From hattenba to profiled geography: Gay sex work, platform mediation, and urban governance in Tokyo (1990–2025)

This article examines the transformation of male sex work in Tokyo between 1990 and 2025 through shifting spatial and media infrastructures. Drawing on Japanese-language scholarship, media archives, documentary sources, and platform analysis, it traces a transition from hattenba-based cruising economies to homepage-mediated escorting and, later, smartphone app–based sexual labor. Rather than treating digitization as displacement, the article theorizes this shift as re-territorialization, reorganizing labor, risk, and intimacy across space and media. It introduces the concept of profiled geography to describe how platform interfaces function as sites of sexual labor under conditions of legal silence and urban governance.