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284 From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s trans-border trade in the sex industry emerged as a social issue, and at the same time globalization, the feminization of labor, and migration also expanded. Yayori Matsui described the problem succinctly in 1995: Many of the women who come to Japan as migrant workers are not in the position of being able to raise their own travel expenses to Japan or find jobs there on their own. What usually happens is that they are signed up by brokers in their own countries, given an advance in the form of a round-trip plane ticket, and sent to Japan with a promise or contract stating that they will work as receptionists, waitresses, models , or ordinary bar hostesses (not engaging in prostitution). In reality, however, brokers often sell them to promoters in Japan, many of whom are connected to organized crime syndicates, better known as yakuza (1995, 310, parenthesis and italics in original). In the first half of the 1980s, the trans-border migration of women in East and Southeast Asia began to be studied by academic women. The actual movement of migrant women increased as their labor for caring of the young, the ill, and the elderly, as well as housework came to be recognized as “new gold” extracted from the Third World to the First World, to borrow Arlie Hochschild’s lexicon (2002/03, 26). At the macroeconomic level, the so-called Plaza Accord at the end of 1985 changed the global climate , when the finance ministers of the G5 nations decided to devalue the US dollar against other currencies, and the relative values of the German mark and the Japanese yen then increased, enticing not only economic but also cultural and human transactions, particularly between Japan and other Asian countries. As a result informal labor migration in this area increased (Aoyama 2009, esp. introduction and chapter 1). However, one must note that these shifts were unequal, based on other economic disparities such as sex, class, and race, as well as the differences Kaoru Aoyama migrants and the sex industry 20 285 between people from the North or the South. Further, as the persons involved were women in the informal sector of the economy, they did not carry with them the status of “migrant worker.” If they were sex workers, moreover, they were treated both in state legislation and public discourse either as “victims” of trafficking, or “criminals” violating immigration law and the Prostitution Prevention Law of Japan.2 This is still true today. Until the latter half of the 1990s, the number of such undocumented migrants was estimated to be on the increase, and as the police also recognized, these women were exceedingly vulnerable, deprived of social welfare and the basic citizens’ right to equal treatment before the law (Keisatsucho ed. 1994, 99-104). Notably, numbers of Thai women were reported by the mass media to have been involved in criminal cases, such as killing their managers in order to escape from their enslavement (see e.g. Shimodate jiken 1995). Feminists like Yayori Matsui and their supporters documented accounts of these women as victims of sexual and economic subordination, and organized rescue and advocacy activities against this trade.3 Now, more than a decade later, and early in the new century, while the politics surrounding trafficking as organized crime has gained more attention at the international level, the lives of migrant women in the global sex trade and the sex industry in Japan have not improved. I can testify to this as a feminist researcher of sex work and migration, who, with deep respect, worked briefly with Ms. Matsui. I dare say that feminists who have been analyzing the issue, rescuing the victims, and leading actions and legal amendments, need now to question our methods and the outcomes of our analyses and practices. Most of all, I believe that we need to search for more complex contexts behind the global sex trade, since targeting the structural subordination of poor women to the rich, male prerogatives have not, in the end, offered better and different job opportunities with improved social positions for these women. What has been lacking seems to be enough attention to the particular actions and non-actions of migrant women in the sex industry, especially in terms of their motives, intentions, and perceptions , all of which together might form the basis of their abilities to act against, or comply with a given situation (based on Giddens 1984...

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