The RAA: Japan’s Official Postwar Comfort Facilities
Three days after Japan announced its surrender in August 1945, the Home Ministry told prefectural police to prepare “comfort facilities” for the incoming Allied troops. Within about a week, an association with state backing was formed in Tokyo to run them: the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA), in Japanese Tokushu Ian Shisetsu Kyōkai, the “Special Comfort Facilities Association” (sometimes searched as “RAB”). It recruited women with newspaper notices that did not say plainly what the work was, and it ended when occupation commanders put its facilities off-limits in late March 1946 because of venereal disease.
This article rebuilds that story from documents: occupation directives, Diet records, a 1956 statute, and scholarship based on archival files. It also shows where the documents run out. The 1945 instruction itself has never been found by the National Police Agency, and the most repeated numbers, including “55,000 women” and the funding totals, rest on secondary writing. We say so wherever that applies.
The women in this history were people, most of them poor and many young, whom the state placed between its own fears and an occupying army. The story ends where our explainer on Japan’s red-line and blue-line districts begins: the occupation’s January 1946 order abolishing licensed prostitution.
What was the RAA?
The RAA was an association created in Tokyo in late August 1945, organized at police initiative and financed with government-arranged money, to provide sexual services, dining, dance halls and other entertainment for Allied occupation troops. Its founders came from the pleasure-quarter, restaurant and entertainment trades. Its first facility was in Ōmori, in southern Tokyo, and prefectural police set up similar facilities elsewhere. The official rationale was that these women would form a “breakwater” (bōhatei) protecting “ordinary” Japanese women from assault. The Japanese term used, ian shisetsu, was the same word the wartime military had used for its own “comfort stations,” now reused for a different army.
The August 18, 1945 instruction
On August 18, 1945, the Home Ministry’s Police Bureau sent a wireless notice to the prefectures titled, in its most cited form, “On comfort facilities in places where foreign troops are stationed.” The date and title are cited in a written question to the House of Councillors dated October 16, 1998.
What it told police to do
The wording survives through prefectural histories that printed it. In a 1996 Diet session, a legislator read from the Saitama prefectural history and the Hiroshima Prefectural Police 100-Year History (p. 414). According to those texts, police chiefs were to actively set up “sexual comfort facilities,” eating and drinking places, and amusement venues, and to staff them first with geisha, licensed prostitutes, café waitresses, bar hostesses, and habitual unlicensed-prostitution offenders (House of Councillors Audit Committee, November 26, 1996).
The list shows the state planned from the first day to draw on women whose options it had already defined by regulation and policing. Geisha were entertainers, not licensed prostitutes, a distinction explained in our piece on oiran and geisha. The notice folded them together anyway.
The missing original
Answering the 1998 question, the Cabinet stated that the National Police Agency had “sincerely continued to search” for the document “but has not found it.” Some Police Bureau files are at the National Archives of Japan after their return from the United States, it said, but for others “no records exist” to confirm what happened (Cabinet written answer, 1998). A renewed request in March 1999 had the same result (Diet record, March 11, 1999). Matching prefectural texts leave little doubt the notice existed, but every English quotation of it is a translation of a reprint.
Founding the RAA: dates, organizers and money
The sources disagree on the exact founding date. A 2013 Japanese-language study gives August 26, 1945 (Takahashi, 2013). The research group Fight for Justice, working from the association’s own 1949 history, gives 23 August (Fight for Justice). Fight for Justice also describes an oath ceremony by the association’s officers in front of the Imperial Palace on August 28, 1945, two days before General MacArthur landed at Atsugi. No founding charter could be located online.
The association was run by business operators, but the police role is documented. An official history of the Ibaraki Prefectural Police, quoted by the Associated Press in 2007, described the strategy as using “experienced women” to “create a breakwater to protect regular women” (AP via NBC News, 2007). We do not name the individual operators; the subject here is the system.
