Exploring the streets of Japan can be fascinating for any tourist; the vast array of lights, colours and costume-adorned workers handing out fliers. As a tourist you may wonder what all the cutely dressed girls, often in cat ears, are selling.  Many of these fliers introduce the famous Maid Café industry that provides Japanese people and tourists alike with food and drink, accompanied by cute and young women dressed in maids attire. As a tourist, the extreme levels of cuteness may shock you, but this is all too familiar for the Japanese citizen. 

In Japan, youthfulness and cuteness is so rampantly sold it is almost a commodity. Whilst the celebration of youth and child-like beauty is not intrinsically wrong, it is a dangerous fixation that has led to a realm of issues hidden beneath the surface of Japan. Enter the streets of Kabukicho and you will be met with the stark realisation that whilst putting on the airs of innocence, prostitution is a powerful and booming industry in Japan. 

The prominence of prostitution mixed with「女性高生」, which refers to school girl fetishization, has created an industry that exploits young girls for a range of activities; ranging from photos or dates with a schoolgirl, all the way to sexual acts. This culture is visible everywhere; such as billboards of young anime schoolgirls, underage idols singing in school uniforms, and celebrities on television joking about dating younger girls.  

This worrying part of Japanese culture is one that needs international attention. Japanese youth need to be educated about the dangers of seeking work with these businesses, and groups need to be deployed to monitor the streets and stop these ‘transactions’ from taking place. It is my hope that my knowledge in gender and sex studies could be applied in a way that respects the culture and that would allow for improvements in protection for young females in Japan.