People Who Eat Darkness

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  There was a good deal of traditional and straightforward lechery. “I suppose a lot of them talked about sex,” said Helen. “I tried to avoid that subject as much as possible.” But in four weeks of working at Casablanca, her only genuinely alarming encounter was with a man who had an obsession with Audrey Hepburn. “He went for brunettes with that look—pale skin and big eyes,” she said. “There was one girl who left after two weeks because he was so creepy. He’d sit next to her and say things like, ‘Now you are mine!’ and ‘I paid for you, now I own you!’ and he’d grip her really tightly around the arm. She left, and then he started asking for me. I just stood up to him, wouldn’t let him touch me.”

  More vexatious than the creeps were the bores. Every hostess routinely found herself engaging in conversations so incongruous or stultifying that if anyone else were present it would have been impossible not to laugh. Hajime Imura, the publisher, recalled entertaining Lucie with stories of his squid-fishing exploits. “I caught a great deal of squid on one occasion, and I told her about it,” he told me. “I never heard back from her after that.” Lucie was the object of an elaborate disquisition from one customer on the functioning of volcanoes. It culminated in the construction of a scale model of an active crater using the implements on the table: an ice bucket as the mountain, the water in the siphon as lava, and a cigarette as the source of smoke.

  Old Mr. Watanabe had no problems finding conversation, as he revealed in his letter to Tim Blackman. The girls at Casablanca were unanimously fond of him because of his age, his extreme courtliness, and the regularity of his visits. They called him “Photo Man” because of his habit of taking countless photographs and then bringing sets of prints into the club on his next visit, carefully laid out in albums for presentation to the girls. He got his money’s worth from Lucie. “We enjoyed interesting and informative conversations [for] about three hours,” he recalled of one evening with her. “We talked about English history, literature, arts, authors, artists, the relation between Britain and Japan from old times, the similarity and difference of nature and mentality between both nations, and the sense of humor peculiar to English people that I like and respect most and so on.” The effect of all this distilled earnestness on the average twenty-one-year-old hostess can only be imagined.

  Casablanca might have been boring, and occasionally bizarre, but it was also strangely reassuring. Sealed within its dim blue cocoon, watched over by Caz and the unsmiling Nishi, the girls who worked there felt safe.

  * * *

  In Japan, where everything had its place, hostessing, hostesses, and hostess clubs did not exist in isolation. The jumble of nightlife establishments to be found in Roppongi—downmarket and upmarket, decent and disgraceful—was encompassed by a beautiful and suggestive term: mizu shōbai, literally, the “water trade.” The phrase was mysterious. Did it refer to the drinking, which was an essential part of the nighttime experience? To the evanescence of its pleasures, flowing past like a stream? The image of water brought to mind sex, childbirth, and death by drowning. At one extreme, the mizu shōbai included the geisha, female entertainers of exceptional skill and refinement who were to be found only in the most old-fashioned quarters of Kyoto and Tokyo; at the other were hard-core S & M and torture clubs, where the most extreme degradation was exchanged for cash. In between extended a spectrum of sleaziness and elegance, cheapness and expense, openness and exclusivity.

  Some Japanese would include within the mizu shōbai ordinary bars, pubs and karaoke parlors, but most definitions required the presence in some capacity of women attractive, at least notionally, to men. This might be no more than the mama-san of a tiny neighborhood “snack” (in Japanese, sunakku), a four-seat counter presided over by a middle-aged proprietress-barmaid whose active powers of seduction were on the wane. Some sunakku had younger waitress-hostesses who chatted and poured drinks under the mama-san’s direction. The bigger of these shaded into the hostess bars and clubs, more likely to be found in larger cities, where female company, for conversation and karaoke, was provided at a price, along with drinks and snacks. “Gentlemen’s clubs” were ones in which the female companions talked at the table but also stripped to nakedness during a public pole dance and in one-to-one “private” dances in a closed booth. The dancer writhed and gyrated astride the customer, who was allowed to touch and suckle her nipples and breasts, and who, in some places, could pay to go further. So, as the barmaid became a hostess, and the hostess overlapped with the stripper, so stripping evolved into prostitution.

