Street scouts — are their days numbered?

Stand around outside any major station or crossing in a Japanese city and you will see them. Young guys picking up girls. Sounds pretty universal. Only these guys are not looking for sex for themselves, nor are they the flamboyant hosts looking for customers to take to their bars.

These usually young and slender guys are scouts. Their job is to recruit girls to work as hostesses or prostitutes in Japan’s whole other dimension of sex shops. They get finder’s fees from the businesses that they recruit for and they can often be seen watching the hordes that pass, only to then slink up to a certain lady and start walking alongside her and engaging her in conversation.

But according to one article now doing the rounds online, their days may be numbered after a major agency that hires scouts was busted by police recently for scouting two high school students in Ikebukuro in 2011.

Weekly Playboy (Sept 30) reports that Talent Bank, which secured the services of some 67 scouts, including females, cleared over 10 million yen a month, and was believed to have raked in over 300 million yen since the company’s founding in 2011.

Street scouting used to be very much a solitary profession, but more recently, the magazine has learned, they have become organized into groups. The main source of inside information about this is the pseudonymous Mr A, who heads his own group of some 20 scouts.

The scouts also then provide other services to the women they recruit, forming a kind of professional relationship with them — after all, the woman are actually their clients at the end of the day. For example, they might find them a clinic to get plastic surgery.

Woman might also be scouted at clubs and elsewhere, since working the streets risks humiliation and there is plenty of competition. Working with an agency like Talent Bank allows them to get a piece of turf secured and so they won’t be bothered by gangsters or other scouts.

The scouts also tend to be young and may often students. No doubt with the skills they hone on the streets they will have long and successful careers in sales ahead of them.

The question now is whether the raid on Talent Bank is the start of a crackdown by the cops?