Meet Sumika Hori, Keio graduate and former soapland sex worker, and now administrative scrivener

The Japanese tabloid Flash has run an extraordinary interview with a former soapland sex worker with an elite education, and today works as an administrative scrivener.

Sumika Hori (保利澄香) was born into an elite family of doctors in Akita Prefecture, in northern Japan.

She endured humiliating experiences during childhood, such as being called fat by her family, and she ran away from her family home. She successfully escaped by enrolling in a high school with a dormitory in Kanagawa Prefecture, near Tokyo, but voluntarily withdrew due to various circumstances, leading to an unstable lifestyle.

She then scraped by on part-time modeling work, before decided to become a soapland sex worker to achieve complete financial independence. She actively sought recruitment via social media.

Incredibly, she was open with her parents about her new choice of career, but they reacted with apparent detachment. “Do whatever you want,” he mother asked. Her father reportedly just asked about the waves. “How much can you make? One or two million yen a month? Is that all?”

She started at a low-end soapland in Kawasaki but found the creepy, toothless middle-aged male customers too much. Hori was approached by a street recruiter and moved up to a high-end establishment, still in Kawasaki.

During this time, she also obtained her high school equivalency certification while working and used her earnings to study for university entrance exams. She passed the entrance exam for the Faculty of Law at Keio University, arguably the most prestigious (and expensive) private colleges in Japan.

When she turned 20, she switched to a high-end soapland in Yoshiwara, a red-light district in Tokyo, where establishments don’t hire underage women.

She was at Keio during the pandemic, so she would attend classes remotely on the Wi-Fi at her soapland in Yoshiwara. (Given the penchant for University of Tokyo faculty to visit Yoshiwara, we wonder if she ever feared meeting her own professors at work.

At this point, she was banking ¥3 million a month — for many young graduates, an annual salary. But unlike many sex workers and hostesses, she chose to save the money instead of spending it on luxury brands and jewelry, and her fellow students were clueless about her side job in the sex industry because she dressed like any ordinary undergraduate.

At work, though, she was open with her customers, who perhaps liked the fact that they were being serviced by a Keio student majoring in law. She also wrote about her studies on the shop’s blog. Hori ended up as a kind of consultant to the soapland’s clients, offering legal advice in between the other stuff, though sometimes these consultations consumed all a client’s alloted time.

She successfully graduated and then, at the age of 25, launched a company taking promotional and business portraits for soapland workers in Yoshiwara. She was also studying for the bar exam and still working at the soapland, but then decided to switch from professions from lawyer to administrative scrivener.

Her personal life was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a little messy.

Hori was also married at this time to a management consultant 15 years her senior. She married him at the age of 20, having met him on a dating app. But after five years of marriage, her husband asked her to accompany him on an overseas posting, and she refused, leading to a divorce. He was apparently blissfully unaware of her soapland work.

At 26, she remarried another man 15 years her senior who is also a consultant at a foreign company. They met through papakatsu (sugar dating). The marriage didn’t last more than three months because of his alleged infidelity (though her soapland work would also surely qualify).

She subsequently married a doctor she met on a dating app. Third time lucky, you might think, but no. She is currently in divorce mediation.

Hori tells Flash that she thinks a large age gap might be the problem, and is currently living with a 30-year-old man. To make matters a little complicated, though, he is financially dependent on her.

Now 27, she has retired from soapland work and focuses entirely on her career as an administrative scrivener. She has an office in front of Meguro Station and employs a team of 10.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is more than enough material for a Netflix series or two!

“I consider myself lucky,” Hori says. “Whenever I see women working in the nightlife industry getting caught up in incidents, I realize that, but for a single wrong turn, it could have been me. That is why I want to use my role as an administrative scrivener to help them. I can connect them with lawyers, mental health social workers, and organizations like Fu-Terrace (an NPO where lawyers and social workers provide free consultations to sex industry workers). I am truly grateful to be able to serve as that kind of hub.”