IBC

Devious women spring honey traps at spring training

February 2, 2009

Spring training each February in Okinawa is the annual prelude to the start of the NPB season. Yet according to Nikkan Gendai (Feb. 2) it also is the beginning of a sport of an entirely different kind.

The tabloid applies the term “camp followers” to predatory women who travel to the southern chain of islands for the purpose of seducing pro baseball players. They are apparently not ravishing beauties, but rather fairly ordinary types who at first glance appear to be vacationing office ladies.

Hanging out at a roadside snack establishments that can be commonly found in Okinawa’s rural towns, they spot players and set themselves up for seduction. One dependable technique is to reach over and grope the man’s groin while the two share a taxi.

Once the player falls into their trap, they will approach a team representative and demand several million yen to keep the scandal out of the sports tabloids. In many cases though, they are persuaded to settle for half a million yen in hush money.

Nikkan Gendai reports that players are regularly warned against such females at team meetings, but each season at least two or three are entrapped. Apparently the combination of money, physical conditioning and male libido is potent enough to make baseball jocks easy targets for such seductions.

http://www.tokyoreporter.com/2009/02/02 ... -training/

That's hilarious!

The funnier part to me is the 500,000 yen, which according to today's exchange rates is $5,329. How many American sports groupies are settling for less than 6 grand?

It's not so low when you consider the highest paid baseball player in Japan last year made just under $6m.

Dude I knew $25,000 Arena Football players paying twice that in child support and what not. If someone is making $6 mil per year I think the appropriate extortion is closer to 100 large.

For one thing, $5k here in the US is not the same as $5k in Japan (just as $5k in NYC isn't the same as $5k in Alabama, I'm not comparing Japan to Alabama, it's just an example), our per capita GDP is quite a bit higher than theirs.
Secondly, the more you try to scam someone for, the more likely they are going to be to go to the cops.
Third, having asked my co-worker Chin (who is Chinese but was raised in Japan), in the still very male dominated society of Japan the likelihood of something like these situations going in the favor of the woman is much lower than here in the US and a scandal like that in the tabloids will reflect much more negatively on the woman than on the male.