1The rhetoric of public officials and anti-trafficking activists, academic discourse, and the media often focus on sex trafficking as the sole defining feature of trafficking. TV programs and movies dramatize and/or sensationalize the plight of trafficking victims, mostly women from Asia and Eastern Europe, in forced prostitution. According to the US Department of State’s Trafficking in Person Reports in 2004 and 2005, Filipina hostesses are the largest group of victims in global sex trafficking. Parrenas challenges the label of Filipina hostesses as trafficking victims coerced into prostitution. She argues that empirical studies are needed to assess the exact scope of trafficking among Filipina hostesses (or any groups of migrant women) and to formulate appropriate policies for redress. In Illicit Flirtation: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo, she deconstructs this generalized portrayal of Filipina hostesses in Japan as trafficking victims through months of fieldwork. She works as an insider (a hostess) and conducts in-depth interviews with hostesses, club owners, brokers, non-governmental organizations, and government officials to understand these women workers’ subjectivities and to accurately represent the lived experiences of Filipina hostesses.

2Parrenas makes significant contributions both methodologically and substantively. While taking a case study approach, she provides comparative analysis without homogenizing Filipinas as a group. For example, she includes transgender women in her study and compares them to other hostesses. In addition, she stresses the importance of differentiating hostesses’ experiences based on their immigration status, such as entertainers (contract workers), undocumented workers, and legal residents (often through marriage). These groups face different challenges and obstacles. Undocumented workers, such as women who overstay their visas or leave their clubs during contract, are far more vulnerable to exploitation by club owners or co-ethnics. To avoid detection and deportation under the criminalizing nature of the Japanese government policy, they have to remain invisible and live in the shadow. The comparison among different groups provides a more nuanced depiction of these women’s lives in Tokyo.

3She also provides various insights substantively. Her central argument is to problematize flattening forced labor and trafficking and generalizing certain cases of sex trafficking to a whole group of migrant women. She acknowledges that forced labor exists, not only in the case of hostesses but also those of foreign domestics and migrant farm workers. However, forced labor cannot be automatically translated into trafficking or sex trafficking in this case. Many of the women she interviews deny that they are trafficked victims. They might knowingly enter Japan illegally through the assistance of brokers. They know they would accrue debt and most of their wage would be deducted. They know that they would work as hostesses and understand that working conditions could be difficult. Yet they choose to work in Japan for the better earning. Parrenas uses the term “indentured mobility” to describe the experiences of these women. That is, while these women face structural constraints, such as poverty at home, deplorable working conditions, and illegal status, they do have agency and make their own decisions to work as hostesses. In other words, their actions are a result of the interaction between structure and agency. In addition to taking women’s agency into account, she argues that Filipina hostesses’ work should be considered as a labor migration issue rather than that of trafficking.

4Parrenas places Filipina hostesses’ vulnerability to exploitation both during and after migration under the context of the Philippine and Japanese government policies. While protective measures, such as minimum age, an accreditation system, standards of employment, and broker regulations, are established for the best interest of these women, these policies, embedded with a culture of benevolent paternalism, end up legitimating women’s dependency on middle brokers (promoters, promotion agencies, and talent managers) for overseas employment and decreasing their ability to work overseas as independents. This state sanctioned dependency through paternalistic regulations engenders their vulnerability to servitude and deprives women of their agency.

5In addition to the disempowering nature of state policy and brokerage system, she examines the intricacy of the labor regime and its bodily discipline within the clubs, which is another contextual factor constraining women’s agency. Parrenas uses the term bodily capital to refer to hostesses’ efforts to maintain their appearance to fit the beauty standard desired by the customer. The requirements for hostesses’ bodily movement and appearance aim at reinforcing their femininity and sexual desirability. For example, hostesses have to sit with their back straight, one leg in front of the other, and their head tilted to one side. During the waiting time, hostesses are expected to sit or stand with their back straight, maintain a delightful demeanor, and express their excitement when being selected by a customer. They must constantly display their sexual desirability and use their flirtations to maximize their sale. Hostesses’ provision of feminine appeal is to strengthen Japanese men’s sense of masculinity through emotional, bodily, and ascetic labor. She makes an insightful observation about the similarity between the clubs’ bodily control and the principle of Talorism and its scientific management in assembly line. However, this is not to say that hostesses are completely powerless to resist. While they have to obey rules at the clubs, they are able to utilize their flirtatious skills outside clubs for financial gains. They invoke men’s expectations for romance, love, or even sex when possible. Their flirtation and display of affection mean little to them. This pragmatic strategy does not necessarily violate their sense of moral value.