  No other race has expended the imagination and creativity that the Japanese have put into the packaging of paid sex, a response to the country’s halfhearted and unenforceable antiprostitution laws. The only thing that is strictly illegal is charging for conventional male-female intercourse. Fellatio and masturbation, in all their forms, are permitted. Proving that any given orgasm has been brought about legally and manually, rather than illicitly and vaginally, is, of course, impossible. In order to veil the obvious, sex businesses package their services under a bewildering range of names, so numerous and fast changing that it is a struggle for the nonspecialist to keep track.

  In Roppongi there are “massage” parlors, where a perfunctory rubdown is the pretext for a manually administered happy ending. There are fasshon herusu (“fashion health”) facilities offering a wider range of services, excluding conventional intercourse. This can be had at a sōpurando (“soap land”—the pretext here is an all-over wash by a woman who employs her body as a sponge). Deri-heru (“delivery health”) is sexual pleasure delivered in a personal visit to your home or hotel. Esute (pronounced “ess-tay” and derived from the English “aesthetic salon”) is sexual massage, subdivided into a diversity of genres. There is “Korean aesthetic salon” (massage and hand relief), and “Korean-style aesthetic salon” (the same as Korean aesthetic salon but with a naked masseuse). Further refinements, each subtly distinct from one another, include “Chinese aesthetic salons,” “Taiwanese aesthetic salons,” “Singaporean aesthetic salons,” “sexy pubs,” “lingerie pubs,” “Peeping Tom pubs,” “touch cabarets” and “Korean-style massage by Japanese housewife.” In a “no-pants coffee shop,” the waitresses are almost naked and will provide relief in return for a specified tip. In a “no-pants karaoke coffee shop,” women without pants perform duets with the customers before, after, or during relief. In a “no-pants shabu-shabu,” shabu-shabu hot pot is served rather than coffee.

  The more expensive, exclusive, and respectable the mizu shōbai establishment, the more likely the women are to be Japanese. At the grubbier end, there are many more Thais, Filipinas, Chinese, and Koreans. “Western” women, meaning Europeans, Russians, North and South Americans, and Australasians, are generally found only in the middle band of the spectrum, from hostess to stripper, the zone in which talking and watching are the principal attractions, rather than touching. I speak of a spectrum, but it would be more accurate to think of shades not of bright and distinct color but of gray.

  * * *

  The practice of paying for female company has a long and noble history in Japan. The first references to geisha—highly trained female entertainers skilled in the arts of dancing, music, costume, makeup, and conversation—date back to the eighteenth century; a gulf of accomplishment and respectability separated them from the oiran, or courtesans, and the common prostitutes who frequented inns and teahouses. It was during the tizzy of faddish westernization in the 1920s that the first recognizable hostesses appeared—taxi dancers in the newly popular dance halls, and “café girls,” whose company, and sometimes more, could be purchased along with coffee. During the same period, there was a short-lived and unsuccessful experiment with a kind of secular geisha, who wore flapper dresses instead of kimonos and played pianos and guitars rather than samisen. “Opinions still differ as to whether the nightclub entertainer and the bar girl of our day are as accomplished as was the geisha of old, but the geisha has gradually yielded to them,” wrote the grea
t American historian of Tokyo, Edward Seidensticker. “The story of the high life of this past century might be told as the retreat of one and the advance of the others.”

  The earliest foreign participants in the water trade were Korean and Chinese prostitutes, colonial subjects of the prewar Japanese empire. In 1945, Westerners appeared in large numbers, but as buyers rather than sellers, during the seven-year-long U.S. occupation. It was during this period, too, that Roppongi began to emerge as a place of recreation. Its name meant “six trees”; before the war, it had been a nondescript residential area dominated by a barracks of the Japanese Imperial Army. The U.S. military took over the barracks after the surrender, and around its entrance sprang up little bars catering to off-duty soldiers, with names such as Silk Hat, Green Spot, and the Cherry. It was at this time that Roppongi’s curious motto originated. Locals noticed that the American GIs would greet one another by slapping palms together above their heads. One could imagine the scene late at night, as a curious Japanese barman asked his customers about this, and the long, drunken attempt to explain the theory and practice of the high five. It was mistransliterated into Japanese as hai tacchi, or “high touch”—hence the slogan on the walls of the Roppongi expressway: “High Touch Town.”

