Real field reports and columns on Japan's adult-entertainment world
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The Tokyo District Court on September 15 sentenced Hosono Masayuki, 52, to five years' confinement and a ¥1 million fine over a 12-year-old Thai girl made to serve about 70 customers at his Yushima massage shop — accepting that he had been deceived about her age, and convicting him because he never checked it.
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Fifteen months after Japan's revised public-morals law made it illegal for sex businesses to pay recruiters for referring women, operators told FRIDAY Digital the kickback rate has risen from about 15 percent of a woman's monthly earnings to nearly 20 percent — and that licensed scouting firms withdrew, leaving the trade to anonymous criminal groups.
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Kyoto prefectural police arrested two men over KOAKUMA DOLL, a business that advertised online as a men's esthetic salon and operated out of four one-room apartments near Kyoto Station. Investigators say about 45 women worked for it and that it took in roughly 50 million yen in a year, in wards where premises-based sex businesses are banned outright.
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Pfizer's benzathine penicillin — the only drug Japan recommends to stop syphilis passing from mother to child — is out of stock until the latter half of 2027. The infectious-disease society has told doctors to save the remaining doses for pregnant women. In the most recent national surveillance quarter, 36 percent of men diagnosed with syphilis reported paying for sex in the prior six months, and 30 percent of women reported selling it.
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Ehime police arrested seven men over two days at a soapland and a 'health' shop in Matsuyama, booking all of them under the Anti-Prostitution Act clause that punishes providing the room. The women and the customers described in the allegations were not arrested — the statute does not reach them.
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The Tokyo District Court sentenced the former manager of an Ikebukuro girls bar to seven years on September 9 for running a woman's prostitution and sexually assaulting her. The investigation began when police arrested the woman herself, under the one clause of Japan's Anti-Prostitution Act that reaches the person selling.
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Tokyo police arrested four men on September 9 over a Shinjuku apartment they say was fitted out as a 'play room' for a shop that advertised itself as a men's esthetic salon and charged 10,000 yen for 15 minutes. Investigators put its takings at about 80 million yen since March. The statute they were booked under has not raised its fine ceilings since 1956.
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Prosecutors in Osaka declined on September 7 to charge a Yamaguchi-gumi-affiliated boss and a 55-year-old woman over a Minami host-club referral center registered in her name, citing 'various circumstances.' Three days earlier, the man who actually ran the center was fined 300,000 yen by summary order — the ceiling for that offense. The case that began with an undercover officer on a Soemoncho sidewalk is now closed.
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Shizuoka police arrested a 40-year-old woman on September 7 on suspicion of running a store-type sex business out of an apartment near Numazu Station, in a district where such businesses are banned outright. The shop called itself a 'feather touch specialty shop' and charged 10,000 yen for 50 minutes. It is at least the third such case in Numazu this year, and each shop went by a different invented service name.
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On September 4, 2026, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police released the verbatim LINE messages illegal street scouts send to women after getting their contact details — including quoted rates of 120,000 to 200,000 yen for five or six hours. Twenty-seven people have been caught using the method, among them a 25-year-old arrested for handing out New Year envelopes with nothing inside.