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 ...
The Japanese interweb is raving over Ai Tano (田野和彩), a 21-year-old employee at a girls bar in Ikebukuro, Tokyo.
Netizens are beside themselves at how in the images of her doing the perp walk for the media, she looks just like a model or celebrity (we think there's something of Mei Nagano about her). Talk about a femme fatale!
Ms. Tano's attractive face aside, we're not going to sugarcoat this: she's accused of a very unpleasant crime. As detailed by Tokyo Reporter, Tano faces of charge of forcing a colleague to engage in sex work in Okubo Park, currently a hub for street ...
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 ...
Another day, another news story about Okubo Park prostitution as the moral panic over street walkers in the area and Kabukicho host club debt and addiction continues.
The latest tale of woe is the arrest of a 53-year-old man, Atsuhiro Kodama, on child prostitution charges on October 18, after he took a 16-year-old high schooler he picked up in Okubo Park to a nearby love hotel.
To pay for her obsession with male underground idols (chika idol), she apparently starting doing papakatsu (sugar daddy compensated dating). Someone on social media told her that you can earn a lot of money doing ...
The tabloid Weekly Friday has reported on two scammers who are terrorizing unsuspecting men they pick up through dating and matchmaking apps.
The first is dubbed Glans Dash Yuri.
Yuri apparently agrees to meet guys on an app for compensated dating. She sets the fee as ¥20,000 and they meet somewhere like outside a fast food restaurant near Seibu Shinjuku Station, which is a short walk to the love hotels in Okubo-Kabukicho.
They go to a really basic love hotel with a small room, bed, and shower (these may not even be in a love hotel but just a "rental room" in a multi-tenant building). ...
With the current boom in international tourists coming to Japan, many popular sightseeing destinations are uncomfortably crowded.
But it's not just the usual suspects that tourists are apparently keen to see.
In Tokyo, along with Ginza, Shibuya, Asakusa, and the like, visitors are also reportedly fans of going to Okubo Park, on the edge of Kabukicho, Shinjuku.
As we have written about several times, this park has become the center of a moral panic about young women publicly offering themselves for sex.
Despite the huge size of the sex industry here, streetwalkers are a relatively rare ...
