Prostitution drops 90% after design change to street in Osaka

Regular readers may remember the story we ran in December about a backstreet in the Taiyujicho/Toganocho district of Umeda that underwent a makeover in a bid to decrease the number of young women who hang around there, waiting for men to pick them and go to a nearby love hotel.

The paving for around 100 meters of the street was changed to a bright yellow color decorated with marine images in the hope that this “brightening” effect would shame young women from coming to loiter (turning the street into a de facto red-light district). Many of these women are presumed to be engaged in sex work because of addiction to host clubs or similar establishments.

There was immediate speculation that it would succeed in reducing the number of prostitutes in the area, though the intense media presence around the time of the street’s reopening might have contributed to that.

Either way, after several months, the Sankei reported on March 12 that street prostitution is down a whopping 90% and there are effectively no women loitering on the street anymore. This is according to local police (who made observations four times a day for a week before and after the makeover, and also in February) and, of course, a major cause is probably the publicity that the countermeasure generated. If there has been no media fanfare, just a street design change, we suspect the results might have been quite different.

Those women and punters have not gone away, they’ve probably just moved to another area or online.

The apparent spike in streetwalkers has become something of a moral panic in Japan, akin to the 1990s one over compensated dating. Stagnant wages, inflation, and youth poverty are some of the socioeconomic factors, as is the rise of new forms (or names) for compensated dating (like papakatsu) that seem to make prostitution more palatable for both sides.

In Osaka, the local police also partnered with residents to install signs displaying information on the prefecture’s assistance services to encourage vulnerable women to seek help.

We wonder if the apparent success of this scheme might prompt Shinjuku to implement something similar in the Kabukicho-Okubo area, especially around Okubo Park, which is these days full of young streetwalkers — to such an extent that is has become a tourist destination in its own right.