The Empire of Human Trafficking

People pay their respects to the dead in different ways. I would have bought flowers to place on her grave, but the body hadn’t shown up anywhere yet. So instead I pulled a 10,000-yen note out of my wallet and gave it to Fujiwara-san at the Polaris Project Japan. Polaris runs a hotline for human trafficking victims in Tokyo, and the folks there do a good job trying to raise public awareness.

Fujiwara-san said that the number of phone calls to Polaris had gone up quite a bit in the last year, mostly from Korean and Eastern European women. She thanked me for the donation and asked if I knew a Russian speaker. I promised I’d try to find her one.

I think I can trace the beginnings of burning out as a reporter to the period where I started covering this very nasty side of the Japanese sex industry. I didn’t even realize it was burning me out until it was way too late.

If you spend enough years as a crime reporter, you get callous. It’s only natural. If you grieved for every victim or shared the pain of the family, you’d become a mental case. Murder, arson, armed robbery, family suicide, they all become routine. There’s a tendency to dehumanize the victims, sometimes to even be annoyed with them for ruining your day off or a planned vacation. It sounds horrible, and it is. But that’s how it works.

I thought I knew a lot about the “dark side” of Japan. I’d covered the Lucie Blackman case, investigated a serial killer, nearly touched a body full of electricity, seen a man burn himself to death, and more. I thought I was pretty tough—in my own way.

I had become very cynical. And I had become a little cold, and, when a reporter starts to cool down, it’s very hard for him or her to ever warm up again. We all build psychic armor around ourselves to cope with emotions and maintain control and meet our multiple deadlines. We have to.

I had covered Kabukicho and hunted for tips in Roppongi. The girls at Maid Station had been very frank about how their whole operation worked. I was pretty conversant with the legalities of the sex-for-money industry in Japan. In fact, I thought the whole idea of sexual slavery was some urban myth created by puritanical bureaucrats in the West who didn’t understand Japan’s sex culture. But I was about to get a real lesson.

It was November 2003 when my cell phone rang. “Moshi moshi,” I said, picking up.

It was a foreign woman, no one I knew but someone who could speak fairly good Japanese. I listened for a bit but wasn’t making full sense of what she was saying. “Do you speak English?” I finally asked.

“Well, yes. You do too, obviously. I apologize for making you suffer through my deplorable Japanese.”

“Not a problem. It’s quite good. But since eigo is our native tongue, maybe it’d be better to use English, ne?”

“A friend gave me your number. She’s a stripper at the Kama Sutra; she said you might be able to help.”

“Try me.”

“Well, at the place where I work, there are some new girls—from Poland, Russia, and Estonia—and they seem to be … under duress.”

“Hmm. What do you mean?”

“They’re being forced to work, and they’re not getting paid. They’re … like slaves.”

“Like what?”

“Slaves. That’s how I would describe it.”

“And what kind of work do you do?”

“I guess you could say I’m a prostitute,” she replied straightforwardly, without embarrassment. “Officially I’m an English teacher, but sleeping with men is how I earn my living.”

“And you’re doing this by choice?”

“Of course. But these new girls they’ve brought into the club … it’s not the same for them. They don’t want to be doing this. They got tricked—forced—into doing this. They’re always sobbing, they can’t leave the building during the day.”

“I see,” I said. It was a pathetic response, I knew, but I didn’t know what else to say and it afforded me time to process the situation. I asked my caller what she wanted me to do.

“You’re a newspaper reporter. Write a story. Find out what’s going on and expose the bastards. And help get those girls out of there.”

It seemed like a hell of a tall order coming from someone who’d just called me out of the blue. I was about to say I’d look into it when something about her voice went ding in my head. “You say your friend gave you my number. Have we met?”

There was a pause.

“Have we?” I asked again.

“Well, when you were working on the Lucie Blackman story, talking to working girls at the bar, I kind of insulted you to your face.”

Over time, I had learned the rules of engagement for getting information from strippers, dancers, and other females in the evening entertainment trade. Apparently this young woman had met me before I’d learned those rules. Perhaps I’d been rude, or just not that savvy. Either way, she had called me an asshole. I remembered that much.

Her name was Helena. That wasn’t her real name, of course, but it did suit her. We met at a Starbucks in Roppongi, on the second floor. She was dressed in a black skirt, a slim-cut black leather jacket over a lime green blouse, and knee-high black leather boots. I have to say, she looked good. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and the only makeup she appeared to have on was a ripe pomegranate–colored lipstick. She had a small mole over her upper lip.

I introduced myself as if we were meeting for the first time, giving her my meishi. She didn’t give me hers until later. We talked about the weather, we sipped our coffee, and then she told me her story.

Helena had come to Japan in 2001 from Australia. She started teaching English at Berlitz and doing a little hostessing on the side. One evening after class, she had drinks with one of her students, a businessman in his fifties, and ended up accompanying him to a love hotel. When they were done, he laid five 10,000-yen notes (about $500) on the bed and said it was for her “travel expenses.”

Helena gradually picked up more patrons and eventually, to ensure a steady income, took a job at an exclusive “gentlemen’s club” called the Den of Delicious. She kept her private clients, but during the day she would perform services for the walk-in trade.

“I’m a prostitute by choice. I like sex. The money is far better than I could make teaching English. I don’t have a problem with what I do. What I have a problem with is women who don’t want to be prostitutes being forced into it. I have a problem with the assholes making them do it.

