Middlemen and Middlewomen: Sex Trafficking Networks in Japanese Open Ports in the Nineteenth Century

Introduction Frequently decried as “modern-day slavery,” human trafficking constitutes a global phenomenon that has existed for centuries – indeed millennia – and clearly dates before “modern” times. 1 Women and children, the most frequent subjects of human trafficking, were not viewed as “victims” in this trade, however, until relatively recently, at the turn of the twentieth century. At this time citizens in “modern” and industrializing countries began to politicize the issue along with related yet more general practices of prostitution as problems of global concern. The 1902 International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, for example, marks a watershed moment when moral, feminist, and human rights advocates began to collaborate internationally to suppress activities involving “the procuration of women and girls for immoral purposes abroad." Despite this international attention, however, human trafficking not only persisted but garnered more and more global concern; showing unprecedented global solidarity, forty-nine countries ratified a United Nations Convention in 1949 for the