Morphological shifts in Southeast Asian prostitution: The long twentieth century

Journal of Global History

Volumn 3, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 251-273

  Tagliacozzo, Eric ^a  

^a Cornell University ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950420170     PISSN: 17400228     EISSN: 17400236     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1740022808002635     Document Type: Review

References (158)

1. Lars Ericsson, 'Charges against prostitution: an attempt at a philosophical assessment', Ethics, 90, 3, 1980, p. 335
2. Lin Leam Lim, ed., The sex sector: the economic and social bases of prostitution in Southeast Asia, Geneva: International Labour Organisation, 1998
3. and Siriporn Skrobanek, Nattaya Boonpakdi, and Chutima Janthakeero, The traffic in women: human realities of the international sex trade, New York, NY: Zed Books, 1997, to name just a few
4. Standouts here include Anthony Reid and James Francis Warren, both male academics who have worked primarily in Australia (see the footnotes for their arguments). The best new book on women's status in early modern Southeast Asia is undoubtedly Barbara Andaya, The flaming womb: repositioning women in early modern Southeast Asia, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006
5. Renée Hirschon, 'Introduction: property, power, and gender relations' in her edited volume, Women and property, women as property, London: Croom Helm, 1984, p. 1
6. There is a long literature on this subject. Of particular interest to this paper is Gail Rubin's conceptual article 'The traffic in women: notes on the political economy of sex' in Rayna Rapp, ed., Toward an anthropology of women, New York, NY and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975
7. The Philippines, which became increasingly Catholic under the expanding rule of the Spanish after the mid sixteenth century, lie somewhat outside the following schema. For early patterns along these lines in that archipelago, see Carolyn Brewer's book Shamanism, Catholicism and gender relations in the Philippines 1521-1685, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004
8. See the contemporary descriptions of van Neck as quoted in Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the age of commerce: the lands below the winds, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988, vol. 1, p. 155, which also seem to have been applicable for Javanese traders in Banda during the nutmeg season
9. The situation has been described in this way for Chinese merchants in Batavia. See S. Abeyasekere, 'Slaves in Batavia: insights from a slave register', in Anthony Reid, Slavery, bondage, and dependency in Southeast Asia, St. Lucia: University of Queensland, 1983, pp. 286-310
10. Snouck Hurgronje commented that, even in prurient Aceh, it was 'thought natural and permissible for all who acquire slaves at once to violate their female captives'. See V. Matheson and M. B. Hooker, 'Slavery in the Malay texts: categories of dependency and compensation' in the same volume, p. 198
11. Anthony Reid, 'Introduction' in Slavery, p. 27
12. Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, The Philippine Islands, Cleveland, OH: The A. H. Clark Company, 1903-9, vol. 2, p. 137
13. For Rangoon see M. Symes, An account of an embassy to the kingdom of Ava in the year 1795, 2 vols., Edinburgh: Constable and Co., 1827
14. quoted in Reid, Southeast Asia, vol. 1, p. 156
15. for Batavia's and Makassar's 'shantytowns', respectively, see Leonard Blussé, Strange company: Chinese settlers, Mestizo women, and the Dutch in VOC Batavia, Dordrecht:, Foris Publications, 1986, p. 169
16. and Heather Sutherland, 'Ethnicity, wealth, and power in colonial Makassar: a historiographical reconsideration', in Peter Nas, ed., The Indonesian city, Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1986, p. 47
17. A. Turton, 'Thai institutions of slavery', in J. L. Watson, ed., Asian and African systems of slavery, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1980, p. 281
18. Women in general, in fact, were seen to be 'dangerous' in the sense that they excited the possibilities of distraction from attaining Enlightenment. See Geoffrey Parrinder, Sex in the world's religions, London: Sheldon Press, 1980, p. 44
19. Also see Chatsumarn Kabilsingh's essay 'Buddhism and the status of women', in B. J. Terwiel, ed., Buddhism and Society in Thailand, Gaya, India: Centre for South East Asian Studies, 1984
20. as well as Sukanya Hantrakul's discussion in 'Prostitution in Thailand', the last essay in Glen Chandler, Norma Sullivan and Jan Branson, eds., Development and displacement: women in Southeast Asia, Clayton, Victoria: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1988, pp. 115-16
