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 ...
Bad news if you are into "JK business", the new style of enjo kosai (compensated dating) where you go on "dates" with schoolgirls that end in a sexual encounter. The days of casually walking into a JK business venue and getting an appointment with a teenager are possibly numbered.
These services are often euphemistically called "osanpo" (walks), though they may also be in the form of "massages" or "soine" (snuggling up together in bed), or as conversations in a "cafe" or even sessions where the customer takes photos of the girl schoolgirl in swimwear. ("JK" stands for "joshi-kosei", or ...
Ever wanted to know what happens inside a gyaru brothel? Well, the best way is to pay one a visit in person. Failing that, there's always Japanese cable television.
The idol Yui Takano, formerly of NMB48, recently took part in a Japanese cable television show that looked at the service customers enjoy at a gyaru sex club.
The particular service shown involves two heavily tattooed, bronze-skinned Japanese punk hotties rubbing their bodies all over a naked male patron, before giving him a handjob and, presumably, a blowjob (sadly not shown).
Yui Takano watches this "threesome course" ...
The gentrification and renaissance of Yoshiwara, the former licensed red-light district (and today, an unlicensed red-light district), continues.
After a designer souvenir shop we saw earlier in the year now comes a new book shop, Kasutori Shobo. The store opened on September 3rd in the heart of Yoshiwara, selling books reprinting valuable resources and history about Yoshiwara and the adult side to the Showa era.
Alongside other publishers' titles, the shop also publishes its own books. The owner, Goh Watanabe, raised money via a crowdfunding service to do this, achieving his target in ...
The Japan Times recently published a long and sympathetic article about the sex industry in Japan.
It superbly shows how the women who ply their "trade" in the sex industry often do so because of economic hardship.
For the past six years, 47-year-old single mother Kasumi Endo has lived a double life.
On weekdays, she works all day as a temp-staff office worker to raise her teenage daughter. But with wages hardly sufficient to keep the household afloat, Endo (not her real name) takes a surreptitious trip to Tokyo’s downtown Ikebukuro district on weekends to earn extra money.
As ...
A new exhibition in Tokyo focuses on the controversial issue of underage enjo kosai, or compensated dating.
The "We Were Bought" exhibition runs from August 11th to August 21st, featuring the photography, text and diaries of junior high or high school students (JK, joshi kousei) who have engaged in enjo kosai, a euphemism for prostitution
The exhibition is organized by 24 students and Colabo, a support group for female high school students. The students and other girls are aged between 14 and 26, and live all over Japan from Hokkaido to Kyushu.
There are around 100 exhibits on ...
