From our other sites
The story
A Justice Ministry expert panel presented a draft report on revising the Anti-Prostitution Law on the 24th. It emerged that a majority of the panel favored introducing penalties for buyers, sparking debate on 5ch over the fact that prostitution itself isn’t currently a punishable offense, the potential impact on existing sex industry businesses like soaplands, and whether such a change would be consistent with the Constitution.
Anti-Prostitution Law Review Panel’s Draft Report: Majority Say Buyers Should Face Penalties Too — Justice Ministry (NTV NEWS NNN) – Yahoo! News
8/24 (Mon) 11:14 JST
On the 24th, a Justice Ministry panel of experts — set up in response to soliciting for prostitution becoming a social problem on the streets of Tokyo’s Shinjuku and elsewhere — presented a draft report summarizing its discussions to date.
Source: news.ntv.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
>Prostitution itself isn't even a crime to begin with
That's just because current law doesn't classify prostitution itself as a crime — the panel has actually floated making prostitution itself a criminal offense.
Prostitution is illegal — penalties only apply to managed prostitution (pimping) and solicitation.
Constitutionally, prostitution can't be legalized. Since the Constitution bans discrimination based on lineage, status, and sex, prostitution that exploits sex can only be treated as illegal.
It's just that simple prostitution — where the person doesn't solicit — carries no penalty, out of consideration for protecting women.
Schools should teach against it from a young age, like anti-smoking education.
Teaching kids about prostitution from a young age? That's monstrous.
That's only when they buy a minor.
Honestly agree with this one. Sure, copy America on the tax side, but stuff like loan collection would need to ignore the law entirely to work — no idea which mafia ends up moving in.
And murder victims should get penalized as well.
We're talking about buying and selling here (it takes two).
That would make us no different from America or China.
What makes Japan a standout among developed nations is that entertainment here is kept within a certain order.
Private gambling dens and managed-prostitution establishments are both clearly illegal, though.
Japan isn't even a developed country anymore.
They're probably dragging their feet on penalties because there are powerful people among the buyers.
Most people struggling under this cost-of-living crunch don't have money to buy women anyway. Meanwhile, the powerful and wealthy have plenty of cash, so the ones with raging libidos might actually be in trouble if this gets regulated.
For kids, just make it so the parents get arrested instead.
There's no constitutional basis for discriminatory enforcement under the banner of "protecting women." The Justice Ministry probably can't even read the Constitution's Japanese.
When the Constitution was drafted, prostitution for survival was pretty common…
Even after it was enacted, there were "akasen" (red-line districts, areas where prostitution was tacitly tolerated).
will the women selling be okay financially?
Are the judges going to help support them out of their own pockets?
Judges are out of touch with the real world, so they'll say "just go on welfare" with a straight face.
The concept of "protecting women" and the current Constitution are about as compatible as oil and water — basically not at all.
If they're going to do that, they should try wiping out soaplands entirely. Between the brothel-style shops and the delivery-health (call-out) services, what they're doing is plenty enough to count as prostitution already. The "we don't insert the penis" pretext lets anything go — they can openly advertise anal as an option, and nobody thinks that's insane? lol
Even with some garbage law revision, everyone knows the police can't actually do their job properly.
Actually, the direction is to phase out soaplands.
Dating-app sugar-daddy arrangements ("papa-katsu") are juicier turf for police interests. Since all the data stays on record, they can crack down whenever they want a trophy case, and the amakudari (retired-bureaucrat) landing spot becomes "self-proclaimed IT company advisor."
More appealing than the small change soaplands used to kick back.
That said, I also think it'll push things further underground and increase the number of women who end up even worse off than now.
So the number went up in the end, huh.
What a joke.
That's because a foreign employee snitched.
Background and Key Points
Japan’s Anti-Prostitution Law (売春防止法) dates to 1956, when it abolished the licensed “akasen” red-line districts inherited from the pre-war brothel system. Its core compromise, still in force, is that prostitution itself carries no penalty for the person selling sex, while soliciting, managing, or profiting from someone else’s prostitution (pimping) does. That asymmetry was deliberate: lawmakers treated sellers as women needing protection rather than offenders. The Justice Ministry panel now reviewing the law was convened because of the very visible “tachinbo” street-solicitation problem around Shinjuku’s Okubo Park, and its draft leans toward finally penalizing buyers — and possibly criminalizing the sale itself.
The thread’s real disagreement isn’t over whether buyers “should” face consequences, but over consistency: posters debated whether it’s absurd to punish only one side of a two-party transaction, whether the reform would gut the gray-zone sex industry (soaplands, delivery-health services) that survives on the legal fiction that no cash changes hands for penetrative sex, and whether treating sellers as protected but buyers as criminals can be squared with the constitutional equality clause the “protecting women” logic leans on.
What the thread doesn’t spell out is that buyers of sex from minors are already punishable under separate child-welfare and anti-child-prostitution statutes — the “buyers currently walk free” framing some posters use only applies to adult transactions. It also skips the practical reason for the panel’s timing: the police and Justice Ministry have shifted attention toward regulating “papa-katsu” sugar-daddy dating apps, which leave digital transaction records ideal for prosecutions, over harder-to-track cash-based soapland trade.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “Anti-Prostitution Law Review Panel’s Draft Report: Majority Say Buyers Should Face Penalties Too — Justice Ministry.”
Leave a Reply