Why the funding figures do not agree
Published accounts give 100 million yen in capital, 55 million guaranteed by the Finance Ministry, 50 million injected by the government, or 33 million in loans. They come from secondary works. An often-quoted remark about the price of women’s “purity,” attributed to a Finance Ministry official who later became prime minister, has the same weak footing. We could not find a Finance Ministry record, loan contract or bank ledger confirming any of these amounts. The state role is not in doubt; the exact sums rest on secondary writing.
The recruitment notices: what they said and left out
The RAA placed recruitment notices in newspapers. We do not reproduce them. They were written to persuade women in desperate circumstances, and reprinting them as display text would repeat that function.
What they promised
According to the Takahashi study, recruitment sought women aged 18 to 25. Historian Hirai Kazuko’s doctoral research at Hitotsubashi University summarizes the offer as high-grade food, clothing and housing provided, aimed at women left destitute by the war (Hirai, 2014). Kyodo News reported in November 2025 that a newly found report from Niigata Prefecture showed recruiters there promising “good clothing, food, and housing” to impoverished women (Kyodo via Japan Today, 2025).
What they did not say
The notices did not state plainly that the work included prostitution; Kyodo describes the Niigata recruits as “duped.” Hirai finds that although the police notice targeted women already in regulated trades, many who answered had no such experience, and recruitment reached across eastern Japan from Aomori to Shizuoka, Nagano and Ishikawa. A U.S. occupation health officer saw the same pattern. A December 6, 1945 memorandum of the Public Health and Welfare Section, quoted by the AP, said “the girl is impressed into contracting by the desperate financial straits of her parents.” That section’s files belong to the GHQ/SCAP records in U.S. National Archives Record Group 331; the National Diet Library holds a microfiche set (NDL Research Navi: PHW records).
Komachien in Ōmori, and how large the RAA became
The first facility was Komachien, a restaurant building in Ōmori, on Tokyo’s southern edge between the city center and Yokohama. Japanese accounts place its start in the last days of August 1945, around 27–28 August. Several English accounts, following a 1995 New York Times report, give 20 September. The AP gives 20 September as the opening date of a facility in Ibaraki Prefecture. We found no contemporaneous record of the opening; the safest statement is between late August and late September 1945. Our photo rounds for this series (Shinjuku and Shibuya; Roppongi, Akasaka and Azabu; Yoshiwara, Asakusa and Ginza) did not include Ōmori. We have not passed off a stand-in photo as the place.
The “55,000” figure
The most common English figure is that the RAA employed about 55,000 women at closure, 70,000 at its peak. Both numbers appear in the Takahashi study; the AP report gives 70,000. The 1998 Diet question used a looser phrase: women gathered “on the scale of tens of thousands.” We found no surviving register or official count behind 55,000. It is unclear whether it includes dancers, waitresses and clerks. “Tens of thousands” is consistent across sources; the exact number is not established. The notice went to every prefecture, and police set up facilities wherever troops were stationed. The Takahashi study cites Japanese government figures of 355 women drawn from nine licensed and unlicensed districts and groups in Yokohama early in the occupation. Ibaraki, Hiroshima, Saitama and Niigata appear in the records cited above. The system was national even where the RAA name was not used.
| Claim | Figures in circulation | Primary document found? |
|---|---|---|
| Women employed | 55,000 at closure; 70,000 peak; “tens of thousands” | No. Secondary only |
| State funding | 100m / 55m / 50m / 33m yen | No. Secondary works only |
| Founding date | 23 or August 26, 1945 | Charter not located |
| Komachien opening | 27–28 August or September 20, 1945 | No |
| 18 August notice | Recruit geisha, prostitutes, waitresses, hostesses first | Reprints only; original missing |
| Off-limits order | 25 or March 27, 1946 | Order text not located online |
Venereal disease and the March 1946 off-limits order
The occupation did not create the RAA, but it did not refuse it either: U.S. troops used the facilities, as the AP’s review of occupation records found. What changed the occupation’s position was disease, not, at first, a moral objection.
