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).
Man 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 ...
Here's a case that ticks all the boxes about the current moral panic.
A concafe ("concept cafe") staffed by men in Kabukicho, Tokyo, is accused of exploiting vulnerable female customers.
Concafes can be innocuous themed cafes but are often staffed only by men, making them essentially a kind of host club (similar to how girls' bars are like a cheap hostess club). The customers come for the fantasy created by theme (butlers, doctors, private boys' boarding school students, etc.) and the men who work there.
At this one, 32-year-old Takuma Ono is alleged to have tried to force a 20-year-old ...
Another day, another news story about Okubo Park prostitution as the moral panic over street walkers in the area and Kabukicho host club debt and addiction continues.
The latest tale of woe is the arrest of a 53-year-old man, Atsuhiro Kodama, on child prostitution charges on October 18, after he took a 16-year-old high schooler he picked up in Okubo Park to a nearby love hotel.
To pay for her obsession with male underground idols (chika idol), she apparently starting doing papakatsu (sugar daddy compensated dating). Someone on social media told her that you can earn a lot of money doing ...
The tabloid Weekly Friday has reported on two scammers who are terrorizing unsuspecting men they pick up through dating and matchmaking apps.
The first is dubbed Glans Dash Yuri.
Yuri apparently agrees to meet guys on an app for compensated dating. She sets the fee as ¥20,000 and they meet somewhere like outside a fast food restaurant near Seibu Shinjuku Station, which is a short walk to the love hotels in Okubo-Kabukicho.
They go to a really basic love hotel with a small room, bed, and shower (these may not even be in a love hotel but just a "rental room" in a multi-tenant building). ...
With the current boom in international tourists coming to Japan, many popular sightseeing destinations are uncomfortably crowded.
But it's not just the usual suspects that tourists are apparently keen to see.
In Tokyo, along with Ginza, Shibuya, Asakusa, and the like, visitors are also reportedly fans of going to Okubo Park, on the edge of Kabukicho, Shinjuku.
As we have written about several times, this park has become the center of a moral panic about young women publicly offering themselves for sex.
Despite the huge size of the sex industry here, streetwalkers are a relatively rare ...
Just a few days after we reported on the ongoing police crackdown in Kabukicho over drugs, prostitution, and delinquency.
These reports appear literally almost daily now. Hosts arrested for extracting debt payments in dubious ways, such as introducing women to pimps. Young women arrested for soliciting on the street. It's a never-ending conveyor belt of moral outrage, dutifully reported in the mainstream media.
The most shocking stories are those that involve underage girls: some hosts are so desperate for money and so unscrupulous that they exploit minors.
The latest story is in a similar ...
