ABSTRACT
Kay Warren’s chapter touches on the irony of donors’ financial support of development interventions far from home that respond to newly identified transnational problems in which they are seen as complicit. At issue are the ways in which aid donors and recipients are bound together in transnational flows of evolving norms and policies. In 2000, the United Nations anti-trafficking protocol condemned certain streams of transnational labor migration as a “human trafficking” crisis. The initial concern was a wide range of coercive and exploitative labor practices. Then the Bush administration used its trafficking monitoring system to target sex entertainment industries that recruited foreign women and minors identified as at risk. This essay explores the Japanese government’s responses to pressures for reforms to prevent trafficking, prosecute traffickers, and provide victim services. The government tactically acquiesced to the protocol by putting a series of legal reforms on the books and supporting “human security” prevention projects in countries like Colombia, while local authorities used this political opportunity to focus on issues deemed of greater domestic importance such as heightened surveillance of threatening illegal labor from Asia.
