Tokyo’s Kabukicho teeters on the brink

Once known as Asia’s top entertainment quarter, Shinjuku Ward’s red-light district of Kabukicho has seen a hallowing out at its core. Monthly magazine Takarajima (April) takes a look at the devastation wrought by police crackdowns and the ongoing recession.

At the end of 2008, the multi-use Koma Stadium, notably known as a home to enka theater performances for a half-century and situated at the heart of Kabukicho, shut its doors. Over a year later, a construction plan for the site has not been set in place. Meanwhile, near JR Shinjuku Station, a large 10-screen cinema complex has since opened at the edge of the Kabukicho boundary. This encroachment, which has forced the shuttering of other long-running theaters in the area, combined with the closing of the cinema screens inside the Koma Stadium complex, has left only four screens remaining in all of Kabukicho, which was once regarded as a cinema Mecca. Read more

Gasp! Zap!! Ah!!! AED-equipped sex shop in Osaka keeps geezers’ hearts ticking

Japan’s fuzoku sex businesses have not only been forced to confront the worst recession in decades; they must also contend with flaccid demand due the aging of society.

But at last, a glimmer of good news. Shukan Jitsuwa (March 18) reports that a shop in Osaka’s Tennoji district has found a way to put a completely new spin on the term “safe sex.” To enable sensual seniors to partake in sleaze with less risk of dying in the saddle so to speak, hotetoru “Pearl Diamond” installed an emergency defibrillator unit (AED) on its premises earlier this year.

A hotetoru, for the uninitiated, is an abbreviation of hotel toruko, typically an unlicensed sex shop that arranges sudsy, soapland-style trysts between gals and their johns on the premises of hotels.

“All of our staff have been instructed in the basics of AED operation,” the shop’s manager boasts. “Fortunately up to now we’ve never had to use it, but it’s there just in case. Our girls like having it too — I suppose it helps take a load off their minds.” Read more

Burning down the house: Tokyo hostess turns to arson

The Mainichi Shimbun (Feb. 10) reported that Kazune Urata, a kyabajo, or nightclub hostess, living in the Sakuradai district of Tokyo’s Nerima Ward, was arrested on Feb. 6 for arson. A surveillance camera captured the 27-year-old hostess using cardboard and a lighter to set parked bicycles alight.

This was probably not the first time for Urata. In the same building at the end of last month, a storage area and postal mailboxes had also been burned in a suspicious fire.

“My pay was really low,” she is quoted. “I thought by doing arson I would be relieved from my stress.”　 Read more

The 5,000-yen mistress favorable to recession-hit fellas

In this era of deflation, reduced fees at fuzoku establishments, such as 4,800 yen for entering an ime kura (image club) or a soapland’s 10,000 yen “early bird” special, are tough to top. Yet Shukan Post (Jan. 14) believes there exists even better cost performance: a mistress for a mere 5,000 yen.

During the bubble era, the tabloid says, it was not unusual for allowances given to mistresses to be roughly 200,000 yen per encounter or 1 million yen a month.

A-san, a 42-year-old sales rep working at a major manufacturing company, has discovered a much more reasonable option. For a year, he has been seeing an executive secretary, 24, who he met at a club designed for singles.

The initial outlay for registration is 50,000 yen but after that expenses are minimal. “The only money I pay to her is 5,000 yen per meeting for car money,” he says. “The club has a policy that makes the male member pay his female date this transportation fee as a minimum. But this girl is telling me that ‘that’s the only allowance I seek.’” Read more

Salons supplying sleaze shuttered across Japan

On a recent visit to Tokyo’s infamous Kabukicho entertainment district, Spa! (Dec. 22) discovered that the typically luminescent Ichiban-gai arch, which hangs above one entrance near Shinjuku Station, was unlit.

