A System of Exploitation

The story I am about the relate is a composite of the actual experiences of several women from the Philippines. Some of them I have known personally, some I have known from working on their cases, and there are many thousands more whom I have never met. I wish to be their voice today. Their story will be my story as I tell it in their name. -- Naoko Iyori

MY NAME? I HAVE HAD MANY names in my life. I will share all of them with you. Right now it is AIDS. That's right, HIV. I am a carrier, the doctor told me. That settles my future, wouldn't you say? I don't think you will like my story, but please listen to it anyway. The first name I remember was Baby. That is what my mother and father called me. We were a pioneer farming family just north of Tagum on the Island of Mindanao in the Philippines. My father actually created our farm from nothing. He was just making a success of it when suddenly, without warning, the Philippine National Army came and forced us to leave our farm.

To "protect" us from the NPA (New People's Army), we were made to take everything we could carry and move to a "strategic village." We learned very quickly what the word hamletting means! There was no village at all, and after building a barracks for the military we had to start all over again. Poor father had to walk to his farm, four kilometers each way, every day.

This event was my first encounter with the military. It changed everything for us overnight. It also changed my name.

I was just 15, and as the eldest I had to do something to help my family. When the captain of our local army squadron introduced a recruiter to my parents, I was ready to go anywhere. He made it sound so nice! I would go to Japan and work in a famous hotel as a professional dancer. It would mean lots of money to send home to my poor family in the Philippines. Of course, I would have to go to Manila first to be trained, and I would have to change my name to fit my new life.

So, I became Mami! My recruiter was from a Philippine entertainment production group. They "train" their girls mainly in the clubs and bars on Mabini Street in Manila. My recruiter wanted me to go to Japan as a prostitute, but I demanded to go as an entertainer. I was lucky because he turned me over to a Japanese recruiter who said I had quality.

I was told that if I learned Japanese songs and took dancing lessons I could get an entry visa for show business -- in six months. He let me work in his bar while I was waiting, but after two months I asked him to get me a fake passport and visa as I was worried about my family. Later on I learned that all these kindnesses were deducted from my earnings in Japan. By the way, the Aquino government claims it prohibits its people from being engaged in "shameful work," but while I was in Manila, my Japanese recruiter alone interviewed 20 new girls like me -- every day!

SO AT LAST I LEFT for Japan with six other girls. None of us had been told where we would be working. At the airport a man met us and after confiscating our passports, he took us to the promoter's office in Shinjuku, Japan. We were trained to work as strippers there. I objected and said I had already been trained as a singer in Manila, but nobody listened.

I was sent first to a bar in Tokyo where I had to work as a stripper. From then on, sometimes I worked in bars and other times in strip halls. I was never allowed to stay in any one place for more than 10 days. It is all a blur to me now, but I was sent all over Japan, and many times I did not even know where I was.

As I went along, I was still paying off my debt to every recruiter, promoter, manager, and bar owner along the way, so I never received the money I should have. There were several places where I received nothing -- we girls would be rushed off in the middle of the night to get away from the police, we were told. Remember, we only had fake passports and our visas were only short-term tourist visas.

My work at this time was just the usual service to customers with no prostitution. I liked these first few months the best.

My manager began to stress that I was illegally staying in Japan and could not be choosy anymore. Then came the day my name was changed again. Prostitute. God forgive me.

I was taken to a snack bar in Nagoya where I was told that from now on my work included prostitution; that I had a debt of 600,000 yen to the owner; that I would have to work it all off before receiving a salary; and that I could take no tips ... or else! The "or else" was physical violence, and I often had black-and-blue marks on my body and even on my face.

If you don't speak Japanese, the working conditions are always bad. I was lucky to learn a little before I came, but in this place it did not make any difference what language I spoke. Often customers would ask, "How much?" and I would answer, "I'm not an object for sale!" If the owner had heard me he would have fined me, or beaten me.

Long after I had calculated that my debt was paid off, I was still not free, and still no salary was coming in. I decided to escape. I got away and found good work. I even had six days of rest, the first since I had come to Japan.

