What runaway girls do to survive

“We couldn’t believe our ears,” says Spa! (Oct 28). The surprise came to its attention via a shady character who launders cell phones for a living, buying them en masse and selling them to organized crime figures and others whose business demands untraceable communication. The crux of his revelation is that the yakuza has begun tapping a once taboo revenue source: underage girls.

The girls are runaways, whose number, Spa! says, has been rising dramatically over the past three years. Unwilling to provoke the police into a crackdown, the yakuza have traditionally shunned inducting minors into its ero-commerce. If the source is to be believed, that has changed.

A Spa reporter finds himself in “K City, in a certain prefecture,” under the guidance of a 35-year-old man called “Yama-san,” director of the local wing of “the project.” Headquarters are a dormitory used by Chinese exchange students. When the students vacate the dorm for the summer holidays, Yama-san rents it for the five girls under his personal wing. There are 21 girls altogether, divided into teams of four or five. The service they provide is a kind of “deri-health”—a euphemism for delivery sex—with this difference: encounters are by appointment only.

We follow Spa’s reporter to a station wagon in an inconspicuous parking lot a 10-minute walk from the love hotel employed by the “project.” Four of the girls are at work; one, evidently between appointments, sits in the back seat absorbed in a computer game.

“At first,” explains Yama-san, “we were dead-set against using underage girls. But then we heard from other deri-health operators who shared their know-how with us on how to keep the police away.”

A key component here is group discipline. A 17-year-old girl chafes as she describes it: “We finish work at 9:30, and it’s back to the dorm. No going out at night. No smoking on the street, no drinking. Host clubs are off limits. And if one of the girls earns less than the rest of us, we have to share with her”—equality, for the sake of group harmony, being a guiding principle. Even so, the trade provides an income in the neighborhood of 200,000 yen a week, the job security and the family-like atmosphere apparently making up for the restricted freedom.

Cell phones and the Internet have given adolescent runaway girls access to a life spacious beyond the dreams of their counterparts of earlier generations. Spa! introduces “K-chan” and “S-chan,” 16 and 17 respectively, who met on a website introducing dubious ways of making a living. K-chan’s scam at that point had been doping her clients at love hotels and stealing their cash.

That was old hat to S-chan, whose yakuza connections had taught her a trick or two beyond the ken of the uninitiated. Why dirty yourself with sex with unattractive rich old men, she counseled K-chan. Instead, sell them sleeping tablets packaged by the yakuza to look like sex stimulation pills. When the men pass out, don’t rob them but use your cell phone to photograph their business cards, drivers’ licenses and so on—all that’s needed for a lucrative yakuza shakedown, of which the girls get a share—as much as 300,000 yen, says K-chan.

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Latest 15 of 26 Total Comments Show All

irontech at 12:47 AM JST - 26th October

**Organised crime look to them as a money making business. It's the same everywhere, as long as there are so-called "demand" from customers, it'll continue, even in the most advanced and developed countries.
jerseyboy at 07:51 AM JST - 26th October

"for the sake of group harmony"...Isn't Wa wonderful?
Zuleyka at 09:41 AM JST - 26th October

i guess these girls are those chinese who are waiting victims in different streets at night.they are offering massage but actually they have plans behind their heads...
PepinGalarga at 11:35 AM JST - 26th October

there's a lesson to be learned here. dont drink or eat anything with strangers. always have a backup plan hahahahahaha
meanmutha at 06:23 PM JST - 26th October

AV
airrunwesker at 01:00 AM JST - 27th October

...anyone (adult) wanting to have sex with a "kid" deserves this, if not worse!

I hope none of these girls get hurt, and use their money to earn an education... ( I can dream)!
neverknow2 at 09:30 AM JST - 27th October

Here they teach people how to lie, cheat and steal at such a young age. Its funny how people think Japanese are honest until they spend some time here.
ALHQQ at 10:49 PM JST - 27th October

...This story needs a new title, how about: Japan's perverted, horney old men get swindled by young girls led by the Yakuza!

Who's really the bad guy here the young girls or the old men attempting to pay them for sex. This crime wouldnt exist if there was no demand for prostitution (I'm sorry, "deli health"). These men should honstly go home after work and have a romantic evening with their wives instead of crawling the streets drunk after work looking for an "ichiban fantasy".
NetteMarie at 11:16 PM JST - 27th October

Actually Nessie, it says in the story that the Chinese girls rooms are rented when they (Chinese girl) go home for summer break.

Read carefully.
oberst at 08:46 AM JST - 28th October

it's like the run away girls ran all the way to Japan ? Get real
thepro at 09:57 AM JST - 28th October

The yaks really are a bunch of low-life scumbags aren't they? I see them in the city and I want to knock their heads in.
Freakenese at 05:54 PM JST - 29th October

Education and Jobs would hopefully reduce the Yak problems in the long term. They are leeches on the a$$ of society.

Legalize Prostitution. The Oldest Profession will Never Go Away. Regulate it and protect the sex workers.

The only way to fix Kiddie Porn Sicko's, Child Molesters, etc... Is death. They will never change. People do not change their sexual preferences.

IMHO
sowhatnow at 07:47 AM JST - 30th October

to me, japan already seems like their regulating prostitution by setting whore houses like Deli Heli and massage parlors all around metropolitan tokyo (and actually all major cities like Nagoya, Osaka, etc.) I've been to smaller cities like Sendai and Hakata, but walking around city in the middle of the night, i got the feeling that working of sex is part of their lives in japan.
dennis0bauer at 03:11 PM JST - 31st October

This does not suprise me in the least
devilswhip at 12:14 PM JST - 20th November

Japan is like a infested sore! there will always be puss, the Yaks.!