  In 1956, Tokyo’s first Italian restaurant opened in Roppongi, the beginning of a craze for exotica such as pizza and Chianti. Two years later, Tokyo Tower, an immense red, faux-Eiffel telecommunications mast, opened on Roppongi’s southern edge. A private television station, TV Asahi, built its headquarters nearby, and in 1964 Roppongi acquired a subway station. This was the year of the Tokyo Olympics, symbolic of Japan’s transformation from postwar destitution to wealth and international influence. By this time, the city had many hostess bars, but the women who worked in them were Japanese. In 1969, in another symbol of expanding affluence, Tokyo’s first foreign hostess club opened in Roppongi under the name Casanova.

  There were plenty of Japanese men who wanted to pay for time with hostesses—usually on company expenses, for the clubs were regarded as a respectable means of entertaining business contacts, closing contractual negotiations, and rewarding employees for loyalty and hard work. The opening of Casanova signaled the emergence of a new mizu shōbai demographic—salarymen with foreign clients and money, and the education and confidence to converse with foreign hostesses in English.

  Casanova was dizzyingly expensive, but over the next thirty years it inspired many cheaper kimpatsu—“blondie”—clubs. An hour at Casanova cost ¥60,000, but Club Kai, which opened in 1992, and its successor, Club Cadeau, cost about ¥10,000 an hour.* The first clubs had employed female backpackers who happened to be passing through; soon club owners were placing advertisements in foreign newspapers and magazines and sending agents abroad to recruit and import suitable young women. But at any one time, the number of foreign hostess bars in Roppongi, excluding strip joints, was never very large. In Lucie’s time, there was Casanova, Club Cadeau, Club Vincent, J Collection, One Eyed Jack’s (the biggest of them all, sister establishment to the “gentleman’s club” Seventh Heaven), and Casablanca.

  * * *

  By 2000, Anne Allison was Robert O. Keohane Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University in North Carolina. In 1981, as a doctoral student, she spent four months as the only foreigner in a Japanese hostess club in Roppongi. This fieldwork formed the basis of her doctoral thesis, later published as a full-length book: Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club.

  Much of it is a closely argued, densely theoretical treatise, heavy with phrases like “phallicized self-image” and discussions of Japanese concepts such as jikokenjiyoku (“the wish to expose oneself and have this self-exposure well received”). But it also contains moments of peculiar comedy as the unflappably calm and analytical cultural anthropologist encountered the neurotically repressed patrons of the Floating World:

  I was sitting at a table of four, all men in their early forties. [They] spoke quietly and interestingly about relations between the United States and Japan, universities, travel, and so on. At one point the Mama came up, asked them how they were all doing, and told one of the men that he looked more handsome every time he came to the club. She smiled intimately, told them to enjoy themselves, and then went to the next table.

  One of the men spoke about singing [karaoke] in a club like this, saying it wasn’t a matter of enjoying it but of having to do it. “It’s inevitable” (shō ga nai), he said. Someone asked me how tall I was, and they in turn told me how big their penises were. One said that his was 50 centimeters long. Another motioned with his arms to indicate that his was two feet long. Another said his was so big that he could jump rope with it, which made walking a big inconvenience.

  Another hostess was called over, and I was assigned to a different table.

