Male host arrested for exploiting junior high school student

More bad news coverage about male hosts as the moral panic over this industry continues.

A Kabukicho host was arrested early last week for allegedly exploiting and prostituting a junior high school student who owed his club around ¥6 million.

The 22-year-old host Renji (Yuya Inaba) works at the appropriately named Worst Over in Kabukicho, central Tokyo. He is also accused of bringing the girl into his club when she was just 15 years old and serving her alcohol, including a very expensive “champagne tower” order.

The student used her mother’s credit card and cash from her grandmother to settle the bill she had racked up at the club. Her family found out and her mother went to the police.

She also, according to media reports, turned to prostitution and compensated dating to make money to pay Renji.

He apparently told the smitten girl, who is from Edogawa ward in the east of Tokyo, that he would give up being a host and marry her when she turned 18.

In March last year, Renji picked the unnamed girl up in Toyoko, an area in central Kabukicho near Shinjuku Toho Building where young people — known as “Toyoko kids” — gather at night. It has become a byword for female delinquency and one of the key sites in the recent moral panic over the dark side of Shinjuku (which, if you know anything about the history of the area over the decades, is actually nothing new).

The “pay-later” (urikakekin) system employed at clubs allows young female patrons to build up shocking debts, turning the hosts into debt collectors and using their emotional hold over the women to extract the money (even the point of escorting women to ATMs).

Inaba has claimed to police that he did not know the girl was underage. The age of majority in Japan was recently lowered to 18 but you can still only drink alcohol from 20.

The manager of Worst Over has also been referred to prosecutors for allowing an underage girl to drink in his establishment.

It follows such stories as the woman who stabbed a host in Kabukicho and the man arrested for pimping a prostitute in nearby Okubo Park, which has become a hotbed for street walkers — many of whom are young women apparently trying to raise money to fund their host club habit.

Other women resort to compensated dating, including papakatsu fraud.

One support organization has already received 180 consultations from the victims of exploitative hosts, the majority of which related to the use of pay-layer schemes.

In response, lawmakers and police are cracking down on host clubs.