The Fueihou (風営法) is the common name for the Act on Control and Improvement of Amusement Businesses (Act No. 122 of 1948), the basic statute governing the whole field of public-morals businesses in postwar Japan. Originally enacted as the Amusement Business Control Act, it has reached its present name and structure through several amendments. It establishes a licensing-and-regulation regime for amusement and sex-industry venues and functions as the framework statute for nightlife and the entertainment industry generally. This article covers its legislative history, regulated categories, amendments, and modern operation.

Overview

The Act regulates a set of enumerated business types: amusement businesses, specified-entertainment-and-dining businesses, premises-based sex-related special businesses, non-premises sex-related special businesses, video-transmission sex-related special businesses, and premises-based and non-premises telephone-introduction businesses. It sets licensing, hours-and-area limits, operator duties, youth protection, and business-conduct standards. The supervising authorities are the National Police Agency and the prefectural public safety commissions, which administer licensing, enforcement, and industry guidance through suspension, revocation, and criminal penalties.

Legislative history

The Act’s predecessor, the Amusement Business Control Act (Act No. 122 of 1948), was enacted on 10 July 1948 to regulate amusement businesses in the chaotic postwar period. Its early targets were restaurants, cafés, geisha houses, mahjong parlours, billiard halls, and dance halls, carrying forward prewar amusement-business policing into the framework of Occupation-era democratisation.

In August 1984 the statute was overhauled into the Act on Control and Improvement of Amusement Businesses (in force February 1985), responding to the rapid expansion of the sex industry, rising demands for youth protection, and the need to exclude organised crime. The amendment created the sex-related-special-business categories, bringing soapland and strip venues into systematic regulation, and the addition of “improvement” to the title signalled a shift from bare policing toward raising industry standards.

The 1998 amendment added non-premises sex-related special businesses (delivery health), video-transmission sex-related special businesses (adult internet distribution), and telephone-introduction businesses, responding to telephone clubs, delivery health, and online adult distribution. The 2015 amendment (in force June 2016) substantially relaxed regulation of late-night dance clubs: the earlier statute had treated dancing as an amusement-business type and banned late-night operation, and the amendment created the specified-entertainment-and-dining category permitting late-night operation under conditions. This followed the social backlash against the early-2010s crackdown on dance clubs (the “Let’s DANCE” petition campaign) and connected to night-time-economy policy.

Regulated categories

The amusement businesses under Article 2(1) are now organised into five divisions (reorganised from the former eight): social-dining venues (cabarets, nightclubs), low-illumination dining venues, partitioned-seat dining venues, game arcades (mahjong, pachinko, game centres), and pachinko-type venues. These do not provide sexual services directly but fall under regulation as night-time and amusement businesses in the broad sense of “public morals”.

Venues providing sexual services directly are classified as sex-related special businesses: premises-based (soapland, fashion health, esthe, strip theatres, adult shops), non-premises (delivery health, outcall health), video-transmission (adult internet distribution, paid adult sites), and telephone-introduction (telephone clubs, two-shot dial). These operate not by licence but by notification to the prefectural public safety commission, subject to strict area, hours, and content limits.

Principal controls

Operable areas are tightly restricted by the Act and prefectural ordinance, with distance rules barring operation within roughly 100 to 200 metres of schools, hospitals, libraries, and child-welfare facilities, implementing geographic zoning of the sex industry. Operating hours are limited by category. Common to all categories are bans on the entry, employment, or accompaniment of persons under 18, central to the industry’s youth-protection regime. The 2007 amendment strengthened provisions excluding organised-crime members from managing amusement businesses.

Modern issues

From the 2010s, policy arguments for activating the night-time economy gained ground from a tourism and industry-promotion angle, with the 2015 dance deregulation as one element; cautionary views over residents’ living environment, public order, and youth protection continue alongside. Labour conditions, social insurance, and human-rights protection for sex-industry workers are addressed only narrowly within the Fueihou framework, and arguments to strengthen sex-worker protection through labour law have recurred. Regulation of video-transmission businesses carries tension with freedom of expression, forming a contemporary point of contact among the Fueihou, Penal Code Article 175, and various ordinances.

See also

• Soapland
• Anti-Prostitution Law
• Zoning
• Public indecency (Article 174)
• Delivery health