LIKE IT OR LOATHE it, the sex industry in Japan is big business. And despite the rickety economy, it's getting bigger. A recent survey by Takashi Kadokura, an economist with Daiichi Life Research Institute Inc., found that the Japanese market for what is rather quaintly called the entertainment trade fuzoku sangyo, swelled to a tumescent [yen] 2.37 trillion in fiscal 2001, up from [yen] 1.7 trillion a decade earlier.
This figure does not include "virtual sex"--Japan's huge sales of adult magazines, rentals and sales of porn videos and DVDs and the burgeoning market for Internet porn. And let's not forget receipts from the country's 40,000-odd love hotels.
Put together, the buying and selling of sex and related services in the world's second largest economy is worth more than the GDP of many smaller countries.
As the sex business expands along with the service sector it becomes increasingly integrated into the mainstream economy, earning billions for blue-chip firms like NTT and increasingly becoming a source of direct and indirect tax revenue for the government.
Why does this industry seem immune to the problems that have kept Japan on the economic disaster pages of the world's newspapers for over a decade? The truth is: It isn't.
As a stroll around the licentious pink heart of Tokyo's sex industry, Kabukicho, or the "soaplands" district of Yoshiwara confirms, many operators of sex clubs and massage parlors have resorted to the same deflationary price-cutting approaches practiced by other businesses.
More noticeable than the stagnation and decline of some areas of the sex trade, however, are the vitality and innovation that characterize the industry as a whole. Despite its murky image and legal problems, thousands of new businesses have sprung up in the last five years, offering all the eye popping lechery that money can buy.
The older ranks of industry veterans have been swelled by thousands of younger entrepreneurs and casualties from the mainstream economy who are transforming the selling of sex using new technology. Many of them are voraciously ambitious.
Some commentators are now using the once grubby sex trade as a stick to poke in the eye of Japan's arthritic political class. As Dacapo weekly magazine declared in May of this year: "Structural reform has been progressing rapidly in this [sex] industry exactly because the reform-driver has not been Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's administration. If he wants to know what reform is about, this is where he should be looking."
Winners and Losers
So who are the winners and losers in Japan's sex services industry? At the top of the list of losers are brick-and-mortar businesses like brothels, soaplands and strip clubs, which have seen collective revenues slump by over a third since the mid 80s, says Kadokura.
Stuck with high overheads (particularly for utilities), prices in these outlets are mostly fixed and are driving away male clientele, who have less disposable income than in the past. The price of a single visit to a soapland outlet (staffed by naked prostitutes offering soapy massages) is about [yen] 60,000--a price that is out of reach for most salarymen.
Strip clubs too are seen as expensive and old hat, and many exotic dancers are under pressure to broaden their appeal, says Tomomi Sawaguchi, who recently formed Japan's first union for sex workers. "The number of customers has fallen, so managers will ask some women to perform extra services on the cheap. I've seen foreign women having sex for as little as [yen] 1,000."
Rushing to fill the gap are the thousands of "fashion (sex) massage" outlets that sprang up nationwide in the 90s. With faster turnaround and cheaper labor costs (many are run and staffed by heavily exploited foreign workers), they offer sessions for as little as [yen] 10,000--keeping their services within range of the average male worker.
Sex message joins an increasingly long list of exotically titled innovations including imekura (image clubs), sumata (crotch play--an everything-but sex service designed to get around regulations banning intercourse in outlets) and "delivery health," or deliheru, a pizza-like business that dispatches a prostitute directly to your door for about [yen] 20,000 to [yen] 30,000.
"The life span of popular services used to be 22 years in the high economic growth era, but now it's less than three years," says analyst Takuro Morinaga of UFJ Research. "Firms are working harder to come up with innovations designed to add value to their services."
Many of these services flirt with the limits of the law and exploit mobile phone technology to do it. Prostitution, for example, is prohibited under the Prostitution Prevention Law of 1956, helping to explain the huge growth of delivery health. Now a [yen] 461 billion annual business, says Kadokura, delivery health firms hook up working women with paying men by advertising on utility poles in most city neighbor hoods, using only a keitai number. What happens next takes place in the privacy of the client's home and is therefore out of reach of the law.
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