(Work During the Day)
The official minimum wage is less than Peso 200 for an 8-hour-day (we were told P180=US$7.20 by one individual and P147=US$6.16 by another), but it is questionable how strictly this law is adhered to. I saw two young boys, probably about eight-years old, sitting with their shirts off at the edge of a pile of charcoal. They were filling small plastic bags with the charcoal for sale. I asked Karen to ask them if I could video tape them, but they said "no." As we walked on they put their t-shirts on and tried to clean themselves up a little bit without anyone telling them. Walking along the beach in Atimonan we came across a group of people taking in a lambat (fishnet). The man who owns the pond rights hires the community to help pull in boliunao fish. The helpers are given the smaller fish that are brought in first and the owner is given the later, larger fish found in the belly of the lambat (fishnet). A labandera can be hired to wash your laundry at a rate of about P150 for a day's work, soap included. A private driver for one of their friends earns P300-a-day (US$12) or P800-a-day when he has to rent a jeepney for hauling products. A carpenter, hired by this same businessman, earns P120 (US$4.80)-a-day for his labor. Having grown up in America and seeing men using hammers and chisels instead of jackhammers to break up cement, or man using a hand-saw while doing some pier work in place of an electric saw was indicative of work in the Philippines. But so was seeing men at a jeepney repair shop taking a lunch break well beyond two hours so they could have a nap after eating their lunch. Being aware of these work situations it is obvious that labor laws in the Philippines are secondary to the necessity to have enough to eat and a place to sleep, and that the values-for better and worse-of the western work ethic and consumerism have not yet completely caught on. It will probably be much, much longer before signs soliciting bading (slang for a gay male) and single women, below a certain age with high school diplomas, become a less common sight.
A small list of the professions of Karen and Kathy's neighbors, classmates and barkada who all work in the Laguna Province provides as sampling of job opportunities there: an agricultural machines manufacturer, owner of a retail muffler supplies and installation shop, and agricultural machinery and car spare parts retailer; an agricultural technician who tests for the affects of radiation on plants and soil; bank tellers; a supervisor at a Honda Motors factory in Laguna Province; a computer data input clerk; a dental supplies wholesaler; a female dentist; a fish farmer; a fruits retailer; sometime entertainers in Japan (japayuki-see below); an operator of a jeepney service (he drives children to and from school); a jeepney repair mechanic; an owner of a jeepney repair shop, sometime piggery owner, and landlord; a quilt wholesaler who employs about a dozen seamstresses; a street-side restaurant owner; and a grade school teacher.
As the sun sets on Maahas, the Hi-way in the direction leading to bayan and Manila thickens and the birds in the sky are replaced with a solitary bat flying here and there. A man walks through town crying out , "balot," (see above) which he sells for P6. Dinner is served by a maid or the mother, who eat last, and always includes kanin (rice). Afterwards, men gather together with their barkada and drink San Miguel beer while they talk while the women tsismis (gossip) and watch television. Afterwards, they may go together to a beer house for more beer and casual sex.
(Work at Night)
It's dark now and the tricycle or jeepney passes by several street vendors whose stands are made more visible with gaas-(kerosene) lighted bottles or cans. The vehicle stops in front of "85" a beer house. In the Philippines bars are distinct from beer houses. A bar is where you would go to drink alak (alcohol, the favorite being San Miguel beer which sells for a mere P9 a bottle), whereas a beer house is where men go to drink alak but primarily for companionship with the other sex. Beer houses aren't allowed in Barangay Maahas, but they are allowed in Barangay San Antonio. There are two such beer-houses just at the border of Maahas and San Antonio. At "85" the interior is sparse. There is a jukebox and booths and a dance floor. The women are not very attractive, but it is dark and after a few beers most men that come to this place don't care. No strip shows are put on here, but for P600-650 ($24-$30) a man can have an intimate time with one of the women.
We learned that most of the international tourists to Calamba and Los Baņos, where numerous swimming resorts are located, are from Korea, though at Pagsanjan Falls there were said to be many tourists from Taiwan and Japan. We saw less than twenty puti (white people) in Manila, Laguna, or Quezon Province, but we did see more puti tourists (primarily German and Australian men) than any others at Puerto Galera where the two principle attractions seemed to be scuba diving and procuring young filipina prostitutes.
