Saturday, December 23, 2017

Support Lighthouse in Japan


The video above on JK is by Lighthouse, an NPO that works to eliminate human trafficking, especially sex trafficking, in Japan.

Japan remains a Tier Two country on the State Department's Human Trafficking watch list. This means it is not doing enough to hinder and stop the sexual exploitation of girls and boys. Japan is not enforcing the laws that it has nor is it prosecuting the perpetrators. Simply put, Japan has not changed its societal views of sex trafficking. This backwardness helps explain why the Abe government is unable to come to terms with Imperial Japan's Comfort Women history.

It should be noted that South Korea has long pulled itself out of being a Tier Two Country and is now a Tier One. This is a government that fully meet the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA) minimum standards and is expanding its prosecution of traffickers and help for their victims.

It is telling that Japan is the only G7 country not a States Parties to the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking In Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, commonly known as the Palermo Protocol. This agreement outlines the distinct responsibility governments bear to criminalize human trafficking in all its forms and to prosecute and hold offenders accountable for their crimes.

Japan it seems, can not take responsibility for neither its past nor its future. If the surviving Comfort Women cannot get Japan to be accountable to them, maybe their quest should be, as the Japanese demand, "future oriented." This is to persuade Japan to sign the Palermo Protocol. Such an accomplishment would be the best sign that the rightists of Japan have been buried and that the country now holds a modern understanding of the scourge of sex trafficking.

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