Willing Daughters: The Moral Rhetoric of Filial Sacrifice and Financial Autonomy in Tokyo's Sex Industry

ABSTRACT

Japan has one of the world's largest and most diverse legal sex industries. In a limited female labor market, sex industry work is a stigmatized yet lucrative form of women's short-term employment and advertisements for recruiting new employees are prominently displayed across urban spaces associated with feminized consumption. In this article, I examine the ideological impasses that adult Japanese women working in Tokyo's sex industry express when talking about their motives for pursuing this work. Female sex workers commonly justify their work as the necessary sacrifice of filial daughters. This rhetoric of reluctant acceptance for the sake of others, however, obscures the reality that many sex workers are middle-class and college-educated women who find the financial opportunity and flexibility of this industry appealing in contrast to more dominant forms of feminized labor. These women express the ambivalence of their desires for economic self-sufficiency through narrating the dependence of others on them. Examining these ambivalences, I argue that sex workers’ motivations can only be understood through considering the ethical and moral frameworks that define the gendered economies in which they labor.

Keywords:

• gendered economy
• motive
• sex work
• labor
• Japan

Acknowledgments

I am greatly indebted to the many individuals who facilitated my research and allowed me to enter into their confidences. I also wish to thank Stuart Strange, Elizabeth Wingrove, Jennifer Robertson, Michelle Damian, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and intellectual engagement with this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Gabriele Koch is a sociocultural anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. She is currently working on a book that explores debates over the meaning of sex, labor, and rights in Tokyo's mainstream commercial sex industry.

Notes

¹Since they do not involve heterosexual intercourse, same-sex commercial sexual services are not regulated by the anti-prostitution law.

²By contrast, in other global contexts of sexual commerce, the cohesiveness and uniformity implied by “sex industry” make it an unproductive term. Svati Shah, for instance, has written about three spaces in which migrant women in Mumbai, India transact sex: brothels, the streets, and public day wage labor markets. She notes that:

the term ‘industry’ was not helpful in the context of this research because the sale and trade of sexual services in the three ethnographic sites was highly irregular and did not produce the same outcomes for the individuals who participated in these transactions. (Shah 2014, 15)

³Keisatsuchō 2015, 15.

⁴As Peter Andreas and Kelly Greenhill point out in their introduction to the volume Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts 2010, given the centrality of quantification to justifying interventions, the production of statistics is often fraught in relation to conflict or illicit activities. Similarly, in his classic analysis of American rhetorical claims surrounding threats to children, Joel Best has illustrated how statistics, once in circulation, often take on a life of their own, regardless of their provenance (Best 1990; see also Feingold 2010 in relation to human trafficking statistics). Aware of these politics of numbers, I have attempted to be as transparent as possible in my calculations on the scale of the legal, heteronormative sex industry.

⁵A term which straddles the Euro-American categories of transgender and transsexual without fitting neatly into either. “New half” individuals are typically anatomically male individuals who take hormones to develop their breasts while retaining their male genitalia. In contrast, “half” (hāfu) is an older and slightly pejorative term for a person of visibly mixed ancestry/ethnicity.

⁶Anglophone sources on this broader market include Allison 1994; McLelland 2002; McLelland, Suganuma, and Welker 2007; Parreñas 2011; and Takeyama 2005, 2010.

⁷Ogiue 2012; Suzuki 2010.

⁸See, for instance, Onnatachi no 21 Seiki 2012, 40–47.

⁹Montgomery 1998, 148.

¹⁰Zheng 2009, 152.

¹¹Agustín 2007; Bernstein 2007; Brennan 2004; Cheng 2010; Hoang 2015; Parreñas 2011; Shah 2014; Zheng 2009. See also Kempadoo and Doezema 1998.

¹²The Yoshiwara district was originally located in what is now central Tokyo. By 1656, however, government authorities were concerned that with urban expansion the district's location was becoming too centralized and the district was moved to its present location in 1657.

¹³Sex workers are themselves often unaware of the legal status of a business due, among other things, to lack of knowledge of the law as well as to unscrupulous managers who may mislead employees. Illegal businesses include, for instance, those that are not registered with the police, are outside of the zoning area, employ minors or those without the proper visa, or operate after legally designated hours.

¹⁴Sex workers may be arrested for hōjozai, or aiding in the carrying out of a crime. Although previously rare, during the period of my fieldwork (2008–2013), the number of female sex workers arrested for “aiding” crimes was on the increase, causing concern among advocates.

¹⁵The anthropologist Anna Wilking (2014) similarly addresses how sex workers use locally available discourses of (female) sacrifice to mitigate stigma, both in the eyes of others and in regard to how they perceive themselves. In the deeply Catholic context of Quito, Ecuador, sex workers are scorned as women “living in sin.” The street prostitutes that Wilking works with, however, all of whom are mothers, emphasize their maternal sacrifice of their spiritual salvation, thereby redeeming themselves as exemplary and virtuous mothers, both in their individual relation to God and to other people.

¹⁶Nakane 1967.

¹⁷Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2015, 64.