The massive arrival of Filipina hostesses in Japan in the early 2000s was often cited by antitrafficking crusaders as proof that large numbers of young, innocent women from poor countries were trafficked to rich countries and forced to engage in prostitution. According to the crusaders, the stages of sex trafficking could be divided into (1) the recruitment of potential victims by recruiters, (2) the transportation of victims by traffickers, (3) the selling of victims to sex venue owners by recruiters or traffickers, (4) the control of, and subsequent (5) victimization of victims by sex ring operators, (6) the use of debt-bondage as a form of control, and (7) the financial exploitation of the victims. The crusaders also argued that most sex trafficking offenders are members of organized crime groups. Consequently, for more than a decade the world community, under the leadership of the U.S. government, has developed many measures to combat sex trafficking, even though the above claims about sex trafficking have never been supported by grounded empirical research.

In Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo, sociologist Rhacel Slazar Parrenas from the University of Southern California challenges most of the claims of the prevailing antitrafficking paradigm and argues that measures adopted by government agencies to stop trafficking actually hurt the women involved by denying them an opportunity to go overseas to work and lift themselves and their families out of abject poverty. Instead, according to the author, sending and receiving governments should treat these women as contract workers, not victims to be rescued, and help them to gain control of their labor and migration.

In 2005 and 2006, as a visiting professor at Ochanomizu University in Japan, Parrenas engaged in ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo, spending time with fifty-six Filipina hostesses: forty-five females and eleven transgender individuals. In Japan, a hostess is not necessarily engaged in paid sex; Professor Parrenas, herself, worked briefly as a hostess in a club controlled by a yakuza (Japanese organized crime) group. The relationship between prostitution and sex trafficking is, by its nature, a difficult subject to study, but Parrenas did an excellent job in combining field interviews with participant observation to obtain rich and reliable data from her research subjects. The result is a highly readable and informative book filled with firsthand accounts of the work and lives of Filipina hostesses in Tokyo.

Parrenas' book is based not only on rich, empirical data, but also on a solid theoretical framework. She suggests that, in order to avoid labeling Filipina entertainers in Japan as either free subject (migrant) or enslaved subject (trafficked person), we should consider the process of their transnational movement as indentured mobility, so that we can capture the complex dynamics of coercion and choice, or subjugation and progress. Under this framework, the author questions the labeling of Filipina hostesses as trafficked persons, but at the same time refuses to dismiss their vulnerability to forced labor.

Most books on sex trafficking, regardless of whether they support or reject the dominant antitrafficking paradigm, rarely provide a nuanced understanding of the experiences of the women who engage in commercial sex overseas. Illicit Flirtations is the exception. In the book, the author portrays in extensive detail the social organization of the migration process, the nature of servitude, and other vulnerabilities of migration. Through the discussions of class, shimei (request for a hostess' company), dohan (paid date), table rotation, show time, surface acting, sales quota, and many other norms or practices associated with Filipina hostess clubs, Parrenas describes how hostesses engaged in illicit flirtations in a labor system that was set up to buttress the masculinity of its clients. Parrenas argues that, even though some hostesses did have sex with their clients, they did not view themselves as prostitutes because they slept only with regular customers they actually liked and there was no cash exchange right after the sexual act. According to Parrenas, contrary to what has been reported in the media and the antitrafficking literature, hostess clubs in Japan are by no means brothels, and the Filipina women working in them are not really prostitutes.

Parrenas observes that hostesses and hostess clubs in Japan have different moral boundaries or regimes, such as moral conservatives, amoralists, and moral in-betweeners. Morally conservative hostesses maintain only platonic relations with their customers, amoralists willingly participate in the direct purchase of sex, and the in-betweeners fall between the above two extreme groups and have sex only with frequent customers who pay them indirectly. In morally conservative hostess clubs, physical contact between customers and hostesses is kept to a minimum; at clubs with a moral in-between regime, the sexual flirtation that takes place is generally meek, whereas in amoral businesses, customers can pay for sex with hostesses. Parrenas makes a good point when she writes: " 'Sex trafficking' becomes an issue when hostesses find themselves working in a club where the moral regime of sex does not match their own. For instance, a moral conservative working at an amoral club is likely to confront serious moral violations at work. Aggravating this situation would be their immigrant status. Arubaito [long-term legal residents] workers could reject peer pressure and quit. Talents, as contract workers [with entertainer visas], unfortunately have less flexibility to do so."

Recently, a number of scholars have begun to question some of the core assumptions and beliefs that have provided the foundation for most of the current antitrafficking policy. Among those works that are critical of the antitrafficking discourse, Parrenas’ book is probably one of the more convincing because it is based on rich, solid field data and on a careful analysis that hinges on the experiences and perceptions of Filipina hostesses. This book undoubtedly makes a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between hostessing, prostitution, and sex trafficking.

