Serving this new breed of female big-spenders are some 3,000 hosts working at
100 clubs in Tokyo's renowned Kabukicho entertainment district alone. Hosts now
also regularly appear on television variety shows, and some write
no-holds-barred books on their working lives. In many ways, they are becoming
the closest thing to a celebrity that the average woman could ever lay her
hands on.
The entranceways to most host bars are tastefully understated, however what
lies within is anything but.
At one Kabukicho rendezvous room, for instance, raucous pop music blares
constantly from the speakers -- but not loud enough to drown out a group of
hosts yelling a Bronx cheer to urge "Emi" to down her liquor. Across the room,
a host lies with his head in a woman's lap -- and she's hooting with laughter
as she cleans out his ear with a swizzle stick.
Nearby, at the aptly named Club Gigolo, impeccably clad, coiffed and manicured
hosts in designer suits scurry around the throbbing, dimly lit lounge making
sure no customer lingers for even a moment unattended.
Huddled in a padded corner booth, one career Casanova whispers to his partner,
careful not to spill a drop as he pours her drink. Across the room, another
teasingly slaps the shoulder of a woman old enough to be his mother.
What seems like reckless abandon is actually serious business, and pampering is
the bottom line: On a recent evening at Gigolo, even one of the top hosts
received a talking-to after overlooking a cigarette that dangled, rudely unlit,
from a woman's lips.
The whole purpose is to beguile the customer into forgetting what each of them
knows deep down inside -- that the charming man they're with is mainly after
money. "It's like Disneyland," explains Ryo Hoshikawa, 27, a former host who
now promotes several clubs through his Web site FusionClub.net. "We sell
dreams."
Ironically, most buyers are in the same business, too. Insiders reckon that
about 40 percent of the patrons are hostesses, and another 40 percent work in
even more upfront sex trades. The remaining 20 percent are a mix of
celebrities, women entrepreneurs, wives of corporate presidents and a
smattering of regular workers tough enough to withstand the 1 a.m.-8 a.m. hours
most clubs keep.
Women customers commonly explain that after spending long hours in
male-dominated environments, a visit to a host club helps restore their mental
balance. "It's very stressful keeping men happy," says one guest at Gigolo, a
soft-spoken, 22-year-old Ginza hostess who's been dropping by for four years.
"It's nice to have men treating me the same way I treat my customers."
As intimate as things may get, though, there are few illusions of customer-host
relationships ever developing into love. A middle-aged woman seated before a
bottle of Jinro points a thumb at her host of five years and says, "I wouldn't
call this guy a close friend, or anything." So what's the attraction? "Compare
it," she responds somewhat mysteriously, "to a husband-and-wife relationship."
"You come home to your spouse," she continues, "and you have to talk about one,
two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and 10. What a pain. Here, I
just cut straight to 10 and everybody goes gaga over me."
For their pains, top hosts say they make as much in a month as an average Tokyo
salaryman would in an entire year. However, starry-eyed beginners immediately
run up against a rigid working system that dictates who rises to the top and
who fades unceremoniously from the scene. Every host undergoes a probationary
period, during which they must tend to menial chores like sweeping the clubs
and scrubbing toilets before opening time and sorting out empties after hours.
Prima donnas are mercilessly chastised by superiors, and workplace harassment
at some clubs has led to reports of fatal beatings.
Every new host also still has to endure "catching" duty, in which they ply the
streets for customers, hour after hour, no matter the weather. Rain and sleet
may be the least of their worries. One host recalled soliciting a woman who
turned out to be the girlfriend of a gangster. Before he could beat a retreat,
a posse of thugs had him down on the ground, where they punched him and kicked
him before finally dumping a bicycle on him to drive their point home. Despite
his working over, he was lucky, he said, to somehow walk away with only minor
injuries.
Perhaps worse yet is not getting a word in at all. "Some guys spend years
pacing the streets and never go anywhere," said former host Asamitsu Kosugi
(also of FusionClub.net) during a stroll through Kabukicho. Nearby, two men --
hands deep in their pockets to stave off the cold -- delivered desperate sales
pitches to a pair of party girls who apparently couldn't care less.
