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Biography

Caroline Norma was a visiting associate professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Japan, during the research and writing of this article. 

Seiya Morita lectures in Marxist political economy at Chuo University in Tokyo, Japan.

Abstract

This article sweeps away glossy abstractions obscuring the indenturing of women in sexual servitude in Japan. These abstractions were generated by anthropologists writing in English in the first two decades of the 21st century who inverted the relationship between perpetrator and victim to suggest that female customers exploited hosts. To overturn this view and expose the ‘gendered reality that [i]s really going on’ in Japan, this article differently explains from a feminist perspective how present-day host and scout businesses indenture Japanese women in sexual servitude. This role is one of both procuring victims as well as keeping young women trapped in prostitution through debt. It suggests Japan’s sex industry relies on these actors to secure domestically trafficked victims, different from counterparts in other wealthy countries who populate their brothels with overseas foreign trafficked women. Glossy abstractions obscuring these mechanics of Japan’s sex industry impede full comprehension of recent developments in which Japanese women are now sex-trafficked abroad, and foreign men travel to Japan as inbound sex tourists. The article contrasts ‘glossy abstractions that make [Japan] seem not male-dominated’ with the avalanche of Japanese- and English-language journalistic evidence emerging since the 1990s showing the sexual indenturing of women and girls.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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