Tokyo's once-thriving cabaret club hostess industry is teetering on the verge of extinction, thanks to a clean-up campaign targeting the street-side touts referred to colloquially as "crows", according to Nikkan Gendai (4/3).

Crows are the (usually) young men in trendy suits who hang around Tokyo's entertainment districts, accosting attractive female pedestrians with offers of work as a hostess in a cabaret club, the Japanese name for establishments where customers are plied with pricey drinks by pretty young women.

Revisions to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's ordinance outlawing people from creating a public nuisance already ban people from trying to get women to work in adult movies and sex businesses, but now it's no longer legal to ask them to work as a hostess, either.

Nikkan Gendai notes that an arrest of a cabaret club talent scout has already happened on April 1, the day the new ban came into effect. It says the clean-up of entertainment areas in the capital -- like Shinjuku, Shibuya and Ikebukuro -- is aimed at making Tokyo look more pristine for its campaign to host the 2016 Olympic Games.

But the lowbrow afternoon tabloid daily says that even though many would welcome the disappearance of the annoying crows from street corners, materialization of such a phenomenon has many within the cabaret club industry fearing their business may be doomed.

"There are about 5,000 crows working the entertainment districts in Shinjuku, Shibuya and Ikebukuro, some of them making upward of 30 million yen a year. A large majority of nightclub hostesses are recruited from the streets. A talented crow knows the kind of woman who's going to succeed in the business, and when a club gets a decent hostess, it livens things up and makes sure everyone has a good time," the manager of several famous cabaret clubs in Tokyo tells Nikkan Gendai on condition of anonymity. "If the talent scouts disappeared off the streets, it would be the death of the cabaret club industry. I'm already worried about whether we'll be able to maintain the quality of hostess we've currently got working at my clubs." (By Ryann Connell)