US-JAPAN HUMAN Rights Diplomacy Post 1945 is an exploratory survey of a major global inhumanity. It intends to examine how the United States has deployed public diplomacy with Tokyo to confront Japanese sexual and labour trafficking, while also charting the successes and failures of the US's own record on anti-trafficking practices at home and abroad. The subject is an important aspect of human rights advocacy where much remains either unknown or imprecise with regard to a phenomenon that involves literally millions of people across all continents and within all nation states.

The approach is largely chronological and country-based, using documentary evidence from 1945 onwards to trace national and international responses to what is frequently termed ‘modern slavery’, placed within the broader and still evolving context of respect for the full panoply of human rights. In the process it may also provide clues on the nature of contemporary US-Japan ties and the wider debate on whether international organizations and other entities linked to civil society have valid claims to be possibly superseding the traditional state-centric international system.

What follows draws largely on the public record. Caveats, however, are immediately in order, since no state, international organization or advocacy group is likely to reveal more than portions of its internal discussions or external negotiations on human rights issues. Such limitations over the gradual availability of printed sources with regard to sensitive material must inevitably disappoint the research student, while ensuring the improbability of anything approaching definitive work. It makes little sense for histonans or those in other disciplines to claim to know more than some of the realities behind battling a vast set of highly-disgraceful yet highly-profitable global criminal activities.

Trafficking, however, sees humanity at its worst. President Trump was surely correct when he said bluntly in his White House press conference of November 2018 that ‘human traffickers [are] the lowest scum on earth, the lowest scum on earth.’ Unfortunately, any recognition of the evils of modern slavery have rarely been matched by an adequate response by individual nation states or wider organizations working in loose, cooperative ventures. At the core of any debate on human rights and trafficking stands a host of major disappointments.