For many women, the journey begins in northern Thailand, where refugees and hill-tribesmen languish in poverty and statelessness. The favored prey of sex-trade recruiters, these undocumented Thai residents can only migrate for work through illegal channels, easily falling into the hands of traffickers. Thousands end up in Japan.
Human Rights Watch, the worldwide rights watchdog, has interviewed 23 women after their time here, studied the interviews of 35 such women with Japanese researchers, and recorded the experiences of 170 more who passed through a women's shelter in Japan.
This is just a sampling of the 22,574 Thai women who the Japanese Immigration Bureau estimated were overstaying visas as recently as 1997. (The latest number available, according to the report, this figure doesn't include Thai women with unexpired visas, nor those who entered with forged passports of other nationalities.) Of these women, a Thai Embassy official reckons 80 to 90 percent end up in the sex trade.