Human Trafficking Around the World (8 page)

JAPAN AS A DESTINATION

Human trafficking accelerated in Japan in the 1980s as a result of rapid economic growth and increased labor demands in bars and restaurants. Persons from Thailand and the Philippines entered the country, often through channels associated with crime syndicates (ILO, 2005). Between 2001 and 2007, MOFA reported 498 identified sex-trafficking victims. The primary countries of origin were Thailand (35.3 percent), the Philippines (23.9 percent), Indonesia (15.3 percent), Colombia (11.6 percent), and Taiwan (8.2 percent) (MOFA, 2008b). Victims are also trafficked to Japan for commercial sexual exploitation from Russia and other nations in eastern Europe, as well as from East Asia and Southeast Asia. Persons are trafficked to Japan from China, Indonesia, and Vietnam for forced labor (U.S. Department of State, 2009). Most foreign persons in the Japanese sex industry are Asian nationals, but a surprising number of victims are from Latin America and the Caribbean. Latin Americans are the largest non-Asian ethnic group in Japan. Roughly 1,700 women are trafficked each year from Latin America and the Caribbean to Japan, primarily for commercial sexual exploitation. The primary countries of origin are Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Other nations of origin are Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Paraguay (OAS, 2005).

In the past, foreign nationals were often brought into Japan under the entertainer visa. The law was made more stringent in 2005 and 2006, creating stricter obligations for employers—such as a salary of no less than $2,226.59 per month and increasing disqualification standards for operators, managers, and other regular employees of the inviting organization (MOFA, 2008b). Masatoshi Shimbo, deputy director-general of MOFA’s Foreign Policy Bureau, said the measures drastically reduced the number of persons entering the country with the entertainer visa (MOFA, 2008a). And indeed the number of these visas decreased from 134,879 in 2004, to 99,342 in 2005, to 40,000 in 2006 (Hongo, 2006; SMC, 2009). But the visa is still utilized by traffickers. In 2009 it was discovered that a former government official had accepted a $54,000 bribe to facilitate entertainer visas for 280 women from the Philippines. The visas were granted by MOFA. The women were to perform in charity concerts but upon arrival in Japan worked as bar hostesses. No investigation occurred to determine whether trafficking took place in relation to this case. The government cited lack of evidence (U.S. Department of State, 2009). The entertainer visa is certainly not the only visa to have been used in the trafficking of persons. People are also trafficked into Japan under the spouse or child of Japanese national visa category (OAS, 2005). Visas are not always necessary. Many countries such as Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Korea, and Taiwan have visa exemption arrangements with Japan that allow nationals to stay in Japan for a limited period ranging from 14 days or less to 6 months or less (MOFA, 2012). The largest officially identified group of trafficking victims is female foreign nationals who willingly migrate to Japan but face debt bondage upon arrival. With debts of up to $50,000, the women are forced into labor or commercial sexual exploitation in order to pay back their debts (U.S. Department of State, 2009).

Many experts state that the
yakuza
(organized crime) networks play a significant role in the smuggling and subsequent debt bondage of women—particularly women from China, Thailand, and Colombia—for forced prostitution in Japan (PBS, 2009). Determining the exact extent of yakuza involvement is difficult because of the covert nature of the sex industry. Consequently, the yakuza are able to minimize people’s direct knowledge of their involvement. Michiko Yokoyama stated that she had heard many stories involving the yakuza but that it is difficult to know which stories are accurate. “Polaris Project Japan is working with particular focus on victim assistance,” Yokoyama said. “We hear many random stories including yakuza, but since our focus is not on researching yakuza networks but on direct assistance to the potential victims of human trafficking, we do not ask further questions. So we do not have much information and are also sensitive about releasing any information that might be without any ground.”
⁴

Jake Adelstein, a former journalist for the
Yomiuri Shimbun
and author of
Tokyo Vice
, was exposed firsthand to the yakuza networks. In an interview for Reuters, Adelstein, who is a Polaris Project Japan board member, revealed that a friend—who was a prostitute—disappeared when she attempted to help him discover more about what he suspected to be a yakuza human trafficking ring:

