As Japan’s economy struggles under the weight of the weak yen, the depleted currency has in parallel attracted record numbers of overseas visitors, with Tokyo emerging as a globally recognized red-light destination — with some drawing comparisons to Thailand’s Pattaya, long associated with sex tourism.
Through social media, influencers have inadvertently popularized the seediest parts of Tokyo’s nightlife, often reinforcing harmful stereotypes of Japanese women as submissive, sexually permissive and exotic. These stereotypes, however, are not merely foreign misrepresentations: Japan’s own postwar legal framework and cultural conditions sustain and reinforce them.
Tropes of Japanese women as both innocent and deviant can be traced back to 19th-century Orientalist views that cast Japan as mysterious and exotic — as outlined by Narrelle Morris, an associate professor at Curtin University in Australia, in a paper exploring Western fiction’s fetishization of Japanese women.
