NPA human-trafficking directive

The NPA human-trafficking directive was a National Police Agency instruction urging police to make serious efforts to shut down trafficking operations and care for victims. Jake Adelstein invoked it when a police officer proposed arresting and deporting a woman whose testimony might help build a case against traffickers. The exchange revealed the directive’s central contradiction: it promised protection, while the procedures available to front-line officers could turn the people it was meant to protect into deportable offenders.

Mandate and the problem of recognition

Adelstein cited the directive as requiring police throughout Japan to pursue trafficking operations and assist their victims. Its broad promise confronted a practical obstacle: the officer said there were no criteria for identifying trafficking victims. Without a way to distinguish a person coerced into work from an illegal worker, the police could treat immigration violations as the clearest actionable offense, even when the person’s account described exploitation.

The problem was visible in the women’s circumstances. One Polish woman had come to Japan after being promised hostess work, but was instead forced into sex work; her passport was withheld, and threats against her family made escape feel dangerous. The directive’s stated duty to care for victims thus met a case in which deception, control of documents, debt, and threats constrained a woman’s ability to refuse or leave. Her circumstances illustrated the kind of exploitation that the policy was supposed to address, but did not by itself provide the police with a reliable procedure for recognizing her as a victim.

Enforcement at the front line

When Adelstein asked whether police could protect a woman who came forward, the officer said she would have to be arrested for working illegally on a tourist visa and deported. Her testimony, he argued, could help police pursue the men for immigration violations and perhaps other offenses, but he maintained that not arresting her would amount to negligence. Adelstein challenged the approach by producing the directive; the officer dismissed it as detached from reality and said police could not disregard illegal work or shelter the women under the existing rules.

The same official described trafficking as a jurisdictional gray area. Because the case involved prostitution, he said, he could proceed through immigration or foreign-worker labor-law violations, depending on the women’s visas, but not straightforwardly as a trafficking case. Adelstein left without exposing his sources, including Helena, and supplied the men’s phone numbers instead. The dilemma was not simply whether police were willing to act: obtaining a witness could mean punishing and deporting the person whose testimony they needed, while withholding access to her left the exploitation harder to prosecute.

A cycle of deportation and evidentiary failure

Adelstein later described the same pattern recurring in his conversations with law enforcement. Women were commonly deported for visa violations soon after club owners were arrested, leaving investigators without witnesses for additional charges. Police said that language barriers and the women’s illegal work made them poor witnesses; deportation then made it harder to develop a criminal case. In this cycle, the classification of a victim as an immigration offender helped produce the absence of evidence later cited as a reason traffickers could not be pursued more fully.

The directive did not resolve that operational bind. Adelstein could reach victims through sources he had cultivated, but he struggled to identify and investigate those who exploited them, and lacked the money and resources for sustained inquiries. His account therefore presents the instruction not as a protection that automatically changed police conduct, but as a declared objective repeatedly obstructed by the rules, classifications, and evidentiary practices used in individual cases.

Public challenge and policy consequences

In June 2004, the U.S. Department of State placed Japan on a watch list for its inadequate response to human trafficking. At a symposium later that month, a National Police Agency representative described Japan’s efforts to combat the problem. Adelstein publicly challenged that account with his experience of the police response and argued that the directive was ineffective in practice. The confrontation carried the issue from individual cases into a public dispute over whether official claims matched the treatment of victims.

Adelstein also obtained a copy of a scathing, Japanese-government-funded study by the International Labour Organization, which the government had ordered kept from publication. The Yomiuri ran the report as a front-page story on November 19, 2004, followed by another article the next day. According to a source, the reporting prompted substantial revisions to a government plan of action, strengthening its victim protections. That reported change gave the directive’s shortfall a policy consequence, though it did not erase the repeated deportations and difficulties in building cases that Adelstein had documented.

The distinction between a written instruction and its enforcement remained central to the book’s treatment of trafficking. The directive stated what police were supposed to do; the officer’s response showed how victim identification, immigration rules, jurisdiction, and the demand for usable testimony could defeat that purpose. Adelstein’s reporting made that gap itself part of the story—and a measure of whether the policy’s promise reached the people it was meant to protect.