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

Crackdown on Tokyo fraud ring closes ‘encounter’ Internet sites

Law enforcement authorities from Tokyo and Miyagi Prefecture have shut down a major fraud ring involving online-dating sites designed to generate massive profits out of membership fees, reports Shukan Asahi Geino (Mar. 11).

On January 16, Noriyuki Hoshi, the leader of the operation, and ten others were taken into custody by police for defrauding members of deai-kei (encounter) matchmaking sites by hiring male actors to take on online personas of ladies seeking dates.

A reporter responsible for covering social media explains to the weekly that the victims were registered with such social networking sites as Mixi and Mobagetown. Between July 2005 and the day of the crackdown, the nationwide scam had swindled 1.4 million individuals out of a total of 2 billion yen. Read more

Hakata Tenjin ramen in Kabukicho

(Photo by Tokyo Reporter, February 27, 2010)

Curtain falling on cinema in Kabukicho

TOKYO (TR) – Tokyo’s Kabukicho entertainment area, once one of Japan’s most vibrant cinema districts, is experiencing a rapid shuttering of its theaters as their aging buildings lose audiences to modern theaters nearby.

The first domino fell in 2008, when Toho acquired the landmark Koma Stadium, a 2,000-seat performing arts theater that opened in 1956. Toho shut the Koma property, which also had two screens in its basement, and its neighboring building, home to the exhibitor’s 1,044-seat Shinjuku Plaza Gekijo, in preparation for redeveloping the entire site.

Last November, four screens operated by Toa Kogyo also closed, and three more, run by Humax Cinema, which had featured everything from “Ben-Hur” to softcore “pink” porn since opening in 1947, had shut six months earlier. Read more

Curtain falls in Kabukicho

(Photo by Tokyo Reporter, January 17, 2010)

Japan’s cunning bottakuri bars con compliant customers

Last month’s incident in the Minami district of Osaka in which comedian Tamotsu Kuroda of the group Messenger was arrested for assaulting a bar manager following a dispute over a 250,000-yen bill highlights the increasingly common practice of bottakuri, or to rip off, that is ongoing in Japan’s entertainment areas, reports Spa! (Jan. 26)

“Those rip-off joints in Osaka scrutinize their targets beforehand,” says the owner of a near where Kuroda’s altercation took place. “There’s a possibility that the bar was assuming Kuroda could afford a certain level of tab just because he is a popular comedian. There have been an increasing number of bottakuri cases here in the Minami area.” Read more

Drink-spikers return to old hunting grounds in Ueno

While the U.S. embassy in Tokyo has mounted a campaign to discourage Americans from enjoying a tipple in Roppongi, among the natives the practice of drink-spiking followed by robbery seems to be much more prevalent in Ueno. It was there, reports Shukan Jitsuwa (Jan. 28), that foreigners of Asian descent first began to slip mickey finns into customers’ drinks in order to relieve them of their cash and other valuables.

Following efforts to expel them from Ueno, the gangs shifted their operations to Ginza and Kabukicho. But police crackdowns have once again sent them slinking back to Ueno.

“It’s like a game of hide-and-seek,” says the manager of a local cabaret club. “Just when we thought that Ueno was safe at last, the crocks returned to their old haunts.”

“Up to November last year, the number of victims around Ueno came to about 90,” a reporter based in Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters tells the magazine. “There were something like 40 more cases in the neighboring Yushima area in Bunkyo Ward. Total losses are estimated at around 70 million yen. Previously the police undertook a sweep and went after the touts and the shops that had teamed up with the crooks, but the thieves just high-tailed it to Kabukicho and Ginza. Now they’re back in Ueno, an area that tends to be overlooked by the MPD.” Read more

Night photos on New Year’s Eve in Tokyo

(Photo by Tokyo Reporter, January 1, 2010) 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

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

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