05. Newsletter: September 2005 Archives

Women from poverty-stricken countries are lured to Japan by promises of good jobs and brought into the country by traffickers who supply them with false passports. After detention by a criminal syndicate, the women are sold off to sex clubs or other sex-related businesses and called upon to pay back a debt for various expenses allegedly incurred, such as for transportation. The amount ranges on average from 3 to 5 million yen. Victims are not informed of how much of their so-called debt they have paid back and are trapped into forced sex labour, continually sold from one shop to another.

The question of ‘Loser Dogs’ has been hotly debated in Japan since Sakai Junko’s bestselling volume of essays “The Distant Howl of the Loser Dogs,” prompted the coining of the new term to refer to unmarried, childless women over thirty. Almost concurrently in neighbouring China, debate has centered around the question of ‘Winning Dogs’ - marital relationships and what it means to be a ‘wife’ – largely due to a television drama serial called “Chinese-style Divorce”.