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Japan's time-honored sex industry still booms today, with its modern-day heart now located in the neon-lit, hedonistic, red-light district of Kabukicho, where despite Japan's Anti-Prostitution Law, everything is for sale, including young girls' hopes and dreams.
The sex industry in Japan has been flourishing since the 15th century. Today, more and more trade routes were opened up here.
Bestselling books and Hollywood movies have even focused on some aspects of the industry's history, such as fictions like Rob Marshall's "Memoirs of a Geisha," which tells of 9-year old girl being sold to a geisha house in the 1920s and forced into servitude, but over the years and through intense training in dance, music, song and etiquette, becoming the most sought-after courtesan in the land and eventually finding love and happiness.
But while historians and contemporary anthropologists may fume at comparisons being drawn between highly talented entertainers and companions such as geisha and modern day prostitutes, the stark reality is that if you subtract the superlatives, the similarities are more than apparent.
What's more, Marshall's romanticized portrayal, if providing an enticing glimpse into the trade, gives a somewhat distorted and at times, utterly misleading lure. The reality, in many cases, is far less rosy.
"My father drank and gambled and had to take out a second mortgage on our house, but because he had such poor credit rating with regular banks, his only choice was to borrow money from a yakuza-related loan shark," Emi Tomikawa, 23, originally from Wakayama Prefecture told Xinhua of her story.
"He'd take out his frustration on my mom and older sister and it just became unbearable," remembers Tomikawa.
"On trips to nearby Osaka with my sister and friends, I saw girls who didn't seem much older than me wearing nice clothes, jewelry and carrying brand bags. They seemed happy -- chatting in coffee shops and restaurants with older guys," Tomikawa said.
She envied what she perceived as their easy, rich life, and after finding out they were "hostesses", she decided that was the way she could rescue her family and, perhaps, herself.
"I was young at the time, only 17, after I found out how much some of these girls were making: between 700,000 and 3 million yen (about 5,916 and 30,000 USD)a month and thought to myself:'How hard must it be to sit a chat to men and get paid for it?' I was so naive and had no idea what was in store for me," Tomikawa reflected.
So she packed a single suitcase, lied to her parents about receiving a scholarship at a technical college to study web design and boarded a train bound for Tokyo.
Her first few weeks were tough as she was the new kid on the block, with no one looking out for her, but she was approached by a "catch man" (young men working for hostess clubs, paid to recruit girls into the clubs from the streets) outside the then- infamous 109 department store -- a popular spot for teenage girls and the men who prey on them -- who took her to a nearby McDonalds to explain the business.
"Two days later I had my own apartment in Shinjuku, in a building owned by the club I'd be working for and had made a few friends there who also worked in some of the company's clubs. I got a cash advance from the manager of the club to buy some new clothes and have my hair and nails done and I was promised that as long as I could get regular customers into the club to buy me drinks, all my financial woes would be a thing of the past," she recalled.
Tomikawa's story is not unlike many young girls' who have also fallen foul to the promise of riches beyond their dreams and a movie star lifestyle. But what many of these girls don't realize when they're young, is that they've essentially sold themselves into the sex trade industry, and once they are in, it's almost impossible to get out.
Sonomi Endo, an NGO volunteer for the Japan Network Against Trafficking in Persons (JNATIP) and the HELP Asian Women's Shelter in Tokyo, told Xinhua that it's only a minority of girls that leave the industry unscathed and many of them find themselves in situations they'd have once thought unimaginable.
"A lot of these girls are duped into working for these clubs believing that they can make a lot of money very quickly and fast track their plans to get into education, pay back debts, go traveling, or pay for a deposit on an apartment and such," Endo said, adding that, "In almost every case this simply does not happen."
"Firstly, the girls are led to believe that they won't have to have sex with their male customers, because this is illegal under Article 3 of the Anti-Prostitution Law, but they are expected to go on "dates" with their regular clients, sometimes before work, sometimes after and sometimes during their free time, and this is where the real solicitation can happen. If you take a vulnerable, impoverished teenager and put her in a situation where she's eating fine cuisine with the CEO of a company who claims he just wants to be her "friend" or "sponsor" and starts giving her gifts like bags and jewelry and helps her pay her rent, she is going to think she's found the dream life," Endo said.
