Just a few days after we reported on the ongoing police crackdown in Kabukicho over drugs, prostitution, and delinquency.
These reports appear literally almost daily now. Hosts arrested for extracting debt payments in dubious ways, such as introducing women to pimps. Young women arrested for soliciting on the street. It's a never-ending conveyor belt of moral outrage, dutifully reported in the mainstream media.
The most shocking stories are those that involve underage girls: some hosts are so desperate for money and so unscrupulous that they exploit minors.
The latest story is in a similar ...
The police crackdown continues on the phenomenon known as Toyoko kids, referring to the young delinquents gathering in the main plaza in Kabukicho at night.
Delinquency in Shinjuku's Kabukicho is absolutely nothing new but the current issue was sparked, in part, by the pandemic and is spatially different now, with young people gathering in one main location and the optics at nighttime contrasting with the "clean" Kabukicho.
The crackdown is linked to the attempts to gentrify Kabukicho and turn it into a tourist-friendly destination, even at night, which is ongoing for several years, and the ...
The media-driven moral panic over visible prostitution in Okubo Park has sparked a crackdown on host clubs, since at least some of the young woman engaged in selling their body in the area near Kabukicho, Tokyo, are doing it to pay their debts at host clubs.
There is a similar moral panic over the youngsters who gather at Toyoko, though young people up to no good in Kabukicho is totally in keeping with the history of the area -- it just jars with the attempts by the Shinjuku government and land developers to gentrify the district. The so-called Toyoko kids at Toyoko are rumored to be ...
More bad news coverage about male hosts as the moral panic over this industry continues.
A Kabukicho host was arrested early last week for allegedly exploiting and prostituting a junior high school student who owed his club around ¥6 million.
The 22-year-old host Renji (Yuya Inaba) works at the appropriately named Worst Over in Kabukicho, central Tokyo. He is also accused of bringing the girl into his club when she was just 15 years old and serving her alcohol, including a very expensive "champagne tower" order.
The student used her mother's credit card and cash from her grandmother to ...
Q. Please introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do?
My name is Pickles Bourne, and I am a nightlife ambassador in Tokyo, Japan.
I work at a company called Kaku-Butsu, which operates a prostitution shop review website in Japan. At Kaku-Butsu, we created a website for visitors who want sexual services called Japanese HENTAI Girls Collection (JHGC). JHGC offers a concierge service, offering you a personalized selection of companions that fulfills your request. My job is to support tourists and visitors in Japan to experience the best out of what Japan has to offer, especially in terms ...
The moral panic over host clubs and prostitution in Japan continues unabated with a story yesterday in the Tokyo Shimbun about a 20-year-old woman whose whopping ¥10 million debt to a club prompted her to begin doing sex work.
While still a high school student in Kanagawa, she went to a host club in Yokohama in autumn 2021. The chandeliers and attention of the hosts seduced her, and she was hooked.
She ended up with a debt of ¥10 million, forcing her into prostitution at Okubo Park, Kabukicho, to pay it off. The club was demanding she pay back as much as ¥300,000 a day. Even after she ...
The surge in streetwalkers at Okubo Park near Kabukicho, Shinjuku's red-light district, has prompted a media panic over the last year or so, not least because the women seem very young.
A lot of media reports have indicated that the women are doing sex work to pay off debts or fund their trips to host clubs. The latter have been demonized by the media and politicians of late, and lawmakers are trying to target "malicious clubs" that trap vulnerable women in a spiral of debt.
The streetwalkers are also perhaps not as freelance as you might think, as one case indicates.
A 27-year-old ...
The gentrification of Kabukicho, which has turned the main strip and square into a cleaner, more tourist-friendly place, has not changed the fundamental nature of the district. Just turn a corner and you'll find blowjob parlors and host or hostess clubs galore, not to mention Shinjuku's massive love hotel area right behind.
The dark side of Kabukicho, which gets its name from an unfulfilled plan in the postwar years to build a kabuki theater in the neighborhood, reared its head over the weekend -- in two very unpleasant scenes.
A few weeks ago, someone was thankfully prevented from jumping ...
One of the biggest trends of the year has been the crackdown on prostitution in Okubo and Kabukicho, especially very young women soliciting customers on the streets.
Most prostitution in Japan operates through structured services, such as "delivery health" call girl services that send a sex worker to your hotel room.
With the gentrification of the main parts of Kabukicho into a tourist attraction, it can be easy for some to overlook the seedy nature of the backstreets and forget that it borders an entire block of love hotels that stretch all the way to Okubo. And that streetwalkers are ...
Japan's porn giant Soft on Demand seems finally to have recovered from one of the most bizarre and shocking screw-ups in their history.
SOD Land in Kabukicho suddenly closed down in March this year after police discovered it was violating the law on fuzoku ("amusement businesses") establishments, which covers hostess clubs, brothels, and so on.
Billed as an "adult theme park," SOD Land allows visitors to meet and interact with actual Japanese porn performers (and others like sex workers and hostesses) in various ways across five floors, including bars and a space for viewing performers in ...
