some important info on JAPAN
i have taken this from as i am awear many girls here do not check up with that site fequently, but this info could affect you.
HUMAN TRAFFICKING???
MARCH 2005- If you haven't heard by now, the US government (George Bush) has been pressuring the Japanese government to "address it's issue of woman trafficking (the selling of women for illicit sex in Japan.)" CNN News has aired several reports about "agents advertising in North American newspapers & luring exotic dancers & hostesses to Japan with false promises of earning big money & then selling them as sex slaves."
60 Mintues then aired its story about dancers & hostesses working in Japan and added their own spin to it. Now this whole hosessting/dancing and human slavery and human trafficking story is getting blown out of proportion. So, below I am displaying the definition of "human trafficking & slavery" as defined by , a human rights advocay group.
United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, Supplemental Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children
'"Trafficking in persons" shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs;
Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000, [United States federal law; the definition below is of 'severe forms of trafficking in persons', for which there are criminal penalties in the United States]
1) Sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion or in which the person induced to perform such an act is under 18, or
2) The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion, for the purpose of subjecting that person to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.
I'm pretty confident that I have not coerced, bribed, forced or trafficked anyone in my life for the purpose of monetary gain, in order to send them to a place where they would be confined or witheld against their will to perform sex acts or other acts of servitude or slavery. However, Rob Cox seems to think differently. On the weekend (March 4th 2005) I recieved an email from Rob, this is the same Rob Cox that worked for World Agency and the same Rob Cox who gave an interview to 60 Mintues for their recent story - see his interview here:
Here's Robs email to me:
----- Original Message -----
From: robert Charles cox
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 4:32 PM
Your palying a major part as hiuman trafficker you hypercit!!
Anyway Rob, who on earth are you calling a hypocrite?!! I've never encountered a bigger hypocrite than you in my life. And speaking of which, how much did 60 Minutes pay you for your story? I have proof they were paying $2000usd for interviews ...so don't tell me you did your little stint for free.
Anyway, you're either a part of the problem or part of the solution - which is it? There is a REAL HUMAN TRAFFICKING & SLAVERY ISSUE taking place in the world, and with all these accusations flying around, and time being wasted on people who aren't involved in such things, its taking the authorities and human trafficking organizations resources away from the people who REALLY NEED it.
Do the people in the photo above (left) look like they are being confined against their will? The Karaoke photo above is what I am referring to Rob? Do they look like sex slaves or look like they are unhappy and/or like they are being held against their wishes? And, if that pic doesn't tell the whole story then it's ok, because I have thousands more photos where those came from... and in none of the photos does anyone look unhappy or like they are being treated as, or forced to be, sex slaves.
Before I was an agent I was a dancer who worked in Japan, therefore, I myself danced & hostessed in Japan. I lived there and have visited Japan over 30 times and never have I ever come across such atrocities. Dancing in Japan was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life.
So define the abuses which you claim happen to the girls you worked with everyday Rob? I want to know about them and I think everyone else does too. We all want to know who was forced or coerced into working in Japan and who is being held against their will, being abused, and being sold as sex slaves? The world wants to know, so name some names. Where are these slaves? Please do come forward and don't be afraid if you are one yourself- you can go to the authorities as there are people there now who are all ears & ready to listen.
BUT first let me reitierate 'making false claims to authorities such as human trafficking & slavery is a "FEDERAL OFFENSE."' It also undermines the authorities & woman trafficking organizations efforts to curtail the REAL HUMAN TRAFFICKING problem." So if you make an "accusation" then be certain it falls under the right definition of "human trafficking and sex slavery" before you even think of saying anything.
If you have a valid complaint then please do take it to your embassy or the authorities, but make sure what you are saying is a legitimate complaint. And think carefully about what you say, and do, before you do or say it and think about who you might be hurting if you make a false claim.
If you require more information then please contact Janet by email
Re: some important info on JAPAN
and the transcript form the 60 min show in australia
Transcript - Night stalkers
February 27, 2005
Reporter: Liz Hayes
Producer: Stephen Rice
Japanese cannibal, Issei Sagawa talks with Liz Hayes.
INTRODUCTION
LIZ HAYES: You have to ask, how on earth can this happen? Every year, hundreds and hundreds of bright-eyed young Australian girls head for the bright lights of Tokyo, every one of them in grave danger. Innocents like 21-year-old Carita Ridgway are easy prey for rich Japanese men. She died a terrible death, a victim of Japan's worst serial rapist. A monster who not only drugged and raped more than 150 women, he videotaped all his hideous crimes. And the frightening thing is, he's not alone. In Tokyo tonight, the predators will be on the prowl looking for young Australians.
