Ministry of Justice to amend Japan’s anti-prostitution law to penalize paying for sex

Japan is inching toward a legal revision that would make it illegal to pay for sex.

As part of a review of the Anti-Prostitution Law, the Ministry of Justice presented a draft report based on prior discussions to an expert panel on August 24, according to the Asahi Shimbun.

The draft outlines a direction to expand the scope of offenses regarding solicitation. At present, solicitation is punishable only for the seller, but the revision would expand this to include the buyer. The proposed revisions would also raise the maximum fine. The ministry is coordinating plans to finalize the report in September and submit an amendment bill to the extraordinary Diet session as early as this autumn.

The panel was chaired by Kayoko Kitagawa, a professor at Waseda University Graduate School.

While current law imposes penalties of imprisonment (or detention) of up to six months or a fine of up to ¥20,000 yen for solicitation by the seller, it does not penalize the buying side at all. Lawmakers and others have pointed out the hypocrisy of this legal situation in which women forced to sell sex are arrested, often to much media fanfare, while the customers get off scot-free as long as the sex worker is above the age of consent.

The draft report notes that multiple committee members argued for the need to rectify the imbalance in the current law, and states that there were no objections to making such acts subject to regulation. The report also proposes ways to penalize solicitation that occurs in public, just as is the case for sex workers (since buying and selling sex in public is of course far worse than doing it behind closed doors).

The revision has been extensively trailed, with the issue widely debated in the media since the legal move was first mooted in early 2026, when the Ministry of Justice announced a panel of experts to begin discussions over revising the current Prostitution Prevention Law to include legal penalties for people who pay for the sex services, not just those who solicit customers.

This development comes in the wake of a years-long media-generated moral panic about young streetwalkers in the Okubo Park area near Kabukicho, Shinjuku, which has become a tourist attraction due to the spread of videos on social media, leading to fears that Japan is becoming a destination for sex tourism. (The Yomiuri Shimbun report on the draft report specifically highlights this as a motivating factor behind the proposed amendment.) There has also been a crackdown in Osaka in east Japan, plus on soapland brothels in regional Japan as well as central Tokyo that has left operators fearful of opening new establishments.

If it did indeed become illegal to pay for sex services, it would have a huge impact on sales for what is currently a massive industry.

A major issue is whether such a legal change would be flexible enough to cover all the various forms of prostitution that exist in Japan, from call girl services to bricks-and-mortar brothels, and papakatsu sugar dating and other types of compensated dating. It would also put to the test the long-established legal workaround that many public-facing sex services use, in which workers nominally only offer nonpenetrative forms of sex to customers in order to not meet the threshold for selling “sex” (though the reality is that once in the room, penetrative sex may very well be available).

The sex industry in Japan has traded in euphemisms for many decades. This expected legal revision will surely lead to new ones to get around accusations of buying and paying for sex.