Comments on: Enjo kosai: compensated dating (or child prostitution) in Japan

By: dating girls

dating girls — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:43:10 +0000

Very usefull infomaction. Thank you.
Keep it up

By: elijah

elijah — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:13:05 +0000

I don’t think this is a real problem in Japan, although I don’t claim to know how other countries are experiencing this phenomina. The fact that some of the girls state that they are doing it out of curiosity and others because they are bored show that it is not causing them emotional damage. Lets face the truth, if we are not concerned over the damage it causes to the girls than we are not addressing the issue but rather are simply stating our own bias. Children in Japan carry a much more adult like role than we find in thier counterparts in western civilization, we should expect them to act in a more adult like fashion.

In my oppinion it is the men who pay such large sums of money who are being exploited. Google quickly translated the prices I heard quoted in articles and these highschool girls are making $450 per client with only 46% of dates leading to sex. Furthermore the girl has the ability to screen who they date, who they have sex with, and what they do. If this were made illegal in Japan it would only strip power from the girls who could no longer go to the police if someone did hurt them or force them into something that they did not volantarily enter into.

By: Kris

Kris — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:44:08 +0000

Are enjo Kosai prostitutes really so independent? It should be further researched. But prostitution research is really difficult, I know it first hand. Many smoke screens. A really hidden world.

Also that the girls organize themselves doesn’t rule out coercion. There could be also group coercion. I read about cases in the Netherlands where teenage girls coerced other teenage girls to work in prostitution. Also women and girls who work for pimps recruite other women and girls to work in prostitution.

By: Ted Cheng

Ted Cheng — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 06:11:58 +0000

Of course there is forced child prostitution. However, in the enjo kosai phenomenon, as far as i know, these underage girls are not controlled by any one, and sometimes these girls organized themselves as a group. They just want to have some money by having sex, and that is all. For anti-prostitution campaign and the government, they just think this is morally wrong and they even appropriated the exploitation discourses and typical child prostitution model (victimization) to impose their own moral value on enjo kosai: they declared the phenomenon as child prostitution. In this case, coercion is never a problem, because the underage has already been regarded as victims. That is why child prostitution and paedophile is a fraught topic–do child have the ability to make consent (but on the other hand, do adult can make a consent themselves?), should the adult and the underage should have different standard of exploitation? It is a hard question especially when the phenomenon is complex and diversified, but the legislation and policy (the related discourses) could only have one answer.

By: Kris

Kris — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 12:21:21 +0000

I can bet that in the Netherlands if you visit a prostitute younger than 18 there is a very serious chance that she is coerced to do that.

It think moral relativism doesn’t work here. Ages ago it was normal and acceptable for men to have sex with 8-year olds. Slavery was totally acceptable. Now it is clearly not.

Pimps are very good any manipulating women to enter the sex industry. If the woman is very young, like 14, it becomes easier. Surely she will say it was her own choice to make money for her own and her boyfriend’s future. I think that you enter very dangerous territory here.

But, I made myself totally incredible here as a heavy porn consumer and my latest visit to a prostitute.

By: Laura Agustin

Laura Agustin — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:20:56 +0000

Thanks, Ted, personally I don’t think the ‘work’ concept is very useful for understanding lots of sex-industry phenomena. I understand why and how activists who claim rights use ‘work’ to normalise these activities, but we don’t have to impose that idea when trying to understand culture.

There are all sorts of money/sex relationships that this applies to, not only enjo kosai.

By: Ted Cheng

Ted Cheng — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:03:52 +0000

One more thing, the literal meaning of Enjo Kosai, at least in Chinese, is assistance and social intercourse. As Taiwan sex liberationist Josephine Ho pointed out, “enjo kosai” is less about sex than about the “exchange”. That is to say, given that sex and money is the important aim, different tactics of exchange are more important method to reach the aim. In this sense,enjo kosai did not concern sex exploitation at all. On the other hand, since enjo kosai concerns exchange, the sex work in this sense is a part time work, or even not a “work” at all. It does not have to fulfill the professionalism of sex “work” as sex worker rights movement argued. In my friend’s field research about high school girls’ enjo kosai in Taiwan, these girls expressed enjo kosai is just a part time work and they do not understand why what they do should be regarded as a profession or work. The meaning of enjo kosai–exchange and social intercourse–enriches the meaning of prostitution that wa–the binary paradigm that only concerns sex morality and money making, exploitation and working rights.

By: Ted Cheng

Ted Cheng — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:42:03 +0000

Culturally Taiwan media had imported Japanese comics, dramas and tv programs into Taiwan, especially in the 1990s. Media also tended to appropriate certain new terms from Japan to describe Taiwan’s local and similar phenomenon.
In the late 1980s the public concerned the underage sex victims in sex business and tended to see these underage sex workers as victims. However, in the late 1990s the news report found that there were juveniles (also mainly high school students) and adults who were not sex workers but voluntarily did part-time sex-money exchange activity. However, I am not sure if the Japanese enjo kosai pratice had great influence on Taiwan, because i do not have enough information or researches (yes, Taiwanese might know enjo kosai from media). I also think that it did have certain influences, but enjo kosai in Taiwan also resulted from certain Taiwan’s local cultures (I also need more researches). But, when the term “Enjo Kosai” became popular in Japan, Taiwan media also appropriated the term to described such kind sex-money exchange and the online sex-money exchange messages in Taiwan (usually internet is a convenient access for individual part-timers; in Japan, the mobile-phone culture are the major inter-personal network). At the beginning the term Enjo-Kosai was used to describe the social phenomenon and later the anti-prostitution NGOs transformed it into child prostitution/child sex exploitation.

By: Laura Agustin

Laura Agustin — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:38:14 +0000

Most activists are eager to condemn and exclude ‘children’ from their demands, but childhood means different things to different people and in different places. And younger people who make their own decisions need to be respected. This is why blanket declarations against some activities based on age are questionable. I know it’s a fraught topic, but I think we should be thinking about it.

By: Caty Simon

Caty Simon — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:22:51 +0000

Sometimes it’s hard for me to condemn child prostitution wholeheartedly when I witness the agency and control these girls exercise.