It's 6:30 in the morning and Bonnie Jinmon is scanning the streets of Dogenzaka in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward. She sees young women, trudging out from under shabby storefronts and love hotels, just finishing their shifts. Others are still luring customers in, working tirelessly to meet their daily quota.
Amid this changing of the guard, Jinmon and a few volunteers from her church approach the women cautiously. They're armed with goody bags filled with lip creams, cookies and, stuffed in among the gifts, the number of a hotline for victims of sex trafficking.
Japan, a nation that boasts the world's third-highest GDP, is not often associated with modern slavery. Yet of the 20 to 30 million slaves in the world today, approximately 45,000 victims live here. Lighthouse, a Japan-based NPO working to end human trafficking, identified 103 of the 241 cases they received in 2018 as crimes of sex trafficking. This number is less than the 138 cases they received the previous year, but activists continue to demand greater crackdowns and tighter regulations.
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