But all over Japan, snack bars and entertainment businesses are often the territory of the Yakuza -- the "Japanese Mafia" -- so one day after a month and a half of freedom the Yakuza found me and took me back to the bar by force. They beat me up terribly, and from then on I was locked up with one of them 24 hours a day.

Through a customer I was able to get a note out, and a few days later two men came looking for me by name. I was afraid for my life, but two of us managed somehow to get away. We hid at first and then finally we asked a police officer to bring us to the police station. It must have been the look of terror on our faces that saved us, for I learned afterward that the police often return women like us to the bars they ran away from.

I still get weak when I think of what might have happened to us. As it was, we were both deported.

I had been able to send some money to my family in the Philippines. They told me how much it had helped. But whenever I think of how much was robbed from me -- and how much I should have been able to give them -- I get angry and cry all over again. My family is the only thing that keeps me going. Do you know my mother still thinks I am a famous entertainer? That is one name I can never claim.

BY NOW, I THOUGHT I HAD seen it all: Filipino and Japanese recruiters, promoters, agents, managers, traders, club owners, Yakuza, Filipino gangs, prostitution, police, immigration, me ... all this is part of the giant multibillion-dollar sex industry.

And of course the customers are part of the industry, too. They always come in with plenty of money in their pockets. Here in the Philippines they come from the East, the West, and the North. Some even come on company-sponsored trips. I often wonder about their wives and families at home. I realize it is men who laugh at us and move us around in what they claim is the oldest business in the world. But why are women so silent? And why do some women have to sell themselves so their families and children will not die of hunger, while other women can afford to wave their men folk off on sex tours?

As I said, I thought I had seen everything -- until I went to work in Olongapo! As the standards of this business go, I was getting old. I could not last long in Manila, so a bar-owner friend of mine said he would help me out. He gave me an introduction to one of his cronies, a former U.S. Navy man who ran one of the thousand clubs and bars clustered outside the U.S. Subic Bay Naval Base. Owners in this town are mostly politicians or ex-servicemen.

After meeting him, my worst experiences in Japan began to look good. If I had not been so desperate for money, I would have gone back to Manila and killed that man who made me think he was my friend. I never seem to learn! The first thing I was told there was that I would be competing with 16,000 other prostitutes, and if I didn't like what I was ordered to do I could go to the clubs where women do boxing and wrestling to "entertain" Navy men.

So what could I do? I went to work in the lewd shows that are meant to arouse the customers. It is a fearful thing to see young boys turn into screaming animals, and worse, to have to go off with them after they had "won" me as a prize. In Olongapo it isn't prostitution we are paid for, it is debauchery!

Whenever I feel sorry for myself, I go out for a walk and take a good look at the street children. There are about 3,000 of them, so they are everywhere. A good many of them are children of U.S. military men. They wander around, some of them on drugs, living off garbage or prostitution. I don't know which is worse. Many are sexually abused by the servicemen, who are often heard bragging about how young "their kid" was.

These children have lost their identity as Filipinos, and they certainly don't have any future. I make myself think, What if my youngest brother had to live like this? Then I can go back and smile through another day of hell.

The U.S. Navy covers this up, of course, and if it doesn't, the owner-politicians do. The other day we were all paid to take part in a demonstration "demanding" that the government keep the U.S. bases in the Philippines. Well, I for one hate them -- I hate the whole place -- "sin city," as it is internationally known. The sailors have their own name for us, "little brown [sex] machines." I am sorry if that offends your sensitivity. That is one name that infuriates me!

Women are blamed for being prostitutes. All I know is that I had no choice in the matter. For myself and most of the women I know, we live like this because we have to feed and educate our brothers and sisters so they won't have to live like this. Without us, our families would not have survived. The sex industry feeds on our poverty.

I don't know what is going to happen to me now. No one really seems to know what HIV does to women. Anyway, the doctor put my present name down on my compulsory health report: AIDS Carrier. That means I might be fired. If I am, what will happen to my family?

Naoko Iyori, M.M.B., was a member of the Mercedarian Missionaries of Berriz, a Catholic religious order, and worked with the Japanese Catholic Council for Justice and Peace in Tokyo, Japan when this article appeared. This article is adapted from a presentation Iyori gave at the Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation convocation in Seoul, Korea in March 1990.