21. Thanh-Dam Truong, Sex, money and morality: prostitution and tourism in Southeast Asia, London: Zed Books, 1990, p. 148
22. For the Thai case specifically, see also Tamara Loos, Subject Siam: family, law, and colonial modernity in Thailand, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006
23. S. Srisudravarna (pen-name for J. Poumisak), 'The real face of Thai Saktina today', in C. Reynolds, ed., Thai radical discourse: the real face of Thai feudalism today, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987, p. 134
24. Turton, 'Thai institutions', p. 284. Many of these indebted or otherwise 'owned' women became prostitutes
25. Cited in Reid, Southeast Asia, vol. 1, p. 157
26. For a good general account of gender in the Malay/Islamic world, see Wazir Jahan Karim, Women and culture: between Malay Adat and Islam, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992
27. For some of the issues in insular Southeast Asia, see James Francis Warren, 'Slavery and the impact of external trade: the Sulu sultanate in the nineteenth century', in E. de Jesus and A. McCoy, eds., Philippine social history: global trade and local transformation, Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1982, pp. 415-44
28. For a more general statement by a scholar whose expertise was in other parts of Southeast Asia, see E. R. Leach, 'Caste, class and slavery: the taxonomic problem', in A. de Reuck and J. Knight, eds., Caste and race: comparative approaches, London: Churchill, 1967, pp. 83-94
29. Reid, Slavery, p. 25
30. see also James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768-1898: the dynamics of external trade, slavery, and ethnicity in the transformation of a Southeast Asian maritime state, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1981, p. 227
31. John Bastin and Robin Winks, eds., Malaysia: selected historical sources, Nendeln: KTO Press, 1979, p. 224
32. On the possible ramifications of getting caught, see H. C. Clifford, In court and Kampong, being tales and sketches of native life in the Malay Peninsula, first edition 1897, second edition London: Richards Press, 1927, pp. 182-5
33. Sultan Ahmad of Penang had three to four hundred concubines while Sultan Zainal Abidin of Trengganu may have had more. See J. M. Gullick, Malay society in the late nineteenth century: the beginnings of change, Singapore and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 50
34. H.C. Clifford, The further side of silence, New York, NY: Doubleday Page & Co., 1927, pp. 66 ff. The enforcers in this case (as in most cases) were the Sultan's budak raja, or bodyguard
35. Braudel's argument emerges most strongly in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1972
36. The notion that the heat of the climate and the spiciness of the food heightened European sex drives were two of these beliefs. For a fuller explication of many of these cultural assumptions (and the practical ends towards which they were used), see Ann Stoler's two fine articles: 'Carnal knowledge and imperial power: gender, race, and morality in colonial Asia', in Micaela di Leonardo, ed., Gender at the crossroads of knowledge: feminist anthropology in the postmodern era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 51-101
37. and 'Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, 3, 1992, pp. 514-51
38. See the postcards of Japanese prostitutes, their hair neatly coiffured, faces impassive, published in James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: prostitution in Singapore 1870-1940, Singapore and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, plates 21 ff
39. A British visitor remembered them as 'waiting odalisques, discreetly visible, magnificent in elaborate headdress and brightly coloured kimonos': Bruce Lockhart, 'Return to Malaya', in Michael Wise, Traveller's tales of old Singapore, Singapore: Time Books International, 1985, p. 238
40. A contemporary Dutchman was equally appreciative of the Japanese prostitutes living in the Indies: see his description in Donker Batavia, 'Dee eer van de Geisha' ('The Geisha's honour') (1912)
41. in Liesbeth Hesselink, 'Prostitution: a necessary evil, particularly in the colonies: views on prostitution in the Netherlands Indies', in Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and Anke Niehof, Indonesian women in focus, Dordrecht: Foris, 1977, pp. 205-224
42. Until the mid nineteenth century these women were actually allowed on board docking ships, in the belief that sailors would be less rowdy if they were able to bring the prostitutes back to their billets. See John Ingleson 'Prostitution in colonial Java', in David Chandler and M. C. Rickleffs, eds., Nineteenth and twentieth century Indonesia: essays in honor of Professor J. D. Legge, Clayton, Victoria: Centre of Southeast Studies, Monash University, 1986, p. 125