There are times when the street justice the yakuza deal out seems like poetic justice, and there are a few yakuza whom I consider honorable men, in their own way. At the same time, certain factions of the yakuza engage in human trafficking, the production of child pornography, extortion, stock manipulation, pushing drugs, assault, loan sharking and occasionally murder. They can and often do create a lot of human misery, and these days I think they’re out of control. (Reynolds, 2009)

The yakuza networks are extremely well organized and stay informed about all crime-related legislation.
The Guardian
reports that members of the Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza—numbering roughly 40,000—are required to study any new anticrime laws in order to identify legal loopholes and avert crackdowns on their activities (McCurry, 2009; Adelstein, 2009). One briefing distributed within a yakuza group reads: “It is now illegal to give financial rewards or promote someone who was involved in a hit against a member of a rival gang. But it is not illegal to give them a salary with a front company and promote them within that organization” (McCurry, 2009, p. 26). Yakuza networks work with organized crime groups from other nations, such as China, Russia, and Colombia. One example involves a Colombian woman living in Tokyo who acted as a broker between Japanese and foreign organized crime networks and a theater for nude dancing in Okinawa. The woman enticed Colombian women and girls with false promises of work as waitresses. Upon arrival in Japan the women were forced to work as nude dancers (Vital Voices, 2004; PBS, 2009).

Prior to adoption of the national action plan, immigration law was typically used to arrest traffickers. In June 2004 Okinawa police arrested the Colombian broker for offenses against the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law on the grounds that the trafficked women were working without work visas (Vital Voices, 2004; PBS, 2009). Immigration law was also utilized to secure the 2002 arrest and prosecution of trafficker Koichi “Sony” Hagiwara. The former head of Japan’s largest known human trafficking ring was arrested for brokering two Colombian women into the sex industry. He was sentenced to 22 months’ imprisonment and a fine of $3,321.71 (Vital Voices, 2004; PBS, 2009).

Commercial sexual exploitation is the only acknowledged form of trafficking under Japanese law. Forced labor is largely ignored and overlooked. After an official visit to Japan in 2009, Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, the United Nations special rapporteur on trafficking in persons, noted in her preliminary report: “Although trafficking for prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation constitute the vast majority of the recorded cases in Japan, trafficking for labor exploitation is also of great concern” (OHCHR, 2009b). Forced labor is prohibited but essentially unenforced. Under Article 5 of the Labor Standards Act, “An employer shall not force workers to work against their will by means of physical violence, intimidation, confinement, or any other unfair restraint on the mental or physical freedom of the workers.” Offenders face 1 to 10 years’ imprisonment or a fine of between $2,615.32 and $39,233.95 (Labor Standards Act, 2005).

Forced-labor victims seem to be made up primarily of foreign migrants, but it would not be a surprise if some of the marginalized Nikkei population—Japanese emigrants and their descendants—were also affected. Most of the Nikkei who have returned to Japan are from Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia. In 1990 the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act was revised to allow Nikkei back into Japan under the visa status of long-term resident for up to three years, which can be renewed. The work available to them is typically short-term and low-wage labor (MOFA, 2000; Sour strawberries, 2008). Taro Kono, a member of the Japanese House of Representatives and at the time a senior vice-minister for justice, said the policy was changed in order to obtain cheap labor. “I was in charge of this immigration,” Kono told National Public Radio in a 2009 interview “I apologize to those Brazilians or Peruvians who came to Japan with high hope[s]. Our policy was very wrong. We just wanted the cheap labor, but we don’t want to open our market to … foreign countries” (Kuhn, 2009).

In the current global economic crisis, Japan’s unemployment has been on the rise. In order to reduce these numbers, the government of Japan has encouraged unemployed Nikkei to leave. They are given at least $3,000 plus $2,000 per dependent if they repatriate to the nation whence they originally emigrated (McCabe, Yi-Ying Lin, & Tanaka, 2009; Arudou, 2009). James Farrer said the general population disapproves of this move by the government.

