Far Eastern Economic Review Issue of August 3, 2000
HUMAN TRAFFICKING
Bright Lights, Brutal Life Each year, criminals smuggle thousands of women into Japan. They arrive with hopes of finding honest work--only to find a life of sexual slavery awaits them
By Velisarios Kattoulas/TOKYO Issue cover-dated August 3, 2000
AT LEAST SIX TIMES A YEAR, Hiro Watanabe drives from the Kabukicho red-light district in western Tokyo to Narita airport, southeast of the Japanese capital. In the international-arrivals hall, he meets three, sometimes four, Southeast Asian women. Almost without exception they are young and pretty, and have come to Japan to take up word-of-mouth job offers from factories, restaurants or bars.
Or so they think. Instead, Watanabe--who works for a yakuza crime syndicate that controls much of the Tokyo underworld--takes them to a small apartment in Kabukicho. There, over the next couple of days, he convinces the women it's in their best interests to work for him and his partners as prostitutes--for free. A bull of a man in his 40s with a shaven head and a tattoo that covers a bulging torso, he won't say how he achieves this unlikely feat. But the way police officials and human-rights activists tell it, Japan's legion of slaveholders rely on the terror of the concentration camp: verbal threats, beatings and rape.
It would be shocking enough if Watanabe (not his real name) was the only yakuza strong-arming foreign women into prostitution in Japan. But while the world mulls the deaths of 58 Chinese in a bungled people-smuggling run across the English Channel in June, the trade in humans flows unabated in North America, Western Europe and Asian countries such as India and Pakistan. Nowhere is that more evident than in Japan, one of the region's top destinations for women forced into sexual slavery.
Now, a survey of people-smuggling has lent support to what Japanese activists and foreign diplomats long suspected: Every year, tens of thousands of women and children are illegally brought to Japan and forced to work in a sex industry that activists estimate is worth Yen4 trillion ($400 million) a year.
Completed in May by the Social Security Research Foundation, the secret, government-funded study, Foreign Women Involved in Prostitution in Japan: A Survey, includes no estimate for the size of the problem. But experts believe that of the 120,000 Asian, Eastern European and Latin American women overstaying visas in Japan today, as many as 75,000 are working under duress in a sex industry that activists say accounts for 1% of Japan's GNP--as big as its annual defence budget.
"Although not all women overstaying their visas are being forced into prostitution, one way or another most of them are involved in the sex industry, many of them against their will," says an Asian diplomat based in Tokyo who has followed sexual slavery in Japan for years.
The results of the study, based on interviews with 257 foreign women conducted nationwide between October and December last year, haven't been made public. But according to a copy made available to the Review, nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they had been forced into prostitution or other types of sex work. (Most of the women in the survey were questioned by police following arrests for immigration offences or prostitution.)
Although the Japanese government acknowledges that there are foreign women working in the sex industry, it maintains that only a fraction of them are coerced into prostitution. Activists, however, estimate that between 500,000 and 1 million women have been enslaved since the yakuza moved into the trade in the early 1980s. That's at least four times the number that historians believe the Japanese military drafted as "comfort women" in the 1930s and 40s. Yayori Matsui, a prominent human-rights activist, describes Japan's sex slaves as "contemporary comfort women" to her nation's "corporate warriors."
Ironically, the yakuza started press-ganging foreign women into prostitution in Japan just as the original comfort women started coming forward for the first time. It was the early 1980s, and growing job and educational opportunities meant fewer Japanese women were becoming prostitutes. For nearly a decade, the yakuza who controlled Japan's brothels solved that problem by organizing sex tours to other Asian nations, especially Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines. But when Japan's neighbours objected and such trips became controversial, the yakuza started shipping women to Japan. In the beginning, they were mainly Thais and Filipinos. Since then, however, the yakuza have brought women from as far as South America and Eastern Europe, creating a truly globalized supply chain.
Watanabe got involved in the international slave trade in the late 1980s. At first, he paid Yen1 million for every woman he picked out from photographs sent by a supplier in Thailand, and then spent nearly as much for a second broker to smuggle the women to Japan. These days, a Thai trafficker selects women and sends them to Narita airport. Watanabe pays more than Yen2 million for every woman who makes it, but he says the extra cost is worth it because his Thai partner almost always sends him women who are young and beautiful.
Moreover, while many women used to flee captivity, today few dare. In part, that's because Watanabe and other yakuza cooperate in capturing women who make a run for it. In particular, they routinely photograph their slaves and fax around their pictures in case one escapes--a system Watanabe says helps him recover nine out of every 10 women who flee.
As if that wasn't discouraging enough, Watanabe's Thai colleague seeks swift and brutal retribution against the families of escapees. For instance, Watanabe says, in November 1999 traffickers gunned down a Thai man who was waiting at Bangkok airport to meet his daughter, who had fled her captors. Although the story appears to be apocryphal, the telling of such tales no doubt helps dissuade young women from fleeing.
"There are fewer and fewer women escaping from sexual slavery," says Chinami Kajo, a lawyer who represents foreign women forced into prostitution. "By all accounts, the yakuza are treating women much more severely than in the past, and it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of women who tried escaping weren't being killed and efficiently disposed of."
