The impact of globalisation has also been profound in drawing women from outside Japan into the sex industry. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, ‘more than two million migrant women were estimated to be working in the [East and Southeast Asian] region, accounting for one third of its migrant population’ (Yamanaka and Piper 2005: iv). Migrant women, like other women, often work in informal sectors of the labour market, in care work, emotional labour and sexual labour, and paid and unpaid work. In Japan in 2001, 132,000 (84 per cent) of the
157.0 Filipino migrants were women, most of whom worked as entertainers; and a total of
89.0 women from China, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea and other Asian countries became resident in the country as wives of Japanese men between 1989 and 1999. There were also an estimated 224,000 undocumented workers, half of whom were women, and many of whom were assumed to be employed as entertainers, service workers or factory workers (Yamanaka and Piper 2005: 9-10). Before this, the police had already started to warn that undocumented migrants were on the increase and that among them Filipino and Thai women were particularly prone to be involved in the sex industry (Keisatsu-cho 1990).
One reason for the feminisation of migration is that women (especially rural women) have become increasingly poor. Poverty severely affects women and their households (United Nations Economic and Social Council 2000: 19-27). In newly developing economies, as the gap between the rich and the poor widened, people were stimulated to fill this gap through seeking more cash income. At the same time, the mode of production changed, affecting the norms of gender division, particularly affecting rural agricultural people. Some became urban workers who would then become migrant workers abroad. Finally, bilateral formal and informal international relations pulled women into migration.
In Thailand, young women from rural areas, and sometimes from urban poor families, started to migrate to richer countries. In some regions, almost 20 per cent more unmarried women in their twenties emigrated than their male counterparts. Japan was the most popular destination at the same time as being Thailand’s foremost trade partner and an important influence in popular culture and consumerism. It is no surprise that some young women, particularly poor working — class and farming women, would be attracted to foreign culture, goods and the people producing them, and would decide to move to the countries these products came from to improve their life chances (Aoyama 2009: 41—53; Whittaker 2001: 28—34).Those who had few opportunities to be employed in their home country, however, did not have much chance of gaining better employment conditions overseas. They usually resorted to unofficial channels to emigrate as there was no way for them to apply for jobs in the formal sector. In some cases, the women themselves were handled as commodities subjected to sale for prostitution. Extreme cases led to a media campaign focusing on the plight of women who had been enslaved in the sex industry and had committed murder to escape. These cases revealed the organised crime of trafficking in women (Aoyama 2009: 57-61, 150-9; Saito 2006: 73).
In the Philippines, the country’s economy has been heavily reliant on cross-border finance in three areas: foreign investment, foreign aid and foreign currency remittances by emigrants. Japanese companies have been significant in the Special Economic Zones which provide tax exemption and other business advantages for private foreign manufacturers, and the country’s infrastructure has been built almost entirely by multilateral and bilateral development assistance, the top provider of which has been Japan. As a result, and also due to the high domestic unemployment rate, people went abroad to work, and Japan has been one of the most popular destinations (Chibana 2012: 4; Satake 2009: 91-93). Encouraged by the Corazon Aquino (1933-2009) administration of 1986 to 1982, in particular, more women became migrants in the late 1980s and up to the mid-2000s. They were in a unique situation in Japan: 50 to 60 per cent of holders of the so-called entertainer visa were Philippine nationals, most of them women. The number of Filipino entertainer visa holders in Japan dramatically increased from 8,509 in 1980 to 42,867 in 1990 and to 81,282 in 2003 (Saito and Ruenkaew 2011: 6-7; Gaimusho 2004: 28). In 2005, however, the Philippine and Japanese governments agreed to curtail this visa category after international public attention was given to women who were working as hostesses or prostitutes on such visas.
Another important area when considering women’s migration for care and reproductive labour is marriage migration (see Nakamatsu in this volume). Saito — and Ruankaew calculated that in 2009, there was an unbalanced sex ratio among Philippine (77.7 per cent female), Thai (73.8 per cent female) and Chinese (58.0 per cent female) documented residents in Japan. As for age, in 2005, approximately 36 per cent of Filipino women in Japan were in their thirties; approximately 35 per cent of Thai women were aged between 35 and 44; and approximately 25 per cent of Chinese women were in their twenties. Some hypothesise that many women who entered Japan in their twenties and early thirties as undocumented workers in the sex industry in the 1990s changed their status to documented migrants by marrying Japanese men (Saito and Ruankaew 2011: 1-4; Aoyama 2009: 179-81). Regarding the Chinese women, their age cohort being relatively younger is doubtless related to the fact that overseas students, technology trainees and wives of Japanese men have drastically increased as a proportion of the total Chinese resident population in the past decade. Chinese nationals as wives exceeded the number of Filipino wives in the late 1990s and now account for half of the international marriages with Japanese men (Kosei rodo-sho 2009).
Not much research has yet been done into Chinese migrant women in the Japanese sex industry, but ongoing outreach work since 2006 by myself together with the sex workers’ advocacy network SWASH (Sex Workers and Sexual Health) suggests that Chinese women now outnumber their Thai and Filipino predecessors. If they have spouse visas and are working in the sex industry, they could be using marriage as a way to secure their status in Japan by avoiding deportation, as spouses of Japanese are exempt from the Migration Control and Refugee Recognition Law (Shutsunyukoku Kanri oyobi Nanmin Nintei Ho, 1951) prohibition on foreign nationals working in businesses regulated by the Entertainment Business Law (see below) (Aoyama 2012: 33, 38, 2014: 280-85).