  Professor Allison described, as another anthropologist might describe a coming-of-age ceremony in Micronesia, the dynamics of the arrival at the club of a new group of salarymen. First, the strained silence, as the workmates—bosses and underlings, young and middle-aged—sat down together for a night of prescribed “fun.” Then the sense of release as the beer and mizuwari arrived, and the tendency of customers to behave drunkenly even before they had finished their first drink. Finally, the signal that the evening had begun in earnest—the inevitable sniggering reference to the breasts of one of the attending hostesses, sometimes accompanied by what the professor referred to as “the bop,” a fleeting, chortling pat on the boob. “Breast talk becomes a signal that the time for play has just begun,” Professor Allison wrote. “As often as I heard a comment about a breast made, it never failed to get the same reaction: surprise, glee, and release.”

  Yet for all this, she insisted that the club was not principally about carnality. “We were taught three things when we started. How to light our client’s cigarettes, how to pour his drinks, and not to put our elbows on the table. We were also advised not to eat in front of him: it shows lack of subservience. Those rules aside, your job was to fulfill his fantasy. If he wanted you loud, you were loud. If he wanted you intelligent, you were intelligent. If he wanted you horny, you were horny. Sordid? Yes. Degrading? Yes. But one thing it wasn’t was the White Slave Trade. The one thing the hostess bars are not about is sex.”

  The public telephone booths of Tokyo were full of printed flyers advertising prostitutes; what the hostess clubs offered was both more specialized and more costly. Unexpectedly, the more expensive and select a club, the less tolerant it was of touching and groping. “Other clubs in the mizu shōbai provide the service of masturbating a man to ejaculation,” Professor Allison observes. “In the hostess clubs, by contrast, the masturbatory ejaculation is of the ego only.”

  Japanese sex, like Japanese society, is ordered and orderly. Japanese men like to know exactly what is expected of them and how they are meant to behave before entering any situation. And in the hostess clubs, they know that the only thing on offer is titillation … The Mama who owned and ran [my club] made one thing very clear: touching, now and then, with a client was OK; sex was a sackable offense. But most of the clients—Japanese clients anyway—did not expect sex. They expected flirtation and flattery, and that is what they got.

  Within those parameters, you put up with whatever came your way. Some conversation was offensive, some was not, but the most important thing was not to be silent. One night you might discuss Tchaikovsky with a charming and courteous gentleman. The next night that same man might ask you how many times you climax each night, when you lost your virginity and compare your breasts with those of the two other hostesses at the table. Your job was to smile and pretend you found him entertaining. You made him believe that he was the most wonderful, most important man in the world, that you longed to jump into his bed. He made himself believe that this tall, beautiful Western woman was desperately in love with him, found him fascinating and was going to become his mistress that very night. They loved talking about sex an
d sometimes the conversations would become explicit or highly suggestive, but at the end of the evening, you went your separate ways. Neither side would be surprised or disappointed because neither side had expected anything else.

  You tell him you wish he was your lover. He tells you he would like to take you home. You say that would be lovely, but my sister is in town and I have to show her the sights. It is the answer he was expecting; he might well have been frightened at any other.

  The only people who did not understand and play by these rules were foreigners, Western men who were unable to grasp the Japanese obsession with ritual and role play. I remember a Frenchman being furious when his hostess wouldn’t go back to his hotel. “Why on earth has she been coming on so strong all evening if she doesn’t want to sleep with me?” he exploded.

  The argument of Nightwork was that, rather than sex, hostess clubs were actually about work. By encouraging and subsidizing the salaryman to spend his evenings together with colleagues, clients, and hostesses (rather than at home with his wife and children), Japanese corporations enabled him to discharge stress and frustration in a way that served the corporations’ ends—bonding with his workmates and building good relations with clients. The hostess club was both leisure and work; in colonizing the salaryman’s after-office hours, as well as the working day, the company ensured that his first loyalty was not to his family but to his job. “They are tired when they arrive and the last thing they want to do is flog their wits to entertain either a client or a woman,” Professor Allison wrote. “The hostess solves that problem. She entertains the client, flatters the man who is paying, and makes him look important and influential in front of others … If that same man went to a disco, he would probably fail to pick up a woman and go home feeling deflated and rejected. The hostess clubs remove the risk of failure.”