More societal problems in Japan

After the bizarre stories about Japanese children, I came across reports of teenage prostitution that's thriving on the internet there. Girls as young as 13 sell themselves online, some earning several million yen (tens of thousands of dollars) in the process.

Japan's sex industry has flourished despite the country's decade-long economic slump. Prostitution was outlawed in 1956, but Japanese still spend an estimated £9 billion a year for sex.

In recent years, the spread of the Internet has led to a rise in teenage prostitution. An estimated 5 percent of girls in Tokyo's middle and high schools have turned tricks in order to buy the latest fashions.

The sex industry does not seem to be very cyclically sensitive; if more brothels were to list on stock markets, would they be classed as part of the Consumer Staples sector? I'm sure somebody at MSCI is working on the problem right now.

I do wonder what on earth is going on in Japan. That the economy is in trouble is no news, but these reports of widespread teenage prostitution among girls as well as the problem of teenage hermits leads me to wonder whether there is something more deeply going wrong with Japanese society. These things can be written off as isolated problems, but if you get enough of these things happening at the same time, the search for an underlying connecting cause (or set of causes) becomes tempting. I don't know enough about Japanese society, but there's enough cause for worry I would think. An entire society seems to be derailing itself and confronting problems is not one of Japan's strongest points.