Kong F OLLOWING their defeat in World War II, Japan's state authorities initiated the building of recreational facilities with brothels, bars, cabarets, and restaurants to "comfort" (ian) the Allied military occupiers. "Comfort station" was a euphemism for the institutionalized system of military sex slavery implemented by the Japanese state throughout Asia during the war. In the immediate postwar period, Japanese officials adapted established practices developed during the imperial period about both forced and voluntary prostitution, sexuality, and its regulation to conceptualize a postwar "recreation scheme." They called it a "female floodwall" (onna no bōhatei)-a protective zone to separate the foreign occupation troops from the Japanese population and especially from women and girls. The initiative was aimed at protecting the "national body" (kokutai), a fuzzy concept of identity and unity originating in imperial Japan. With the sudden disintegration of its empire, this initiative helped Japan's authorities establish a new sense of community. Its emergence was shaped by imperial strategies being turned inwards as Japanese society shifted from colonizer to colonized with the imposition of American hegemony. Gender and sexuality, mediated by Japanese women's bodies, were key elements in this clash between the fall of the Japanese empire and the rise of the U.S. empire which forged the emergence of postwar Japanese nationalism. 1 This article analyzes the conceptualization and