They hand out condom packets, half-price discount tickets for services topless
or nude. They tote signs displaying cartoon drawings of nymphets with enormous
breasts and wayward skirts, often clothed in schoolgirl attire, listing the
ages of their staff. They tell the men about well-earned pleasures and the
women about easy money, filling their heads with dancing visions of Prada bags
and holidays overseas.
These are "the soaplands," Japan's red-light districts, named for the most
hygienic of erotic massages: A nude female rubs the length of her soap-lathered
body over a man's pokémon, and he comes clean.
Service reigns supreme. The air is filled with a prerecorded, chirpy female
voice that greets you in the same breathy tone at the bank or the porn shop,
enveloping your world in an aura of kawaii -- cuteness, prettiness,
harmlessness. Full-color fliers in your mailbox feature lingerie-clad or
topless models posed compromisingly and demurely. A variety of options are laid
out on the order-in "menu": fellatio, 69, sadomasochism and straight sex, with
prices, locations and phone numbers demarcated clearly.
To understand anything in Japan, you must know about tatemae and honne. The
former indicates the embarrassment-saving rituals of the public sphere -- the
deferential bowing, the litany of apologies and the polite banter of mutually
assured repression. The latter is loosely defined as your true feelings as an
individual, mysterious sensations and impulses and desires that are reserved
for private domains. In a land smaller and less habitable than California but
with a population half that of the combined United States, the strict
codification of public and private space is no minor concern.
Last year, for example, at the peak of the globally syndicated series about the
president and his intern, I sat alongside a 50-ish Japanese linguistics
professor at a sake bar in Osaka. We watched Bill Clinton's clown-nosed face on
the screen and nodded at one another.
"Why does America embarrass itself?" the professor asked me.
"Sex," I replied. "America is confused about sex and love. We talk about it a
lot."
He nodded: "In Japan, maybe he would be fired or he would resign, but the worst
thing would be this news everywhere." He shook his head: "Here, no one would
talk about it to the rest of the world."
Sex happens and is talked about almost exclusively in the sphere of honne. On
the face of it, and certainly amid the then-depressing din of White House
hysteria, this lends an admirable air of dignity to the daily dance between
spirit and flesh. But finding where the lines are drawn can mystify a
Westerner, to whom Japan might seem at once both a pleasure dome of guilt-free
perversions and a hyper-prim, overpopulated dystopia of plastics and
pollutants.
The uniformly blue-suited businessmen who frustrate foreign counterparts with
elaborately formal agreements that amount to elaborately polite evasions (or
outright lies) sit in overstuffed subways, riffling through newspapers
featuring half-naked women and manga (comic books) displaying graphic sex and
violence. They appear unconcerned with the eyes of fellow commuters pressing
over their shoulders and elbows.
The office ladies, secretaries and elevator-operators greet their bosses and
customers in pristine white gloves and high-collared suits, their hair tied
back into tight ribbons. But later that night, they don neon micro-minis and
breast-clinging halter tops as they gyrate in nightclubs or rendezvous in "love
hotels." Context, in other words, is everything.
Even so, what's tolerated with little fuss or moral hand-wringing in Japan
remains striking. Hiro Fujiwara, a man in his 30s who helped produce
pornographic videos before manning his parents' noodle stand in an Osaka
neighborhood, tells me that "pornography is sort of seen as a good outlet for
men, a sign of a healthy man, like drinking a lot of alcohol." His friend,
Kazuyo, a woman in her mid-20s, concurs, adding that "women don't mind so much
because it means the man is normal. He watches when he is alone."
And this is how many Japanese men live. Habitually sent away from their
families for years at a time by their company heads, Japanese men often have
more intimate relations with their colleagues and the hostesses/mistresses who
serve them than they do with their wives or children. Amid the boom of the
nation's post-war economy, the corporation replaced the family.
"And even if they do go home," says Kazuyo, referring to legions of distant
dads, "they don't really stay there. My father goes out after work and stays
out, or he comes home late and goes to his room." (Married Japanese
traditionally sleep in separate beds.) "He doesn't really know us. On weekends
he plays golf."
That older men lust after younger women, and sometimes girls, is news to no
one. But in Japan the fetish is so entrenched that there's a term for it: Enjo
Kosai translates as "a supportive association or exchange" and means, according
to 24-year-old Saeko: "He supports her lifestyle, she supports his ego."
A newspaper survey reports that 1 in 20 high school girls are involved in Enjo
Kosai, and since poll respondents in Japan tend to reply with more discretion
than those in America, it is generally assumed that the results err on the
conservative side.