The drudgery may be seeming to go on forever. Then, just like that, the host
can have a lucky break. A woman collars him on the street. Or perhaps she takes
a fancy to his photo on Lady's Club Chocolate Romance, or any of the multitude
of other host-business Web sites where a date is only a click away.
However she finds her man, when a woman heads down to a host club and appoints
him her shimeisha (assigned host), he's won the exclusive right to entertain
her there. Then, too, she becomes off-limits because -- in a system designed to
stop infighting between hosts -- she has to be with her chosen beau whenever
she's at the club.
From the hosts' perspective, the system creates a sense of financial stability.
Becoming a shimeisha is a prerequisite for making money, as hosts survive not
on their base salary -- typically a daily pittance of about 7,000 yen -- but by
taking a cut of the customer's tab at the club. What better way for a cozy,
albeit contrived, bond to flourish?
But getting the woman into the club is only the first step. Once she's there
her host wants her to drink -- and since nobody likes to drink alone, he must
drink with her. And drink, and drink. Brandy, shochu distilled spirits, you
name it, every host consumes it in mind-boggling quantities every day. Despite
discreet trips to the restroom, where they force themselves to vomit as much
booze as possible, many hosts still fret over the state of their livers.
Those trips to the john aren't only for physical relief. A wise host will also
pull out his notebook and jot down any details on a customer that he can recall
through the fog of his memory, says Issa Tsurumi, 23, a top earner who's been
in the business three years. Important details include her work, hobbies and
birthday, and in the case of top customers, even their parents' given names.
The most popular hosts work for up to 30 women at a time, so it's not
surprising they occasionally forget a woman's profile. In an emergency, it
helps to switch the blame, suggests host superstar Yuya Mikami, 26. "You say,
'Girl, you've been away four whole months! How am I supposed to remember your
face?' " he explains, adding, "Then you apologize."
Sooner or later in any dedicated host's career, a customer asks for sex.
Insiders say she sometimes gets what she asks for. But despite their public
image as exemplars of virility, many hosts consider gentle, yet firm, refusal a
key to professional survival. "It's a small world and rumors spread like
wildfire," says former host Hoshikawa. "Let's say a guy sleeps with Girl A and
with Girl B, and as his luck has it, they're friends with each other. Poof! Two
perfectly good customers down the drain."
Playing hard-to-get pays off, he says. "If the guy makes himself a boy-toy too
easily, the woman will just get her fill and take her business elsewhere."
As for those cases when a host, for whatever reason, does decide to go the
extra mile, to stay on the right side of the law he has to go about it
privately and keeps his employer out of it, according to a spokesman at the
National Police Agency who requested anonymity. Of course, despite the risk of
complications, extra services may inspire a woman to lavish her host with
gifts, and Cartier watches and luxury cars aren't unheard of -- they also help
keep the host from falling foul of the Law Regulating Adult Entertainment
Businesses, which forbids offering sex for cash.
With the legalities attended to, though, there's still the practical matter of
faking excitement if he's not physically attracted to the woman. "I guess guys
with strong libidos can pull it off," says Hoshikawa. "But I never even
bothered trying. I knew I'd be found out in a second."
Emotional matters aside, business is business and a host's devotion --
consummated or not -- doesn't come cheap. Mainly, payment goes to the club,
which then pays the host a cut of as much as 60 percent. Consider the cash flow
at Club Rêve, also in Kabukicho. There, a customer pays 5,000 yen at the door,
a 2,000 yen table charge and 3,000 yen to choose a host. That's before an
average 25,000 yen for heavily marked-up drinks. Tack on a 30 percent service
fee, and you begin to get the idea.
