There used to be a phenomenon in Japan that startled me. In bookstores or convenience stores, magazines with pictures of customs are everywhere, and children can also look through them; on the street of Shinjuku West Exit, there is a shop specializing in customs reading materials and videos (I later learned that there are many such shops, mainly renting videos), and in Kabukicho in The East Exit of Shinjuku at night, some people stand in front of the store and shout loudly, attracting customers, from the storefront and neon decorations, probably a place to provide custom services. In Japan, are customs culture or custom services openly legal?
To put it simply, customs and culture are open and legal, but prostitution and prostitution are illegal, and it is a crime to instigate the organization of prostitution. Customs, culture, or custom services, which are restricted by law, were once a large industry in Japan.
From the 1970s to the early 1990s, the custom industry flourished in Japan, and the cities with a slight scale in the country had some of the following customs places: stripteases, a bathing ground written soap-land where women bathed men; there was also a name called image club, in which women changed clothes such as nurses, schoolgirls, and flight attendants according to the requirements of customers to create certain image customs performances; there were also door-to-door massage services; in addition, there were various movies, videos, etc. And as many as five hundred custom magazines, it is really dizzying.
Some people may ask, is it because Japanese men are particularly, or Japanese women are particularly despicable, which causes such a phenomenon? I don't think so entirely. In any country or region in the world, as long as the authorities open a channel and do not impose regulations and restrictions, most of them will have the proliferation of customs and cultures, often caused by gender characteristics and the consumption of urban society. In countries where highly disciplined religions dominate, human lust is often seen as a sin.
Ironically, however, among monasteries or priests, sexual immorality has been repeatedly revealed. In The Buddhist teachings, "fornication" is considered to be one of the "five precepts" that must be forbidden, but if you look at the "three words and two beats", many of them are about the story of the monk's sexual immorality. In fact, in the original Chinese ethics, "color" may not have been denied, and the Book of Rites records confucius's words: "Men and women who eat and drink, the great desire of man is to survive." Mencius also said, "Food color, sex also."
In the mythological stories recorded in Japan's earliest books, such as the Ancient Chronicles, relevant metaphors or straightforward descriptions can also be seen. Later, probably with the introduction of Confucianism and the establishment of a unified state, these folk customs slowly declined.
Most of the customs and cultures mentioned now are related consumer cultures, belonging to the category of commerce, and in general, consumers are men, and women provide custom services. Worldwide, such cultures are almost as old as the history of human civilization. However, custom services mainly exist in stranger societies.
Speaking of which, Japan's large-scale customs services appeared relatively late, and in the Heian period or the Kamakura shogunate and the Muromachi shogunate era, there were also secret acts of serving princes and nobles or upper-class figures, and later in the vicinity of travel to Tsutsu and near the inns that provided accommodation for travelers, there were also some secret prostitutes, but it seems that they have not yet formed a scale, and large-scale custom services really appeared after the birth of the city.
It was not until the seventeenth century of the Edo period that cities such as Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka were formed, and there were real city dwellers, and most of them were men, so the custom of serving men came into being. In the 18th century, four major custom areas appeared, including Yoshihara in Edo, Shinmachi in Osaka, Shimabara in Kyoto, and Maruyama in Nagasaki, which were called "Youkuo" in Japanese, and "Younu" who performed customs services. The names of these customs are called so-and-so tea houses, as if they are places to drink tea, but insiders understand that this is mainly to provide custom services.
Not only customs, but also many popular novels for the entertainment of the citizens emerged in the Edo period, such as "The Lustful Generation of Men" and "The Lustful Generation of Women" written by Ihara Nishizuru from Osaka, and there are many scenes and lives depicting youkuo, and some of the ukiyo-e paintings that were born at that time were also paintings, directly and nakedly depicted, and often exaggerated. These are all consumer needs that cater to the emerging civic class.
After the Meiji Restoration, when Westerners saw that the Japanese were so open, they accused them of being uncivilized, and their customs were open. In order to show that it is a civilized country, the Japanese government has had to issue decrees, ostensibly restricting and even issuing some prohibition orders, but in fact, customs have not been eradicated.
