Papakatsu is the new "sugar daddy" genre of compensated dating. For some, it's an easy way for guys who are middle aged or older with some money to have sex with younger women. For others, it's a way to fall victim to crime. In May, a man was almost murdered by woman who looked in reality very different from the cute lady in the pictures she put online. Now comes a fresh cautionary tale. A 25-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of fraud. According to media reports, the host-addicted Mai Watanabe is accused of swindling three men out of ¥156 million through a romance scam. She ...

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Be careful. That cutie you are messaging on that app or website may not be who she says she is. Meeting in person is still the safest way to guarantee someone looks like their picture -- but even this is a risky proposition, as their personality might be homicidal. A cautionary tale about papakatsu has generated headlines in Japan recently. Rino Ito was arrested near Hiratsuka Station on May 4 for attempted murder after stabbing a middle-aged man in the belly with a knife. The 28-year-old called Kanagawa police herself and confessed to the crime, before waiting for officers to arrive and ...

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One of the most sensational stories that has gripped the Japanese media over the past few weeks has involved the arrests and deportations in the Philippines of several young Japanese citizens, who were allegedly part of the "Luffy group" responsible robbery and fraud since 2021 (including from behind bars). The name of the gang is a reference to the manga and anime franchise One Piece. One of the most recently detained citizens was 25-year-old Hitomi Kumai. Japanese police issued a warrant for her arrest last September on fraud charges. She is accused of making phone calls tricking people ...

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There have been various scandals about YouTubers, proving that these new kinds of celebrities are as fallible as the rest of us. But this one is quite a bit more serious than the others. A former member of the YouTuber group Kindan Boys (禁断ボーイズ) has been arrested on suspicion of prostitution. According to various media reports on February 14, Mohrii (Kohei Mori) is accused of recruiting clients via a dating app by posing as a woman. Another four members of an alleged prostitution ring were also arrested. Mori's role was to send messages and reel patrons in. Police believe the ...

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Papakatsu, the buzzword that refers to compensated dating for sugar daddies, is in the news again. Takeru Yoshikawa, a politician with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, has been accused of drinking with an 18-year-old girl. House of Representatives member Yoshikawa, who is 40 but frankly looks a but older (perhaps it's the jowls), has a wife and two daughters. He was photographed arriving with the girl at a high-end hotel in the Odaiba bay district of Tokyo in late May. According to the scoop in News Post Seven (that includes 46 pictures!), he and the girl arrived, checked in, and then ...

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After losing his wife, the former TV announcer Mao Kobayashi, to cancer in 2017, the top kabuki actor Ebizo Ichikawa was reinvented in the public imagination as a sympathetic figure bravely battling on as a single parent. Ebizo, who had an image as a womanizer before he settled down with Mao Kobayashi, is apparently starting to date again. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the tabloids are relishing the details: namely that the 44-year-old star is dating more than one woman, judging from paparazzi shots, and they are much younger than him. Though one such report came out last autumn, ...

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A 24-year-old woman was arrested on January 22 after a 82-year-old man was found dead in a love hotel in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. The man, Katsuzo Imano, was found in the room on the night of January 21, covered in blood and with box-cutter wounds on his chest. The money in his wallet was gone. The suspect, Haruka Fujii, apparently called a former boyfriend immediately after the crime and then attempted to flee. Fujii, the ex-boyfriend, and his younger brother were apprehended at Nishi-Hachioji Station, just outside Tokyo, the following morning. The image above shows Fujii shortly before she ...

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The tabloid magazine Weekly Bunshun has published an interview with someone they give the alias Yuna Ishihara, who is apparently a 24-year-old student at Tokyo College of Music. But she also appears in adult video and works at a soapland in Yoshiwara, Tokyo's long-established red-light district in the east of the city. But due to the pandemic, her income of ¥900,000 (around $9,000) a month has massively decreased, leading her to take up papakatsu. As reported before, this is a euphemism for compensated dating with older men (sugar daddies). The principle is hardly new but the term has ...

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Is compensated dating with sugar daddies increasing among Japanese women due to remote working? Bunshun Online had an intriguing article suggesting something to that effect. It interviews a 24-year-old female office worker who has started doing "papakatsu," a newly coined kind of compensated dating where younger women go on dates with older men. She started her new sideline in January and over the course of the past few months, has met over 60 men this way. The woman says that shifting to working remotely has changed her whole daily schedule, making it more flexible, whole semi-lockdowns ...

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The casting couch is one of the open secrets of the idol industry. Another one is the extra money that idols (music, gravure, AV), seiyu, models, and actors earn from compensated dating. This gets exposed at regular intervals by tabloid scoops. One such scandal caused Shoko Takahashi to lose her agency as a gradol (when she worked as Shoko Takasaki) and launched her porn career. The JAV star Yuria Satomi had trouble with the tax agency in 2016 over huge amounts of undeclared income from her "boyfriends," who compensated her financially for their relationship. The latest scandal was broken ...

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