4 Arrested for Live-Streaming Lewd Acts from Tokyo Studio for Stripchat Pornographic Website

The Yomiuri Shimbun

14:43 JST, September 3, 2025

The Metropolitan Police Department arrested on Monday and Tuesday the president of a Chuo Ward, Tokyo-based company and three others on suspicion of having live-streamed lewd acts on Stripchat, one of the world’s largest pornographic websites.

The MPD arrested Yuki Kitagawa, 28, who is president of the company, TOPPA, and three women on suspicion of indecency in public.

The three women are a 24-year-old manager of the company and two unemployed women ages 40 and 34 who performed the lewd acts in the online content.

According to investigative sources, the four live-streamed video images, in which the two naked female performers did the lewd acts, on Stripchat from March to August, and let a large number of unknown people watch them.

The website is based in Cyprus, an island nation in the Mediterranean Sea. The website supports Japanese language content.

In the website’s system, viewers pay viewing fees and also can give gift money to support performers. Those who live-stream video images get amounts of money, from which the website operator deducts commissions, as rewards.

TOPPA had solicited women via advertisements posted on the social media website X, containing such enticements as being paid “up to 85% of revenue” and saying that “hourly pay over ¥30,000 is possible.”

More than 100 people registered themselves at an office operated by the company. The investigative sources said that the company shot video images of naked women and their lewd acts mainly in studios in Tokyo and live-streamed the content.

The MPD suspects that the company had gained more than ¥100 million in viewing fees and other rewards via the website since February last year and distributed money to performers.

The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, designated Stripchat in December 2023 as a Very Large Online Platform that is obliged to properly respond to harmful postings under the Digital Services Act.

In May this year, the European Commission announced that it had begun probes into the website on suspicion of violation of the act.

According to Similarweb Ltd., a website analyzing service firm, Stripchat had been accessed about 667 million times a month on average from May to July.

Accesses from Japan accounted for 20% of the total, which was the second largest, after 21% from the United States.