JAPAN’S DIRTY SECRET
NEWSWEEK THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE
December 23, 1999
(Full-cover story):
JAPAN’S DIRTY SECRET
Schoolgirls Selling Sex:
The New Teen Trade Raises Questions About The Country’s Moral Values
Innocence for Sale
As more teenage girls begin to market their bodies for easy money, Japan reconsiders the limits of its thriving sex industry By Jeffrey Bartholet
Yoshie is a Tokyo high-school girl with a trim haircut and a bittersweet smile, talking tough as she plays with her ice cream. The child of an alcoholic mother, Yoshie hopes to escape home by making money through a dating club. She is disgusted by the grown men who pay the club for a chance to seduce young girls-and insists that none of them has succeeded with her. She explains how she can make a few extra dollars just by patting her clients’ hands when they start whining about their “hard lives,” and how some men feel guilty paying cash, so they buy designer clothes for her instead. But Yoshie reserves her most scathing cynicism for the Japanese critics who say girls like her are the worst of a young generation that has lost any sense of sexual morals. “The people buying the high-school girls are from the older generation,” she says, swirling her ice cream and fruit topping to make a gooey soup. “They created the market. They have no right to say that we are immoral.”
You’ve heard about Japan’s economic crisis, its debt crisis and its banking crisis. Well, the malaise is spreading from the boardroom to the bedroom. The otherwise buttoned-up Japanese have long had libertine views on sex-and patronize a vast “floating world” of bathhouses, massage parlors and sex clubs. But now, with reports that teenage girls are getting involved, adult Japanese are concerned as never before about the dirty secrets of their sex industry. With respect for family and authority fraying, the younger generation seems unmoved by these worries. “Girls have found out that this is a deceitful, male-oriented society, full of lies,” says Shinji Miyadai, a male sociologist studying the teen-sex trend. “If ordinary guys can buy women, why can’t ordinary girls sell themselves?”
To some Japanese, that kind of question suggests the need for an urgent national-values debate. Ichiro Ozawa, the country’s leading opposition politician, warns that Japan has become a “spiritual wasteland.” Other opinion makers tie the growing trade in teen sex to everything else that is going wrong, from corrupt politics to the gassing of Tokyo’s subways last year. For all the riches Japan has earned in the last half century, there’s a nagging sense among many Japanese that something even more valuable has been lost. “The Japanese believed that if Japan became affluent, they would be happy,” says author Setsuko Inoue, whose latest book explores the psychology of Japanese men who use prostitutes. “That turned out to be wrong. We lost the most important thing in human relations-the ability to find value in something invisible, like love.”
Young people like Yoshie are particularly cynical, their elders worry-and not just about sex. “They grew up in the bubble period of the ’80s, and ever since they could reason, all they heard about was money, brand names, materialism,” says Inoue. According to Tokyo police, the teens getting involved in the sex trade these days are not just from troubled homes. “Ordinary girls from ordinary families are now involved in the sex industry,” says Akiyoshi Ishibashi, a clinical psychologist with the Tokyo metropolitan Police. Says Yoshikatsu Nakamura, deputy director of the juvenile division: “It has to do with a longing for material things. Its not that they come from poor families who need to support themselves. They just want to have more and more.”
It’s not hard for them to find opportunities in the flesh trade. Magazines that feature photos of women dressed as schoolgirls lifting their skirts have been around for a long time. In the early 1990s, high-school girls realized there might even be a market for their used underwear. Specialty shops sprang up, displaying old garments under a photo of the former owner, and charging up to 5,000 yen (about $50). Sociologist Miyadai estimates that at the height of the craze in 1993, between 6,000 and 10,000 girls sold their underpants in Tokyo. To rein in this embarrassing but perfectly legal trade, police eventually invoked a law requiring a license to sell used goods. The crackdown shut many of these shops, but may have pushed the customers (mostly older men) into a new, even more troubling pastime.
By the mid-1990s, so-called date clubs were taking off. In these places, men pay a fee to pick a “date” from a group of young girls-with no guarantees of what will happen after the two walk out the door. Last year Tokyo police informed 137 high schools and 18 junior high schools that their students were involved in such clubs. “People tend to believe that if both parties agree to have sex, it’s OK,” says Nakamura of the Tokyo police. “It’s a social trend,” he adds with exasperation: “Any form of sexual relations is acceptable.”
Another way for older men to pick up schoolgirls is through “telephone clubs,” which have been around for more than a decade, but got hot a few years ago. At these places, men pay a fee ($15 to $20) to sit in a small cubicle and answer calls from anonymous women who might be interested in a “date.” The women get the telephone number from advertisements and tissue packets distributed free on the street. Today there are 364 such clubs in Tokyo alone, up from 113 in 1992 and 80 in 1987. A recent government survey showed that a quarter of high-school girls had called a telephone club at least once, and that 3 to 4 percent of them actually went on a telephone-club date. Nakamura says these clubs “play a big role in child prostitution.”
The police want to see stronger regulations to discourage teen prostitution, and blame much of the problem on the proliferation of pornography. These days, even mainstream newsweeklies and other popular magazines routinely print photos of naked women: the Weekly Gendai, which has a circulation of 940,000, recently ran what it proclaimed to be a “scientific study” on the moment of female orgasm, including full-body pictures of a woman apparently masturbating. Photos of women tied up or blindfolded are common, and many magazines seem fascinated with very young girls. A November issue of the Weekly Post (circulation: 1.06 million) featured photographs of three girls-12,13 and 14 years old-provocatively posed in bathing suits and white negligees with angels’ wings. “The most beautiful time on the face of the earth,” read the caption. These days adult comics for both men and women, sometimes featuring lurid scenes of gang rape, are sold in convenience stores right next to the potato chips and candy.
