The Mainichi ran an article recently about how the the tournament has been affected, citing an increase of empty seats as just one of the issues facing his highly-monitored event. A great bit of flavor comes from an account of two fans who got into a fight because one offhandedly said the other looked like a yakuza:

「暴力団……」。２日目の取組終了後、黒いサングラスをつけていた愛知県安城市の男性（６２）が会場の外に出ようとしたところ、他の観客の男性からこうささやかれた。２人は口論になり、警察官が仲裁に入った。

サングラスの男性は「まさか自分が暴力団に間違われるとは。頭にくる。雰囲気が異常だった。名古屋場所は開催すべきではなかったのではないか」と憤った。

At the end of the second day of the tournament, a 62-year-old man from Aichi Prefecture who was wearing black sunglasses was exciting the arena when a fellow fan mumbled, “bouryokudan…” The two got into an argument that ended after security guards intervened.

The man with the glasses commented angrily, “How dare he mistake me for a gang member. It’s really insulting. The whole atmosphere here is really strange. Maybe they shouldn’t have held the tournament at all.”

The article goes on to report that a woman in charge of the information desk at the tournament says that they haven’t gotten even half the number of viewers they typically host and that there’s been a number of cancellations.

Comments from those who did attend the tournament seem to indicate a common sentiment that the entire thing has been blown out of proportion. One 60-year-old local said he thinks the punishment against Kotomitsuki  is too harsh for just gambling on baseball, while a middle school student commented that he wished the Sumo Association “would consider the fans.”

Other news reports tell tales of a large but still disappointing turnout on the first day. While 90% capacity is considered “full house” for the event, the July 11 opening reportedly saw 7,200 of the 8,100–or 89 percent–of the arena’s seats filled. This year was the first since 1985 that the tournament couldn’t roll out their “manin onrei banner,” signaling a full house. Reports of the second day, cite attendance numbers even lower at only around 4,500–800 fewer than last year.

A number of sponsors have also pulled out, leaving the tournament with around 80 percent fewer prizes than in past years. It was reported that on the second day of the event had only 12 gifts, the third 10, and according to the Mainichi, today saw only 11. Understandable that Japanese companies are pulling out sponsorship in the face of scandal (some of us probably remember the heat sponsors gave poor Tsuyoshi Kusanagi after his romp in Roppongi), but it certainly can’t be very encouraging for wrestlers who are already battling it out to a bunch of empty seats.

In a move to put a stop to illegal deai-kei cafes, the National Police Agency announced they will tighten regulations regarding love hotels from January of next year. Although the businesses appear to be love hotels, they do not meet standards set by law and some are used as a location for enjo-kosai. Says the Mainichi Daily:

There are about 3,590 facilities that closely resemble love hotels but are not recognized as such because they do not meet the standards set by the current law, according to the NPA. About 80 percent of them are situated in areas where adult entertainment businesses are prohibited by law.

According to the Asahi, the new regulations will specify that love hotels are businesses that have “rest” and “stay” prices displayed in front of the building, have an entrance that is shrouded by curtains or some other obstruction, and may be used without seeing employees face-to-face. Those under 18 years of age must be prohibited from entering, and the business cannot be within 200 meters of a school.

Also from the Mainichi Daily (and a great AP article here), Japan has finally begun to respond to international pressure regarding child pornography, with the National Police Agency and other government ministries pressuring the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications to agree to ban access to websites dealing in child porn instead of simply demanding site owners delete them. Despite some concerns that the move may be an infringement of freedom of expression, most seem to welcome the plan. And it couldn’t come sooner, as the day after the announcement was made police reported that seven child pornography sites–five “ranking” sites and one run privately–had been discovered and the owners ordered to shut them down. Still waiting for them to get their act together on the junior idol stuff..