STORY
LIZ HAYES: It was meant to be the beginning of a new career. At 21, Carita Ridgway was already an accomplished model and now trying to make it in the movies. But first, this young beauty wanted to take a working holiday and, like thousands of other Australian girls, boarded a plane for Tokyo.
So Carita had never expressed any concerns about this job at all?
NIGEL RIDGWAY: No, she hadn't. I think they just thought it was a bit of a laugh, really, easy money.
LIZ HAYES: What happened to Carita in Japan has, until now, been a mystery. It's a horrifying story — a story of rape and murder and men who prey on innocent young Australian women.
ROB COX: Sexual violation to a stripper or hostess would happen every night. Every night.
LIZ HAYES: Every night an Australian girl is abused?
ROB COX: Yep. Yep. Every night.
LIZ HAYES: This is Tokyo's red-light district, Roppongi. It's a Saturday night and, like millions of other Japanese men, Mr Sagawa is looking for love and, in particular, the love of a young Western girl.
ISSEI SAGAWA: They're beautiful, especially white young girls.
LIZ HAYES: You just love young white girls?
ISSEI SAGAWA: Yeah, blonde hair and, uh, blue eyes and white skin.
LIZ HAYES: Mr Sagawa's heart has already been broken once by a young Australian dancer whom he showered with gifts and money.
And where is this?
ISSEI SAGAWA: In Canada. Toronto.
LIZ HAYES: You went on holidays together?
ISSEI SAGAWA: Yes.
LIZ HAYES: But the 22-year-old Melbourne girl was lucky, for she quickly learnt that her mild-mannered boyfriend had a despicable secret.
ISSEI SAGAWA: I really, I wanted to eat her. She looks very delicious.
LIZ HAYES: For the shocking truth about Issei Sagawa is that he is a psychopath, a killer. He's Japan's most notorious cannibal.
ISSEI SAGAWA: First part I ate is from her hips, yeah. I don't know why, but the hips of the girls really attract me.
LIZ HAYES: It was in Paris 20 years ago that we first heard about Issei Sagawa. One night he lured a young woman named Renee Hartevelt to his apartment. There he shot her, methodically cooked her, then ate her body. But Issei Sagawa got away with murder. Judged incurably insane by a French court, he was deported back to Japan and once there, his influential and very wealthy father ensured that he's never spent a day in jail.
ISSEI SAGAWA: A lot of pictures of beautiful girls.
LIZ HAYES: There certainly are. Here in his bedroom Sagawa proudly keeps a record of his obsession. Now he'd like another Australian girlfriend, preferably one that he can add to his trophy wall.
ISSEI SAGAWA: Are you shocked?
LIZ HAYES: Yes, I'm shocked.
ISSEI SAGAWA: I know I'm crazy. I'm crazy. So please don't hate me.
LIZ HAYES: This is Issei Sagawa's hunting ground. It's a lawless place. Here the Mafia is in control. The police are paid to look the other way. On any given night there are more than 500 girls from Australia working at bars like this.
ROB COX: They are the fresh meat, as they call them over there.
LIZ HAYES: The fresh meat?
ROB COX: The fresh meat. Oh, yeah.
LIZ HAYES: Were you working for the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia?
ROB COX: The owner of the company is under the control of the Yakuza.
LIZ HAYES: Rob Cox has broken the Yakuza's code of silence. He's an insider. He once worked for a Tokyo strip club. Cox says it's a world where money can buy you anything — sex, drugs and even the police.
ROB COX: The police and the Yakuza work hand in hand to make sure that the sex industry keeps spinning around and around.
VANESSA: Sometimes you can make up to 10 grand a week or more, you know.
LIZ HAYES: Like every Australian girl who arrives here, Vanessa had to make a choice. She could work in a hostess bar, which involved nothing more than talking with Japanese businessmen, or, for four times the money, she could become a stripper.
Part of the job entails, does it not, dealing with perfect strangers who do want to touch you?
VANESSA: Yeah.
LIZ HAYES: So what do you do about that?
VANESSA: Well, that's why most of the girls get mixed up with, you know, alcohol and drugs.
LIZ HAYES: It has to be said that not all of the young Australians who arrive here succumb to this lifestyle. One was Carita Ridgway, the aspiring actress who had been trying out for movie parts back home.
NIGEL RIDGWAY: She had a great sense of humour. She used to keep us in stitches as a kid because she would mimic all her teachers at school and she'd have them down pat.
LIZ HAYES: Carita's dad Nigel wasn't worried when she left for Japan in 1991 and found a job in a hostess bar.
Did she ever express feeling unsafe?
NIGEL RIDGWAY: No, no. In fact, the opposite. They said that they always felt safe.
LIZ HAYES: But then Carita was asked to go out on a dohan, a Japanese practice where clubs allow a customer to take a hostess out on a date.
VANESSA: In most cases, the girl will go for dinner with the customer. The customer will take you shopping, buy you Gucci … shoes, handbags, that sort of thing.
