Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Kinsella, Sharon

Titel

Gathering and interpreting the statistical evidence

Ist Teil von

• Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion in Japan, 2014, p.39-52

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The power of weekly magazines, newspapers, and television shows to define the state of society and compose an agenda of social problems, such as schoolgirl prostitution, was seen as meddlesome troublemaking by organizations such as the Parent Teachers Association (PTA) and National and Tokyo Metropolitan Police, Seinendan (Youth League), NGOs such as ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Tourism), and by civil servants based in local and national government offices. In June 1994 the national assembly of the PTA was the first to respond to media reports of the use of telephone clubs by schoolgirls. PTA Survey results indicated that 27.4 percent of children aged 14 to 16 years old claimed to have had experience of calling a telephone club, and 1 percent of the third-year middle school students (aged 15 to 16 years old) claimed to have visited a bloomer sailor shop (Miyadai, 1994: 1-3). In The Decision of the Girls in Uniform (1994), and subsequent best-selling books and articles written through the 1990s, sociologist Miyadai Shinji was consistent in his claim that the rate of involvement of girls in their mid-teens in the new sex-service industries was high and rising. Though citing the 1994 PTA Survey as an important source of evidence supporting his thesis that schoolgirl prostitution had flourished from the late 1980s, Miyadai questioned the validity of these national figures in the Tokyo Metropolitan region. Presenting examples from his own Tokyo-based fieldwork, Miyadai commented that in 1993 he had visited a girls’ high school where ten in a class of “thirty-five to forty” girls had sold their pants to a bloomer sailor shop, and almost the entire class had experience of calling a telephone club. The skepticism with which Miyadai Shinji viewed low digits was shared by magazine journalists, who also placed their bets on a bigger number. In October 1994 the editors of Dime, a magazine for trend-conscious salarymen, carried out their own survey on “the sexual awareness of teenagers,” the results of which were published under the headline “What’s All That Talk of Only a Fraction of Girls Using Telephone Clubs and Bloomer Sailor Shops!?” (Dime, 1994: 118). Miyadai Shinji estimated that in 1993 there were between 6,000 and 10,000 girls across the nation selling their underwear (Miyadai, 1994: 124), and pointed out that 90 percent of the messages deposited in 2-shot dial voicemail telephone clubs were left by schoolgirls, of whom half clearly indicated an intention to prostitute themselves (Miyadai, 1994: 2). The question of commercial dissimulation and role play in the sex industry-the possibility that some, if not the majority, of these voicemails were deposited by young women stating that they were schoolgirls in order to attract men, rather than by schoolgirls themselves-was overlooked. Although Miyadai’s research was significantly based on qualitative ethnographic methodology, in which he carried out “deep” interviews with a self-selected segment of women claiming to be “schoolgirls” whom he intercepted on the switchboards of telephone clubs, his claims about the extent of schoolgirl disaffection and sexual deviancy were largely quantitative and based on unsubstantiated hand counts in school classrooms and personal estimates. His generous claims about errant schoolgirl sexuality, however, fueled media interest and created a platform for Miyadai to air his charismatic thoughts on the new psychological state of accepting owarinaki nichijō (endless everyday) existence no longer interrupted by hopes for radical change or revolution on a distant horizon.1 Section chiefs in the Department of Women and Youth in Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) sought to trounce the media with sober investigations into the real situation. Each year the Tokyo Metropolitan Government commissions a large-scale sociological survey of youth behavior and attitudes (Seishōnen kenzen ikusei kihon chōsa Heisei 8, 1997) known in abbreviation as the Youth Survey (Seishōnen chōsa). The survey, commissioned in 1996, asked questions about telephone clubs and enjo kōsai, and selected details of the results were more widely reported than usual. Statistics of compensated dating that the 1996 TMG Youth Survey yielded were universally interpreted as high figures, and as official proof of the seriousness of the problem of schoolgirl prostitution (shōjo baishun)—with which compensated dating was generally conflated. Headlines in newspapers shouted “4%!” The official figure of 4 percent (of high-school girls claiming to do compensated dating) entered into the flow of newsworthy digits and “numerical metonymy” (Crump, 1992: 46) indicating the direction of society: “There’s No Misrepresenting the Meaning of ‘Compensated Dating at 4 percent,’” claimed Sunday Mainichi (3 November 1996: 138), while