{{Short description|Post–War Japanese sex worker}} {{Italic title|string=Panpan}} {{Use British English|date=August 2025}} {{Use dmy dates|date=August 2025}}

[[File:Pom-pom girls.png|alt=A woman stands in a tunnel smoking, another woman squats beside her.|thumb|328x328px|{{translit|ja|Panpan}} girls]]

{{nihongo|lead=yes|'''''Panpan'' girls'''|パンパンガール|panpan gāru}}, also {{nihongo|'''''pom-pom'''''|パンパン}} or {{nihongo|'''''pansuke'''''|パン助}},{{sfn|Condry|2007|p=656}} 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. {{translit|ja|Panpan}} girls were generally looked down upon by Japanese men, and cultural renditions of {{translit|ja|panpan}} girls have seen the phenomenon as a challenge to masculine identity. The reality of {{translit|ja|panpan}} 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 {{translit|ja|panpan}} originates from a term Japanese and American soldiers brought from the southern Pacific.{{sfn|Conrad|2022|p=57}} Contemporaneously, {{translit|ja|panpan}} girls were considered a form of [[sex worker]] or [[call girl|escort]]. Sometimes the term was used to imply an exclusivity to the relationship or arrangement between the woman and the soldier,{{sfn|Tanaka|2004|pp=29–31}} while some authors used it to refer to all kinds of sex workers, including those working in clubs and brothels.{{sfn|Mendoza|2015|p=182}} 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 {{translit|ja|yōpan}}, women who had one client were referred to as {{nihongo|only|オンリー|onrī}}, while women with multiple clients were called butterfly.{{sfn|Lie|1997|p=258}}

== History == Following Imperial Japan's surrender at the end of the [[Second World War]], but before the arrival of [[Occupation of Japan|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.{{sfn|Tanaka|2002|p=133}} 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.{{sfn|Tanaka|2002|p=136}}

[[File:A Japan-sponsered dance is given at "Oasis of Ginza" Hall - crop.png|alt=Three Allied servicemen talk to three Japanese women with varying looks of discomfort.|thumb|Japanese women employed to mix with Allied servicemen.]]

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, {{ill|Kanzaki Kiyoshi|ja|神崎清}}, wrote in the 1950s that soldiers referred to {{translit|ja|panpan}} girls and sex workers as "yellow [[human faeces|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 [[Feminisation (sociology)|feminised]] by the loss of the War. {{translit|ja|Panpan}} girls would often escort soldiers, wearing high heels and dancing to American music.{{sfn|Tanaka|2004|pp=28–31}}

After the occupation, some women who entered relationships with non-Japanese men voluntarily took a different, more accepting attitude towards the term {{translit|ja|panpan}}; with changing social mores around sex, a term referring to a {{nihongo|black ''panpan'' girl|ブラパン|burapan}} was coined by Japanese women who dated black men.{{sfn|Tanaka|2004|p=34}} The term {{translit|ja|burapan}} has also been used disparagingly by Japanese men in [[Japanese hip-hop|hip-hop communities]] to refer to Japanese women who have a black boyfriend.{{sfn|Condry|2007|p=656}}

== Culture == Most cultural renditions of {{translit|ja|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.{{sfn|Sakamoto|2010|pp=4–6}}

To Andrea Mendoza, the visibility of Allied soldiers walking around with Japanese girls established a metaphor of Western masculinity against an imagined feminine Japan.{{sfn|Mendoza|2015|p=184}} 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.{{sfn|Mendoza|2015|pp=185–188}} Similarly she criticises [[Taijiro Tamura]]{{'}}s ''[[Gate of Flesh (novel)|Gate of Flesh]]'' for reinforcing the idea of {{translit|ja|panpan}} girls as a kind of "double-defeat".{{sfn|Mendoza|2015|p=190}} East Asian scholar [[Ian Buruma]] identifies the absence of {{translit|ja|panpan}} girls in the film ''[[Drunken Angel]]'' (1948) to be conspicuous, and an intentional shift of focus away from western intrusion into Japanese life.{{sfn|Buruma|2007}}

