The issue of young streetwalkers, known as tachinbo in Japanese, in the Kabukicho area of Shinjuku, especially around Okubo Park, has become a huge social panic, with media reports and police crackdowns appearing almost weekly, along with the Toyoko kids delinquency problem.
To help explain the tachinbo issue, the manga artist Sugimura (also known as Sugiyan) created a short comic in English as part of the This Is Japan! series. It was published online on October 13, though we only spotted it recently, and have taken the liberty of republishing it here for our readers.
The media and authorities have attempted to explain it by pinning the blame on parasitic host clubs and concafes, which allow emotionally vulnerable young women to build up debts, so they then turn to tachinbo to fund their addiction.
While there are certainly some, if not plenty, of unscrupulous hosts and establishments doing this, sometimes even actively involved in pimping out women, our pet theory is that the numbers of streetwalkers in Okubo suggest a wider, more systemic issue related to deeper socioeconomic malaise.
Sugiyan’s detailed and even-handed manga also rightly points out the larger social pressures that are affecting young women, as well as the historical contexts, from the more recent like the compensated dating moral panic of the 1990s to the forced prostitution of the Edo era.
The manga concludes that the tachinbo crisis is caused not from financial poverty so much as an emotional poverty: the young women, “many” of who have “mild intellectual disabilities,” don’t feel loved enough.
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