Around the 1920s, some cafes appeared on the streets of Tokyo and other places, originally a place to drink coffee, when coffee was a relatively modern foreign gadget, but soon it slowly changed its flavor, and some of the café waitresses also engaged in custom business, which attracted the attention of the authorities, so the Japanese government issued the "Cafe and Bar Ban Items" in 1929, and in 1933, it was used as the applicable object of the "special restaurant ban rules". Some shops that actually serve coffee have changed their names to "tea shops" in order to wash away the customs, so today Japanese cafes are called "tea shops".
Beginning in the second half of the 1930s, Japan began a large-scale war of aggression against the outside world, implemented fascist rule at home, and banned almost all entertainment venues.
After the war, there was a shortage of materials, but the customs industry was quickly revived, light and dark, and everywhere was rampant. In order to regulate this phenomenon, in 1948, the Law on regulating the Regulation of Customs and Customs and Other Business and the Standardization of Related Business (Law No. 122) was promulgated to make clearer legal provisions on related business, and this law has been revised many times since then, most recently in 2001. Simply put, it is permissible to operate dance halls in Japan, bathing grounds for women's services, bars, cafes, and dance halls with customs services, making custom audio-visual products, and publishing custom books, newspapers, and magazines.
However, there is a strict stipulation that the transaction is a serious violation of the law or even a crime, and the intermediary or operator should be investigated for criminal liability. Custom images are OK, but sensitive parts must not be directly exposed, mosaics must be played. However, there are always policies at the top and countermeasures at the bottom, and although there is no direct trading behavior in some open customs and places, according to the reports of journalists who specialize in this aspect of investigation, the actual transaction also exists.
For example, soap-land is, by its very nature, only women providing bathing services to men. But the operator will create a clever name, that is, each bathroom in the store is rented to the woman, there is a clear provision that there can be no special service, once the woman provides the service, it is the personal responsibility of the woman, and it has nothing to do with the store. It is difficult for the police to catch the current (not to break into people's houses at will), they cannot deal with it, and most of them turn a blind eye to it. Unless children's customs are involved, that must be dealt with seriously. In order to join international organizations and international human rights conventions, the Japanese authorities have legally formulated a set of rules and regulations that are in line with international standards, but the actual supervision is relatively relaxed.
However, custom consumption costs money after all. After the 1990s, the economic bubble collapsed, the pockets of companies and individuals were exhausted, the operation of customs industry became more and more difficult, and many dance halls and other customs venues closed down, making the threshold for women to enter this industry higher.
Finally, I would like to discuss, why is it legal today's Customs and Culture, while real trading, etc. is illegal? It seems to be somewhat contradictory. In fact, at least since the Edo period, customs services have not been condemned by public opinion, and the authorities have not severely banned them, and at that time, the culture of mixed bathing between men and women has always existed.
However, with the advent of Western civilization, the morality of Christian society also affected Japanese society, customs were regarded as incompatible with civilized society, the abolition movement of prostitution arose among the people, and the government also issued a ban on private prostitution, on the one hand, to rectify the social order, to a large extent, it was also for the international community, in fact, by 1933, there were still nearly 50,000 people in Japan, and there were 2,940 people in Yoshihara, Tokyo. Secretly, the Japanese government still regards customs as a reasonable existence, so that when the Japanese army goes overseas to fight, it will also set up military customs, and in September 1945, when the American occupation forces poured into Japan in large numbers, the authorities set up military customs specifically for the US military.
After the war, Japan wanted to join a series of international conventions, return to the international community, and appear to be a civilized country, so it not only allowed the existence of customs and culture, but also set some technical restrictions, such as not being able to publicly expose organs, not having public trading behavior, etc. Externally, it still has to maintain the face of a civilized country.
In recent years, with the long-term downturn in the economy, people's material desires have really declined so much that Japan is now known as a low-desire society, and Japan's customs industry has become a sunset industry.
Thanks for reading, welcome to pay attention, thank you.