Japan’s prostitution law has always been lopsided. Selling it in public can get you arrested. Buying it? Basically a shrug.
That may be about to change. A Justice Ministry expert panel released a draft report on August 24 saying customer-side solicitation should finally carry a penalty. The idea is to fix what they call an “imbalance”: women waiting on the street get pinched, while the men circling them walk away. A final report is expected in September, and the ministry is already talking about a bill for the autumn Diet session.
They are not jumping straight to “paying for sex is a crime.” The panel wants caution there. Full criminalization of the act itself, they say, could just shove everything underground and make the women less safe. What they’re aiming at first is the public hunting: wandering around looking for someone to buy, responding to street offers, that kind of thing. Fines for seller-side soliciting are also looking cheap — the current cap is still 20,000 yen — so those may go up too.
Shinjuku Ward has been begging for this. After COVID, Okubo Park in Kabukicho turned into the place everyone talks about: women standing around waiting, the scene exploding on social media, and then a wave of foreign tourists showing up either to buy or just to gawk. Language gaps have meant a lot of money fights on the street. Police arrested 112 women around the park last year for waiting for customers. A big crackdown last August cleared the park edge for a minute. Then it just slid over into the love-hotel streets next door.
Residents and the ward now do joint patrols. Loudspeakers blast the same line in Japanese and English: buying sex is prohibited by law. Hideyuki Asami from the ward’s crisis-management team told the panel in July that none of it has actually solved anything. He wants real deterrence on the buyer side — and also welfare support for the women who are out there because they’re broke.
So the law may finally start looking at the customers, not just the women standing in the park. Whether that actually empties those streets is another question. Kabukicho has a long history of just moving the problem two blocks over.
