MS Baltic Princess

While I was in Tallinn the advertising campaign for the national shipping company featured a disturbing clown dressed in a red fitted jump suit and a slogan that read Sirkusen Taikaa, which translates as “Circus Magic.”

"Circus Magic"

I travelled from Tallinn to Helsinki on the MS Baltic Princess and a circus it most certainly seemed. Magical? Not so much.

Tallinn Harbour

The journey began happily enough; plenty of room to wander; food, drink and gifts massively overpriced but available; lovely views of Tallinn harbour and the city’s rooftops as we pulled away. But then everyone started drinking.

I had made a concerted effort in Riga and Tallinn to avoid the hoards of stags (bachelor parties) that congregated (and, some might say, ruined) the centre of both cities; dressed in matching shirts, belligerent and drunk. For me, it was even more pressing to distance myself from these people because they were my people: the British.

I had thought that only the British were guilty, but I made the crossing on a Monday morning and, judging by the PVC leggings, metal shirts and wild hairstyles sported by my fellow passengers, I was joined by the Finnish stragglers from a long, drunken weekend in Tallinn.

The mass export of alcohol was astounding. People were carrying crates and pushing carts full of it; beer mostly, but whisky, vodka and various fruity “long drinks” too. I understand that alcohol is a lot cheaper in Tallinn than in Helsinki but, gosh, is the price difference really substantial enough to warrant a production that rivals Prohibition-era bootlegging?

Booze carrier

At first it was amusing watching everyone card their slabs of booze on board, but as containers were cracked and bottles and cans began to pile up on deck, I had an ominous feeling. Prescient, I realised after I walked into the ‘Entertainment Lounge’ and was groped by a drunk. Of course I shouted and kicked up a fuss, but then retreated to a couch in reception shared with a group of quiet elderly ladies. Besides a brief interaction with a man dressed as one of those hideous clowns, I was left alone to enjoy the rest of the trip.

During the events of last year, I took a particular interest in the commentary of feminist blogs. From that perspective, women were central to the uprising, standing side by side with male protestors in Tahrir Square, free from the fear of harassment that stalks (according to a 2008 study by the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights) four out of five women in Egypt.

It seemed almost utopian. With the toppling of the regime, women were released from harassment and oppression:

“I really believe the revolution has changed us. People are acting differently towards each other. An oppressed people look for someone else to bully and oppress. Now, this is the first time in 40 years people have tasted freedom. Men are no longer touching women.” 

The centering of women’s role in the revolution was perhaps not as unlikely as commentators would have us believe; after all, women have held powerful positions in Egypt. Indeed some of those universal symbols of powerful, defiant women come from Egypt: Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Hatshepsut …

In the weeks and months following those 18 days in Tahrir, there was a sinister sense of those very women having been sold out: The Million Woman March on International Women’s Day where women were told to “go home..where you belong”; the forced virginity tests; brutality captured in the widely circulated video of soldiers pulling the abaya from a woman, beating and kicking her, and the specter of creeping social conservatism.

But there is still, I believe, ample room for optimism. How can you not feel optimistic looking at these pictures of thousands of women defiantly marching through Cairo; “the biggest women’s demonstration in modern Egyptian history.”

Shima'a Helmy. Photgraph by Pete Foley via flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/petefoley/6284943260/

There are six weeks until International Women’s Day and in that time (and perhaps beyond) I want to pay my respects to those brave, defiant, badass Egyptian women that have touched me. Purely out of indulgence; I take pleasure reading and educating myself about wonderful women.

This series will take no particular order, but I want to start with a woman who has been fighting and shouting for decades. Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of feminist history will know the name ….

Nawal El-Saadawi

Nawal El-Saadawi: Author, doctor, director of public health, publisher of the feminist magazine Confrontation, feared by the government, and imprisoned by the Sadat regime. She was also, at the age of 79, among the protestors in Tahrir Square.

I first read her slim novel, Woman at Point Zero around the time I was beginning to take an interest in the sex worker rights movement. It was recommended to me by an activist, and it is plain to see why. For all its tub-thumping quotability – “Now I realized that the least deluded of all women was the prostitute. That marriage was the system built on the most cruel suffering for women.” / “A woman’s life is always miserable. A prostitute, however, is a little better off.” —  The book takes a complex view of prostitution: at once showing the ways in which it can victimize a woman, and how she can find liberation and empowerment through the work.

