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 ...
A recent column in Weekly Playboy explored what ChatGPT tells us about sex workers in Japan.
Procurement and acquisition consultant Takanori Sakaguchi used AI to analyze the sex industry in Japan. With his ChatGPT Pro account, he collected data on 635 sex workers at soaplands and "delivery heath" call girl services: their heights, busts, waists, and hips. The data were taken from high-end services as well as cheaper ones.
The results for height are not surprising: sex workers are essentially as tall as most Japanese women.
What about those all-important breasts? Sex workers almost all have ...
Police have arrested a Vietnamese man living in Hamamatsu for the alleged rape of a sex worker.
According to a report by TV Shizuoka, the unnamed man has admitted having sex with the woman but claims there was consent.
The 28-year-old works in the food and drink industry, and lives in Chuo Ward, Hamamatsu. The allegation relates to an incident at a love hotel in the same ward in late February.
It is unclear why it has taken this long for police to arrest him.
The sex worker is a woman -- presumably Japanese, though not specified in the report -- in her twenties who works for a ...
Another day, another grim piece of news from Osaka.
Local police have arrested 25-year-old Kaito Takimoto of no known occupation and 21-year-old Hayato Niiyama on suspicion of violating the prostitution law and kidnapping for profit.
Last June, the pair are said to have approached a 16-year-old girl by the famous Glico Man billboard on Dotonbori and offered her the chance to make a million yen.
Niiyama later drove her to the Tohoku region of northeast Japan, where she did sex work in several prefectures between June 15 and June 25.
Takimoto and Niiyama pretended to be women on deai-kei ...
Police have arrested four people on charges of criminally profiting off acting as go-betweens for women and brothels.
In the latest example of a general police crackdown on such brokers, 42-year-old Kazunori Inoue, who runs a beauty salon in Higashinari ward, Osaka, was arrested along with three accomplices, including a 30-year-old Korean-Japanese who runs a dispatching services company. They are suspected of hiding around ¥3.2 million of income, which came from fees gained for illegally introducing women to a brothel in Hiroshima between March and October last year.
Park, who was ...
Tokyo Metropolitan Police have announced the arrest on February 10 of a 40-year-old man from Osaka on charges of violating an employment law while acting as a go-between for an American brothels and a woman he scouted on the street for sex work.
The man is of no fixed employ and Korean nationality (probably nothing of note about that -- Ikuno, the area of Osaka where he is from, has the largest number of Korean Japanese, who often nominally retain South Korean citizenship).
He is accused of conspiring with others between February and April 2023 to pimp and introduce a woman in her twenties ...
Police have raided a brothel that offered services to foreign tourists, arresting seven for violating the prostitution law.
The establishment in Kabukicho, central Tokyo, provided Japanese sex workers for overseas visitors.
Police proudly showed the fruits of their efforts to reporters on February 4, which included English-language information ("Our shop provides Japanese-style service by Japanese girl. The service content may differ from that in your home country"), multiple phones, and cash in sixteen currencies.
The 54-year-old Japanese manager and other arrested six members of staff ...
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 ...
In tabloid terms, Anri Sakaguchi is the gift that keeps on giving.
The celebrity, who is the daughter of an actress and golfer, and was a feature on TV shows in the 2010s, has had a checkered career and past, to say the least.
She entered porn in 2016 pay off her debts. She also did a full-frontal nude shoot.
After her porn career ended, she was twice arrested for extortion and trespassing.
Since then, it's an open secret that she (like other minor celebrities) makes ends meet by compensated dating.
More recently, she married and then swiftly split from a trans man.
The latest Anri ...
The photographer Beniko has launched a crowdfunding campaign for a follow-up photo book to her 2023 publication about Japan's disappearing old red-light districts (yukaku, akasen).
Beniko is herself a former sex worker at a soapland in Yoshiwara, the famous red-light district in east Tokyo that was a booming licensed pleasure quarter during the Edo period. A single mother in her early fifties, she taught herself to use a camera from the age of 48.
She has given guided tours of Yoshiwara and taken portraits of porn stars, strippers, and Yoshiwara soaplands.
Her photography project has ...