I first began feeling uneasy on the boat ride from Batangas to Mindoro when I noticed two European men in their late 50's to 60's with a filipina who was at least fifteen years younger than either of them. Dressed in tank tops or t-shirts and shorts the pot-bellied men were obvious tourists. We had been persuaded to take a trip to a beach resort area on the northern end of Mindoro by a friend of friends instead of taking a lengthier and more expensive trip to the Visayas.
One night we got dinner at a simple, more local oriented restaurant and we noticed that the young woman (18 years-old or younger) was talking to another young woman about the same age. The woman sitting down began talking to us, and shortly told us that she used to be a companion (prostitute) for European men that came to a nearby bar, but was now planning on marrying a German man whom she communicated with in English. She explained that the women usually would get a male patron after 10:00 p.m. She then pointed out her friend who was working at the restaurant we were at and proclaimed that she would could not work at the bar because the European men only liked ugly filipinas like herself. I, who was coincidentally the only puti in our group, thought she was more attractive than the one she called her better though everyone else in our group agreed with her judgment that she was ugly when we discussed the matter later. She was darker and more "ethnic" looking than the restaurant employee who looked more mestizo.
The following night, a group of us, male and female, went to one of the bars at our beach town where there was a strip show. It seemed as if we could see all the puti we had seen during the day in one place that night, but this was only one of about three or four bar-strip clubs. The woman (some were quite young) would dance on a stage with a pole at either end of a long rectangular center stage and strip down to their underwear, sometimes pulling their panties down halfway to reveal a g-string. A short while after we had been there, we noticed that one of the dancers looked particularly familiar and soon realized it was the restaurant worker we had spoken to the previous night. She danced fairly well, but the signals she kept giving another dancer with her eyes and hands, and the way she laughed before she made a special move, it appeared that it was her first time stripping in public. Karen and I saw her again the next morning with a small boy.
In addition to the professions listed above, Karen and Kathy had friends working overseas where incomes were higher than in the Philippines even after paying for the travel expenses, agents in some cases, and accounting for the higher costs of living. They had friends and family working in Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Hong Kong. Some working in office environments and some as domestic helpers, while those working in Japan had been entertainers at one time though a couple had been married and later worked in factories there. At the time of a visit in 1995, Taiwan had become a new place of opportunity in place of Hong Kong for people seeking jobs overseas.
| Japanese rhyme
Moshi Moshi
Ano ne, Ano ne, Ano ne
Moshi Moshi
Ano ne
Sayonara
| Japanese commercial
Moshi Moshi
Gelatin
One for you
One for me
Moshi Moshi
Gelatin
Flavor play mo
| Japayuki Song
Moshi Moshi
Ano ne
Gusto ko trabaho
Entertainment sa Japan
Japayuki
|
The last song was sung to me by two pre-pubescent girls in Laguna. They had learned it from their half-sister upon her return from work in Japan. Japayuki is a derogatory term for Filipinas working as "entertainers" in Japan. The common belief in the Philippines is that filipinas who worked in Japan do so as prostitutes. This view may seem simplistic for people who define prostitution as sexual intercourse for hire because employment for filipinas in Japan is often very sexual without requiring them to have sexual intercourse with a customer. I've met two japayuki in the Philippines (both of which said they worked as hostesses in Japan) and some at a hostess club in Japan who describe their job similarly to the way this woman, an American anthropologist (Nightwork, Anne Allison) who worked as a hostess in Japan as part of her research, describes some aspects of the profession:
Not only does the hostess attend to the oral desires of the men as individuals-keeping their cigarettes lit and their drinks replenished-but she attends to the oral desires of the men as a group-keeping them involved as a unit through speech and song.
Besides supplying functional lubrication to a group, the hostess flatters the men in a more personal, individualized way. During my observations it often took the form of constant, exaggerated compliments: "You sing so well"; "You're very handsome"; "I bet you could make love all night long"; "You're the best joke teller I've ever met"; "What a gorgeous tie you have on!"
