60 Euros an Hour in Akihabara

Japan has a way of making exploitation feel like a subculture. The joshi kōsei business—JK, shorthand for "high school girl"—operates openly in parts of Tokyo, which is part of what makes it so hard to look away from. In Akihabara, girls stand outside in their uniforms handing out flyers advertising conversation, walks, massage. Around 60 euros an hour. What happens inside rarely stays at a walk.

Japan’s relationship with the fantasy of the schoolgirl gets explained endlessly and understood barely at all. The explanation goes: it’s the uniform, it’s decades of visual culture reinforcing the image until the image feeds the demand and the demand produces the industry. None of that changes the fact that these are teenage girls navigating a city where rent is extreme and safety nets are thin, making choices that aren’t really choices.

Simon Ostrovsky reported on this for VICE News, going into the establishments in Akihabara and meeting the people working to get the girls out—not just out of the clubs but out of the shame spiral that comes after, the one that ends, for too many of them, in suicide. It’s serious journalism about a thing the Japanese government sporadically pretends to address and largely tolerates. The faces in the documentary stay with you after it ends. They stay longer than the statistics.