The novel concerns a woman, Firdaus, a prostitute sentenced to death for murdering a man who demands to be her pimp. Her childhood history includes female genital mutilation, hunger, being orphaned, and a forced marriage, which brings with it brutal beatings. She enjoys a comfortable life as a prostitute — being very selective in the customers she accepts — but yearns for the respect she would gain by working in a normal, low-paying job. She takes such a job but soon realizes that “as a prostitute I had been looked upon with more respect … An employee is scared of losing her job and becoming a prostitute because she does not realize that a prostitute’s life is, in fact, better that hers.” She returns to prostitution, but then this would-be pimp ruins it for her.

She goes to her death without guilt.

The prose is heavy and points are hammered home, but reading her, I can barely restrain myself from punching the air and crying Yes! Perhaps she has to bludgeon the point home because she is saying things that, frankly, are unspeakable: do wives really want to hear that they are prostitutes too? (and, according to Firdaus, the cheapest kind.)

Firdaus hated the work of prostitution, but had reached the conclusion that she lived in a society where women were taken advantage of and mistreated at each and every turn. For her, prostitution carved off a little power for herself: “my insistence on remaining a prostitute, proved to me this was my choice and I had some freedom, at least the freedom to live in a situation better than that of other women.”

The book is eminently quotable. Moreover it speaks to modern concerns: anti-vice corruption (the police tell her that they have to protect “respectable families” from the likes of her — of course it was the “respectable families” who abused her) and do-gooder “rescuers” of fallen women (“the men I hated the most were those who tried to give me advice, or told me that they wanted to rescue me from the life I was leading.” )

Firdaus found freedom and empowerment in sex work. But she also found abuse and, ultimately, her death. I don’t think I have read such a conflicted account as that of Woman at Point Zero.

An Interview with Nawal El Saadawi – The Nation

Nawal El Saadawi: i am going to carry on this fight forever – Independent

Egyptian Feminist Nawal El Saadawi in Cairo’s Tahrir Square – Ms. Blog

Women and the Revolution – NOW Lebanon

Display at the National Museum of Scotland. The quote from Thatcher reads: "We English, who are marvellous people, are really very generous to Scotland."

I am unlikely to go to see “The Iron Lady”. I grew up under Thatcher; young, but still. I don’t think I could watch an admiring portrait without a gnawing resentment. I’m Scottish and a lot of Scottish people resent her. Moreover, I begrudge her the title Iron Lady, with its connotations of strength, resilience and the reasoning (pervasive, I find, in the U.S.) that she is admirable and some kind of role model for ambitious women. I hate hearing her name invoked as some kind of feminist symbol. I think Lauren Laverne of Kenickie spoke for many of us when she called Geri “Ginger Spice” Halliwell “tory scum” for embracing Thatcher as “the original Spice Girl.”

Anyway, I was encouraged to read about this protest by the ‘Real Iron Ladies,’ veteran members of the TUC‘s Women’s Action Group including organisers of the 1984-1985 miners’ strike.

From the BBC report:

Toni Bennett, an organiser with the Bolsover Women’s Action Group during the 1984/5 miners’ strike, said the film gave a false impression of Thatcher’s contribution to feminism.

She said: “The film suggests that Thatcher stood up bravely against a male establishment and was a women’s champion.

“Nothing could be further from the truth. Thatcher mobilised every arm of the state against the striking miners and coalfield women who were defending their jobs, their children’s futures and their communities.

“Anyone watching this film needs to be able to distinguish facts from fiction.”

(BBC News 6/1/12: “‘Real Iron Ladies’ stage protest against Thatcher Film’)

The train has been operating on and off for more than 100 years and played the part of the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter film series.

Driver. Photo: author

Driver. Photo: author

Steam. Photo: author

Spectators at Neptune's Staircase. Photo: author.

Heather. Photo: author

Glenfinnan Viaduct. Photo: author

Glenfinnan. Photo: author

Loch Morar. Photo: author

Mallaig. Photo: author.

