Drinking tea with Tokyo’s seniors: 70-year-old man busted for pimping out the elderly

Our image of the pimp is typically a young wannabe gangster, flashy clothes with sunshades and a toothpick in his teeth.

Beware an old man in a hurry, as the saying has it. The elderly chap in spectacles might just be rushing around arranging sexual encounters for his fellow older acquaintances.

Such was the case in Tokyo where the 70-year-old Kiyohide Kuroda was arrested for organizing meet-ups between older men and women in coffee shops, which would then lead onto some more vigorous encounters.

Kuroda’s arrest stems specifically from a meeting he arranged between a male 67-year-old company employee and a 65-year-old female prostitute, who met at a coffee shop in Tokyo in August.

For ten years Kuroda was placing classified ads in the Tokyo Shimbun advertising his San Ai (Three Loves) services. He would then coordinate people via his “tea-drinking friends introduction club” to have sex.

It is being reported in the media that he assisted 1,000 men and 350 women in this way. The average age was 65, though his oldest male customer was a sprightly 88 while one woman hit a feisty 82!

Of course, Kuroda wasn’t a charity and was earning money as commission. There was a 5,000 joining fee and then men who wanted to take things further had to pay around 20,000 yen each time. It is said Kuroda earned 30 million yen over the last decade.

San Ai was based in Katsushika Ward’s Shin Koiwa, a borough not short on the elderly. And we know that the senior citizens of east Tokyo are full of sexual energy.

The Tokyo Shimbun newspaper is also in hot water for advertising sex services, albeit through euphemisms. For years it was getting a nice monthly fee from San Ai and had in theory checked that the ads were legal. However, Kuroda maintains the code word was comprehensible to those looking for liaisons.

“I used ‘tea-drinking companions’ because I didn’t want to give the impression that it was a sex business,” he said. “I thought people seeking prostitutes understood what it meant.”