43. British patrols in Singapore, for example, were only allowed by law to search suspicious junks arriving from China. Chinese traffickers, therefore, unloaded many prostitutes in the Riau Archipelago south of Singapore, usually into waiting native prahus. Japanese traffickers such as Muraoka Iheiji stowed women away in the bowels of ocean freighters, and even Indonesian traffickers (who had the religious dictates of Islam on their side) brought new 'wives' into the colony with each successive trip, hidden under the formalized secrecy of the veil. See League of Nations, Report to the Council of the Commission of Inquiry into Traffic in Women and Children in the East, IV. Social 1932, pp. 77, 91
44. Ronald Hyam, 'Empire and sexual opportunity', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14, 2, 1986, pp. 67-8
45. and Yvonne Quahe, We remember: cameos of pioneer life, Singapore: Landmark Books, 1986, p. 80
46. Warren, Ah Ku, front endpaper
47. Ingleson, 'Prostitution', p. 125
48. Nick Joaquin, Manila Sunday Inquirer, 10 July 1988, p. 3
49. See especially John Butcher, 'A social history of the British in Malaya, 1880-1940', PhD thesis, University of Hull, 1975
50. and Yen Ching-hwang, A social history of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, 1800-1911, Singapore and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986
51. Arlene Eisen Bergman, Women of Viet Nam, ed. Susan Adelman et al., San Francisco: People's Press, 1974, p. 44
52. Ngo Vinh Long, Vietnamese women in society and revolution: I. the French colonial period, Cambridge, MA: Vietnam Resource Center, 1974, pp. 35 ff. Especially in Tonkin and Annam, many women were forced to become concubines to rich landowners
53. League of Nations, Report to the Council, p. 243
54. Ann Stoler, Capitalism and confrontation on Sumatra's plantation belt, 1870-1979, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985, pp. 31-3
55. See also a very good dissertation: Andrew Abalahin, 'Prostitution policy and the project of modernity: a comparative study of colonial Indonesia and the Philippines, 1850-1940', PhD thesis, Cornell University, 2003
56. Butcher, 'Social history', p. 342
57. The coup de grace here was the Crewe Circular, which stipulated that planters' and officials' careers would suffer if it became known that they were still keeping concubines. See Ronald Hyam, 'Concubinage and the Colonial Service: the Crewe Circular (1909)', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 14, 3, 1986, p. 170
58. The information on Vietnam above is culled from League of Nations, Report to the Council, p. 217
59. and Ngo Vinh Long, Vietnamese women, p. 87
60. See Hanneke Ming, 'Barracks-concubinage in the Indies', Indonesia 35, 1983, pp. 65-94. Concubines originally slept out in the open with the soldiers to whom they were 'bonded', but in 1889 morality debates in the Netherlands forced an end to this system. Hereafter, a curtain was drawn around the area where a soldier slept with his nyai (concubine). Eventually this too was discarded, as the women were banished to separate dormitories. Finally, concubines were legislated out of existence altogether, returning Dutch soldiers to the practice of prostitution
61. See also Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret trades, porous borders: smuggling and states along a Southeast Asian frontier, 1865-1915, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005, ch. 10
62. For a record of this scenario in the Philippines, for example, see T. Agoncillo, The fateful years: Japan's adventures in the Philippines, 1941-45, Quezon City: R. P. Garcia Pub. Co., 1965, p. 134
63. A. V. H. Hartendorp, The Japanese occupation of the Philippines, Manila: Bookmark, 1967, p. 188
64. See Sheila Coronel and Ninotchka Rosea, 'For the boys: Filipinas expose years of sexual slavery by the U.S. and Japan', Ms., November/December 1993, pp. 11-12
65. See, for Malaysia, Raja Rohana Raja Mamat, The role and status of Malay women in Malaysia: social and legal perspectives, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia, 1991, p. 7
66. The above information is culled from Amsakasasi et al., translated by Alison Garrod, Heidi Lindgren, and Kate Napthali, 'Screams from a bamboo house', Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, 26, 2, 1992, pp. 77-89
67. For other perspectives on this period (many of them first-person), see Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore Cook, Japan at war: an oral history, New York, NY: New Press, 1992, pp. 108 ff.