]]> http://thesixtrees.com/2012/01/04/in-pictures-the-jacobite/feed/ 4 Karen DSC_0260 DSC_0261 DSC_0262 DSC_0267 DSC_0866 DSC_0277 DSC_0280 DSC_0309 DSC_0315 http://thesixtrees.com/2011/12/18/what-type-of-people-work-in-the-mizu-shobai/ http://thesixtrees.com/2011/12/18/what-type-of-people-work-in-the-mizu-shobai/#comments Sun, 18 Dec 2011 20:59:13 +0000 Karen http://thesixtrees.com/?p=722 ]]>

Roppongi Clubs. Photo: Karen Dion

The search terms that lead people to my blog both confuse and amuse me. Sometimes they make me think. The other day someone arrived here by Googling “what type of people work in mizu-shobai.” So here you are: a personal sample, from my own experience, of the “type” of people that work in Japan’s nightime entertainment business.*

Phillip. Papa-san

Phillip, from Nigeria, arrived in Japan in his early twenties, 10 years before I worked for him. He spent years working in poor conditions for long hours in a factory before saving enough money to open his club on the seventh floor of a Roppongi building. He attributed the lung cancer that killed him, in his early thirties, to the factory work.

Traci. Mama-san

Mama and Papa were married. She was from Cameroon where her six adopted and two birth children still resided while she lived and worked in Tokyo. After Papa’s death she continued the business until it had to close through licensing problems. Before Papa passed, he fixed her up with Lucky, one of the club’s flyers (touts). Lucky was from a neighboring village in Cameroon where she grew up. She liked to eat at Mama Africa‘s around dawn after finishing work — she always complained if her plate of food wasn’t big enough. Bobby who worked for the Cameroonian Embassy grumbled that she had the habit of wearing her nightclub dresses to embassy parties.

She’s in Douala now, working in a nail salon.

Julia.

Julia had first arrived in Japan to work with horses. She adapted well to the mizu shobai and was one of the top earners — thanks in no small part to the size of her chest. Charlotte always complained that she stretched her dresses when she borrowed them. Julia returned to the Tokyo nightlife time and again: she would work for three months, take a month off to detox at a Thai spa, then return. She burned out badly and now tells me she can never go back. I don’t ask her what happened.

When she went home to Sweden, she worked as a prison guard for three years. Now she is studying journalism.

Charlotte

Charlotte was from a rich English family: her father owned a chain of restaurants. Her family disowned her when the found out about her work in porn. She had worked in various sectors of the sex industry since she was 17 — for 17 years. She had seen a stripper break her neck falling off a stage in Germany.

She got pregnant by a drug dealer from Nigeria. He disappeared and now she and her son live alone in England.

Erica

Erica named herself after her favorite singer, Erykha Badu. She was from Israel but hated when other Israelis came to work at our club. She was passionate about Japan and took breaks to study a traditional Japanese pottery with a family outside of Kyoto. When she was in Tokyo she would spent the day in Japanese lessons and cleaning the guesthouse she lived in. At night she would come in to work exhausted and rarely make a lot of money — she was to kind to the customers, we told her, too sensitive.

Now she has two children and lives on a kibbutz.

Tabi

Tabi was only at our club for a short time. She would have panic attacks and crying fits when she had to get ready and started thinking about the customers. When she returned home to Denmark she got a degree in Anthropology and spent a semester studying film in Stockholm. She had just started a masters when she fell off the bar she was dancing on top off. I heard that she can’t hold her concentration for long enough to study. She’s between Berlin and Copenhagen these days.

Kim

Kim was from Kenya. Her boyfriend thought she was waitressing and she was terrified her would find out where she worked. She was quiet, kind and always positive. She disappeared soon after witnessing an Iranian man killed with a knife in a Roppongi bar.

Pal

Pal was from Cameroon. She was tall and muscular and unkind customers would at times speculate loudly about her gender. She was deported at some point.

Miki

From the Philippines. Miki was married to a Japanese man and had been living in the Tokyo suburbs for close to ten years. A housewife for all that time, she took a job at our club to get out of the house. She didn’t seem to care about money so she wouldn’t sit with the customers, just clean the tables and keep everything tidy. She said that was what she was used to doing; that it was what her husband had married her for.

