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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...