More details are emerging about the prostitution ring that preyed on young women in Osaka.
As reported widely last month, police arrested Yusuke Kimura (34) and Koki Hideshima (24) for recruiting teenaged girls, violating the Anti-Prostitution Law and Child Welfare Law.
The girls were recruited from the Gurishita area of downtown Osaka (a district known as Minami). Gurishita is the spot near the Dotombori canal under the famous Glico Man billboard. It has become a notorious gathering place for underage delinquents and runaways, and a hotbed of prostitution and crime. Commentators have ...
Crime doesn't pay, they say, but it seems that's not true if you're in the recruitment racket for prostitutes.
According to multiple media reports, a scouting group called Access introduced 78,000 women to sex work at around 1,800 establishments nationwide over a five-year period from 2019. Let those numbers sink in: 78,000 women and 1,800 brothels.
Access earned ¥6 billion in commission, police estimate.
The scout group had contracts with adult entertainment establishments nationwide, and recruited women via social media. They expanded their influence by sending women's profiles, such ...
While train gropers (chikan) are a well-known problem in Japan, people exposing themselves (particularly men to younger women) is another variant that combines the thrill of exhibitionism with the crueler fetish of enjoying the discomfort it induces on a vulnerable woman.
The classic choice of locations for such flashing is a public park, but it is also often done on a crowded train where the victim has no way to escape.
A train like the Shinkansen, which provides high-speed, long-distance rail services across Japan, might seem like an illogical choice. After exposing himself, the man has ...
If you're dating a sex worker half your age, chances are things are going to get complicated.
And so it proved for a man in his fifties in the west of Shizuoka Prefecture, who was involved with a 22-year-old sex worker in the nearby city of Shimada.
According to a report by SBS on June 9, the unnamed woman was arrested on June 8 for sending a message in which she threatened to kill the man and his family.
"I'll kill you and your whole family," she allegedly wrote in a message to the man sent on the app LINE.
The woman works at a local brothel. It is not known how she and the man began ...
University teachers are generally seen as figures of respect in Japan, like elsewhere, but they sometimes do things that seriously endanger that status.
Who can forget the Taisho University educator who was found wandering the campus in the buff, having been ordered to strip off by his student lover?
But the case of a 49-year-old associate professor at the University of Toyama's Information Technology Center trumps that.
Toyama police re-arrested Hiroshi Takitani, a natural disaster and computational scientist, on June 2 on suspicion of fraud and extortion, having already been charged with ...
A Japanese man has been arrested for public indecency after exposing his lower body to a woman on the streets of Hongo, Tokyo, in January.
The 29-year-old Masaya Yamada was arrested in April, though the crime was only reported this week in the Japanese media. The incident took place on the night of January 18. The victim was a woman in her twenties.
It seems that the arrest also led police to discover other crimes carried out by Yamada in previous months.
In addition to silently exposing himself in January, Yamada is accused of getting sexual pleasure from urinating on children's bicycles ...
Two Japanese women in their thirties have been arrested for defrauding a Shizuoka man of ¥900,000 in cash after they met him on a dating app.
The two women, who are both in their early thirties, persuaded the man (also in his thirties) that they needed the money for hospital fees.
The women, unnamed in media reports are aged 34 and 31, and live in Chuo ward and Shinjuku's Okubo district in Tokyo.
Police suspect the pair of engaging in badger game to cheat him of money between May 22 and May 24 last year, claiming the money was for hospital fees (presumably to get tested for sexually ...
On May 17, Sapporo Higashi Police Station arrested a 34-year-old company employee from Higashi Ward of Sapporo on suspicion of setting up a phone in his workplace's restroom and then photographing the genitals of a woman in her thirties at around 6 p.m. on May 16.
The incident came to light after the woman came to the police station at around 10:30 p.m. on May 16, reporting that she had been photographed secretly in the company restroom. It is not clear from media reports how she knew but she presumably found the phone, which must have been a chilling experience to say the least.
The man ...
Korean brokers of Japanese prostitutions have been sentenced by a court in Seoul.
According to Korea Wave, the Supreme Court of Korea dismissed the appeal of two Korean brokers on April 25, upholding the original ruling against the men of prison sentences of two years and one year and eight months.
Between November 2023 and May 2024, the pair helped approximately 80 Japanese women enter South Korea and arranged for them to become prostitutes in Seoul and Gyeonggi. Based in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, they advertised on a website under the name "Girls of the Archipelago," recruiting ...
Readers with longer memories may well remember the shocking case of Yuka Takaoka, the young hostess who almost killed her host boyfriend in 2019. The shocking nature of the crime -- stabbing the guy with a kitchen knife and leaving him in a pool of blood while she sat on the floor, smoking a cigarette, and talking on the phone call -- and her cute looks earned Takaoka a legion of followers online in the wake of her arrest. She was proclaimed a living example of a yandere or jiraikei girl.
The impact of the case was amplified by certain visuals: the image that quickly appeared of Takaoka ...
