Police called to Wan Chai building to break up fight between prostitutes and Japanese tourist

Police had to be called to a building in Wan Chai to settle a fight after three prostitutes took none too kindly to a Japanese tourist snooping around their building with a camera.

HK01 reports that officers were called to the Fuji Building on Lockhart Road in Wan Chai in the early hours of Thursday morning after receiving a report that a 41-year-old Japanese man had been caught trying to film inside the building.

The Fuji building is notorious in the city for being home to 18-floors of so-called “one-woman brothels.”

The Japanese tourist pressed the doorbell on one of the doors, and was greeted by a 46-year-old woman surnamed Fan, who noticed that the man was carrying his phone in his hand, with the camera lens facing outwards.

Suspecting that he was filming inside the building, Fan held him back, called two of her neighbors — a 45-year-old surnamed Hau, and a 41-year-old surnamed Ma — and began to beat the tourist.

Officers arrived at the scene shortly afterwards carrying shields, but after finding that no one had been injured, they classified the case as a mere “dispute,” and no one was arrested.

In Hong Kong, it’s not against the law to solicit sexual services, but it is illegal to run a vice establishment, which means that many sex workers offer their services out of their own apartments.

A spokesperson for Zi-Teng, an NGO that supports sex workers in Hong Kong and China, told Apple Daily that the Fuji Building has been featured in Japanese travel books as a tourist attraction in Hong Kong, and as a result some Japanese tourists have visited the building to film inside it. Some of these clips have even been posted on YouTube.

The spokesperson added that some of the women working in the building don’t want to be filmed because their families don’t know they are engaged in sex work, and said one woman even contemplated committing suicide after her family came across a video of her inside the building.

Zi-Teng says they have succeeded in getting some videos from inside the building taken down, but haven’t been able to remove all of them from the internet.