Playback ’15] The scene of the chaos that occurred every weekend… Kabukicho Police Box “rip-off”: Customers, Shops, and Cops.

What did “FRIDAY” report 10, 20, or 30 years ago? In “Playback Friday,” we revisit the topics that were hot at the time. This time, we introduce “Kabukicho Koban 24 Hour” (Kabukicho Police Box 24 Hours), which was published 10 years ago in the July 3, 2003 issue, featuring a live report of a big fight between shopkeepers, customers, and police officers.

Since around 2002, the number of victims of rip-offs at restaurants in Kabukicho, Shinjuku, where customers are charged much higher prices than the market price, has been on the rise, especially since the beginning of 2003. On weekends late at night, the Kabukicho police box was swarming with customers complaining of damage and shopkeepers demanding payment, and police officers were on hand to deal with them, creating chaos. The following is an article on the scene of the situation (the descriptions in parentheses are quotations from past articles). All ages and titles are current at the time).

Victims of rip-offs queue up at a police box in Kabukicho

“Customers, you have to pay for what you have drunk!　Because I’ve been drinking!

Late at night on a weekend in mid-June. Kabukicho police box in the middle of Kabukicho, Shinjuku. The voice of a “rip-off store” blackshirt intimidating a customer with a binder of slips in his hand echoed in the background.

In the four months from January to April ’15, there were more than 1,000 110 calls from customers who said they were victims of rip-offs. In 2002, there were 700 cases in one year, which means that the number of cases had increased at more than four times the rate of the previous year. On this weekend night as well, there was a line of customers in front of the police station who came to the police station for advice. While the customers were complaining to the police, the ripped-off shopkeepers were looking relaxed. They were sitting on the street smoking cigarettes and talking to each other .

A man in his twenties who came to us for advice said, “Around 9:00 p.m., a friend of mine and I were having a fight.

I was walking around Kabukicho with a friend at around 9 pm. I asked him, ‘Are you going to a nuki (sex establishment)?　Do you want to have a drink? I ignored him at first. At first I ignored him, but then he said, “It won’t cost you more than 3,000 yen for an hour. I decided to go with him.

The store was described as an “amateur cabaret club. The girls were all inexperienced in the water business, and I took the touts’ words to heart, “You’ll definitely be able to take them home,” which was hard to believe.

I was only in the bar for about an hour and a half, but the bill came to 134,400 yen. I was told that a drink for the girl, which was not supposed to cost anything, was 7,000 yen per drink, plus 36% tax (tax and service charge). I was yelled at to pay up, and I did.

Katsuyuki Aoshima, a lawyer who has consulted with many victims of Kabukicho rip-offs, explained as follows.

“At least since July ’14, almost all of the Kabukicho rip-offs are the same. Almost 100% of them involve touts, who offer a set price of 3,000 to 7,000 yen for one hour and then charge a higher price at the time of billing.

There have been malicious cases where customers were charged 500,000 to 600,000 yen for an hour’s stay.

One of the reasons for the increase in rip-offs was the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Gang Exclusion Ordinance, which came into effect in October 2011. In the past, the gangs that received top payments from rip-off stores adjusted the number of rip-off stores so that they would not have to compete for the pie (customers). However, after the ordinance, bank transfer scam groups, foreigners, and others began to enter the market. Tominao Kageno, a novelist and nonfiction writer who once established a major rip-off group in Kabukicho and was called the “king of rip-offs,” had the following to say.

“The Tokyo Metropolitan Government enacted an anti-bargaining ordinance in 2000. However, the penalty under the ordinance is very light: imprisonment for not more than six months or a fine of not more than 500,000 yen for improper solicitation or collection. First-time offenders often end up with a fine of about 300,000 yen. The risk is low because rip-offs are rarely caught in criminal cases such as robberies. That is why there is no end to the number of rip-off stores.

In response to this situation, the police, who until then had never cracked down on rip-off stores on the grounds of “non-intervention in civil matters,” finally got serious about it. Since June 1, 2003, the police have been applying the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s rip-off ordinance to make cases. …… Was this really effective?

Rip-offs have decreased since July, but…

The number of rip-offs seems to have dropped dramatically since the police began to intervene. According to an August ’15 announcement by the Metropolitan Police Department, 28 rip-off stores in Kabukicho have gone out of business. In addition to exposing them for violating the anti-bargaining ordinance, the police also began to “rip off” customers when they come to the police station with a shopkeeper, separating them from the shopkeeper without making the customer pay any money.” Since the summer of 2003, there have been few reports of rip-offs.

However, this does not mean that rip-offs have completely disappeared from Kabukicho. Especially since around 2011, new methods of rip-offs that do not involve touts have become more frequent. A woman I met on a matching app took me to a bar and ordered shots on the pretext of playing a game. The woman is taken to a restaurant by a woman she met on a matching app, and then charged a hefty fee for the shots, which she thought were all-you-can-drink, but the shots cost extra. As of the end of October 2012, this scheme had caused 140 million yen in damage.

The tricky thing about this technique is that it slips through the anti-bargaining ordinance that had been applied to crack down on the practice. Since the ordinance prohibits the obligation to display fees and unreasonable collections, it is difficult to detect these scammers because they explain their fee structure at the beginning and avoid using abusive language. The recent rip-offs are said to be organized by special fraud groups that have created manuals and other information, making them even more sophisticated.