The Government of Japan does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so. Japan continues to demonstrate a lack of political will to criminally investigate and prosecute cases of labor trafficking and child sex trafficking.  Law enforcement continues to identify hundreds of children exploited in the commercial sex industry without sufficient screening for trafficking indicators, which allowed child sex traffickers to operate with impunity. Traffickers use fraudulent marriages between foreign women and Japanese men to facilitate the entry of women into Japan for sex trafficking in bars, clubs, brothels, and massage parlors.  Traffickers keep victims in forced labor or commercial sex using debt-based coercion sometimes through recruitment debts equaling more than one year of salary and threats of violence or deportation, blackmail, confiscation of passports and other documents, and other psychologically coercive methods.

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Karayuki-san was the name given to Japanese girls and women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who were trafficked from poverty stricken agricultural prefectures in Japan to destinations in East Asia,  South Southeast Asia, Siberia (Russian Far East), Manchuria, and British India to serve as prostitutes and sexually serviced men from a variety of races, including Chinese, Europeans, native Southeast Asians, and others.

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https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-trafficking-in-persons-report/japan