68. and more generally Alfred McCoy, ed., Southeast Asia under Japanese occupation, New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1980
69. Bergman, Women of Vietnam, p. 82
70. Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1972, pp. 352-3
71. Susan Brownmiller reports that 'by 1966 the 1st Cavalry Division at An Khe, in the Central Highlands, the 1st Infantry Division at Lai Khe, 25 miles north of Saigon, and the 4th Infantry Division of Pleiku had established official military brothels within the perimeters of their base camps': Against our will: men, women, and rape, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1975, pp. 93-5
72. Quoted in Thanh Nam, 'In the shadow of the American Embassy in Saigon', South Vietnam in Struggle, 164, 11 September 1972, p. 2
73. Kathleen Barry, Female sexual slavery, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979, p. 61
74. For an example of one serviceman who was trying to set up an 'all-Vietnamese whorehouse' in Honolulu, see Alan Dawson, 55 days: the fall of South Vietnam, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977, p. 267
75. The Philippines were hosting some 10,000 US servicemen daily by the 1960s, giving rise to a prostitution population of over 50,000. See Coronel and Rosea, 'For the boys', p. 13. Sex also became one of Thailand's biggest businesses during the Vietnam War, catering to US air bases being used to fly missions over Vietnam
76. See Noeleen Heyzer, Working women in South-east Asia: development, subordination, and emancipation, Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1986, p. 59
77. Demand for young women to 'service' American soldiers spread even into Laos, as revealed by a United Nations Slavery Report (Mohamed Awad, Report on slavery, New York, NY: United Nations, 1966, p. 198)
78. See R. Simbulan, Bases of our insecurity: a study of the U.S. military bases in the Philippines, Metro Manila: BALAI Fellowship, 1983, p. 7
79. and Brenda Stoltzfus and Saundra Sturdevant, 'The sale of sexual labor in the Philippines: Marlyn's story', Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 22, 4, 1990, p. 13
80. Coronel and Rosea, 'For the boys', p. 13
81. The analogues here to colonial practices regarding prostitution are unmistakable. Recall colonial-era Vietnamese women's copper 'ID' bracelets, as well as the 'health charts' placed at the foot of the beds of Indonesian women in the Dutch Indies. See Ngo Vinh Long, Vietnamese women, p. 110
82. On the work of 'casual' local prostitutes, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, beaches and bases: making feminist sense of international politics, London: Pandora, 1989, p. 87
83. The records of Olongapo (the town nearest Subic Bay station) showed that no prostitutes worked in the city, although 10,000 were registered with the Navy and a further 10,000 (unregistered) were said to be working. See Stoltzfus, 'Sale of sexual labor', p. 13
84. On the provenances of long-term women, see Virginia A. Miralo, Celia O. Carlos, and Aida Fulleros Santos, eds., Women entertainers in Angeles and Olongapo: a survey report, Quezon City: Women's Education, Development, Productivity, and Research Organization and Katipunanng Kababaihan para sa Kalayaan, 1990, chs. 1 and 6
85. Enloe, Bananas, p. 86. By 1987, the United States had over 68,000 Filipinos on the government payroll
86. see also, Saundra Sturtevant, 'The bargirls of Subie Bay', The Nation, 3 April 1989, pp. 444-6
87. Kathleen Barry, 'The network defines its issues: theory, evidence, and analysis of female sexual slavery', in Kathleen Barry and Charlotte Bunch, eds., International feminism: networking against female sexual slavery. Report of the Global Workshop Against Traffic in Women, New York, NY: New York International Women's Tribune Center, 1983, p. 39