The tabloid wonders: Is this how far Kabukicho has sunk? Once Tokyo’s adult playground, the area has hit upon hard times — a trend buffeted by the ongoing recession and law enforcement activities that is sweeping through Japan’s legendary entertainment quarters. Read more

Sakai and Oshio cases leading to Tokyo ‘white powder sweep’

The high-profile drug arrests of singer-actress Noriko Sakai (“Nori P”), 38, and her 41-year-old husband, Yuichi Takaso, have prompted police to institute a “white powder sweep” through the notorious Tokyo entertainment areas of Roppongi and Shibuya, reports Shukan Taishu (Dec. 21).

Both Sakai and Takaso subsequently received suspended sentences, which have led some to question how seriously the cases were handled. “Considering their impact on society, they were treated very leniently,” says a representative within the legal community. “It would have made more sense for them to have served time.”

The police, apparently, feel likewise and, according to the article, have been utilizing undercover officers since the beginning of this month to institute street searches of pedestrians and crack down on neon-lit clubs and bars in Shibuya and Roppongi where methamphetamine distribution is known to be prevalent. Read more

Tallying the bottom line for Tokyo women in the sex trade

The “elite” of Japan’s sex industry used to be the gals who slither in suds at deluxe soaplands.

During better times, says 27-year-old Azusa, a “foam princess” could earn as much as 500,000 yen a day. But the big-spend bubble has been pricked, and these days pickings are slim.

“We work on a commission basis, so no customers means no money,” she tells Shukan Jitsuwa (Dec. 17). “The shop guarantees 30,000 yen per diem for us to show up. But when business is slow the number of girls on duty are cut. So even if we want to work we can’t. Anyway, there’s no demand.”

To win back clients, some soaps have begun offering an increasingly rough-and-tumble range of services heretofore unavailable. These would include soku-shaku and soku-beddo (on-the-spot oral sex and intercourse as soon as the patron enters the room); the usual matto play atop an air mattress; and bareback rides. Read more

Navigating Japan’s nyotaimori netherworld

TOKYO (TR) – For at least as long as nyotaimori — the practice of serving sushi on the body of a naked female’s torso — has been making inroads overseas, the media has been raising the same question: Where does the practice fit within the context of Japanese culture?

For an answer, one can turn to the 168-cm-long body of Miho Wakabayashi. Until last year, the 30-year-old’s bare stomach and limbs were adorned with fish and fresh fruit slices once a month at the Sleeping Beauty “happening bar” in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. (Such a drinking establishment is one in which customers engage in uninhibited intimate activities with one another.)

“It was a show promoted as a special event,” says Wakabayashi, who is also a part-time stripper, sometimes performing at the legendary Rokku-za theater in Asakusa, and an actress in adult films. “It was used as a kind of ice-breaker intended to draw laughs.” Read more

Maria Ozawa, other acclaimed AV actresses on auction as stagnation sticks

Buried in the back of Weekly Playboy (Nov. 23) is a report claiming that the lingering recession is resulting in popular adult video (AV) actresses increasingly being auctioned off at top-class sex establishments with none other than starlet Maria Ozawa appearing on the block.

A conventional deri heru (out-call) sex service, the tabloid explains, has an image of being inexpensive, but one staffed with AV ladies is quite the opposite, commanding fees between 30,000 and 50,000 yen a pop for run-of-the-mill actresses and three or four times those figures for top-name talents.

Ozawa, who is half-Canadian and no stranger to the pages of Weekly Playboy, is registered with Club Tora no Ana in Tokyo’s Shibuya entertainment area. A source says that once an asking price of 150,000 yen for 70 minutes with the actress appeared on the club’s Web page a flood of roughly 200 inquiries soon followed. Read more

Insider reveals the secrets of winning a fuzoku femme’s favor

In its latest weekly installment of the ongoing memoirs of a veteran writer covering the pink trade, Nikkan Gendai (Nov. 5) suggests that when it comes to scribes who scribble about sex, seniority is certainly significant.

Why? While not citing his source, the writer claims that about 40 percent of female sex industry workers come from broken homes, and of these, a vast majority, perhaps over 80 percent, grew up without a father in the household.

Many, for reasons related to their unfamiliarity with males at home, grew up and had the further misfortune of gravitating to gloomy relationships with disreputable or violent partners. Read more

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