“There are two guys running the show in Roppongi and supplying girls for the club in Shibuya where I work. One guy is Japanese—everyone calls him Slick—^1*and there’s a Dutch-Israeli guy named Viktor. They own five or six clubs; they recruit the women overseas, mostly in poor countries, through ads or brokers, and they bring them to Japan. They stick them in sex clubs, and they rip them off. The women are totally dependent on these bastards. So they end up like sex slaves.

“What I heard was that, initially, they’re promised more money than they can imagine, but when they get here, it’s a whole different story. They have to fuck to eat, because they don’t have any options. And then they’ve got all these costs that they were never told about that get subtracted from their earnings. Slick tells them that since they’re working illegally, they’ve got to work for him. Because he’s legit—if you can believe that. If they don’t want to work for him, that’s up to them, but they aren’t going to find work anywhere else in Roppongi. One girl I knew went to the police; she was threatened with being arrested herself. And then she ended up having to service the fucking cop.

“Viktor tells people he’s been here six years. He started with dancers and moved up to prostitution; he’s very proud of himself. He says he knows what kind of girls Japanese men like—blond and blue-eyed. Takes a lot to figure that out. Helps too if they’re helpless, because then they have no choice but to do what they’re told.

“Viktor likes to act like a nice guy—until it comes to money. Then he’s the fucking devil in disguise … Slick, he’s married and has a daughter.”

Helena’s story had the ring of truth. I didn’t see any reason for her to lie. I didn’t know, though. She was an observer, not a victim herself; this was hearsay; maybe she had an ax to grind. I told her I’d have to speak with one of the girls directly.

That got her a little upset. “If these girls get caught talking to you, they could get in trouble. Real trouble. You understand that, right?”

I said I did. I said I’d be careful. So Helena promised she’d introduce me to one of the girls. And we parted ways.

I did some checking on my own.

Sekiguchi popped into my mind, but this wasn’t his beat. Then I thought of Alien Cop, who had done such a good job of showing me around Kabukicho. Alien Cop had since been transferred from the Shinjuku Police Department to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters, where he might be able to tap into some good information. He’d be a good source. But in order to get what I wanted, I’d have to pay for it. A night on the town, certainly. A bar or strip club employing foreign women, definitely. It wouldn’t be cheap, but by that point I had some connections.

I called up a lawyer acquaintance working for a company promoting mixed martial arts tournaments. These slugfests were like a cross between boxing, wrestling, and karate, and they were wildly popular. I talked him into coughing up two second-row seats, and I took them over to the manager of the Eighth Circle of Hell, a strip club, who agreed to comp me for the night.

I texted Alien, and we had a date.

Alien was still a decent, straightforward guy. We got caught up with our latest doings, and while a buxom redhead named Jasmine ground her curvaceous ass on his crotch and ran her fingers through his crew cut, I told him Helena’s story. Jasmine was content to sip the champagne Alien had bought. When I was done with the story, Alien frowned. He lifted Jasmine off his lap and told her, in fairly good English, “Please go get me some smokes, angel. I must talk to my friend now. Come back in five minutes.” Jasmine dutifully excused herself and was gone.

“You know,” Alien said, sucking on a cigarette and switching back to Japanese, “I’ll look into it. What your friend says is probably true. I see more women like that now, but there isn’t much I can do to help them. It bugs me.”

“It bugs you?”

“I like women in the business like that. I know my money is buying their attentions, but I like them anyway. It’s a game. But when a woman doesn’t want to be in the business, if she’s being forced to do it, then I don’t want to be with her. It’s not fun. It’s not a game then. Your friend is right: if they’re not getting paid, that’s not okay.”

He took a notepad out of his pocket and I gave him what I’d been able to find out: the location of Slick’s office and the real estate deed, which was under the name of J Enterprise.

Jasmine was taking more than five minutes to come back. While we waited, our conversation got personal.

“Jake, you ever sleep with any of these women at the clubs? They seem to like you. I can see that.”

“They like me because I don’t sleep with them. I don’t want to sleep with them. This makes me different from the usual customers.”

“Because you don’t like white women?”

“No, because it’s a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Because they give me information sometimes and you’re not supposed to sleep with your sources. I did before I was married but not now. I might bring home some horrible STD and give it to my wife, who would hate me and dump me.”

“Well, what if there was this hot girl who had some information you really wanted—but she’d give it to you only if you slept with her?”

“Yeah, I would sleep with a woman for good information. I’m a total information whore. What about you, Alien? You ever sleep with a source?”

“Of course. It’s like a fringe benefit. I’m not married; I don’t have kids.”

“So you think I’d be a slimeball if I did what you’re doing?”

“No. I just think you’re strange. Not a strange gaijin but a strange person. You have a code. You stick to it. It’s a weird code, but it’s a code. I admire that. And you’re a good guy. Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ll tell you something …”

“Tell me.”

“You’ll break your code sooner or later. Vice does it to you. Like the saying goes, lie down with dogs and get up with fleas. You’ll get fleas.”

“I’ll get a flea collar.”

“Hah. Won’t work. You’ll sleep with someone not just for money or information but because it seems like the thing to do. Like shaking hands. It’s a slippery slope. And you won’t even feel guilty about it. It won’t occur to you that it isn’t right or out of the ordinary. The job screws you up. You should ask for another posting. You’re lucky you’re already married, at least. I could never get married.”

“Why not?” I asked, now surprised.

