International Labour Organization

The International Labour Organization’s study of human trafficking in Japan became a suppressed assessment of the government’s failure to punish traffickers and protect victims—and, after a journalist obtained it, the basis for a front-page disclosure that reportedly helped strengthen a government action plan.

The study and its findings

The International Labour Organization carried out a study of human trafficking in Japan with funding from the Japanese government. The book describes the report as scathing: it found that Japan had failed both to punish human traffickers and to take care of their victims. The evidence does not detail the report’s research methods or individual cases, but its central judgment directly challenged the adequacy of the government response.

That judgment gains force against the conditions described elsewhere in the account. Foreign women could be recruited with promises of hostess work, then face unpaid work, accumulated charges, and threats that made leaving dangerous. In one case, a woman said her passport and return ticket were withheld and that she feared for her daughter and mother after being threatened. Such testimony establishes the human stakes of trafficking in the book; it should not be mistaken for a description of the report’s own contents.

Suppression and publication

Despite having funded the study, the Japanese government ordered the International Labour Organization to keep the report under wraps. The narrator knew the report existed and obtained a copy through undisclosed channels. On November 19, 2004, the Yomiuri Shinbun published it as a front-page story. The narrator had to fight to secure what he considered adequate coverage, then followed the report with another article the next day.

The disclosure mattered in part because the official response described in the book repeatedly narrowed enforcement to immigration violations. An officer told the narrator that a woman working illegally on a tourist visa would have to be arrested and deported, even if her testimony might help shut down the traffickers’ business. In other cases, victims were deported soon after arrests, leaving investigators without evidence for other charges. The report’s public release placed government responsibility and victim protection at the center of the issue rather than treating the women primarily as immigration offenders.

Reported policy effect and limits

The narrator’s source said the government had been preparing to announce an action plan on human trafficking and that the newspaper story had prompted drastic revisions to strengthen protections for victims. The account presents this as a reported consequence of the coverage, not as a direct description of the International Labour Organization implementing policy. The narrator regarded the publication as a small but meaningful instance in which reporting had made a difference.

The book also makes clear that exposure did not resolve the practical barriers facing victims. Police continued to cite the difficulty of obtaining testimony from women who did not understand Japanese, alongside their immigration violations, as obstacles to building cases against traffickers. The International Labour Organization’s report therefore functions both as an institutional indictment and as a turning point in public disclosure: it helped force the government’s failures into view, while the continuing gap between recognition and protection remained apparent.