Healing Labor

Reviewed by: Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy by Gabrielle Koch Akiko Takeyama Gabrielle Koch. Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. 248 pp. Studying Japanese women’s sex work in contemporary Japan, Gabrielle Koch’s ethnography, Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy, insightfully shows how sex workers make sense of the multilayered contradictions they face: an essential work that reproduces Japanese male workers’ productivity and yet is stigmatized; highly visible sex commerce in Japan while sexual labor itself is largely concealed; sex work that is lucrative and empowering but still looked down upon; a job that entails not only physical but also emotional and psychological skill sets to produce iyashi (healing) for customers but is assumed to be effortless embodiment of inherited femininity. “Even as women in the sex industry view their intimate encounters with customers as socially and economically essential,” Koch contends, “the value of their labor depends on their marginalization” (4). Situating sex work today in the changing family life and post-bubble economic recession of the country, Koch develops the concept of what she calls healing labor based on the Japanese emic term iyashi. Koch argues that the healing labor is welcomed to “repair the well-being and productivity of men against what sex workers regard as the harsh and exhausting conditions of male work in postindustrial capitalism” (14). Nonetheless, she further argues that women’s healing labor is embedded in a gender division of labor that extends beyond the household to the sphere of sex commerce more pervasively in the era of economic precarity. [End Page 363] The book consists of six body chapters. Each chapter unfolds a different aspect of contradictions and moral dilemmas that sex workers face amid gender power dynamics in new millennium Japan. Unpacking one layer after another, Kochi skillfully shows the larger politico-economic, socio-legal, and moral web in which sex work in Japan is nested. Chapter 1, “Sex in Gray Spaces,” demonstrates how the legal grayness of sex commerce manifests the ambivalent social position of sex workers. Koch argues that the legal ambivalence magnifies the paradox of the social necessity of sex work and its moral concerns. Chapter 2, “First-Timers Welcome!,” explores how sex workers think of their relatively high earnings, flexible work schedule, and sense of autonomy, while facing marginalization from the mainstream labor market and deviation from gender norms. Chapter 3, “Stigma and the Moral Economy,” goes one step further to examine the ways that sex workers juggle their moral dilemma that derives from their feelings of empowerment, pride, stress, and anxiety due to the nature of their work. Koch reminds the reader that the sexual economy, which is entangled with social stigma and dissemination, is always a moral economy. In Chapter 4, “Healing Customers,” the author illuminates how sex work requires considerable effort to acquire skills to “heal” customers and, at the same time, the effort needs to be concealed so as to best provide what men want—naturally caring femininity. As a result, their work is inevitably belittled as effortless and “supportive” work to contribute to the maintenance of male workers’ well-being and productivity in the “real” economy. Chapter 5, “Victims All,” zooms out to examine how non-sex workers, especially the advocacy group against human trafficking and prostitution, dismiss sex workers’ narratives and experiences, assuming that all sex workers are victims of exploitation. In contrast to the advocacy group, which attempts to abolish sex commerce itself, another advocacy group for sex workers’ rights strives to improve working conditions in the sex industry rather than getting rid of the sex work without providing alternatives. Chapter 6, “Risk and Rights,” illustrates the dilemma of sex workers’ rights advocates. These advocates call for the decriminalization of sex work and the entitlement of legal protections and benefits. By the same token, they find that the majority of women working in the sex industry do not much care about their legal rights as they see sex work only as a transient, not lifelong, occupation. Healing Labor draws on rich ethnographic materials, from participant observation at sex workers’ workshops and anti-trafficking advocacy

Capitalism · Division of labour · Political science · Sex work · Sociology · Unpaid work · Work (physics) · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · Law · Sex work and related issues