Oshikatsu – the act of supporting your oshi (推し), or fave, by attending events and buying goods – can be harmless entertainment. It can also become an expensive addiction that leaves people scrambling to find more money to shove at entertainers.
A string of recent stories in Japanese media highlight the latter trend. Encouraged by TikTok, women and girls are entering the sex work trade to support their oshis, with some so-called underground male idols grooming girls as young as 15 to engage in sugar babying. Some of the idols don’t seem to think there’s a problem with it – and Japanese police say there’s little they can do to stop it.
Groomed at 15 to go to hotels
FNN Prime Online tells the story of a girl, now a first-year high schooler, who discovered men’s underground idols (地下アイドル; chika-aidoru) on TikTok when she was 15. Underground idols are performers who focus on live performances in small venues rather than on media appearances. They’re also called “real-contact idols” (リアル系アイドル) because close contact with fans – handshake events, post-show chekis (Polaroid photos) – are a key part of their business model.
There are both male and female performers on the scene. The girl became hooked on several men’s-chika performers, ultimately handing over a total of three million yen ($18.8K) to them. As happens with many fans, she became a premium buyer of cheki, going from buying one at a show to buying dozens at a time. She spent a total of 100K yen ($627) on penlights alone.
What drove up the price? The opportunity to date her fave. Some men’s underground idol groups give fans face-time awards based on cumulative spend: 500K yen ($3,120) can lead to a one-hour date at a game center; 1.5M yen ($9,410) can mean a trip to Disneyland.
To amass this money, the girl took up street prostitution and regular sex work. Her fave idol knew she was doing this. He encouraged her. He even promised to “take her in” once he retired from idoling.
The girl says she was paid between 10K and 20K yen ($62-$125) per sexual encounter to earn the money for the Disneyland date. That comes out to between 150 and 300 clients – possibly more, as some of her work involved intermediaries who took a cut.
Working part-time to feed one’s oshi habit
It’s not just young girls who find themselves under their oshi’s spell. Mainichi and Bunshun carry the story of another woman, a tax official in Saitama Prefecture, who was disciplined for using sex work to support her oshi and later resigned.
The woman, in her 20s, spent 61 days working at delivery health (デリヘル; deri-heru) services, so-called “no-shop” sexual providers in which sex workers visit a client’s hotel instead of the client coming to their store. She said that “waiting for customers felt wasteful,” so she also took up sugar babying (パパ活; papa-katsu) with clients she met on social media.
She made a total of about 2.3M yen ($14,400) before her work found out (roughly 1.8M from delivery health work and another 500K from papa-katsu with about 30 men over 22 days). Many companies in Japan, particularly government offices, have strict rules forbidding side hustles. The Kanto-Shin’etsu Regional Taxation Bureau disciplined her on May 25, giving her a 10% pay cut for three months. She resigned her job two days later.
The case is reminiscent of another I wrote about four years ago where the Tokyo Tax Bureau fired a worker for her sex work side hustle. In that case, the woman was working to pay off her host club debt.
“Many fans do this”
These aren’t isolated cases. It’s a pattern – one that some performers are all too willing to exploit.
Underground idols make their money off of short, paid conversations as well as cheki (Polaroid) sales at 1,000 to 2,000 yen a pop. Hardcore fans will buy, not one, but 10, 20 or even 50 cheki at a performance.
Multiple stories across years from different news outlets show that massive purchases aren’t uncommon.
- In 2022, Gendai Business cited Maya, a university student who was spending 1M yen ($6,275) a month on men’s underground idols.
- Another 27-year-old teacher in the same article racked up 3M yen in debt the same way.
- In 2021, FRIDAY profiled Chikako, a 25-year-old megabank employee earning over ¥10 million/year who had borrowed ¥6 million (~$37,650) from four lenders to keep up.
- The same article cited Anna, a 19-year-old who was working delivery health and going on paid dates to fund her cheki habit.
Some of the women (and in some cases, girls) say this is common in their clique. “I never imagined selling my body to support my fave,” Emina told Bunshun Online. She was only 17 when she became fixated on men’s underground idols. She took to social media sex dating and, eventually, street prostitution in Kabukicho to fund her habit.
“Many underground idols fans do this,” she said.
Performers know full well what’s happening, too. One unnamed underground idol told FNN, “It’s good value. They’re using their money because they like it, we’re not asking them.” That’s the kind of on-the-nose statement that would get even a host at a host club fired.
Little legal recourse
Japan’s Entertainment Business Law (風俗法; fūzokuhō) regulates (or attempts to regulate) a myriad of nightlife occupations, including host and hostess clubs, con cafes, and girls’ bars. When problems surface, the government can amend the law to crack down on bad behavior. That happened recently with host clubs; new regulations now prevent practices such as “business romance.”
Underground idols, however, fall under no equivalent regulatory framework. Japan’s National Police Agency says they’re “aware” of cases in which support for underground idols has led to cases of minors being prostituted. However, a spokesperson said that the definition of “idol” is “ambiguous” and “difficult to distinguish from legal business.”
Instead of cracking down on the cause, authorities in Japan are cracking down on the effect. While street prostitution is illegal, it’s hard to prosecute. Previous attempts have targeted sex workers, leading to a public outcry that women were being unfairly singled out. The Cabinet of Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae is looking at reforms that would punish the buyers of street prostitution – the so-called Norway Model – as a remedy.
(Sex workers and sex worker advocates oppose both solutions, arguing instead that decriminalization is the best way to keep women safe.)
Criminalizing buyers will do little to stop idol fans from pursuing legal sex work options, such as delivery health. And it doesn’t address the increasingly large social media-based sex trade.
In the end, adults have free will. If a grown-up wants to go into debt over an idol, there’s little law enforcement can do to stop them.
But it’s a different story when literal children are being sucked into this world. Social welfare advocates say that, thanks to social media, the age of those entering the underground idol scene is getting younger every year. In the absence of regulation, Japan could find itself faced with a mounting child prostitution crisis centered on Kabukicho.
Keep reading
Sources
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