SCAPIN-153 and the scale of infection
On October 16, 1945, GHQ issued SCAPIN-153, “Control of Venereal Diseases.” It called existing measures “inadequate,” made syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid reportable diseases, and ordered medical examination of people “whose occupations or activities subject them to serious hazard of venereal disease transmission” (SCAPIN-DB, SCAPIN-153). In practice that burden fell on women, not soldiers. Secondary works put infection among U.S. troops at more than a quarter by early 1946; we could not open the Army reports behind that figure. The civilian picture is firmer: the U.S. Army Medical Department’s official history records about 436,000 syphilis, 556,000 gonorrhea and 108,000 chancroid cases reported in Japan in 1946 (U.S. Army Medical Department, Office of Medical History).
The order that ended the RAA
In late March 1946, occupation commanders declared the RAA facilities and similar establishments off-limits to Allied personnel. Sources give 25 or 27 March; one overview also cites U.S. Army directives of 4 and 18 March that led up to it (Fight for Justice). With its customers barred, the RAA wound down.
What happened to the women
No severance, retraining or housing plan appears in any source we examined. Historian Yuki Tanaka, quoted by the AP, put the number of women left without work at more than 150,000, a figure we could not trace to a primary count.
SCAPIN-642: abolishing licensed prostitution on paper
The off-limits order is often confused with the abolition of licensed prostitution. The first was a military order to soldiers; the second, issued two months earlier, was a directive to the Japanese government about its own laws. Neither made prostitution a crime.
On January 21, 1946, GHQ sent SCAPIN-642, “Abolition of Licensed Prostitution in Japan.” It declared licensed prostitution “in contravention of the ideals of democracy” and directed the government to “abrogate and annul all laws, ordinances and other enactments” permitting it and to “nullify all contracts and agreements” binding any woman to prostitution (SCAPIN-DB, SCAPIN-642). The digitized original is in the National Diet Library’s GHQ/SCAP holdings.
The Japanese response
According to the National Diet Library’s reference service, an order abolishing the licensed system followed on 24 January, and on February 2, 1946 the Home Ministry repealed the 1900 Regulations for the Control of Licensed Prostitutes and related rules (NDL Collaborative Reference Database). That system had governed walled quarters like the one in our history of Yoshiwara’s three centuries.
Why paper abolition produced the akasen
Historian Fujino Yutaka analyzed the Police Bureau’s own file on the abolition, held at the National Archives of Japan and disclosed in 2011. It shows police read the directive narrowly: it voided debt-bondage contracts, but prostitution by a woman’s “free will” remained lawful, so the same buildings and operators could continue under new paperwork. On November 14, 1946, a meeting of vice-ministers under the Yoshida cabinet adopted measures that let businesses operate as “special restaurants”. When Imperial Ordinance No. 9 of January 1947 made it a crime to force women into prostitution, police documents admitted that coercion through advance-debt contracts was still “often seen” (Fujino, Keiwa College research annual). Police marked the districts where such businesses operated on maps with red lines, the origin of the akasen told in our akasen and aosen explainer.
The panpan street economy
When the facilities closed, the demand and the poverty remained. Women sought soldiers as clients near stations, parks and bases. Press and police called them panpan, a contemptuous slang term we use only because it is the word in the records.
Roundups and compulsory examinations
Occupation military police and Japanese police carried out joint roundups (karikomi), detaining women for compulsory venereal disease examination. Hirai dates the first Tokyo roundup to January 1946, before the RAA had closed, and describes an occupation sexual policy that treated all Japanese women as potential sources of venereal infection, with Japanese police accompanying the MPs (Hirai, 2014). The pattern outlasted the RAA. In Gotemba, at the foot of Mount Fuji, Hirai found about 2,000 women working near three military camps at the 1953 peak, average age about 22, carrying health cards she describes as a “prostitution passport.” Hirai also counts 52 municipalities in 12 prefectures that passed local ordinances against prostitution. In Tokyo the same years saw districts rebuilt on burned ground with new entertainment economies, as our history of how Kabukicho grew from a burned field traces for Shinjuku.
