The Prostitution Prevention Law and the Entertainment Business Law have not stopped prostitution but have rather hidden it in a grey area where in practice it can take place unofficially along with other sorts of regulated sexual services which are overt. In other words, the sex industry has been both normalised through legalisation under the Entertainment Business Law and ostracised through criminalisation under the Prostitution Prevention Law. This combination makes it difficult for sex workers not to be at the mercy of the whims of the police but also shifts the boundary between sex workers and non-sex workers.
This boundary has frequently been socially constructed and reconstructed since the creation of the grey area, as it has been through modern Japanese history and elsewhere in the world.
Ochiai Emiko’s often-cited theory of the modern Japanese family characterises the period between World War Two and the period of high economic growth from the 1960s to the 1980s as the period of the popularisation and normalisation of the middle-class gendered division of labour centred on the nuclear family with the genesis of the full-time housewife as an ideal concept (Ochiai 2004: 44—55). Others have added that this family form reproduced men’s economic power and women’s economic powerlessness, except where women opted out of respectable housewife/mother status. Some writers also point to the similarities between the unpaid gendered service work of the housewife/mother and the paid, but unregulated, work of the sex worker (Tanaka 2001 [1972]: 144-45, 338; Dalla Costa 1986[1972]: 114-17). In this situation, however, women did not often opt out of the marriage and family system because of the scarce job opportunities outside of the sex industry. If they worked in the sex industry they would be subject to what Pheterson has called the ‘whore stigma’ (Pheterson 1993: 39-64). Sex workers in this period were ideologically segregated from ‘housewives’/’mothers’ by middle — class norms, though sex workers might well have actually been wives and/or mothers, if not full-time ones.
Although the family with a breadwinner husband and a full-time housewife/mother was an ideal, this form of family was only realised for a brief period in mid-twentieth-century Japan (Sugino and Yonemura 2000: 178-83). As the Japanese economy started to decline after the burst of the bubble economy in the early 1990s, full-time housewives were outnumbered by housewives engaged in waged work by 1992, and this trend has become consistent since 1997 (Naikakufu Danjo Kyodo Sankaku-kyoku 2012: 79, Figure 1-3-17). In this context, the boundary between sex workers and non-sex workers among women in contemporary Japan became blurred in an extension of this economic and demographic change. Globalisation was also behind this, as it brought about more precarious working conditions for the general population.
Since 2003, more than half of the women in waged work have been in ‘non-regular’ positions, meaning jobs without permanent contracts or employment benefits. In the past decade, married women aged between 25 and 34 in particular have been in the non-regular workforce (Kosei rodo-sho 2011: 4-10; Statistics Bureau ofJapan 2011: Table No.1). Women’s socio-economic status has become more unstable than at any time in post-war Japan. For example, the average hourly wage of women in non-regular jobs in the year 2011 was ¥988 (approx. US$10, about 37 per cent of male full-time employees’ hourly wage). In order to support a family of four at this rate, for instance, a non-regular worker would need to work 3,600 hours per year (about 70 hours per week). It is credible that a woman with children to support might, then, ‘voluntarily’ choose work in the sexualised service industry where she could typically earn 50 per cent more than the average casual wage (Nakano 2012: 25-26). A documentary writer on underground youth culture gives us a concrete picture of this through interviews with some twenty single mothers who are working as ‘call girls’. He proposes economic difficulty and precariousness as the reason for their undertaking sex work, including the rising divorce rate, the lack of other ways to earn income to support their children, and insufficient child support payments from the children’s fathers (Suzuki 2010: 63). Although there are no statistics on the number and characteristics of all sex workers, nor is it new for women in economic hardship regardless of their marital or maternal status to earn money by offering sexual services (Walkowitz 1980: 15-31; Aoyama 2009: 57-61, 68-74), there is a growing awareness in Japan in recent years that women can be both wives/mothers and sex workers.
Young unmarried women and students have also been identified as participating in sex work. In an Internet questionnaire of 2,264 women between 18 and 29 funded by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s AIDS prevention research scheme, 11.8 per cent of respondents had received money for having sexual intercourse with non-stable partners met via dating sites, and a further 2.4 per cent had received monetary compensation for ‘some sort of sexual conduct’ (Nosaka 2007: 31). Here, one might be reminded of the 1990s controversies about ‘enjo kosai’ (literally ‘supported dating’): teenage girls receiving financial compensation for dating men met via telephone messaging services. This phenomenon might also have been contingent on the cycle of economic boom and bust and the social atmosphere after the burst of the economic bubble. Sociologist Miyadai Shinji initially asserted that the young women who engaged in ‘enjo koosai’ were rebelling against the status quo and that they were empowered and were even leading change in the society. Later, however, he amended his opinion as it turned out that the first generation of these young women did not find themselves in any better situation after becoming adults in the 2000s. By this time the status quo and the middle-class family norm was economically and demographically challenged (Miyadai 2006: 112-17, 153-64, 321-22, 344-47).
By the 2000s, organised underage prostitution businesses called en-deri (or ‘support delivery’) came into fashion. Many of the workers were homeless young women without other means of livelihood (Suzuki 2012: 6-10). Some young women engage in ‘warikiri’ (literally: having no illusions) which is prostitution not organised by a third party. The two terms have one thing in common: contrary to the independent image of the 1990s enjo kOsai, both en-deri and warikiri do not now have the connotation of choice. According to Ogiue Chiki who researched some 100 women in this recent situation, those who were involved in warikiri tend to be socially excluded: from education, corporate welfare, family welfare, and public welfare. Yet they do not rebel against their circumstances as they have internalised their own social exclusion. They see their own situation as an individual problem rather than a social issue and this reduces their visibility as a social group (Ogiue 2012: 10, 92-95). The recent social awareness about some women’s need to do sex work has not dismantled the ‘whore stigma’ yet.