The Transnational Governance of Human Trafficking in Japan
Ben Chapman-Schmidt
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University, November, 2017
PROHIBITIONISM IN THE LATE 19TH
AND EARLY-20TH CENTURIES
Internationally, the late 19th- and early 20th-century was also the period of the diffusion of the sex work prohibitionist movements, which soon spread to protestant communities in Japan. Even before the Meiji Constitution of 1889 enshrined a right to religious freedom, the ban on Christianity was only partially enforced, allowing for a mild proliferation of Christianity.[1] The predominance of Americans and British among foreigners in newly opened Japan meant these early Christians were primarily Protestant, and they brought with them Protestant discourses on sex work—specifically, that its immorality required its prohibition. In 1880, the Annaka Church submitted a proposal to prohibit licensed sex work in Gunma, where it was located. This initial effort was fruitless, but the church persisted in organising campaigns against sex work in Gunma over the next decade, until they (temporarily) succeeded in 1892. Their efforts also led to the formation of local and national Prostitution Abolition Leagues, and encouraged the Salvation Army and the Japanese Women’s Christian Temperance Union (JWCTU) in their own prohibitionist efforts.[2]
The JWCTU was founded as a branch of
the World WCTU in 1886, and despite their English name, their focus was not
exclusively on temperance but rather on a broader platform of moral reform. As
such, the JWCTU made a tactical decision to include neither “temperance” nor
“Christian” in their Japanese name in order to broaden their appeal, instead
calling themselves the Fujin Kyōfūkai
(“Women’s Reform Society”).[3]
Ultimately, prostitution displaced the consumption of alcohol as their primary
target for prohibition. As with alcohol, they described sex work—and by
extension, sex workers—as a corrupting vice that needed to be stamped out for
the protection of (upper middleclass) women and their families. In pursuit of
this objective, they actively stigmatised sex workers, referring to them as shūgyōfu (“women of the unsightly
occupation”) or sengyōfu (“women of
the lowly occupation”).[4]
The Salvation Army, meanwhile, focussed primarily on rescue work, establishing
shelters such as the Women’s Home for the purpose of “rescuing” “fallen women.”[5]
Following this example, the foreign auxiliary of the JWCTU established the Jiaikan, the “House of Kindness,” which
provided food and shelter for former sex workers while trying to transform them
into productive (non-sexual) labourers.[6]
However, the main goal of these
organisations was the abolition of the system of licensed prostitution.
Operating as part of the broader Prostitution Abolition Leagues, they had some
localised successes in eliminating specific brothel districts, accomplished by
pressuring local authorities into declining to grant or renew licences for
brothels.[7]
However, the prohibitionists were unable to prevent Yoshiwara from being
rebuilt after it was destroyed by a fire in 1911.[8]
Following this defeat, the male abolitionists formed their own group, the Kakuseikai
(“Purity Society”) to act as brother organisation to the JWCTU, and were able
to recruit to their cause a number of high-profile, non-Christian political
figures. Through these efforts, these groups were able to pressure a number of
prefectures to prohibit licensed prostitution, and in 1934 the Home Ministry
announced that the licensed system would be abolished in the near future.
However, even with this expanded reach they struggled against the deep coffers
and political connections of the sex industry, as well as the widespread
patronage of the industry by male members of the elite.[9]
At the same time, the goals of these
moral entrepreneurs shifted from ending the licensed system to criminalising
sex work more generally. This would seemingly put the JWCTU at odds with the
global prohibitionist movement, which claimed to be freeing women from sexual
slavery. However—as both contemporary prohibitionists and sex workers’ rights
advocates agree—despite its superficially abolitionist rhetoric, the international
antitrafficking movement had by this point already been hijacked by moral
puritans who aimed to suppress and reform immoral practices and practitioners.[10]
The JWCTU was simply making explicit the implicit beliefs animating the global
anti-trafficking movement at the time, and as such were thus the first group in
Japan to adopt a transnational human trafficking governmentality. Both ending
the licensed system and prohibiting sex work would, however, prove out of reach
until the post-war era.654
Faced with these difficulties, many members of the JWCTU focussed initially on ending sex work by Japanese overseas. In Japan during this period, one common aspiration—not just of the elites, but of commoners and of organisations such as the JWCTU—was the transformation of Japan into a first-class nation that commanded respect on the international stage.[11] This goal was often articulated in slogans such as “fukoku kyōhei” (“rich country and strong army”) and “bunmei kaika” (“civilization and enlightenment”).656 Originally, the existence of overseas sex workers was largely (though certainly not universally) seen as congruent with this goal, since by remitting foreign currency, they contributed to fukoku kyōhei. However, some of the prohibitionist activists sought to recast these women as kaigai shūgyōfu, “overseas women of the unsightly occupation,” whose presence overseas undermined bunmei kaika. They argued that the significant presence of sex workers among the Japanese communities overseas was making these sex workers the public face of Japan, and was thus propagating a belief that Japan was a backward nation with loose morals. This discourse was in turn heightened by concerns—expressed in editorials and petitions—that the association of Japan with sex workers would lead to a ban on Japanese immigration to Anglo-European countries.[12]