“Because I’ve spent too much time with people that sex doesn’t have any meaning for. It already doesn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t be faithful to one woman, and I wouldn’t believe she could be faithful to me. Monogamy is bullshit. Sex is like exchanging New Year’s cards, a ritual. I understand that for the rest of the world it’s different. It’s a big deal to them. I’m out of sync with the normal world, and I won’t be in sync with it ever again. I’ll never marry a regular chick because the gap would bury us. I could marry a prostitute, but she’d have to promise to have sex with me primarily. Otherwise it wouldn’t be safe, and I might get jealous. Maybe I could marry another cop who had worked vice. But not a hostess. They’re bloodsuckers.”

“That’s pretty bleak.”

“Wait and see. You’ll understand. But let me tell you one thing that I’ve learned about all this cheating and monogamy shit: Never admit anything. Never confess. If you love the woman you principally want to be with, the main one, then lie. Confession is for the confessor. It makes you feel good; it ruins the lives of everyone else. It’s a selfish thing to do. Don’t confess.”

“That’s not advice I expect to get from a cop.”

“I’m only telling you because I think you have got a good heart. When you talk to me about these girls, I can see it bothers you. You’re like me, you dig these women. So I’m telling you an important secret of life. Never confess.”

Jasmine came back, cigarettes in hand. She sat on Alien’s lap, swigged directly from the champagne bottle, lit a cigarette, sucked suggestively on it, and then put the cigarette between Alien’s lips, her left hand cradling the back of his head. She turned to me and smiled and then looked over my shoulder. A tall, thin brunette in a black silky negligee was sauntering over to our table. She sat gently on my lap. I ordered her a drink as Alien readied himself to go to the back room for a private dance.

•    •    •

Alien Cop came through with some strong information. And three days later, after knocking on doors and trading favors for information on my own, I had the book on Slick and Viktor’s operation. A lot of it was confirmation of what Helena had told me; some filled in the gaps.

The company fronting the operation was, no surprise, J Enterprise, a Roppongi-based LLC that was not registered with the Japanese authorities. The company was owned and run by Slick Imai. Viktor was his partner. Their operation involved bringing foreign women into the Tokyo area and placing them in sex clubs and massage parlors. Slick ran four clubs—Club Angel, Den of Delights, Club Divine, and Club Codex—in the Roppongi area, supplied the Den of Delicious in Shibuya, and ran an escort service on the side. He was the king of foreign flesh in the ward, pocketing the equivalent of $20,000 a month.

The focus of Slick’s recruitment was girls from Israel and also Hungary, Poland, and other countries in Eastern Europe. He placed hostesses wanted ads on www.jobsinjapan.com. One Canadian girl, age twenty-two, who responded to the ad was filtered through a recruiting agency in Germany before she eventually got to Japan. In 2003, the firm was known as Entertainment Valentina; the name may have changed. Typically the girls were promised an astronomical 4 million yen ($40,000!) a month for working as high-class hostesses, accompanying rich businessmen to dinner. The company agreed to pay an agent in their home country a fee of 3,000 euros for the girl’s airfare and lodging in Tokyo.

Once the girl arrived in Tokyo, she was met and taken to the company apartment, which she would share with other working girls. If she hadn’t figured it out by then, she would quickly be informed what was expected of her. Financial pressure, lies, subtle (and not-so-subtle) threats to hurt her family, and plain and simple indoctrination were brought to bear.

The girls worked a full nine-hour shift at a sex parlor and earned the equivalent of about $100 a day; of this $75 was reclaimed as fees. Essentially this left the women $25 per day, a far cry from the $40,000 a month they’d been promised. All were on tourist visas, which is good for a three-month stay and don’t allow employment. The benefit of this—for Slick and Viktor—was the revolving-door supply of fresh girls as well as constantly collecting on the hiked-up airfare. Many girls left the country actually owing Slick money.

Viktor, who was tall and good-looking, was rumored to be married to a Japanese woman, which would have given him solid ground to conduct business in Japan.

A source at the Ministry of Justice uncovered a company that had been registered under Slick’s name: “R&D,” a car-importing, clothing sales, consulting, and insurance brokerage firm established in 1993, apparently no longer in business. The director of the firm, Ko Kobayashi, had had a brush with the Prostitution Prevention Law; he’d been arrested in 1989 in Shizuoka (Goto-gumi territory) for bringing Taiwanese women into the country and putting them to work as prostitutes. Slick had allegedly been on the board of directors. So it was clear that Slick had a history of trafficking since way back.

Alien Cop had one pretty disturbing bit of news: Slick could not be touched. I suspected as much because his intel had provided one of the keys to breaking open the Lucie Blackman case. Until the TMPD got a new chief in the Roppongi jurisdiction, Slick was free to do as he pleased. Slick had done one good deed in his life; everybody else had been paying for it ever since.

Viktor did most of his recruiting directly in Europe. He handled the logistics and arranged sex tours to the Maldives, which was the real moneymaker.

By early December, I had enough material together to write a story. I showed a draft to my supervisor at the time, Yamakoshi, aka Steve McQueen. Why he considered himself the Japanese equivalent of Steve McQueen instead of, say, Tom Cruise beats me, but he was interested.

However, given the sensational nature of the story, he wanted about twenty things cleared first. He turned the story and me over to Mr. Bowtie, the scariest, most demanding editor/senior reporter in the National News Department.

