Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. xv, 230 pp. (Graph, B&W photos.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-5036-1134-4.
Healing Labor is the fruit of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork on Tokyo’s sex industry that took place intermittently between 2008 and 2017. Gabriele Koch explores how adult Japanese women working in the industry experience and understand the contradictions in their work and their social value. These contradictions reveal how the concept of gender remains fundamental to the overall Japanese economy, as reflected in the transactions that take place in the sex industry. Exemplified by the laws, regulations, and common assumptions governing the industry, as well as by the relationships between sex workers, their clients, and individual businesses, the author argues that such contradictions, combined with the fundamentality of gender to economy, are also found in the post-industrial service-sector market in which care, more generally, has become commercialized.
Healing Labor includes elaborate depictions of urban Japanese life in general and, in particular, the daily lives of the young women Koch encountered as sex workers. Their backgrounds and their reasons for providing sexual services for income are diverse. Although they are typically leading precarious lifestyles at the time in question, they are not necessarily suffering from poverty or lower educational attainment. Contrary to popular representation, many of them “reject negative characterizations of their work and suggest that it is, in fact, ‘ordinary’ employment that is exploitative” (72). It is worth mentioning that the ordinariness of the work is supported by accounts and observations of male managers, staff members, and other industry “experts,” including users and police officers who scarcely appear as actual living people in most academic writings. It is surely of methodological interest to any fieldworker studying marginalized populations that it is likely the author achieved this level of access not only by virtue of her intellect and effort but also because of her outsider status as an American researcher. She is aware that, if she was a Japanese woman and peer, perhaps because of the stigma attached to the industry as a whole in the country, her “interlocutors” might have been more reluctant to open up to her (21).
There is an enlightening section on laws and regulations, and how they work in reality to police as well as to define the sex industry and sex work in Japan. Especially revealing is how the “clean up” campaign in Tokyo in the 2000s was conducted and how the crackdown, which was a large part of that campaign, affected the industry (35–44). Koch taps into the figures of municipal budgeting, and of businesses shut down coinciding with the then newly emerging business style of “delivery health” (escort service via internet order). This backs up the severity expressed by people working in the industry, especially because “delivery” is considered to make sex workers more vulnerable than an in-house setting. It is rather puzzling, however, why Koch does not identify the connection between the “clean up” and the national government’s Anti-Trafficking Action Plan when she wonders about the motives of the crackdown (39) despite the fact that she, importantly, allocates a substantial part of her fieldwork and writing towards the anti-trafficking movement. Also, I must point out that it is slightly misleading when she writes that the Prostitution Prevention Law constitutes and defines “‘sex’ as penile-vagina intercourse” (28, 181n21, and passim). The law itself does not state this but applications of this law in judicial practices such as police investigations and court decisions do based on their own history of assumptions.
Nevertheless, much more significantly, this book demonstrates a conceptual advance for this area of study via its introduction of the key term “healing labor,” to explain the above-noted fundamental contradictions of sex work and the social values they are embedded within in Japan. Koch states, “healing labor is a form of women’s reproductive labor” and “[t]hrough revealing how sex workers view their encounters with customers as socially and economically essential at the same time that the value of their labor rests on its marginalization—that is, on its concealment within performances of naturalized femininity—healing labor helps us to see how the gendering of the economy is constantly restored” (100). The gendered economy via healing labor is not something abstract here. It works for sex workers to present, and often quite genuinely perceive, themselves as shiroto, or non-professional, with regard to sex, in the face of making sex their occupation. Because this is regarded as the right attitude for young women within the general norm, it also serves to mitigate the stigma attached to them, is demanded by their male clientele and sells well (chapters 2–3). It is plain to see that these women do not assert or see themselves as “sex workers,” as subjects embracing professionalism, and that this is at odds with the workers’ rights discourse adhered to in sex work advocacy.
Overall, Healing Labor is a well-balanced discussion of the contemporary sex industry in Japan. In this aspect, I disagree with Caroline Norma’s review of this book. It is true, as Norma points out, that Koch does not offer any solutions to the contradictions discussed. Nor does she try to raise awareness of sex workers’ rights among these “ordinary” women who do not register human rights or workers’ rights as an important matter for them. For those who are adamant in their aim of abolishing prostitution, like Caroline Norma, this book is read as a “[f]ailure to respond to human rights violations against women in Japan’s sex industry” and “far outside the scholarly conversation currently underway among Japanese academics” (Caroline Norma, Review of Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy, Journal of Development Studies, 2022, DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2022.2107157, 2). Equally, for those involved in organizing political movements and pursuing the goal of seeing sex work protected by labor rights and solidarity, the book could be read as indecisive, or not supportive. However, I respect Koch for not jumping onto either of these bandwagons, which must have been a difficult personal decision. For me, supporting the sex workers’ rights movement and promoting the sex work as work discourse in Japan, especially vis-à-vis the state, has been as important as trying to maintain a middle ground in which the diverse lived experiences of sex workers themselves can speak. If they can, then we are providing them with a space, within existing socio-economic-cultural structures, to have a say in developing best practices, in making policy and also in revising the method of activism – with a view to having their rights as human beings and workers protected regardless of gender or sexuality. While ethnography is firmly rooted in the scholarly conversation in Japan and elsewhere, its role in society is, arguably, to maintain the middle ground, and I read Koch’s work as fulfilling such a role.
Kaoru Aoyama
Kobe University, Kobe