Manga explains tachinbo street prostitution in English
Just yesterday we posted about the gang of eight thieves who allegedly beat and robbed a foreign man who had picked up a streetwalker. The issue of young streetwalkers, known as tachinbo in Japanese, in the Kabukicho area of Shinjuku, especially around Okubo Park, has become a huge social panic, with media reports and police crackdowns appearing almost weekly, along with the Toyoko kids delinquency problem.
To help explain the tachinbo issue, the manga artist Sugimura (also known as Sugiyan) created a short comic in English as part of the This Is Japan! series. It was published online on October 13, though we only spotted it recently, and have taken the liberty of republishing it here for our readers.
The media and authorities have attempted to explain it by pinning the blame on parasitic host clubs and concafes, which allow emotionally vulnerable young women to build up debts, so they then turn to tachinbo to fund their addiction.
While there are certainly some, if not plenty, of unscrupulous hosts and establishments doing this, sometimes even actively involved in pimping out women, our pet theory is that the numbers of streetwalkers in Okubo suggest a wider, more systemic issue related to deeper socioeconomic malaise.
Sugiyan’s detailed and even-handed manga also rightly points out the larger social pressures that are affecting young women, as well as the historical contexts, from the more recent like the compensated dating moral panic of the 1990s to the forced prostitution of the Edo era.
The manga concludes that the tachinbo crisis is caused not from financial poverty so much as an emotional poverty: the young women, “many” of who have “mild intellectual disabilities,” don’t feel loved enough.
1 Comment
Funny how it always wheels back to “many women are dangerously stupid and can’t be trusted to not make a complete mess of their lives despite living on ez tutorial mode.” If men were as ruinously mentally unstable as these chicks we’d be living in Mad Max land.
Artist is overanalysing it and seeing it from a womans’ perspective – as always. There’s tens of millions of men that would love and cherish these women with every ounce of their heart but they’re not Prince Charmings so they may as well not exist as far as these ‘poor, damaged, desperate-to-be-loved’ whores are concerned.
It’s not just Japan. It’s happening across the developed world. Women have been given the right to choose and they’re deciding en masse that they’ll either marry handsome millionaires, or be cumbuckets for profit. If they can’t manage the former they just do the latter. They feel no shame because they all have their own social media bubbles that will always support whatever they do.
I will say that general whoredom seems to be much more deeply entrenched in Japanese culture. However the rest of us are catching up rapidly since the inception of Onlyfans made ‘being a human toilet’ an instantly accessible ‘career’ for every western girl with a smartphone.