One of the biggest stories over the summer was the arrest of four Okubo Park prostitutes for defrauding foreign men. The women seemed to encapsulate all the elements of the tachinbo (streetwalker) moral panic: desperate girls, swiped wallets, horny tourists, and addiction to host clubs.
With claims that they had made hundreds of thousands of dollars over two years and that cases of fraud with customers were on the rise, these four sparked a febrile reaction from netizens, who nicknamed them the Four Heavenly Kings of tachinbo (after the Buddhist protectors of the world).
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Given the unregulated nature of the sex industry and the recent proliferation of dodgy, host-addicted young ladies doing tachinbo (streetwalking), it's expected that a client might be on guard, worried about losing his wallet or receiving a visit from the cops because the girl is actually underage.
What they might not expect is for the prostitute to dob you into the cops!
That's what happened at a hotel in Kitakyushu, where an elementary school teacher was arrested after a call girl tipped off police over the presence of weed, which was wrapped in paper and disguised as a ...
It's not a shock to anyone that the officers in the vise squad are probably getting a few freebies. But to see it described in plain print and blunt detail still raises eyebrows.
A former senior police officer in Wakayama received free services at an illegal brothel for eight years. As broken in a scoop from Weekly Bunshun, Yasuhiro Horiuchi allegedly used his power over a soapland and exploit it for freebies, according to testimony from a former operator.
"For eight years, I was extorted by a senior Wakayama Prefectural Police officer. He used his police authority to force me to provide ...
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 ...
