Kabukicho host arrested for fraud with female teenager

Shinjuku police have arrested a 22-year-old in Kabukicho host for tricking a 17-year-old girl out of around ¥400,000 in cash.

Rai Akama is a former actor and was in contact with the girl after she came to see one of his stage productions last summer. He invited her to his host club and, so that she wouldn’t get caught as underage, even lent her the ID of a female friend.

This only solidified the girl’s dependency on Akama, who was apparently prepared to deceive his own club and risk his livelihood for her benefit.

She took a part-time job to give him money but he wanted more. He allegedly told her that his mother had cancer and also claimed to require medical treatment on his throat.

The girl was unable to cover this amount by her part-time job so started doing “illegal work.” This is not specified in media reports but it was probably a form of prostitution.

The girl gave Akama ¥400,000 in cash at her home last December. The total amount she gave him was as high as ¥1.13 million, investigators believe.

A month after getting the lump sum from the girl, Akama quit his acting agency and broke off contact with her. Realizing that she had been deceived, the girl went to the police in February to report him.

Kabukicho is currently at the center of a moral and media panic. For those with long memories, this is nothing new, but it sits awkwardly with the government and developers’ attempts to gentrify the district into Tokyo’s Time Square that is suitable for middle-class foreign tourists and families (similar to how Mori Corporation remade Roppongi in the early 2000s). Despite the Godzilla hotel and other gleaming new buildings, young delinquents gather every night in the main plaza, acquiring the moniker of Toyoko Kids, and the backstreets are still full of blowjob parlors and hostess or host clubs, not to mention a huge number of love hotels stretching all the way to Okubo.

The host clubs have generated a lot of negative headlines and police attention in recent months, with both the mainstream media and authorities belatedly seeming to realize that they exploit vulnerable women.

A more academic way of looking at them as a form of affective labor, the hosts functioning like counselors for women in need of someone to listen to them for a change. Most clients at host clubs are actually hostesses, sex workers, and other women in the so-called “water trade,” and only a minority tend to be regular civilians, so to speak.

But it all comes down to money in the end and the hosts use their silver tongues to persuade their indebted clients to sink to new lows so that they can pay back the club. This extends even to prostitution, both abroad in places like Macau and domestically, with many of the young women offering themselves at night in Okubo Park believed to be host club addicts.

The issue is now very much in the spotlight and a police crackdown is in full swing.