Taiwan's invisible sex trade

The east side of Tokyo's Shinjuku Station is a place with thousands of pubs, karaoke bars, brothels, gigolo clubs and pachinko parlors. It is also a world which has absorbed over 10,000 Taiwanese women over the past two decades, women whose lives have been neglected in the teeming and highly lucrative connection between Taiwan and Japan.

Ling-chien (凌倩) is one of these many thousands. Everyday, she gets up at noon, and goes to a beauty shop owned by a Taiwanese friend to get her face done. Around dinner time, she heads off to work, a small karaoke bar in the first street of the Kabuki Cho in Shinjuku. She has been doing the same thing for 20 years.

When the men come in, she attends to them, pouring wine or whisky, chatting or singing a few songs. If the guests are generous with money, she doesn't mind if they put their hand on her thigh. There might even be a few friendly kisses. Then it's lots of smiling and bowing and calling out her thanks. Just very occasionally, she goes home with a guest.

"I'm very tired," she says. "This is a land of troubles. If I hadn't been in debt, I would not have come here."

Road to ruin

Ling-chien and Chien-hui (千惠) went to Japan in the early 1980s. They were told to go to the Shinjuku station, take the east exit and keep walking east towards the Kabuki Cho streets. They were to go to a Taiwanese-owned bar called Feng-lin where someone would pick them up.

"When we first got here, money was easy to earn. We earned more than twice what we could in Taiwan. So when my three-month visa came due, I bought a fake marriage certificate so I could keep on working," said Chien-hui.

According to Chien-hui, most of them came to Japan to earn money to take care of their family. Others were heavily in debt back home or had many young siblings to take care of. They usually hoped to make some quick money and return home, but things did not always work out that way.

Earning money was easy. But spending money was also easy. Money lenders where always there to help out, but suicide was sometimes the only way out of their clutches. "Last month, my sister committed suicide because of large debt," said Chien-hui. "Her last words were, `I regret coming to this place.'"

In the blocks of Kabuki Cho in 2002, there were more than 3,000 registered bars and brothels, 1,000 of them owned by Taiwanese.

Shinjuku also has the highest crime rate in Japan. Kabuki Cho registered 5,400 criminal cases in 2002, 40 times more than the average for Tokyo as a whole.

"If you want to survive in Kabuki Cho, you have to play tricks. That's the lesson I've learned over the years," said Fu-dai (富代), a Taiwanese mama-san who owns three bars. "I have opened my own bars. I work 24-7. I grit my teeth and I'll work until I die here. I don't feel ashamed of myself, because I don't steal."

Documenting a hidden life

Ling-chien's life, and that of her Taiwanese sisters has become the subject of a documentary film by Yang Li-chou (楊力州) and Chu Shi-chien (朱詩倩), titled Someone Else's Shinjuku East.

"The thing I thought about most making this film, is that it portrays a version of Taiwan's history in the 1970s," said Yang.

"In the 1970s, many people from Taiwan were sent overseas to study. People such as Boris Chang (張忠謀), who was instrumental in establishing the foundations for Taiwan's computer technology industry -- a major player in engineering Taiwan's economic take off. But at the same time, there were also many Taiwanese women going abroad, earning foreign exchange for Taiwan, and being the breadwinner for their families. But their lives and their history have long been neglected, even stigmatized," added Chu Shi-chien.