Over coffee Bowtie told me, in no uncertain terms, what he wanted. One was that I talk to the brokers/traffickers and hear their side of the story. The other was that I find an “innocent victim.”

“What do you mean by ‘innocent victim’?”

“What do you think I mean, shithead? Some slut who comes to Japan to make a couple thousand dollars a night on her back and finds out she isn’t going to make so much, that’s hardly a crime. I want a girl who was duped, an innocent. I want a sad story. If it’s just an underpaid whore unhappy with her job, you don’t have a story.”

“I don’t think you get it.”

“I get it. I know the deal. I’m just telling you how it is. You want to write the story, write a story that will make people feel sorry for those innocent women and hate the traffickers. If you can’t do that, you don’t have a story. And you’re wasting my time and your time.”

I didn’t like his attitude, but I was hell-bent on writing this story. The fact was, it was becoming a cause with me. So I leaned on Helena for help. She told me how to reach one of the women who’d escaped, Veronika. She had been lucky enough to steal back her passport before fleeing.

Veronika was short and thin, and her blond hair had been pulled back into a sloppy ponytail. She did not look well. A thick layer of makeup obscured but didn’t hide the dark circles under her eyes. She was wearing a white leather coat with a fur collar. Her left ear looked as if it had been crushed.

She was twenty-six, from a small village thirty miles from Warsaw. “I saw this ad on the Internet: ‘Work in Japan as a hostess! Anyone can make a lot of money in a short time! Now hiring blond women.’ I answered the ad.

“I went to Warsaw and met this talent company representative named Mikel. He showed me pictures of a club—a really extravagant place—and he said, ‘You’ll be here, dancing with Japanese men, chatting with them in English. For one hour you’ll earn a hundred dollars U.S.’ My daughter was six, so I asked my mother to take care of her. I left Warsaw and flew to Tokyo. I was given instructions to go to the ANA Hotel, and there I first met Viktor. He was from the Netherlands, very handsome, and played the part of a perfect gentleman. I felt so relieved.

“Viktor drove me to where I would be staying. He said that I was probably tired from the long flight, so I could relax. It would be fine if I started work tomorrow. He took me to the apartment—it was on the fourth floor in a building in Nishi-Azabu. I remember the address very well. At the apartment were a Colombian girl and a Canadian girl. Three people in one tiny room. I started to feel a little uneasy. Viktor pulled out a drawer and told me to put anything of value in it, including my passport, so that it wouldn’t be stolen. I did as he said.

“The next day, around five in the afternoon, Viktor and Slick, a Japanese man, came to the apartment. They then took us to the Den. It was totally different from the picture I was shown in Poland. Viktor very rudely told us we were to work there. I got mad, thinking what the hell is this? Then the two guys explained the job to us: We were going to be providing sex services. Give massages and jerk the men off. For oral sex, we would get four thousand yen [$40]. Whether we had customers or not, they would collect seventy-five hundred yen [$75] from us each day. If we didn’t pay, that amount would become a ‘loan’ we would have to pay back. The plane ticket was the first thing they were charging us for; they said we already owed them three hundred thousand yen [$3,000]. The apartment cost was ten thousand yen [$100] a day. ‘Don’t drag your feet about it,’ they said. ‘If you want more money, you can sleep with a customer; you can make twenty thousand yen [$200] for that. You have three months in this country, so if you work, you can pay back all your loans.’

“I was horrified. I was absolutely repulsed, but there was nothing I could do. I left the bar, but I didn’t know Tokyo at all, not even the way back to the apartment. Somehow, though, I remembered certain places, and after two or three hours, I made it back to the apartment. I thought I would grab my passport and plane ticket and get ready to go back home. When I got back, though, everything had been taken from the drawer. There was nothing I could do but wait.

“When I saw Viktor, his face was so … proud and triumphant. I was angry. ‘What the hell are you doing? Give back my passport! Give me my return ticket! You’re a thief, and if you don’t give them back, I’ll go to the police.’ He was totally unfazed, and he told me, ‘We’re the ones who bought the ticket—the ticket was ours, not yours. I’m not stealing anything, you ungrateful bitch. Go try the police. You have no passport, right? They’ll arrest you for being an illegal alien. The police here are worse than the hounds of Hell. Please, by all means, go ahead and try it. They’ll deport you, but the money you owe us won’t disappear. Quite the contrary. We’ll get compensation from you. I know where your family lives, and my friends know, too.’

“My daughter I had left with my mother. The man who introduced me to all of this knew where they lived. With Viktor’s threat, I was very afraid. I thought they would hurt my family. I thought that if I escaped, while I was escaping, my daughter would be killed … and my mother, too. If I could do it over, I would have gone to my embassy. But I worried that Viktor could have somehow messed that up for me too. I thought that he might even have friends in the embassy. God, I was stupid.

“I had no place to sleep, no money, and nowhere I could go. There was only ‘work.’ It was the first time I had done anything like that. They had explained that for just a massage, it was a thousand yen [$10]. I hated doing it, but I did. Touching the men was one part of it, but the clients always demanded a blow job. I got more money for that. For the first week, I only did massage, but Viktor and Slick were demanding ten thousand yen [$100] a day for the apartment. So I tried to do a blow job, but I just couldn’t do it with someone I didn’t know. I started choking really violently. I started to hate myself. One day, I started crying and went begging to the manager of the shop. He said that he’d had no idea they’d taken my passport. I don’t know what he said to Viktor, but he got back my passport for me. The manager told me that I could try to look for work at another place. Then he lent me his telephone, so I called my mother and daughter and told them to go to a safe place. They said that Viktor had called them once. I wanted to go straight home to them, but I couldn’t. I had no money.

