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

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.