> I'm confused here - according to Wikipedia, (coital) prostitution is illegal in Japan.
And so is gambling, yet you'll find plenty of pachinko parlours or soaplands/"health salons" announced very explicitly. I believe the main reason is that many of these places are run by Yakuza (organized crime), and police would rather not stir up the hornet's nest - there's a sort of tacit agreement.
You've missed the point. The original premise from patio11 was that legalizing prostitution doesn't automatically make it all safe, aboveboard, and free from crime. Then he used Japan as an example... except that prostitution isn't legal there. Regardless of how it's treated by the police, the point is that it's not legal, and that skews how the illegal operations work.
(Regardless, my feeling is that Japan's attitude toward sexuality is so different from that of Europe/the Americas that it's a little hard to make good comparisons anyway.)
The Amsterdam argument is interesting and worthy of further discussion, at least.
A lot of places where prostitution is legal, pimping is not, e.g., Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. There's less of a trafficking problem in those places, since it can and does get prosecuted (though there still are problems, since here sadly is demand for underage prostitutes etc.)
In the Netherlands, pimping is legal though, which may contribute specifically to the problems they are seeing. I'm not the only one who thinks so:
And so is gambling, yet you'll find plenty of pachinko parlours or soaplands/"health salons" announced very explicitly. I believe the main reason is that many of these places are run by Yakuza (organized crime), and police would rather not stir up the hornet's nest - there's a sort of tacit agreement.