¹⁸As such, the koseki is the site of major challenges from feminists, sexual minorities, and permanent residents of ethnic Chinese and Korean descent.

¹⁹Robertson 2014, 579, emphasis in original; see also Chapman and Krogness 2014.

²⁰Although it had earlier precedents, this practice existed from roughly the early 1600s through the 1950s. In a recent book, the Japanese historian Fujino Yutaka (2012) details how this traffic in humans, including boys, continued into the early postwar years in farming and fishing villages around the country.

²¹Stanley 2012, 9.

²²Stanley 2012.

²³Garon 1997, 95.

²⁴Garon 1997, 94–95.

²⁵Scholarship such as Yamazaki Tomoko's Sandakan Brothel No. 8 (Sandakan Hachiban Shōkan) has offered a powerful counterpoint to naïve portrayals of the women sent to work as prostitutes. Yamazaki's oral history of several former karayuki-san demonstrates how lower-class women were exploited by both family and nation and suffered not only from often dismal working conditions overseas but also from the intense discrimination and isolation that welcomed them on their return (Yamazaki [1972] 1999).

²⁶Shiga-Fujime 1993, 14–15; Sievers 1983; Tsurumi 1990.

²⁷Mark Ramseyer 1991 has shown how, despite contemporary assumptions that brothel owners might have unscrupulously manipulated the contracts so as to extend the labor of prostitutes, the archival evidence does not support this conclusion. Examining indenture contracts from the 1920s and 1930s, Ramseyer found, instead, that many indentured prostitutes paid off their debts and left their workplace before the maximum six-year term was up, while others left without incident after having served the full term.

²⁸See, for example, Tsurumi 1990, 59–67.

²⁹Sievers 1983; Tsurumi 1990.

³⁰Sievers 1983, 58.

³¹See, for instance, Partner 2004, 46–51.

³²Dower 1999; Kovner 2012; Sanders 2012.

³³“Rupo Hifuyūsō no Genjitsu” [Close-up on the Realities of the Non-Wealthy], Tōkyō Shimbun, December 9, 2012, morning edition, 1.

³⁴“Kōkō Kyōyu Fūzoku de Baito” [High School Teacher Working in Sex Industry], Osaka Yomiuri Shimbun, May 3, 2013, morning edition, 29; “Sensei ‘Hōkago’ wa Fūzokujō” [After School, Teacher Works as Sex Worker], Sankei Shimbun, May 3, 2013, Tokyo morning edition, 23.

³⁵I should note that while rhetoric about being a “good daughter” is not the same as that of being a “good mother,” I invoke them together insofar as both mitigate women's labor in a stigmatized field via an (implicit) expression of others’ dependence on them.

³⁶Cullinane 2007; Leheny 2006; Miyadai [1994] 2006.

³⁷“JK Bijinesu, Asu Zenmen Kinshi” [Ban on JK Businesses Starts Tomorrow], Asahi Shimbun, June 30, 2015, morning edition, 1.

³⁸Adolescent girls involved in JK businesses may be taken into police custody and be subject to “guidance” measures, while their managers face jail time and/or fines.

³⁹Brinton 1993; Miura 2012.

⁴⁰Brinton 2011.

⁴¹Brinton 2011, 30.

⁴²Shimizu 2013, 166.

⁴³Steinberg and Nakane 2012, 19.

⁴⁴Fujiwara 2008.

⁴⁵Additionally, 24.1 percent of first-time (married) mothers were already unemployed when they became pregnant. 17.1 percent were still employed at the child's first birthday and had taken parental leave, while 9.7 percent were still employed but had not taken leave. Naikakufu Danjo Kyōdō Sankakukyoku 2015, 61.

⁴⁶Mun and Brinton 2015.

⁴⁷Osaki 2014.

⁴⁸These percentages include both those who responded “agree” and “somewhat agree.” Naikakufu Danjo Kyōdō Sankakukyoku 2015, 56.

⁴⁹60.3 percent of respondents were between eighteen and twenty-three, and 33.3 percent were between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-nine. Kaname and Mizushima 2005, 16.

⁵⁰Kaname and Mizushima 2005, 18–19.

⁵¹The magazines are distributed rather indiscriminately to female pedestrians. Although I am phenotypically Euro-American, I was also offered the magazines on numerous occasions. Whenever I asked the individuals distributing the magazines – typically young men in their twenties – why they gave one to me, they invariably shrugged and mentioned their distribution quota. Similarly, I once observed as two women in their sixties were handed the magazines. They looked at the cover and exclaimed, “High-paying work for girls!” before laughing and marching back to return the magazines to the now blushing young man.

⁵²The magazine's name is onomatopoeic, evoking the sound of an engine being revved (“vroom vroom”). It suggests that the magazine is a vehicle for women to jumpstart their work – and their goals.

⁵³Kaname and Mizushima 2005, 27.

⁵⁴Tachikawa 2010, 101, 119.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by the Fulbright IIE Program, the National Science Foundation's East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes (EAPSI) Program, and numerous sources at the University of Michigan.