Early responses to the outbound
migration of sex workers were limited to criminal laws targeting “traffickers”
that were similar to early “White slavery” laws passed overseas. For example,
when the Penal Code was promulgated in 1907, it included provisions calling for
the punishment of those who received or removed from the country victims of jinshin baibai for the purpose of profit
or “obscenity” (waisetsu).[13]
However, by depicting the karayukisan
as detrimental to bunmei kaika, the
prohibitionists were—after decades of campaigning—able to push the government
into taking a more restrictivist approach. In 1919, the Japanese government
ordered its consuls to encourage and assist the repatriation of all overseas
sex workers. Though nominally a voluntary recall, local Japanese communities
pressured these women to repatriate, and in Singapore the Japanese consul
worked with local authorities to forcibly repatriate virtually all of the karayuki-san there.[14]
Then in 1925, Japan acceded to the
1910 International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic,
whose official Japanese translation reads as the “International convention for
the prohibition of the baibai
(“buying and selling”) of women for the purpose of forcing them to undertake shūgyō (“the unsightly occupation”).”[15]
That same year, they also acceded to the 1921 International Convention for the
Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, whose official Japanese
translation reads as the “International convention for the prohibition of the baibai (“buying and selling”) of women
and children.”[16]
These treaties established a precedent for the use of the term “baibai” as the official translation for
the English term “traffic,” a translation that would re-emerge with the use of
“jinshin baibai” in the Japanese
version of the 1949 Trafficking Convention. These treaties also served to link
the karayuki-san (then called kaigai shūgyōfu) to White Slavery, by
using the term shūgyō in the Japanese
translation of the latter.
More concretely, these treaties
committed Japan to criminalising both involuntary sex work and the use of
underage women for sex work, with “underage” defined as including all women
below the age of twenty-one. Originally Japan made two reservations to these
treaties. One was that these rules would not apply to its colonies, a standard
reservation made by most of the colonial powers.662 The other—which
again Japan was not alone in making—was that they would decide upon their own
age of consent for sex work, which they then set at eighteen. The
prohibitionists, interestingly, accepted the former reservation, but campaigned
vigorously against the latter. These campaigns led to this reservation being
dropped in 1927, making it illegal in Japan for women below the age of
twenty-one to travel overseas for the purpose of selling sex, and leading the
JWCTU to declare victory in their long-running war on overseas sex work.[17]
From a historical perspective,
however, the outcome of these measures is more ambiguous. Although the karayuki-san had served as good sources
of foreign currency (for the government) and as useful political pawns (for the
prohibitionists) while abroad, they were of no further use to either group once
they had been repatriated and were abandoned to their own devices. This did not
mean that they were left in shame and poverty—many of the karayuki-san had been able to invest in their households and
communities and were respected accordingly, and Mihalopoulos argues that it was
only those who failed to
succeed financially who were
stigmatised upon their return.[18]
On the other hand, many of the karayuki-san
had left believing that they were fulfilling their patriotic duty to enrich the
nation, only to return to a country that would take to vilifying them as
immoral women who brought shame upon it.[19] They
were subsequently forgotten until the 1970s, when their memories were
resurrected—in particular by Yamazaki’s book Sandakan Brothel No 8 and its film adaptation—as part of a renewed
battle over the acceptability of sex work.[20] These
works, and their representation of the karayuki-san,
would subsequently inform discourses on human trafficking in Japan in the late
20th and early 21st centuries.[21]
As for the hopes that these measures
would help Japan be recognised as a first-class nation, these had already been
dashed by the US via its explicitly racist Asian Exclusion Act of 1924. This
act not only confirmed Japanese fears of an immigration ban, but also suggested
that, in the eyes of Americans, Asian countries would forever be “second
class.” Even members of the JWCTU and other women’s organisations found
themselves continuously confronted by racism and paternalism from their
overseas counterparts.[22]
This treatment helped convince
Japanese policymakers of the US’s hostile intent,
setting them on the path for war.[23]
Finally, it is important to keep in
mind that the JWCTU supported Japanese colonialism as a path for “freeing”
women in Korea and China from feudalism, allowed the Japanese government to
keep in place the reservation preventing application of the 1921 Trafficking
Convention to its overseas colonies, and said nothing about the establishment
of licensed prostitution in Manchuria. Among other things, these actions
created a legal possibility for sending Korean (but not Japanese) women to
China to work in the military brothels. The Salvation Army, for their part, was
actively involved in the recruitment and transportation of young women as “maid
servants” for the new colonies.[24]
As a result, the two most prominent “anti-trafficking” civil society groups in
Japan would themselves come to be implicated in human trafficking in Japan’s
overseas colonies and captured territories.
