Sex-Buying Tourism in Kabukicho—Would Punishing Buyers’ Solicitation Correct Japan’s Prostitution Law?

On 24 August 2026, Japan’s Ministry of Justice panel on the regulation of prostitution presented a draft report.

One central question was whether Japan should create an offence for buyers who publicly solicit paid sex.

A Yomiuri Shimbun report published the following day described concerns in Kabukicho, Shinjuku. According to the ward, scenes of people waiting for clients near Okubo Park have spread internationally through social media. More foreign visitors are said to be arriving to buy sex or simply watch, and language barriers have contributed to disputes over money.

Three qualifications are essential.

First, the document is a draft panel report, not an enacted law. The precise conduct, evidentiary elements and penalties of any buyer-side offence remain undecided.

Second, local observations that more foreign visitors are present are not the same as nationality-specific data on the sex trade. They do not justify treating foreigners in general as the cause.

Third, the panel was not reported to favour blanket punishment of every consensual transaction between adults. Most members were cautious about criminalizing the transaction itself, in part because it is difficult to justify treating all adult consent as legally invalid. The stronger support concerned the existing asymmetry: sellers’ public solicitation is punishable, while buyers’ equivalent approaches are not.

Without these distinctions, the discussion collapses into a moral referendum—either “accept prostitution” or “eradicate it.”

The serious question is more concrete:

Whose conduct may the state punish, for what harm, and on what proof?

What Japan’s present law prohibits—and what it punishes

Japan’s Prostitution Prevention Act defines prostitution as sexual intercourse with an unspecified person in exchange for payment or a promise of payment. It declares that no person shall engage in prostitution or become its partner.

Yet there is no general criminal penalty for the transaction itself between adults.

Criminal penalties attach mainly to surrounding conduct. Article 5 covers a person who, for the purpose of prostituting themselves, publicly solicits another person, blocks or follows someone in a public place for that purpose, waits for clients, or advertises. Other provisions address procuring, coercion, providing a place and operating prostitution as a business.

The asymmetry is striking.

• A seller who publicly asks someone to buy may be punished under Article 5.
• A buyer who publicly asks someone to sell faces no structurally equivalent offence.

A transaction requires at least two people, but the legal visibility of searching for the transaction falls mainly on one side.

The law has historically rendered sellers visible as a public-morals problem while allowing purchasers to dissolve into anonymous demand. A body waiting on a street is easy for police to see. A person who walks through, approaches and pays can be indispensable to the market yet remain in the background.

The proposal to regulate buyers’ solicitation begins by challenging this one-sided gaze.

Did policing Okubo Park solve the problem?

Yomiuri reported that 112 women were arrested in the act near Okubo Park during 2025 on suspicion of violating the Prostitution Prevention Act. After an intensified crackdown in August, fewer people appeared near the park, but more were reportedly seen waiting in nearby hotel streets.

That distinction matters.

Disappearance from view is not disappearance.

Place-focused policing can improve passage and tranquillity in one location. It may reduce unwanted approaches, disputes, crowds of spectators and the burdens experienced by residents and businesses. Safety in shared space is a real public good.

But if people merely move from a park to hotel streets, policing has displaced a market rather than eliminated it. If transactions then migrate to social media, intermediaries, encrypted messages or private rooms, they may become less visible to the authorities while violence and exploitation become harder to report.

Criminal policy often treats a lower visible count as success. Yet lower visibility is not necessarily greater safety.

Evaluation should ask more than how many arrests were made or how many people remained on one pavement:

• Did violence, coercion and trafficking decline?
• Did the sexual exploitation of minors decline?
• Did workers gain more time and power to refuse clients?
• Did access to health care, housing, debt advice and addiction services improve?
• Did transactions move to more dangerous, isolated settings?
• Did concrete harms to residents and passers-by decline?

If the state merely moves visible people, it begins to measure social problems by address.

Mill: offence is not the same as harm

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued that a civilized community may exercise power against a person’s will to prevent harm to others, not simply for that person’s own good.

On this principle, society’s distaste for a consensual transaction between adults in private is not, by itself, a sufficient basis for punishment.

But Mill’s principle does not convert all street solicitation into protected liberty.

Following people, repeatedly approaching them after refusal, blocking passage, threatening them, generating fights or imposing sustained burdens on residents are harms beyond moral offence. Public conduct can be regulated whether the proposed transaction concerns sex, a product, a donation or anything else.

The categories should therefore be separated.

