Parco, a leading department store chain in Japan, has issued an apology after it used a "sex booth" to promote an event.
The installation was decked out in the style of the "free information" kiosks (muryo annaijo) that are found in certain city districts for providing listings, referrals, and recommendations about various forms of sex services (fuzoku), including blowjob parlors, delivery health, and soaplands, and also hostess clubs and girls bars.
Though less common as they were in the days before everyone had access to the internet on their phones, such adult booths are still found in ...
We stumbled upon this confessional post on Amina du Jean's Substack, billed as "a digital temple for positive femininity." The title, "Crazy Sexy Tokyo," is provocative and sounds like another "wacky Japan" story at first, but we were especially intrigued to read the author's insights into compensated dating (enjo kosai).
Writing about her personal experiences of participating in this social "custom" of young women, in which they go on dates with (older) men and receive monetary "compensation" for their troubles, the author is very candid and doesn't resort to the more obvious ...
A few years ago, various shops began to appear in places like Akihabara offering services like hugs, ear-cleaning, "snuggling," massages, and "reflexology." However, like how massage parlors may provide more than just a massage, some of the "cuddle cafe" (soine-ten) establishments merely used these services as fronts for forms of prostitution. A police crackdown ensued and we actually thought there were very few, if any, left.
It seems that such places are still around and up to their old tricks, operating under the guise of rifure-ten (reflexology shops).
A rifure-ten chain, Rapunzel ...
The growing problem of syphilis in Japan is not new: we've been writing about it for years now. But it simples that it won't get better any time soon. Just when you think cases can't rise anymore or that the coronavirus pandemic would at least slow its relentless spread, along comes the latest batch of statistics to prove you wrong.
We are only a quarter of the way through the year but number of cases of syphilis in Japan is already up yet again, reports the Mainichi.
Compared to the same period last year -- whose overall figure reached a record high -- the number of syphilis cases has ...
Be careful what that young lady offers you: it probably is too good to be true.
When the fiftysomething man from Ibaraki met the 28-year-old Chiharu Yamaguchi through a fuzoku (brothel) service three years ago, he thought all his Christmases had come at once. They started exchanging messages via LINE and he came to believe they were a couple.
She promised she would be with him till death. Thinking she would marry him, the man agreed to her requests for money that she said she needed to pay back her student loan or her mother's operations. She is alleged to have tricked the unnamed man out ...
It's almost time to declare taxes in Japan, so we were particularly amused by this story in the news. Tokyo Taxation Bureau has announced the punishment of a 27-year-old female employee at one of its branches for breaching its rules on civil servants having side jobs.
The nature of the side job probably didn't help.
The unnamed woman was actually working at a soapland as a sex worker. For her troubles, she has been handed down a nine-month suspension, the bureau announced at the end of January.
She was working at soaplands from October 2020 to January 2022 at weekday nights and on days ...
The tabloid magazine Weekly Bunshun has published an interview with someone they give the alias Yuna Ishihara, who is apparently a 24-year-old student at Tokyo College of Music.
But she also appears in adult video and works at a soapland in Yoshiwara, Tokyo's long-established red-light district in the east of the city.
But due to the pandemic, her income of ¥900,000 (around $9,000) a month has massively decreased, leading her to take up papakatsu.
As reported before, this is a euphemism for compensated dating with older men (sugar daddies). The principle is hardly new but the term has ...
It's probably Tokyo's most famous and futuristic pieces of architecture: the Nakagin Capsule Tower.
Despite its repute, it's an endangered species: demolition of the Metabolist landmark has been scheduled for a long time.
People have continued to reside in the pod-like pied-à-terre living units or use them as office spaces. Or for other uses, it seems.
We had never heard of this before but it seems that certain capsule rooms in Nakagin were used by prostitutes to service customers.
In Tokyo, a brothel-style fuzoku service typically has its own little place with basic facilities. ...
Is compensated dating with sugar daddies increasing among Japanese women due to remote working?
Bunshun Online had an intriguing article suggesting something to that effect. It interviews a 24-year-old female office worker who has started doing "papakatsu," a newly coined kind of compensated dating where younger women go on dates with older men.
She started her new sideline in January and over the course of the past few months, has met over 60 men this way.
The woman says that shifting to working remotely has changed her whole daily schedule, making it more flexible, whole semi-lockdowns ...
The casting couch is one of the open secrets of the idol industry. Another one is the extra money that idols (music, gravure, AV), seiyu, models, and actors earn from compensated dating.
This gets exposed at regular intervals by tabloid scoops. One such scandal caused Shoko Takahashi to lose her agency as a gradol (when she worked as Shoko Takasaki) and launched her porn career.
The JAV star Yuria Satomi had trouble with the tax agency in 2016 over huge amounts of undeclared income from her "boyfriends," who compensated her financially for their relationship.
The latest scandal was broken ...
