Shannon Danielle Wong, a Canadian national, has been arrested in Japan for entering into a fake marriage for visa reasons.
Tokyo Metropolitan Police arrested the 29-year-old Wong, who admits the charges, as well as her "husband" Narimichi Sasaki, a construction worker. The pair met at a cosplay event in Kabukicho while Wong was technically a student and then entered an arrangement to marry on paper in June 2016.
Wong paid Sasaki an initial ¥700,000 and then was monthly payments of ¥30,000 each. The total fee for Sasaki's participation in the scam was to be ¥1 million yen.
It ...
In case you have ever wondered where your taxes went, take a peep into the lurid world of politicians' "travel expenses."
In the case of Ken Namikawa, the young mayor of Tenri City in Nara Prefecture, he made two trips to Tokyo in February and June. The provincial politico was determined to make the most out of his time in the capital, it seems, since he procured the services of delivery health call girls at his hotel room for intimate nude "massages".
He has since apologized at a press conference on August 31st after Shunkan Shincho made allegations about the 38-year-old's ...
Back in 2015 we reported about M.S.M. -- Men Who Have Sex With Men, an upcoming documentary by Ian Thomas Ash and Adrian Storey/Uchujin.
Despite the announcement, nothing seemed to happen with it and the official website went dead. We assumed the project had somehow fizzled out.
So we were very pleased to see that it is still alive, though in a slightly different form.
Ian Thomas Ash and Adrian Storey/Uchujin are still involved, but as producers and DOP. The title has changed, too, and presumably the content. It's now called Boys for Sale.
Boys are selling sex in Japan. Who ...
We wonder how many articles we are going to see like this as we get closer towards the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
The Washington Post is the latest media outlet to step into the controversy over osanpo (walking dates) and JK business (high school girl dating) with an article somewhat provocatively headlined "For vulnerable high school girls in Japan, a culture of 'dates' with older men".
It sets the tone early on: "Here, 'high school dating' matches girls in uniforms with men in their 40s and 50s and beyond. And it means money changing hands."
It goes on to explain that the dates may be a ...
"Teenage girls luring men into dens of sleaze warned by police."
It sounds like a headline on a parody news website. The men are lured into dens of sleaze by teenage girls. Oh, so the men are the victims?
But it's not. It's an article in the Asahi Shimbun and just the latest entry in a media frenzy about the JK business ("high-school girl business") as the police continue their crackdown on what is often a thin cover for underage prostitution.
Twenty teenage girls suspected of working in the sleazy "JK business" were given a slap on the wrist by police in a series of street ...
The annual Kanamara Penis Festival is one of the most famous and popular in Japan and seems to be attended by as many foreigners as Japanese. While you probably won't find it promoted in any of the official government tourist information, sightseers to take snaps of the phallic objects of worship as well as sample the penis-shaped sweets. Cool Japan indeed.
Held every April in Kawasaki City, one of the highlights of the festival is a large pink phallic float apparently called Elizabeth.
Last year this was only on a four-wheeled trolley and visitors were disappointed by its lack of ...
How much do women working as prostitutes in Japan earn? Regardless of your nocturnal habits, it's no doubt a question no doubt many of us have asked at various times.
Grow As People (GAP) is a nonprofit group that supports sex workers and it just released a new report.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it found that wages decrease with the age of the workers (the opposite of the classic Japanese corporate model).
It based its report on an online survey conducted in 2015 with 377 women working at Kanto-area "delivery health" brothels (fuzoku), which dispatches call girls to love ...
It's from late December 2013 but we just stumbled upon this stimulating article on The Tokyo Files about Yoshiwara.
As regular readers will know, Yoshiwara was the licensed pleasure quarter in historical Tokyo (Edo). Today it doesn't correspond to an official address (funny that!) but you can find it at Senzoku 4-chome in Taito-ku, which is in the east of the city and very far from the expensive brand stores or third-wave coffee shops of Shinjuku, Shibuya and Omotesando.
Its location from 1675 was moated with two entry points: the Japanese love to control everything, even ...
Lots of women marched around the world to mark International Women's Day on March 8th, including at least one group in Tokyo.
But here is another protest by a different kind of feminist: sex workers.
A group of sex workers (male and female) marched while wearing masks and carrying red umbrellas. This was part of Red Umbrella March, which has emerged as a sex worker solidarity event around the world.
The sex workers started in Shibuya and then traveled to Kabukicho by train before finishing their march in Ueno. Along the way they kept their masks on and held signs indicating that they ...
A journalist working on a BBC Three documentary about child sexual exploitation was held in police custody.
The 29-year-old Stacey Dooley was held by police in Tokyo for two hours during the making of her documentary, Young Sex For Sale In Japan.
"It [the doc] focuses on the fact they only made it illegal to possess child pornography in 2014," said Dooley. "We set out to try and understand why it took a privileged country, like Japan, so long to come to this conclusion. Also to see if the change in their law had made any real difference on the ground."
Dooley and her team were ...
