ABSTRACT
Inexplicably, truisms of demand-side economics are mostly ignored in analyses of Japan's sex industry. One exception is a four-person research team from Nagoya University that was assisted by Fukushima Prefecture's Gender Equality Bureau to produce a report on the sex industry operating in the prefecture and men's attitudes towards prostitution. Japan's sex industry boom of the high growth era was not, of course, a matter of prostitution businesses simply reinvesting profits earned and miraculously expanding their operations on a supply-push basis. Demand for the industry's activities grew in a range of quarters, including in the mainstream business world through its development of corporate prostitution practices. isolating the toruko sector specifically in drawing direct historical parallel between the high growth era state and the pre-war state with its purported exercise of ‘control’ over the sexuality of citizens leaves wholly unexplained the nature of the mechanism that thereby allowed the renovated post-occupation state to meet the terms of its sexual imperative.
