On October 24, 2026, Human Rights Watch published "Japan should stop punishing sex workers," by Teppei Kasai and Stacey-Leigh Manuel, which also ran in Nikkei Asia on October 25. It urges Japan to repeal its 1956 Prostitution Prevention Law and fully decriminalize consensual adult sex work, including its purchase, instead of adding penalties for buyers. The piece comes as the government prepares to amend the law. In November 2025, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi directed the Justice Ministry to examine "the necessity of penalizing the buyers of prostitution." A ministry expert panel on the regulation of buying and selling sex issued a draft report on August 24 and a revised version on September 17, according to Gendai Business. Bengoshi JP News reported that the move to submit a bill was gathering pace as the extraordinary Diet session convened October 5.

Why It Matters

Japan is the world's largest market where the commercial sex industry largely operates under licensing rather than prohibition. A buyer-side solicitation offense is the first change to that 70-year framework. Two things to watch in the bill text. The first is **how "solicitation" is defined**. HRW notes the current law already treats *advertising* as solicitation by sellers. If the buyer-side offense reaches online messaging, then matching apps, "papa-katsu" sugar-dating services and creator DMs fall within scope, and platforms will need to moderate for it. The second is the **Nordic-model direction of travel** in Asia. It sits alongside recent court rulings that went the other way in [India and Czechia](/stories/courts-voluntary-sex-work-india-czechia) and decriminalization debates from [Michigan](/stories/michigan-ag-race-sex-work-decriminalization) to [Cambridge, Mass.](/stories/cambridge-council-sex-worker-policy-order). How Japan resolves this will shape how other countries frame their own reforms, and it will affect payment and advertising risk for adult businesses that touch the Japanese market.

The details are narrower than many headlines suggested. Under the current law, prostitution itself is prohibited but carries no penalty. What is punished is soliciting to sell sex, including approaching people on the street, waiting in public or advertising, with up to six months' detention or a ¥20,000 fine. Sankei reports more than 200 solicitation cases a year over the past decade. Buyers face nothing. The panel's fix is to penalize solicitation by buyers, meaning approaching someone on the street to buy sex, not the purchase itself. Gendai's media critique noted that headlines from Yomiuri and Kyodo dropped the word "solicitation" and simply said buyers would be punished, which overstated what is proposed. HRW says the panel "stopped short of calling for criminal penalties" on purchase. Because the law covers only intercourse, much of Japan's sex industry (fūzoku) operates legally under a separate licensing system, and that would not change.

Sex workers say they have been left out. On October 4, a sex-worker-led online symposium, "STOP買春処罰" (Stop Punishing the Purchase of Sex), drew 442 registrants. Advocacy group SWASH and others argued that criminalizing buyers pushes transactions underground, cuts outreach workers off from the people they serve, and keeps the law's moral framing of sex work as harming "public morals." HRW cites Médecins du Monde research on France's 2016 buyer-penalty law, which found clients' fear of arrest pushed street sex workers into more dangerous locations, followed by 10 sex worker killings in six months. A rival symposium the same day, held by groups that see the sex trade as exploitation, argued the panel's proposal is too weak.

Sources

Update — 2026-10-26

Initial entry — story first created.