Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

  “You mean it’s illegal to sell pornography showing someone getting fellated or something but not illegal to get the actual blow job?”

  “Yeah, that sums it up. You catch on fast. You can do it, but you can’t watch it. At least not on your VCR.”

  “So what’s to enforce?”

  “Mmmmmm.”

  It was hard to understand Alien because the twenty-four-year-old girl serving him his dinner was playfully stuffing her nipples into his mouth. He tongued them while talking. Her moaning, fake or real, made it hard to follow the conversation.

  “Well, every now and then you have to take down the places that are blatantly offering intercourse. You have to draw a line somewhere.”

  “Why don’t they just make normal sex legal? I mean, you can do almost everything else.”

  “Actually, the restriction on normal intercourse makes it more interesting, I think. It forces people to search for new avenues of erotic pleasure. There’re a lot of ways to get your rocks off besides the standard screw.” He popped the woman’s nipple out of his mouth and had a drink.

  After dinner I was ready to catch a taxi home, but Alien wanted to take me to one more place. It was a Korean massage parlor and sauna.

  Alien assured me it was a legitimate place. “Hey, I’m not going to get either of us in trouble. I come to this place now and then. Koh-san will take care of you. This is my treat.”

  The setup reminded me of a place in Omiya. I was led into a small, windowless room. There was a massage table in the center and a shelf next to the wall, stocked with various lotions, a basket for clothes, a couple of vibrators, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, cotton sheets, and towels.

  Koh-san was wearing a beige nurse’s outfit and round wire-rimmed glasses. She had on long white latex gloves. Her Japanese was fairly good, and she had me strip and lie down. She gave me a twenty-minute massage, using a very sticky clear massage oil. It was like being rubbed with hot glue. I was facedown, and then she had me turn over. I didn’t want to turn over, but she laughed and literally flipped me in a second. She commented on my anatomy. She giggled. She told me to wait, and she called in two of her friends to look. She and her friends made comments to one another in Korean or Chinese and giggled some more. Then they left. I caught the word katsurei, meaning “circumcised.”

  The rest of the massage was not relaxing but not unpleasant. The massage was for forty minutes, so after a total of thirty minutes had passed, I started to get up but she would have none of it. “Massage not over. Please wait. Relax.” And with that she grabbed my shaft in one hand and speared my anus with her other.

  Maybe Alien Cop was testing my sense of humor? My curiosity? I was wondering if refusing the service would be insulting his hospitality. I didn’t have to wonder for long. After finishing me off, Koh put me into the shower. Then I got dressed and walked out to the lobby, where I met up with Alien.

  He was glowing. He had something approaching a smile. I thanked him for setting me up with such a good masseuse. What else was I supposed to do?

  “No problem. Now you understand what Kabukicho is all about. Sexual desire. Selling it and satisfying it. As long as the shops don’t go too far over the line, they can do whatever they want. Our job as vice cops isn’t to put these places out of business, it’s to keep them in line.”

  I nodded in understanding. Alien had a question for me.

  “You like Japanese women?”

  “I don’t have an Asian fetish, but yeah, I like Japanese women. I married a Japanese woman.”

  “I’m the same way as you.”

  “You like Japanese women?”

  “No, I like foreign women. Blondes and redheads. Can you introduce me to one? I don’t meet many foreigners—well, not the kind, you know, you could date or anything.”

  So that was what this was all about. I said I’d see what I could do. And I did. It was the start of a long-term partnership, of sorts. Alien Cop was the guy who gave me my first and maybe only real scoop on the Fourth District.

  As I was getting into a taxi, my cell phone rang. It was the editor.

  “Adelstein!”

  “Yes?”

  While I’d been hanging out with Alien Cop, I hadn’t checked my phone or my beeper once. It was now way past the time when any additions or corrections to an article could be made. I thought I was in deep shit.

  “What’s with that article you sent about the hot wives club thing?”

  “What about it?”

  “You wrote in the last line, ‘In reality, only a third of the women were actually married.’ Why the fuck did you put that in?”

