On March 21, 2023, I published an article titled Feeds and Read-It-Later for Online Reading. My project there was to provide an account of how a good collection of RSS/ATOM/JSON feeds can serve as a discovery mechanism for interesting articles and resources from around the web that are not direct feed subscriptions. As I explained there, this requires subscribing to feed sources that regularly link externally and having some sort of system for saving links to read later. Neither social media nor other algorithms are necessary for discovering good writing and media. My preferred tools have changed since March 2023, but the principle remains the same, which is why I link to that article regularly.
My essay about feed-based discovery focused more on theory than practice. Below, I submit a real-world example of how one of my feed subscriptions led me to an interesting foreign crime story.
I recently added Fuwanovel (https://fuwanovel.moe/) to my feed collection (https://fuwanovel.moe/feed/). This is a visual novel news site and blog. I have a few visual novel-related writing projects coming up (beyond my regular reviews), so I collected some sources in my feed reader that may point me to interesting materials. On September 1, 2026, I read Untranslated Releases: August 2026 in my feed reader. The featured untranslated releases largely did not strike me as the sorts of visual novels I would read, much less review, some on topical grounds and others on family website grounds. So the specific novels are obviously not what prompted this article. One of the less-appealing looking novels on the list is called Appetite. Below, I present Fuwanovel’s description of Appetite:
For nukige lovers, Appetite will be releasing , Itadaki Joshi, Itadakimasu. A revenge story about a swindler girl dressed in jira-kei fashion engaging in papa-katsu. This is a visual novel that is surely inspired by real events
I could tell from Appetite’s featured image that it is not for me (much less this website), but I noted that “real events” was a hyperlink. What real events could have inspired this assuredly classy piece of digital story-telling? I decided to click the link and see where it took me. Where did It end up?
‘Sugar Baby Riri’ gets nine-year prison term over romance scam (Karin Kaneko for The Japan Times. April 22, 2024.)
Fuwanovel’s quip about a questionable new visual novel included a link to a 2024 news story about a criminal matter in real-world Japan. I do not recall having come across the story of “Sugar Baby Riri” before. I read on so as to not continue living in the shadow of ignorance. I quote the opening paragraph:
The Nagoya District Court on Monday imposed a nine-year prison term and an ¥8 million ($51,700) fine on a 25-year-old woman — who went by the moniker ‘Sugar Baby Riri’ — for swindling three men out of ¥156 million through a romance scam and for selling a manual on how to commit similar acts of fraud.
I read the opening paragraph before seeing any other part of the article (note for reference that I was reading on my Google Pixel 3aXL). Naturally, I wondered what she was doing with 156 million yen, which would have been $1,162,824 USD as of April 21, 2023. I figured the answer was something simple like buying clothes or buying a house or nice apartment. I would be disabused of that misconception in the next paragraph:
The defendant, whose real name is Mai Watanabe, spent the money she obtained from the three men on a host whom she fell in love with, with the aim of making him No. 1 in terms of sales at the club where he works in Tokyo’s Kabukicho entertainment district…
“That’s something,” I thought. Judge Yoichi Omura also thought it was something, but something negative to be precise: “[H]er motive to contribute to the sales of a host is truly selfish, and there is no room for leniency.”
To recap, Ms. Watanabe (DBA “Sugar Baby Riri”) apparently frequented a host club. There, she was rather taken by a male “host,” whose job, as I understand from prior reading and watching anime (thank you for the lesson, Trillion Game), is to charm women customers so that the women buy copious amounts of food and alcohol (probably more the latter), and the club maintains a “ranking” of hosts in order to inspire the clientele to “support” their favorite host by spending money. In order to support her favorite host, Ms. Watanabe turned “sugar baby,” selling herself to three men and convincing them to unknowingly fund her favorite host by telling them fake sob stories.
If anyone said there is no such thing as a perfect crime story, I would think that person would have to take a moment to reconsider after considering this one.
Having never been to a host club or studied host club economics, I would have thought that more than $1.1 million U.S. dollars would have been more than enough to satisfy Ms. Watanabe’s dream of making her favorite host the top host. But like many dreamers, Ms. Watanabe wanted more. She was also charged with “with helping a 21-year-old woman in Nagoya defraud two men of a total of about ¥10 million in 2022 by selling her a manual titled ‘A Reference Book for Sugar Babies.’”
Sometimes the king-maker becomes king. Sometimes the patron of the arts (is being a host an “art”?) becomes an artist (is authoring a “Sugar Baby” manual being an “artist”?). Ms. Watanabe’s host-funding efforts were aided by the fact that she “fail[ed] to declare around ¥40 million worth of income over a two-year period” (unexpectedly).
Despite the fact that the honorable Judge Yoichi Omura stated unequivocally that there was no room for leniency in this matter, the report suggests that Ms. Watanabe received some leniency. “Prosecutors had sought 13 years of imprisonment and a ¥13 million fine…” Nine years of imprisonment and an ¥8 million fine was a bit shy of that. In Japan, nine years for committing fraud as a “Sugar Baby” and writing the manual for others who want to follow in your footsteps is the generous sentence. In my home and native New York City, you can be paroled after 10 years in prison for shooting someone in a Subway, allowing you to murder two people in two separate armed robberies while you are out on parole. Cross-cultural comparisons are nothing if not enlightening. But I digress.
Returning to the original prompt for this article, my subscription to a visual novel news and review website unexpectedly pointed me to a 2024 Japan crime story. Not only was I inspired to share the story with my fair readers, but I was also inspired to note how it is a shining example of feed-based discovery. Of course, I have discovered more substantive articles and media through my feed collection, not to mention new feeds to subscribe to, but few provide so pure an article prompt as the story of “Sugar Baby Riri.”
