Cops bust organizer who says he’s been hosting the parties for years.
Back in early August, Yoshihiro Murakami, a 62-year-old resident of Osaka’s Shimanouchi neighborhood, invited a group of people over to his home. As a thorough host, he also had some entertainment planned, but his guests weren’t there to play charades or watch sports.
The gathering was the latest “orgy party” organized by Murakami, and this naked shindig’s guest list consisted of seven people: five men in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s and two women in their 30s. It’s not known whether the unbalanced male/female ratio was a crowd-pleaser or not, but it’s a pretty safe bet that all seven guests, plus Murakami himself, were unhappy when they got arrested by the Osaka Prefectural Police last weekend.
While there’s no law against a group of consenting adults going straight from “Nice to meet you” to “Let’s get it on” in Japan, there is a law about saying “Sure, as long as you pay me for it.” Murakami assembled the orgy group though an adult website he runs, collecting approximately 15,000 yen (US$143) from each of the men. The women, meanwhile, didn’t have to pay anything, and were instead paid from the money collected from the guys, with Murakami also ostensibly getting a cut of the cash. He also reportedly interviewed the male applicants before allowing them to attend, though it’s unclear whether this was an attempt to gauge how discrete they would be or because he was trying to weed out potentially problematic participants.
▼ Personal hygiene is probably a plus in orgy applicant screening interviews.
Because the participants were invited to the party with the laid-out terms of “pay/get money for sex,” Murakami’s orgy was seen as a violation of Japan’s anti-prostitution laws, leading the Osaka Prefectural Police to arrest the entire group once they found out what happened. All of the participants have admitted to the charges, with Murakami saying “I’ve been organizing [paid] orgy parties for years,” sometimes hosting them in his home, and other times at hotels.
The arrest might be a surprise to those who have walked through the bar districts of major Japanese cities and seen open operation of not just hostess bars, but erotic massage and body-washing services, some of which even offer to dispatch the masseuse to the client’s home or hotel, so that he can enjoy her services in private. While the fuzoku industry (as Japan’s adult-oriented personal entertainment industry is called) is rife with stories of under-the-table prostitution, sex is never explicitly offered, allowing for ostensibly plausible deniability along the lines of “After the masseuse gave the customer a massage, the two decided, mutually and without compensation, to engage in intercourse.”
That’s a pretty low hurdle for staying out of trouble with the law, but ultimately even that proved to be too much for Murakami.
Sources: Kyodo, The Sankei News via Livedoor News via Otakomu
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert image: Pakutaso
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