michiko (2010). "PAN-PAN GIRLS PERFORMING AND RESISTING NEOCOLONIALISM(S) IN THE PACIFIC THEATER: U.S. Military Prostitution in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952". In Hohn, Maria; Moon, Seungsook (eds.). Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present. Duke University Press. pp. 78–108. doi:10.1515/9780822393283-007. ISBN 9780822393283.