Back on the fuzoku topic, it was reported today that a Dentsu employee was arrested for running a nightclub in Kanagawa Prefecture that illegally employed Filipino waiters and hostesses. The man started the club in August 2006, reportedly trying to pay off debts he accumulated through “entertainment” and the purchase of a 43 million yen condo. To staff the pub, he started a fake web design company to get work visas for the Philippine nationals. As we learned earlier, Dentsu is known as being quite the harsh taiikukai-kei company, so you have to wonder where the entrepreneur found the time to run his other operation.

Taku Hachiro is probably the most unlikely sex symbol in the world. A talento known for his personification of the ultimate otaku stereotype, this Shizuoka native’s long stringy hair, portly figure and gopher-like posture might make him better suited for the back corner of a video arcade than ads for the sex industry. But for over a year he has been promoting deai [hook-up] sites in manga magazines. In today’s poor economy, peddlers of pleasure will do anything to attract new customers, including taking on an otaku image.

Otaku have been booming in the popular consciousness since 2005, when Fuji TV aired its prime time drama Densha Otoko, a beauty and the beast romance starring an otaku. Women’s magazines raved about how the show championed otaku as new potential partners for middle-aged career women, but otaku remained incredulous. That same year, Toru Honda wrote Dempa Otoko, a manifesto calling for otaku to abandon “love” for human females and embrace “moe” for two-dimensional characters. His book sold 33,000 copies in three months, and fans planted signs in Akihabara reading, “Real Otaku Don’t Desire Real Women.”

But Honda is the voice of an extreme minority.

“We may have sworn off dating, but that does not mean we don’t have sex,” says Hiroyuki Egami, 23, a prominent voice among himote, a catchall for otaku types unpopular with the ladies. By Egami’s estimation, paying for sex is easier and more honest than wining and dining women to prove oneself a worthy mate.

Those who share Egami’s assessment may head to one of dozens of cosplay cabaret or image clubs found in Shinjuku, Shibuya and Ikebukuro. While many just use the terms of otaku culture such as moe to make a splash, some take pains to attract a demographic deeply involved with media images of the opposite sex.

“Pure-cos” in Shibuya caters to all of the fantasy wishes of its customers by offering close to one hundred costumes based on famous anime heroines. Employees are expected to talk the talk as well; on its hiring page, Pure-cos warns potential employees that customers will expect them to talk and converse about their favorite anime and manga. Staff are rewarded with all the manga they can read during breaks and coupons for the local Mandarake store.

The shift to more physical pleasures is also apparent in Akihabara. The omnipresent maids used to just pour tea, but the boom surrounding Densha Otoko has put cafes in fierce competition and encouraged a diversification of services. Royal Milk, for example, offers its customers “soul care,” 60 minutes of one-on-one talk time with a maid for 9,000 yen. With a market of lonely men that ripe it was only a matter of time before talk shifted to sex.

The area in front of The Radio Kaikan used to be called Maid Row for all the costumed girls passing out fliers there. However, adverts for maid escorts—costumed girls who play the part of a temporary girlfriend–began to outnumber those for cafes, and authorities chased the maids off the street in June 2007.

Today, many men shopping in Akihabara have one or even two maids escorts by their side. They pay 1,000 yen per 10 minutes for the company and compliments on computer-buying skills. Maid escorts ostensibly work between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m., the operating hours of most stores in the area, but local authorities warn of “maid enjo” prostitution after dark.

It remains to be seen how purely “otaku” any of this is. Even as clubs using the otaku vernacular are on the rise, the major buzz in the community surrounds games such as Love Plus and Dream C Club. In the former, players can use their Nintendo DS to interact in real-time with a virtual girlfriend. The latter is a virtual hostess club, which simulates an ultra-real experience down to the overpriced drinks. Real money is exchanged for virtual currency to enjoy an array of services. While otaku imagery in the mizu shoubai world may be on the rise, it seems that otaku still prefer to pay for the not so real thing.