Ground for regulation	Example	Philosophical assessment
Moral offence	Disapproval of exchanging sex for money	Too weak by itself to justify criminal punishment
Concrete public harm	Obstruction, harassment, persistent solicitation, violence	Can justify regulation if conduct is clearly defined
Protection from exploitation	Coercion, trafficking, sexual exploitation of minors	Justifies strong intervention and protection

The language of “public morals” often wraps all three together.

Residents’ concerns should not be dismissed. But criminal law must translate “the district’s morals have deteriorated” into demonstrable harms. Is the problem an unwanted proposition, blocked passage, a violent dispute, exploitation—or simply an unwelcome sight? Different harms require different remedies.

Hart and Devlin: may law enforce a community’s morality?

In twentieth-century Britain, legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart and judge Patrick Devlin disputed whether the law could punish private sexual conduct between consenting adults.

Devlin argued that a society’s shared morality helps hold it together and may therefore deserve legal protection. Hart, following Mill, warned against turning moral disgust into criminal intervention in private adult life.

Kabukicho reproduces this dispute.

The statement “our city must not become a destination for buying sex” expresses a community’s image of itself. Residents have a legitimate interest in the public environment they share with children, neighbours and visitors.

Yet communal morality can become the majority’s language for excluding minorities. Historically, “good morals” made selling women visible as degraded while buyers remained obscure; it also disciplined sexual minorities and sex outside conventional family structures.

“This is not who we are” is therefore insufficient as a criminal-law test.

The case must be translated into reasons available to everyone: public safety, non-consensual contact, coercion, trafficking and protection of minors. Before morality becomes law, we should ask whose body that morality will make punishable.

Kant: does purchasing sex necessarily turn a person into a thing?

Kant’s principle of humanity requires us to treat persons never merely as means but always at the same time as ends.

One of the strongest arguments against buying sex follows from this idea.

If payment makes a purchaser believe they have acquired control over another person’s body, time and obedience—if refusal or withdrawal of consent is ignored—then the person is reduced to an instrument. Economic inequality, insecure immigration status, debt, dependency and violent management may make a formally signed agreement a very poor guarantee of respect.

Yet Kant’s formula does not automatically prove that every paid sexual interaction negates personhood.

Many forms of labour exchange time, bodily effort, emotion and skill for money. Care work, hospitality, performance and manual labour can all involve commodification. If sex alone is treated as categorically different, the distinctive harm must be explained rather than assumed.

The morally important questions include:

• Can a person reject a client or a specific act?
• Can consent be withdrawn at any moment?
• Can violence be reported without retaliation?
• Can price and conditions be negotiated?
• Can the person leave without losing housing or subsistence?
• Does the buyer mistake payment for authority over a person?

A law that protects personhood must also avoid turning a person into the thing called “victim.” Protection that silences every participant and denies all capacity for judgment can instrumentalize in a different way.

Sen: formal consent is not proof of substantive freedom

Amartya Sen’s capability approach focuses not merely on formal choices but on what people are genuinely able to do and become.

A person choosing between selling sex and losing housing does not have the same range of freedom as a person choosing among several safe and viable occupations. Both may formally consent, but their capabilities differ.

Consent is not simply an on-or-off switch. Its substance depends on alternatives, information, time, housing, income, health, debt, dependency, immigration status and protection from violence.

Two opposite mistakes follow.

The first says, “There was consent, so society has no further responsibility.” It hides deprivation and coercion.

The second says, “There may be deprivation, so the person’s will is entirely invalid.” It removes agency and allows police or rescuers to decide a life for someone else.

A capability-oriented policy widens the set of real alternatives rather than commanding the supposedly correct choice.

Emergency housing, cash support, debt relief, addiction treatment, health care, immigration advice, education, employment assistance and refuge from violence can give safety to those who remain and a genuine exit to those who wish to leave.

“Just stop” is not an exit. An exit includes somewhere to sleep and something to eat the following day.

Would punishing buyers reduce demand?

Demand-side criminalization has an intuitive force.

Policing supply alone cannot remove a market sustained by demand. Legal responsibility for purchasers can disrupt anonymity and require the party with spending power to bear some risk. The “Nordic model,” which criminalizes purchase while seeking not to punish sellers, institutionalizes that view.

There is also a contrary human-rights and public-health position. Amnesty International and UNAIDS support decriminalizing consensual adult sex work. They argue that criminalizing buyers and associated conduct can push transactions underground, reduce time to screen clients, weaken condom negotiation, deter reports of violence and obstruct health care.

