Playback ’14] Amateur Women Sitting on the Guardrail in Kabukicho, Shinjuku Ten Years Ago

What did “FRIDAY” report 10, 20, or 30 years ago? In “Playback Friday,” we take a look back at the topics that were hot at the time. This time, we present ” Nurses and cabaret girls sit on benches to make extra money… Shinjuku’s Kabukicho ‘amateur pick-up prostitution’: Is it really that easy?

Since the COVID-19 crisis, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of “stand-up” women in the Shinjuku-Kabukicho and Okubo Park area. Around 2010, these women became known as “koin girls” and became a social problem, and Okubo Park became a famous spot for tourists. The following article describes the situation in Okubo Park 10 years ago (descriptions in parentheses are taken from past articles).

Amateur women engaged in prostitution.

At 8 p.m. on a weekend night, women in their late twenties appear one by one. A municipal park in Kabukicho, Shinjuku, Tokyo. The park is covered by a fence and is inaccessible at night, but the women sit on the guardrails surrounding the park and begin to play with their phones. Hearing rumors that “amateur women have been engaging in prostitution here recently,” a reporter from this magazine rushed to the park to confirm the truth.

Fifteen minutes later, there were four women in the park, including an older foreign woman, and the number of men began to increase, as if in response. They seemed to be circling around the park, looking at the women. Eventually, a man in his 30s who looked like a businessman sat down next to one of the women, chatted with her for about three minutes, and then disappeared with her to a nearby love hotel. The rumors were true.

Last December, 24 women were arrested in the vicinity of this park for the purpose of prostitution. They were professionals who paid 5,000 yen a day to the backroom gangs and stood on the streets every day. When they were cleared out and things quieted down, we started to see amateur women. They all came only a few days a month for the purpose of earning pocket money. Compared to the professionals, there are fewer of them, and it is hard to tell who is around when. Moreover, they never approach men,” said a restaurant clerk with knowledge of the inner workings of Shinjuku.

When a man and woman who have reached an agreement on negotiations disappear, another woman appears to replace them. The reporter approached a woman in her mid-twenties with long black hair and a resemblance to Yuka.

Can we play?”

The moment I said that, she smiled and broke off the business meeting.

She said, “I need about two (10,000) yen for spending money, is that okay?”

Oh, I can really play. But it’s expensive ……. I chatted with her for a bit and she said she was a nurse and 27 years old.

She said, “I went shopping with my friends today and spent too much money, so this is to make up for that.”

‘How about strawberry?’

I can’t do that.”

I would love to try, but 20,000 yen plus 5,000 yen for hotel is a pain. When I told her I couldn’t pay very much, she started playing games on her phone again.

She disappeared with a guy who approached her after that, but an hour later, the reporter asked the brown-haired lady, “Wanna go out for a drink?” She then asked him if he wanted to go out for a drink.

She said, “If it’s an ogori-gori, sure.”

She is 22 years old. She is a cabaret girl in her hometown, Saitama. At an izakaya, she told me how she came to come here.

I was waiting around here for my girlfriends who were playing at a host club, and I was approached by an old man who gave me 5,000 yen for just going out for a drink. That’s when he told me what kind of place it was.

Since then, she has been coming here once a month.

If you stay there for 10 minutes, you will be approached by two or three people. I ignore drunken, sweaty, fat guys and old men in dirty fashions.

She looks like an ordinary girl of today. After parting at an izakaya a little after 10:00, she went back to the park.

Women standing in the dark around Okubo Park, a little outside the hustle and bustle of Kabukicho, have existed for a long time. In the 1990s, however, the Mecca of the stand-up crowd in Shinjuku was the love hotel district of Shin-Okubo, where foreigners stood. It is said that since around 2000, runaway girls who were looking for help or “waiting for God” were often seen in the Okubo Park area, but it was not until the beginning of the decade that women became more conspicuous. As the article states, the number of “amateurs” seems to have increased as they no longer had the backing of an “organization.

In 2011, the Metropolitan Police Department stepped up its crackdown on the Okubo Park area, arresting 140 women for waiting for customers, nearly triple the number of the previous year. The “dating girls” were temporarily decimated by the almost daily patrols by police officers. In late April, a 28-year-old woman was arrested for the first time for “waiting for customers in the past” rather than being caught red-handed.

Fearful of being caught by the police, few new women now stand in the park, and most of them are “regulars” who have been there since last year. Street prostitution seems to be steadily declining. However, looking at the history of the street prostitution, the women on the street may never disappear from the darkness of this Kabukicho district.