http://www.moe-tokyo.net/

http://www.pure-cos.com/system/comic/comic.html

Editor’s note:  The Otaku subculture is one that I’m no expert on and the definition of otaku is as varied and changing as the autumn sky. And often otaku have a very poor sense of humor about how they are portrayed or defined, as do self-proclaimed experts on otaku culture. So be it.  The first time I ever heard the word and vaguely understood what it meant was in 1999.  I was still on the police beat then and there had been a series of muggings in Akihibara, aka Akiba–the electronics district.  Wayward youth were targeting the cash-bearing teenagers who came to Akiba to load up on manga, games, dolls and other otaku lucre, and luring them into allies with promises of rare manga and such, only to beat the crap out of them and steal everything the poor victims had.  The youth gangs doing this coined a term for the practice, a take on 親父狩り (oyaji-gari–literally: hunting middle-aged men) which was a popular term for beating up old drunken salarymen and stealing their wallets–used by both the kids doing it and the cops investigating incidents.  The kids detained by the Manseibashi police referred to their misadventures as オタク狩り(otaku-gari/hunting otaku) . The term quickly became a new part of the criminal vocabulary.  Every few years, the story I originally wrote on it gets recycled and reported as if it were a new phenomenon. Well there is nothing new under the sun.  Of course, speaking of otaku, there was also the infamous Akiba-kun, a former otaku who went to work for Japan’s largest organized crime group, the Yamaguchi-gumi, running the programs and databases for the 1,000 store loan sharking operation that the Goryokai managed from 2002-2004.  I wonder where he is now? Maybe running businesses in Akihabara?

For more on Otaku culture please check  out The Otaku Encyclopedia by Patrick Galbraith and also the tour book/audio guide to Akihabara by Patrick and Max Hodges. Whether you agree that the books are “authoritative” or not, they are good reads for novices like myself.  I should also say that I’m planning to do the narration for the revised Kabukicho tour with Mr. Hodges, so I’m not unbiased in my fondness of the Akihbara guide. It is fun and informative, at least I think so. (Jake Adelstein, assistant editor)

In January 2005, ICE agents executed three federal seizure warrants targeting Los Angeles and Las Vegas bank accounts belonging to Kajiyama, 60, who is currently serving a 6 ½ year sentence in Japan on loan sharking charges. As a result of those warrants, ICE agents in Los Angeles seized two bank accounts containing approximately $342,000 from the Union Bank of California. ICE agents in Las Vegas executed a third seizure warrant targeting an account containing $250,000 in Kajiyama’s name at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino. ICE agents in Los Angeles and Las Vegas coordinated closely with the agency’s attaché office in Tokyo and the Nevada Gaming Control Board on the case.

Read ICE’s announcement here.

Another article about the case can be found here.

Cabaret Club girls are neo-celebrities in Japan, even putting out CDs

The publication of the magazine Koakuma Ageha in 2005 sent a shock-wave through Japanese society: when did cabaret-club hostesses become socially accepted to the degree that they have their own widely-available fashion magazine? And when did “kyabakura girl” become a glamorous and enviable occupation for young women? The answers to these questions were not apparent. And since the Japanese media is not allowed to talk about trends in terms of socioeconomic class or subculture, Koakuma Ageha’s popularity gave the impression that all young women, no matter the family background, have suddenly clamored to work nights in Kabukicho. (–JRSC note–but it’s not that simple, as the author explains. For more read the rest of the article by clicking the link here)

子ども性被害防止で相談ＨＰ

Note: I’ve been working with the Polaris Project Japan, a non-profit organization that combats human trafficking and sexual exploitation of women and children, since 2005 and recently agreed to be their temporary public relations director.  In the last year, a lot of the calls coming to Polaris Project Japan were concerning Japanese teenage women who appeared to have been forced into the sex industry–not foreign women.  It does seem that the Japanese government has been enforcing the anti-human trafficking laws to the point where there are significantly fewer non-Japanese women being made sex-slaves. However, it seems they have been replaced by young Japanese teenage girls, many of them runaways or abused children. 

