Expo boom bad news for Nagoya's boom-boom business

By Ryann Connell March 22, 2005

Nagoya has long been ranked alongside Tokyo's Kabukicho and Sapporo's Susukino districts as one of the great innovators of Japan's flesh trades, but the main activity around the central Japan city's netherworld as the Aichi Expo prepares to open is coming from the police, says Cyzo.

Aichi Expo has so far failed to generate a great extent of interest among Japanese consumers, other than its corny characters, which are apparently selling like hotcakes.

Japan's first World Expo in 35 years (Osaka held the last one in 1970) has sparked something of a flurry of economic activity in the area in recent years, but now that same business boom is sparking bad news for the boom-boom business.

"Nagoya's got a great economy going at the moment, with the healthy state of (Aichi Prefecture-based) Toyota Motor Co. and the construction of the Chubu International Airport. Workers are pouring in from other prefectures and, starting about three years ago, people started patronizing sex businesses again," a writer specializing in Nagoya's sex industry Cyzo. "In the area around Nagoya Station, the number of what are being called kyanpabu has skyrocketed. (kyanpabu are places where women workers display their handiwork until men reach a climax). Nagoya was once called a Health Kingdom for the proliferation of parlors offering erotic massages, but now it's become a Kyanpabu Heaven. Nagoya has always been a great innovator, coming up with the Kaiten Sushi Fuzoku, where sex workers were whirled around a club on a giant conveyor belt and given labels that matched popular types of sushi, as well as the 99 yen-per minute cabaret club. Nagoya has about 80 sex clubs in the area around Nagoya Station alone."

Though the flesh trade may be thriving, authorities are apparently working even harder as the world turns its eyes toward Aichi and its prefectural capital of Nagoya because of the expo.

Just as Osaka cops shut down soapland brothels in the city when it held a flower exposition in 1990 and cops rounded up foreign streetwalkers prior to the 2002 World Cup that Japan co-hosted with South Korea, Aichi crimebusters are looking to clean up the area before the beginning of the expo on Friday.

"Most sex clubs used to get a warning from the cops about once every six months or so, but recently these warnings have become more like monthly ones. Weekly and adult business magazines have stopped writing stories on Nagoya adult businesses in the hope they won't draw attention to the area," the operator of an adult business near Nagoya Station tells Cyzo. "If cops know what we're doing, it won't take long for them to order us to halt our business. Some places have already been shut down."

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