Four Okubo Park prostitutes arrested for defrauding foreign men

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 women are charging very low fees for full sex.

According to news reports late last week, four women — all in their twenties — were arrested for scamming men who subsequently made complaints to police about not receiving sex.

The women would hang out at Okubo Park, waiting for customers to pick them up. When they went to a nearby love hotel, they’d take the fee but then promptly leave the room.

They particularly accepted offers from elderly or foreign men because the likelihood of them being undercover cops is lower, and they probably assumed such men would be easier to defraud. Okubo Park has become a kind of tourist attraction in recent months due to the proliferation of online videos about the “tachinbo” situation. Clearly, some male tourists go to Okubo to pick up women. The cheap yen makes Japan a sex tourism paradise, unless you get scammed.

The women would promise something like “I’ll go with you to a hotel for ¥10,000” but then claim in the room that they fulfilled their side of the bargain, and make a quick getaway. Unfortunately, some of the foreigners were not too embarrassed to go to the police. Eleven such cases were reported in around nine months. We suspect it is the specific targeting of foreign tourists that attracted police attention to these women out of the countless at Okubo Park nightly.

Police also received some 40 reports about “stolen wallets” from defrauded customers.

The Okubo Park women are like a community. One the women arrested, 20-year-old Miyu Aoyagi, created a group chat in which she shared pics of undercover police and updates about patrols to warn other prostitutes.

Aoyagi allegedly made $750,000 in two years, only to spend it all at host clubs. A key part of the police and media narrative is that the Okubo Park prostitution is driven by women addicted to host clubs. While no doubt true to some extent — and host clubs are certainly driving many women into debt and even actively involved in prostitution — it is surely far too simplistic a narrative to explain the numbers of women and their willingness to engage in sex work so openly. But every story needs a villain, of course, and host clubs provide that.

One of the benefits of using a sex service like a delivery health establishment is, though bait and switch may happen, the woman is not going to run away with your money, but that is always a risk with freelance streetwalkers or women encountered on apps. This latest story follows a report last September about two particularly notorious women who would scam men they met through dating apps and offer compensated dating (a euphemism for sex work).