The Transnational Governance of Human Trafficking in Japan

Abstract

Over the last two decades, governments and civil society groups have increasingly sought to govern human trafficking around the world, including by passing a major international Trafficking Protocol. Although the rise of human trafficking governance has been well-researched, much of this research has focussed on countries with weak economies and governance institutions. In these countries, foreign governments and NGOs can exert direct economic pressure to achieve policy changes, making it difficult to see how this governance works at an ideological level. For this dissertation, I therefore look at Japan—a country whose advanced economy and strong legal institutions make it easier to resist international pressure—in order to ask how transnational actors, ideas and networks influence the local governance of human trafficking.

To answer this question, I spent over a year in Japan researching Japan’s response to human trafficking in sites across the country. The bulk of this fieldwork was semi-structured interviews with officials from government agencies, local police officers, the staff of NGOs and IGOs, and officials at foreign embassies. I also analysed a wide range of documentary evidence on Japan’s human trafficking situation and anti-trafficking policies. These included legal documents, policy directives, NGO reports, government pamphlets, media articles, international treaties and the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report.

Drawing on a Foucauldian conception of “governance,” this dissertation begins with a genealogy of human trafficking discourses. Internationally, I trace the evolution of human trafficking discourses from the anti-slavery campaigns of the 19th century through the battles over the legitimacy of sex work in mid-20th century, the securitisation of migration in the late-20th century and the shift back to “modern day slavery” in the 21st century. In Japan, I trace these discourses from caste slavery in the 7th century, bonded labourers in the medieval period, indentured sex workers in the early modern period, and child exploitation and migrant labour abuses in the 20th century. I use these histories both to explain the evolution of human trafficking governance in Japan and to show how this governance has been influenced by transnational actors. Finally, this dissertation looks at more recent attempts at domestic and transnational human trafficking governance in Japan, and explores why these attempts have (and have not) been successful.

Based on this analysis, I argue that efforts at transnational human trafficking governance in Japan have been effective only when they were aligned with the priorities of local actors. As such, they have largely operated to magnify the influence of these actors, and contemporary human trafficking governance in Japan continues to reflect local ideas about migration and the legitimacy of sex work. However, I also note that when transnational actors have been successful in pushing their own anti-trafficking policies, these policies have sometimes harmed the very people they claimed to protect. This suggests that governments like Japan should work more closely with local civil society, rather than allowing transnational actors to be the ones defining human trafficking and how best to govern it.