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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A few weeks ago, we reported on the rise in highly visible prostitution in the Okubo area of Shinjuku, located next to the notorious entertainment and red-light district of Kabukicho. Recent attempts to gentrify Kabukicho notwithstanding, you are still only a short walk away from a blow-job parlor and a huge bevy of love hotels, which stretch all the way to Okubo. The latter has now become a well-known and flagrant place for picking up street walkers, who are otherwise relatively rare sights in the city. Most sex workers operate from "delivery health" businesses as call girls dispatched to ...

For the most part in Japan, prostitution is not visible. Sure, if you can understand the euphemism and codes in the signage, you can see fuzoku brothels everywhere, normally in the form of places where you can go for "introductions" to sex workers. But though call girls are visible entering and leaving love hotels, or you might seem female escorts waiting for a car or sitting in a vehicle outside a love hotel, it's relatively rare to see streetwalkers in Tokyo -- as in, actual prostitutes hanging around outside and trying to pick up clients (known as tachinbo in Japanese). There are ...