Japan has a complex view of migrant workers. Currently, there is public support for a more progressive policy that is welcoming to foreigners. The Nikkei were presumably allowed into Japan because they were persons of Japanese origin whose ancestors had been sent away as part of a sponsored emigrant program. Japan needed immigrants, so the Nikkei were, in a sense, invited back to Japan. Now that it has been seen that many Nikkei Latin Americans have not assimilated and are not making much of an effort to be Japanese, the government [has] created a program to send unemployed migrants back. It seems that in general many Japanese see this as an insult and not a good move politically.

Under Japanese law, foreign unskilled laborers are prohibited from employment. Yet there is a demand for such workers. Although the Nikkei were allowed back into Japan to help satisfy this need, certain government programs also created loopholes for employers to obtain low-cost migrant workers. Employers are able to hire foreign unskilled laborers through the government-run Industrial Training Program and Technical Internship Program, revised in 2010 as the Technical Intern Training Program. The programs have resulted in a number of abuses. A 2007 survey by the Justice Ministry cited 449 companies and organizations that were abusing foreign employees hired through job training programs by failing to pay adequate wages (Nambu Foreign Workers Caucus, 2008). In what is designed as an overall three-year program, enrollees are supposed to spend the first year as trainees and the remaining two years as technical interns. Much like the H-2B program in the United States, the worker’s dependence on legal employment is tied to one employer, creating the opportunity for unfair treatment and abuse. “Tying workers to one employer for the duration of the three years makes them vulnerable to exploitation, since they might be discharged and forced to leave Japan if they complain about working conditions, and they cannot seek an employer with better conditions,” Michiko Yokoyama said. In July 2009 Polaris Project Japan visited four dormitories in the Fukui Prefecture, where Chinese workers in the trainee and technical intern programs were housed. The workers faced inordinate fees as well as inhumane conditions. Yokoyama said that according to government statistics, more than half of the people who come to Japan through the trainee program are from China:

The two women we met [were part of] the trainee program and paid expensive fees to brokers in China to get to Japan. They paid deposits that would only be returned if they finished the three-year contract. Once in Japan, both faced harsh work conditions that included extremely long hours, low pay, and excessive overtime. In one case the compensation for overtime was only 300 yen [approximately $3] per hour. One of the women had suffered from a beating at the hands of the president of the company. They [the women] fled their companies and were living in a shelter.

According to Ippei Torii, leader of the Zentoitsu Workers Union, the program is not really a training program but simply a means to bring in cheap labor. “Japan doesn’t want to damage the façade of being an ethnically homogeneous nation,” said Torii in the documentary
Sour Strawberries
. “They [Japan] said they don’t accept unskilled workers. So training is used as a pretense to get migrant workers into the country” (Sour strawberries, 2008). One man stated that after applying to participate in the job training system in 2005, when he arrived in Japan from China there was no actual job training. Instead, he was forced to perform agricultural duties:

I was forced to do a farming job from 5 in the morning through 10 at night every day, without any paid days off. My pay was a little more than 100,000 yen [roughly $1,111.27] a month and my employer banned me from using a cell phone and confiscated my passport. I can’t afford to return home, as doing so before I finish the three-year period under the training system would mean that I’d forfeit the deposit, or guarantee money that I managed to raise from my relatives. (Nambu Foreign Workers Caucus, 2008)

Three men from China faced similar circumstances. Their documents and signing stamps were confiscated when they came to Japan as part of the training program but instead were forced to work 365 days a year on a strawberry field in Tochigi Prefecture. Additionally, the men were not paid their wages. Four months before the end of their contracts, they were taken to the airport by force by a private security agency (Sour strawberries, 2008). Torii said the conditions foreign workers face have been worsening with each passing year. Various forms of exploitation such as sexual harassment and skimmed wages are commonplace. “These folks are sometimes called $3-an-hour workers,” Torii told National Public Radio. “They are not treated like human beings. They are trafficked like slaves” (Kuhn, 2009). Thus, although the Japanese government acknowledges only trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation, it is the trainee and intern programs that have sparked debate in the Japanese media. According to Farrer: