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 ...

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 ...

The surge in streetwalkers at Okubo Park near Kabukicho, Shinjuku's red-light district, has prompted a media panic over the last year or so, not least because the women seem very young. A lot of media reports have indicated that the women are doing sex work to pay off debts or fund their trips to host clubs. The latter have been demonized by the media and politicians of late, and lawmakers are trying to target "malicious clubs" that trap vulnerable women in a spiral of debt. The streetwalkers are also perhaps not as freelance as you might think, as one case indicates. A 27-year-old ...

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 ...