“I looked for work at a different hostess club, but the fact I was doing that got back to Viktor almost immediately. He came to the club and said to me, ‘You can’t work in Roppongi. I am in charge of you. Nobody will give a job to an ungrateful bitch like you.’ Slick was with him, too.

“I didn’t come to Japan to be a prostitute. I was promised a job as a hostess. The shop manager had given me my ticket and passport, so the next day, I decided I would run away. I spoke with some women who were in the same situation I was in, and we made a plan to go to the police, but everyone got so scared they ended up not going. They said things like ‘They’ll arrest us’ or ‘Now we can’t repay the loan, but if we go, we have to get a lawyer’ and ‘Japanese prisons are terrible.’

“Viktor is unforgiveable. Slick too. Hell is too good for them.

“They also do sex tours, you know, for businessmen. They have a big boat in the Maldives, and the girls are the escorts. The men can sleep with a different girl every evening if they like … There was another Polish girl who told me she worked on one of these tours. She was promised two hundred thousand yen [$2,000] for five days, but Viktor kept taking money out for ‘rent’ and ended up only paying her half of what he owed her. ‘It was like a vacation for you,’ he told her. ‘I don’t think one hundred thousand yen is too much to pay for a vacation.’

“I don’t understand it. Why do the Japanese police allow this? They know it is happening, but they think that women who come to Japan are all prostitutes. I thought I would go to the police when I went back home, but I’m worried about my family.

“This Russian woman, Karina, went on one of the tours I was on in November. She was bad-tempered, always fought with customers. One night she disappeared. Viktor told us she had pretended to have stomach pains so they took her to the hospital on the island and she ran away. No one believed him. I saw her tiptoeing out of the room where she was spending the night, and she definitely didn’t look like she was running off. When she didn’t come back, I looked in her room; there was no trace of her, but by the bed there was blood and it looked like someone had tried to clean it up. You could smell the detergent. I got so frightened. I couldn’t ask anybody. Asking is dangerous. I couldn’t even say anything to the other women. There was a guy on board who was in the Japanese mafia. The day after Karina disappeared, he had a deep cut on his face. Maybe she resisted and he killed her. That’s what I think. Maybe it was just a coincidence. That’s what I want to think.

“They gave me a little extra money at the end. I think it was hush money. Probably, when everyone went home, they just wanted to forget this horrible experience.

“There’s no point in going to the Japanese police to complain. Even if I told the local police in Poland, they’d just call me a whore.

“I don’t want to be with a man anymore. I don’t even want to be with anyone. That’s how I feel now. I’m just … filthy. Not even a woman. Not anything.”

Veronika talked for a long time. I scrawled notes while she did. What she had to say was not too different from what I’d heard elsewhere. Different motives for coming to Japan, different details, but the same fundamental horror story.

I wanted to go after Viktor first but needed to get his number.

To do so, I spent an evening at Dispario buying drinks for Kiki, the craziest Israeli girl I’d ever met. She was so tan that she looked like a cinnamon Pop-Tart, and her hairdo was an honest-to-god Afro. She was Viktor’s ex-girlfriend.

I tried to charm her into giving me Viktor’s number but she’d either been warned or was naturally wary, maybe both. I wasn’t getting very far and was running out of money. Two hours and 20,000 yen ($200) into the evening, Kiki was very drunk but still not talking. Well, she was talking but not about anything I wanted to hear. She could barely sit up. I propped her up and started massaging her shoulders.

“You give a great massage! Where did you learn that?”

“Swedish Massage School. Class of ’85.”

She laughed. “You’re such a liar! Don’t stop.”

I massaged her neck, moved on to her hands for another few minutes, and then tried to close the deal. “Kiki, I have to get home,” I said.

She put her head in my lap and looked up at me. “Don’t go.”

“I have reports to write up. If you call me after work, I’ll come meet you and I’ll give you a full body massage. Without any funny stuff.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Full body? Okay, you’re on.”

At three in the morning, she rang, raging drunk, demanding the massage. I made my way back to Dispario, and we walked to a love hotel. As soon as we got into the room, she stripped off her clothes, jumped on the bed, exhaled, and said, “I am so tired. Massage me!”

So I did. For about twenty minutes, which was just enough to relax her but not enough to let her fall asleep. A good massage is not supposed to result in sexual arousal, but I wasn’t giving her a good massage. I wanted her aroused. It worked.

She turned over and grabbed her breasts. “You’re doing me so good, you can fuck me.”

“I can’t fuck you. I have things on my mind.”

“Like what?”

“Like Viktor’s telephone number.”

“You want the fucking number? Why do you want the fucking number?”

“He owes me money.”

This seemed to make sense to her. She grimaced and spat out the number. I quickly wrote it down.

“Now you can fuck me,” she said.

“I’m not charging you for the massage, but I would have to charge you for the happy ending.”

She sat up and stared at me. “What?”

“I said I’m not going to fuck you, but I can get you off. That’s out of bounds of the normal massage, though. I’ll have to charge you.”

At that she laughed, then reached over to her dress tossed on the chair, pulled out a wad of 10,000-yen bills, and threw them at me.

