"On any given evening, you can see noisy quarrels between club staff and customers outside the local police box," attorney Katsuyuki Aoshima tells Asahi Geino (May 2), adding, "The police treat these as civil claims between the shop and the customer, and won't get involved, adopting the position of neutral mediators. The club staff know this, and refuse to back down from demanding the full amount. In an overwhelming number of cases, the customers are worn down by their opponents' persistence and wind up paying."
But such claims have continued to soar, and on May 29 TBS TV news reported that the Tokyo Metropolitan Police finally cracked down on a Kabukicho club called Lumine, whose 36-year-old manager, Yoshihiko Okumura, and one other employee were arrested on charges of having intimidated two male customers by refusing to allow them to leave the club premises until they forked out ¥240,000.
In the four months since Lumine opened, TBS reported that it was the target of 214 complaints — accounting for nearly a quarter of all complaints about such scams received in the first four months of 2015.