Zuzana

Zuzana had paid someone in her Slovakian home town to arrange passage and a job in Japan. Until she had paid this guy off, she had to work where and when he told her — and he was always hanging around. Like most of us she was illegal. At 19, I worried that she was too young for this business, until I remembered that I had first done this job at the same age.

Her situation was one of those very common, very grey areas that anti-trafficking zealots ignore. Was she trafficked? Yes. Was she a victim? No, I don’t think so.

Roppongi. Photo: Karen Dion

And then there’s me. I loved Japan and wanted to stay. But I was burning out and the visa situation was becoming more difficult. Afterwards I went to Laos and Thailand for a couple of months, then worked in Guam for a few months more. I spent a few months working in Iceland; a month in Paris, then a year back in London while I did my masters.

And there are thousands of other stories and experiences. Each of them different.

Which is all to say, that much like there is no typical person who works in your industry, there is no “type” of person who works in the mizu shobai.

*Not real names.

Riga Skyline. Photo: Karen Dion

Art is everywhere in Riga. Just take a walk through the Art Nouveau district with your head turned skywards and you’ll find almost an entirely new population of Rigans: dozens of highly expressive, and often haunting, faces etched into the 750+ buildings designed in the Jugenstil or ‘youth style’ –  a dramatic style of architecture that coincided with Riga’s late 19th century economic boom. It is a little depressing, however, to contemplate the bland buildings behind the ornate facades and Latvia’s subsequent economic strife, which is perhaps made all the more stark by the sumptuousness of the facades.

(More Rigan faces.)

Jugenstil. Photo: Karen Dion

Photo: Karen Dion

Besides the flamboyant works on display on Riga’s streets, the city has an impressive number of art museums featuring collections from the country’s history. And the Contemporary Art Museum of Latvia, whose setting in a disused power station recalls London’s Tate Modern, is currently being constructed.

On top of this, new galleries are opening up all the time, several of which function as not just a place to view cutting-edge art from the city’s young artists, but a place to hang out for coffee, lunch or drinks.

Galerija Istaba

Galerija Istaba. Photo: Karen Dion

Galerija Istaba‘s ground floor is stuffed full of cards, jewellery and and objets d’art by local Rigan artists, as well as art books and magazines. The tiny upstairs bar features bright colours and a few small tables where you can dine on a changing menu prepared by Martins Sirmais, one of the city’s most popular chefs.

Kr. Barona iela 31a

Kim? Contemporary Art Pilot Project

Kim. Photo: Karen Dion

Kim stands for “kas ir maksla?” or what is art? This place, in the redeveloped warehouse district of Spikeri, is a buzz of cultural activity, from philosophy discussions, to book readings, film screenings and live music.

Next door’s Dirty Deal Cafe offers electronica, hip-hop and live shows, while, in the same building, the Meta Kafe book cafe serves fresh, seasonal dishes sourced from the nearby Central Market.

Garage

Garage is housed in a converted garage in the Bergs Bazaar, one of the city’s most interesting areas, a collection of arcades, cafes, boutiques and twice monthly farmers markets, peacefully hidden away from the main streets of the inner city. On the first floor you will find a selection of items from some of Latvia’s leading artists and designers, while the mezzanine-level café offers good coffee and views of Bergs Bazaar.

Elizabetes str. 83/85

Riga Art Space

Riga Art Space. Photo: Karen Dion

The Riga Art Space is said to be one of the most important and active art spaces in the entire Baltic region. Sadly for me, when I visited it was between exhibits and staffed by a comically grumpy old lady.

Kungu iela 3

Riga Gallery

Close to the Freedom Monument, this is one of the biggest and most prestigious galleries in Riga, and has been in operation since 1992. The gallery holds a large, rather haphazardly displayed collection of contemporary art and the building was once owned by the father of Jazeps Grosvalds, one of Latvia’s finest painters.

Aspazijas bulvaris 20

I had this piece on Richard Lloyd-Parry’s book about the murder of Lucie Blackman published at Matador recently.