The road to 1956
By the late 1940s, Japan had three overlapping systems: red-line districts operating as “special” eating and drinking places, blue-line areas tolerated under ordinary restaurant licenses, and a policed street trade. A Venereal Disease Prevention Law was passed in 1948, with premarital and prenatal examinations (U.S. Army Medical Department history). Bath-house businesses appeared from 1951, a line followed in our piece on how “Turkish baths” became soaplands.
Hirai notes that anti-prostitution legislation was first proposed in 1948 and debated for eight years. The Prostitution Prevention Law (Law No. 118) was promulgated on May 24, 1956. Article 3 states that “no person may engage in prostitution or be the other party to it.” The law took effect on April 1, 1957 and its penal chapter on April 1, 1958 (Law No. 118 of 1956, House of Representatives database). The closing of the red-line districts is told in 1958, the year the red lines closed.
Timeline: August 1945 to April 1958
| Date | Event | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| 18 Aug 1945 | Police Bureau notice on “comfort facilities” | Reprints read into Diet record; original missing |
| 23 or 26 Aug 1945 | RAA established in Tokyo | Secondary; dates differ |
| 28 Aug 1945 | Officers’ oath ceremony before the Imperial Palace | Secondary |
| Late Aug–Sep 1945 | Komachien opens in Ōmori | Secondary; disputed |
| 16 Oct 1945 | SCAPIN-153 on venereal disease | SCAPIN text |
| 6 Dec 1945 | PHW memo on recruitment through family poverty | Quoted by AP |
| Jan 1946 | First joint roundup in Tokyo | Hirai (2014) |
| 21 Jan 1946 | SCAPIN-642 abolishes licensed prostitution | SCAPIN text; NDL |
| 2 Feb 1946 | 1900 licensed-prostitute regulations repealed | NDL reference |
| 25 or 27 Mar 1946 | RAA facilities placed off-limits | Secondary; dates differ |
| 14 Nov 1946 | “Special eating and drinking establishments” allowed | Police Bureau file (Fujino) |
| May 24, 1956 | Prostitution Prevention Law promulgated | Statute |
| 1 Apr 1958 | Penal provisions take effect | Statute |
Frequently asked questions
What does RAA stand for?
Recreation and Amusement Association, in Japanese Tokushu Ian Shisetsu Kyōkai (“Special Comfort Facilities Association”), set up in Tokyo in late August 1945.
Did the Japanese government create the RAA?
Formally it was a private association, but it followed a Home Ministry notice of August 18, 1945, was organized with police involvement, and was financed with state-arranged money. The exact amounts are unconfirmed.
Did the occupation order the RAA’s creation?
The Japanese notice came first, before the troops arrived. U.S. troops used the facilities until commanders put them off-limits in late March 1946.
How many women were involved?
Secondary works give about 55,000 at closure and 70,000 at the peak. No surviving official count supports these figures; “tens of thousands” is the safest statement.
Is the RAA the same as the wartime “comfort women” system?
No. The wartime system served Japan’s military across Asia; the RAA served the Allied occupation inside Japan. They shared vocabulary and some methods.
Why the RAA still matters
The RAA lasted about seven months. It matters for what it shows about August 1945: within days of surrender, officials planned to protect one group of women by assigning another to the occupying army, in a notice that has since disappeared. The occupation used the system, closed it for health rather than rights, and ordered an abolition that police read so as to keep the trade running under new names. The women left almost no documents of their own, and that absence is part of the record. They moved from the RAA to the streets and the red-line districts, where the next chapter begins in our guide to akasen and aosen.
