Sex ＆ money: a winning combination
Dear readers, last week’s story about the erotic film industry was very popular so I decided to delve a little deeper into Japan’s nonchalant relationship with sex. Trying, of course, to be less naughty and more informative and, hopefully, thought-provoking.
Let me know what you think about it.
Japan has the biggest sex industry in Asia and one of the biggest in the world, but finding reliable data on its inner workings and the money it generates is a daunting task to say the least.
For one thing, official statistics are unreliable, especially when it comes to the underground economy. For example, if we compare police data with the number of ads in sex magazines, it is easy to see that the actual number of sex-related shops and practices is quite bigger (probably as much as twice that of official statistics), which means that many of them are not registered with the authorities. This is especially true for “fashion health” massage parlors and “image clubs” while in the case of soaplands, only few establishments are moguri (underground) businesses.
By the way, for the uninitiated, a fashion health parlor is a relatively cheap place where there is no intercourse, and customers are serviced through hand-jobs or oral sex. Image clubs (shortened as imekura in Japanese), on the other hand, do about the same things but are themed after certain sexual fantasies (office, doctor’s clinic, classroom, train carriage) and the girls wear costumes. As for soaplands, these are bathing facilities where the customers can get a special treatment.
Back to our problem, how can we dig up reliable data on the sex industry? Luckily for us, economist Kadokura Takashi has done all the hard work on what he calls the “lower body industry,” and we can now read everything we always wanted to know on the subject in his books including his most popular title, Sekai no “kahanshin” keizai ga mokaru riyu (Why the World’s “Lower Body” Economy Is Profitable). In this and other works, Kadokura has analyzed and elucidated the mechanisms of the amazing profits generated by Japan’s sex industry, the actual number of sex workers in the legal and illegal industries, etc. based on the latest available data.
Born in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1971, Kadokura found a job at the Japan Economic Research Center after graduating from Keio University. He then joined the Institute for South-East Asian Studies in Singapore before becoming a representative of the BRICs Research Institute in 2005. A part-time lecturer at Doshisha University Graduate School, he specializes in underground economies and labor issues and has published many books on Japan’s working poor.
According to Kadokura, the only way to estimate the sex market size is to approach the subject from the bottom up, starting with a single place and then multiplying the information gathered by the approximate number of similar businesses around Japan.
Let’s take, for instance, the soapland industry. Having done his diligent bit of fieldwork, Kadokura says that each store, on average, has eight rooms. The average service time is 90 minutes, while the waiting time is about six minutes. Based on this data, we can say that a soapland averages about 40 customers per day for a grand total of 15,000 annual visits. Presuming that the average guest spends 50,000 yen, we can imagine that the annual income of a single soapland is around 750 million yen. Now we only have to multiply this figure by the number of stores nationwide. In 2005, for instance, the soapland market size was 981.9 billion yen.
However, only about a quarter of these fees are reported to the tax office. That’s because the “special service” fees are rarely declared and end up in the pockets of the women who work at these establishments. In other words, the soapland underground economy amounts to a whopping 736.4 billion yen.
As for the above-mentioned fashion health parlors, they bring in 678 billion yen a year. According to Kadokura’s research, an established parlor is open 12 hours a day, it is visited by 32,500 customers (service time is much shorter than at soaplands) and the average waiting time for service is 20 minutes.
Kadokura also explored Japan’s problem with teenage prostitution. Luckily, in this case, he did not engage in fieldwork but relied on a Japanese government survey. By adding his own research, he came up with the following data: there are an estimated 170,000 junior high and high school girls engaged in prostitution each year in Japan, and the market is estimated to be as high as 54.7 billion yen. As for who the girls’ customers are, Kadokura notes that 1 in 10 Japanese men has a “Lolita complex” (i.e. he likes teenage girls) and that 15% of the male population has viewed child pornography, while over 10% owns child pornography.
Kadokura’s books are full of fascinating and thought-provoking information that gives a real sense of the sex industry in Japan. For example,
the market size of Japan’s sex-related industry (7,663.6 billion yen) is comparable to the government’s labor costs for civil servants (7,880.5 billion according to the initial budget for the 2017 fiscal year).
The “delivery health” market (or deri-heru i.e. call girls being “delivered” to the customer’s house or a love hotel) amounts to 1,848.1 billion, surpassing Shimane Prefecture’s gross domestic product (1,767.6 billion in 2013)
The market size of adult shops (209.3 billion) is comparable to the initial budget for the 2017 general account (201.5 billion) in Utsunomiya, the city in Tochigi Prefecture that is famous for its gyoza dumplings.
Kadokura even tackles subjects that are not strictly related to the “ejaculation industry.” He calculates, for instance, that if Japan legalizes same-sex marriage, the marriage market will increase by 51 billion yen.
Well aware that a string of numbers and cold data do not make for the most entertaining reading material, Kadokura spices up his research with a healthy amount of useless but immensely fun statistical trivia. For example, did you know that the market size of a transsexual specialty sex shop (15.65 billion yen) is comparable to the 7-year contract amount (16 billion) of Tanaka Masahiro of the New York Yankees baseball team? Or that the number of porn actresses in Japan (about 7,500) is almost the same as the estimated number of Sumatran orangutans (about 7,300) which are designated as endangered species? Do you care? Whatever.
Far from limiting himself to gathering an endless stream of statistical data, Kadokura devotes the final chapter of his book to discussing what Japan can and should do about its humongous sex industry. He makes a good argument that Japan should abandon the gray zone laws it has now (prostitution is theoretically illegal in Japan, but there are so many loopholes that thousands of businesses are allowed to grow and flourish) and legalize and regulate the industry. He is well aware that this is a morally controversial position, but, as Kadokura explains, clarifying the status of the sex industry would better protect the rights of sex workers, increase tax revenue, and also prevent the spread of sexual diseases among both the population at large and those who are directly involved in the sex business – the workers and their customers.
Let me know if you want more of this. And please check out Eric Rechsteiner’s great website.
Fantastinating, as always!
Two parts I particularly liked:
1) "Kadokura even tackles subjects that are not strictly related to the “ejaculation industry.” He calculates, for instance, that if Japan legalizes same-sex marriage, the marriage market will increase by 51 billion yen." - 100000% agree. I always find it funny when conservatives in the US complain about gay marriage, yet all they focus on otherwise is increasing the economy and getting folks to spend money (irony!)
2) "He makes a good argument that Japan should abandon the gray zone laws it has now (prostitution is theoretically illegal in Japan, but there are so many loopholes that thousands of businesses are allowed to grow and flourish) and legalize and regulate the industry." - also 100000% agree :)