Tokyo brothel for foreign tourists raided by police
Police have raided a brothel that offered services to foreign tourists, arresting seven.
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 at Relaxation SPARAKU are accused of taking money from customers for sex from October to November last year (no information is provided in the reports about when the brothel began operations or what happened after November).
Nominally a “massage salon,” SPARAKU (whose tagline was “Happyending in Kabuki-cho, Shinjuku”) had a bilingual website (complete with photos of the “cast” without any censorship or attempts to disguise their identities), made a video that it put online, and even approached tourists on the street to offer its services. About 60 percent of its customers were foreign, none of whom were caught up in the raid.
SPARAKU had 25 women serving customers (the website at present lists only 13 “cast” members). All were Japanese. They served an average of 30 customers per day, pulling in about ¥450,000 ($3,000) for the establishment. Some basic online research suggests SPARAKU had been in operation since at least November 2021.
The huge uptick in tourist numbers in Japan in recent years has led to a proliferation of new services. Inevitably, prostitution is one of these.
For a long time, most brothels (including soaplands) would not allow foreign customers, usually citing spurious reasons like language barriers (even if the foreigners were residents who spoke Japanese).
As such, services have appeared specifically targeting foreign men. There is nothing new about this, though police have told media that SPARAKU is the first brothel of its kind.
Why was it raided? Perhaps some of the workers were aggrieved about something and went to police, or were otherwise detained by police (the current charges specifically relate to prostituting three women in their twenties last year, which suggests this scenario). SPARAKU may just have been a bit too blatant or had not paid the right protection money to the right people. Or perhaps because it was openly targeting foreign tourists, this kind of service was too flagrant given the government’s determination to boost the economy through visitors from overseas.
Is this the start of a wider crackdown by Tokyo police? We shall have to wait and see.
Despite the large-scale cleanup and gentrification of the district in the past two decades, Kabukicho remains a red-light district, as any trip down the back alleys will attest — to say nothing of the love hotels located immediately between Kabukicho and Okubo.
It is also a short walk from Okubo Park, which has become notorious for young street walkers. This has become a tourist attraction in its own right now.
The main plaza in Kabukicho is packed with tourists going to see the Godzilla head on top of a building but also runaways and young delinquents, some of whom are targeted by men looking for sex.
Kabukicho is also packed with host clubs, another recent focus of police and media attention as one of the supposed causes of prostitution at places like Okubo Park, since woman (and also young girls) addicted to host clubs and concafes are forced into sex work to pay off their debts. There are cases of the hosts themselves acting as go-betweens and pimps.
At least some of the women who worked at SPARAKU were, according to news reports, recruited by the manager while hanging around Okubo Park, and included women who needed money to feed their addiction to host clubs and underground idols.