  “It seemed relevant. False advertising. I mean, all the customers thought they were screwing someone else’s wife, but that wasn’t the case. It just seemed like an important detail to show how shady the operation was.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? This is the Yomiuri, not Tokyo Sports. We aren’t about protecting the consumer rights of goddamn perverts. That fucking line stayed all the way to the last edition. Think before you write, idiot.”

  And he hung up.

  Well, at least the article had made the paper. I was happy about that. I got home at five in the morning, and Sunao was waiting for me. She was still up, in her bathrobe, typing an article on the latest trends in Japanese socks. She had a bath waiting for me and some fried rice on the table ready to be heated up.

  She asked me how my day had been, and I told her. I didn’t hold anything back. I felt Jewish puritanical guilt, a need to confess. I thought she’d rake me over the coals, but she was neither shocked nor angry. She listened with some interest while I explained to her everything I’d learned and the whole evening’s events. Even the massage parlor. She did have questions, though. She massaged my shoulders while she interrogated me, occasionally really jamming her thumb in.

  “So she just gave you a hand job? She didn’t suck you off or anything?”

  “No. Just a hand job.”

  “Well, if this cop invited you to come along, I guess that’s what you had to do. Just don’t make a habit it of it. And if you do, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Understood.”

  “And if you do something, wear a condom, honey. I don’t want any diseases.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you have any left?”

  “Any what left?”

  “Any sperm. It’s that time of the month. Check your reporter pad, Jakey.”

  I opened my Yomiuri-issued calendar/notepad, and sure enough there was a big O in Sunao’s handwriting marked in red on the date. The big O. Ovulation day. I guess crawling into bed was not an option.

  I winced a little. Sunao just smiled.

  “Don’t worry, Jake. I won’t even charge you today. It’s on the house.”

  It was a long day.

  Well, at least I knew that this “hot wife” was really married. I was definitely not getting ripped off. I thought to myself, it’s good to have my own hot wife rather than be paying another man’s wife. Maybe it would keep me out of trouble.

  Note: Soapland Trivia

  The Soapland shops in Japan used to be called toruko, short for Turkish baths. This so offended one Turkish resident of Japan that he launched a campaign to get the name changed, which the Yomiuri reported on in the late sixties or seventies. I remember one particularly obnoxious editor from the Foreign Affairs Bureau showing me his article about it. Eventually, Japan gave in to international pressure and solved the problem by giving the sex shops a wholesome moniker. It sounds like good, clean fun. “Soapland.”

  Incidentally, the Japanese term for blow-up sex dolls is “Dutch wife.” The Embassy of the Netherlands has yet to launch a formal protest or make counterassertions that “Dutch women are not frigid and thus we are outraged by the term ‘Dutch wife’ in the selling and use of inanimate sex dolls,” but when it does it’s my scoop.

  1* It was a difficult story to cover because the victims were in sex clubs and illegal gambli
ng parlors at the time of their demise. The names were not printed after the early-evening edition for that reason.

  2* A skimmer scans credit cards for their data and then makes illegal purchases with fake cards or sells the information to third parties.

  3* Soapland was a blind spot in the Japanese Adult Entertainment Law. In those places, the customer was bathed and blown by the girl, and then, if the two of them hit it off, they could go to another room next door and have actual intercourse. The intercourse wasn’t included in the price of admission and wasn’t guaranteed, so technically it wasn’t prostitution. It didn’t make much sense to me, but that’s how Alien explained it. It wasn’t sex; it was “free love.”

  My Night as a Host(ess)

  You can look at Kabukicho as an example of the sociopathology of Japanese life, or you can look at it as a microcosm of relationships in general. Host and hostess clubs are probably the most misunderstood aspects of Japan’s adult entertainment industry. They’re not about sex, they’re about the illusion of intimacy and the titillating possibility of sex.

  Intimacy is a commodity in Japan, and it rarely comes for free. It’s the same way in the United States. We just pay different people.

