Lovesick Japan: Sex * Marriage * Romance * Law

5. Commodified Sex

5 Commodified Sex A delivery health (deriheru) service is a legal business in which women are dispatched to meet men in their homes or hotels for any sexual activity except intercourse. The following 2002 case involved one of those establishments . The defendant shop owner told his store manager, who was in charge of hiring, that he wanted his workers to be over eighteen, to be drug-free, and to abstain from vaginal intercourse with clients. The defendant and the manager never asked prospective employees for proof of age. When Hideko applied for the job, she volunteered that she was only sixteen . The manager, who faced a shortage of “health girls” (herusujō), said, “Let’s keep that a secret,” and listed her age as eighteen. The defendant sent Hideko out on jobs just as he did any other employee, and Hideko had oral sex with her customers. She was seventeen at the time. The defendant was prosecuted for violating child welfare laws (“no person shall...cause a child to commit an obscene act”).1 Although the defendant did not actually know that Hideko was under eighteen, the court held that he should have checked her age, and found him guilty. The court 146 Lovesick Japan sentenced him to probation and one year in prison, suspended for four years. It explained the sentence: The defendant was heavily involved in the establishment of a so-called delivery health business in which he dispatched women to customers’ houses and hotel rooms to perform oral and manual sex, and he played a substantial role in management.... The defendant once ran a hotetoru [hotel Turkish bath] in Fukushima Prefecture, and on February 7, 2000, he was found guilty of violating the Prostitution Prevention Law, for which he received a sentence of one year and six months, suspended for four years. The defendant committed this act while under a suspended sentence, and for that he should be heavily condemned for his lack of a law-abiding spirit. As the prosecutor noted, after autumn 2001, the defendant stopped paying the victim child the money he had promised when he caught her dozing when she was supposed to be servicing a customer. The defendant faces jail time, and he should reflect seriously on his actions. However, in the background behind the defendant’s failure to check the victim child’s age is the former store manager’s disloyalty; the defendant had told the manager not to hire women under eighteen, he prohibited the “health girls” from having intercourse, and he required customers to sign an oath when they were introduced to a girl....At the time of the incident, he had already decided to wash his hands of the sex entertainment industry , he shows genuine remorse, and his wife has sworn that she will assist with his rehabilitation.2 Two factors seem to have hurt the defendant. First, the court criticized him for not paying his child prostitute her due for her sexual services, implying that if he had paid the seventeen-year-old appropriately, he might have been less culpable. Second, the court condemned him for his lack of a law-abiding spirit, a factor that presumably increased his light sentence. Despite these criticisms and condemnations, the court refrained from disparaging the defendant for running a pseudo-brothel in which women are paid for oral sex. To this court, the morality of the business, like its legality, seems to have been a given. Two other factors seem to have helped the defendant (leaving him with no actual jail time). First, he showed remorse, a factor commonly cited in Japanese sentencing but especially interesting here for the fact that the Commodified Sex 147 defendant’s wife had sworn to help him (what if she hadn’t?). Second, the court credited the defendant for his requirement of his customers of a signed oath (presumably prohibiting intercourse and violence, among other things) of questionable enforceability. The court gave the defendant points for running a contractually sound pseudo-brothel. In this chapter, I explore three areas in which Japanese courts rule and comment on commodified sex. The first two are clearly commercial: prostitution and other kinds of neon-lit sex-for-money transactions, and pornography . In these two areas, in contrast with the conservatism of private sex, a wide variety of sexual services are clearly legal. Courts generally enforce the law strictly, but their commentary is inconsistent: although they never...