International evidence does not offer a simple verdict.

• The Swedish government has credited its sex-purchase prohibition with reducing street prostitution and changing social attitudes toward purchase.
• A 2019 Northern Ireland government review found that its purchase offence had only a minimal effect on demand and could not establish an impact on trafficking.
• New Zealand’s 2008 government review found no clear increase in the number of sex workers after decriminalization and reported that many workers felt more able to refuse clients.

These are not controlled versions of one experiment. Welfare systems, policing, migration rules, housing and markets differ. Laws sharing a label may be implemented differently.

At minimum, no evidence warrants the promise that adding one offence automatically reduces exploitation.

A regime should be judged by all the consequences it produces. If street visibility falls while violence, isolation and dependency on intermediaries increase, it has not succeeded.

Foucault: punishment produces visibility as well as removing it

Michel Foucault argued that modern power does more than prohibit. It observes, classifies and separates the normal from the abnormal.

In street policing, the people easiest to observe can become “the problem.”

Someone standing for a long time, wearing conspicuous clothing, speaking another language or walking through a hotel district at night may attract surveillance. None of those traits establishes an intention to buy sex.

Reports on the panel’s discussions mention proposals to consider conduct such as wandering around to search for a seller or responding to a solicitation.

That raises a serious danger.

An explicit proposition, negotiation, obstruction or following can be proved as conduct. “Searching,” however, describes a purpose, and walking around is ordinarily lawful. How many circuits, looks or pauses convert a person into an offender? If police must infer inner purpose from appearance, punishment shifts from acts to profiles.

The principle of legality is not an inconvenience that protects only wrongdoers. It lets everyone know in advance what conduct is criminal and guards against punishment based on an officer’s intuition.

The justified demand to “make buyers visible” must not become permission to “watch everyone who looks suspicious.”

Foreign visitors are a policy concern, not an ethical cause

Reports that more foreign visitors are coming to buy sex or spectate deserve a practical response. Multilingual information, clear explanations of the law, measures against websites that market the district abroad and procedures for language-related disputes may all be necessary.

But nationality must not be treated as the cause.

Foreign visitors did not create the market around Okubo Park. Japanese demand, debts associated with host clubs and other consumption, recruiters, social media, housing insecurity, gender inequality, urban anonymity and decades of enforcement practices all predate the present attention. Cross-border information may have expanded an existing market; it did not invent it.

Nationality does not change the harm of an act.

A Japanese and a foreign visitor making the same explicit approach should face the same elements of an offence. A person who cannot read Japanese should receive multilingual notice. Immigration status and appearance must not become proxies for proof.

Overemphasizing foreigners shifts the centre of policy from preventing exploitation to managing tourists. It also allows Japanese purchasers, intermediaries and institutions to fade into the background once again.

The strongest case for a buyer-solicitation offence

There are at least four strong arguments for regulating buyers’ public approaches.

Correcting one-sided responsibility

It is unfair to criminalize only the seller’s approach when both sides are searching for the same transaction in the same public space. A system that hides demand concentrates legal risk on the party likely to have less economic power.

Protecting all passers-by from unwanted propositions

People who have no intention of selling sex may be asked for a price or followed by would-be buyers. Regulating explicit buyer solicitation protects sellers and non-sellers alike.

Changing the norm that payment erases responsibility

Markets are sustained by demand. The ability to pay should not confer immunity from responsibility for risks borne by another person.

Enabling intervention before greater harm

Police can address persistent bargaining, obstruction and following before coercion or violence escalates. Carefully designed law may therefore have a preventive role.

These reasons can justify regulating explicit, public solicitation for purchase, obstruction and following, on terms at least equivalent to those applied to sellers.

The strongest case against it

Opposition does not necessarily express approval of buying sex. It may instead defend worker safety and the limits of state power.

Displacement may increase danger

If buyers fear arrest, they may demand that decisions be made more quickly or in less visible places. Sellers may have less time to screen them and fewer escape routes.

Evidence gathering may intensify surveillance of sellers

To catch buyers, police may continuously observe sellers, their messages and movements. A buyer-focused label can conceal seller-focused surveillance.

Vague intent offences invite selective policing

Inferring purpose from walking, looking, dress or nationality invites mistake and profiling.

Individual arrests can conceal structural causes

Housing, debt, management, online platforms, labour markets and migration rules remain untouched if the state narrows responsibility to two arrestable people on a street. Another pair may simply replace them.