While Watanabe admits to forcing more than 100 women into sexual slavery, he is unapologetic. For one thing, he says, coercing women to work at the Yen30,000-an-hour brothels popular among Japanese salarymen is great business. In a month, one woman can earn him and his partners about Yen1.5 million--at least twice what their typical customers take home. And, of course, there are no profit-sapping wages to pay.
In any case, Watanabe adds, he treats the 16 women he "manages" well. He doesn't force them to work when they are menstruating. When they are ill, Watanabe's partner lets them recuperate at his spacious home, instead of in the guarded, shoebox apartments where they normally live, two to a room. And Watanabe hits them only as a last resort. "They don't make as much money if they're all cut up," he says matter-of-factly. "So I try to create the kind of atmosphere you'd find in a family."
That's not the way Maria Gonzalez remembers her experience at the hands of another Japanese slave trader. A slender woman in her 20s with long curly hair, an aquiline nose and large brown eyes, Gonzalez grew up in a small town in Latin America. Last October, a local woman offered her waitressing work in Japan that paid 100 times as much as her $25-a-month job selling lottery tickets.
Eager to help her bed-ridden father, Gonzalez (not her real name) flew to Osaka in January. There, she was met by a man she later realized was a gangster, and taken to a dilapidated apartment in Nagoya. For the next three days, she was given nothing to eat or drink except coffee, and was only let out of a locked room to parade in front of several small groups of men.
"At first, I had no idea what was happening," she says. "I still thought maybe there was a restaurant job waiting for me. But when men starting arriving at the apartment to look me over, I thought 'Oh shit, I'm for sale.'"
Eventually, a local pimp "bought" her, confiscated her passport, and told her she had to make $5,000 a month working a street corner in an infamous red-light district. Ten days later, Gonzalez had earned only $300. "My pimp was furious," she recalls. "He threatened to make me work in a live sex show, pump me full of drugs, beat me or sell me to a more violent pimp."
A few days later, she refused to do what a customer told her--and was paid for it with bruises and welts on her face, neck and legs. Fearing that her next beating might be her last, she decided to flee. As the man guarding her apartment slept the next morning, she ran to the local police station. Gonzalez says that she explained her situation to a Spanish-speaking officer and was told the matter was not police business. The following day, she sneaked out to see immigration officials. This time, she says, she was told that since she had a valid 90-day tourist visa they couldn't help her. (Activists say they often hear similar tales; however, police and immigration officials deny them.)
Convinced word of her escape attempt would soon reach her captor, she called a friend in Latin America to find out a phone number for her embassy in Tokyo. Three days later, and barely two weeks after she was sold into slavery, she was on a train bound for the capital. Thanks to a Tokyo-based diplomat, Gonzalez received a new passport and flew back to her family. "I am not an object, something that can be bought and sold," she said, the week before she left. But although she wants to expose the slave traders, Gonzalez fears what might happen to her if she did.
By all accounts, Gonzalez is one of the lucky ones. Last year, of the 50 women who fled to the only Japanese hostel that took trafficking victims, roughly a fifth were addicted to drugs--force-fed to them by their jailers--and a third tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes Aids.
Although activists have been clamouring about such suffering for years, Japan started to take them seriously only in 1998, after the Group of Eight summit in Birmingham, England, pinpointed people-trafficking as a rising global scourge. The same year, Japan donated $84,000 to Empower, a Thai human-rights group that provides counselling to victims of sexual slavery in Japan. And it started training police and customs officials from Japan and neighbouring countries in how to identify human-smuggling operations and crack down on them.
To Japan's credit, its efforts have started to bear fruit. In its first such raids on Japanese brothels, police last year freed 127 foreign women kept as sex slaves. And in joint operations with Thai and Filipino police, the Justice Ministry repatriated three Japanese to stand trial on people-trafficking charges.
That said, Japan still has much to do. For starters, like virtually every other nation, Japan lacks adequate legislation to tackle the crisis. In most cases, slavers are prosecuted under either immigration or anti-prostitution laws, which means sentences are light. In February last year, for instance, the courts found a slaver guilty of forcing a 15-year-old girl and scores of women into prostitution. But because it was his first offence, he was given a one-year sentence, suspended.
In all likelihood, the world's slaves won't get much respite until the passage of a landmark United Nations protocol designed to break the global slave trade. Slated for adoption by the end of the year, it should help governments levy stiffer sentences against traffickers, establish witness-protection schemes for victims and fund projects to train women at risk.
In the meantime, the slave trade grinds on. In late July, Watanabe plans to pick up a fresh batch of unsuspecting women at Narita airport. Like thousands before them, they will arrive expecting to work as waitresses or factory assembly-line workers. How different the reality will be.
--------------------------------------------------------- Sex slavery never stopped even after the war. By denying the comfort women atrocity, they will continue with it. The IJA use brute force, the Yakuza use tricks to lure the women. It seem rooted in their culture.
Guess the Yakuza gave a percentage to Koizumi and gang, to keep this "internal" economy thriving.