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The Japanese law Fūzoku eigyō tō no kisei oyobi gyōmu no tekiseika tō ni kansuru hōritsu (風俗営業等の規制及び業務の適正化等に関する法律), commonly known as fūeihō prohibited dancing in nightclubs after midnight (or 1 A.M.). This law was rarely enforced at least between the late 1980s to 2010, but suddenly police began to crack down on nightclubs nationwide for violating the law in the early 2010s. This led to a civil society campaign and eventually to a revision of the law in 2016, seemingly letting nightclubs operate freely in the future. However, studies by Ryan Hartley, for example, point out that the law still poses many difficulties for nightclubs and reports show that nightclub crackdowns have continued after the revision (Hadfield 2018).

This research aims to identify, analyse and compare discourses in Japanese and international news articles in the 2010s concerning fūeihō crackdowns, the civil society campaign and the revision, following the methodology of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and previous research on the environment in which nightclubs operate in Japan. Four main areas of interest in the articles are: 1) What is the reason mentioned for the 2010s crackdowns, 2) what led to the 2016 revision of the law, 3) fūeihō & the crackdowns in international context, and 4) what does the future look like for Japanese nightclubs.

Many of the international articles studied exhibited a lack of researching or possibly deliberate oversimplification of the issue, especially by often stating that the revision has eliminated the “war on dance”. Japanese articles occasionally brought up concerns over issues that the revision of the law could bring including noise pollution and drug trafficking, from which it can be understood that a discourse of nightclubs being apotential source of problems exists. Despite this, all of the articles in one way or another expressed that revising the law is important or would at least bring positive outcomes, for example by increasing tourism.