In Japan, you don't have to go far to find the sex business - it's in your mailbox.
Lists of videos with titles like "My Love Is Free." Postcard-size advertisements for massage parlors. Color photos of wide-eyed strippers tearing off their high school uniforms.The business of lust thrives all over the world, but Japan's mammoth sex industry enjoys a benefit pornographers and pimps elsewhere can only dream of: acceptance.
The mailbox ads - known as "pink chirashi" - are just the beginning. In grocery stores, men gaze openly at centerfolds; on the subway, it's S-and-M comics. At video shops, adult tapes are displayed beside family movies.
"In the West, people try not to expose that sort of thing in public," said Nobuhiro Hirabayashi, director of Tokyo city government's Women and Youth Division. "But not in Japan."
Not everyone approves, and increasing numbers of Japanese are calling for moves to shield children from the sex business, primarily because of an increase in teenage prostitution. But most folks accept the flesh trade as a fact of life.
Japan's upfront attitude toward sex goes way back. For centuries the Japanese have celebrated fertility in festivals centering on phallic worship. Religious sexual taboos never took root. Prostitution wasn't even outlawed until 1956, and the ban has had a minimal effect on the business.
This age-old tolerance - combined with undreamed-of wealth - has fueled a freewheeling multibillion-dollar sex business that caters to every preference and is available at a moment's notice.
At the center of that empire, in Tokyo's frenetic Kabukicho district, men stand on corners to hand out ads for strip clubs or to openly entice customers to nearby brothels, all with no fear of police interference. Clubs where you can arrange liaisons with teenage girls line the streets.
The ribald reality, however, thrives side-by-side with a quirky puritan streak, the legacy of both the importation of Confucian values from China centuries ago and the adaptation of Victorian morality during the Westernization drive of the late 1800s.
The result is a contradictory mix of the outlandish and the uptight. Rape is standard comic book fare, but photos of genitals are banned. Porn actresses chat about their work on talk shows, but single women who live alone are assumed to be promiscuous. Nudity is common on TV, but kissing in public is shocking.
The paradox is luridly illustrated in the adult video business. To comply with Japan's vaguely worded obscenity laws, producers blur out pubic hair and genitals. An ethics commission composed of major studios screens more than 5,000 titles a year.
The availability of graphic pornography, however, has not brought the social decay for which it is blamed elsewhere. Teenagers are much less worldly than their peers in the United States. Women can walk nearly anywhere in Japan's large cities without a worry, although anonymous fondling by men on crowded subway trains is a major problem.
But for some, the licentiousness has gone too far.
"Sex is being treated as merchandise," said Hirabayashi, the Tokyo city official. "The girls that sell sex are a problem, and so are the men that buy it from them."
Hirabayashi's office received more than 500 complaints about the sex industry last year, the first year the government has fielded a significant number of calls.
Authorities are not completely blind to what's going on. Moves have been taken to tighten control over the pink chirashi and more outrageous late-night TV, and police periodically crack down on pornographers who break the law too brazenly.