Female foreign migrant workers in Japan: Working for the Yen

Abstract

Abstract This paper focuses on the issue of female foreign workers in Japan. In the case of Japan, female migrant workers arrived earlier than their male counterparts, which contradicts the common view that it is normally males who migrate first and females follow them as dependants. Another characteristic with regard to female migration in Japan is that a large number of young female foreign workers, mainly from the Philippines and Thailand, tends to concentrate, not in the domestic service employment sector, but in the entertainment and the sex‐related industry. Because of this trend, the issue of female migrant workers has been treated as a feminist issue and as a peculiar social phenomenon of the entertainment industry in Japan. This paper is an attempt made to rectify this slighting of the female migrant to Japan, and to explain why she goes to Japan, often to work in the so‐called sex industry, in preference to other forms of domestic or foreign employment.