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Japanese police plan fresh crackdown on sex traffickers
February 3, 2005
Tokyo - Japanese police said Thursday they were planning ways to tighten
registration rules for foreign sex workers in a bid to fight human trafficking,
a problem which has put Japan on a US watchlist.
The National Police Agency said it hoped to require businesses in the sex
industry to show that their foreign employees had permits to live and work in
Japan, where adult entertainment is widely available although illegal.
Businesses in violation of these rules could have their right to operate
revoked, an agency spokesman said.
"We are drafting the proposed changes and are hoping to receive the cabinet's
approval soon," he told Agence France-Presse.
Many owners of businesses in the sex industry get away with flouting the rules
by telling authorities they did not know their foreign employees were living
and working illegally in Japan.
The police also aimed to ban the distribution of leaflets offering sexual
services to private residences, the spokesman said.
Japan has vowed to do more to stop the sex trade after a damning US report in
June that put it on a watchlist of countries involved in human trafficking.
The US State Department said Japan has "a huge problem with slavery,
particularly sex slavery," and that there was a "tremendous gap" between the
size of the problem and the resources devoted to addressing it.
However, Japan's crackdown on the sex trade has also drawn international
criticism, with weekly pickets outside the Japanese embassy in Manila by
Filipinos worried that many legitimate workers would be deprived of their
livelihoods.
Japan plans to begin restricting the issue of entertainment visas -- often used
in human trafficking -- only to Filipinos with two years' training outside
Japan or at foreign educational institutes.
Nearly 300,000 Filipinos work in Japan, many of them women "entertainers" at
bars and other nightspots.
Filipino officials estimate that up to 77,000 entered the country illegally.
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