Aya, now 15, says she started letting men touch her breasts two years ago for the equivalent of about $100. Last October, she says she turned her first trick, with a man who approached her and a girlfriend on a Tokyo street and paid about $500 apiece to have sex with him. She began commuting regularly from her suburban home to ply her body, lured by the cash she spent on restaurants, miniskirts and trips to Tokyo Disneyland.
Aya (whose last name is being withheld because of her age) is part of what Japanese police are starting to call an epidemic: prostitution by schoolgirls. Police say they picked up 5,481 girls under 18 in Japan for prostitution and related activities last year, 38% more than two years earlier. The statistics understate the problem because most schoolgirl prostitutes can't be detained on any charges, says Yoshikatsu Nakamura, deputy director of the juvenile division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.
Shinji Miyadai, a sociologist at Tokyo Metropolitan University, estimates that 8% of schoolgirls nationwide -- and one-third of girls at some schools that aren't geared toward the university bound -- are involved in the sex industry. The head of a cram-school chain was arrested in June for running a teenage-prostitution ring with 350 girls, some as young as 14. (Cram schools help prepare students for entry exams to secondary schools and universities.)
Though child prostitution is notoriously rampant in some poorer Asian nations, its proliferation in Japan is apparently born not from poverty or coercion but from materialism. Japanese teenagers have expensive tastes; $500 Prada purses and $350 Louis Vuitton wallets are hot teen items.
"It seems that prostitution is the fashion for kids," says Mr. Nakamura, the Tokyo police official. "Kids want brand-name clothes like Chanel; their friends have them and their parents don't give them the money," he says, so they turn to prostitution.
It has spread to junior high schools as Japanese men opt to buy sex with even younger girls. "If you're in senior high," says Yoshisato Seto, deputy at one juvenile police station in Tokyo, "you might be considered an old lady."
Police and social workers blame weak laws, permissive attitudes and the cheap cellular phones that make it easy for girls to arrange dates away from parents. Teen prostitution is particularly rife in Tokyo, where it is legal for adults to have sex with children over 12 and where prostitution isn't punishable unless arranged by a pimp. Tokyo police grumble that when they spot an older man and a young girl emerging from one of the ubiquitous "love hotels," which rent rooms by the hour, all they can do is take names and ages and notify the girl's parents.
Kotaro Nishida, director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police's Juvenile Center in Sugamo, says some men have admitted that they travel to Tokyo to take advantage of its lax child-sex laws, especially now that some other prefectures have outlawed sex with juveniles. Mr. Nishida says that on one recent patrol he nabbed an elementary-school teacher leaving a love hotel with a 16-year-old girl. Police didn't report the incident to the man's school in a neighboring prefecture because he couldn't be charged under Tokyo law.
"Tokyo is the prefecture that needs the law the most but Tokyo is proud that it has the least regulations," Mr. Nishida says. "Tokyo looks away from the reality."
That reality is hard to miss. Terekura, or telephone clubs, are one way the girls fall into the prostitution habit. Plastered on utility poles, phone booths and other prominent places around Tokyo are posters advertising the clubs, where men can wait for calls from teenage girls. Many girls -- who get the numbers from advertisements handed out near schools and train stations -- say curiosity initially drives them to call the toll-free numbers. The school board in Ashikaga, a city north of Tokyo, found that several fifth and sixth graders were calling the phone numbers posted in public-phone booths, school officials said, though the children stopped short of arranging dates with men.
In a recent government survey, one in four teenage girls said they had called a telephone club at least once.
Some agree to have sex for money, says Izumi Yokouchi, the deputy director of the National Police Agency's Juvenile Division. A 47-year-old high-school guidance counselor and rugby coach in Yaocho, a small town in central Japan, was arrested earlier this month and charged with having sex with a junior-high-school girl he met through a telephone club, police say. She was 15. He paid her $400 for each of the three times he had sex with her during the past few months, police say.
The case against the teacher -- who faced penalties of up to two years imprisonment and $10,000 in fines because of Toyama's ordinance against "indecent activities" with juveniles -- was freed after paying a $2,700 fine. He was fired from his job, a school board official says.
Then there are "dating clubs," which often consist of condominiums where men go to pick out a young girl -- in theory to accompany to tea or karaoke singing. Tokyo police woke up to the epidemic two years ago, Mr. Nishida says, when they found a girl who was missing for three days in a hotel room with a man she met through a dating club. Police found 100 high-school girls had registered at the club and many were having sex with customers. Dating clubs and telephone clubs slip through the cracks in the prostitution law because they claim to be arranging only dates, not prostitution.
One such club is the Melon Club, which advertises on a busy Tokyo street with a man holding a sandwich-board that declares, "We have amateurs and students. Pick your type by looking through the magic mirror and have a date."
Melon Club is a studio apartment on the second floor of a building across from the Rodin, a love hotel. It features a tiny one-way mirror looking in on a main room where girls wait. On a recent weekday afternoon, it looks like a slumber party: Six girls lounge on sofas, playing video games, putting on lipstick and reading comics. The 22-year-old male manager -- with dyed-orange hair, cut-off jeans and a "Vice Squad" T-shirt -- strums a guitar. Splayed on the floor are the girls' Prada, Fendi and Chanel bags.
