RIGHTS-JAPAN: Volunteers Taking on the Sex Industry

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, May 6 2003 (IPS) - Jinaemon Sugawara is 80, feisty and still furious. It was 15 years ago that the spunky geriatric decided that enough was enough – he had seen the last smutty flier that he wanted to see, pasted inside a phone booth, carrying a young girl’s picture and a telephone number.

Jinaemon Sugawara is 80, feisty and still furious. It was 15 years ago that the spunky geriatric decided that enough was enough – he had seen the last smutty flier that he wanted to see, pasted inside a phone booth, carrying a young girl’s picture and a telephone number.

Sugawara lives in Sendai, a large city in northern Japan and a tourist destination. Being so, Sendai is also home to Kokubuncho, one of the country’s densest concentrations of nightspots – bars, pubs and nightclubs.

It is an atmosphere that acts as a magnet for vice, and Sugawara found his hometown plastered with thousands of fliers featuring young girls offering their company to lonely men – on building walls, the insides of phone booths, and the sides of stalls in public places.

This is why he set up his group, now numbering 40 members, called the ‘pink chirashi bokumetsu sushin kai’, or, the movement to eradicate ‘pink’ advertisements that offer illegal prostitution.

"I love my hometown and decided to start this volunteer service with a few other people," said the civic-minded elder, a former chairman of the Kokubuncho street community. "We were all so sick of seeing this blatant display of sexual services, which gives the town a bad image and corrupts youth."

Some advertisements for commercial sex are as small as a large postage stamp, and still manage to carry a photograph of a smiling young woman and a phone number. Small as they are, they do not escape the attention of Sugawara and his partner, who begin their nightly patrol at around 8 p.m. and finish four hours later.

When they do, they usually have between them about 45 garbage bags of ‘pink’ advertisements. It is a good night’s work, but Sugawara concedes that despite his group’s plentiful collections, their volunteer work has not been able to clear their neighbourhood streets of prostitution and its clientele.

"The advertisements represent a huge underground sex business, which is why they come up again as soon as we disappear," said Sugawara. "That doesn’t mean we are going to give up."

That is the sort of spirit that forced authorities to take action.

First, in April 2000, came authorisation from the police for the imposition of hefty fines – up to 1 million yen (8,290 U.S. dollars) – for pasting advertisements. "Fines are imperative for our campaign," said Masahiro Ninagawa, who heads the Group to Keep Roppongi Clean, another community effort to rid the heart of Tokyo’s entertainment district of indecent fliers.

Every night, Ninagawa’s 20-member group patrols the streets between 8 and 10 p.m., ripping off the fliers from walls and kiosks. "There has been some reduction recently, but not much," he said. "Our movement is mainly to inform people of the need to protect morals. This message is important in our efforts to keep out prostitution."

Groups like those organised by Sugawara and Ninagawa receive grudging support from the authorities and rarely enough from the media, even though the sale of sexual services is prohibited under the Prostitution Prevention Law of 1956.

Indeed, the sex industry is hugely lucrative, estimated at 16 billion dollars annually, and is managed by Japan’s wide network of criminal mafia. Despite reports of cases where women in the sex industry have been murdered, physically assaulted or harassed, the police and the mafia tend to stay out of each other’s way.

"The government has allowed the sex business to operate because of its vast revenues," said Kazuko Furuta, head of the New Japan Women’s Association that advocates gender equality. The bulk of the revenues accrue from taxes – under the revised Entertainment Establishment Control Law of April 1999, companies must register their services.

But Furuta’s concern hints at the underlying connections that allow the industry to continue thriving.

The majority of consumers are local Japanese businessmen, and it is rich businessmen who support political drives. The transient nature of the providers in the industry makes it difficult to monitor – they can be college students, married women, even high school girls, and will work for a spell as an ‘escort’ to quickly earn a large sum.

There are signs though that worrying new developments – a rise in crime, teens being targeted to sell sex, and growth in the number of HIV/AIDS cases – is weakening the traditional links that characterised official inaction to curb the sex trade.

"With the situation out of control, officials are finally starting to take some steps," noted Furuta.

The official line on the revised law of April 1999 is that it is designed to closely monitor sexual service businesses. "But if we become too stringent, we fear these business could go underground, which will cause more problems," said an official at the National Policy Agency (NPA).

Activists are far from satisfied with the present set of laws and the authorities’ sanguine attitude.

They point out that the law has no teeth as it does not empower police to arrest gangsters soliciting sexual services and to charge them with committing a crime. It also does not recognise women as victims in the sexual trade, but as offenders of the law.

Just as lawyer Yoko Hayashi, a well-known anti-prostitution activist, has called for tougher laws and higher fines to control the sex trade, activists are demanding longer jail sentences for those convicted of crimes relating to the sex trade and new laws aimed at protecting the rights of women.

Yet the NPA’s own figures show the boom in the trade – in 1999, there were 2,684 government-registered businesses that specialise in sending out ‘female companions’. That number soared to 12,251 by the end of 2002.

"The message from the government must be clear," Hayashi emphasised. "An all-out war to stop the sexual trade must be launched."