I was a little concerned about the editing, in which my introduction was just lopped off leaving the reader with a book review that doesn’t introduce the topic of the book. Readers familiar with Lucie’s name will do fine without an introduction, but for anyone else: Lucie Blackman was an English woman who was murdered in Japan while working as a hostess in a Tokyo club. Her accused murdered, Joji Obara was found guilty of multiple rapes, a murder, and of the disposal of Lucie’s body, but not of actually killing her.

The name of Lucie Blackman frequently comes up whenever I talk about hostessing in Japan. We worked at the same club, not at the same time but the same era; we were the same age, and both British. The flurry of media attention when she disappeared inspired in me a selfish frustration that my secret wasn’t a secret anymore. My story about working in “a bar” in Tokyo became increasingly implausible with each breathless report about the “seedy Tokyo underworld” that foreign girls were “helplessly lured into” (according to the gutter press.)

Parry’s book was one of four I have read in the past year or two that take Tokyo’s shady nightlife business as its topic — the others are Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein, Roppongi Crossing by Roman Adrian Cybriwsky and Illicit Flirtations by Rhacel Salazar Parrenas. All are refreshingly free of the sensationalistic writing that had characterized almost everything I had read about Roppongi, hostess clubs and the women working in them — like this book Inside the Shocking World of Tokyo Nightclub Hostessing (serialized in the Daily Mail, natch) that genuinely and without irony asks if Lucie’s murder was “exquisitely Oriental.” Like Susana Jones in her rebuttal to Campbell’s book, I had grown tired of representations of Japan and the Japanese and sex in Japan as weird, sick, crazy, something to to poked at, examined — as if those things are so clear cut in any other country.

Again, something was lost in the editing of my piece, but I hope that the point made it across. Sorry, Clare Campbell et al, but after several years of Tokyo nightclub hostessing, I can genuinely say there was very little “shocking” about the job that Lucie and I performed. The truth of her death was, as Parry writes, “sad and mundane.” She was “very, very unlucky.”

I have always favored Henning Mankell over Stieg Larsson. With all his talk of “men who hate women,” Larsson tries just a little too hard to be a “good guy” for my tastes, and his hero Mikael Blomkvist’s irresistibility to women is frankly tiresome.

I never bothered with any of the Millennium related sites in Stockholm, but when I went to Ystad you bet I tracked down Mankell’s fictional inspector, Kurt Wallander.

Wallander cake. Photo: Karen Dion

– Special Wallander Cake (decorated in the colors of the Swedish police force) at Fridolfs Konditorei in Ystad. The cafe freqently appears in Mankell’s books as the place where Wallander get his usual herring sandwich.

Ystad street. Photo: Karen Dion

Ystad’s typical pleasant, colorful facade. Don’t be fooled, evil lurks below.

Ystad Bok kaffe. Photo: author

Cafes are ubiquitous in Ystad, as are various media detailing where you can retrace Wallander’s footsteps.

Celebrate Local pop-up store at Easton. Photo by Karen Dion

“Local” is huge here in Ohio. We’ve got the farmers’ market CSAs; the microbreweries; microdistilleries; the micro coffee roasters, food trucks and great independent restaurants like Surly Girl. There’s a pop-up store open right now at Easton called, appropriately, Celebrate Local, that sells only handmade and artisan products made in Ohio.

It was a comfort to me to find a proudly local scene. Moving here from Hawaii made me feel deflated, like, what is there in Columbus, OH? The Midwest doesn’t really have the greatest reputation and it was easy for friends back in Hawaii to sympathize with my unwelcome move: “Oh well. At least you’ll be near New York.” I felt as though I was moving to a place that just wasn’t good enough.

Well, what do you know; it really isn’t that bad. Columbus is truly waking up and evolving into a destination. Look, even the National Geographic and the Chicago Tribune say so. We’ve even got some of the world’s best ice cream right here — what impresses me even more about Jeni’s is that, according to one of their ice cream ambassadors that I was talking to, it stays busy even in winter.

We are also a bit of a cultural melting pot, which is something I didn’t really realize (outside of the impressively diverse ethnic restaurant scene) before attending the 56th annual Columbus International Festival at the Veteran’s Memorial last weekend. Groups representing Somalia, India, Scandinavia, Russia, Japan, Ecuador, Rwanda and at least 70 other countries opened up booths offering food, crafts and general information from their native lands while troupes performed traditional dances on the main stage.