LIZ HAYES: Once you're taken away, anything can happen?
VANESSA: Oh, definitely. Obviously, it's very dangerous.
LIZ HAYES: One of Carita's first dohans was with this man, a wealthy and well-connected playboy called Joji Obara.
Most of the girls who are hostesses are asked to go out on dohans, which are dates with customers. Were you aware of that?
NIGEL RIDGWAY: No, I wasn't. In fact, you having mentioned it just now is the first time I knew that that was part of the deal.
LIZ HAYES: Joji Obara seemed charming and invited Carita back to one of his luxury apartments for a drink. Within hours, she was in a coma and taken to hospital. Obara told the doctors it was something she ate. Carita died here in Tokyo women's hospital without regaining consciousness. Doctors ruled that she had been suffering from hepatitis. When Carita's family asked the Japanese police to investigate, they were fobbed off, even laughed at. It was to be the first in a series of extraordinary blunders by the Japanese police, blunders that would allow Obara to continue and drug and rape young women for the next eight years.
TIM BLACKMAN: She was very vivacious, a hugely entertaining young lady.
LIZ HAYES: Five years ago, Lucy Blackman told her dad Tim she was heading off to Japan.
TIM BLACKMAN: It seemed an entirely safe and a standard thing to do, really.
LIZ HAYES: She, too, got a job as a hostess and like Carita Ridgway was taken out on a dohan by a charming English-speaking Japanese man who invited her down to his apartment on the coast. It was the last time Lucy Blackman was seen alive.
You basically blanket-bombed Tokyo with your message that you wanted to find your daughter?
TIM BLACKMAN: That's right, because we set up a hotline out there so that girls didn't feel they had to go to the police. They could come to us and tell their story.
LIZ HAYES: One name kept coming up — Joji Obara.
TIM BLACKMAN: Various girls came to us and related this story about being taken to the coast and being date-raped.
LIZ HAYES: Tim Blackman's pressure finally forced the police to act. They raided Obara's seaside haunt. Lucy's dismembered body was found in a shallow grave in a beachside cave just metres from Obara's apartment. How her body could have gone undiscovered for so long is still a mystery. What we do know is that Joji Obara brought hundreds of young Western women here. The pattern was always the same. He would offer the girl a drink spiked with a knockout drug, then rape her while she was unconscious. When Japanese police finally raided his apartment, they found more than 1000 tapes. Obara had recorded his own crimes — the rape of more than 150 women. Some of the women identified on the tapes were Australian. One of them was Carita Ridgway, the 21-year-old from Perth. Now, 10 years later, her family is finally being told the truth. Carita didn't die of hepatitis at all but from the drugs Obara had used while he raped her.
NIGEL RIDGWAY: It is another dimension of, like, horror and disgust. It is just a horrible feeling to think your child has been violated by somebody.
LIZ HAYES: Obara has not been charged with the murder of either Carita Ridgway or Lucy Blackman. Instead, he's on trial for much lesser charges — abduction, rape resulting in death and improper disposal of a body.
What do you believe Lucy's case has exposed about this Japanese society?
TIM BLACKMAN: I think the only thing it actually shows is that the Japanese aren't going to change, unfortunately.
Re: some important info on JAPAN
LIZ HAYES: And the risk for Australian girls still remains. In the seedy hostess clubs of Roppongi, it is business as usual, as we discovered when we followed Issei Sagawa on a night out. Here Japan's most notorious criminal quickly found just what he was looking for — three young Australian women. Mr Sagawa introduced himself as his favourite secret agent...
ISSEI SAGAWA: My name is James Bond, okay.
LIZ HAYES: …and chatted happily to the unsuspecting girls.
WOMAN: ST Moths? Yes, in summer.
ISSEI SAGAWA: I am very scared of them, yeah, yeah.
WOMAN: Oh, they're nothing to be scared of. They're cute.
LIZ HAYES: Issei Sagawa swears that these young women have nothing to fear from him.
ISSEI SAGAWA: Never. Never. At least, um, kill, never. Of course I want to eat the meat of young beautiful girls. It will not change at all, but...
LIZ HAYES: You still want to eat the girls, you just don't want to kill them.
ISSEI SAGAWA: Yeah, so I know now that killing is really terrible. So for eating I never kill.
LIZ HAYES: By the time he left, all three of these trusting young Australians had handed him their private phone numbers. Outside, we politely took the girls' phone numbers back from him.
How dangerous do you believe the Roppongi bars and strip clubs are for young foreign girls?
ISSEI SAGAWA: Of course it is very, very dangerous because, um, the customers are very rich. They can do everything.
