The geisha effect: How the West uses Japan's sex industry (Geisha kouka Oubei wa Nihon no sei sangyou wo dono you ni riyou shiteiru no ka)

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of the Japanese ‘geisha’ has justified and beautified prostitution in the Western world. The trend continues to the present, with Asian women in local Western sex industries popularly advertised as ‘Japanese’. This chapter describes the ‘geisha-effect’ of Japanese practices of prostitution and pornography, imagined or real, on the Western world. This effect entails Western-world capitalisation on the sexual exploitation of Japanese women and children to justify domestic abuses, particularly against local Asian women. Focusing on the author’s home country of Australia, the chapter first describes historical forms of geisha-isation in the West. It then addresses contemporary ways in which Japan’s sex industry is used to justify and legitimise commercial sexual exploitation in the Western world. Japanese women and children are described as twice-over victims of commercial sexual exploitation: first, at the hands of their countrymen, and then at the hands of male populations abroad who ignore their plight to capitalise upon it, through promoting geisha-ised forms of prostitution and pornography in their own countries, especially against local Asian women.