Is this the end of the streetwalker (tachinbo) phenomenon in Okubo Park? The area on the edge of Kabukicho, Shinjuku, in central Tokyo became notorious during and shortly after the pandemic for young women standing and waiting for men to solicit sex for as little as ¥10,000 a session.
It prompted a moral panic, driven by social media content and mainstream media reports, amid suggestions that most of the young women were doing it to fund their host club debts (at times directly pimped out by hosts) or pay for their expensive fandom (oshi).
Now Shueisha Online reports that the women have ...
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department has conducted its first coordinated series of inspections on men's concept cafes in Tokyo's Kabukicho district. The inspections revealed illegal practices at 60% of establishments.
Between July 22 and July 23, police carried out simultaneous inspections at 20 men's concept cafes in Shinjuku's Kabukicho, central Tokyo, checking for valid business licenses.
Also known as concafes, concept cafes provide an experience based on a specific theme through costumes and decor. The staff are generally either all men or women. In the same way that a girls' bar ...
A Small Love Story: The World of Mameban Shunga is a new exhibition of erotic prints in Tokyo.
It focuses on mameban (literally, "bean format") shunga, referring to palm-sized prints that were distributed privately in the form of pictorial calendars and given to people like greeting cards. It is the world's first such showcase of shunga in this format, and features around 300 examples.
"These palm-sized prints contain intimate, humorous, and tender love stories," the organizers say. "Though small in scale, they are rich in expression."
The exhibition runs, aptly, from Valentine's Day on ...
It was a rather sad and pitiful end for such a large enterprise. The Marin chain of soaplands came to end on January 30, announced by just a single message on the app LINE.
The chain of around 30 soaplands was run by Morishita Group, a giant in the nightlight and adult services sector in Japan with huge interests in Kabukicho, Shinjuku. This included soaplands in Ikebukuro and Kabukicho, such as the foreigner-friendly soapland Barubola. The Marin Palace (also known as Marin Blue or Marin Mito) was probably the best-known location, renowned for its luxurious-looking and kitsch facilities. It ...
In November, Bunshun published a two-part report about an elderly female prostitute, based on a book by Mizuho Takagi about street prostitution in the Kabukicho district of Shinjuku, Tokyo. The same book included an interview with a teen prostitute in Kabukicho, previously introduced in October.
One morning in Kabukicho, Takagi called out to an elderly woman crouching on the asphalt and got to know her. Kumi (not her real name) was standing on the street, working as an elderly streetwalker for ¥3,000 a session. She looked to be over 60 years old. He gradually came to learn her story.
Born ...
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 ...
