Papakatsu is the new "sugar daddy" genre of compensated dating. For some, it's an easy way for guys who are middle aged or older with some money to have sex with younger women.
For others, it's a way to fall victim to crime.
In May, a man was almost murdered by woman who looked in reality very different from the cute lady in the pictures she put online.
Now comes a fresh cautionary tale. A 25-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of fraud. According to media reports, the host-addicted Mai Watanabe is accused of swindling three men out of ¥156 million through a romance scam.
She ...
Be careful. That cutie you are messaging on that app or website may not be who she says she is.
Meeting in person is still the safest way to guarantee someone looks like their picture -- but even this is a risky proposition, as their personality might be homicidal.
A cautionary tale about papakatsu has generated headlines in Japan recently.
Rino Ito was arrested near Hiratsuka Station on May 4 for attempted murder after stabbing a middle-aged man in the belly with a knife.
The 28-year-old called Kanagawa police herself and confessed to the crime, before waiting for officers to arrive and ...
One of the most sensational stories that has gripped the Japanese media over the past few weeks has involved the arrests and deportations in the Philippines of several young Japanese citizens, who were allegedly part of the "Luffy group" responsible robbery and fraud since 2021 (including from behind bars). The name of the gang is a reference to the manga and anime franchise One Piece.
One of the most recently detained citizens was 25-year-old Hitomi Kumai. Japanese police issued a warrant for her arrest last September on fraud charges. She is accused of making phone calls tricking people ...
We've written before about the problem of scams in the Japanese "dating site" industry, where customers think they are interacting with real women who want to meet them but are actually exchanging messages with someone (perhaps even a man) who is trying to ensure they keep paying the membership fees for as long as possible.
In a recent article on Japan Today, someone apparently interviewed two such scammers.
The first is actually just someone who worked as a cheap hostess bar. We don't think this qualifies, since though it is possible for a customer to take a hostess out on a date, it's not ...
The immensely popular Japanese porn star Eimi Fukada landed herself in hot water this week by complaining on social media that men should pay for dates with girls.
Fukada, who last year held a 24-hour "free hugs" event for fans, reasoned that women already have various expenses that men don't, such as hair styling, makeup, and clothing costs, not to mention the time the women spend getting ready for their date.
She said men should pay the "date charges" -- presumably meaning paying for all the costs of the date (meal, drinks, movie theater tickets, etc.), not an actual "fee" paid to the ...
Papakatsu, the buzzword that refers to compensated dating for sugar daddies, is in the news again.
Takeru Yoshikawa, a politician with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, has been accused of drinking with an 18-year-old girl.
House of Representatives member Yoshikawa, who is 40 but frankly looks a but older (perhaps it's the jowls), has a wife and two daughters. He was photographed arriving with the girl at a high-end hotel in the Odaiba bay district of Tokyo in late May.
According to the scoop in News Post Seven (that includes 46 pictures!), he and the girl arrived, checked in, and then ...
Our post yesterday featuring the confessions of a foreign female about compensated dating in Tokyo led us to this case study (from early 2021) on legal website Bengo4, which sets out to answer a curious question: What happens to your assets if you divorce your wife for compensated dating?
According to the author (a lawyer), an aggrieved husband consulted him about divorcing his wife, who had been caught doing compensated dating.
Apparently, starting from around the time they got married, his wife was meeting another man around two times a month and having sex with him. For these dates, she ...
We stumbled upon this confessional post on Amina du Jean's Substack, billed as "a digital temple for positive femininity." The title, "Crazy Sexy Tokyo," is provocative and sounds like another "wacky Japan" story at first, but we were especially intrigued to read the author's insights into compensated dating (enjo kosai).
Writing about her personal experiences of participating in this social "custom" of young women, in which they go on dates with (older) men and receive monetary "compensation" for their troubles, the author is very candid and doesn't resort to the more obvious ...
After losing his wife, the former TV announcer Mao Kobayashi, to cancer in 2017, the top kabuki actor Ebizo Ichikawa was reinvented in the public imagination as a sympathetic figure bravely battling on as a single parent.
Ebizo, who had an image as a womanizer before he settled down with Mao Kobayashi, is apparently starting to date again. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the tabloids are relishing the details: namely that the 44-year-old star is dating more than one woman, judging from paparazzi shots, and they are much younger than him. Though one such report came out last autumn, ...
The tabloid magazine Weekly Bunshun has published an interview with someone they give the alias Yuna Ishihara, who is apparently a 24-year-old student at Tokyo College of Music.
But she also appears in adult video and works at a soapland in Yoshiwara, Tokyo's long-established red-light district in the east of the city.
But due to the pandemic, her income of ¥900,000 (around $9,000) a month has massively decreased, leading her to take up papakatsu.
As reported before, this is a euphemism for compensated dating with older men (sugar daddies). The principle is hardly new but the term has ...
