K-pop star Ju Hak-nyeon has been kicked out of The Boyz for a private meeting with former Japanese porn star Kirara Asuka. He is also accused of paying for sex with her.
His agency announced on June 16 that the 26-year-old was taking a break for undisclosed reasons. He was then fired from The Boyz on June 18. His agency has also let him go.
On June 19, Ju issued a hand-written apology for his liaison with Asuka, though denied paying for sex after it was first reported by Japanese tabloid Shukan Bunshun (it seems that these are initial reports of a scoop, though Bunshun has yet to publish ...
Host and hostess clubs were demonized during the Covid pandemic as superspreaders. Despite the greater need for intimacy among clients, the sex industry also took a big hit but was denied any government handout.
This sparked controversy over perceived discrimination and some fought back: a lawsuit was filed in 2020 over the omission of sex industry businesses like delivery health (outcall escort services) and soaplands from cash relief schemes.
The lawsuit, filed by a call girl service in Kansai and successfully crowdfunded by over 1,000 supporters, was dismissed in 2022 by Tokyo District ...
Korean brokers of Japanese prostitutions have been sentenced by a court in Seoul.
According to Korea Wave, the Supreme Court of Korea dismissed the appeal of two Korean brokers on April 25, upholding the original ruling against the men of prison sentences of two years and one year and eight months.
Between November 2023 and May 2024, the pair helped approximately 80 Japanese women enter South Korea and arranged for them to become prostitutes in Seoul and Gyeonggi. Based in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, they advertised on a website under the name "Girls of the Archipelago," recruiting ...
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 ...
