Japan’s obsession with cutesy culture has taken a dark turn, with schoolgirls now offering themselves for “walking dates” with adult men. Last year the US State Department, in its annual on human trafficking, flagged so-called joshi-kosei osanpo dates (that’s Japanese for “high school walking”) as fronts for commercial sex run by sophisticated criminal networks.<br />In our exclusive investigation, VICE News host Simon Ostrovsky will bring you to one of Tokyo’s busiest neighborhoods, where girls solicit clients in their school uniforms, to a concert performed by a band of schoolgirls attended by adult men, and into a café, where teenage girls are available to hire by the hour. But the true revelations come behind closed doors, when schoolgirls involved in the rent-a-date industry reveal how they’ve been coerced into prostitution.
