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 ...

It has just been announced that Tokyo will host the Summer Olympic Games in 2020. Will the city try to expunge all its unsavory elements ahead of the event? The last time the city hosted the Games there was a similar campaign to "clean up" the streets, and when the Winter Games were held in Nagano they forced Pachinko parlors to close. So can we look forward to the municipal government going full-out to hide unsightly shacks that serve as residences for the homeless or the slum-like drinking dens like Piss Alley in Shinjuku? Perhaps. But we are most worried about what it may try to do to ...

A long-established strip club in Shinjuku's Kabukicho has been raided by police for letting Japanese porn stars perform and expose their vaginas. Police have arrested ten for public indecency, including the manager of the Kabukicho T S Music club and several strippers aged 24-39 years old. The club had been allowing patrons to see the JAV girls' private parts after a show had ended, even lending them cameras so they could take photographs. Kabukicho T S Music Club opened in 1985, making it a veteran by Tokyo standards. It makes much of its 250 million yen ($2.8 million) turnover from ...