The Full Story of the Hellish Prostitution Tour That Victimized 130 Gurishita Kids

A total of 130 girls were prostituted.

Girls frequenting the so-called “Guri-shita” area in Minami, Osaka were being forced into prostitution, leading to the arrest of 34-year-old self-proclaimed businessman Yusuke Kimura by the Osaka Prefectural Police on June 20 for violating the Anti-Prostitution Law.

Kimura is said to have led a 70-member group consisting of scouts who searched for girls wanting compensated dating around Guri-shita and on social media, decoy women who posed as females on dating sites to attract male customers, and drivers who transported girls to and from love hotels. The group repeatedly sent around 130 women on what was described as “prostitution tours.”

“A scout would find girls, then Kimura would interview them at a café. He’d persuade them with lines like ‘You can easily make a million yen,’ or ‘Split the money from prostitution 50/50 with me. Just try it for five days,’ before dispatching them in trios of a driver, decoy, and the girl to regional cities. They targeted areas far from Osaka because of fewer competitors and lower chances of being tracked. It also made it harder for girls to escape,” said a reporter from a national newspaper’s social affairs desk.

During these trips, the decoy would manage the girls’ schedules and force them to engage in sex work non-stop from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

“Drivers would drop girls off at love hotels where customers waited, then stay until they were finished. Afterwards, they’d take them to the next customer. Some even conducted acts in parked cars. The decoys would post things like ‘Looking for someone who can meet now’ on dating apps during downtime to keep the girls working at full capacity.

The girls barely had time to eat, surviving on convenience store meals during long trips. They could hardly sleep and became extremely worn down. Some were forced to have unprotected sex and had to take emergency contraceptives,” said an investigator.

The prostitution fee was 15,000 yen per girl per session, of which only 5,400 yen went to the girls. All the money the girls received from customers was immediately confiscated—another method of preventing escape. The same investigator continued:

“One high school girl forced to go on a prostitution tour from Minami to the Tohoku region serviced 109 men in 10 days but only received 600,000 yen. Another girl, toward the end of a five-day trip, told the decoy, ‘I’m exhausted,’ ‘I want to stop,’ and ‘I want to go home,’ but was only told, ‘You can do it,’ and ‘Hang in there.’ Pushed to the edge both mentally and physically, she ended up cutting herself. When she returned to Osaka, she was handed just 150,000 yen.”

A cruel and vile crime that preyed on the vulnerabilities of girls with nowhere to go—the authorities are now working to dismantle the group.