TOKYO -- Rika returned from an "assisted bath" with the day's first customer. The humid air hung heavy with the sweet smell of soap, and she listlessly leafed through fashion magazines in a back room packed with other young prostitutes.
"If I get five customers, that's a good day," said Rika, 25, flashing a confident smile from beneath a dyed-red bob that matched her checkered sundress.
For the past month, this has been Rika's new job -- selling sex at a top-class "soapland" brothel in Tokyo's Yoshiwara red-light district, a grid of quiet streets immortalized in centuries-old woodblock prints of kimono-clad courtesans.
As an industry, smut has been nearly recession-proof in Japan, despite a decade-long economic slump. All told, Japanese spend an estimated $13.9 billion a year on sex.
But hard times are putting the squeeze on the sleaze.
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Given Japan's sour economy, Rika called soapland "a move up" from her old job waiting tables. She sometimes pockets $8,200 a month. It pays for her $1,500 shopping binges and gets her closer to her dream of retiring at age 30 with her own house.
But for other women, Japan's red-light underworld is a last resort. Record unemployment and a soaring number of bankruptcies are forcing more women into the flesh trade -- at lower rates and in more desperate conditions.
For Hitomi, a 24-year-old Thai streetwalker, it's about survival.
She was laid off from a refrigerator factory; she had her work visa taken away; she lost her company housing. Now, a good night for her means recouping the $65 in protection money she gives to gangsters on her street -- and not having to work until dawn.
The pricey soaplands, where hourly rates reach $820, are giving way to low-end "pink salons" and cut-rate foreign prostitutes. Cheap thrills there go for as low as $65.
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The number of soaplands has declined from about 1,700 in the booming 1980s to 1,200, said Takashi Kadokura, an economist at Dai-Ichi Life Insurance Co. who published a two-year study of the underground economy earlier this year.
By contrast, the nation's 1,800 fly-by-night sex shops have had revenues jump 50 percent, to $5 billion, since the '80s. Kadokura estimates shops get an average of 32,800 visits a year.
Increased competition has led sex clubs to resort to wilder antics, younger women and lower prices.
Phone that call girl advertised on the flier and you're likely to get a housewife working part time. An estimated 5 percent of girls in Tokyo's middle and high schools have turned tricks in order to buy the latest fashions.
Japan outlawed brothels in 1956 after centuries of sanctioned sex-selling in glamorized "licensed zones" like Yoshiwara. But there are loopholes.
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Train stations are surrounded by "pink salons" promising sexual massage and "telephone clubs" where men line up liaisons with teenage girls. Convenience stores stock brothel guides as thick as telephone books. Household mailboxes are stuffed with "delivery health" ads emblazoned with color photos of lusty schoolgirls.
Surveys by anti-prostitution groups suggest that up to 40 percent of Japanese men have paid for sex at least once. But last year there were only 1,032 arrests.
Most of those arrested were pimps, because Japanese law targets sex brokers rather than prostitutes or customers, said Takeshi Koyanagi, deputy director of the Justice Ministry's research department. "It's very hard to prosecute," he said.
Soaplands duck the law by billing themselves as assisted bath houses. The tacit understanding is that whatever happens inside is between consenting adults.
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A little more than a hundred years ago, Rika's predecessors in the "Nightless City" were prisoners displayed behind barred windows, with little hope of buying freedom.
Today, the moats are paved over and Yoshiwara isn't even marked on most city maps. The workers get a week off every month and regular health checkups, plus enough cash for regular trips to Tokyo's glitzy Ginza shopping district.
But soaplands -- even in bastions such as Yoshiwara -- are vanishing like the geisha.
Nothing symbolizes Yoshiwara's seedy flip side more than Tokyo's Kabukicho district, where women like Hitomi prowl the frenetic, neon-bathed alleys.
Prostitution has always exposed women to disease, violence and extortion. But activists say Japan's bad economy makes women more willing to risk low-end work.
Women at soaplands can hit a panic button and alert a bouncer to trouble. But on the street or in a gangster-run massage parlor, there are no such safeguards.
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Conditions are especially bad for the estimated 12,000 foreign sex workers like Hitomi, said Yayori Matsui, director of the Tokyo-based Asia-Japan Women's Resource Center.
Many of them were brought into the country and indentured by debt. The economic slump means it takes them up to a year to buy back their freedom.
Matsui said it's an uphill battle, in part because of changing mores.
"There is also a growing point of view that it is a woman's right to engage in prostitution," she said. "I feel helpless against this trend."
Like many foreign workers, Hitomi was lured to Japan with the promise of a job -- in her case, a real job inspecting rubber seals for refrigerator doors.
But a year later, she was fired as part of the company's restructuring plan.
There was no shackling debt, but also no money to pay her way home. Other Japanese employers wouldn't hire her because she didn't have the proper papers, qualifications and language skills.
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So she took a tip from a friend and started selling herself outside an hourly rate hotel with peeling wallpaper and no towels. It's just enough to pay rent for the one-room apartment she shares with four other Thai women.
Hitomi said she came here full of hope that she would make money, return to Thailand and start a family. But since she traded her factory smock for a low-cut jean jacket and fuchsia lipstick, she said, those aspirations seem more like fantasies.
"I can't think about marriage or kids because I'm not a good woman. The future is only dreams," Hitomi said. "What would you do if you were me?"
The streets of Tokyo's Kabukicho entertainment district are bathed by the neon lights of brothels and "pink salons" that promise sexual massage.
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