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 ...
In tabloid terms, Anri Sakaguchi is the gift that keeps on giving.
The celebrity, who is the daughter of an actress and golfer, and was a feature on TV shows in the 2010s, has had a checkered career and past, to say the least.
She entered porn in 2016 pay off her debts. She also did a full-frontal nude shoot.
After her porn career ended, she was twice arrested for extortion and trespassing.
Since then, it's an open secret that she (like other minor celebrities) makes ends meet by compensated dating.
More recently, she married and then swiftly split from a trans man.
The latest Anri ...
The photographer Beniko has launched a crowdfunding campaign for a follow-up photo book to her 2023 publication about Japan's disappearing old red-light districts (yukaku, akasen).
Beniko is herself a former sex worker at a soapland in Yoshiwara, the famous red-light district in east Tokyo that was a booming licensed pleasure quarter during the Edo period. A single mother in her early fifties, she taught herself to use a camera from the age of 48.
She has given guided tours of Yoshiwara and taken portraits of porn stars, strippers, and Yoshiwara soaplands.
Her photography project has ...
Here's a case that ticks all the boxes about the current moral panic.
A concafe ("concept cafe") staffed by men in Kabukicho, Tokyo, is accused of exploiting vulnerable female customers.
Concafes can be innocuous themed cafes but are often staffed only by men, making them essentially a kind of host club (similar to how girls' bars are like a cheap hostess club). The customers come for the fantasy created by theme (butlers, doctors, private boys' boarding school students, etc.) and the men who work there.
At this one, 32-year-old Takuma Ono is alleged to have tried to force a 20-year-old ...
Another day, another news story about Okubo Park prostitution as the moral panic over street walkers in the area and Kabukicho host club debt and addiction continues.
The latest tale of woe is the arrest of a 53-year-old man, Atsuhiro Kodama, on child prostitution charges on October 18, after he took a 16-year-old high schooler he picked up in Okubo Park to a nearby love hotel.
To pay for her obsession with male underground idols (chika idol), she apparently starting doing papakatsu (sugar daddy compensated dating). Someone on social media told her that you can earn a lot of money doing ...
The tabloid Weekly Friday has reported on two scammers who are terrorizing unsuspecting men they pick up through dating and matchmaking apps.
The first is dubbed Glans Dash Yuri.
Yuri apparently agrees to meet guys on an app for compensated dating. She sets the fee as ¥20,000 and they meet somewhere like outside a fast food restaurant near Seibu Shinjuku Station, which is a short walk to the love hotels in Okubo-Kabukicho.
They go to a really basic love hotel with a small room, bed, and shower (these may not even be in a love hotel but just a "rental room" in a multi-tenant building). ...
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 ...
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 ...
Prostitution is big business in Japan, as any wander down the back alleys of Kabukicho or around Okubo Park should quickly attest.
The former is filled with blowjob parlors and "dispatch" shops, while the latter has become a notorious hotbed of streetwalkers (actually, street standers -- since they are all just lingering and waiting for clients to come along).
We would like to think it's the sex workers themselves who are making all the yen but there are almost always middlemen (perhaps with the exception of the women at Okubo Park, which is why they are more vulnerable).
As reported ...
