Tokyo’s latest tourist attraction: sex workers at Okubo Park

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 sight because of the legal risks. Instead, people make use of fuzoku services like “delivery health” (call girls) or compensated dating (which includes the most common recent buzzword, papakatsu).

But Okubo Park at night is filled with lines of young women — sometimes very young — hanging around and waiting to be picked up. It has led to a lot of attention from social media, mainstream media, and the police.

According to an article on Shueisha Online published last month, tourists are also coming to see this “tachinbo” (street prostitute) phenomenon.

The article claims that one in ten men in Okubo Park since around last summer are non-Japanese, including Asians and Westerners.

Some no doubt come out of curiosity and just to gawp, while others to make use of the services on offer.

The article says that some speak no Japanese and approach the women in English or using a translation app to communicate.

The interest in the park is supposedly driven by foreign YouTubers, who have made videos about Okubo.

According to one woman interviewed in the article, the Westerns mainly come just to make fun of the park, but she has had many customers who were Chinese, Filipino, and Indian.

“Globalization is underway here in Okubo Park!” she jokes.

She doesn’t charge the foreigners any more than her Japanese customers — ¥15,000 per session, excluding the charge for a room in a nearby love hotel.

The article details some issues between Japanese sex workers and foreign clients, such as women suddenly demanding an extra ¥10,000 once they have got into the love hotel room and had a shower with the man, or even reports of some women stealing money from a client’s wallet and making a dash for it.

Clearly, this all comes down to the individual and there is always a risk involved in picking up a woman on the streets.