The uniform includes a red blouse worn each day except Mondays and Fridays, the Muslim holy day, when his employees wear batik shirts. All of them have zippers up the back, which remain unlocked, Setiawan said.
He stores the padlocks and keys in a special box at the cashier's counter.
When a customer arrives for a massage, given in a private room behind a curtain, the "cashier calls one masseuse, asks her to prepare things and locks her pants," Setiawan said. "Because the masseuse knows the drill, she usually pees before that. And when the client is done, the masseuse comes to the cashier, and the cashier opens the padlock."
Once in a while, Setiawan said, he checks to make sure no one lifts the keys to cut copies.
Locking up women's pants seemed such an elegant solution, Setiawan suggested that other massage parlor owners try it during a meeting of their association about two months ago, when the main item on the agenda was "how to handle some naughty guests."
At least four owners agreed to start dressing their masseuses in similar uniforms and padlocks, he said, and others plan to follow suit soon.
But local reports have portrayed the move as a government order. Municipal official Imam Suryono said: "This new policy is still in the form of a suggestion. But in the future, we expect this policy to be enacted as city legislation."
Putting women and their pants under lock and key has inflamed an already heated national debate over the government's role in enforcing morality and strikes many here as bureaucracy run amok.
Last month, Indonesia's parliament passed a bill that makes it a crime to look at violent or pornographic material on the Internet. The penalty is up to three years in prison.
News that massage parlors were clamping down on prostitution soon followed, and with all the publicity, Setiawan is suddenly losing customers. Many of them never knew that they were getting kneaded and soothed by securely fastened women because the padlocks were hidden beneath their long tops, he said.
"It's not because of the padlocks, but because they are not comfortable with the journalists" poking around, he added.
The objections of Swasono, the women's empowerment minister, were echoed on the editorial pages of the Jakarta Post, where the majority of 26 reader comments published one day this month ridiculed locking up women's pants.
Some called it a throwback to the Middle Ages, or even the Stone Age. Calling for fair treatment, one said, "The customers' hands should be chained too to prevent them from sexually harassing the masseuse."
Another suggested that modern technology offered a better solution: monitoring the women and their clients by closed-circuit TV.
Amid news that officials in the capital, Jakarta, were weighing the padlock option for its massage parlors, a Post reader wrote, "Jakarta should consider locking up the hands of politicians to prevent corrupt officials from taking bribes."
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paul.watson@latimes.com