== See also ==

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

== References == === Citations === {{reflist}} {{refbegin|30em}}

{{refend}}

=== Bibliography === ==== Books and articles ==== * <!-- Condry 2007 --> {{Cite journal |last=Condry |first=Ian |title=Yellow B-Boys, Black Culture, and Hip-Hop in Japan: Toward a Transnational Cultural Politics of Race |year=2007 |journal=Positions |volume=15 |number=3 |publisher=[[Duke University Press]] |doi=10.1215/10679847-2007-008 |issn=1067-9847 |pages=637–671}} * <!-- Conrad 2022 --> {{Cite book |last=Conrad |first=David A. |title=Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan |publisher=McFarland & Co. |year=2022 |isbn=978-1-4766-8674-5}} * <!-- Lie 1997 --> {{Cite journal |last=Lie |first=John |title=THE STATE AS PIMP: Prostitution and the Patriarchal State in Japan in the 1940s |year=1997 |volume=38 |number=2 |journal=[[The Sociological Quarterly]] |jstor=4120735 |doi=10.1111/j.1533-8525.1997.tb00476.x |issn=1533-8525 |pages=251–263}} * <!-- Mendoza 2015 --> {{Cite journal |last=Mendoza |first=Andrea |title=Pan Pan Girls and Transvestite Patriarchies: Performing and Recovering Masculinity in Post-1945 Literature and Film |year=2015 |journal=Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies |volume=15 |editor-last1=Bourdaghs |editor-first1=Michael |editor-last2=Long |editor-first2=Hoyt |editor-last3=Jackson |editor-first3=Reginald |issn=1531-5533 |pages=181–191 |doi=10.26812/pajls.v15i.1395 }} * <!-- Sakamoto 2010 --> {{Cite journal |last=Sakamoto |first=Rumo |title=Pan-pan Girls: Humiliating Liberation in Postwar Japanese Literature |year=2010 |volume=7 |number=2 |journal=Portal |location=Sydney |doi=10.5130/portal.v7i2.1515 |issn=1449-2490}} * <!-- Tanaka 2004 --> {{Cite book |last=Tanaka |first=Masakazu |year=2004 |chapter=戦後日本の米兵と日本人売春婦 : もうひとつのグロー���リゼーション |trans-chapter=American Soldiers and Japanese Prostitutes in Post–War Japan: Another Form of Globalization |title=Globalization, Localization, and Japanese Studies in the Asia-Pacific Region |publisher=[[International Research Center for Japanese Studies]] |volume=2 |pages=27–35 |language=ja |doi=10.15055/00001302}} * <!-- Tanaka 2002 -->{{Cite book |last=Tanaka |first=Yuki |author-link=Yuki Tanaka (historian) |title=Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II and the US occupation |year=2002 |location=London |publisher=Routledge |isbn=0-203-30275-3 |series=Asia's Transformations |editor-last=Selden |editor-first=Mark}}

==== Web ==== * <!-- Buruma 2007 --> {{Cite web |last=Buruma |first=Ian |author-link=Ian Buruma |date=19 November 2007 |title=''Drunken Angel'': The Spoils of War |url=https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/620-drunken-angel-the-spoils-of-war |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20250215075925/https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/620-drunken-angel-the-spoils-of-war |archive-date=15 February 2025 |access-date=16 August 2025 |publisher=[[Criterion Collection]]}}

=== Further reading === * <!-- Takeuchi 2010 --> {{Cite book |last=Takeuchi |first=Michiko |chapter=''PAN-PAN GIRLS'' PERFORMING AND RESISTING NEOCOLONIALISM(S) IN THE PACIFIC THEATER: U.S. Military Prostitution in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952 |year=2010 |title=Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present |editor-last1=Hohn |editor-first1=Maria |editor-last2=Moon |editor-first2=Seungsook |publisher=[[Duke University Press]] |pages=78–108 |isbn=9780822393283 |doi=10.1515/9780822393283-007}}

[[Category:Occupied Japan]] [[Category:Prostitution in Japan]]