“Here’s your money, greedy boy. Now get me off. I want to come.”

I have long fingers, a gift from birth. I fingered her to orgasm.

And then she was out like a light. I tucked her in, folded her clothes, and scooped up the money. I might have considered having sex with her under other circumstances. If I hadn’t gotten the number and I thought it would have gotten me the number, I would have done it. I considered that for a second and was a little surprised. I probably would have felt guilty about it, but I would have done it.

Anyway, I had what I wanted, and I was happy. I decided that I would head back to the apartment and see Beni and Sunao before I went to work. Maybe we could eat breakfast together. I caught a taxi and told the driver to take me home. Well, I thought I told him to take me home, but instead I asked him to drive me to TMPD headquarters. It was only when I pulled up in front that it hit me—wrong place—and by then I didn’t feel like getting back in the cab.

Well, it felt more like home than home did these days. On the bright side, I knew I wouldn’t wake anyone up. I took the elevator to the press club, got my clothes out of my locker, took a shower, and crashed in the tatami room in the back of the club. I was almost glad I’d made the mistake.

I had Slick’s number from reporting on Lucie Blackman. But before I interviewed him, I wanted him to dig his own grave. I got one of the bar girls at Dispario to call him. This is a transcript of the tape:

To some extent, my face was already known in Roppongi. Slick probably wouldn’t remember me, but just to be sure I gave the tape to Matchie, a junior reporter, and asked him to interview Slick for the article. I didn’t think Matchie would be in any danger. I don’t mind danger myself, I just thought that this was the best strategy. But Matchie lacked vigor. With what he brought back, the article would be dead in the water. I threw discretion to the wind, and for the follow-up I went with Matchie to see Slick.

We met at Club Katy: nice Art Deco interior, black marble tables, view of Tokyo Tower. Since the time he’d spoken to Matchie, Slick had thought out his story, refined it. He was actually charming in his laid-back way. I expected evil incarnate; I got Goebbels instead.

“Viktor only takes their passports to make them live to their promises,” he started off.

His English was a little off, but you got the picture. Then, switching to Japanese, he admitted to, once or twice, having held on to a passport for a few days after receiving it from Viktor, an acquaintance he said he had known for eight years. “All the girls were told from the start that they would be working at a sex parlor when they came to Japan. As for Veronika,^2* they were the conditions laid out for her, but she refused to work as she promised. She was never deceived.”

Yes, he and his cohorts recruited girls via the Internet, even on www.jobsinjapan.com, and through an underground network sent them to Japan. “I had an agent in Germany ask me to find jobs for women who were willing to work as prostitutes,” he said casually.

He didn’t seem on the defensive at all. He was talking to me, but he wasn’t addressing me. He was trying to convince Matchie, his countryman, that he was just a misunderstood businessman, that the whole situation had been misrepresented.

“Viktor’s version of events is totally different,” I interjected, not entirely truthfully. “He says you’re the heavy. He says you’re the one who lies to the girls and takes their money. Call him if you don’t believe me—here’s his number.” I handed him my cell phone; Viktor’s number was displayed.

That threw him off balance. He cursed under his breath. He pulled on his ponytail and flared his nostrils. “Viktor is a fucking liar,” he finally said in British-accented English, gritting his teeth.

He decided to talk. By the time he was done, we had enough for the article. We had him admitting to stealing the passports, to occasional coercion, to being a pimp to foreign women, and to breaking Japanese laws.

The article ran in the morning edition of the paper on February 8, 2004. The reaction around the Yomiuri was good, in a way, and I was jazzed. Naively, I expected something would happen—maybe even justice.

What the hell was I thinking? Did I really believe that the TMPD would swoop down on Slick and Viktor, close their operations, and liberate the women?

Slim, the near-retirement-age detective in charge of the newly formed Organized Crime Control Division 1, which dealt mostly with illegal marriages and illegal immigration schemes, called me. He’d read the story, and he wanted to talk.

Excited, I gathered my files, my data, my notes, my telephone numbers, and got to Slim’s office by ten in the morning.

He was very cordial. “Good work, Jake. A very interesting article.”

“Thank you,” I said, pleased with myself. “So, are you going after those jerks?”

“I’d like to. Do you think you can get one of the women to come forward and talk to me?”

“I think I can. But you’ll protect her, right?”

“No, I’m afraid we’ll have to arrest her for working illegally on a tourist visa and deport her. But with her testimony we can bust the two guys for violations of the immigration laws and maybe some others. We can shut down their business that way.”

I wasn’t liking the sound of this. “Why do you have to arrest the woman? Who’s going to come forward only to go to jail?”

“Well, it’s the law. We have to enforce the laws.”

I rifled through my files and pulled out a directive from the National Police Agency. “Look,” I said, “it says here that all police in Japan are to make serious efforts to close down human trafficking operations and take care of the victims of such perpetrators.”

He snorted. “Jake, that is pure NPA bullshit. It’s divorced from reality. There’s no way we can ignore someone working here illegally and give them shelter, even if they are victims. There are no criteria for identifying human trafficking victims. That’s why it’s impossible to build a case against the traffickers. The victims are classified as illegal workers and forcibly repatriated. There are no witnesses, and therefore no cases can be built. If we did not arrest one of the women deceived into working for those people, that would be negligence of duty.”

Potentially I could save a whole crew of women from being exploited, but I’d have to rat out my sources, including Helena. I’d have to sacrifice them. I couldn’t do it. Angry and depressed, I gave him Viktor’s and Slick’s numbers and gathered up my things, readying to split the joint.