Innocence is on sale everywhere. At what the Japanese call an “image club,” men pay for oral sex in a fantasy setting. The clubs offer rooms mocked up as a subway car or a nurse’s office, and young women dressed as high-school girls or as Victorian dolls. In some business circles, it’s long been common to reward valued contacts with an invitation to “soapland”-a euphemism for the world of upscale bathhouses where sexual service is included. But police got concerned when they recently busted a 48-year-old company official for catering to select customers by providing them with high-school and college girls. “We hope it’s not a trend,” says Nakamura of the juvenile division.
Women try to cash in on their looks while they’re still relatively young. That’s certainly the ethic that animates the JJ Club in Yokohama, near Tokyo, where men line up for a service called “fashion health”-code for a shower an oral sex. Erika Tachibana (her professional name) works here in a room barely big enough to fit a built-in bed, a shower stall and a digital stopwatch. It smells of wet vinyl and cheap, lavender-scented air freshener. Tachibana entered the sex industry at 18 as a bar hostess and quickly graduated to fashion health, where the women who “work hard” make up to $1,000 a day servicing men who pay $90 per half hour. Tachibana, now 22, says she’s glad to be earning more than her salaryman father-but tells her parents she’s an office clerk and uses a special answering service to conceal her secret. She also hides her occupation from suitors, though not out of shame. “They know how much a girl can earn,” she says, “and they’ll come after me for the money instead of appreciating me as a person.”
Japan’s code of law is far from tough on clubs like JJ’s. What they sell is not illegal because “if it’s not actual sexual intercourse, it’s not called prostitution,” says Nakamura. (Signs posted inside JJ’s threaten a $5,000 fine for forcing intercourse on a woman.) Even the act of prostitution is not illegal in Japan. Only pimping, or providing a facility for prostitution, is outlawed. When teenage girls sell sex to older men, they call it enjo kosai, or “charitable relations.” And engaging in sex with teenagers as young as 14 is legal in parts of Japan, including Tokyo.
Young women also have fewer inhibitions these days. Indeed, the initiative in sexual encounters appears to be shifting from the boys to the girls. According to Tokyo police, high-school girls are now more likely to have sex than boys. In 1984, 22 percent of male high-school seniors surveyed had lost their virginity, compared with 12 percent of girls. By this year the standings were reversed: 34 percent of high-school girls and 29 percent of boys said they had had sexual intercourse.
Sexual affairs used to be a male prerogative, too. But the growing number of women working in business or the professions are getting more opportunities to meet men other than their husbands. Kunio Suzuki, a 46-year-old private eye, says that social changes have been both good and bad for business. The number of women who hire him to spy on their husbands is declining. Yet more husbands want him to spy on their wives. “They probably look for some warmth their husbands fail to show, or some stimulation their husbands fail to offer,” he says.
At the telephone clubs, the battlefield of the sexes seems to offer plenty of ammunition for both sides. The men sit in their little cubicles, waiting for the phone to ring. Then they race each other to be the first to pick up an extension and make contact with a girl. “The conversation generally is very businesslike,” says Keiko Yanagawa, a 17-year-old girl who advises local television stations on the teen-sex phenomenon. “The girls will ask: ‘What do you want?’ And the guys will ask: ‘How old are you and how far will you go?’” If the deal clicks, they work out a time and place to meet, and under what terms. Often, two or more girls will make the call, arrange a meeting and then check the man out from a distance. Many girls-even some in grade school-call the clubs for a lark. They get a good giggle purring to the man over the phone, or watching their eager mark run to some public meeting place hoping that his new “girlfriend” will show up.
But it’s hardly all just fun and games. Just last week, a 23-year-old man was arrested in Ibaraki, north of Tokyo, on suspicion of trying to blackmail the mother of a 15-year-old girl he had met through a telephone-dating club. According to police, the man took photos of the girl-presumably nude-in a hotel, and later told the mother that he had kidnapped her daughter and demanded a million-yen ransom. The girl later told police that she played along with the kidnap ploy because she was scared the man would distribute the photos. On the same day, a driver was arrested for confining a high-school girl aboard his bus in Chiba, east of Tokyo, in order to grope her. And a day earlier, in Kyoto, a 38-year-old man was arrested for abducting a 14-year-old girl. (She quickly escaped from his apartment, and police refuse to discuss possible motives.)
Such cases remain relatively uncommon in Japan. But police and others fear that sexual violence will increase. Some concerned Japanese are taking actions of their own to block the spread of pornography. Japanese airlines recently followed the lead of foreign carriers and suspended the distribution of Japanese newsweeklies that include nude photos. Under pressure from citizens’ groups, the Patent Agency in September rejected a trademark applicant who wanted to print a T shirt with the word BITCH above a picture of a man holding a gun to a woman’s head.
Such efforts seem quixotic given the vast amount of pornography out there, and the sheer size of Japan’s sex industry. “Young men grow up seeing and watching violent pornography,” says author Inoue. “They think it’s normal and maybe pleasing to women, and that’s a dangerous situation.” Japan’s flourishing sex business was one thing when it operated as a self-contained service industry helping salarymen unwind after an 18-hour day. But it has become quite another now that so many of their daughters are entering this dangerous fantasy world.
With Hideko Takayama and Kay Itoi in Tokyo
