The Report Is Final
The panel met nine times between March and September. On Thursday, September 17, 2026, at its ninth and last session, it signed the document.
The Ministry of Justice's Study Group on the Regulation of Prostitution — baibaishun ni kakaru kisei no arikata kentōkai, chaired by Kitagawa Kayoko, a criminal-law professor at Waseda University — adopted its final report, concluding that solicitation by the buying side should be made a punishable offense. The ministry said it would accelerate the legislative work, with an amendment bill to the baishun bōshi-hō — the Anti-Prostitution Act — in view for the extraordinary session of the Diet this autumn.
A draft of the report reached the panel on August 24. What Thursday's version adds is not a reversal but a specification, and the specifications are where the reform acquires its shape.
| Final report, September 17, 2026 | |
|---|---|
| Body | Study Group on the Regulation of Prostitution, Ministry of Justice |
| Chair | Kitagawa Kayoko, Waseda University |
| Sessions | 9, from March 24 to September 17, 2026 |
| Core finding | Solicitation by the buying side should be punishable |
| Scope | Street approaches and solicitation over the internet and social media |
| Conduct named | Looking over and loitering for the purpose of buying; requesting brokerage of prostitution; soliciting via SNS; responding to a seller's solicitation |
| Penalty level | Current ceiling called inadequate as deterrence; raise recommended |
| Criminalizing the transaction itself | Majority urged caution; no recommendation |
| Definition of prostitution | Debated; no conclusion reached |
| Next step | Ministry drafts offense definitions; bill eyed for the autumn extraordinary Diet |
The Asymmetry Being Corrected
The 1956 statute contains no penalty for the act of buying or selling sex. What it penalizes is the conduct around the transaction, and the balance of that conduct has always tilted one way.
A person who solicits or waits for customers in public on the selling side faces up to six months' confinement or a fine of up to ¥20,000 — about $135 at current rates, a figure fixed when the law was written and never adjusted. The man who approaches her, negotiates and leaves is outside the statute entirely. Kyodo News described the resulting structure as an imbalance by sex that the review was convened to address.
The report proposes to write the buyer in. Its examples are concrete: monoshoku — looking over the available sellers — and loitering for that purpose; asking a broker to arrange prostitution; soliciting through social media; and responding to a solicitation from the selling side.
The online items matter most. Street prostitution around Okubo Park in Tokyo's Kabukicho, and the comparable trade in Osaka's Kita district, is the enforcement picture that drove the review, and it is the picture most reporting reproduces. But the transaction it stands in for has been migrating to messaging apps and social platforms for years, and a solicitation offense confined to public places would have codified an offense for a market that is emptying out. The final report closes that gap explicitly.
The Ceiling
The panel also took a position on the number.
The current statutory penalty, the report found, is hard to call sufficient from the standpoint of crime deterrence. Members argued that a ¥20,000 maximum fine functions as a licensing fee rather than a sanction, and the report calls for raising the upper limit.
This is the least contested item in the document and probably the most durable. A fine set in the Occupation-era economy has lost nearly all of its bite through inflation alone; raising it requires no new theory of the offense and no position on the underlying moral question. It is also the change most likely to survive the Diet intact.
The Two Questions It Left Open
An expert panel earns its credibility partly by declining, and this one declined twice.
Whether to criminalize the transaction itself. The report records that a majority favored caution. The reasoning is practical as well as doctrinal: members found the theoretical and legal justification for punishing consensual adult sex-for-payment difficult to construct, and warned that criminalization would push the trade underground and raise the risk borne by the selling side. That warning tracks the argument sex-worker health and rights groups in Japan have made for years, and it is notable that it appears in a ministry document rather than only in opposition to one.
What prostitution legally means. The 1956 act defines it as sexual intercourse with an unspecified person in exchange for compensation. That definition — intercourse, and only intercourse — is the architecture on which Japan's licensed adult-entertainment sector rests: fūzoku businesses regulated under the fūei-hō, the Businesses Affecting Public Morals Regulation Act, operate lawfully by offering services that stop short of it.
Some members argued the definition should extend to acts similar to intercourse, including oral sex, which Japan's non-consensual sexual intercourse provisions already treat as equivalent. Others were cautious, citing the effect on people working in the adult-entertainment industry. The ministry's own account is that views varied widely, consensus would be hard to reach, and none was reached.
So the reform heading to the Diet is aimed at the street and the phone, not at the licensed industry. Whatever it does to the men buying sex outside Okubo Park, it does nothing to the legal footing of the soaplands, delivery health services and private-room massage businesses that constitute the sector as an economic matter.
What Has to Happen Next
A report is not a bill. The ministry must now convert the panel's categories into statutory language — what counts as looking over, what counts as loitering for the purpose, what distinguishes a solicitation on social media from a conversation — and each of those definitions will be argued over long before anyone is charged under them.
The political calendar is the binding constraint. Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae instructed the justice minister to examine the imbalance last November; the panel was stood up in March and finished in six months, which is quick work for a seventy-year-old statute. The ministry is aiming at the autumn extraordinary session. If it misses, the bill goes to the ordinary session and the schedule slips by months.
Two things are already true regardless. The government's anti-trafficking Action Plan 2026, whose draft was agreed at the Prime Minister's Office on September 15, contains language consistent with the panel's conclusion — the buyer who answers a solicitation now appears in the cabinet's own enforcement frame. And as of Thursday, the recommendation that men who buy sex should be punishable is no longer a draft circulated to a committee. It is the finished advice of the ministry's own experts.
Sources: Kyodo News, as carried by the Chūnichi Shimbun, Daily Sports and the Ryukyu Shimpo, for the September 17, 2026 adoption of the final report, its extension to solicitation over the internet, the sex-based imbalance in the 1956 statute, the current penalty of up to six months' confinement or a ¥20,000 fine for public solicitation and waiting for customers by the selling side, and the ministry's acceleration of legislative work toward an amendment bill; the Nihon Keizai Shimbun for the report's finding that the existing statutory penalty is inadequate as deterrence and its recommendation to raise the ceiling, the enumerated buyer conduct of looking over and loitering for the purpose of purchase, requesting brokerage, and soliciting via social media, the caution on criminalizing the transaction itself, and the ministry's next step of defining the offense; NHK and TV Asahi's ANN for the September 17 report's conclusion that the counterparty's conduct should be punishable, the inclusion of responding to a seller's solicitation, and the majority view that criminalizing consensual adult transactions is difficult to justify theoretically and legally; the Ministry of Justice's published record of the Study Group on the Regulation of Prostitution for the nine sessions held between March 24 and September 17, 2026; the Asahi Shimbun, Jiji Press and the Sankei Shimbun for the August 24 draft report and the ministry's intention to submit a bill to the extraordinary Diet session; the Tokyo Shimbun and the ministry's account of the panel's deliberations for the unresolved question of whether the definition of prostitution should extend to acts similar to intercourse and the concern about the effect on adult-entertainment workers; and the Prime Minister's Office announcement of September 15, 2026 for the draft Human Trafficking Countermeasures Action Plan 2026. Glossary: baishun bōshi-hō = the Anti-Prostitution Act of 1956, which prohibits both selling and buying sex but attaches no penalty to either act, penalizing instead the seller's public solicitation and the third parties around the transaction; fūei-hō = the Businesses Affecting Public Morals Regulation Act, which licenses and polices nightlife and adult-entertainment businesses; kōkinkei = the unified "confinement" penalty that replaced imprisonment with and without hard labor on June 1, 2025. The report is advisory; no bill had been introduced at the time of writing.