The schoolgirl fetish is huge here, abetted by both sexes. The traditional
blouse-and-skirt uniforms are purchased from graduating girls by dealers who
sell them at double the cost to middle-aged men. Girls' underpants, new and
used (purportedly), are sold from vending machines tucked into streetside cul
de sacs alongside sodas, cigarettes, beer and whiskey, and in one case, a few
blocks from a Buddhist temple. Animated and live-action porn videos feature
figures and performers in suggestive schoolgirl garb, as do magazine layouts,
comic book tales and, with slightly less nudity, prime-time TV dramas.
Some actual schoolgirls hitch up their skirts to further expose their thighs
and more on stairwells and escalators. Men might approach them discreetly after
school or through a third party who would set up the "exchange."
"The girls get money, sometimes gifts, you know, material stuff," says Saeko,
who spent five years in Australia and is now applying to graduate schools in
California. "They might have a high school boyfriend, but a lot of them aren't
interested in high school boys. Japanese boys their age are too young or wimpy
or just, like, nerds."
She is quick to point out that Japan is a "feminine country," an observation
that reminds me of its matriarchal foundation myth. In the myth, a sun goddess
named Amaterasu has to be seduced out of her cave by a bunch of ribald farmers
so that the island will become fertile again. The sexy matriarch in Japan can
be seen in everything from classical erotic woodblock prints to modern-day
strip clubs, where men rent magnifying glasses to closely inspect the
strippers' procreative genitalia.
The goddess myth is from Shinto, the only spiritually oriented philosophy that
is indigenous to Japan. Shinto concerns itself with animism -- godlike spirits
in all things, animate or otherwise -- but doesn't demand that one feel guilty
about lust, homosexuality or masturbating in front of a computer fed by 3-D
CD-ROMs -- as long as one doesn't run around talking about it.
"The Japanese approach to sex is mechanical and morbid," says Sylvia, an
Italian expat who has lived in Kyoto for three years. "Especially for the men,
who have an inferiority complex. They can't handle real women so they act like
perverts." She cites office harassment, the subway-groping epidemic that has
only recently gained media attention and the proliferation of rape fantasies on
video, television and in cartoons. "The women won't say anything because of
shame. Then the men go down to Thailand and act like sex maniacs."
I mention the rumored development of touch-sensitive "sexbots" made from some
kind of cyber-skin, molded to teenage proportions with implants of human hair.
Said to moan on contact, they are engineered by the same Kyoto technicians who
introduced the bestselling artificial pets that feed, expel waste and mimic
certain human emotions in their computer-chip hearts.
Sylvia makes a vomit gesture. "Just like those love hotels -- can you believe
it? You pay money for a few hours of just sex. It's so ... mechanical," she
repeats.
Love hotels are Japan's fertility chambers -- gaudy temples to Eros in the
post-war era of rampant overcrowding. Designed to make copulation private,
discreet and desirable in a land where several generations once shared the same
tiny space, love hotels have evolved into a multibillion-dollar industry that
is part-kitsch, part-cool. Twenty to 50 bucks will buy a two-hour stay at
"rest" rates; after 10 p.m. prices rise to $100 or $200, with an early-morning
check-out.
The buildings themselves resemble castles, mansions, palaces, even cruise
ships, all bathed in neon. The theme-oriented rooms (anything from S&M to
tropical island) are immaculate -- a far cry from the notorious fleabags of
American one-night stands. Driveways are shielded behind curtains, license
plates blocked by clip-on devices. The customer feeds his bills into a
computerized slot and chooses a room by pressing a back-lit panel. He never
sees anyone but his partner, and no one else sees him.
The woman who introduces me to Love Hotel Hill in Tokyo's Shibuya district, a
27-year-old actress named Marico, is neither morbid nor mechanical. Like most
unmarried women her age, she still lives at home. Her nights out end here.
We choose a room called "Peach" and are offered a selection of erotic videos on
digital TV. We sip the cheap champagne and check out the bath and bouncy
king-size bed, playing with its lighting control panel. There's a CD player
with four speakers, a video camera, mirrors on the ceilings and walls and, of
course, a massive karaoke machine. We look through the condoms and various oils
and then settle into a deep Jacuzzi, gazing through the tinted window at
lighted Ferris wheels along the bay, six-story Sony screens suspended in space
and alluring soapland neons that blaze till dawn.
Behind its playful gaudiness, the love hotel is forthright and frank, designed by a culture that has learned to dignify space for intimacy. I feel unreasonably secure -- as if this evening's romance were meant to happen, were sane and decent and even ... fun. We can watch each other shower through glass walls, we can tan together in adjacent beds. What a concept! To set aside a respectable, well-appointed and affordable space for physical affection; to lay out the gadgets without pretense or seediness. It's kitsch and cool and honest at once. If capitalism is going to get sexy, this is one way to do it.
