Tokyo erotic massage parlor owner arrested for employing 12-year-old Thai girl

Here’s a story so horrible that it made us practically spit our coffee out when we first read it in the Japanese-language media last Friday.

On November 6, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police announced the arrest of a 51-year-old male owner of a massage parlor on suspicion of violating the Labor Standards Act by employing a 12-year-old Thai girl.

The girl first came to Japan with her mother and police believe she was a victim of human trafficking. She was forced to provide sexual services to male customers at the parlor.

According to the announcement that was widely reported by media outlets, Masayuki Hosono is suspected of forcing a Thai girl to service customers with erotic massages at the parlor in Yushima in Bunkyo ward, east Tokyo, between June and July.

Police allege that Hosono knew that the girl was under 15, the minimum working age as defined by the labor law. Hosono of Tobitakyu, Chofu City, a suburb in the west of Tokyo, was arrested on November 4, along with a 32-year-old Thai woman who was also running the parlor with Hosono.

The girl came to Japan in June with her mother on a short-term visa. Her mother then brought her to the parlor and taught her how to provide sexual services to men in a private room in the parlor. Her mother disappeared the following day, though apparently came back to visit in mid-July with a baby in tow, informing the girl that the child was her younger brother. Promising to return one day to collect the girl, the mother then left Japan two weeks after arriving.

The girl slept in the kitchen of the parlor and served more than 60 customers over the course of about a month. She does not speak Japanese.

The parlor offered “Thai massages” for ¥6,000 an hour. The manager took all of the approximately ¥630,000 earned by the girl, though transferred a portion to an account linked to the mother.

The girl moved to an adult entertainment establishment in another prefecture in August, and in September sought help from the Tokyo Immigration Bureau, where she was taken into custody. She is quoting as telling police, “I thought my family back home wouldn’t be able to make a living, so I had no choice but to put up with doing this. I want to return to Thailand and attend junior high school.”

Thai police believe the mother is currently in Taiwan and that she intentionally took the child to Japan to pay back her family’s debts.

“Her mother has also worked as a sexual services worker in places like Singapore and Taiwan, so we’ve almost never lived together,” the girl reportedly told police.

Cases of human trafficking in Japan are growing, though foreign nationals remain a minority of the official victim numbers.