Soaring summer temperatures raise fears of a profusion of perversions

There’s flaky and then there’s outright weird. The Nagoya police ought to know, reports Nikkan Gendai (Aug. 7). A 33-year-old salaryman assaulted a woman on an escalator in an heretofore unheard-of manner.

According to police, while exiting the Meitetsu railway station in August last year, the perpetrator had thrust his hand up a 39-year-old woman’s skirt and dashed the contents of a small plastic case containing his own semen onto the woman’s underwear. Read more

Women flee nursing, insurance trade for ‘pink’ careers

Ask a gal working at a “pink” business what she was doing before she went into the life, and you’re likely to be told she had formerly worked as a nurse or an insurance saleslady.

In the latest installment of the long-running series titled “The Dark Side of the Sex Industry,” Nikkan Gendai (July 23) investigates whether there’s any substance to this story.

Apparently, there is.

Nurses’ demanding duties mean they must always on the run, and those with a tendency to take things slowly and calmly tend to receive nasty treatment from their peers. And if an insurance saleslady reports good sales, her envious co-workers will start spreading rumors that she “landed the business by sleeping with customers.” Read more

‘Carnivorous women’ with yen for men find licking to their liking

With growing numbers of hesitant, herbivorous males matched by more assertive, carnivorous females, sex in Japan has truly turned topsy-turvy. Nikkan Gendai (July 17) reports that increasingly libidinous Japanese women have been flocking to discreet “sensual massage parlors,” where they pay to be pampered by young hunks.

An office worker in her 30s who patronizes such a place in Shinjuku’s Kabukicho district tells the tabloid, “The place where I go has a membership system and won’t admit anyone without an introduction. A 90-minute session costs 30,000 yen.”
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AV actress Reiko Yamaguchi matures into bar mama in Kabukicho

G-cup AV actress Reiko Yamaguchi has spent much of her career playing “mature” leading ladies. Yet ten years after her debut she finds herself as a full bar mama-san at a snack in Tokyo’s entertainment district of Kabukicho.

“Since I have experience as a hostess and I also wanted to create a venue for interaction with my fans, I decided to open this bar,” says the AV veteran to evening tabloid Nikkan Gendai (July 12) about her club called Bar Naked, which opened in April. “With me working ‘naked’ on a regular basis, I came up with this name because I wanted to expose the other side of me.”

The bar has 15 seats behind the counter. Entry fees start at 60 minutes for 2,500 yen. Sparkling wine (Cafe de Paris) can be purchased for 3,000 yen, and the actress, who has starred in roughly 500 adult video features, will sandwich the bottle between her 98-centimeter breasts as a no-charge extra before pouring. On Friday and Saturday nights part-time girls also serve. Read more

Hoods sucker sumo grapplers with sex business swindles

The media has been full of reports about ties between professional sumo and the Japanese underworld.

The first question that comes to almost everyone’s mind is, how could these guys be so dumb?

Nikkan Gendai (July 1) looks to Alexandre Dumas for the answer, and — voila — comes up with Cherchez la femme.

As reported in the ongoing weekly column “The Dark Side of the Sex Business,” an ex-sumo grappler who opened up a “pink” shop after retirement tells the tabloid, “Sex shops can be profitable. You can expect to turn over 100 million yen or more in a year. So thanks to the sex trade we have a chance to become a yokozuna (grand champion), in a manner of speaking.” Read more

Soapland boy-sans turn tables on their tormenters

“Over the past 20 years, the biggest change the sex industry has undergone has been the male staff at soaplands,” begins Nikkan Gendai (June 24) in the latest installment of its long-running series “The Dark Side of the Sex Business.”

These staff, known as “boy-sans,” typically robust young lads with crewcuts who bow welcome and see off visitors to their erotic bathhouses, belonged to a clearly established pecking order.

In the past, the boy-sans were expected to be particularly deferential to top earning hookers at the shop, who in a good month brought in as much as 7 million yen in revenues, the source of their regular paycheck. Read more

Disconsolate Johns’ ‘fuzoku loss’ provides new fodder for head shrinkers

When a person’s dog dies, cat collapses, parakeet poops out or goldfish goes belly up, grief, confusion, anger, guilt and depression often result. These are said to be typical symptoms of “pet loss” following the death of a beloved animal friend.

In the latest installment of an ongoing column series by a veteran “pink” reporter, titled “Fuzokukai no Yami” (the darkness of the world of the sex trade), Nikkan Gendai (June 3) looks into a similar phenomenon it has termed “fuzoku loss.”

It is most common among younger patrons and usually occurs when a customer goes to a sex shop for a romp with his regular and is informed by management, “XXXX-chan doesn’t work here any more.” Read more

The puerile perils of proletarian prostitution

Earlier in May, police in Chiryu City, Aichi Prefecture, arrested a 25-year-old man on charges of assault and robbery against a 34-year-old woman while in a love hotel.

Nikkan Gendai (May 29) reports that Kenta Hayashi, unemployed and with no fixed abode, allegedly used his hands or a towel to strangle his victim until she lost consciousness. He then stole 5,000 yen in cash and her cell phone from her handbag.

Hayashi admitted to police that he had met the woman via an encounter site on the Web.

“His motive was simple robbery and he had no intention of killing her,” a police source is quoted as saying. Read more

Japan’s crackdown on loansharks may prompt housewives to peddle flesh

From June 18, a revised law controlling moneylenders, which has been applied incrementally up to now, goes into full force. A salient feature of the law, reports Nikkan Gendai (May 19), will be a limit on the loan amount to less than one-third of the borrower’s annual income. At the same time, nearly all consumer loan companies are ceasing to extend loans to housewives.

This is no small matter. According to the national census of 2005, Japan had 16.4 million full-time housewives, of whom an estimated 4.75 million, or 29 percent, had taken out consumer loans.

“A majority of that number have already lost their sources of credit,” says loan consultant Mikio Kobayashi. “It’s believed that 38 percent of the housewives who take out loans conceal it from their husbands. As a result, women desperate for money have resorted to underground moneylenders, who charge usurious rates, and many wind up working flat out just to keep up the interest payments.” Read more

Hard times: Japan’s commercial sex version of ‘fast food’ squeezes it out to rake it in

Even with Japan’s economy in the doldrums, salarymen have not necessarily forgone the pleasures of visits to sex shops. They’ve just reduced their outlays.

The sex industry’s current version of fast food for the masses are tekoki-ten (hand job shops), where the going rate for a 5-finger burp job is 5,000 yen.

Nikkan Gendai (May 15) learned of this when the Metropolitan Police Department reported the arrest of 34-year-old Daijiro Nogami, proprietor of “Love Search,” on violation of a public morals charge. Read more

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