Sexshops in Japan geben sich häufig als „Männer-Estes“ (Schönheitssalons) aus, was bei seriösen Estes zu Verwirrung und Problemen führt: „Wir haben eine Zunahme lästiger Kunden gesehen, die wütend fragen, warum wir keine sexuellen Dienstleistungen anbieten.“

As usual, the answer is regulation and education. The fact that the sexual men’s esthes tend to rely on innuendo rather than explicitly stating what’s on offer (which, to be fair, is pretty obvious already) leads the dumb people or people unfamiliar with the innuendo to assume things about men’s esthes generally.

To an extent, you can’t really fix stupid, and requiring the standard esthe shops to display a prominent “We don’t offer sexual services!” sign isn’t really fair. So, you have to require very specific and clear guidelines on how to differentiate the two, putting the onus on the red light esthes to be even less subtle about it.

But I have the suspicion that some men, no matter how clearly the two kinds of businesses differentiate themselves, will simply fail to read the room and cause trouble. Requiring a specific nomenclature for the sexual esthes (エロエステ, as an example) is probably the best we can do, even if it kind of unfairly places the financial burden on those shops by requiring them to change their signage.