Interview with a 16-year-old Japanese sex worker

Bunshun Online has published a three-part interview with a 16-year-old Japanese sex worker who, she claims, has sold her body to over 50 men in Kabukicho.

But unlike other similar tales, Kanae (not her real name) wasn’t doing this because she was in debt or had run away from home. Her motive was simply to get money “to have fun.”

And it apparently paid off, literally: she earned ¥140,000 on her best days and had sex with over 50 men.

“I don’t remember exactly,” she says, but estimates she earned at least ¥2 million during her time as a streetwalker.

“A middle-aged man even asked me to smell his boots for ¥10,000,” she says, in one of the more outlandish details in the interview, which is an excerpt from Mizuho Takagi’s Reportage: Street Prostitution in Kabukicho Shinjuku.

But she grew tired of selling her body to random men and eventually left the industry.

What happened to that ¥2 million? She apparently squandered much of it on impulse purchases of clothes and extravagant meals. It was a lot of money for a 16-year-old, and her daily life became more glamorous, but her body began to cry out in pain, even to the extent that her vulva tore and she got a sexually transmitted disease.

But the main reason she continued to sell her body was, ultimately, money. “I don’t like sex, whether it’s with a customer or a boyfriend. It doesn’t feel good; it just hurts me from the friction. So I was really only doing it for the money.”

We think this is quite common: many women engaged in sex work (regular prostitution or compensated dating) either really like sex (so are happy to do it with different, even random, people) or actually don’t feel anything from it (so don’t care who they do it with).

Of course, it does take a mental toll. “It definitely started to make me sick.”

And there was a learning curve.

“On my first day, I only got a single customer. I had to constantly act, smiling politely and pretending to be in the mood. I just hated being held by older men. I was shocked by how tough it was to do sex work. But when it was over and I got ¥25,000, I felt relieved. So much money in such a short time. It means ¥100,000 if I can put up with four guys.”

In Kanae’s case, she was too young to work for a brothel doing “delivery health” service with call girls, or for a soapland or other incall services. She had to go out into the streets to pick up trade.

She says she did have some standards. She would generally turn older men down. “But if the price was high enough, I would pretend to be in the mood so as not to look too annoyed.”

In the end, Kanae claims that the older customers made her stop. “Having sex with an older man every day definitely started to make me sick. It made me go on impulse purchases. So even though it felt like I was saving money, I wasn’t. It was really tough mentally. I started to think that maybe I don’t need to do this now, that I should do sex work once I turned 18, so I quit.”

Kanae, who originally lived in a Tokyo suburb with her salaryman dad, housewife mom, and older brother, was not a freelancer exactly because she was paying “rent” to a yakuza, who lived in an expensive condo in Kabukicho. Nonetheless, she was still able to quit and the gangster didn’t put up much of a fuss about it.

The Bunshun Online article notes that there would be little benefit in forcibly keeping Kanae in Kabukicho, since she could simply go to the police and rat the gangster out, who would then be arrested for trafficking a minor into prostitution.