TOKYO (TR) – Tokyo Metropolitan Police have arrested a 39-year-old man for allegedly filming a teenage girl in suggestive poses, the footage of which he posted on a pay-to-view site, reports the Mainichi Shimbun (Mar. 14).
On four occasions between June and August, 2017, Norimichi Maruyama, of no known occupation, allegedly filmed the girl, then 16, as she committed acts deemed obscene inside hotel rooms in Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo and Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture while knowing she was a minor.
Maruyama, who was arrested on Tuesday on suspicion of violating the anti-child prostitution law, denies the allegations. “I didn’t know she was under 18 years of age,” the suspect told the Shinjuku Police Station.
Maruyama paid the girl, whom he met on a deai-kei matchmaking site, a total of 600,000 yen in cash, police said.
Maruyama posted the footage of the girl and roughly 50 other women on the pay-to-view site for at least the past three years, collecting about 40 million yen in revenue from the site’s operator, police said.
The National Police Agency said on Thursday that the number of cases of child prostitution reached a record high of 3,097 in 2018, an increase of more than 28 percent over the year before.