Slim leaned forward and very quietly said to me, “I realize that you find this state of affairs appalling. So do I. It is like slavery. However, since it is prostitution, it’s not really in our jurisdiction. I can only handle it in terms of illegal immigration or as a violation of the labor laws for foreigners, depending on what kind of visa these women have. Human trafficking falls into a gray zone. I suggest you talk to the chief of vice.”

I went to see the head of the vice squad. He had a copy of my article on his desk. He was a short fellow with curly hair, square frameless glasses, and a booming voice. I always thought of him as Curly.

“Adelstein, nice work. You should be a cop.”

“Thanks. What do you think? Are you going to bust these guys?”

He sucked air through his teeth, making the sssa sound that older Japanese men often make when asked a perplexing question that they don’t want to answer. “It kind of seems like an immigration thing. Did you talk to O.C. Control Division 1?”

“They said if it’s prostitution, it’s your beat.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Curly picked up my article and read it over.

“Jake, we cover a lot of ground on the vice squad. Drugs, guns, pachinko, licensing legitimate sex shops, busting illegitimate ones, things like that. It’s obvious that whether coerced or not, we’ve got a prostitution operation going on here. Are any of the girls teenagers?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Okay, that makes it hard for the child protection squad to take the case. Just asking.”

“Your point being?”

“Well, tell me what you have, and we can try and work it as a violation of the prostitution laws case, but it’ll take time and the penalties are a slap on the wrist for the accused, even if we get a conviction.”

“Okay.”

“And here’s the other thing … the prostitutes—they’re all foreigners, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we don’t have many officers in our section who can handle foreign languages. So that means we’ll have to ask the Criminal Investigative Division’s International Crime Unit for backup. Frankly, they’re not eager to help out on a low-level prostitution bust.”

“So you’re saying you can’t do anything.”

“No, I’m saying it’s going to take a lot of time. Logistically. There are budget issues. People issues. Language issues.”

“Well, I can give you what I have.”

“I’ll take it. I may not be able to do anything with it.”

“There’s clearly criminal activity going on.”

“There’s clearly criminal activity going on all over the fucking place. We only have the manpower to make a few token arrests and keep people in line. We’ll do it. It’s just not a simple case for us to handle.”

And that was that.

For the first time, I was very disillusioned with the cops. I know that they can only enforce laws that exist, but I wanted them to do something anyway.

Viktor continued to bring in women. Slick continued to make money. A couple of clubs dropped their services after the article. Some people stayed away from the Maldives trips, but nothing really changed. Helena was not happy with me. I was not happy with me. I was so mad and frustrated that I took everything I had on the whole debacle and gave it to a State Department contact at the U.S. Embassy. I figured at the very least that it might be good cannon fodder for the annual white paper on human trafficking.

I made sure the article was translated into English properly, and I was happy to see that it spread across the Internet fairly rapidly. I heard that Viktor began to have trouble recruiting women.

I was really delighted when in June that year the U.S. State Department put Japan on a watch list of countries doing a piss-poor job of addressing human trafficking problems. In terms of willingness to act, Japan was ranked only slightly above North Korea. For the Japanese, that was like pushing a button. Never underestimate the power of national humiliation to make the Japanese government get off its lazy ass.

I felt gratified in another sense: when the U.S. Embassy held a symposium on human trafficking at the United Nations University later that month, I was invited to be a panelist. Not a journalist, but a participant. I felt honored.

At the conference, the National Police Agency representative gave a speech outlining the amazing things Japan had done to combat human trafficking. I couldn’t resist raising my hand during the Q&A, and I went on a tirade. I related my experience dealing with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, and then, using as an example the same roadblocks thrown in my face, I proceeded to explain why the NPA directive was a worthless piece of self-serving crap. The questions after my questions were only slightly less brutal.

The next morning, my article on the conference came out with the headline “Japan: Kingdom of Human Trafficking? American Wants Japan to Criminalize Human Trafficking.” Normally, you know, reporters don’t get to choose their headlines, but I’d taken extra care to make sure that I got the headline I wanted. I only had to buy an 8,000-yen bottle of sake for one of the guys in layout.

When I got to the conference that day, a trio of irate Japanese bureaucrats stood waiting for me. One was from the NPA, one from the Ministry of Justice, and one from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The MOFA official was a woman, and it was obvious she had been picked to do the honors because she could speak English. While the others stood behind her, she waved the newspaper in front of my face. “This headline is inexcusable,” she said, forgetting herself and speaking to me in Japanese.

I took the paper from her and studied the headline. “You’re right,” I said. “This headline should have been corrected. The question mark after ‘Japan: A Kingdom of Human Trafficking’ should be an exclamation point. And the part about the American is unimportant. The whole headline should read ‘Japan: Kingdom of Human Trafficking! As Bad as North Korea?”

I was on a roll. Even though it was tough, I had found a cause I could really fight for. There’s a certain charge and power derived from being on a crusade. Self-righteous anger can really motivate you. I had done some things I wasn’t proud of, but compared to the flesh traders I was writing about, I was the Dalai Lama, at least in my mind.

And I was angry. I was angry that, although human trafficking was rampant in the country at the time, the Japanese police and the Japanese government didn’t care and didn’t want to deal with it. I can’t really blame the police that much. The laws are the laws, and without any real anti–human trafficking ordinances on the books, what were they supposed to do? The problem didn’t start with the cops; it started way above them.

