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 ...
Q. Please introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do?
My name is Pickles Bourne, and I am a nightlife ambassador in Tokyo, Japan.
I work at a company called Kaku-Butsu, which operates a prostitution shop review website in Japan. At Kaku-Butsu, we created a website for visitors who want sexual services called Japanese HENTAI Girls Collection (JHGC). JHGC offers a concierge service, offering you a personalized selection of companions that fulfills your request. My job is to support tourists and visitors in Japan to experience the best out of what Japan has to offer, especially in terms ...
The moral panic over host clubs and prostitution in Japan continues unabated with a story yesterday in the Tokyo Shimbun about a 20-year-old woman whose whopping ¥10 million debt to a club prompted her to begin doing sex work.
While still a high school student in Kanagawa, she went to a host club in Yokohama in autumn 2021. The chandeliers and attention of the hosts seduced her, and she was hooked.
She ended up with a debt of ¥10 million, forcing her into prostitution at Okubo Park, Kabukicho, to pay it off. The club was demanding she pay back as much as ¥300,000 a day. Even after she ...
The surge in streetwalkers at Okubo Park near Kabukicho, Shinjuku's red-light district, has prompted a media panic over the last year or so, not least because the women seem very young.
A lot of media reports have indicated that the women are doing sex work to pay off debts or fund their trips to host clubs. The latter have been demonized by the media and politicians of late, and lawmakers are trying to target "malicious clubs" that trap vulnerable women in a spiral of debt.
The streetwalkers are also perhaps not as freelance as you might think, as one case indicates.
A 27-year-old ...
The gentrification of Kabukicho, which has turned the main strip and square into a cleaner, more tourist-friendly place, has not changed the fundamental nature of the district. Just turn a corner and you'll find blowjob parlors and host or hostess clubs galore, not to mention Shinjuku's massive love hotel area right behind.
The dark side of Kabukicho, which gets its name from an unfulfilled plan in the postwar years to build a kabuki theater in the neighborhood, reared its head over the weekend -- in two very unpleasant scenes.
A few weeks ago, someone was thankfully prevented from jumping ...
One of the biggest trends of the year has been the crackdown on prostitution in Okubo and Kabukicho, especially very young women soliciting customers on the streets.
Most prostitution in Japan operates through structured services, such as "delivery health" call girl services that send a sex worker to your hotel room.
With the gentrification of the main parts of Kabukicho into a tourist attraction, it can be easy for some to overlook the seedy nature of the backstreets and forget that it borders an entire block of love hotels that stretch all the way to Okubo. And that streetwalkers are ...
Japan's porn giant Soft on Demand seems finally to have recovered from one of the most bizarre and shocking screw-ups in their history.
SOD Land in Kabukicho suddenly closed down in March this year after police discovered it was violating the law on fuzoku ("amusement businesses") establishments, which covers hostess clubs, brothels, and so on.
Billed as an "adult theme park," SOD Land allows visitors to meet and interact with actual Japanese porn performers (and others like sex workers and hostesses) in various ways across five floors, including bars and a space for viewing performers in ...
One of the most-profile experiments in genderless toilets in Japan has ended quickly rather ignominiously.
When Tokyu Kabukicho Tower, the latest example of the gentrification of Shinjuku's red-light district, opened in the spring, its decision to have genderless restrooms on the second floor immediately attracted attention -- largely in terms of concerns over female safety. The toilets are all in stalls but the hand-washing station was shared by all users.
Soon social media was flooded with footage of men loitering around the entrance and wash basins for seemingly no reason than perhaps to ...
A few weeks ago, we reported on the rise in highly visible prostitution in the Okubo area of Shinjuku, located next to the notorious entertainment and red-light district of Kabukicho.
Recent attempts to gentrify Kabukicho notwithstanding, you are still only a short walk away from a blow-job parlor and a huge bevy of love hotels, which stretch all the way to Okubo.
The latter has now become a well-known and flagrant place for picking up street walkers, who are otherwise relatively rare sights in the city. Most sex workers operate from "delivery health" businesses as call girls dispatched to ...
For the most part in Japan, prostitution is not visible.
Sure, if you can understand the euphemism and codes in the signage, you can see fuzoku brothels everywhere, normally in the form of places where you can go for "introductions" to sex workers.
But though call girls are visible entering and leaving love hotels, or you might seem female escorts waiting for a car or sitting in a vehicle outside a love hotel, it's relatively rare to see streetwalkers in Tokyo -- as in, actual prostitutes hanging around outside and trying to pick up clients (known as tachinbo in Japanese).
There are ...
