N.Z. next stop on sex tours for Japanese?

Press, 10 January 1984, Page 6

N.Z. next stop on sex tours for Japanese?

From .BRUCE ROSCOE, in Tokyo

A huge Japanese travel company that is widely reputed to have pioneered sex tours in South-East Asia, appears set to add New Zealand cities to its itineraries of night playgrounds for male Japanese tourists. The decision by Japan Travel Agency, Ltd, which is based in Hong Kong, to enter New Zealand has the potential to vastly alter the country’s image in Japan as a dean, green destination. Hong Kong serves the company as a base only nominally. All important tours are run out of the Tokyo office of J.T.A. Japan Company, Ltd, established in 1974, eight years after the Hong Kong business was begun by Mr Muneo Yamamoto, a dealer in precious stones. According to former business associates of Japan Travel Agency, Ltd, who have extensively assisted the running of many of its South-East Asian sex tours, euphemistically called “night tours” by the Tokyo travel trade, the agency’s business is conducted along lines totally different from accepted tourist procedures in New Zealand.

The business machinery that grinds out packaged tours of hundreds of thousands of Japanese each year to Asian sites in many ways is cat-throat down to the last throat It is markedly cfaaqjcterised by competitioaw fierce among agen-

cies that tour prices are cut to heavy loss-making proportions. From the losses the agents skilfully manage to turn a profit.

For Japan Travel Agency, Ltd, and numerous other Japanese firms that followed its example in the 19605, some led by former Japan Travel Agency executives, profits come not through the tour price charged in Japan but in the commission rake-offs from the shops and sex parlours in Asian cities into which the packaged tours are decanted.

A private investigation of Japan Travel Agency’s Hong Kong business shows that at least three jewellery shops agreed to pay the agency 20 per cent in commission of the sale price of all jewels bought by Japanese in the agency’s packaged tours, after being promised by the agency that it would direct several thousand Japanese into the shops each year.

Because the agency’s income from the commission fluctuated, depending on how much the tourists bought, the shops were told to pay Japan Travel Agency, Ltd, in addition to the commission and one year in advance, $5 a head for each tourist who entered no matter whether the purchase was a diamond or a postcard. The advance payment was calculated on an estimate of the total numJber of arrivals. the shops were

asked, and agreed, to buy a coach for the tourists to be driven from their hotels to the shops, and to foot the bills for the salary of the bus driver and the guide. Thus prices for Japanese tourists at these shops, which still had to pay their own staff and make a profit for themselves, always were higher than other shops charged but the tour routes would not include other shops.

Soon after setting up in Hong Kong, the company stretched its functions to Bangkok in 1966. Two years later Singapore was next and in 1969 an office in the Philippines was opened. In Taiwan and South Korea, the business was run through local companies, wooed by the injection of a little Japanese capital. The companies are called “sleepers.” They never use the J.T.A. name.

Such a company, one that has no present business with Japan and runs reasonably profitably, would seem likely to be selected in New Zealand by the president of Japan Travel Agency, Ltd, Mr Koji Sugimoto, to handle the South Pacific extension of the business.

Mr Sugimoto, while he was in Tokyo last month preparing for his New Zealand visit, declined, through his secretary, to be interviewed on the company’s plans for New Zealand and Australia. He isidue to arrive in today, accom-

panied by Mr Kenichi Katano, whose official- title is adviser to the company chairman though by his own admission, as a former executive of the Cathay Pacific air carrier who is well connected in the airline industry, his actual corporate role is to secure cutrate air tickets for group tours.

Mr Katano said he did not know which New Zealand travel companies he would hold talks with because all of the introductions would be made by Air New Zealand soon after his arrival.

