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Activist slams indifference to sexual exploitation of girls in'JK' industry
BY TOMOHIRO OSAKIMay 22, 2015

STAFF WRITER

An activist fighting the notorious “JK” industry has called on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to initiate efforts toeradicate the increasingly knotty problem of sex trafficking involving high school girls in Japan, describing thenation as too indifferent toward curbing child prostitution.
Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo on Thursday, Yumeno Nito, 25, founder ofColabo, a Tokyo-based support group for marginalized teen girls, said the situation surrounding the part-time
job industry and sexual exploitation of joshi kosei (high school girls) has gotten worse.
Although progress has been made by police to round up the girls and ban the distribution of racy flyers on
the streets, Nito said the traffickers who hire them continue to outsmart authorities by exploiting legal
loopholes to create variants of their businesses.
But perhaps most problematic, she said, is that the central government apparently is not interested instamping out such commercial sex involving teens.
“Japan significantly lags behind other industrialized nations in cracking down on child prostitution. Instead,the government downright ignores what is happening to those girls,” Nito said.
The misguided assumption that the girls, not the traffickers or customers, are to blame runs deep within thegovernment and society, she said.
“But this thinking does not solve the problem. The society instead must think how to change the backgroundor environment of the girls by providing them with care and support so they don’t find themselves in thesebusinesses,” Nito said.
Many girls ensnared by the industry, the activist said, come from underprivileged backgrounds at home,including poverty, neglect and abuse. Some are battling mental illnesses as well.
Those judged not attractive enough or deemed to have learning disabilities tend to be marginalized to thepoint where they work in extremely dirty, stinky places that resemble nothing but brothels and are treated “asif they were sex slaves,” Nito said.
The JK industry’s best known forms used to be “rifure” (reflexology), where the girls massage customers andlie alongside them, or “osanpo” (walking), where the girls take a stroll with customers as if on a date.

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Nito said that despite the purportedly nonsexual nature of these services, almost all of the girls she has
encountered providing them confessed to having been pressed for sex by male clients. The U.S. State
Department, too, cited JK osanpo as an example of sex trafficking in its annual report on the problem released
last June.
In a recent development, a shop owner in Tokyo’s Toshima Ward was arrested earlier this month for allegedly
running an enterprise in which girls were instructed to fold origami cranes with their legs wide open, allowing
customers to peek at their underwear through a one-way mirror.

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