Osaka love hotel alley gets design makeover to combat streetwalkers

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 Taiyujicho/Toganocho district of Umeda, the nightlife and commercial district in the north of the city (the other being Namba in the south).

The authorities (the police, local government, and neighborhood anti-crime association) were so concerned about this spot being used by prostitutes to pick up trade, that they decided to close the street and transform it. Add security cameras? It seems not.

Rather, the solution was to resurface a small section of the road in a yellow color!

The idea came from a local design student and was inspired by the routes inside aquariums, hence the marine pictures on the ground.

So, are prostitutes and their clients expected to follow the yellow brick road to Oz?

It seems no. The idea is to shame streetwalkers and their customers from using the alleyway for their business, and according to news reports, it’s working — with the space apparently being deserted after the makeover.

However, the work only finished on December 10, on which date it was dutifully reported by the mainstream media, so we suspect that it’s too early to tell. It’s pretty obvious that streetwalkers are not going to flock back to a street that was recently closed and is now probably being watched by media and police.

Call us naive or idealistic, but perhaps the best way to stop young women from doing sex work is to take measures to prevent youth poverty and, if host clubs are to blame, protect vulnerable women from such exploitation.

Turning part of the street yellow might also affect other “innocent” traffic — i.e., regular couples going to the love hotels in the district. People might find the street too garish and indiscreet now (while many love hotels also sport garish and eye-catching designers, most of the ones in such urban clusters like Shibuya and Umeda are relatively plain).

It might even backfire and turn the street into a kind of attraction in its own right, the yellow path snaking its way through the love hotels of Osaka and lined by streetwalkers hoping to pick up some of the traffic. Only time will tell once the media fuss has died down.

Readers with a more urban studies background will recognize this tactic as what’s known as hostile architecture, in which urban space is changed to make it less hospitable to certain people. This is perhaps most representatively measures taken to prevent homeless people from sleeping in certain locations. This time, though, the target is sex workers.

The most famous area for prostitution in Osaka is Tobita Shinchi in the south, a long-established red-light district that gives a sense of what things were like in the early Showa period or even before. This has closed (or been closed) during international events in Osaka. Following the recent police raid on a large Osaka strip club, we suspect people in Tobita are anticipating a crackdown ahead of the expo.