The term is almost outdated.
Japayuki, like many other words suddenly finding currency in mainstream language, was coined to capture the emergence of a social phenomenon, namely the influx of young Filipina entertainers to Japan throughout most of the 90s up to about three years ago when kogyo (entertainment) visa was practically banned.
At its peak, 100,000 young Filipinas, some pre-legal, streamed to Japan every year to provide relaxation and entertainment to hardworking Japanese salary-men, many at company expense.
In the Japanese language, if you add -yuki to the name of a place as a suffix, like Tokyo-yuki or Osaka-yuki, it means bound for that place.
But clearly, Japayuki was intended from the start as a word with a negative nuance to refer to the young Filipinas coming to Japan to ply their trade at night. A more neutral word would be Nippon-yuki, or Nihon-yuki, but this never gained currency in the mass media or in everyday language.
There was a time when the word became so widely associated with Filipinos that when I introduced myself, people would invariably ask, "Which band or which club do you work for?"
Now, the word is fading into obsolescence, thanks to the immigration law that upgraded the entertainment profession into some kind of highly skilled trade. You should present a diploma from an internationally accredited entertainment school to be able to qualify as one. Many of the so-called Japayukis have dissolved into Japanese society as ordinary housewives. The last four years have seen a dramatic spike in Filipino-Japanese marriages, real or arranged, as entertainers faced prospects of not having their 3 to 6-month contracts renewed under the new regulation.
These days, you seldom hear the word hereabouts.
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