For more about the festival: Celebrating Diversity at the Columbus International Festival

Romanian dancer. Photo by Karen Dion

Indian dancers. Photo by Karen Dion

Russian candy. Photo by Karen Dion

I wrote the following article in mid-2008 and it was published in the dearly departed $pread Magazine the following summer. As such it is quite dated, and somewhat inelegant (OK, horribly written).

I was reminded of the piece by the recent publication of this book: Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, (hat-tip to Tits and Sass for introducing me to it) which seems to cover some of the topics I touched on, namely the effect of the U.S’ TIP report (in which the United States smugly assigns every country a grade on how well it believes they are doing in the fight against trafficking), subsequent policy changes, and the effect on migrant workers in Japan.

From the back cover:

“In 2004, the U.S. State Department declared Filipina hostesses in Japan the largest group of sex trafficked persons in the world. Since receiving this global attention, the number of hostesses entering Japan has dropped by nearly 90 percent—from more than 80,000 in 2004 to just over 8,000 today. To some, this might suggest a victory for the global anti-trafficking campaign, but Rhacel Parreñas counters that this drastic decline—which stripped thousands of migrants of their livelihoods—is in truth a setback.

Parreñas worked alongside hostesses in a working-class club in Tokyo’s red-light district, serving drinks, singing karaoke, and entertaining her customers, including members of the yakuza, the Japanese crime syndicate. While the common assumption has been that these hostess bars are hotbeds of sexual trafficking, Parreñas quickly discovered a different world of working migrant women, there by choice, and, most importantly, where none were coerced into prostitution. But this is not to say that the hostesses were not vulnerable in other ways.

Illicit Flirtations challenges our understandings of human trafficking and calls into question the U.S. policy to broadly label these women as sex trafficked. It highlights how in imposing top-down legal constraints to solve the perceived problems—including laws that push dependence on migrant brokers, guest worker policies that bind migrants to an employer, marriage laws that limit the integration of migrants, and measures that criminalize undocumented migrants—many women become more vulnerable to exploitation, not less. It is not the jobs themselves, but the regulation that makes migrants susceptible to trafficking. If we are to end the exploitation of people, we first need to understand the actual experiences of migrants, not rest on global policy statements. This book gives a long overdue look into the real world of those labeled as trafficked.”

The book arrived in the mail this morning. As always I am grateful to hear that there are people writing nuanced (and non-hysterical) pieces on trafficking and, especially, the problems of U.S. imposed “anti-trafficking” policies — see also Cambodia.

Also, I spent over a year working alongside other migrant women in the hostess bars of Tokyo. I will write more on the book when I finish it, meanwhile here is my piece from a few years ago:

Foreign Fuzoku: $pread Magazine

One of the most familiar images of Japan is Tokyo’s Kabuki-cho district where sex clubs in a myriad of different forms openly display services. Given the openness of the Japanese sex industry, it may be surprising to learn that the 1958 Anti-Prostitution Law still stands today. Prostitution is referred to by the euphemism “fuzoku”—a word that encompasses the wide range of possibilities within the sex industry. Activities are largely tolerated and authorities generally turn a blind eye.

But turning a blind eye is not the same as supporting sex workers. Reports on the Japanese sex industry state that this is an estimated $13 billion industry, yet Japanese resources for sex workers are rarely heard of. Two organizations which have formed to work for sex worker rights are SWEETLY (Sex Workers! Encourage, Empower, Trust and Love Yourselves!) and SWASH.

Kaname Yukiko founded SWASH (Sex Workers and Sexual Health) in 1999 and makes HIV/AIDS education a priority. A 2003 report by SWASH found that “53 percent of massage parlor workers never ask customers to use condoms even though they are aware of the risk” and that some brothel owners have banned condom use. SWASH wants legislation encouraging condom use to be instigated, however, due to the 1958 Anti-Prostitution Law–which SWASH wants overturned–instigating a 100 percent condom use law would be impossible.

So far, SWASH has only Japanese members, so what about the foreigners working in the Japanese sex industry?

Foreign sex workers are heavily discriminated against, being blamed for introducing HIV/AIDS to the country, and for increasing criminal activity in Tokyo’s red light districts.