Sex tours, however, rarely are the sole object of the packaged male-travel trade. Traditionally, like shopping tours, they have merely represented one of many devices employed to secure a commission large enough to recover the losses incurred in discounting the cost of the tour to attract large groups at prices normal competitors cannot hope to match. In Bangkok, according to the associates, the early, primitive style of the tours was,for a, bus of all-male travellers to be directed to night clubs, two in particular, named after the costly Akasaka and Ginza Tokyo nightlifer hauntSj where the men would look into magic mirrors that enable them to see and choose a partner from among the numbered girls who could not see them. . If the madame of the mub got $5O from a tour men Der

for an evening’s entertainment, she would be obliged to return half the amount to Japan Travel Agency, Ltd. A rule of thumb was that of 30 male tourists, 70 per cent could be counted on to agree to a sex proposition. The sex tours, however, are no longer the exclusive property of Japan Travel Agency, which in its earlier years ran its Tokyo branch without a Japanese Transport Ministry' licence, nor were they limited to Japanese tourists. The Japanese were just more conspicuous, being in such big numbers and always in groups. Japan Travel Agency is held by many travel experts to have been the first big firm, business blossoming as the number of Japanese travelling overseas rocketed from 663,000 in 1970 to more than four million a decade later, to realise that commissions would be sufficient to fund business.

Visits to each country in a typical three-nation tour always are short, two days in this capital, one day in that for the busy company employees who must hurry back to the office and seldom take more than a week’s holiday each year. If such a tour had 20 members, that was 20 sets of commissions times the number of destinations. So it worked directly against the interest of Japanese agents to promote long stays in any one country. Significantly, the Japan Travel Agency is not con-

templating the dispatch of tours to only New Zealand or only Australia, but to both countries, with stays of only three to four days in each, according to Mr Katano.

Japan Travel Agency, Ltd, in spite of its name, is not in essence a travel agency at all. It is called a “land operator,” for as a middleman it negotiates deals and commissions with hotels, shops and local agents in the destinations.

It can move more than 140,000 tourists a year through Asia by being able to present a complete sales package of a multi-destina-tion tour to Japanese agents who are conveniently saved the paper work of having to correspond and deal with local firms at each destination. The agents feel secure in the knowledge that Japan Travel Agency, Ltd, has English-speaking Japanese staff on the ground in each destination.

It is the biggest Japanese firm by far yet to pursue an interest in New Zealand tourism, prompted in part by the wealth of attention New Zealand is getting in Japanese travel media as a growth destination, and also by a recent steady decline in its South-East Asian business brought about by more Japanese tourists becoming aware of the traps of packaged travel and a fall-off in short-haul tourist traffic.

Such, firms direct night tours 4pt only to Asian cities Kit to Paris, Amster-

dam and now even to Warsaw. Adding New Zealand and Australian cities would, therefore, by no means set a Western precedent. It is questionable whether the method of working will be accepted without reservation. Indeed, attempts in the 1970 s by Japan Travel Agency to maintain offices in Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Rome, and London all reportedly failed in the face of strong European resistance to the highly refined Japanese commission system.

Both Mr Katano and J.T.A. Japan Company, Ltd’s director and general manager, Mr Yoshimichi Horie, deny vigorously their intention is to set New Zealand on the tail end of an Asian sex-tour grid. Times have changed, they insist, from the heyday of the night tours. That was just four years ago, when men made up 80 per cent or more of the 700,000 Japanese who visited Korea, the 690,000 to Taiwan, 260,000 to the Philippines and 200,000 to Thailand, according to official figures of those countries.

According to its own figures, Japan Travel Agency had an about 20 per cent share of that traffic.

An independent inquiry placed last week from Tokyo with the agency’s Manila office, however, confirmed that Japan Travel Agency is still handfing night tours in the Philippines.

According to the New Zealand Government Tourist Office in Tokyo, no New Zealand licensing system exists for Japanese tour firms. Any firm can send any tour. The only restrictions that apply are contained in the Travel Agency Law of Japan which was amended last year in a largely superficial move to crack down on sex-tour firms. The move started in 1981 after SouthEast Asian women protested at every step of the way of the Asian tour of the former Japanese Prime Minister, Mr Zenko Suzuki, that Japanese men were using their economic wealth to enslave the women of poorer Asian neighbours. This law was rewritten to state in watered-down words that a travel agent shall not “render a service so as to allow travellers to receive a service which is against the law operative in the place of travel or give assistance to travellers so that they may receive such a service.”

In a further token gesture hoped to appease Asian criticism of the sex tours, the Transport Ministry in 1981 investigated 37 travel agents. It found evidence in document form that only one was selling tours expressly geared to sex. Ministry officials involved in the investigation today will neither confirm nor deny that Japan Travel Agency was among the 37 suspects.