Aside from being filled with hidden gems of Japanese cuisine, the Melawai district of South Jakarta’s Blok M, colloquially referred to as Little Tokyo, has also long been rumored to be a hotbed of prostitution by night, mostly catering to Japanese nationals.
Recently, it was propelled into the spotlight after four Japanese basketball players competing in the Asian Games were booted from their team after they were caught going into one of the district’s hotels with prostitutes. The scandal has attracted global media exposure to the apparent detriment of the sex workers employed in the area — where reports of prostitution raids have been rare compared to Jakarta’s other infamous red light districts .
On Monday night, the police’s Public Order Agency (Satpol PP) said they apprehended six sex workers in Little Tokyo during an undercover operation. Since being a sex worker is not technically illegal in Indonesia (although being a facilitator of prostitution is), the women were sentenced to “social rehabilitation”.
“The six people we apprehended have been handed over to the Jakarta Social Agency,” South Jakarta Satpol PP Head Ujang Harmawan told Tempo today.
Ujang said that the Satpol PP routinely carries out prostitution raids in and around Blok M but admitted that they have intensified their efforts following the Japanese athletes’ prostitution scandal.
Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan, who promised to eradicate prostitution off Jakarta during his election campaign, said he regrets the Japanese athletes’ scandal and urged other athletes to focus on sports and not much else.
Jakarta City Council member Gembong Warsono placed some of the blame for the scandal on the Jakarta administration, accusing them of being lax about enforcing the law and saying that Anies’ plan to eradicate prostitution in the capital was just talk.
“It was just Anies’ rhetorics, in terms of implementation in the field it’s like the earth and the sky. They want to make Jakarta into a sharia city but the fact is it’s still like this,” he told Detik.
The Japanese athletes — who were caught with the prostitutes while wearing their national jerseys — were dismissed on Sunday and sent home in disgrace. Soon after they arrived in Tokyo, the four basketball players appeared in a press conference in which they performed a deep 20-second long bow to show their contrition for the scandal.
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