"But the fact of the matter is that in 100 percent of cases, as the old adage goes: 'There's no such thing as a free meal,' and in almost all cases these girls, many of them underage, end up compromising themselves for financial gains," stated Endo.
Tomikawa's story, it would seem, was the norm and not the exception. She was an intelligent girl who did actually dream of going to college to study computer science, but there was no way her family could afford to send her and she felt that due to her father's failings financially and his violent treatment of her mother and sister, it was her duty to try and help.
"It didn't take long for me to get a few regular customers in the club and aside from my hourly wage, I was making a lot of commission on drinks, even though I was legally too young to drink alcohol at that time," Tomikawa said.
"At first the dates were fine too, I got to go to some of the best sushi restaurants in Ginza and was always given a gift or ' pocket money' when I went on a date. It was working out well, not only was I able to send money home to my mother to take the burden off her and hopefully ease her situation, I was saving some too, as I still planned to go to college one day. Life was good."
"But I should've known things would change. Most of my customers were affluent, married with kids and forever complaining about how strict and boring their married lives were. At first I'd listen sympathetically, but all of a sudden the subtext hit me like a sledgehammer. I felt like a fool. I was being subtly ' groomed' and it wasn't long until one of my most generous customers asked if I wouldn't mind accompanying him to a hotel one night after work," Tomikawa remembers.
She said she refused at first thinking nothing of it, but over the next few weeks at work she realized that he had stopped coming to the club. Because he was a regular customer and a cash-cow for the club, the manager was absolutely livid and insisted she should do whatever the clients wanted to keep them coming back to the club.
Tomikawa went on to explain how in the blink of an eye she went from thinking she was earning her way out of her families' debt, to hugely contributing to it.
"I didn't realize about the quota system and how if I wasn't bringing in a certain number of customers per week, who were spending a certain amount of money, I was penalized financially and within no time my manager told me that I was being paid on credit, and as I was not earning enough to pay my rent and utilities, which was automatically deducted from my salary, I was millions of yen in debt to the club. I was utterly despondent," Tomikawa recalled.
"I wasted no time calling my regular customers and inviting them for dinner and coquettishly suggesting that we could 'deepen' our relationship. For a price of course. And before I knew it, I had a new work schedule, both in the club and in the hotels. I chipped away at my debt, but at the same time my soul and dignity was being hugely chipped away at too," she said in tears, asking that the interview be stopped here.
Endo explained that a lot of these girls, like Tomikawa, as was the case, end up addicted to amphetamines like speed and cocaine to keep them awake, as their schedules become so punishing yet they always have to appear happy, alluring, sexy, cute, funny and lively. This, she explained, often saw the girls wind up in more debt to the clubs and indirectly to the yakuza groups who own and run them and supply the drugs.
"It's a pretty rapid downward spiral when addiction enters the equation, because then there really is no way out, and in fact if you look at the statistics for girls who are admitted to emergency rooms and mental clinics for self-harming, overdoses and suicide attempts, the number of hostesses and other sex workers are exponentially high," Endo stated.
She said that NGOs like hers were doing all they could to help these girls escape their situations and while efforts have been made by the government to clamp down on shady bars and clubs operating in gray zones on the edge of the law, and rebranding themselves or moving location if and when they get busted, the problem was endemic in the Japanese society and punctuated by economic strife.
"Of late we're seeing more and more women coming to our shelters for help, who have entered the industry in later life, many being housewives with kids who need extra cash to supplement their husband's earnings, unbeknown of course to their husbands, who when they find out would promptly divorce them."
"It's a sure sign of the economic times, when rising numbers of regular housewives are turning to freelance 'delivery-health' prostitution to support their families. I wonder if our prime minister has factored this demographic into his plans to 'raise women's status in society,'" Endo quipped cynically.
