There has been much in the news recently about concept cafes in Japan. Concept cafes, also known as concafes, provide an experience based on a specific theme.
In the same way that a girls' bar is a "lite" version of a hostess bar, a women's concafe is like a host club without the eye-watering prices or nighttime reputation. Though there are plenty of female-staffed concafes that operate like a maid cafe with another character instead of maids, the establishers that have attracted media and police attention so far have been concafes run by men and aimed at women.
Common cosplay themes ...
Korean brokers of Japanese prostitutions have been sentenced by a court in Seoul.
According to Korea Wave, the Supreme Court of Korea dismissed the appeal of two Korean brokers on April 25, upholding the original ruling against the men of prison sentences of two years and one year and eight months.
Between November 2023 and May 2024, the pair helped approximately 80 Japanese women enter South Korea and arranged for them to become prostitutes in Seoul and Gyeonggi. Based in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, they advertised on a website under the name "Girls of the Archipelago," recruiting ...
Regular readers may remember the story we ran in December about a backstreet in the Taiyujicho/Toganocho district of Umeda that underwent a makeover in a bid to decrease the number of young women who hang around there, waiting for men to pick them and go to a nearby love hotel.
The paving for around 100 meters of the street was changed to a bright yellow color decorated with marine images in the hope that this "brightening" effect would shame young women from coming to loiter (turning the street into a de facto red-light district). Many of these women are presumed to be engaged in sex work ...
Police have arrested four people on charges of criminally profiting off acting as go-betweens for women and brothels.
In the latest example of a general police crackdown on such brokers, 42-year-old Kazunori Inoue, who runs a beauty salon in Higashinari ward, Osaka, was arrested along with three accomplices, including a 30-year-old Korean-Japanese who runs a dispatching services company. They are suspected of hiding around ¥3.2 million of income, which came from fees gained for illegally introducing women to a brothel in Hiroshima between March and October last year.
Park, who was ...
Tokyo Metropolitan Police have announced the arrest on February 10 of a 40-year-old man from Osaka on charges of violating an employment law while acting as a go-between for an American brothels and a woman he scouted on the street for sex work.
The man is of no fixed employ and Korean nationality (probably nothing of note about that -- Ikuno, the area of Osaka where he is from, has the largest number of Korean Japanese, who often nominally retain South Korean citizenship).
He is accused of conspiring with others between February and April 2023 to pimp and introduce a woman in her twenties ...
Police have raided a brothel that offered services to foreign tourists, arresting seven for violating the prostitution law.
The establishment in Kabukicho, central Tokyo, provided Japanese sex workers for overseas visitors.
Police proudly showed the fruits of their efforts to reporters on February 4, which included English-language information ("Our shop provides Japanese-style service by Japanese girl. The service content may differ from that in your home country"), multiple phones, and cash in sixteen currencies.
The 54-year-old Japanese manager and other arrested six members of staff ...
While the uptick in streetwalkers around Okubo Park in Shinjuku, Tokyo, has attracted immense mainstream and social media attention, mostly because it seems to be very young women doing it (according to the police and media narrative) because they are all in debt to host clubs, what about Osaka?
Japan's second city rarely likes being outdone by the eastern capital, hence it is holding a hugely over-budget world expo next year as a kind of riposte to the Tokyo Olympics. And it also has its own new "problem" with streetwalkers.
The location is a certain backstreet among the love hotels in the ...
Back in 2019, we lamented the (fortunately temporary) closure of Osaka's red-light district Tobita Shinchi in a bid to stave off a crackdown by the authorities ahead of the G-20 summit. (Because the 2020 Olympics ended up being held in 2021 and with basically no visitors, the Tokyo Games ultimately did not involve as much of a crackdown on porn and sex services as expected.
There's nothing we hate more than hypocrisy and trying to hide what society is truly like, but Osaka is at it again.
With next year's expo fast approaching, Osaka police have raided a strip club called the Toyo Show ...
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 ...
