Is this the end of the streetwalker (tachinbo) phenomenon in Okubo Park? The area on the edge of Kabukicho, Shinjuku, in central Tokyo became notorious during and shortly after the pandemic for young women standing and waiting for men to solicit sex for as little as ¥10,000 a session.
It prompted a moral panic, driven by social media content and mainstream media reports, amid suggestions that most of the young women were doing it to fund their host club debts (at times directly pimped out by hosts) or pay for their expensive fandom (oshi).
Now Shueisha Online reports that the women have ...
Japan is inching toward a legal revision that would make it illegal to pay for sex.
As part of a review of the Anti-Prostitution Law, the Ministry of Justice presented a draft report based on prior discussions to an expert panel on August 24, according to the Asahi Shimbun.
The draft outlines a direction to expand the scope of offenses regarding solicitation. At present, solicitation is punishable only for the seller, but the revision would expand this to include the buyer. The proposed revisions would also raise the maximum fine. The ministry is coordinating plans to finalize the report in ...
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department has conducted its first coordinated series of inspections on men's concept cafes in Tokyo's Kabukicho district. The inspections revealed illegal practices at 60% of establishments.
Between July 22 and July 23, police carried out simultaneous inspections at 20 men's concept cafes in Shinjuku's Kabukicho, central Tokyo, checking for valid business licenses.
Also known as concafes, concept cafes provide an experience based on a specific theme through costumes and decor. The staff are generally either all men or women. In the same way that a girls' bar ...
A 38-year-old man living in Nagoya has been arrested for failing to provide contracts and other documents to women who appeared in adult videos he produced.
According to police, the arrested man is Yuto Kamiya, a company employee from Naka Ward in the city. He is suspected of failing to provide contracts or related paperwork to three women who appeared in adult videos he produced between June and September of last year.
Kamiya has admitted to the allegations, stating, "Women often told me they didn't need the documents, so I eventually came to view the process as a hassle."
Kamiya ...
We recently reported about the large-scale closure of soaplands around Japan following the shuttering of a major chain, possibly to avoid a police crackdown in the wake of the investigation into a major scouting operation that has had far-reaching consequences for the Japanese adult entertainment industry.
And with the closures, it brings to mind a peculiar legal situation for soaplands in Tokyo: according to the regulations governing sex services, you are not allowed to open an establishment in the city, with the exception of a few blocks near Yoshiwara, the old red-light district of Tokyo. ...
In Japan, it is currently illegal to receive money for sex, but not to pay for sex. In other words, a sex worker's customer is not doing anything wrong in the eyes of the law, though the sex worker and the service she works for may well be in breach of the law.
A way around this is that sex workers may not always provide full service, at least nominally.
But in the wake of the moral and media panic over increased visible signs of prostitution in places like Okubo Park on the outskirts of Kabukicho, Tokyo, there are now motions in the government to redress the imbalance in the legal ...
On October 10, 2025, Sapporo police arrested three men living in the city's Chuo Ward on suspicion of violating the Anti-Prostitution Act.
According to a report by Sapporo TV, the arrested men were a 55-year-old man running a sex entertainment establishment, a 41-year-old man, and a 50-year-old man, both of whom worked at soapland-style brothels.
The men are suspected of conspiring to provide a venue for prostitution at a bathhouse's private rooms in the ward, knowing that the prostitutes were engaging in sex work with customers. The charges relate to activities up to September.
Initially ...
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 ...
While much of the current police and media obsession with young female streetwalkers has focused on the Okubo-Kabukicho area of Tokyo, Osaka is also experiencing an apparent increase in visible prostitution.
And just as police are cracking down on both the sex workers and scouts in Kabukicho, the authorities in Osaka are targeting concafes ("concept cafes" -- a kind of "lite" version of a host club) and pimps who prey on young delinquents and runaways near the Dotombori canal, and even redesigning a street to deter streetwalkers.
This has not solved the problem, it seems, because police are ...
