Campaigner draws on experience to help children lured into Japan sex industry

Just as she did as a teenager, Yumeno Nito still walks the streets of Tokyo’s most notorious red light districts. Today, however, she is trying to help the children who are being insidiously groomed to meet Japan’s apparently bottomless demand for sex.

Alarmingly, Nito believes that society in Japan is becoming ever-more tolerant towards juveniles in the sex industry while the media treats the latest trends as entertainment.

And those attitudes have convinced a new generation of children, primarily girls and often as young as 13 or 14, to sign up with companies with “cute” websites and offers of well-paid work that is little more than a constant party.

“Japan is not an advanced nation when it comes to our understanding of the problem of child prostitution,” said Nito, who was herself on the fringes of the industry when she worked in a “maid café” in the Shibuya district of Tokyo.

“In Japan, the ‘joshi kosei’ business is looked at as trendy or a form of entertainment,” said Nito, using a term that literally translates as high school girl but has a much darker implied meaning.

“The sense in society here is that it is the girl who is in the business who is bad, that it is her parents who have failed and there is no blame attached to the person who ‘buys’ the girl,” she said.