Commentary

I watched Last Call the way I watch most things that make Japan collectively squirm: with one eyebrow raised, one hand on my tea, and a very familiar sense of déjà vu. Because everyone is acting shocked — shocked! — that a reality show about hostesses would be ruthless, judgmental, transactional and obsessed with looks, when in fact it is simply holding up a very clean mirror to a society that has been quietly running on these rules for decades. Let’s get one thing straight. Last Call did not invent...

I have lost count of how many times I’ve heard this story in different accents, different cafés, different WhatsApp voice notes whispered late at night. The geography changes—Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur, Surabaya to Johor, Batam to wherever the ferry is cheapest—but the logic stays depressingly familiar. Go quietly. Stay briefly. Earn fast. Come back clean. Lie politely. What fascinates me isn’t that Indonesian women travel to Malaysia to sell sex. That part is boringly predictable in a region built on labour arbitrage and moral hypocrisy. What fascinates me is how...

I have taken Tokyo trains at rush hour often enough to know that the experience is sold internationally as a kind of urban spectacle. Look at us, we say, marvel at our discipline, our efficiency, our ability to compress millions of bodies into steel carriages that still run on time. What rarely makes it into the tourist brochures is what that compression actually feels like when you are inside it—and what it quietly enables. Let’s be honest: when bodies are pressed together so tightly that breathing becomes a collective activity,...

I read about the police bust in Bắc Ninh and sighed the kind of sigh that comes from being proven right yet again. This case confirms exactly what I’ve been saying for years, often to polite smiles and raised eyebrows: prostitution does not exist because people are immoral, greedy, or broken. It exists because pleasure, desire, and intimacy are hemmed in by social, religious, and cultural constraints so tight they leave very little room to breathe. What shocked the public in this case was not the secrecy, not the messaging...

When I first read about Malaysia finally killing off the “seduction of a married woman” law, my initial reaction wasn’t relief. It was a tired, bitter laugh. Because the law didn’t invent the idea that women belong to men; it merely wrote it down in neat colonial prose. It gave it a number. Section 498. As if ownership could be indexed, footnoted, and archived. The logic was painfully clear: a married woman could not be seduced unless she was taken. Stolen. Damaged goods. The crime was not that her consent...