  In the United States, we pay psychiatrists, therapists, counselors, and life coaches to listen to our problems, raise our self-esteem, pretend to like us, and give us good advice. Friends used to do those things for free, but friends have been known to retreat when the water gets too deep. Japanese tend to believe that going to a shrink is a sign of weakness and an admission of mental illness, so there’s still a tendency to avoid those types of paid friendships.

  After covering the Kabukicho beat, I learned that when a Japanese man wants his ego—as opposed to his penis—stroked, when he wants to be fussed over or have someone listen to his problems, he doesn’t go home to his wife, he goes to a hostess club. A hostess club is not a sex club. A hostess club is not a pickup joint, a fuzokuten, or a singles bar. It is usually a small bar with several attractive women who will greet you warmly, sit down and chat with you on a sofa, sing karaoke with you, and act as if they were your lover or flirt with you as though they might want to be.

  Typically, the woman running a hostess bar, the mama-san, is a former hostess with a scratchy, rough voice from years of inhaling secondhand smoke, drinking watered-down whiskey, and staying up too late. If you want to know the number of years any particular woman has been working in the industry, just listen to the timbre of her voice. If she sounds like Scatman Crothers, she’s a veteran.

  It’s not unheard of for a hostess to date a customer, just rare. The problem with turning a customer into a boyfriend, for the hostess, is a loss of revenue, not to mention the potential of alienating other regular customers. The hostess has to maintain an illusion of availability to encourage a pseudocourtship that might someday culminate in sex. Along the way to that elusive goal line, which few regular customers ever reach, a man might blow $10,000 in a year courting a hostess, buying her drinks, giving her birthday presents, and occasionally taking her out to dinner.

  On a nippy day in October 1999, I was hanging around the Kabukicho koban shooting the breeze with one of the officers. He said something about the vice squad raiding a “host club” that night. At first I didn’t get it. Host club?

  “You mean a hostess club?”

  “No. It’s like a hostess club but with guys doing the hosting.”

  “You mean a gay joint?”

  “No, women go to those clubs, and hosts wait on them just like a hostess would wait on guys. You know, compliment them, pour them drinks, flirt, get them to talk—get them to shell out cash. Look around; what do you think those faggy guys in expensive suits and long red hair are doing in Kabukicho at three in the morning?”

  I’d always thought they were trying to pick up chicks, not herd them into a bar that serviced them. Well, compulsive observer of social phenomena that I am, I wanted part of it.

  At TMPD at the end of the day, I grabbed Nojima, one of the senior vice squad guys, and suggested a beer. I didn’t have to work hard to convince him. But when, in the middle of the first round of drinks, I mentioned the raid that night, he was pissed. He didn’t want the story out before its time.

  “We’ve got two more places to hit. If you sit on the story for a day, I’ll give you an exclusive.”

  “Okay,” I said, being ever so cooperative, “but I want the details now.”

  He wasn’t willing to tell me at first, but after a bit, here is the story he gave me:

  The Shinjuku police and the TMPD Juvenile Protection Department had decided that host clubs were a breeding ground for juvenile delinquency. They had already raided four clubs for violations of the adult entertainment and sex industry laws: operating without a license and allowing juveniles into adult facilities.

  “It used to be that the only women who went to host bars were hostesses, but times have changed. What we keep seeing is college girls, sometimes even high school girls with money, who start going to these host clubs. They love the personal attention, and maybe they get infatuated with the hosts, who milk them for everything they have. The girls accumulate debts, and at some point the management introduces them to a job in the sex industry so that they can pay off their debts. Sometimes the guys running the host bars are the same guys who run the sex clubs. Some girls start shoplifting and reselling merchandise to pay off their host bar tabs. We’ve seen enough to know that these aren’t isolated incidents.”

  In July of that year, the Shinjuku police had gotten a call from the parents of a high school dropout. Their daughter had received a bill from a host club in Kabukicho for 4 million yen (close to $38,000 then). The parents had freaked out.

