From Bangkoking backpackers to L.A. lays, callgirls Japan's latest sexport

By Ryann Connell
December 7, 2004

Much of Japan was shocked earlier this year after the U.S. State Department listed the country as a prime destination for female sex slaves, but being the export powerhouse that it is, Japanese women selling their bodies overseas are making sure it's not all one-way traffick, according to Spa!.

"The 700,000 yen I brought with me to fund my trip vanished pretty quickly and my (dance) school worked on a pay as you go basis, so I needed to have money to go to classes, Mie Sasaki, who worked as a streetwalker in Las Vegas, tells Spa! "Plenty of American dancers sell their bodies to make a living. I went to a Greyhound bus terminal in L.A. and sat down on a bench because if you do that it's 100 percent certain a black pimp will come by and pick you up. Sure enough, that's what happened. When I said in broken English, 'I've got no money,' he picked up my bags, said, 'OK, here we go then and took me off on a bus."

It was a fairly short trip to the streets of Las Vegas, where Sasaki serviced as many as five customers per day, most of them white male tourists.

"For every day I worked, I could go to school for two days. I had to pay 50 dollars a day to the pimp. That rate stayed the same whether I got customers or not. I usually worked about three days a week. Most of the sex was normal, but two out of every three customers would offer me drugs. Once you take drugs, you're finished. Some girls work just to keep up their drug habit," Sasaki says. "After about half a year, I was feeling the pinch. But I have no regrets. The memory of working so hard is one of my life's treasures."

Kimiko Saito was lured into working as a prostitute Stateside after seeing a call girl buddy's palatial New Jersey home.

"It was huge, eight bedroom place like one of those two story homes you see in the movies. I thought it'd be great to live there," Saito tells Spa!, adding that she later discovered she'd been smitten by a cathouse. "There were six of us Orientals living there, including a Korean and a Thai. We lived together and worked as prostitutes in the house. American guys like white faces, straight black hair and dark eyes, so I straightened my hair out and let it return to its natural color."

Saito says she serviced Mafioso, tourists and employees of top companies and the government.

"I made about 100,000 dollars a year. Orientals in particular get paid well. And Japanese are better paid than the rest. None of the customers asked for weird sex. They get excited enough just by being able to have sex with an Oriental."

Eriko Nakamura went to Australia to ply what she has down under.

"I ran out of money not long after arriving here. Just as I was worried about how I'd get by, I came across a tabloid newspaper like Tokyo Sports and saw all these ads saying things like, 'Japanese Women Wanted,' or 'Places Japanese Women Can Work,'" says the 26-year-old who traveled on a working holiday visa and studied English while in Oz.

Nakamura answered the ads and discovered they were for men's clubs. Her interview was conducted entirely in Japanese and she agreed to a rate of pay twice that handed out to the Aussie girls.

"Customers could take the girls out of the club. We had to prance around in miniskirts and skimpy aprons. You could negotiate with customers at the club, then head to a hotel once you'd agreed on a price. Melbourne has red light districts, so everything we were doing was legal," Nakamura says, adding that about half the Japanese female students in Australia were also moonlighting as prostitutes. "It's a secret, but during the Sydney Olympics, we looked after some members of the Japanese Olympic team and we also had some sumo wrestlers come to us. Tour conductors used to get paid if they brought clients to us. I used to think they were really stupid for coming all the way to Australia just to pay for sex with a Japanese student."

Thailand is a source of many of Japan's sex workers, but many Japanese sex workers like Chiaki Nishiyama also see the Land of Smiles as a good place to get Bangkok and Phuket.

"I used the lobby of a cheap hotel in Bangkok run by a Thai friend of mine and approach customers on their way through. My starting price is 5,000 baht (about 13,000 yen), but we usually agree on about 3,000 baht. My clients are all backpackers, and they don't have much money, so if he's a really good-looking guy, I'll give it to him half price," the 21-year-old Nishiyama says. "Incidentally, I don't pay anything to the hotel operator. Instead, I bring him back souvenirs from Japan like digital cameras and electronics. If I turn one trick a night, I make enough to buy myself some weed."

Nishiyama fell into streetwalking in Thailand purely by chance on a visit early last year.

"This white guy picked me up and the sex was so rough, when he woke up the next morning, I asked him to pay me and he did so without saying a word," she says.

Caucasian backpackers apparently have a thing for Japanese professionals like Nishiyama.

"They pay more for us than they do for the local women and most of them have been around so they know how expensive it is to use a Japanese brothel," Nishiyama tells Spa! "Some white guys avoid going to Japan and instead come all the way here to Thailand to buy Japanese women. It's much easier to make money to travel here in Thailand than trying to get by on some part-time job."

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