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When Japanese media reported that a 12-year-old Thai girl had been forced to provide sexual services in a Tokyo massage parlor in November 2025, the basic facts were horrifying enough.

She arrived in Japan with her mother in late June. Within weeks, she was left at a “massage” shop in Tokyo. She slept in a corner of the kitchen and was made to give sexual massages to customers. In about a month, she was forced to serve around sixty men. The shop took its cut; money was sent to people connected to her mother.

Police arrested the Japanese man who ran the shop. He admitted that he also made the girl perform sexual acts on him.

And yet, in a story where dozens of adult men paid to sexually use a 12-year-old child, public anger in Japan quickly focused on one figure:

The “terrible Thai mother.”

Online comments and talk shows rushed to condemn her as a monster who “sold her own daughter.” She may indeed bear serious responsibility. But almost no one stopped to ask the most obvious question:

Who were those sixty-plus Japanese men – and why are they allowed to stay invisible?

The Pattern: Blame the Woman, Blur the Men

This reaction is not unique to this case. It fits a pattern that repeats again and again in Japan:
• When a girl is sexually exploited, we look for the “bad mother,” the “foreign parent,” the “runaway girl,” the “greedy woman.”
• We focus on her morality, her choices, her background.
• The men who pay – often ordinary salarymen, fathers, “respectable” citizens – disappear into the background.

Even in commentary that calls for harsh punishment “for everyone involved,” the clients become a vague group, not real people with names, jobs, and social power.

This is convenient. As long as we can point to a foreign mother, a creepy shop owner, or a “problem girl,” we don’t have to look at the ordinary Japanese men who create the demand that makes this abuse profitable.

A Legal System Built Around Male Comfort

On paper, Japan has laws against child prostitution and human trafficking. Clients who buy sexual services from minors can be punished.

But the longer history of the Prostitution Prevention Law shows something important:
the law was designed to control and “rehabilitate” women and to punish intermediaries – brothel keepers, recruiters, managers – not to directly criminalize the act of buying sex itself.

Even today:
• Selling and buying sex between adults is formally “prohibited,” but there is no direct criminal penalty for the simple act of purchase.
• What is punished is solicitation, brothel management, and other surrounding acts.

In practice, this has meant that:
• Women on the street can be picked up under the Anti-Prostitution Law or local nuisance ordinances.
• Brothel operators, like the man in this Thai girl’s case, are sometimes arrested.
• But the men who show up with cash are structurally protected: the law literally looks past them.

This legal architecture matches the social norm you see in many Japanese nightlife districts:

Men’s sexual access is treated as normal and necessary.
Everyone else – women, foreign migrants, girls, “hostesses,” “massage workers” – is expected to adjust around that.

Poverty and Violence Disappear Behind “Bad Choices”

The Thai mother in this case is now also being pursued by Japanese police on suspicion of human trafficking.

From local reporting, we know at least this much:
• She was deeply in debt.
• She reportedly borrowed around 1 million yen.
• The girl herself believed she had to endure the situation or her family couldn’t survive.

None of this excuses what happened. A child was sold into sexual exploitation. That is unforgivable.

But it does matter that the mother’s actions were shaped by poverty, gendered power, and likely by her own exploitation. It is entirely possible for her to be both a perpetrator of harm and a victim of a larger trafficking structure.

Japanese commentary, however, tends to flatten her into one simple role:
“evil mother who sold a child for money.”

This simplification has a political function. It keeps the focus on individual morality – especially the morality of poor, foreign women – and keeps us from talking about:
• Japanese men’s demand for sexual access to women and girls
• Policies that fail to provide housing, income support, or real protection to vulnerable families
• A sex industry that openly operates in the middle of our cities and quietly absorbs the most vulnerable bodies

“Normal Men” as Untouchable

It is easy to hate a distant, foreign “bad mother.”
It is much harder to admit that the men who paid to use a 12-year-old girl might look a lot like our coworkers, neighbors, or relatives.

If we took the buyers seriously, we would have to ask:
• Who were they?
• How old? What jobs? Married? Fathers?
• How many had bought sex from minors before?
• How many will do it again?

We don’t ask, because it is uncomfortable. It breaks the illusion that sexual exploitation is something done by “monsters,” not by “ordinary” men.

So we protect that comfort by making the story about:
• Foreignness (“Thai” mother, “Thai” girl)
• Deviance (“weird massage parlor”)
• And individual moral failure (“bad parent,” “immoral girl”)

The result is that Japanese society gets to keep its self-image as “safe” and “orderly,” while the actual violence is pushed onto the bodies of foreign women, migrant girls and other vulnerables.

A Mirror, Not an Exception

This case is often described as “shocking.”
It is shocking.
But it is not an exception.

For years, human rights reports and survivor testimonies have pointed out the same pattern: Japan still fails to fully protect women and children from trafficking and sexual exploitation, while systems that enable prostitution and abuse quietly continue in the background.

The Thai girl’s story doesn’t come out of nowhere. It simply throws a harsh light on a structure that was already there:
• A market where men expect to be able to buy access to women’s and girls’ bodies.
• Laws that move around male demand instead of confronting it head-on.
• A public narrative that attacks “bad mothers” and “bad girls,” while allowing the men who pay to remain abstract and anonymous.

Japan likes to see itself as a safe, clean, orderly country. In many ways, it is.
But a society that allows men to buy sexual access to vulnerable women and children – and then blames those same women and children for what happens to them – is not a safe society for half its population.

If Japan truly wants to stop another 12-year-old from being prostituted to sixty men in a month, it has to start from a different question:

Not “Why did she sell her body?”
but “Why do men feel entitled to buy it?”

As long as we refuse to look directly at the buyers – to name them, to hold them responsible, to question the culture that protects them – cases like this will keep happening.

They are not rare tragedies.
They are a mirror, reflecting back the values of a society that still chooses male comfort over women’s and girls’ safety.