Lin Neuman. The tone is alluring and the woman beautiful, but the scene, repeated thousands of times nightly in the crowded nest of nightclubs in Ermita , the tourist 'belt' of Manila, is indicative of the clash that often occurs when the people of a poor nation come face to face with the influx of dollars associated with tourism. It is a multitiered system in the Philippines; the procurement of women for pleasure, and the open invitation to the mysteries of a "hospitality girl" is only the most visible manifestation of a prostitution phenomenon which grows larger with every percentage growth in tourist arrivals.
Director Lucina Alday of the Bureau of Women and Minors of the Ministry of Labor estimates that there are as many as , women employed in the hospitality industry, as she calls it, in Manila. The industry includes, in addition to hostesses who dispense their favors in cocktail lounges and nightclubs, waitresses an often ambiguous term , go-go dancers, and sauna bath attendants. Hospitality is generally taken to be a loose euphemism for prostitution as the wages paid by club owners are scarcely liveable and the desire of tourists and leisure-class Filipinos for available women is well-known.
The , figure may even be misleadingly. Father Toru Nishimoto , a Redemptorist priest who counsels Japanese tourists and has followed the prostitution problem for years, identifies several categories of the business in Manila ranging from high-priced call girls, often models and film actresses, and descending a scale which ends with streetwalkers. Call girls, brothels, and others, of course do not obtain such permits. Prostitution in the Philippines has always flourished in places where there is a heavy concentration of foreigners.
The rows of clubs adjacent to the United States military bases in Angeles and Olongapo give long standing testament to that fact.
The current situation is traceable to the influx of Japanese and other tourists since the imposition of Martial Law in In addition, former havens for male relaxation, like Taipei and Seoul, have become less accessible due to political attitudes and stricter enforcement of anti-prostitution codes after years of exploitation by Japanese sex tour operators.
