I'm probably not going to have very exciting posts over the next few days because I'm basically coming home straight from school and doing my essay, so.
Today in class we read about postwar Japan. Two big takeaways from today's class: first, just because the war was over doesn't mean you can just hang up and go home. If you managed to avoid being a prisoner of war, you might still be stuck in a foreign country with no resources to repatriate you, and when you get home you might find out that your wife has remarried because you were presumed dead.
Second: prostitution. Because of the American occupying force, Japan's government was afraid that the women of the country would be ravaged by the foreign occupiers with their big strapping muscles and other big things. So they set up a "front line" of sex workers to cater to the army and navy forces stationed in Tokyo. They actually put up an advertisement to recruit women. It was deregulated soon enough (because of the spread of STDs), but the fact that it existed at all was pretty astonishing. It's rare to see governments have that kind of foresight.
Boom boom pow, nothing much happened today. I don't even have photos. Spent most of the evening writing my second paper.
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