A pair of pub operators in suburban Tokyo have been collared by the cops for allegedly employing a handful of 14-year-old girls to work as nightclub hostesses, according to Nikkan Gendai (5/12).

Hiroshi Asada, 36, the owner of the Peach Girl pub in Tokyo's Kasai, and Hiroshi Yasuda, 29, the establishment's manager, were arrested for breaking the Child Welfare Law, and police accuse the pair of employing junior high schoolgirls to toy with the bar's male clientele -- with at least four of the 10 girls believed to be no older than 14.

"The junior high hostesses were paid 3,000 yen an hour and worked three to four days a week, getting there at opening time and finishing around 1 in the morning," a police investigation insider tells Nikkan Gendai.

Peach Girl was located in a building not far from Kasai Station on the Tozai Line subway, and at first glance appeared little different to any of the thousands of other hostess clubs in cities across the country.

"There were only ever about six or seven hostesses working at any one time, so it wasn't that big. And most of the hostesses were pretty homely, none of them were top-class beauties," an employee at another hostess bar in the same building tells the lowbrow afternoon tabloid.

"From about the summer of last year, though, there were whispers going around that Peach Girl had the youngest hostesses of anywhere around. Some customers deliberately headed to the bar because they knew there were junior high schoolgirl hostesses working there. The pub boasted of its young hostesses to get more regulars."

Indeed, the child cheesecake service worked wonders for Peach Girl's books, with the club estimated to have raked in as much as 5 million yen a month, a phenomenal amount for a small suburban pub.

The schoolgirl exploitation finally ended when cops picked one of the young children up on the streets as she staggered around drunk one night after a hostessing shift.

"When officers questioned the drunken schoolgirl, she told them she had a part-time job working as a nightclub hostess," the police insider tells Nikkan Gendai. "She'd spent most of the night drinking so hard she was nearly off her face." (By Ryann Connell)