Polaris Project Japan had the brilliant idea of reaching out directly to these girls by making a mobile-phone web-site aimed at them, that was user friendly, and could offer some good advice.  Young schoolgirls don’t read newspapers, don’t watch as much television as they did, and most of their communications is over cell-phones and social networking sites. Unfortunately, such sites have also becoming prime hunting grounds for pimps, low-life yakuza, and pedophiles who seek out fresh meat to use themselves or sell to others. 

A mobile phone web-site aimed at helping Japanese teenage victims

NHK, Japan’s answer to the BBC gave the website some good coverage this morning. 

The contents of the consultations that Polaris Project Japan and their partner organization Yukon have gotten are quite unpleasant. 

●　From Host Club Patron To Forced Prostitution 

　　 A male Host asked a young victim come visit his club without worrying about money. After his begging continued, she went to the club a few times. Then, a different man from the club asked her for a few hundred thousand yen (a few thousand dollars) for the food and drinks she had consumed. She received threatening phone calls and was even ambushed at her own home. The men kept pressuring the girl to pay the bill, coercing her to go and work in the sex industry. Around that time, she was put in touch with Polaris, and after consulting with the police, she is safe once again.  

Note: I covered incidents like this one as far back as 2000, when I was still a police reporter assigned to the 4th district. It’s a classic technique that yakuza or general low-lives use to force young women into the sex trade.  Host clubs seems to be the equivalent of trafficking recruitment centers in many parts of Japan. 

●　A 14-year-old farmed out as a prostitute by her classmates

　Her friends told her that she had a bad attitude, and forced her to apologize by paying money earned from prostitution. A few months later, through some website, she was introduced to a customer, and forced into prostitution. It had already been taken up as a case as a juvenile victim when she contacted this organization. She says, “I’m out of the situation, but I have nowhere to go. I always feel depressed.I let myself get picked up for casual sex, abuse my body, and start crying for no reason.” Polaris Project Japan provides  her regular counseling and the support she needs. 

Polaris Project Japan Launches a New Mobile Website:

To help victims of child/teen prostitution

and child pornography and prevent further exploitation

The Polaris Project Japan (PPJ) is the Japanese branch of Polaris Project in Washington DC.  PPJ has been operating a hot-line for human trafficking victims for several years In the last year, PPJ has been receiving more and more calls not just from the traditional human trafficking victims–foreign women ensnared in the sex industry–but Japanese teenage girls who have been lured or forced into the sex industry and can’t get out, and sometimes even been asked by their own parents to work in the industry to make money for their family members. 

Contrary to the popular picture of Japanese teenage prostitutes as clueless teenagers who just want to earn money to buy a designer bag–many of the girls now in the industry are there because of financial necessity and a lack of support for abused girls and boys who run away from home. 

Many of these victims are recruited over the internet and or/are sold over social networking sites by their pimps–like commodities. 

The National Police Agency reported in 2008 internet Profile sites and Social networking sites are the hotbeds of child sex crimes, surpassing the net dating sites (which were originally the hub of sex trafficking).

It is hard to measure the extent of the problem because no Japanese government agency has attempted a comprehensive survey, and the laws protecting children are administrated by many different government agencies and ministries that do not share information or work together.

To provide an effective and systematical intervention to prevent sexual exploitation of adolescents and help victims, Polaris Project is launching a website:

¨       To provide an environment to seek counseling in a safe and anonymous way.

¨       To give information to questions like “What happens if….”, rather than sending simple “Stop” or “Danger” signs.

¨       To eliminate the embarrassment and fear of seeking counseling face to face by allowing contacts via website and phone.

¨       To inform the victims of additional channels of help available.

Polaris Project will also be working with The Children’s Human Rights Committee of the Japan Lawyer’s Association, Prefectural Women’s Centers, and Children’s Shelters to make sure that the children calling receive the best care and advice possible. It will also advertise on sites popular with Japanese youth to make sure the message reaches those who are most vulnerable.

