The Japanese Woman's Christian Temperance Union (Nihon Kirisutokyō Fujin Kyōfūkai; JWCTU) was one of the first civic organizations to draw public attention to the flow of Japanese women going abroad to work as prostitutes. The JWCTU was a formidable organization in terms of mobilizing public opinion. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, its Tokyo branch organized public lectures in churches and civic halls to enlighten the public about the problem of Japanese prostitutes domestically and abroad. The editors of the Tokyo JWCTU monthly periodical, the Tokyo Fujin Kyōfūkai zasshi, also regularly printed articles describing the lamentable condition of Japanese prostitutes living abroad and the scandalous circumstances of their covert passage out of Japan. The lectures and printed articles were integral parts of an orchestrated campaign by the Tokyo branch of the JWCTU to gain public support for their crusade to persuade the government to ratify regulatory measures preventing young Japanese women from going abroad without proper supervision. In 1890, the JWCTU Tokyo branch submitted a petition with over 800 signatures to the foreign ministry imploring it to pass a law protecting all Japanese women abroad. How much influence the petition had on government affairs is hard to ascertain, but it seems more than coincidental that in March 1891 the foreign ministry successfully shepherded the passage of the Law for the Protection of Japanese Women in Foreign Countries through the Cabinet and submitted it to House of Peers for approval.

The formation of the JWCTU was a product of the first global wave in the feminization of politics that occurred in the last half of the nineteenth century. Women activists across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans successfully extended their influence outside the domain of their homes by participating in orchestrated moral campaigns and philanthropic work advocating a healthy family life. These interventions strengthened women's rights by reinforcing and reconstructing the role of the mother as a primary agent in the socialization and moralization of her family. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), one among many women's organizations engaged in moral and philanthropic work in nineteenth-century America, has been a subject of contention.