Bowing in shame: Filipina sex workers in Japan
By Jose Montelibano
Januanry 28, 2005
It is absolutely humiliating to watch our government try to negotiate the
decision of Japanese authorities who have awakened to their own shame and are
trying to slam the door on Japayukis. The policy of sending Filipino women to
Japan on the pretext that they are dancers and singers has been the greatest
national shame that our government, and we who did nothing about it, will have
to account for -- even to our grandchildren one day. We make prostitution a
crime in the Philippines, but use the official seal of the motherland to
approve entertainers going to Japan when we know that most of them will become
sex workers.
What makes matters worse is that the Philippine government uses the lack of
work opportunities in the country a reason to officially ask Japan not to
prevent Japayukis from continuing to ply their services. Instead of contesting
and protesting to the high heavens that the information of the Japanese
government about Japayukis being mere sex workers, our government officials
practically beg their counterparts to keep being officially blind to a horrid
story of accepted immorality.
It is doubly dishonorable when we have a woman president and a woman secretary
of labor interceding for the commercial interests of Filipinos, and their
hidden Japanese partners, who feel no compunction to exchange personal and
national honor for money. The prevalence of poverty is not excuse enough to
officially and blindly allow a trade that defines by practice the trading of
sexual favors as entertainment. If it were so, then government should encourage
prostitution to be a legal endeavor in the Philippines.
The condemnation does not belong only to government. It belongs to all
Filipinos who have not stood up to denounce the official sanction of immorality
that has been crudely disguised as honest and clean entertainment. But it
belongs in a special way to the Catholic Church because it is the dominant
religion, and to all religious groups who have not trembled with shock and have
not spoken out and moved in outrage at the corruption of the nation's morality.
It is interesting to investigate the trail of dishonor that began in the
Ferdinand Marcos era and stayed unbroken to today. It is the same story as
poverty. When it is there all the time, people begin to accept it as a normal
part of the national landscape. But Japayukis have not been there forever,
maybe not even thirty years. It used to be that sex tours were part of the
great tourism drive that the Marcos government pretended not to know. Everybody
else did, though, as they quickly recognized the pimps dressed in white
loitering around hotel lobbies where Japanese tourists stayed.
I wonder who thought of it first -- sending Japayukis to Japan, that is. Most
probably, it must have been the Japanese who were arranging the sex tours from
Japan who thought of supplying wholesale what Japanese men were craving for --
Filipina flesh. And it is not strange to note how Filipino businessmen jumped
at the chance to earn extra money even at the price of selling our women, of
shaming a whole people, a whole nation.
Even less strange is to find a Department of Labor giving official cover to a
shocking practice of sex for money. Officials will argue that there has been
little evidence of Filipino entertainers serving as prostitutes. Of course,
there will be little evidence when no one is seriously looking to find any.
Everybody knows but officially pretends not to. That is why there is no
diplomatic protest about the unfairness of the Japanese government's decision
as being unfair on the grounds that there is no prostitution involved. The
protest is founded instead on the fact that tens of thousands of Filipino women
will lose their special way of making money.
How much more shame can we endure, or how much embarrassment must we make the
Japanese endure by insisting on an extension of a policy that is the source of
our greatest national shame? Is the corruption rating of our country that
accurate that even our national soul has been exposed as insensitive to the
natural demands of decency and morality? A political personality once asked
after being shot, "What is happening to our country?" I wonder what he would
have said about the Japayuki trade.
For several years, the Japanese government has tried to be diplomatically
subtle about prodding the Philippine government into instituting measures that
would choke the exit of Filipino sex workers to Japan. But the Philippine
government, represented by the Department of Labor and Employment, has
consistently allowed, if not advised, the traders of Japayukis to find their
way around Japanese policies. I suspect that the same groups, the same cabal,
who started this in the Marcos era, in the labor department and in the private
sector, remain largely the same after more than twenty years.
Now, the Japanese officials are the ones who cannot stand it anymore. It is
always us who are shamed, but it is Japanese money that is instrumental in
numbing our shame. That intimate connection with our national shame has become
more unbearable to the Japanese than our own officials. And the more that our
officials keep begging the Japanese authorities to stay with a shameful
practice officially, the more the Japanese will be forced to embarrass us
before the world by articulating in detail the reasons why they are changing
their policies.
No more, Mrs. President, please no more. Let us just agree to work together
with relentless determination and sincerity to address national poverty and
national corruption. Let us build our nation from the ground up by restoring
dignity to our people, especially the poor. Let us return to the land and give
our people access to technology and credit so they can grow their own food and
feed their families, the cities and even our Asian neighbors. Let the poor who
have become our greatest liabilities become our greatest assets by inspiring
the rich and powerful to be big brothers instead of big bullies.
Filipinos are ready to find their roots, to recover their dignity, to develop
their potential. Filipinos only ask for their leaders to show the way.
Meanwhile, we continue bowing in shame.
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