Kōhyō journal presented the same single figure as a quality of all teenagers: “The Experiences of the Compensated Dating 4% Generation” (Kōhyō, July 1997: 26). Despite weaknesses in the structure and distribution of the surveys in the first instance,2 and the special narrative treatment of its results in the second, numbers embedded in headlines were taken as potent signs of a desired revelation. The interest in numbers overlapped a tendency to link compensated dating fees to the other values in the national economy. A briefly fashionable book titled Japan’s Underground Economy (2002) argued that, while the legal economy was in recession, the black market might represent a hidden boost. Underground Economy found, by means of an undisclosed calculation, that compensated dating was at its peak in 1995 to 1997 (Kadokura, 2002: 133), and claimed that by 1999 compensated dating represented 4.9 percent of the sex industry, which as a whole has a total turnover equivalent to 0.23 percent of the official national GDP (Kadokura, 2002: 136). In his work on statistics Joel Best identifies the tendency for some statistics to gain a perceptual aura and “magical properties” (Best, 2004: 116-143). “Magical numbers,” Best suggests, appear especially at “culture’s fault lines-at those spots where conflict, uncertainty, and anxiety seem particularly intense, where we feel the need for a firmer foundation on which to base our actions” (Best, 2004: 118). The categorization of women and their sexuality certainly constituted a point of conflict and uncertainty in the Japan of the 1990s. What was not reported was that a notable 2.9 percent of 12-to 13-year-old first-year middle-school boys also said they had done compensated dating (1996 TMG Youth Survey, 1997: 50), rather undermining the significance of the magical number 4, and raising doubts as to what the word “compensated dating” in fact meant to the school population. If “compensated dating” was something young lads did as well as older teenage girls, then what was it? Responding to a later question about “earning money through anything connected to sex that is not compensated dating,” 3.2 percent of middle-school girls, but also 3.1 percent of middle-school boys, said they had done this (1996 TMG Youth Survey, 1997: 54). In the fashionably brassy slang of the mid-1990s, part-time work talking on telephones operated by sexual service companies and unadorned prostitution were both known as uri (“sell”), and both would have fallen into this firmer category of part-time work (arbaito). While the significance of compensated dating snowballed from the mid-1990s onwards, what it referred to did not become any clearer; in fact, it remained, at core, uncertain for the duration of the 1990s. According to Iwama Natsuki, whose company conducted the 1996 TMG Youth Survey, compensated dating was a “subtle slang word with an indirect meaning” being used among schoolchildren to mean “earning money by ‘meeting people’ and any type of ‘sexual service’ that did not include full sexual intercourse” (Iwama Natsuki interview, November 1997). According to media research carried out by another sociologist, Maruta Koji, the first trace of the term in postwar Japan can be found in the Naigai Times in 1953, when it was used in an article about the new popularity of “free mistresses” who could now be paid by the date rather than retained as kept women (Maruta, 2000: 212). The term resurfaced in print once in 1973, while the first magazine article to mention “compensated dating by wives” in the text, but not in the title, was published in the Shūkan Post on 23 December 1994 (Maruta, 2000: 212). (Further discussion of the ironic undertones and etymology of the term enjo, which linked it to the state of the economy, can be found in Chapter 10.) Surveys commissioned by local government avoided questions that used this problematically unclear term in subsequent years. According to an account given by Miyadai Shinji, the term was used in oral slang in the early 1980s, when personal ads magazines were launched. In the early 1990s the phrase was picked up by women using telephone clubs to find customers for occasional acts of prostitution. Miyadai suggests that it was later adopted by teenage girls working in date-clubs to refer to dates with customers that explicitly excluded sexual intercourse, while from 1994 on “compensated dating” came to mean paid dates with high-school girls. Whether or not this included sex varied, but Miyadai suggests that in the mid-1990s most schoolgirls were using the phrase to mean payment for sexual intercourse. Miyadai concludes that, after the extensive television coverage of “compensated dating” in the summer of 1996, schoolgirls began to use the term to refer to wandering up and down streets in pairs and waiting for groups of school and college boys to shout out to them. In this period, which corresponded to the height of the media coverage-and to the time when the 1996 TMG Youth Survey was conducted-it did not necessarily refer to sex at all, according to its most public analyst, but rather constituted a series of fashionable poses