Japan's Sex Trade. Peter Constantine

      When the Anti-Prostitution Law descended on Japan in 1957, some of the lower red-light echelons with firm roots in the slums and shanty towns of large cities refused to budge. At first, mass hysteria broke out as retired prostitutes, pimps, and small-time mobsters realized that the government meant business about closing down their mini-brothels and the red-light bars into which they had sunk their life's savings. They protested, picketed, and committed little acts of terrorism, but when it became clear that the Draconian law was here to stay, they put their heads together and decided that they would close down their houses of ill repute and immediately re-open them as something else. The brothel owners rushed down to their local police stations, and as their houses were struck off the register one by one, "restaurants" sprang up in their stead. Food, however, was remarkably absent from their menus.

      There is an area of Yokohama, in one of the rougher neighborhoods near the port, that has remained to this day among Japan's most blatant brothel quarters. As one walks from the Isezaki District up towards the railroad tracks beyond the Ōka River that runs down into the harbor, bright posters set up by the local police warn "Beware of AIDS!" and "Beware of Violent Criminals!" and, in what looks like a desperate appeal to the neighborhood, "Stop Foreign Prostitutes!" In the dead of night soft Philippine and Thai voices call out from dim street corners, "Choi no ma?" (Wanna quickie?) as dump trucks and tired cabs cruise slowly past. Just across the river in Koganechō, a two-block mini-district that stretches under the elevated railroad tracks, 180 small brothels that defied the law back in 1956 have remained open. The dilapidated two-floor shanties of wood and corrugated iron, made to measure under the tracks along the 500-odd yards of Koganechō, rattle when the train passes overhead. The girls stand waiting in the doorways. A 15-minute session costs between $90 and $100.

      In the early fifties, Koganechō and the two blocks of neighboring Shiroganechō were one of the newer unlicensed prostitution areas that had sprung up in the desperate years after World War II. The elevated tracks had been built in 1931 for the Shonan Electric Railroad, and by the following year 990 people were living under them. During the allied bombing raids in 1945, Koganechō's railroad bridge became a death-trap for thousands when everything under and around it went up in flames. In the next few years dumpy bars and grungy noodle shops appeared, and along with them the ¥200 prostitutes.

      The early Koganechō brothels had a set layout. A seedy bar on the street side with the owner and his family living in the back room, and on the second floor, right under the tracks, the two or three small rooms in which the prostitutes worked. The owners did well for themselves, especially after the Anti-Prostitution Law was passed, and soon the bars and noodle shops were being shut down to make more rooms that could be rented at a boisterous profit to new prostitutes. But even more rental rooms were needed, and by the late sixties and throughout the seventies the owners and their families started moving to better neighborhoods so they could subdivide whole ground floor areas into small and expensive cubicles. By 1980, the official resident count of Koganechō had dropped to 95 people.

      By the late eighties, Taiwanese and Philippine prostitutes started appearing in the brothels and on the street corners, followed in the early nineties by a wave of Thai girls. With them came a new pimping-husband phenomenon, in which the prostitute would marry—paying her husband an average of $500 a month—so that she could legally remain in Japan. The girls soon realized that being a foreigner in Koganechō was expensive; by 1993, the room rates had rocketed to as much as $1,000 a month. The landlords, however, possibly in compliance with the police posters, rented out the rooms exclusively to bona fide Japanese girls or to pimp-brokers who charged the foreign girls anywhere from $4,000 to $6,000 a month.

      In a December, 1992 interview with Marco Polo magazine Mr. Hattori, head of the Koganechō Restaurant and Bar Association, commented on how the foreign girls had boosted the Koganechō economy by working for the brothels at a fraction of what Japanese prostitutes would work for. The Taiwanese girls who had come in a wave in the mid-eighties, he continued, were now all in their early thirties and somewhat "past it," and it was the rush of teenage Thai prostitutes in the 1990s that whipped new life into the streets.

      The police have recently gone beyond their poster-pasting campaign, and have begun storming the brothels. In a 1991 onslaught, 156 prostitutes were dragged to the precinct, 118 of them Thai. In a January, 1992 raid, 80 more were arrested. Then a Thai girl got AIDS and was sent back to Thailand in disgrace, and new posters were put up throughout the area.

      Another infamous area where brothels were quickly turned into restaurants on the eve of the Anti-Prostitution Law was Tobita in Osaka's Nishinari District. Tobita has more of a sensational past than its sister district in Yokohama. It had started off in the early 1600s as one of Osaka's seven cemeteries, and became notorious by doubling as a feared center to which Osaka criminals were dragged for execution. In the 1860s the cemetery moved east to the Abeno District, the execution center was closed down, and Tobita turned into a bustling slum.

      Its career as a red-light district started in 1914 when a flash fire totally wrecked Minami, the most prominent red-light district in fin-de-siecle Osaka, just a mile north of Tobita. The rich but now destitute brothel owners were frantically scouting for prime brothel real estate. The consensus was that the new turf would have be close enough to Minami to keep old clients coming, but far enough from the charred ruins and the devastated roads and bridges to be easily accessible. The new territory, everyone agreed, had to be cheap. Tobita was the obvious choice, and in 1919 the first brothel opened, after much exorcism, pomp, and ceremony, on the grounds of the former cemetery. The neighborhood was scandalized and took to the streets in protest, but the Minami brothel owners had quickly formed the Hannan Real Estate Company and had systematically bought up the whole area.

      Rows of brothels opened, and the Tobita red-light district stretched from Sanno and Tengachaya into the neighboring Tennoji District. Business was so good that desperate brothel owners even snatched up the northeastern corner of the Abeno Cemetery.

      In 1928, the arrival of the Nankai Hirano Railroad clinched Tobita's red-light supremacy. The tracks were only five miles long and ran from Imaike, just outside Tobita, to the old Nankai Hirano Station. But now Tobita was accessible from all directions, and eager men cascaded in from surrounding districts. Two years later, by 1930, the brothel count was up to 220, with the prostitute count at a dizzying 2,700.

      As the Anti-Prostitution Law went into effect on April Fools' Day in 1957, Tobita's rows of brothels, like those in Yokohama, hastily transformed themselves into ryōtei (restaurants), with the prostitutes changing into arubaito nojokyu (part-time waitresses). That same year, the government set up its first prostitute rehabilitation center in Tennoji, and although the prostitutes were slow in flocking in, a second center was set up the following year in nearby Nishinari. The brothels, aware of the delicacy of the situation, immediately protected themselves by forming a powerful "restaurant" association, which started working closely with the local mob and the police. The solidarity among the Tobita owners became so strong that all the brothel prices, services, and even the decor were standardized.

      While the Yokohama brothels are a blend of concrete, corrugated iron, and wood, Tobita prides itself on sustaining the pre-war wooden yukaku (brothel) look. The association put much effort into steering clear from Tobita's dangerous former image of being among Osaka's largest red-light centers, and worked on publicly