A good book about the Economic Yakuza (Keizai Yakuza)

The yakuza invasion of Japan’s financial markets in recent years has been amazing and rapid.  Prime Minister Koizumi (who’s grandfather was a member of the Inagawa-kai crime group) , under encouragement from the Bush administration and with the advice of Miyauchi, the chairman of the Orix group, instituted a widespread relaxation of previous laws and regulations of the finance industry which made it possible for organized crime to get their foot in the door, and once they got inside the House Of Commerce, they decided to stay.

The modern yakuza, or the 成人ヤクザ, make their real money in loan-sharking, stock manipulation, real-estate speculation, and IPOs. They need a veneer of legitimacy to do this and that is usually done by creating a dummy corporation—front companies. 

One of the things I liked most about this book is the section where Suda discusses how the yakuza have changed over the years, and the very nature of the yakuza front company has changed as well.  Personally, I feel kind of nostalgic for the days when yakuza were idiots. They’d use their own gang offices as the company registration and put their own members on the board of directors. If you had a roster of yakuza names or a good database, it wasn’t hard to determine whether it was a front company or not.  Hell, you could to the office and watch the tattooed guys in bad suits come and go and pretty much figure it out instantly. 

There is a very good book, long since out of print, by Mizoguchi Atsushi, called Yakuza Front Company.  I think it was issued around 1992, or 1991. I don’t have a copy with me right now. In that book, he gave a very credible explanation of why the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Wal-Mart of organized crime in Japan, holds such a large number of front companies. Back in the day, when the Yamaguchi-gumi had agreed to stay out of Tokyo, they weren’t able to open gang offices. However, front companies were a different thing. It allowed them to operate in Tokyo but not necessarily as “the Yamaguchi-gumi.”  In many ways, the front companies paved the way for the Yamaguchi-gumi invasion of Tokyo with the “merger” between the Yamaguchi-gumi and the Kokusuikai （国粋会）in November of 2005.

Well, anyway, things used to be a lot simpler when I was a cub reporter. The basics of yakuza operations were gambling, prostitution, extortion, violence, blackmail and shakedowns. They certainly have diversified over the years.  I’m having to read books on finance and forensic accounting to keep up.  If you don’t understand the stock markets in Japan, you can’t understand the modern yakuza.  

Recently, I found a front company for a front company of a front company. In other words, it took me three layers of digging to find out the real company I was looking at and another layer to figure out which organized crime group was really running the show. It’s like peeling an onion and the onions keep getting bigger.

However, one yakuza boss did dispute my whining that yakuza money-earning activities （シノギ）had really changed in the last fifteen years. 

“The yakuza started at gamblers （博徒). Gambling was always a source of great revenue for us, whether we received protection money from the bakuchiba (博打場・ばくちば=casino）operating on our turf, or whether we actually ran the bakuchiba ourselves.  Yakuza, the word itself, refers to a losing hand in Japanese gambling. And when we run the casinos, we always set it up so that the house wins more often and wins bigger. The Japanese stock market–all it really is a virtual bakuchiba, and it’s not hard to rig. Nowadays they call it ‘insider trading’ but it’s really just a crooked card game of sorts. 如何様の博打に過ぎない.  We have the capital to play the game and win every time. Monthly dues to the organization alone from lower ranking factions are tremendous revenue. The Osaka Stock Exchange–might as well be Caesar’s Palace for some of us. The difference is that we’re not ordinary customers and we already have our own dealers on the inside. How could we lose?”

Indeed.

In Japan, prostitution isn’t just for professionals anymore. The quasi-legal sex industry in Japan is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar market and all signs indicate that it continues to grow. In an otherwise stagnant economy, despite the efforts of the local police to contain it, the fast-food restaurant inspired fellatio-for-sale coffee shops (pink salons), the home delivery service sexual massage operations, and the S & M clubs and their like show no signs of disappearing.

One of the many signs of the health and expansion of the industry can be found in any major convenience store or book store, among the women’s magazines.

