With the yen so cheap and inflation relatively low, the hordes of tourists flocking to Japan today enjoy a great time in the country. On the other hand, many people able to work abroad are doing so to earn more money than they can get in Japan. This includes sex workers, who have recently turned to places like Hong Kong, South Korea, China, Dubai, the United States, and Southeast Asia.
Legal website Bengoshi JP recently focused on the phenomenon of Japanese migrant sex workers, interviewing two examples of women with experience of working overseas.
One woman has been to Manila twice, Taiwan ...
Friday has published an interview with a teenager who is a tachinbo streetwalker in Okubo Park to pay for her host club addiction.
"I've become addicted to host clubs and now I'm working in Kabukicho," the teenager confesses, saying she has sex with three men a day for ¥20,000 a pop.
"My day and night cycle is reversed. I sleep until the afternoon and head to Kabukicho in the evening. I stand in front of a hotel until dawn, waiting for a man to approach me."
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department arrested 35 women in their 20s to 40s on suspicion of violating the Anti-Prostitution Act ...
The post-COVID uptick in streetwalkers in the Okubo Park area of Kabukicho, Tokyo, has been a media obsession for some time in Japan, generating a moral panic over the young age of the women and also some embarrassment because it has coincided with the huge rise in tourist numbers in Japan.
In the age of social media, going to rubberneck the lines of prostitutes at Okubo Park has become an activity for tourists to do as well as contributed to the notion that Tokyo is already a destination for sex tourism like Bangkok. Of course, approaching women on the street does not come without risk and ...
While much of the current police and media obsession with young female streetwalkers has focused on the Okubo-Kabukicho area of Tokyo, Osaka is also experiencing an apparent increase in visible prostitution.
And just as police are cracking down on both the sex workers and scouts in Kabukicho, the authorities in Osaka are targeting concafes ("concept cafes" -- a kind of "lite" version of a host club) and pimps who prey on young delinquents and runaways near the Dotombori canal, and even redesigning a street to deter streetwalkers.
This has not solved the problem, it seems, because police are ...
The moral panic about young prostitutes in Okubo Park near Kabukicho in Shinjuku, Tokyo, just took a new twist with the arrest of four women for defrauding men, especially foreign tourists.
Ongoing for some time, the Okubo Park issue has been a big news story, filled with salacious detail about young women standing around in the area, waiting for men to pick them up for money. While there's nothing new about prostitution in Kabukicho, it is rare to see so many young Japanese women openly engaged in sex work (most streetwalkers tend to be Chinese, since it is more dangerous and public). Such ...
More details are emerging about the prostitution ring that preyed on young women in Osaka.
As reported widely last month, police arrested Yusuke Kimura (34) and Koki Hideshima (24) for recruiting teenaged girls, violating the Anti-Prostitution Law and Child Welfare Law.
The girls were recruited from the Gurishita area of downtown Osaka (a district known as Minami). Gurishita is the spot near the Dotombori canal under the famous Glico Man billboard. It has become a notorious gathering place for underage delinquents and runaways, and a hotbed of prostitution and crime. Commentators have ...
Crime doesn't pay, they say, but it seems that's not true if you're in the recruitment racket for prostitutes.
According to multiple media reports, a scouting group called Access introduced 78,000 women to sex work at around 1,800 establishments nationwide over a five-year period from 2019. Let those numbers sink in: 78,000 women and 1,800 brothels.
Access earned ¥6 billion in commission, police estimate.
The scout group had contracts with adult entertainment establishments nationwide, and recruited women via social media. They expanded their influence by sending women's profiles, such ...
Tokyo Metropolitan Police announced the arrest of seven men in their twenties on suspicion of violating the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Concerning the Prevention of Disturbing the Peace.
The arrests were announced on June 25. The men are alleged to have been scouts luring women to work at hostess clubs and brothels in the Kabukicho area of Shinjuku, central Tokyo.
The men are thought to be members of the largest scouting group in Japan called Natural. Two of the men have admitted the charge, while the other five claim they are not scouts and did not recruit women.
The arrests are the ...
K-pop star Ju Hak-nyeon has been kicked out of The Boyz for a private meeting with former Japanese porn star Kirara Asuka. He is also accused of paying for sex with her.
His agency announced on June 16 that the 26-year-old was taking a break for undisclosed reasons. He was then fired from The Boyz on June 18. His agency has also let him go.
On June 19, Ju issued a hand-written apology for his liaison with Asuka, though denied paying for sex after it was first reported by Japanese tabloid Shukan Bunshun (it seems that these are initial reports of a scoop, though Bunshun has yet to publish ...
Host and hostess clubs were demonized during the Covid pandemic as superspreaders. Despite the greater need for intimacy among clients, the sex industry also took a big hit but was denied any government handout.
This sparked controversy over perceived discrimination and some fought back: a lawsuit was filed in 2020 over the omission of sex industry businesses like delivery health (outcall escort services) and soaplands from cash relief schemes.
The lawsuit, filed by a call girl service in Kansai and successfully crowdfunded by over 1,000 supporters, was dismissed in 2022 by Tokyo District ...
