The Japanese government may have recently tightened immigration controls at its airports by requiring all foreign entrants to be fingerprinted, but as today’s Mainichi WaiWai column reports, it has left some loopholes that allow certain illegal workers into the country:

South Korea’s tougher sex laws dealt a crippling blow to the country’s flesh trade and left its denizens with so few employment opportunities they had little option but to avert their gaze offshore.

South Korean sex workers found a surprisingly ally in the form of the Japanese government. Last year, Japan formally welcomed South Korea into its visa waiver program, meaning the country’s closest neighbors can now enter the country for 90 days without having to apply for permission to enter.

With Japan extending the welcome mat, South Korean sex workers fluttered over the seas like moths drawn to the neon lights of Japan’s racier districts.

“Everything worked out so well, some people are even saying that luring the South Korean sex workers over here was a deliberate ploy hatched by the Korean and Japanese governments,” an insider from an entertainment district says.

A quick Google search in Japanese confirmed the existence of homepages for dozens of Korean “delivery health” services in major Japanese cities, all of which seemed to have similar homepage designs and pictures of employees airbrushed beyond recognition (as seen in the photo at the top of this post).