tillingfolk 众生

Well said, Cyrus. I’m also fascinated by the psychology of paid demonizers, and have spoken to quite a few over the years. Many have a narrow religious-type outlook: “Western style governance is the way, the truth and the life, and no community cometh to Right Thinking without it.” Others have deep confirmation bias issues: they surround themselves by friends with the same views, and never read comments, so live in a bubble. Others are well paid for their bias, such as the horrific demonizers at the China desk at HRW. Many HRW salaries are in the region of US$200,000 a year and HRW boss gets US$600,000 a year

Something ugly is happening in Laos. Since June 2025, the Japanese Embassy in Vientiane has been issuing unusual public warnings. It had to. Japanese men keep getting arrested there — for paying to rape children. Last December, Lao authorities detained a 52-year-old Japanese man at a hotel in Luang Prabang. He had been staying in the room for about two weeks — with three girls, aged 12, 13, and 16, brought to him by a local broker. He reportedly paid nine times the going rate for the 12-year-old, because she had not been touched before. In Laos, sex with anyone 12 or under is classified as child rape, carrying 10 to 15 years in prison. He is still in custody there. Police suspect he also filmed them. Last August, Japanese police arrested a 65-year-old man from Nagoya. Seventeen notebooks were seized from his home. In them, a tally kept from July 2014 through 2025: over 140 children across Southeast Asia, with names, ages, locations, and prices paid. One entry read "9 years old." He had bought a manual on how to find such children online. In January, a 61-year-old from Osaka was arrested on fraud charges — related to running a blog that offered travel tips and a how-to guide for child prostitution. Written under the handle "The Emperor of Laos." He had traveled to the country 17 times. This is where most people will stop reading, and this is exactly where the harder conversation should start. Japan is not alone in exporting men like this. Child sex tourism is a global industry, and every rich country with passports has a version of it. What is specifically Japanese is what happens next. Japan's child prostitution law has had extraterritorial jurisdiction since 1999. A Japanese citizen who pays for sex with a child abroad can be prosecuted at home. The maximum sentence is 5 years in prison or a 3-million-yen fine. For comparison, the maximum for fatal dangerous driving is 20 years. Enforcement is another matter. The three arrests above happened because Lao authorities and Japanese police both moved. The cases where nobody gets caught — which is most of them — rely on a man being careless enough to keep a notebook, or run a blog, or do something loud enough to be noticed. In 1996, at the Stockholm World Congress on the sexual exploitation of children, Japanese lawmakers themselves acknowledged that Japan was lagging behind on this issue. Three years later, in 1999, Japan passed its child prostitution law. In 2001, Japan hosted the second congress in Yokohama and pledged to do better. Twenty-five years later, its own embassy is still issuing warnings to stop its own nationals. It is not that Japanese men are uniquely predatory. They are not. Predators travel from every wealthy country to every poor one, and have since cheap flights were invented. It is that a country that prides itself on being safe and orderly at home has never fully reckoned with what some of its citizens do when they land in Vientiane, or Manila, or Phnom Penh. The law exists. The political will to use it — to track, to prosecute, to publicize convictions at home — does not. The men being arrested in Laos right now are the loud ones. The man with the notebook. The man with the blog. The quiet ones are on the next flight. So what can we actually do? One. Raise the sentencing for extraterritorial child prostitution offenses to match domestic ones. Five years is not enough. Two. Publish the names of those convicted, and restrict their passports. Three. Require travel agencies and airlines to report suspicious travel patterns — the way banks are required to report suspicious transactions. None of this is technically hard. And one more thing. If you are ever in a hotel lobby in Vientiane, or Manila, or Phnom Penh, and you see a pairing that obviously does not fit — you can tell the embassy. You can tell the local police. Looking away is a form of complicity.

🚨 Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni: “I accuse Israel of crossing the red line, I condemn the massacre of Palestinian civilians, and I announce that Italy will support European sanctions against Israel.”

İsrail her gün masum yüzlerce Gazze'liyi sessiz sedasız idam ediyor. İdam etmeden öncede organlarını çalıyor Lütfen bunu duyurun, paylaşın! Daha çok kişiye ulaşmak için takipte kalın