The residents of a condo block near JR Nakano Station in the west of Tokyo started to become suspicious about some of the apartments in their building. Every day, different men seemed to come and go out of the apartments. Those well-meaning but perhaps a little nosy neighbors even went so far as to contact the cops, who promptly investigated. Sure enough, those gentlemen callers were up to no good -- at least, in the eyes of the law. A business called Nakano Men's Esthe Renga Spa was operating out of 33 apartments in the building, providing sex services to male clients. The police ...

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The moral panic over host clubs and prostitution in Japan continues unabated with a story yesterday in the Tokyo Shimbun about a 20-year-old woman whose whopping ¥10 million debt to a club prompted her to begin doing sex work. While still a high school student in Kanagawa, she went to a host club in Yokohama in autumn 2021. The chandeliers and attention of the hosts seduced her, and she was hooked. She ended up with a debt of ¥10 million, forcing her into prostitution at Okubo Park, Kabukicho, to pay it off. The club was demanding she pay back as much as ¥300,000 a day. Even after she ...

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While the Japanese mainstream media and social media seems obsessed right now with young women reduced to prostituting themselves in Okubo Park, Kabukicho, allegedly over host club debts, people in Yokohama are apparently upset over a "surge" in trans sex workers. Before the pandemic, the Asahi reports, just two male prostitutes were detained in 2019. But several male prostitutes presenting as women have been arrested since May this year by Kanagawa police. The suspects are from Thailand, the Philippines, and Peru. Cameras were installed the monitor the activities on the streets and police ...

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The surge in streetwalkers at Okubo Park near Kabukicho, Shinjuku's red-light district, has prompted a media panic over the last year or so, not least because the women seem very young. A lot of media reports have indicated that the women are doing sex work to pay off debts or fund their trips to host clubs. The latter have been demonized by the media and politicians of late, and lawmakers are trying to target "malicious clubs" that trap vulnerable women in a spiral of debt. The streetwalkers are also perhaps not as freelance as you might think, as one case indicates. A 27-year-old ...

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One of the biggest trends of the year has been the crackdown on prostitution in Okubo and Kabukicho, especially very young women soliciting customers on the streets. Most prostitution in Japan operates through structured services, such as "delivery health" call girl services that send a sex worker to your hotel room. With the gentrification of the main parts of Kabukicho into a tourist attraction, it can be easy for some to overlook the seedy nature of the backstreets and forget that it borders an entire block of love hotels that stretch all the way to Okubo. And that streetwalkers are ...

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The YouTuber Takashii, who provided the interesting video we reposted recently about Japanese women and their attraction toward foreign men (or non-attraction, as the case may be), has produced a couple more videos with interviews about the old saw: adultery. His latest provocative topic is on adultery in Japan, especially cheating on a partner with sex workers. He asks some women for their opinions and some men. They give a range of responses, but the general gist is that the women don't seem to mind if their men cheat on them with fuzoku (sex workers/services). In fact, this doesn't ...

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One of the bigger and somewhat stranger media stories of the last few days in Japan has been the case of a influencer from Osaka who was denied entry to Hawaii. Considering the millions of tourists who enter Hawaii annually -- many of them from Japan -- it might seem like an odd story. The border officer became suspicious of Karen Okajima because she had written she was an office worker on her ESTA immigration form but seemed to have a lot of clothing in her luggage for someone traveling alone. The 32-year-old says she was taken to a private room and questioned for a long time. She ...

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Last year, police in Hong Kong cracked down on foreign sex workers, arresting several women including former Japanese porn star Noa Aizawa. It's well known that active and former adult video performers do sex work. It can be especially lucrative to engage in such work outside Japan, particularly other parts of Asia, where JAV is immensely popular. If your career is flagging in Japan or you want a change of pace, you can enjoy a good lifestyle with affluent clients abroad. It seems that situation in Hong Kong is much the same, with media reporting the arrest on September 5 of 11 members of a ...

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Firefighters in Japan have a reputation for being pretty macho and sexually active. This reputation is arguably not unearned, as past scandals have shown. Remember the hunky firefighters who stripped off for charity? Or the Osaka firefighters who got suspended for appearing in porn? Or the male and female firefighters in Nagoya who were caught having sex at work? Now apparently comes the news that two male firefighters in Ichomiya, Aichi Prefecture, have been caught working a side job. What's the rumpus? Well, the scandal -- and why it got reported in the news -- is that their side ...

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What is about female politicians in Japan at the moment? Just days after learning about Japan Innovation Party lawmaker's role in a past porn production, we now find out that Yuri Saito (斎藤ゆり), a one-time candidate for Politician Girls 48 Party, is alleged to have been a sex worker and nude model. Well, we shouldn't be too surprised. She was a candidate for SJJ48 (as the party dubbed itself, parodying AKB48), alongside a bevy of other women with unusual backgrounds. Hasumin Yoshikawa, for instance, was a former Self-Defense Forces nurse and sex worker, and then embarked on a porn ...

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