Re: some important info on JAPAN
I don't know quite what to make of all of this, but it certainly doesn't jive at all, not even a little bit, with what I have personally experienced in Tokyo's gaijin strip clubs and hostess bars going back for over a decade. Despite its association with what one might have thought to be reliable news sources, I think it must be mostly, maybe entirely, totally exaggerated and bullshit sensationalism and fear mongering for the sake of "selling papers" and getting attention.
Just a few points:
- I have known many Western dancers and hostesses working in Tokyo and have spent countless hours talking to them both in clubs and outside in public and private places. Not a single one of them have ever said or even hinted at any problems like these. Just the opposite in fact. Many have commented on how safe they find living and working in Japan compared to other places.
- Now, you might wonder if they simply don't talk about the dangers with customers for fear of getting in trouble, but that doesn't wash either because their actions speak even louder than their words. I have never been anywhere that dancers seem less afraid of customers and less caustious about general security issues than in Tokyo. In other words, if all this terrible stuff were really the norm...or even an occasional problem, I don't think you would see dancers and hostesses going off with customers on dohans and after-closing dates and weekend trips and so forth in the routine and casual way that is the norm in Tokyo. I have been in some Third World countries where women have plenty to fear, both from organized crime and from individual "predators", and the way they talk and behave could not possibly be more different than the Tokyo scene.
- The famous Carita Ridgeway story is another demonstration of how rare crimes against hostesses and dancers must be. What happened to her and subsequently to the man who killed her has been a major news story, both within Japan and internationally for years...specifically because it was so unusual and exceptional. The Issei Sagawa story is obviously even more unique and rare; I am sure more dancers have died in Tokyo due to traffic accidents or slipping and falling in the shower than have been eaten by cannibals!
- It is also worth noting that lots of dancers and hostesses return to Japan to work, often repeatedly. I have met dancers in Tokyo clubs, known them to leave and go back home (to Canada in one case I recall clearly) and then return after a few months to work some more. Such a pattern is very common, in fact. Would they be doing that if the working conditions were anything like those described in these hysterical media pieces.
- And, for that matter, right here on SW we have had quite a few dancers work in Tokyo even in the short time I have been active on the site. Have any of them reported this sort of trouble...either happening to them or even hearing about it on the dancer rumor mill in Tokyo? I don't think so. There are complaints about not making as much as expected or about poor service by agents and there was mermaidnz's report of a burglary of some other dancers' apartment while they were out, but as far as I can recall, no one has even mentioned feeling threatened with violence or abduction. Right? This includes at least one dancer, Kitty-chan, who worked in Tokyo clubs for years and who speaks fluent Japanese. If going there to work were such a terrible risk, would none of these dancers with Japanese experience have warned the SW (and other dancer web site) communities?
Bottom line - I think all this fear mongering "information" is almost certainly complete nonsense and no cause for serious concern. Of course, everyone has to make their own decisions, and since no one reading this really knows me, I guess there is no reason to believe me over what they are putting on TV, but this is my 2 cents worth...make of it what you will.
Btw, to be clear, none of the above is directed "at" mermaidnz or intended as a criticism of her posting the material from thebestdancers.com here. Since it is making the rounds anyway, it is very appropriate that the SW community see it, and I think it was good that she posted it here too.
-Ww
PS - In case any of you were attributing my very low profile on SW over the last week or two to me being abducted as a sex slave or eaten by a Japanese cannibal, don't worry. The explanation is much more mundane; I have been traveling (not in Tokyo now...will be again soon though) and have not had much time online.
Re: some important info on JAPAN
ha wwanderer, no its definatly not directed at me in anyway :)
but i thought it was well worht posting to clarify things for those who ahve been following the threads on japan, and were a lil confused, and did not read thebestdancers often.
anyone here knows just how pissed i was with would agency, well i got offered the 2k to do an interview with 60mins also, yet my 'story" obviously wasnt gossipy enough, not enough impact there, and as much as i didnt like teh agents at that time, i didnt make any shit up just to make a quick buck, unlike some of the people featured in the interview!
sushi, i hope you get a chance to read up on this too...although im sureyouve seen in via thebestdancers
Re: some important info on JAPAN
If I were the paranoid conspiracy theory type, which I'm not, I'd be tempted to think that there is a connection between all the recent immigration/visa busts of dancers and hostesses in Tokyo and the insane/hysterical media coverage of the dangers of working there reported in this thread. It is almost as though someone were trying to completely shut down or suppress foreigners working in the mizu shobai (water business = nightlife/entertainment industry) for some reason.
I don't quite believe this "explanation" but whether or not it is correct, between the busts and all this scare-tactic publicity, it certainly looks like there are going to be many fewer gaijin dancers and hostesses working in Tokyo in the near term future, at least. When I get back there next month I am going to make the rounds and see if any more of the clubs are "closed for rennovations" or employing mostly Japanese dancers.
-Ww