In 2004, the U.S. State Department designated the more than 80,000 Filipinas who worked as hostesses in Japan’s legendary nightlife industry as “trafficked persons,” believing these women to be victims of forced prostitution. Sociologist Rhacel Parreñas, an expert on women’s global labor migration who was in Japan attempting to study the workers, disagreed. She suspected that the labels of ‘victim’ and ‘prostitute’ assigned to the hostesses masked a more complicated reality that policy makers needed to understand if they hoped to make women’s lives better.

After extensive research, which included several months working undercover as a hostess herself, Parreñas arrived at a nuanced understanding of the women’s situation — the migrants, the majority of whom came from extremely poor backgrounds, both benefited from and were subjugated by the work they did. She illuminates this paradox in her latest book Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo, just published by Stanford Press.

How did Parreñas gain access to a group of migrant sex workers whom most researchers believed to be unreachable? Surprisingly, a Catholic nun introduced her to their provocative world.

Parreñas had found the hostesses whom she encountered reticent to talk with an outsider about their work. Frustrated, she told a Filipina nun who worked in the migrant community of her dilemma, commenting that she would even take a job as a hostess to learn more about their lives. To Parreñas’ surprise, the nun marched her over to a nearby club, knocked on the door, and introduced her to the manager who promptly hired her. Parreñas recalls the nun telling her, “Working as a hostess is not necessarily bad. It is what you do with the job that could make it bad. Most of these women are working here…to help their families.” By working as a hostess, Parreñas employed a commonly used research strategy called participant observation, in which the researcher assumes a role in the social situation they are observing.
Bridging gender, labor migration, and human trafficking

The nun’s introduction proved to be a fitting entrée to the morally complex world of hostessing detailed in Illicit Flirtations .

The book brings together issues of gender and labor migration with discussions of human trafficking, contributing the theoretical concept of “indentured mobility” to describe the hostesses’ situation. Parreñas defines indentured mobility as “a middle zone between human trafficking and labor migration” in which participants paradoxically experience both “progress” in the form of occupational mobility and financial opportunity and “subjugation,” including servitude to middleman employment brokers and tight contractual ties to specific nightclubs.

Once Parreñas began working as a hostess herself, co-workers were willing to tell her their stories. She conducted over 50 interviews with migrant hostesses and spoke with club owners, labor brokers, and government officials. In the process, she developed detailed knowledge of the labor recruitment process for hostesses and the dynamics of their workplaces, as well as a demographic profile of the women – the majority of whom come from conditions of extreme poverty in their home country.

Parreñas notes that women willingly participate in hostess work. “Migrant Filipina hostesses go to Japan on their own volition,” she says. “This calls into question their identification as trafficked persons. For the most part, no one has forced or coerced them to seek work in Japan. They were not drugged, taken on a plane, and trapped in a hostess club. No one lied to them and explicitly told them that they would only be singing and dancing on stage.” “They were quite adamant,” Parreñas says, “that they weren’t prostitutes.” Rather, she describes the work of hostessing as “commercial flirtation” through which women work to “bolster the masculinity” of their customers. They typically make money for the club owners to whom their labor is contracted by selling men drinks, not sexual acts.

Parreñas is careful not to glamorize hostess work, however. She describes it as “exhausting” and “belittling” and notes that the accommodations provided by club owners for contract workers are often filthy. Moreover, she outlines the severe structural pressures, such as the debt that migrants owe to the brokers who arrange their employment and the immigration regulations that tie them to a specific workplace, that make the migrant entertainers “vulnerable to” — but not automatically victims of –forced labor. She also calls attention to the varied perceptions of the women themselves, noting that their experience of their work depends on the particular moral lens they use to evaluate and make sense of what they do.
Morality and policy

In Illicit Flirtations, Parreñas urges policymakers to acknowledge these differing moralities and target specific structural issues that make workers vulnerable to trafficking. She believes that anti-trafficking policies that fail to recognize complexity can have unanticipated consequences that make women even more vulnerable to human rights violations. She notes that when Japan tightened visa requirements in the wake of the U. S State Department designating the hostesses as “trafficked persons,” the number of Filipina hostesses migrating to Japan declined dramatically – from 82,741 in 2004 to 8,607 in 2006. Women who were unable to renew their entertainer visas saw their livelihoods evaporate, and those who managed to do so needed to demonstrate an additional eighteen months of training in the performing arts. These more stringent requirements upped some women’s debts to their labor brokers and encouraged others to enter the country illegally. In both situations, they saw their autonomy as workers decline. In short, they became more, not less, vulnerable.

Parreñas also has a challenge for migration scholars; they should pay more attention to issues of subjugation. She says, “Indentured mobility is applicable to most migrant workers today. Most migrant workers are contract workers – not migrants who migrate and have equal rights. Most are bound to the employer that sponsored them. They are not free people.”