Such attitudes towards foreign sex workers seem to be rooted in the ‘Matsumoto Incident’ of 1986 in which a Filipina sex worker in Matsumoto contracted HIV. When her infection was discovered—having gone to a clinic for a blood test—the woman was sent back to the Philippines on the pretext of “visa violations.” Eric A. Feldman writes in The Ritual of Rights in Japan that “there was no protest about potential violations of her civil rights, i.e., why and how her test results reached the immigration authorities.”

The issue of foreign sex workers and HIV/AIDS is one that persists and is conflicted. A 1994 survey by the School of International Health found that “the overwhelming majority of FFSW (foreign female sex workers) are aware of the risks involved in the unprotected sex and (are) attempting to prevent it…contrary to the accusations that they are the major route of HIV transmission in Japan.” Yet a 1997 report by Shiokawa Yuichi said “foreign women are an important source of AIDS infection in our country.” More recent investigations of the issue are difficult to find, and it is reasonable to believe that the marginalized status of sex workers–especially foreign sex workers—makes it extremely difficult to collect data. This could possibly have a connection to the “Clean-Up Tokyo” campaigns that began in the early 2000s.

The far right governor of Tokyo since 1999, Shintarō Ishihara initiated a “Clean-Up Tokyo” campaign in 2003 promising to rid the city of crime and sleaze. Similar to Giuliani’s Times Square crusade of the mid 1990′s, the campaign has resulted in raids and closures of businesses, arrests and the installation of surveillance cameras on the streets of Kabuki-cho and Roppongi.

Many of the raids on sex clubs have been focused on those with foreign owners and those with majority foreign staff. Images of groups of foreigners being rounded up and marched out of a club and into police vans score points for the likes of the Governor—committed to “cleaning up” the streets of Tokyo. Indeed such images are sometimes broadcast on television.

There may be a case for saying that this clean up campaign is focused less on regulating the sex industry and more on regulating migration.  The hostility towards foreigners working in the sex industry was highlighted when the Mainichi News reported in 2007 that a Chinese sex worker in Tokyo was kidnapped and assaulted, and then arrested for visa violations when the police were alerted.

Additionally, even persons unwillingly trafficked are often treated as “overstayers,” because, says Kinsey Alden Dinan, a Columbia University researcher, for Japanese officials “it’s easier to deport them than to deal with them.”

“When there’s clearly a demand for these people (foreigners) to work in your country, you have an obligation to work out a system that they can do it in legally and safely,” she continues.

The ramifications of the closure of visible places of business is that sex workers are said to be moving to more underground, poorer working environments. This is particularly true of undocumented foreign workers who fear not only the stigma of the sex trade, but also the possibility of immigration raids. There is an inherent contradiction in blaming foreign sex workers for spreading HIV/AIDS but not allowing them the power to insist upon condom use, or accessibility to health resources.  Surely it would be in everyone’s best interest to promote sex worker health, rather than singling them out for blame as the source of infection.

The 2004 Trafficking in Persons Report of the United States placed Japan on the ‘Tier 2’ watch list, which stated that it was not complying with the minimum standards toward the elimination of human trafficking.  The TIP report described Japan as a “destination country for a large number of… women and children who are trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation.” Following such criticism, the Japanese government has spent the last few years trying to show that they are indeed committed to eliminating trafficking.

This included introducing a new law requiring all visitors to Japan to be fingerprinted at the airport, and by changing the conditions of the “Entertainer” visa, which many sex workers previously used to enter the country. The TIP report said the number of entertainer visas issued by Japan was extremely high compared with other countries and the visas are “often used by traffickers to bring victims” into the country. The number of entertainer visas issued to Filipinas in 2006 was reduced from 80,000 to 8,000, from 8,500 to less than 5,000 for Chinese, and from 6,000 to 3,000 for Russians.   However this does not improve conditions for these workers. On the contrary restrictive immigration policies, which impede the legal means to enter the country, create opportunity for abuses, not to mention the traffickers they are supposed to prevent.

With fewer opportunities to migrate legally, foreign sex workers may rely upon third parties to provide passage into Japan–often accruing debts as they do so. This dependency increases the possibility of exploitation of an already vulnerable group of people.