Eight arrested for beating and robbing foreign man outside love hotel with sex worker

A gang has been arrested for robbing and assaulting a foreign man as he exited a love hotel with a prostitute he had picked up in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

The eight people allegedly surrounded the man in his fifties, taunted him for his actions and threatened to tell others, and then beat and robbed him of the cash he was carrying — ¥1.1 million — in a rucksack. With that much cash on his person, he was either a bit naive or planning to have a lot of fun in Kabukicho.

The incident took place back in February this year and the victim required a month to recover from his injuries. Earlier in October, police arrested the eight of alleged perpetrators in their twenties. The reason for the gap is unclear, though presumably the investigation took time to identify the perpetrators and so on from security camera footage. If they were Kabukicho regulars, the cops would have been able to find them eventually.

They presumably knew the victim had picked up the woman (almost certainly in the Okubo Park area of Kabukicho) and then waited till he was finished at the hotel near Shin-Okubo Station, on the edge of the Kabukicho district. It is believed that the young woman who entered the hotel with the man was also part of their gang. Perhaps she realized how much cash he had and alerted her friends in the Toyoko area of central Kabukicho to assist her in robbing him, though we are just speculating about that.

One of the arrested was shown yawning as he was transferred from a police detention cell. (The Japanese media are always informed by the police when this is taking place, so they are waiting to film suspects being moved.)

The notoriety of Okubo Park in Kabukicho, Shinjuku, as a place to pick up young streetwalkers (tachinbo) has grown so big that the place is crawling with undercover cops. It has also become famous on social media, so much so that many tourists now go to take a look or hire a young woman.

In the midst of this crackdown and an inbound tourism boom, many streetwalkers are now keen to go with tourists because they can charge more and the foreigners definitely won’t be cops. However, there are risks for the foreign tourists, as the recent cases of theft have shown.

This latest incident proves it is far safer to pay a bit more and use an established outcall service.