Prostitution in Japan

Prostitution in Japan has a long and varied history. While the Anti-Prostitution Law of 1956 made organised prostitution illegal, various loopholes, liberal interpretations of the law and loose enforcement have allowed the sex industry to prosper and earn an estimated 2.5 trillion yen a year. That equates to 1% of Japan's GNP and equals the country's defense budget.

Terms

Many terms have been and are used for the sex industry in Japan.

Baishun (売春), literally "selling spring" or "selling youth", has turned from a mere euphemism into a legal term used in, for instance, the name of the 1956 Anti-Prostitution Law (Baishun-bōshi-hō (売春防止法)); the modern meaning of the word is quite specific and is usually only used for actual (i.e., illegal) prostitution.

Mizu shōbai (水商売), the "water trade", is a wider term that covers the entire entertainment industry, including the legitimate, the illegal, and the borderline.

Fūzoku (風俗), lit. "public morals", is commonly used to refer specifically to the sex industry, although in legal use this covers also e.g., dance halls and gambling and the more specific term seifūzoku (性風俗), "sexual morals", is used instead. (The term originates from a law regulating business affecting public morals; see Legal status below.)

History

The Shinto faith does not regard sex as a taboo, while the impact of Buddhist teachings regarding sex has been limited.

Shogunate era

In 1617, the Tokugawa Shogunate issued an order restricting prostitution to certain areas located on the outskirts of cities. The three most famous were Yoshiwara in Edo (present-day Tokyo), Shinmachi in Osaka, and Shimabara in Kyoto.

Prostitutes and courtesans were licensed as yūjo (遊女), "women of pleasure", and ranked according to an elaborate hierarchy, with oiran and later tayū at the apex. FUCK ME IN THE ASS The districts were walled and guarded to ensure both taxation and access control. Rōnin, masterless samurai, were not allowed in and neither were the prostitutes let out, except once a year to see the sakura cherry blossoms and to visit dying relatives.

Meiji era

The Opening of Japan and the subsequent flood of Western influences into Japan brought about a series of changes. Japanese novelists, notably Higuchi Ichiyo, started to draw attention to the confinement and squalid existence of the lower-class prostitutes in the red-light districts. In 1908, Ministry of Home Affairs Ordinance No. 16 penalized unregulated prostitution.

Escaping poverty in their own land, many Japanese women, known as Karayuki-san (唐行きさん) (lit. "Ms. Gone-to-China"), worked (or were sold) as prostitutes into Southeast Asia (especially Singapore and the Philippines), Siberia, Hawaii, Australia, and even some parts of India and Africa. Many of these women are said to have originated from the Amakusa Islands of Kumamoto Prefecture, which had a large and long-stigmatized Japanese Christian community.

The recent surge in the number of Asian women who go to Japan to work in the sex industry has resulted in the neologism Japayuki being coined on the model of the older Karayuki, who traveled in the opposite direction.

War era

Main article: Comfort women

During World War II, the Japanese military procured prostitutes for its soldiers in China. More than half were Korean, but the other were gathered from other countries occupied by Japan. Many if not most of these so-called "comfort women" were tricked or coerced into service. Some of them were kept until they contracted diseases and then discarded. Many survivors are still seeking compensation in Japanese courts.

Postwar

After the war, SCAP abolished the licensed prostitution system in 1946. In 1947, Imperial Ordinance No. 9 punished persons for enticing women to act as prostitutes, but prostitution itself remained legal. Only the Anti-Prostitution Law of 1956 (No. 118, passed May 24, 1956)—reportedly spurred by alarming rates of sexually transmitted diseases among troops—made organised prostitution illegal, at least in some forms.

Prostitution today

Legal status

Article 3 of the Anti-Prostitution Law of 1956 states that "No person may either do prostitution or become the customer of it", but no judicial penalty is defined for this act. Instead, the following are prohibited on pain of penalty: soliciting for purposes of prostitution, procuring a person for prostitution, coercing a person into prostitution, receiving compensation from the prostitution of others, inducing a person to be a prostitute by paying an "advance", concluding a contract for making a person a prostitute, furnishing a place for prostitution, engaging in the business of making a person a prostitute, and the furnishing of funds for prostitution.

However, the definition of prostitution is strictly limited to coitus. This means sale of numerous sex acts such as oral sex, anal sex, and other non-coital sex acts are all legal. The Businesses Affecting Public Morals Regulation Law of 1948 (Fūzoku eigyō torishimari hō (風俗営業取締法)), amended in 1985 and 1999, regulates these businesses.

