Japan’s travel industry signed a code of conduct against child sex tourism in an attempt to stop the practice by Japanese clients in Southeast Asia. The code, which was launched by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), also calls upon travel agents to train personnel on how to avoid working with child sex tourism businesses and requires a clause in contracts with local agents that forbids the sexual exploitation of children, reports Agence France Presse.
Japan has also started to apply new rules to the 60,000 to 80,000 Filipinos who come to Japan on entertainment visas as a way to stem trafficking and to reduce the number of Filipinos who end up working in Japan’s sex industry, reports BBC News.
Earlier this year, the Japanese government, in a response to the US Department of State’s Trafficking in Persons Report placing Japan on the “watch list” due to its lax anti-trafficking laws, started making final edits to a new law that will make trafficking illegal in Japan.
