Sex shops sweating ahead of World Athletics Championships

[Anchorman]

Osaka is to host the World Athletics Championships later this month, but the lead-up to the event has seen the city's cops sprinting faster than anybody else as they dash to crackdown on sex services that may present an inappropriate face to the outside world, Shukan Shincho (8/2) says.

Osaka is notorious for taking a tough line on its ejaculation industry denizens whenever there's a hint that the city may move into the limelight.

"Soapland brothels disappeared from Osaka in 1994 at authorities' whim after the Kansai International Airport opened and made the city a gateway to foreign countries.

When Osaka held an international flower exhibition in 1990, the knocking shops in the Tobita Shinchi district refrained from allowing their workers to show their faces on the streets," a national news reporter tells Shukan Shincho.

"Whenever there's an event with an international flavor held in Osaka, the sex business really feels the heat."

And the World Athletics Championships in Osaka are no exception.

"(Osaka district) Kita Shinchi has western Japan's only foreign, blonde streetwalkers, but they've all been picked up now. In the Minami district, the area in front of the Shin Kabukiza used to be a hotbed of enjo kosai (selling sex for luxury items or cash), but a crackdown there means you can't see any women into that sort of thing hanging around at all," a writer on the Osaka sex business tells Shukan Shincho.

In Osaka's Nihonbashi electronics district, sellers of illicit and adult DVD have vanished. Uniformed officers are patrolling Osaka's entertainment districts on foot and in cars, searching for the contraband traders who have gone underground.

"Tobita Shinchi's union is cooperating with the cops and will probably be able to go through the world championships unscathed as long as they keep a low profile like they have in the past," the Osaka sex writer says. "But since late June, police patrol cars have been going in and out of the area all the time."

An operator of a call girl service bemoans conditions in Osaka.

"There are loads of companies that have suddenly become the target of arrests because of the clean-up campaign being carried out," the operator tells Shukan Shincho. "Some of these companies had been operating without a license for 20 years or more. Still, business is all about ups and downs." (By Ryann Connell)