[1] Notto R. Thelle, Buddhism and Christianity in Japan: From
Conflict to Dialogue, 1854-1899 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press,
1987), 10–18.
[2] Fujime, “The Licensed Prostitution
System and the Prostitution Abolition Movement in Modern Japan,” 149–50.
[3] “Christian” would later be
added back in, but never “temperance.” See Elizabeth Dorn Lublin, Reforming Japan: The Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union in the Meiji Period (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 31, 169.
[4] Bill Mihalopoulos, “Mediating
the Good Life: Prostitution and the Japanese Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union, 1880s–1920s,” Gender & History
21, no. 1 (April 1, 2009): 19–38, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.2009.01533.x;
Lublin, Reforming Japan; Mara
Patessio, “The
Creation of Public Spaces
by Women in the Early Meiji Period and the Tokyo Fujin Kyofukai,” The International Journal of Asian Studies
3, no. 02 (July 2006): 155–182, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479591406000313;
Fujime, “The Licensed Prostitution System and the Prostitution Abolition
Movement in Modern Japan.”
[5] Jack E. Nelson, “Moral
Entrepreneuring in Japan: A Labeling Theory Analysis of the Salvation Army’s
Efforts,” Review of Religious Research
40, no. 1 (1998): 35–54, https://doi.org/10.2307/3512458.
[6] Manako Ogawa, “Rescue Work
for Japanese Women: The Birth and Development of the Jiaikan Rescue Home and
the Missionaries of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Japan, 1886-1921,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, no. 26
(2004): 98–133; Lublin, Reforming Japan,
118–25.
[7] As we will see in subsequent
chapters, this remains a tactic for the elimination of establishments offering
sexual services in contemporary Japan.
[8] Mihalopoulos, Sex in Japan’s Globalization, 1870-1930,
61–81; Lublin, Reforming Japan,
111–18; Elise K. Tipton, “Cleansing the Nation: Urban Entertainments and Moral
Reform in Interwar Japan,”
Modern Asian Studies 42, no. 04 (July
2008): 705–731, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X06002678.
[9]
Garon, Molding Japanese Minds,
98–105.
[10] Barry, Female Sexual Slavery, 24–38; Doezema, Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters, 59–60. 654 Fujime,
“The Licensed Prostitution System and the Prostitution Abolition Movement in
Modern Japan,” 153–58.
[11] Michael R. Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal
Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004), 146–75; Mihalopoulos, Sex in Japan’s Globalization, 1870-1930, 83–104; Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 371–413. 656
Lublin, Reforming Japan, 2–3.
[12] Sidney Xu Lu, “The Shame of
Empire: Japanese Overseas Prostitutes and Prostitution Abolition in Modern
Japan, 1880s–1927,” Positions 24, no.
4 (November 1, 2016): 839–73, https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-3666065; Lublin,
Reforming Japan, 101–25; Fujime, “The
Licensed Prostitution System and the Prostitution Abolition Movement in Modern
Japan,” 154–58.
[13] Keihō, Act No. 45 of April
24, 1907, Ch. 33. In Kinzō Yamano, Shinkyū
Keihō Taishō (Tokyo: Yūhikaku, 1908), 144–47. The Penal Code (Keihō, also
sometimes translated as the “Criminal Code”), is another of the six basic codes
of Japan. See Oda, Japanese Law.
[14] Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San, 159–77.
[15] Full text of the MOFA’s
official Japanese translation available from:
http://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/gaiko/treaty/pdfs/B-S38-C1-353.pdf. See also
Appendix 3.
[16]
Full text of the MOFA’s official Japanese translation available from:
http://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/gaiko/treaty/pdfs/B-S38-C1-373_1.pdf.
See also Appendix 3. 662 See reservations in the appendices to the
1910 White Slavery Convention and the 1921 Trafficking Convention, supra.
[17] Lublin, Reforming Japan, 111.
[18] Mihalopoulos, Sex in Japan’s Globalization, 1870-1930,
34–36.
[19]
Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San, 159–77.
[20] Mihalopoulos, Sex in Japan’s Globalization, 1870-1930,
1–36.
[21] See Tomoko Yamazaki, Sandakan Brothel No. 8: An Episode in the
History of Lower-Class Japanese Women, trans. Karen Colligan-Taylor (1972;
repr., Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999); Kei Kumai, Sandakan Hachiban Shōkan Bōkyō, DVD (Toho, 1974).
[22] Manako Ogawa, “The ‘White
Ribbon League of Nations’ Meets Japan: The Trans-Pacific Activism of the
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1906–1930,” Diplomatic History 31, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 21–50, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2007.00601.x.
[23] Izumi Hirobe, Japanese Pride, American Prejudice:
Modifying the Exclusion Clause of the 1924 Immigration Act (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2001); John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, NY:
Pantheon Books, 1986), 27.
[24] Fujime, “The Licensed
Prostitution System and the Prostitution Abolition Movement in Modern Japan,”
158–62.
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