Susukino by Daisuke Morita

The keyword here is demand, as in how much money are customers prepared to pay to have sex? Which businesses thrive because they are popular?

The Bank of Japan commissioned a report entitled Susukino, Recent Trends and Changes to a Pleasure District, hoping that, by counting brothels, it would be able to gauge the demand for services, a sector of the economy becoming more important as exports fail. The Pleasure District investigated is Susukino, in Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, Japan’s second largest island.

The report says Susukino is currently home to 264 sex businesses (soaplands and others), along with normal hotels, love hotels, restaurants, cafes, fast-food shops, discos, nightclubs, karaoke, cinemas and many kinds of bars. The creative and practical aspect of the bank’s report was its focus on services in general, in the form of entertainment, whether sex, food, drink or music.

Bloomberg.com , 6 August 2009

The number of sex parlors in the Susukino red-light district in Sapporo more than quadrupled in the past 20 years.

“Any study into services is most welcome,” said Martin Schulz, senior economist at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo. “We’ve got hundreds of studies on exports and manufacturing. What’s needed is creative thinking on services and if that includes brothels, so be it.”