88. See the accounts of Rome in the eighteenth century, Mexican border towns, Lebanon (vis-à-vis the Muslim Middle East during the 1960s and 1970s), and the Marquesas and Fiji, in Louis Turner and John Ash, The golden hordes: international tourism and the pleasure periphery, London: Constable, 1975, pp. 45-6, 94, 106, 240, 257
89. Also see Flaubert's peregrinations (many of them sexual) through the female population of Egypt in Francis Steegmuller, ed. Flaubert in Egypt: a sensibility on tour, Chicago, IL: Academy Chicago Limited, 1987
90. Here she is allied with several other authors, most notably Thanh-Dam Truong, 'The dynamics of sex tourism: the case of Southeast Asia', Development and Change, 14, 4, 1983, p. 533
91. For a more general account of tourism's effect in Asia, see Elwood Pye and Tzong-biau Lin, eds., Tourism in Asia: the economic impact, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1983
92. Two of the best recent books on sex tourism on Southeast Asia are Jeff Pope, Assessing the economic benefits and costs of sex tourism, Chiang Mai, Thailand: Social Research Institute, Chiang Mai University, 2006
93. and Jeremy Seabrook, Travels in the skin trade: tourism and the sex industry, London and Sterling, VA: Pluto, 2001
94. Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978
95. See also Talal Asad's article comparing European visions of Asia and Africa: 'Two European images of non-European rule', in Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the colonial encounter, New York, NY: Humanities Press, 1973
96. Quote from Life Travel, a Swiss agency, in Jyoti Sanghera, 'Poverty and prostitution: redefining some categories', Diva, Sept/Dec 1992, p. 47
97. See also the advertisement of the Rosie Reisen Tour Group (Germany), published in Enloe, Bananas, p. 37
98. Sanghera, 'Poverty and prostitution', p. 47
99. Marlise Simons has also noted that many tourists come 'in search of sex that is expensive or downright dangerous to pursue at home'. Paedophile guidebooks and newsletters regularly place Thailand, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka at the top of their international destinations. See Marlise Simons, 'The littlest prostitutes', New York Times Magazine, 16 January 1994, p. 33
100. I'm thinking here of Paul Theroux's descriptions of Laotian women smoking cigarettes out of their vaginas, as depicted in his The great railway bazaar: by train through Asia, Boston, MA: , 1975, p. 207
101. Chat Garcia, 'The bride trade in Australia: a case of trafficking', in Women empowering women: proceedings of the Human Rights Conference on the Trafficking of Asian Women, April 2-4, 1993, Metro Manilla: The Coalition, 1993, p. 154
102. Truong, 'Dynamics of sex tourism', p. 533
103. The most complete work on the subject is Thanh-Dam Truong, Sex, money and morality
104. See Geetanjali Gangoli and Nicole Westmarland, eds., International approaches to prostitution: law and policy in Europe and Asia (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2006)
105. also worth viewing is the UN's list of ratifications by individual Southeast Asian nation states when it comes to human rights laws, many of them having to do with trafficking and prostitution. The 2007 data can be viewed at http://www.un.or.th/ohchr/countries/ratrfrcations.doc (consulted 27 March 2008)
106. 'Thailand stupefied', The Economist, 1 August 1987, p. 82
107. The best single study on prostitution in modern Thailand may be Ryan Bishop's Night market: sexual cultures and the Thai economic miracle, London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1998
108. See Alex Renton, 'Learning the Thai sex trade' Prospect, 110, May 2005; available at http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article-details.php?id=6889 (consulted 27 March 2008)
109. Several revealing interviews with prostitutes in this city are published in Susanne Thorbek, Voices from the city: women of Bangkok, London: Zed Books, 1987, ch. 7