Girls drift into the club and wait to be chosen by customers who pay $100, $50 of which goes to the girl, then go on a one-hour "date." Many girls say they give out their portable phone numbers and begin freelancing.
The phone rings from a customer the manager says is asking if any girls are in school uniform today. Half are. Uniforms improve the odds of being picked, the girls say. One, who gives her name as Miki, says she can earn $150 to $200 a day at the club, whereas she would earn only $7 an hour dishing out ice cream.
Keiko, 16 years old, began calling a telephone club in elementary school: It was next door to her house. Now, she earns $800 to $1,000 a month from Melon and her freelancing. She has gone out with about 50 men who range in age from 20 to 60.
"If I want to buy Prada and Vuitton bags that cost $600 to $700, I have to have this kind of job," she says. "Everybody wears them. I feel like a more valuable person if I have them."
Keiko says the designer wares made her mother suspicious. She rifled through her daughter's room and found a letter from Keiko's girlfriend confessing that the friend was involved in prostitution. Keiko told her mother she earned the money at a bookstore.
Like Keiko, many girls deny doing anything more than going to restaurants or shopping with the men. But police say their stakeouts of Melon and similar clubs often lead to hotels or private karaoke booths where they believe the girls are having sex or allowing nude photos to be taken of them.
Across town at Pudding dating club -- where the owner says 1,000 girls have worked during the past three years -- a neatly dressed 39-year-old man saunters in. "I'm tired of college students," says the man, who won't give his name but says he owns a small business. "Junior-high-school girls are very candid and honest."
Now some girls bypass the clubs entirely, posting their cellular-phone and beeper numbers along Tokyo streets. Juvenile-police director Mr. Nishida, 58, says he has been solicited by schoolgirls while walking Tokyo's streets in plain clothes. Shopping arcades have begun posting signs ordering "do not write your phone or beeper number."
Japanese sociologists say teen prostitution is tolerated in part because prostitution doesn't have the stigma here that it has in some other cultures. Japanese culture doesn't impart on sex the sense of sin that Western religions tend to. Even incest isn't a crime in Japan except in the case of rape.
The girls call their customers "Papa-san" and don't speak of prostitution -- to them it is just enjo kosai , or financially supported dating. Akiyoshi Ishibashi, a police clinical psychologist in Tokyo, says half of the 400 teenage prostitutes he and other Tokyo psychologists have counseled extensively -- most from middle-class families with two parents -- don't feel prostitution is wrong.
So while child prostitution has gained national attention -- talk shows have been devoted to it and schoolgirl hookers often crop up in television dramas -- Japan is doing surprisingly little about it.
The Tokyo prefecture's legislature is contemplating an ordinance that would outlaw sex with children, as some other prefectures have done. Opponents of stronger child-sex laws include the Communist Party, several teachers' unions and mothers' groups, which argue that the girls would be shamed in testifying against patrons.
"We wouldn't want the police to have more power," says a petition opposing a proposed child-sex ordinance signed by 90 members of the Tokyo Teachers' Union. Others worry that schools would be shamed if their girls are charged as prostitutes. One principal lectured a private-school girl for posing for seminude photos for $50 a shot, says a teacher the girl confided in. The principal was upset because, in the photos, the girl still had some of her uniform on, which would identify the school, the teacher says.
Even child-welfare advocates show little interest. Seiko Noda, a member of the Japanese parliament and an outspoken critic of Japan's role in the sex trades in developing countries, is drafting a bill to punish Japanese men who have sex with children overseas.
But "I have no sympathy for the girls in Japan; they are stupid," Ms. Noda says. "Thai children don't want to do prostitution, they are forced to do it; they are slaves. But here in Japan, stupidly, kids want to do this to get money to buy bags and dresses. Most (Japanese) kids don't feel it is a crime. It's a moral issue and I don't have time to teach morals. That's the families' business."
Aya, the 15-year-old who started turning tricks last year, talks about sex with strangers with the casualness of a chat about pop music. She is more embarrassed about her other part-time job: working at a convenience store. Though she says her mother, a divorced insurance agent, is very strict, she nevertheless began going to dating clubs at 13, encouraged by a friend who promised she could earn "easy money." Now she simply walks the streets in her school uniform -- a plaid skirt, white blouse and white knee socks -- picking up men.
Lately she has cut back, fearing disease: Her customers usually don't use condoms. She says she has stopped having intercourse and allows customers to touch her legs only. "Even if I don't have sex, I can make money, but little by little," she says.
It may be too late. Several months ago, she says, she began having chronic vaginal pain. She hasn't gone to a doctor. She seldom has the money; when she does, it is too bothersome.
Despite her experience, she doesn't advise girls against prostitution. Asked what she would think if her three-year-old stepsister followed her footsteps, she replies nonchalantly, "If she likes it, she should go ahead and do it."
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