Joan Sinclair, a 22-year-old photographer, was working as an English teacher in Tokyo when a friend dragged her to the city's infamous Kabukicho red-light district, a neon-drenched enclave packed with 5,000 sex shops that cater to an impressively specific array of sexual fantasies and fetishes. She was hooked. Eight years later, she returned with a camera and set out to document Japan's $20 billion sex-services industry, befriending hundreds of budding sex workers and their businessman clients. The results of her project are collected in a lush, vinyl-wrapped new book, Pink Box, published this month by Abrams. It provides a vivid glimpse into a subculture rarely seen by Westerners.
PINK BOX THE SITE
(CLIC ON IT)