How police are cracking down on 'scout' sex broker groups
Old-school yakuza may be on the decline, but a recent trial shows how similar today's 'scouts' — who recruit women into Japan's sex industry — can be to their predecessors: organized, violent and ruthless even toward their own.
Japan's scout networks are part of a broader category of underground groups classified by police as tokuryū — fluid, anonymous criminal organizations. While they may appear disorganized from the outside, court documents and investigations reveal a rigid, brutal hierarchy beneath the surface, marked by beatings, punishments and internal purges.
Now, major scout groups like Natural and Access are under scrutiny, as authorities uncover a far more systematized and sinister network than previously imagined.
The scouting networks are extensive, reaching beyond Japan to establishments overseas. Women are sent abroad for prostitution to places such as Macao, Australia and other countries, according to Ayaka Shiomura, an Upper House member for the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan.
'This has been going on for about ten years," said Shiomura, who has long advocated for tightened regulations on the host club industry. "One of the people involved in the case I'm currently working on has been in this situation since around that time. But the number of cases surged all at once around the time of the COVID pandemic."
Chat messages on Signal obtained by The Japan Times showed individuals linked to scout groups offering women various sex-related jobs ranging from drinking with men, including foreign nationals, to escort jobs overseas.
A further glimpse into the scouting world came during the trial of Hiroyuki Okuda, a former member of Natural, who referred to the scout group as a 'corporation' with a clear division of labor divided into departments with their own tasks. He was subsequently sentenced to three years in prison, suspended for five, for forcibly assaulting another member in February 2024.
Natural is one of the biggest scout groups in Japan, with over 1,500 members spanning nationwide. It first began its operations in Tokyo's Kabukicho district in 2009.
The ruling, handed down mid-March by the Tokyo District Court, described how the victim was physically assaulted with a rod-like object in an apartment in Kabukicho. The assault escalated to a sexual nature as the victim was sodomized with a sex toy resembling male genitalia; the incident was filmed and the victim was forced to say a relative's name during the act.
The assault wasn't without a motive. According to the ruling, the victim had embezzled money from the group to fund a gambling addiction. Within the organization, breaking internal rules was grounds for punishment ranging from salary cuts and fines to physical and even sexual assaults, all enforced as part of the group's code of discipline.
A former member of Natural, who was part of the group for a year from the age of 17, said that there was a strict hierarchy within the group. The witness, whose identity was protected by the court, corroborated the existence of the group's internal rules. He testified that Natural had its own custom-built app designed to resemble a news platform, including a bulletin board where explicit content — such as nude videos of members who had broken the rules — was uploaded and shared with others in the group.
'I don't want other people to go through the same thing as I did,' he told the gallery as he recounted his experience as a low-ranked member of the group.
Upper House lawmaker Ayaka Shiomura in her office on March 26 |
Karin Kaneko
The recent crackdown on scouts is tied to a wider investigation into host clubs' exploitative practices, in which women are often coerced into racking up massive debts through emotional manipulation. To pay them off, some are pushed into the sex industry.
Scouts play a key role in that pipeline, approaching vulnerable women and linking them to jobs in prostitution or related nightlife work and receiving a hefty commission for it. Some scouts also approach men to recruit them for host clubs or into their own groups.
Another group, known as Access, has been in the headlines due to recent police crackdowns. It is said to have made a profit of ¥7 billion in total for luring women into prostitution.
Unlike Natural, which operates by approaching people on the streets, Access mainly uses social media to recruit women, making it easier for its members to operate anonymously.
Founded close to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, it has around 300 members and has dispatched women to 350 sex-related establishments nationwide. As part of the contract for introducing women to such places, members get a 15% cut of their earnings, with the women mailing cash to a 'virtual office' to make it difficult to trace the flow of money.
The group operates an auction-like system where it dispatches women to establishments that offer the highest pay after providing them with the profiles of women, including IDs, selfies, ages and bust sizes.
The group continues to receive referral fees for as long as the women work at the establishments they were introduced to. If the women refuse to comply, the establishments may threaten to leak their personal information.
What sets Natural apart from Access is its mode of operation — particularly its street-level recruitment tactics and alleged connections to organized crime groups.
Various members linked to both groups have been arrested for allegedly introducing women to sexual service establishments, including Access' leader and a woman involved at the group's highest level. Authorities are yet to arrest the top leaders of Natural.
Beyond cracking down directly, law enforcement is also targeting these crime syndicates through legal reforms — specifically by criminalizing the use of pseudo-romantic manipulation by host clubs, as well as penalizing establishments that employ scouts, which previously was not considered a crime.
Under the new bill, violators could face up to six months in prison and fines of up to ¥1 million. The government has approved the bill, and it is currently awaiting debate in parliament.
'(The National Police Agency) actually created a fairly comprehensive law — stronger than what we initially requested — so it's not that the law itself is lacking," Shiomura said. "What's important now is to make full use of it: carry out proper crackdowns and make sure arrests are made.'
However, Shiomura also recognizes the challenges, such as the way many of the women addicted to host clubs and fall into prostitution are being manipulated and how the harm often can't be addressed unless the victims come forward themselves.
'So yes, there will probably still be people who are forced into prostitution or sex work," she said. "But unlike before, I think we'll now be able to help the women who realize partway through that something's wrong — that they are, in fact, victims.
'Not all harm will disappear, but everyone is saying it will definitely have an impact.'
Information from Jiji added
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