These objections do not require inaction. They require narrow definitions and continuous measurement of consequences for safety and access to support.

Seven conditions for a defensible reform

Any buyer-side law should meet at least seven conditions.

Define crime by objective conduct, not inner desire

The offence should be limited to explicit propositions, negotiation, repeated approaches after refusal, obstruction or following. Mere presence, walking, looking, dress or nationality must not be elements.

Reconsider seller punishment at the same time

Adding buyers while intensifying the existing seller offence may merely double the number of arrestable people. At minimum, diversion to support before prosecution, non-carceral responses and the effects of criminal records on rebuilding a life should be examined.

Separate adults’ consent from minors, force and trafficking

Sexual exploitation of children, violence, threats, confinement, deception, trafficking and managers who extract earnings require strong investigation and punishment. Disagreement about consensual adult sex work must not obscure these harms. Nor should trafficking be used to force every adult into a single victim narrative.

Never exchange support for cooperation with arrest

Housing, health care, interpretation, immigration advice, debt relief, addiction treatment and refuge from violence should not be rewards available only to those who identify a buyer or intermediary. They should be accessible as rights.

Give specific multilingual notice

Airports, travel sites, accommodation providers and entertainment districts should explain prohibited conduct in multiple languages. Abstract demands to respect “morals” are less useful than concrete notice about propositions, following and the sexual exploitation of minors.

Publish enforcement disparities

Anonymized data should include gender, age, nationality, location, conduct alleged, non-prosecution, referrals to support and complaints. Independent review must be able to detect enforcement by appearance.

Measure safety, not arrest production

Pre-announced indicators should track violence, health access, trafficking, movement online, resident harm, reports to police, and housing and income after exit—not only arrests or people visible in one street. A review or sunset mechanism should permit revision if harms increase.

Conclusion: make demand accountable without criminalizing desire

Kabukicho’s current legal structure is genuinely imbalanced.

The law can see a seller waiting on a street but lacks an equivalent offence when a buyer approaches, bargains, follows and sustains the demand that makes the transaction possible. There is little reason to leave explicit public propositions, obstruction and following untouched.

It is therefore defensible to create a buyer-solicitation offence defined by clear, objective conduct.

But the law must not move from that proposition to punishing people who merely appear to be walking with the purpose of buying sex.

Criminal law is not a machine for reading desire. It punishes proved acts. If foreign appearance, repeated walking through a hotel district or a glance becomes a substitute for evidence, one inequality will be replaced by another.

Nor is a buyer offence sufficient by itself.

The reported displacement from Okubo Park to nearby hotel streets after the 2025 crackdown shows how punishment may move a problem across a map. If Japan retains punishment of sellers, adds punishment of buyers and leaves housing, debt, health, violence, addiction, immigration and employment untouched, the street may look cleaner while danger becomes deeper and less visible.

Justice is not the removal of an uncomfortable scene.

It is the allocation of responsibility to demand, the protection of sellers’ personhood and agency, strong action against coercion and child exploitation, and a real route out for anyone who wants to leave.

The law should not see a “dirty district.”

It should see who acts upon whom, who bears the danger, who profits from it, and what harm can actually be proved.

NOW IN QUESTION

• Is public sexual solicitation wrong because it concerns sex, or because it creates unwanted approaches, obstruction and other harms?
• Does adding a buyer offence to a seller offence create fairness—or merely expand punishment on both sides?
• Can law respect consent constrained by poverty without abandoning the conditions that constrain it?
• When transactions disappear from the street, how will we know whether safety improved or visibility merely declined?
• How specific must an offence be to address foreign sex-buying tourism without turning foreignness into suspicion?

References

• Yomiuri Shimbun: Foreign visitors seeking to buy sex and expectations for a buyer-solicitation offence
• Ministry of Justice: Study Group on Regulations Concerning Prostitution
• Ministry of Justice: Draft Final Report
• Ministry of Justice: Eighth Meeting, 24 August 2026
• e-Gov Laws: Prostitution Prevention Act
• TV Asahi: Panel draft calls for punishing buyers’ solicitation
• Amnesty International policy on the human rights of sex workers
• UNAIDS, HIV and sex work: Human rights fact sheet 2024
• New Zealand Ministry of Justice, Report of the Prostitution Law Review Committee 2008
• Northern Ireland Department of Justice, Report on the impact of the sex purchase offence
• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Hart–Devlin Debate
• Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Capability Approach
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Michel Foucault