Indeed, alcohol is the cash cow for any host club. At Rêve, a relatively frugal
guest may opt for a 10,000 yen bottle of shochu. The more adventurous order
200,000 yen bottles of "Fantasy XO Decanter" brandy, which contain little
painted glass figurines of animals from the Chinese zodiac. The wildly
indulgent, however, splurge on a 2 million yen bottle of Hine brandy that is
delivered in its own hermetically sealed box. Rêve owner and host
extraordinaire Maru Amami boasted that admirers celebrating his birthday there
in May helped push his personal earnings to 16 million yen that month, mainly
by spending on drinks.
But like every business, host clubs also have their costs. There are salaries,
there's rent, and then there's protection money of course -- typically 30,000
yen to 150,000 yen a month payable to whichever crime syndicate is top dog in
their section of the entertainment district.
Costliest of all, though, is when someone upends a table full of drinks,
knocking a bottle to the floor. At Rêve, Maru displayed a Frapin brandy, its
Baccarat crystal decanter cracked, its contents in the mop bucket. "That cost
me 400,000 yen," he said. But experience has taught him to prepare for at least
some contingencies. "See these pictures?" he said, waving a hand at the Art
Nouveau posters on the wall. "All fake, with plastic in the frames rather than
glass. This protects not just me, but also my customers when they've had a few
too many."
While Rêve, with its dreamy, circumflexed name and French salon decor, may
exude a certain Westernized air, the notion of wrapping commercialized romance
in elaborate pretense is very much based on Japanese precedent. We know that by
the 16th century, teahouses were arranging trysts between rich, but lonely,
women and male kabuki actors who provided sexual favors as a sideline,
according to U.S. author and long-time Japan resident Donald Richie, who has
written extensively on Japan's social mores. The teahouses -- like their modern
offshoots -- charged a hefty premium, partly to cover the expense of the many
middlemen involved in the subterfuge.
But money can't always buy secrecy. "In Edo history, there are many anecdotes
of the woman getting caught or the man getting caught, and the awful things
that happened to them," says Richie. He cited as an example a 1714 scandal in
which a woman known as Ejima, and her kabuki-actor partner, Ikushima Shingoro,
were banished into separate exile for conducting an illicit affair.
Nonetheless, similar trysting customs persisted, with varying degrees of
stealth, through the years. Then, in the mid-1960s, Night Tokyo -- said to be
Japan's first host club -- appeared outside Tokyo Station's Yaesu exit. With a
staff of more than a hundred, it serviced a steady flow of hostesses, their
mama-san bosses and the occasional wife of a yakuza boss, says Takeshi "King of
the Hosts" Aida, 62, who worked at the club in its heyday. Aida broke off and
opened his own host club, Ai, in Shinjuku 2-chome, before going on to establish
several others in the area. The idea caught on and soon there were copycats
everywhere. A modern institution was born.
That from such tentative beginnings such a mightily prosperous host-club
industry has grown is, in its way, a good reflection of women's changing role
in postwar Japan. For one, the booming revenue in this sector is hard-cash
evidence of what sociologists may employ reams of -isms to intuit -- namely,
that young Japanese women have begun to feel less shame over sexual activity.
It also sends a clear warning to Japanese men who expect women to maintain a
secondary, servile role in society. Says Richie: "Host clubs have become
respectable because of the growing power of the single woman and the gradual,
reluctant acceptance of a real feminism."
That isn't to suggest that the host clubs always play a healthy role. In recent
years, there have been numerous reports of female customers falling victim to
the shadier aspects of the industry. In some cases this has involved them being
forced into prostitution (or, as insiders point out, further into prostitution)
to pay off a tremendous tab. Other allegations have included clubs luring
under-age girls, presumably to stick them with large bills they can only repay
by working for affiliated sex businesses.
Some day soon, though, Hoshikawa hopes the industry will shake off its shady
image. "Until now, we were seen as special places, underground places. But now
people take a reasonable view of us," he says. The outcome, he believes, will
be a higher class of customer -- woman executives, for example, who will demand
that their hosts know foreign languages and stay abreast of current events to
hold their interest.
After all, times are changing. "As women gain a better place in Japanese society," he says, "the world of hosts will also climb one step higher."
