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 ...
The YouTuber Takashii, who provided the interesting video we reposted recently about Japanese women and their attraction toward foreign men (or non-attraction, as the case may be), has produced a couple more videos with interviews about the old saw: adultery.
His latest provocative topic is on adultery in Japan, especially cheating on a partner with sex workers.
He asks some women for their opinions and some men.
They give a range of responses, but the general gist is that the women don't seem to mind if their men cheat on them with fuzoku (sex workers/services). In fact, this doesn't ...
One of the bigger and somewhat stranger media stories of the last few days in Japan has been the case of a influencer from Osaka who was denied entry to Hawaii.
Considering the millions of tourists who enter Hawaii annually -- many of them from Japan -- it might seem like an odd story.
The border officer became suspicious of Karen Okajima because she had written she was an office worker on her ESTA immigration form but seemed to have a lot of clothing in her luggage for someone traveling alone.
The 32-year-old says she was taken to a private room and questioned for a long time. She ...
Last year, police in Hong Kong cracked down on foreign sex workers, arresting several women including former Japanese porn star Noa Aizawa.
It's well known that active and former adult video performers do sex work. It can be especially lucrative to engage in such work outside Japan, particularly other parts of Asia, where JAV is immensely popular. If your career is flagging in Japan or you want a change of pace, you can enjoy a good lifestyle with affluent clients abroad.
It seems that situation in Hong Kong is much the same, with media reporting the arrest on September 5 of 11 members of a ...
Firefighters in Japan have a reputation for being pretty macho and sexually active.
This reputation is arguably not unearned, as past scandals have shown. Remember the hunky firefighters who stripped off for charity?
Or the Osaka firefighters who got suspended for appearing in porn?
Or the male and female firefighters in Nagoya who were caught having sex at work?
Now apparently comes the news that two male firefighters in Ichomiya, Aichi Prefecture, have been caught working a side job.
What's the rumpus? Well, the scandal -- and why it got reported in the news -- is that their side ...
What is about female politicians in Japan at the moment? Just days after learning about Japan Innovation Party lawmaker's role in a past porn production, we now find out that Yuri Saito (斎藤ゆり), a one-time candidate for Politician Girls 48 Party, is alleged to have been a sex worker and nude model.
Well, we shouldn't be too surprised. She was a candidate for SJJ48 (as the party dubbed itself, parodying AKB48), alongside a bevy of other women with unusual backgrounds. Hasumin Yoshikawa, for instance, was a former Self-Defense Forces nurse and sex worker, and then embarked on a porn ...
A few weeks ago, we reported on the rise in highly visible prostitution in the Okubo area of Shinjuku, located next to the notorious entertainment and red-light district of Kabukicho.
Recent attempts to gentrify Kabukicho notwithstanding, you are still only a short walk away from a blow-job parlor and a huge bevy of love hotels, which stretch all the way to Okubo.
The latter has now become a well-known and flagrant place for picking up street walkers, who are otherwise relatively rare sights in the city. Most sex workers operate from "delivery health" businesses as call girls dispatched to ...
Twitter. YouTube. TikTok. Instagram. And now Threads. It's a crowded social media landscape and people want to stand out.
It has become one of the aphorisms of our times that people will do almost anything for clout.
And that includes crazy antics in Japan.
Known as p8stie or Mariè online, and claiming to be an independent journalist and dentist, a French woman has claimed she was attacked in the Tobita Shinchi red-light district of Osaka. In Tobita, you get a sense of the bygone Japanese pleasure quarters, with its street full of old establishments with entranceways, in which sit sex ...
When you use a sex worker of some description in Japan, they may well be operating under yakuza protection if they belong to a brothel or other such service. This is especially the case with sex workers and services based out of areas like Kabukicho in Tokyo.
Many sex workers in Japan are actually Chinese, especially the ones you see plying their trade out in the open on the streets of Dogenzaka or who work at venues advertised as "Chinese massage" or a similar euphemism. They too are probably (hopefully?) protected in some way from police, rivals, and violent customers.
If a client gets ...
