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 ...
A gang has been arrested for robbing and assaulting a foreign man as he exited a love hotel with a prostitute he had picked up in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
The eight people allegedly surrounded the man in his fifties, taunted him for his actions and threatened to tell others, and then beat and robbed him of the cash he was carrying -- ¥1.1 million -- in a rucksack. With that much cash on his person, he was either a bit naive or planning to have a lot of fun in Kabukicho.
The incident took place back in February this year and the victim required a month to recover from his injuries. Earlier in ...
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 ...
One of the biggest stories over the summer was the arrest of four Okubo Park prostitutes for defrauding foreign men. The women seemed to encapsulate all the elements of the tachinbo (streetwalker) moral panic: desperate girls, swiped wallets, horny tourists, and addiction to host clubs.
With claims that they had made hundreds of thousands of dollars over two years and that cases of fraud with customers were on the rise, these four sparked a febrile reaction from netizens, who nicknamed them the Four Heavenly Kings of tachinbo (after the Buddhist protectors of the world).
Shueisha Online ...
Friday has published an interview with a teenager who is a tachinbo streetwalker in Okubo Park to pay for her host club addiction.
"I've become addicted to host clubs and now I'm working in Kabukicho," the teenager confesses, saying she has sex with three men a day for ¥20,000 a pop.
"My day and night cycle is reversed. I sleep until the afternoon and head to Kabukicho in the evening. I stand in front of a hotel until dawn, waiting for a man to approach me."
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department arrested 35 women in their 20s to 40s on suspicion of violating the Anti-Prostitution Act ...
The post-COVID uptick in streetwalkers in the Okubo Park area of Kabukicho, Tokyo, has been a media obsession for some time in Japan, generating a moral panic over the young age of the women and also some embarrassment because it has coincided with the huge rise in tourist numbers in Japan.
In the age of social media, going to rubberneck the lines of prostitutes at Okubo Park has become an activity for tourists to do as well as contributed to the notion that Tokyo is already a destination for sex tourism like Bangkok. Of course, approaching women on the street does not come without risk and ...
The moral panic about young prostitutes in Okubo Park near Kabukicho in Shinjuku, Tokyo, just took a new twist with the arrest of four women for defrauding men, especially foreign tourists.
Ongoing for some time, the Okubo Park issue has been a big news story, filled with salacious detail about young women standing around in the area, waiting for men to pick them up for money. While there's nothing new about prostitution in Kabukicho, it is rare to see so many young Japanese women openly engaged in sex work (most streetwalkers tend to be Chinese, since it is more dangerous and public). Such ...
Tokyo Metropolitan Police announced the arrest of seven men in their twenties on suspicion of violating the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Concerning the Prevention of Disturbing the Peace.
The arrests were announced on June 25. The men are alleged to have been scouts luring women to work at hostess clubs and brothels in the Kabukicho area of Shinjuku, central Tokyo.
The men are thought to be members of the largest scouting group in Japan called Natural. Two of the men have admitted the charge, while the other five claim they are not scouts and did not recruit women.
The arrests are the ...
Police have raided a brothel that offered services to foreign tourists, arresting seven for violating the prostitution law.
The establishment in Kabukicho, central Tokyo, provided Japanese sex workers for overseas visitors.
Police proudly showed the fruits of their efforts to reporters on February 4, which included English-language information ("Our shop provides Japanese-style service by Japanese girl. The service content may differ from that in your home country"), multiple phones, and cash in sixteen currencies.
The 54-year-old Japanese manager and other arrested six members of staff ...
A month ago, we wrote about the trial of former House of Representatives member Tamotsu Shiiki underway at Tokyo District Court, accused of sexually assaulting a junior high school first grader in a karaoke parlor in Kabukicho.
Shiiki's excuse was that he "didn't ejaculate." He also tried to claim that he was trying to help the 12-year-old in August last year. "I wanted to do something for her because she was a runaway. She was looking for someone to talk to." This claim rather falls down when we consider that Shiiki went to buy personal lubricant before taking the student to the karaoke ...