Types

The sex industry in Japan uses a variety of names. Soaplands are bath houses where customers are soaped up and serviced by staff. Fashion health shops and pink salons are notionally massage or esthetic treatment parlors, and image clubs are themed versions of the same (see Cosplay). Call girls operate via delivery health services. Freelancers can get in contact with potential customers via telekura (telephone clubs), and the actual act of prostitution is legally fudged by terming it as enjo kōsai or "compensated dating".

Over 150,000 non-Japanese women are in prostitution in Japan, mostly Thai, Filipino and Russian women. Japanese men constitute the largest number of Asian sex tourists. One "sex zone" in Tokyo, only 0.34 sq. km., has 3,500 sex "facilities"; strip theaters, peep shows, "soaplands," "lovers' banks," porno shops, sex telephone clubs, karaoke bars, clubs, etc.

References

• Coalition Against Trafficking in Women-Asia Pacific Facts and Statistics Trafficking and Prostitution in Asia and the Pacific, See under Japan category. Accessed online 27 September 2007.

Further reading

• Araki, Nobuyoshi. Tokyo Lucky Hole. Köln; New York: Taschen, 1997. ISBN 3822881899. 768 pages. Black and white photographs of Shinjuku sex workers, clients, and businesses taken 1983–5.
• Associated Press. "Women turn to selling sexual favors in Japan". Taipei Times, December 9, 2002, p. 11. Accessed 11 October 2006.
• Bornoff, Nicholas. Pink Samurai: Love, Marriage and Sex in Contemporary Japan. New York: Pocket Books, 1991. ISBN 0-671-74265-5.
• Clements, Steven Langhorne. Tokyo Pink Guide. Tokyo: Yenbooks, 1993. ISBN 0-8048-1915-7.
• Constantine, Peter. Japan's Sex Trade: A Journey Through Japan's Erotic Subcultures. Tokyo: Yenbooks, 1993. ISBN 4-900737-00-3.
• De Becker, J. E. The Nightless City ... or, The "History of the Yoshiwara Yūkwaku.", 4th ed. rev. Yokohama [etc.] M. Nössler & Co.; London, Probsthain & Co., 1905. ISBN 1933330384.
• De Becker, J. E. The Nightless City: Geisha and Courtesan Life in Old Tokyo (reprint). Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2007. ISBN 0486455637.
• De Mente, Boye Lafayette. The Pleasure Girls and Flesh Pots of Japan. London: Ortolan Press, 1966.
• De Mente, Boye Lafayette. Sex and the Japanese: The Sensual Side of Japan Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle Publishing, 2006. ISBN 0804838267.
• De Mente, Boye Lafayette. Tadahito Nadamoto (illus.). Some Prefer Geisha: The Lively Art of Mistress Keeping in Japan. Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1966.
• Fitzpatrick, William. Tokyo After Dark. New York: McFadden Books, 1965.
• French, Howard W. "Japan's Red Light 'Scouts' and Their Gullible Discoveries". The New York Times. November 15, 2001. Accessed 11 October 2006.
• Goodwin, Janet R. Selling Songs and Smiles: The Sex Trade in Heian and Kamakura Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. ISBN 0824830687, ISBN 0824830970.
• Japan The Trafficking of Women.
• Kamiyama, Masuo. "The day Japan's red lights flickered out". MSN-Mainichi Daily News. February 25, 2006. Accessed 11 October 2006.
• Kattoulas, Velisarios. "Human Trafficking: Bright Lights, Brutal Life". Far East Economic Review. August 3, 2000. Accessed 11 October 2006.
• Longstreet, Stephen, and Ethel Longstreet. Yoshiwara: City of the Senses. New York: McKay, 1970.
• McMurtrie, Douglas C. Ancient Prostitution in Japan. Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2005. ISBN 1425372066. Originally published in Stone, Lee Alexander (ed.). The Story of Phallicism volume 2. Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1927. Reprinted Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0766141152.
• MSN-Mainichi Daily News. "Ambiguous attitudes vex kiddy sex laws". MSN-Mainichi Daily News. December 20, 2001. Accessed 11 October 2006.
• Seigle, Cecilia Segawa. Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of ihe Japanese Courtesan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993. ISBN 0824814886.
• Sinclair, Joan (2006). Pink Box: Inside Japan's Sex Clubs. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. ISBN 0810992590.
• Talmadge, Eric. Getting Wet: Adventures in the Japanese Bath. Tokyo ; New York: Kodansha International, 2006. ISBN 4770030207.
• Yokoyama, M. "Analysis of Prostitution in Japan". International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 19, no. 1 (1995): 47–60.
• Yokoyama, M. "Emergence of Anti-Prostitution Law in Japan—Analysis from Sociology of Criminal Law". International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 17, no. 2 (1993): 211–218.