Female Migration Into Japan In The 1980s-1990s

[Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx <xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hoover wrote:

>Various dangers that sex work poses for women - disease, physical &
>psychological abuse & injury, death, emotional trauma, personal
>indignity - are found in other forms of women's work.  Are such
>dangers more essential  to sex work than other forms of women's >work?

***Women's Struggles And Female Migration Into Japan In The 1980s-1990s
Dissertation Proposal by Satoko Watenabe

Overview

The average annual inflow of documented immigrant workers into Japan was
between 20,000 and 30,000 in 1976-83 but began to increase in 1984 and
reached 94,868 in 1990. In the latter half of the 1980s, the size of the
inflow exceeded that of any of the traditional labor importing countries
of Europe such as West Germany or France. Business journals and the
press frequently report that increasing numbers of foreigners are
working in areas such as banking and investment, corporate management,
language training, engineering, and other jobs requiring high level of
skills or education.(3) In 1990, more than half of the documented inflow
(94,868) was from Asian countries, and 42,690 or 45 percent of the total
were accounted for by Filipino workers who were almost exclusively
"entertainers."(4)

Not only the documented, but also the undocumented have sharply
increased in numbers during the 1980s. The evidence to this effect can
be found in the number of violations of the Immigration Act, which was
only 1,889 in 1982 but increased nearly twenty-fold to 36,264 in
1990.(5) But these figures show only those who were apprehended by the
Immigration Bureau and thus represent the tip of an iceberg of unknown
size. The Japanese government has estimated that the total number of
undocumented workers in the country as of November 1991 was 216,000,(6)
while unofficial estimates range from 300,000 to as many as 500,000.

Phongpaichit, for example, argues that Thailand's development strategies
which have been strongly oriented towards urban investment and
international trade (export) financed with a surplus extracted from
agriculture, have brought about rural impoverishment and enormous wage
differentials between the two sectors.(37) It has been this increasing
pressure, she argues, which has FORCED young women to migrate into sex
trades in cities in order to sustain their families.(38)


Truong has pointed out that the expansion of the entertainment industry
along with the integration of prostitution into tourism has been
facilitated by national economic and investment policies.(39) In
Thailand, as well as in the Philippines, the development of the
international tourist industry has been incorporated into the export-
diversification strategy following the "Rest and Recreation (R&R)"
market for US military personnel during the Indochina conflict. The sex
trade workers in both countries have become breadwinners not only for
their families but also for the state, and vested interests have swelled
within the military, the police, the government, and tourism-related
businesses.(40)

Some economists, such as Phongpaichit and Reynolds, have argued that
those women moving into sex trades are "making a perfectly rational
decision [in terms of returns] within the context of their particular
social and economic structure"(44) or seeking "to maximize ... [their]
earnings and general well- being within legal and other constrains of
the market."(45) But these discussions, using a logic within the
framework of economics, seem to reduce migrant women to mere
homoeconomicus and thus fail to recognize the self-determining aspect of
their life which even goes beyond the mere resistance to capital's
imposition
of work.(46)

Thus, female immigration needs to be analyzed in the context of the
"global social factory" and the global class composition therein. The
former denotes not merely the internationalized production process of
manufacturing but the global society under capitalism as a whole, which
involves the internationalization of the reproduction of labor power
(thus including nonfactory work).(54) Some aspects of the "global social
factory" can be readily found in the development of sex tourism to the
Third World and the reproduction of First World labor power (e.g.,
French) using Third World women (e.g., Algerian).(55) The global class
composition includes relations among various sectors of the global
working class.(56) Capital constantly reorganizes labor power by
substituting one sector of the global working class for another in order
to make the balance of class forces more favorable for its reproduction,
e.g., importing house maids and mail-order brides from the Third World
to maintain housework refused by First World women.

Capitalist accumulation must therefore be seen as an ongoing process on
an ever-growing scale in which the international mobilization (and
regulation) of the working class has been increasingly critical to
further capitalist development.(57) Women migrants must be understood
not only as an integral but also an active part of such capitalist
development. Female migrant workers (as well as male workers) moving
across the artificial barriers of nationstate borders are multinational
workers who can either reinforce or break down the international wage
hierarchy and recompose the structure and distribution of power within
the class against capital's control.


--

Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222



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