These magazines have names like YUKAI, TWINKLE, LUN LUN CLUB, CIRCLE 2, with cover stories on “Fall Fashion,” “The 12 Best Hot Spring Resorts This Winter,” and other articles of the women’s mag genre. In many ways, they are indistinguishable from HANAKO and other magazines aimed at hip, young Tokyo trend-setting females. The only difference is that these have the added bonus of being “full of information and want-ads for high paying part-time/full-time jobs.” It’s only when you open the magazine and look inside do you understand that a vast majority of these “high-paying jobs” are in the sex industry.

Magazines like TWINKLE (now in it’s twelfth year) used to only be found in seedy shops in the red-light districts of Tokyo. In the past few years, however, TWINKLE and its imitators are stocked in the front window of major bookstores all over Tokyo. YUKAI, which means “pleasant” in Japanese, the most popular magazine at present, according to industry sources. YUKAI means “Pleasant” in Japanese.

In the late nineties, there was a surge of high school and junior high school girls getting involved in “sponsored dating” (enjo kosai), and ever since then the sex industry has been flooded with amateurs and part-time dabblers. Magazines like TWINKLE cater to many of these girls who are now older and seeking steadier and safer part-time employment. The target audience isn’t just young women, though — Japan is a country of specialization, and any woman can find her own niche to work in, regardless of her age or body type. If she is confused about the exciting and well-paid jobs in the industry, she just check the front section of each magazine, which explains each job and type of work, as well as average payscales. Each description is usually accompanied with illustrations of women in S and M uniforms, maid outfits, and what appear to be dental technician uniforms, in accordance with the job description.

Some magazines even have special photo-features wherein a woman might choose her place of work by looking at the “super-cute” uniforms available to the staff. Schoolgirl, bride, dominatrix, stuffed animal… the list goes on.

The jobs available include “seikan massage” or sexual massage, which entails anal stimulation, masturbation of the customer, and whole-body licking. Depending upon the establishment, the employee may be required to provide simulated sex through the use of her thighs. The minimum day’s wage is 200 dollars.

For the girl who wants to work days and have her evenings free, pink salons are a good choice. Pink Salons open in mid-afternoon, and resemble coffee shops from the outside. When the customer sits down in a box or a booth, he is served the beverage of his choice and then fellated or given a hand-job until climax. You get all of this, in less than thirty minutes, for three thousand yen (approximately thirty dollars). A pink salon girl can expect to make a minimum of three hundred dollars a shift, but one magazine warns “you should avoid this kind of work if you are an office worker or have carpal tunnel syndrome due to the repetitive nature of the work.”

The big money, though, is in S&M. Sado-Masochistic clubs allow a venue for a female to abuse or be abused for hundreds of dollars a day.

Mothers and housewives also have quite a few options for sex work. The bigger establishments offer a fake answering service and fake paychecks, all printed under the name of fake company so that your husband or boyfriend will never know the truth. A growing number of places offer child-care facilities. This may be particularly useful for those who want to work at an image club, like CHILD in Shinjuku-ku, where all women must be lactating and the male customers are stripped, diapered, and masturbated.

You might think by looking at these magazines that prostitution is legal in Japan…

It is not.

However, the anti-prostitution law stipulates that only the pimp and the establishment provider can be arrested, not the customer or the prostitute. Thus, most women can operate without fear of arrest. The owners of the sex parlors and other establishments, who do face legal repercussions, tend to discourage actual straight intercourse between the customer and client. Anything else goes. Anal sex, which does not meet the legal definition of intercourse, has recently become a popular substitute in many places. Almost every other deviant activity besides intercourse, of course, is available and on the “menu” if you know where to look.

Some of these sexual-massage parlors are registered with the police or licensed; many others are not. Most of these shops occupy a place in the gray-zone between legal, semi-legal and blatantly illegal, as defined in the Japanese Entertainment Establishments Control Law.

A veteran vice-cop for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police explains it this way, “Prostitution is technically illegal in this country, but in reality… it’s not. Zoning laws and revisions of the EEC make some sex parlors completely legal, others are required to register. In almost all cases, the person at risk of breaking the law is the business owner, not the employee. Any way you slice it, a woman can do whatever she wants with her body and not be arrested. However, if she’s stripping off everything and showing her genitals to the general public, or having sex in front of a crowd, than she can be arrested. That would be public indecency, which is a crime.”

