Japan’s systemic failure to combat human trafficking and protect victims

Japan’s systemic failure to combat human trafficking and protect victims lies in the distance between an official promise to protect people subjected to exploitation and the procedures that classified them as immigration offenders. In Jake Adelstein’s account, that contradiction left potential witnesses facing arrest and deportation, while making it difficult to build cases against those who exploited them.

Written Policy and Operational Reality

The National Police Agency had directed police to make serious efforts to shut down human-trafficking operations and care for their victims. But when Jake Adelstein sought help investigating women reportedly forced to work without pay, a police officer proposed arresting and deporting a woman working illegally on a tourist visa. Her testimony, the officer explained, could help police pursue the operators for immigration violations and perhaps other offenses.

Adelstein challenged that approach by producing the National Police Agency directive. The officer replied that it did not reflect operational reality: authorities had no criteria for identifying trafficking victims, and overlooking an immigration violation could itself be treated as neglect of duty. As a result, women deceived into exploitative work were categorized as illegal workers rather than protected as victims. Arrest and forced repatriation removed potential witnesses, making it harder to establish cases against traffickers.

A second officer acknowledged that the circumstances resembled slavery but described a jurisdictional gap. Police could approach the matter through immigration violations or foreign-worker labor laws, depending on the women’s visas; prostitution, he said, placed the case outside his unit’s remit. He advised Adelstein to speak with the vice squad. Elsewhere, police described their limited manpower as allowing only a few token arrests. The written directive promised concerted action, but the available categories, responsibilities, and resources repeatedly narrowed what officers would do.

The Mechanics of Coercion

The gap between victim-protection policy and police procedure was visible in the women’s working conditions. One woman described being recruited in Warsaw through an advertisement promising hostess work in Japan, with an agent named Mikel showing her pictures of an extravagant club and promising earnings of one hundred U.S. dollars an hour. She left her six-year-old daughter with her mother and flew to Tokyo, where she was met at the ANA Hotel by Viktor, who presented himself as a reassuring guide and took her to an apartment in Nishi-Azabu.

The promise collapsed when Viktor and Slick Imai took her and other women to Den of Delicious. They were told they would provide sexual services, not hostess work. The operators imposed daily charges for the apartment and the supposed cost of the airfare, turning those amounts into debts if the women could not pay. Her passport and return ticket had been placed with her valuables; when she tried to leave, she found them gone. Viktor used her lack of immigration status and the threat of consequences for her family to deter her from seeking help. The woman feared that escape might expose her mother and daughter to harm, and she remained without money or a safe place to go.

Her account shows how recruitment, debt, document control, and threats worked together to constrain a worker’s ability to refuse the assigned work or leave. She eventually recovered her passport with help from a shop manager and contacted her family, but attempts to find work elsewhere were met by Viktor and Slick Imai asserting control over where she could work. She and other women considered approaching police; fear of arrest, deportation, legal costs, and imprisonment kept the group from going. In this system, the same immigration status that made the women vulnerable to coercion also made seeking protection appear dangerous.

Reporting, Reform, and the Limits of Accountability

The immediate investigative route offered little prospect of protecting the women who might testify. Jake Adelstein concluded that bringing forward a witness could expose her to arrest and deportation, and he would not sacrifice sources, including Helena, to build a case. He left the police with information about Viktor and Slick Imai, but the encounter deepened his disillusionment: officers could enforce only the laws available to them, while those laws gave them few ways to treat exploited women as victims. Police later described their limited manpower as sufficient for only a few token arrests. The case exposed not simply an individual officer’s reluctance, but a mismatch between the problem and the categories through which authorities were prepared to address it.

An article brought some immediate pressure, but not a decisive change in the business. A couple of clubs dropped their services, and some customers avoided sex-tour trips to the Maldives; Viktor continued recruiting women, and Slick continued making money. Adelstein gave his material to a U.S. Department of State contact at the U.S. Embassy, hoping it might inform the annual assessment of trafficking. He also ensured that the article was translated into English and circulated online. He later heard that Viktor was having difficulty recruiting, a limited consequence that contrasted with the persistence of the operation itself.

In June, the U.S. Department of State placed Japan on a watch list for its inadequate response to human trafficking, ranking it only slightly above North Korea in willingness to act. Adelstein regarded the public comparison as a source of leverage: national embarrassment, he believed, could prompt a government to respond where its own stated commitments had not. At a U.S. Embassy symposium at the United Nations University later that month, he spoke not merely as a journalist but as a panelist. When a National Police Agency representative described Japan’s efforts, Adelstein challenged the account with his experience of the obstacles encountered in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. The exchange made the divide between official claims and the practical treatment of victims visible in a public forum.

He then pursued evidence that implicated policy above the level of individual police action. The International Labour Organization had conducted a Japanese-government-funded study that criticized Japan’s failure both to punish traffickers and to care for victims. Adelstein learned that the government had ordered the report kept from publication, obtained a copy through sources, and secured a Yomiuri Shinbun front-page story on November 19, 2004, followed by another article the next day. A source told him that the government had been preparing an action plan and that the reporting prompted major revisions intended to strengthen victim protection. For Adelstein, this was evidence that reporting could affect policy, even if the change remained limited and the underlying enforcement failures persisted.

The pursuit of accountability extended beyond publication. The drug squad took an interest in Slick, raided his clubs, and he eventually went out of business and went to jail. Information supplied to Japanese Customs officials and Dutch police about Viktor’s enterprises contributed to Viktor also ending up behind bars; he was additionally beaten by local yakuza for encroaching on their territory. Adelstein credited Helena as a partner in the first investigation, emphasizing that she had shown the courage to contact him and had worked harder than he had on the story. The outcomes against the two operators did not erase the structural problem: women continued to face deportation after raids, while the system’s treatment of their immigration status could deprive investigators of the testimony needed to prosecute exploitation.

The Cost of a System Without Witnesses

In the aftermath of raids, the women were often deported for visa violations before investigators could use their accounts to pursue other charges. Many did not know who had harmed them, where they had been held, or the names of the Japanese people involved. Police argued that language barriers and the women’s immigration violations made their testimony difficult to use; deportation then made it harder still to build cases. Jake Adelstein encountered the same reasoning repeatedly. He believed the laws needed to change, but saw little indication that they would.

Adelstein cultivated sources to reach victims, yet lacked the money and resources to identify those responsible. He began spending substantial portions of his salary to help women he met, sometimes paying for airfare or arranging access to abortions. He knew this crossed the boundaries of journalistic objectivity, but chose to get involved rather than leave women without practical help. The personal assistance could address an immediate need; it could not repair the institutional cycle that removed potential witnesses and left exploitation difficult to prosecute.