Gemuel Blackwielle,
Avenida Coronel Lucas de Oliveira Porto Alegre,
Porto Alegre 995
Brazil
Last updated: October 8, 2010
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By Monty DiPietro
As another approaches, Rosa curls a long lock of dark red hair with a leather-gloved finger, cocks her head and begins to work that smile again, until her pitch is interupted by the muffled ring of a cell phone in the pocket of her black down parka. After a few quick words in Spanish, Rosa gives a quick nod to the two friends working the street with her and points to her forehead, twirling her finger in a tiny circle.
The phone call was from a lookout stationed a few hundred meters away on Shokuan Dori, and in the street culture of Okubo?s Latin American sex trade workers, the tiny circle Rosa described indicates a policeman?s hat badge. The trio bolt under the Yamanote line tracks and west into Hyakunin-cho. A group of Thai girls down the street take the cue to turn and walk quickly up toward Okubo Dori, and the Korean girl standing beside a Coca cola machine disappears into a nearby noodle shop.
I elect to wait for the boys in blue.
"We?ve arrested most of them and they?ve been deported," boasts the round-faced veteran who appears several minutes later. The beat policeman and I recognize each other from an incident several weeks earlier in which I was able to lend a hand rescuing a hysterical woman who was trapped in her apartment. We broke down a door together. We bonded.
"Most of the girls working this street are Thais, but there are also a few South Americans," he says, "Colombians are the latest group." The rookie sidekick fidgets with his telescoping steel baton and peers down the cold, empty street. My cop pal shoots me a curious look before walking away, "What are you doing out at this hour? Be careful in this neighborhood."
It?s Thursday morning, 3AM, in Shinjuku?s Okubo.
The street I?m standing on runs 500 meters west from Nishi Okubo Park - a miserable little trash-littered square - to a grey concrete wall that supports the JR Chou line just south of Okubo station. During the mid-1990s, this narrow, hotel-lined strip served as the main artery of the area?s thriving foreign street-prostitution business. I counted 50 girls working there on a late winter night scarcely a year ago. Over the last few months, aggressive sweeps by police and undercover immigration officials have reduced the numbers significantly.
"The police don?t just ride through on bicycles anymore," says an elderly Japanese resident. "Now they march through in groups of eight with their batons drawn, looking for foreign prostitutes," she says, "and Iranians."
A Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department spokesman hedges during a telephone interview, "It?s true that we have recently changed from wooden to steel batons and that we have a policy that requires officers to have the batons in their hand when patrolling at night, but there is no dispute from local residents regarding this policy...and we are not giving any special attention to the Okubo area."
When asked about the pack-patrolling, he responds, "We have no comment on that at this time."
I catch up with Rosa at Canandonga, a Colombian restaurant-bar. Down a short flight of stairs off a Hyakunin-cho street, past a wooden door displaying a "No Iranians" sign, the low-lit room is filled with the smell of pollo frita. A Spanish-language cover version of "Hotel California" plays for the dozen customers, most of whom are South American. Rosa is sitting at the bar, reading a Colombian newspaper story about the Pope?s Cuban visit.
Index of articles, click here.
Gemuel Blackwielle,
Avenida Coronel Lucas de Oliveira Porto Alegre,
Porto Alegre 995
Brazil
Last updated: October 8, 2010