110. Robert Wihtol, 'Hospitality girls in the Manila tourist belt', Philippine Journal of Industrial Relations, 4, 1-2, 1982, pp. 18, 36
111. Liza Maza and Cath Jackson, 'When the revolution came', Trouble and Strife, 14, Autumn 1988, pp. 19-22
112. Simons, 'The littlest prostitutes', p. 34. As many as 60% of these adolescents are sold outright by members of their families. The US$350-US$600 cash advances that the families ordinarily receive are roughly equivalent to one year's income
113. This information and the following statistics on Vietnam have been culled from Le Thi Quy, 'Sexual policy on prevention and restriction of prostitution in Vietnam', in Women empowering women, pp. 91-3
114. Nguyen Dinh An, Vice President of the People's Committee of Quang Nam Danang Province, has stated that in his opinion there are about 200,000 prostitutes in Vietnam: see Mark Bonacci, Senseless casualties: the Aids crisis in Asia, Washington, DC: Asia Resource Center, 1992, p. 19
115. See William Vollman, Butterfly Stories, New York, NY: Grove Press, 1993
116. See 'Banyak tempat hiburan jadi tempat prostitutsi', Angkatan Bersenjata, 12 November 1997, p. 6
117. see also Syarifah Sabaroedin, 'Matrix of a country report on trafficking of women in Indonesia', in Women empowering women, p. 90
118. A good overview can also be found in Johan Lindquist, 'Modern spaces, wild places and international hinterlands', Anthropology Today, 16, 3, 2000, pp. 15-17
119. With the opening of new oil rigs off the coast of Indonesian Timor, North Australians are starting to visit Kupang for exactly the same purpose. See Garcia, 'The bride trade in Australia', p. 154
120. Two of the best recent books examining these processes are Muhadjir Darwin, Anna Marie Wattie, and Susi Eja Yuarsi, eds., Living on the edges: cross-border mobility and sexual exploitation in the greater Southeast Asia sub-region, Yogyakarta: Center for Population and Policy Studies, Gadjah Mada University, 2003
121. and Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei-wei Yeo, eds., Postcolonial urbanism: Southeast Asian cities and global processes, New York, NY: Routledge, 2003
122. Khin Thitsa, Providence and prostitution, London: Change International Reports, 1999, p. 2
123. See also Teresa Sobieszczyk, 'Pathways abroad: gender and international labor migration institutions in northern Thailand', PhD thesis, Cornell University, 2000
124. May-an Villalba, 'Understanding Asian women in migration: toward a theoretical framework', Women in Action, 2 and 3, Quezon City: ISIS International, 1993, p. 14
125. Leonora Angeles, 'Between the devil and the deep blue sea: transnational issues and the trafficking of Filipino women', in Women empowering women, p. 39. In January and February 1992, 1,157 commercial sex workers registered in the city, compared to 799 during the same period the previous year
126. Similar increases happened after the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in 1991 and, generally, in times of poor harvests or plagues as they hit individual areas. For Mt Pinatubo and prostitution, see The Philippine Daily Inquirer, 21 March 1992
127. Jitlada Rattanapan, 'The trafficking of women and girls for prostitution', in Women empowering women, p. 78
128. Thitsa, Providence and prostitution, p. 3
129. Bonacci, Senseless casualties, pp. 21, 71
130. The Thai case has probably generated the best studies in Southeast Asia: see Ara Wilson, The intimate economies of Bangkok: tomboys, tycoons, and Avon ladies in the global city, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004
131. and Leslie Ann Jeffrey, Sex and borders: gender, national identity, and prostitution policy in Thailand, Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2002
132. Skrobanek, 'Tourism', p. 1
133. For some of the larger arguments on trafficking in the region, see Karen Beeks and Delikt Amir, eds., Trafficking and the global sex industry, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006
