Playback ’94] More Than 20 Women in Kinshicho, Central and South American “Women of the Night” in the Early Hours of the Day

Latin American Women Brought to Japan for “Blonde Demand

The number of foreign women “dekasegi” in Japan has increased since the 1980s. These women were once called “Japa-Yuki-san” after “Karayuki-san” who went abroad from Japan to work. They were mostly of Asian descent, such as Filipinos and Thais, and worked in restaurants and sex stores, but some of them also stood on street corners. Most of the women standing at “stand-up” spots at the time, such as Shin-Okubo, Ikebukuro West Exit, Kinshicho, and Isezaki-cho in Yokohama, were foreign women.

There was a period around 1990 when the number of Central and South American women began to increase rapidly among the mostly Asian “Japa-Yuki-san” crowd. These women were brought in by brokers from Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and other countries. At that time, it was the role of brokers to bring “JapaYuki-san” from their home countries, but since there was a high demand for blonde foreign women, it is said that they pioneered the Latin American route where they could bring blonde women cheaply.

The women were often saddled by brokers with expensive debts in the name of entry fees, and soon came under international criticism as “human traffickers. As a result of stricter enforcement measures, women of Latin American descent seemed to have almost completely disappeared by the late 1990s.

Thirty years have changed the landscape 180 degrees.