Girls are trafficked (jinshin baibai) into geisha houses, Kanzaki wrote in 1955, through geisha house managers buying the right to ‘adopt’them through payments to parents or brokers. Geisha houses interned women and girls who were prostituted in escort-type arrangements to places like ‘geisha restaurants’ or ryoutei. Kanzaki described a ryoutei as a ‘prostitution hotel with banquet facilities’. 9 The trafficking of girls into geisha houses, where they lived under the control of a ‘proprietor’(ookami), was a longstanding practice of the geisha system, which used adoption contracts to disguise its trafficking of girls through debt bondage. The contracts bonded girls to geisha houses, as well as circumvented laws prohibiting trafficking and debt servitude. Kanzaki wrote that this practice ‘exact [ed] an unimaginable toll on the human rights of girls who [were] entirely under the control of their “parental” masters’ in the geisha system. 10 A survey by the Women and Youth Division of Japan’s Ministry of Labour in 1953 on the sex, age, and receiving industry of children trafficked in Japan over a one-year period indicates that the scale of this trafficking wasn’t actually large in relative terms. The survey found that, of 1489 children trafficked, thirty-one had been trafficked into geisha houses, which was only around three per cent of girls trafficked into Japan’s sex industry that year. 11 However, the trafficking of girls into the geisha system at this time was particularly problematic for the way it was institutionalised through adoption contracts, and also for its social celebration as Japanese ‘tradition’. A range of elaborate rituals and protocols governed the entry of girls (called maiko) into the geisha system. In addition to some form of artistic training, they were subject to elaborate dress codes, beauty practices, housework obligations, and ‘coming out’rituals refined over the long history of the geisha system. 12 The stylised conventions of particularly the top echelon of the system encouraged public acceptance of the prostitution of girls. British ex-military man AC Scott wrote in 1960 that pictures of maiko, or what he called ‘apprentice geisha’,‘appeared on postcards, posters, brochures, towels, crockery, and anything else that is available to put pictures on’in Japan. 13 A