Anne Allison explains that it is the "notion of service that persuades men to pay three, four, or five times as much for a drink in a club as the drink would cost if they bought a bottle at a store" (the patron pays for the hostess's drinks as well and an exorbitant fee for the time spent at his table as well). What Allison goes onto explain is that the service includes sexual banter where the male ego is always cultivated and, from her Freudian (nominally Marxist-Feminist) analytical viewpoint, the hostesses are demeaned as women by the Japanese men who feel psychologically inferior to woman based on the overpowering influence their mothers have had in their lives. She supports her analysis with these observations of hostess life:
Three men who had been drinking at that club approached her. They did not know the hostess, but as they passed, one reached out and patted her breast, without a murmur or even a glance. The men kept moving, but they laughed together loudly. The woman had no visible reaction; no words, no facial response, no protest. The encounter had lasted only a few second.
While touching can include other parts and involve a more prolonged feeling or pawing, these short, ritualized pats to the breast were by far the most pervasive form of male touching at [the club].
Although some of the things customers say about the hostess's body can be overtly crude as well as rude-"Your vagina looks wide"; "Do you wear underpants? Are they made of paper?" or "Maybe you're not even a woman-your breasts are so small"-such remarks are made into a tone that doesn't appear intended to insult and doesn't appear to be taken as insulting by the hostess.
Allison believes that what transpires in the hostess club is a uniquely Japanese thing. Men go there and pay exorbitant fees from the company expense account. Her estimation that the goal of a man at the club is to relax from the constraints imposed upon him at the office and in Japanese society. One of these constraints is that put upon men sexually. A hostess club is not primarily sexual though, there are many alternatives for sexual fulfillment in Japan that are more direct and less expensive than the hostess club.
In his book, Underground in Japan, a Filipino named Rey Ventura who himself worked in Japan as a dock worker and experienced the community of Filipinos in Japan that he wrote about, relates a strip-sex show he witnessed in Japan where the strippers were Japanese, Korean, and Filipino. Part of the show involved allowing members of the audience to have sex with one of the strippers on stage, "the cheapest available intercourse in Japan." This is how he explains the attitude of Filipinos towards japayuki (using himself) as well the japayuki's shame for her own actions:
...it would be shameful, for myself and for my country, to see her publicly fucked...it was obvious that the Filipina didn't like being seen at work by her compatriots.
The sense of shame that japayuki shows that hiya is not only confined to the barangay. The women I met at a hostess club in Japan were all very nervous around me after they knew that my wife was a filipina. They immediately told each other and expressed their shame over what they were doing for me being there, at their club, merely because I was married to a filipina. When asked the extent to which their job requirements required them to perform sex with customers (why else feel shame?), the japayuki I have spoken with universally denied they had sex with customers, though they equally universally said that others did. Anne Allison, in her work, as well as some japayuki I have spoken with say that a hostess can get fired for having sex with a customer, but one japayuki told me that the club owner disliked her because she wouldn't have sex with customers, implying that she was bad for business. It seems that in most cases, hostesses are not expected to have sex with customers but that the line they crossed in coming to Japan for work and the money they earn makes it more and more plausible with every new night during their six-month contract. Here is more about what Rey Ventura had to say about filipinas in Japan:
If the Japanese see a Filipina in their country, they automatically assume that she's on the job [working as a prostitute]. In fact not all of them are. Some are maids for foreigners. Some have married farmers [ usually after meeting their future husband while working in Japan]. Many are legitimate entertainers, waiting in bars, singing to the karaoke when requested. A few are students.
Nevertheless, many of the girls who go out as entertainers end up as prostitutes, and many others know exactly what the deal is from the start. Most prostitution in Manila caters for [sic] Filipinos rather than foreigners. Girls working in this area would naturally be attracted by the thought that they can earn in one day in Japan what would take them a month in Manila. So they go to the so-called "Dance Studios" and "Promotion Agencies" which operate throughout the main cities of the Philippines. There they get fixed up with jobs as "cultural dancers" or "artistes", for a "budget" of between $300 and $800 a month, according to their beauty and abilities. Naturally this is an exploitation wage. The rest is made up by prostitution.
PRINTER-FRIENDLY FORMAT
