When Yokohama hosts the final and three other games in the soccer World Cup next June, foreign visitors will be spared a full-frontal view of the city's sleazier side by the waterfront, where a campaign to lessen any shock to their systems has been under way since last year.
Prior to previous major international events -- most recently the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano -- sex-business cleanups have been quite rigorous. But as a port city traditionally relatively tolerant of the world's oldest profession, Yokohama's strategy appears to be one of "control" rather than outright censorship.
"It's a kind of human instinct," a superintendent at the headquarters of the Public Safety Division of the Kanagawa Prefectural Police said this week, with a fatalistic shrug. "Men go drinking; they like to look at girls; they play around.