Tokyo’s red alert

The authorities are cleaning up Tokyo’s red light district for the city’s 2016 Olympic bid. But a new audio tour seeks to dispel stereotypes about the area

• Justin McCurry
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 January 2009 11.27 GMT

As I recently reported, Tokyo’s authorities have stepped up their campaign to turn Japan’s biggest red-light district, Kabukicho, into somewhere visitors can take the children without corrupting them for good. With Japan eager to host the 2016 Olympics and the city’s governor keen to clean away sleaze and crime, the ramshackle collection of ageing buildings housing bars and clubs catering to every sexual proclivity is in the authorities’ firing line.

But Kabukicho is an asault on the senses that no visitor to Tokyo should miss and, thankfully, for older tourists curious about the underbelly of one of the world’s major cities, the big clean-up is encountering fierce resistance from the locals.

To help visitors find their way around the maze of narrow streets occupying a tiny, but expensive, chunk of prime Tokyo real estate, Max Hodges, the American expat founder of White Rabbit Press, spent more than a year trawling every inch of Kabukicho to produce an audio package he describes as “a museum guide, only outdoors”.

“Kabukicho’s one of the most fascinating parts of Tokyo,” Hodges says on the website. “It has an interesting history and the most diverse kinds of places, and there are a lot of real characters in the area. You see a lot of hysterical stuff here … It’s almost a carnival-like atmosphere.” Read the rest of this entry »