  The police checked out the host club and found it was operating without a license; they arrested the young owner in August. In September, they launched a broader investigation and were surprised to find seventy-one host clubs in operation. Three years earlier there had been twenty. Why the large increase? According to Nojima, in this day and age, girls just wanted to have fun, hosts just wanted to make money, and with sexual liberation and economic empowerment women had no problem buying affection just as men did.

  It was a little strange to hear sociological theory coming out of the mouth of a cop, but then again, Nojima wasn’t your ordinary cop. He was a graduate of Sophia, and he had majored in psychology and was a certified counselor. But he was quick to underscore the economic motive: a good host club pocketed the equivalent of more than $300,000 a year. Nojima, playing sociologist again, suggested I write an article on host clubs, which people knew little about. He named three establishments, and I visited each of them. After being met with the usual confusion about a gaijin writing for the Yomiuri, I was pleasantly surprised to find the proprietors willing to talk to me. One even invited me to spend a night as a host. I took him up on the offer, of course.

  But before that, I gathered my notes and spoke to my editor about the raids, a breaking story. Kasama, one of the few women in the shakaibu, helped me put the article together and convinced the desk to run it in the national edition. Hamaya, one of the other women in the division, gave me a few words of faint praise for my efforts and some good suggestions. It was a good feeling.

  The article was published in the Yomiuri morning edition on October 6, ahead of the official announcement that afternoon. It was a nice little scoop.

  A few evenings later, I picked out my best suit, trimmed the hair in my ears and my nose, and splashed on some cologne. My shirt was pressed, my tie was straight, my nails were trimmed, and I didn’t have any seaweed stuck between my teeth, so I felt fairly debonair. I didn’t look anything like a seedy private detective or a struggling English teacher—or, for that matter, like a hungry newspaper reporter. I looked like a host.

  Ai was located in the back alleys of Kabukicho, near a stand-up shot bar not far from the Furinkaikan.

  The storefront was garish, with neon tubing, spotlit photos of the top-
selling hosts, and a gold leaf LADIES’ CLUB sign above the entrance. Two bronzelike statues of muscular men guarded the front door, on which the ideograph for ai, which means “love,” was written in red. It was a combination of expensive Art Deco and 1950s diner kitsch.

  Once you go down the steps, you enter the club, which is illuminated by crystal chandeliers but is otherwise dark. Lights ripple over the dance floor as if over a pond. Plush round couches are dotted throughout the room. The effect is rather like a planetarium, as the lights are reflected from bronze statues, silver mirrors, and shiny decor, like stars on a summer night. Perhaps this is an overly poetic description of the place, but that’s the idea of it.

  When I arrived for duty at six, incredibly early for a host club, Takeshi Aida, the owner and president of the chain of Ai clubs, was waiting for me. He had a punch perm—tight curls all over his head—a thin Mexican moustache, and photochromatic oval shades. He wore an expensive suit, with a fine sheen to it, and a patterned silk tie, knotted so tightly one feared insufficient oxygen was getting to his round baby face. At fifty-nine years of age, he had an undeniable, if hard-to-put-your-finger-on, charm. He was very good at making you feel comfortable.

  Aida was born in Niigata Prefecture, the sixth of nine brothers. When he was twenty, he left Niigata for the big city. He went to work for a bed company, where he became a top salesman; started a crime prevention goods business, which went bankrupt; then opened up a wig business, which introduced him to the women-oriented economy.

  That led to a job as a host. A year later he was hired away by another host club and then hired away again a couple years later by the largest host club in the city. Obviously Aida had something going for him. Recognizing his calling, he started Ai, which soon established itself as the gold standard of host clubs. In the years after that, Aida created a small empire of host clubs, pubs, and bars. Ai was such a fixture of Kabukicho nightlife that at some point it was included on a bus tour for middle-aged women from the countryside. When Aida hired me for a night, he had about three hundred men in five clubs in his employ. He had also written a book on business management (and his wife had written a book about the joys and perils of being married to a professional host).