He is not happy about the growing number of sex-job information magazines. “You could argue that these rags are soliciting prostitutes and luring girls into the industry. Even then, I don’t think any prosecutor would let us make the case that the publishers of the magazines are violating the anti-prostitution law and could be arrested. The magazines do, however, give the impression that the sex shops are a legitimate enterprise, and I don’t think that’s good for public morality.”

It’s debatable whether the public of which he speaks really disapproves of these magazines or the sex industry in general. It’s not uncommon for adult movie actresses to cross over into the legimate entertainment industry, and posing nude is hardly a mark of shame for any would-be actress or idol in this country. And even the vice-cop has to admit, “the girls applying for these jobs and working in the establishments probably aren’t breaking the law and even if they were, they would be difficult to arrest.”

For those reasons, it’s not uncommon for women working in the sex industry to also appear on the cover of these magazines along with an interview about their likes, dislikes and job experience. Fifteen minutes of fame is readily available for the “working girl.” There is even a word for these high-profile sex workers — fudoro — it’s a combination of the word fuzoku which refers to adult entertainment, and idol, Japanese slang for any popular female singer or actress.

Akiko N, age twenty-seven, a part-time nurse and an avid reader of LUN LUN CLUB, has been working on an off in the industry since college. “LUN LUN is a great magazine for finding a better job. The articles are really good, too. When I’m looking for a new place to go with my boyfriend, I always look at the restaurant section. Of course, the want-adds are the real draw. I hate long commutes and I’m tired of the hard-core stuff. I need a place with good alibi services and softer work. I’m hoping to find something in the Roppongi area,” she says. Akiko has no qualms about supplementing her income by working in the adult entertainment industry.

“I have a junior-college education and nursing doesn’t pay close to enough to live the life I want to live. If men are willing to pay for sexual services, I’m willing to give it to them. It’s not like I’m sleeping with them or anything. And I always make the man use a condom. I’m not stupid.”

Akiko pulls in about 8,000 dollars a month and works three days a week in a Fashion Health Parlor in Chiba. She spends 1500 dollars a month on rent, a hundred on transportation, blows a thousand dollars a month on clothing. She saves roughly four thousand dollars a month.

Akiko sees similarities between her nursing job and her other job. “I’m providing relief to people. A lot of customers just want someone to talk to, someone who will listen to their problems, and not nag them like a girlfriend or their wife. One regular just puts his head on my laps and has me clean his ears, like his mother used to do. Sometimes, all I do is listen. I’m providing a public service. Part-whore, part-mother — it’s a complex job.”

An assistant editor at one of the publications says that people like Akiko are typical readers. “I’ll be honest, we can sell our magazine for about 250 yen (two dollars and fifty-cents) because we’re making so much money from advertising. At the same time, we have to provide reading materials that will attract readers, to sell the magazine and justify our ad rates. I’d say our articles are as good as anything you find in HANAKO or TOKYO WALKER.” He says the magazines also receive lots of revenue from host clubs. Host clubs are bars and pubs, where attractive young Japanese men are paid to entertain and flirt with the female customers who visit, pouring them drinks, dancing with them, and massaging their ego. A recent issue of the magazine included an insert of young “hosts” stickers. It’s slightly ironic that many of the women working in the industry, after spending the entire day pampering male customers and faking attraction to them, flock to host clubs where they in turn pay young studs to provide them with the same manufactured affection and pampering they dish out on the job.

“There are a slew of similar magazines on the stands these days, which tells you how much demand there is for this kind of work,” the assistant editor says, and claims that its hard to keep ahead of the competition. “What’s interesting to me is the difference between what the want-ads says and what the ads for the sex shops say. Of course, the girls don’t read the sex-shop guide magazines like MANZOKU which are aimed at men, and vice versa. If you want to understand the Japanese sex industry, pick up copies of both. It’ll tell you more than you want to know.”

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