I was thinking like a good yakuza-busting cop investigating a gangland shooting. Who cares about the shooter? The shooter is just following orders. If you want to have an impact, bust the person who ordered the shooting.

I decided to bust the Japanese government as far as I could.

The crime in this case was indifference to and tacit approval of the exploitation of foreign women. I needed evidence to prove my case. I had some in mind. The U.N.-backed International Labor Organization (ILO) had carried out a study, funded by the Japanese government, on the state of human trafficking in Japan. The report was scathing: Japan had failed to punish human traffickers or to take care of the victims. The Japanese government ordered the ILO to keep the report under wraps; it would never be published.

I knew it existed, however, and through certain channels I got a copy. It was the Yomiuri’s front-page story on November 19, 2004. I had to fight to get it decent coverage, but it was worth it. I followed up with another article the next day. My source told me that the government had been preparing to announce a plan of action for dealing with human trafficking and that my article had spurred drastic revisions to strengthen protection of the victims. I felt that as a reporter I’d finally done something that made a difference, however small it might be.

I didn’t give up on getting Viktor and Slick put down. Eventually, both went to jail. The drug squad had taken an interest in Slick, his clubs were raided, and he went out of business. Someone fed enough information to both Japanese Customs officials and the Dutch police about Viktor’s enterprises that Viktor wound up behind bars. Apparently, someone also gave his name to the local yakuza, who beat the crap out of him for infringing on their turf.

I had made a difference. No, I should rephrase that. Helena and I had made a difference. She had had the bravery to contact me and had worked harder than I on the first story, and if there had been any justice, her name would have been on it as well.

In the end, the sex tours to the Maldives stopped. Slick’s clubs were raided and shut down. Justice was served, more or less.

Something happened to me in the course of working on the human-trafficking stories. I couldn’t tell you when it happened or even why. I wasn’t very good at talking to the victims and keeping my distance. Their stories stuck in my head. There were images that rattled around as well. The skinny, toothless six-year-old boy of a Thai sex worker. She wasn’t allowed to get dental care for her son, because the traffickers didn’t want the authorities to realize that they were both in Japan illegally.

The Korean woman who had been brutally beaten by a customer, cigarettes stubbed out on her breasts. The man who had done it, probably a low-ranking yakuza, had also given her AIDS and a child. She felt that God had cursed her. I found it hard to disagree with that.

There was the Estonian woman who had been sodomized with a sake bottle for spitting on a customer, so savagely that she required surgery. And there were more.

And in almost all cases, the women would never know who had victimized them, where they had been held, or the names of the Japanese people involved. They had memories of their suffering but rarely anything useful that could lead you to find the people responsible. It was like fighting yurei (ghosts and phantoms). Most of the time, the women were forcibly deported for visa violations immediately after the sex club owners were arrested, thus leaving no evidence for prosecution on other charges. I tried to convince the cops that they should be arresting the traffickers for kidnapping, rape, assault, and any other charges that were possible, but the cops would tell me, “In order to do that we’d need evidence and these women are poor witnesses because they don’t understand Japanese and can’t give solid testimony. In addition to this, they have been working illegally in Japan, which is a crime, and they have to be deported. Once they’re deported, it’s hard to build a criminal case.”

It was like a Zen Buddhist mondo. I kept having that same conversation with law enforcement. I knew that if the laws were changed, things would change, but it didn’t seem as if that would ever happen.

I’d cultivated various sources in order to get to talk to the victims, but try as I might I could never find out much about the victimizers. I didn’t have the resources or the money to do that. I started spending huge amounts of my pay on helping the women I met. Sometimes, that meant taking them to some place where they could get an abortion, off the books.

I didn’t know how I felt about abortion, but I know that I believed that no woman should have to bear the child of the man who’d raped her or bought her unwilling services. Sometimes I’d cough up airfare. I did what I could. And, of course, I was breaking all the rules of objectivity. Don’t get involved. I got involved.

Over time, I lost interest in sex. It seemed a vulgar, nasty, and brutish thing. Everything about it seemed vaguely unpleasant. I wasn’t impotent, I just wasn’t interested. Chronic fatigue didn’t help either.

I should have talked about all these things with my wife, but I didn’t. When could I? I was never home. I called the house at night and said good night to the kids. I tried to e-mail her during the day but often forgot to do it. I was becoming distant. I observed it happening as if I were watching someone else. I might have been able to explain why to her, but I didn’t want to. She didn’t seem interested in my work, and I stopped talking about it. We argued. She accused me of spending too much money on booze, and I didn’t want to say I’d been giving it away to women she didn’t know. Why? I was afraid she’d tell me to stop doing it. She probably would not have done that. She probably would have been supportive. I just didn’t give her a chance.

When lying is part of your job, you forget how love is supposed to work.

I started sleeping in the back room of the house when I came home late. We shared the bedroom with our children, so that made intimacy difficult as well. We didn’t even really have a bedroom, just a tatami living room where we put out our futons.

Even when I got home early, which was rare, I began to make excuses for sleeping in the back room. I felt better there. I didn’t like to be touched when I slept anymore.

I knew that I was burning out. When my parents talked to me they noticed that I was always distracted. I began to think about calling it quits and going home. I decided that that would be a good thing to do, the smart thing to do. The best choice for myself, our marriage, and the children.