134. and Janice G. Raymond, et al, eds., A comparative study of women trafficked in the migration process: patterns, profiles and health consequences of sexual exploitation in five countries [Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Venezuela, and the United States], North Amherst, MA: Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, 2002
135. Jyoti Sanghera, 'Poverty and prostitution', pp. 49-50
136. 'Smuggling human beings', Bangkok Post, 19 July 1992
137. For the Cambodian border, see Leviseda Douglas, Sex trafficking in Cambodia, Clayton, Victoria: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, 2003
138. Christina Mahoney, 'Trafficking and forced prostitution of Chinese and Burmese women in Thailand', in Women empowering women, p. 62
139. Rattanapan, 'Trafficking of women', p. 78
140. Estimates place 20,000 Burmese women in Thai brothels, with 10,000 new arrivals coming to replenish 'depletions' each year. See 'The slaves from Myanmar', The Economist, 5-11 February 1994
141. Mahoney, 'Trafficking and forced prostitution', p. 59
142. For Cambodia, see Vollman, Butterfly stories, p. 44
143. For Indonesian 'shipments' to Malaysia via Denpasar, Surabaya, Manado, Malang, and Ujung Pandang, see Jakarta Post, 31 March 1988
144. The situation in Ruili, a Chinese town on the Burmese border, has been described as 'like something out of the movie Bladerunner'. Chinese girls to Burma (en route to Thailand), guns, gems, teak, and tiger skins can all be made available on a moment's notice. Perhaps not surprisingly, the AIDS percentages in this remote outpost of China are beginning to spiral out of control. Telephone interview with Edith Mirante, Executive Director of Project Mage (A Burmese Human Rights Awareness Group). See also 'From China to Burma and then to Thailand', Bangkok Post, 19 July 1993
145. 'An international trade in sex slavery', Bangkok Post, 18 July 1991
146. and 'Silent suffering', The Nation (Bangkok), 6 July 1992
147. Alison Murray, No money, no honey: a study of street traders and prostitutes in Jakarta, Singapore and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 105-6
148. For two good accounts of the parameters of prostitution in modern Indonesia, see Terence Hull, Endang Sulistyaningsih, and Gavin Jones, eds., Pelacuran di Indonesia: sejarah dan perkembangannya, Jakarta: Pustaka Sinar Harapan bekerja sama dengan The Ford Foundation, 1997
149. and A. S. Alam, Pelacuran dan pemerasan: studi sosiologis tentang eksploitasi manusia oleh manusia, Bandung: Alumni, 1984
150. Women empowering women, p. 16
151. Sanghera, 'Poverty and prostitution in Asia', p. 51
152. See the rather heartbreaking interview with a young Filipina woman who was about to go off to Japan to work in the 'entertainment industry' (but did not believe the whispered stories of abuse) in Ed Gerlock, 'She went to Kara, far, far away', Asian Migrant, trial issue, October/November 1987, p. 9
153. For other works on 'Japayuki-san' (Southeast Asian women working as prostitutes in Japan), see Oshima Shizuko, 'Gathering the fires of help', Yamazaki Hiromi, 'Japan imports brides: can isolated farmers buy consolation?', and Nakamura Hisashi, 'Japan imports brides: from a new poverty discovered', all in AMPO, 19, 4, 1988
154. Also see Nicholas Bornoff, Pink samurai: love, marriage, and sex in contemporary Japan, New York, NY: Pocket Books, 1991), pp. 341-6
155. Manila Chronicle, 4 March 1990
156. quoted in Angeles, 'Between the devil', p. 41
157. The traffic to Japan is just one aspect of the purchasing of Southeast Asian women's sexual services abroad. Filipina and Thai women are regularly trafficked to Europe and the Middle East, while Indonesian prostitutes have even turned up in Jeddah and Riyadh (a pilgrimage of a wholly different kind). See (in order) Sabaroedin, 'Matrix of a country report', p. 89
158. and Bornoff, Pink samurai, p. 341