The Review
Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has convened an expert panel to review the Act on Support for Women Facing Difficulties, the statute that in April 2024 took over the protective functions of the country's Anti-Prostitution Act. Fukushi Shimbun reported the panel's launch on August 17; the first meeting was held on July 29.
The panel is chaired by Tamie Kaino, professor emerita at Ochanomizu University. It is scheduled to deliver a report in March 2027.
The review is not discretionary. The law was passed as a member-sponsored bill in 2022 and carries a supplementary provision requiring the government to examine its operation three years after it took effect. That clock runs out in the spring of 2027.
According to Fukushi Shimbun, the panel's central assignment is to close the gap between prefectures — to identify why the women's consultation support centers that every prefecture is required to operate perform so differently, and how to raise the floor. The single largest question before it, the paper reported, is what to do about the breadth of administrative discretion the law leaves to local governments.
Kaino's own framing of the problem, as reported, was blunt: she said she was concerned about whether the new women's support law is reaching women in difficulty at all.
Why This Is a Sex-Industry Story
The connection is structural, not thematic.
The Anti-Prostitution Act (baishun boshi-ho), in force since 1957, criminalizes soliciting for prostitution, brokerage, coercion and the provision of premises, while leaving the purchase of sex from an adult unpunished. But the statute was never only a criminal law. Chapter 3 provided for hodo shobun — guidance dispositions, a correctional track for women convicted of soliciting. Chapter 4 provided for "protection and rehabilitation," the apparatus of women's consultation offices and women's protection facilities.
The 2022 law deleted both chapters. The women's consultation offices (fujin sodanjo) became women's consultation support centers. The women's protection facilities (fujin hogo shisetsu) became women's self-reliance support facilities, redefined in statute as places that support the recovery of physical and mental health.
That was the point of the reform. For six decades, a woman who sold sex was, in the eyes of the welfare system, a person to be corrected. Since April 2024, she is a person entitled to support. The panel now sitting is assessing whether that change was real.
What the Panel Is Looking At
The figures Fukushi Shimbun reported from the panel's materials describe a system that is not being used.
Temporary protection — emergency shelter placement through the prefectural centers — has fallen by roughly 40 percent over the past decade. The decline is not evenly distributed; disparity between local governments is one of the panel's stated concerns.
The residential side is thinner still. There are 47 women's self-reliance support facilities nationwide, 23 of them operated directly by government and the rest by social welfare corporations. Because the law makes them optional rather than mandatory, eight prefectures have none at all. Tokyo has five. Across the country, the facilities are running at about 20 percent of capacity.
Some 1,770 women's consultation support workers are posted at welfare offices. And fewer than 20 percent of municipalities have adopted the basic plan the law asks them to produce — a duty of effort, not an obligation, and one that most have not met.
An empty shelter is an ambiguous number. It can mean the need has fallen, or it can mean the door is hard to find and harder to walk through. The panel's task is to determine which, and Fukushi Shimbun reported that access barriers to temporary protection, coordination with child welfare law, and the low public recognition of these facilities as welfare institutions are all on its agenda.
The Enforcement Line Is Moving the Other Way
The review lands in a year when the criminal side of the same statute has been unusually active.
This summer the Metropolitan Police Department cleared street prostitution out of Okubo Park in Shinjuku, arresting women for waiting for customers under the Anti-Prostitution Act. Shueisha Online reported on August 14 and 15 that the women had largely relocated rather than stopped. In early August, Asahi Shimbun reported the arrest of three women in their twenties on soliciting charges, one of whom told investigators she was under pressure from a host to earn quickly.
Those arrests and this panel concern the same women. The Anti-Prostitution Act supplies the charge; the women's support law is supposed to supply the alternative. One of those two instruments is demonstrably operating at scale. The other is running its shelters at a fifth of capacity.
Nothing in the reporting establishes that the enforcement is driving the shelter numbers down, and it would be wrong to assert it. What the reporting establishes is that the two lines are moving in opposite directions at the same time, and that the ministry has now asked a panel to explain the second one.
The Wider Docket
The review is one of three live official examinations of how Japan governs paid sex.
The Ministry of Justice has convened a study group on the regulation of the sale and purchase of sex, which first met in March 2026 and has met seven times, most recently on July 16. It has published no conclusions. Whether to penalize the purchase of sex from adults — the asymmetry at the center of the Anti-Prostitution Act — is among the questions before it.
The revised Businesses Affecting Public Morals Regulation Act (fuei-ho), whose principal provisions took effect in June 2025, banned the romantic-manipulation sales tactics and debt-driven coercion used by predatory host clubs, including demands that customers work in the sex trade to clear a tab. The National Police Agency reported in April that 143 people connected to such clubs were cleared in 2025.
And on August 16, Kansai Television reported that working hosts in Osaka's Minami district had begun collecting signatures for a petition to ban tab payments outright, to be submitted to the Osaka City Council. Tokyo's Kabukicho has largely abandoned the practice; Osaka has no ordinance addressing it. That report has not been matched by other outlets and is presented here as the account of a single broadcaster.
What Comes Next
The panel reports in March 2027. Its recommendations will inform any amendment of the support law and the next basic policy, due to take effect in fiscal 2029.
Until then, the state's answer to a woman selling sex on a Japanese street remains divided between two statutes written seventy years apart. One of them can arrest her tonight. The other has forty-seven buildings, eight prefectures without one, and four empty beds for every one that is filled.
This article is compiled from: Fukushi Shimbun Web, August 17, 2026, for the launch of the ministry's review panel, its first meeting on July 29, 2026, the chair Tamie Kaino of Ochanomizu University, the March 2027 reporting deadline, the focus on inter-prefectural disparity and administrative discretion, Kaino's stated concern about whether the law is reaching women, and the figures for temporary protection, facilities, occupancy, consultation workers and municipal plans; Economic News (economic.jp), July 22, 2026, for the statutory three-year review requirement and the panel's remit covering local consultation systems, public-private coordination and workforce development; the text of the Act on Support for Women Facing Difficulties (Act No. 52 of 2022), in force April 1, 2024, and its amendment of the Anti-Prostitution Act, for the deletion of Chapters 3 and 4 and the renaming of the consultation offices and protection facilities; Shueisha Online, August 14 and 15, 2026, for the displacement of street prostitution from Okubo Park following police enforcement; Asahi Shimbun, August 6, 2026, for the arrest of three women in their twenties on soliciting charges; the Ministry of Justice's published schedule for its study group on the regulation of the sale and purchase of sex, for the first meeting on March 24, 2026 and the seventh on July 16, 2026; the National Police Agency, April 2026, for the figure of 143 people cleared in connection with predatory host clubs in 2025; and Kansai Television, August 16, 2026, for the signature campaign by Osaka hosts seeking a ban on tab payments, a report not corroborated by other outlets. No private individual is named here. Legal gloss: the Anti-Prostitution Act (baishun boshi-ho) criminalizes soliciting for prostitution, brokerage, coercion and the provision of premises, but does not penalize the purchase of sex from an adult; the Businesses Affecting Public Morals Regulation Act (fuei-ho) licenses and regulates adult-entertainment businesses, and as revised in 2025 prohibits debt-driven coercion of customers into sex work.