Tokyo Girls
At my first job in Japan (and yes, I am working on the book) was when I also first found out about non-Japanese girls slipping into the “hostess” industry. I was working at an eikaiwa (英会話): essentially an after-school school for both adults and children to learn and practice English conversation. One of the younger teachers there was…well, simply not cutting it. She was a bit too flighty, such that even the more clever children were calling her out on giving poor or inaccurate explanations of English. The owner of the school felt he was going to have to let her go.
But in Japan, the visa you’ve been approved for is still good even if you are fired from the job that helped sponsor you for it. And once you’ve made the effort to move to Japan and get settled, most people don’t want to tuck tail and leave defeated. So the boss of the school, er allegedly, suggested to this young teacher that he could get her a job as a hostess instead. She could make lucrative money there with her bubbly personality and fair skin, especially if she died her hair blonde, he said. And if she really wanted to make bank, he could set her up on a web page for enjo kōsai (援交)… “compensated dating”. Think “sugar-ing”.
As someone newly-settled in Japan after just a few years living abroad post-university, the idea that my boss would be moonlighting as a pimp was shocking and scandalous. Of course, (assuming it’s true, which I do) I’m sure he wouldn’t see it that way at all. Japanese cultural values are in many ways different than Western values. Japanese people like to talk about the Puritan heritage of Americans, and how it results in them being so hung-up on sex, whereas Japanese view it from outside this religious and moral lens. I’ve found however that that’s not really true on a personal level. As borne out by all kinds of statistics from the birth rate to condom sales, Japan is in many ways a largely sexless society. But on a macro level, it’s true that they don’t look at sexual acts with the same set of values as strict Christians.
Penelope Buitenhuis’ film Tokyo Girls (2000) dives into this world, with Western ladies finding their ways into the Japanese hostess industry and revealing their experiences. It’s a short documentary made with the National Film Board of Canada, and still preserved for viewing on their Youtube channel. That means that there is a certain level of “TV-quality” to this, both in style and in the depth to which the ladies delve into the nitty gritty of that nighttime world. But I’m here to fill in some of the gaps between what they’re saying and what they’re not saying…
The approach of the film is to talk to various White women who’ve spent different amounts of time in the industry. Suffice to say that their experiences are a lot more “samey” than the hostesses from the Philippines or Vietnam or even rural Japan. But they have had differing experiences based on when and how long and to what level they got involved in the industry. There’s:
- Dhana- she worked in a couple clubs off and on in early 1990s; was never a super high roller. Her description of her time reveals she was too blunt, she didn’t know how to -or was reluctant to- play the game and reel in the true big spenders.
- Jamie- she worked mostly in one high-profile club from ‘91–’94; she went all-in and played at the top ranks of the field, even getting a “patron”.
- Nancy- she has worked at one or two places for a couple years at the time of filming; she’s just now starting to figure out the reality of the industry… and she hates it.
- Hillary- she’s finishing a 6-month stint shortly after filming; she’s on a gap year and plans to go back to Canada. She doesn’t mind the work and seems blissfully unaware that she’ll be fired if she tries to stay longer (“sayonara parties” are a big moneymaker for clubs, and she refuses to attend them, among other things.)
The film focuses early on Hillary, the youngest of the ladies and so the closest entry point for the average viewer. But that’s not where much of the insight of the film comes from. As someone who lived in Japan for years and later made friends with some Japanese women in the industry, I can tell you that Hillary is so sheltered, and SO bad at her job, ha ha! She’s really coasting on her fair skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, and youth, all of which will get you far in Japan. But once all the customers of a club get used to her, she’ll need the softer skills that make hostesses a success. There’s a reason that this job is different than others in the “mizu shōbai” (水商売) industry like cabaret girls, strippers and go-go dancers, soapland workers, and actual prostitutes.
What Hillary hasn’t figured out yet, that Jamie did, is that the successful Japanese hostesses listen to their customers, make them feel heard. And appreciated. They have diaries with all the important details of their clients, their birthdays, jobs, marital/girlfriend status, alcohol and cigarette brand preferences, even how big their family is or where they’re living. Hostesses are there to provide for the clients needs, and sure, that includes flirting and partying, but it can also be sipping a drink with the guy ranting about how stupid the boss is, how overbearing his wife is, or how unreasonable their family is being. And through it all, they know how to say the right things to keep their client’s hope alive…that someday, maybe, if they’re a good enough and loyal enough customer, the relationship will cross over from the professionally friendly to the truly intimate.
The film interviews several managers of hostess clubs, and one male manager talks about this: repeat customers spending lots of money on a particular hostess and “hoping for sex”, as he puts it. Miss Kurumi, the mega-hostess pictured above, denies ever being paid for sex but says that if she’s feeling the attraction when a client flirts with her, she might go to bed with him. Of course, she’s in-demand enough that she really can control these choices. But what about the vast majority of hostesses, the ones who are less naturally pretty, or start off in a bad, high-pressure, competitive club? This doc doesn’t explain the system for this (because of course there’s a system for everything in Japan) which is “dohan” (どうはん). More on that later.
Back to Hillary. In the footage we see of her early in the film, getting ready for work, dutifully putting in a few phone calls to clients, sitting at a table in the club and fending off mild flirtations, we see why Hillary makes about USD $200/night when Jamie was making 5x that, ten years earlier. Hillary can’t remember a customer who called, says “I’d really like to see you” in the most unconvincing voice, and often tells the clients flat out “no”… She has failed to realize what even Dhana and Nancy knew: they’re not in the “no” business, they’re in the “yes, but…” business.
A lady who manages one hostess club offers an explanation of what “mizu shobai” actually is… and the explanation is some fairydust-coated BS. Like many things in Japan, people are always going to put their best representation forward, not the whole truth. So the interviews and the filming we see inside these clubs is clearly mostly set up, with the owner’s permission, a sort of staged version of hostessing, not the real thing. They know that whatever they say or do is being filmed, so they alter their behavior accordingly, and they know that the director knows, so they assume that the proper mental calculations are being made.
This is not considered lying or manipulation, because fundamental to Japanese culture is the art of “kuuki wo yomu” (空気を読む), or “reading the air”. It is considered a given that of course people will put out the best representation of yourself, and your business, and everyone knows this. So, we’re in a game of everyone knowing the falsehoods involved, and trying to get the other side to be just a bit more honest, more revealing, but never truly having an open, truthful relationship. That’s not just hostessing, that’s almost everything in Japan.
So when watching Tokyo Girls, I’d keep in mind that most of what you see is just the tip of the iceberg — what’s above the surface. Hillary doesn’t even know what she doesn’t know. Nancy is at least aware that there’s a lot more going on. She’s picking up on the implications of the business, on the pressure for dohan and the second type of dohan: アフター “After”. Being in Japan for several years, she’s surely heard the common saying “ichi ieba ju wo shiru”, or “hear one, understand ten.” This illustration of how important it is in Japan to read context while being understated is very much at play in the nightly dance of promises and flirtations in hostess bars. They are perhaps the ultimate distillation of the Japanese ethos, of understanding what’s not being said, of knowing your position and what’s expected in that role, so that you provide it without being asked.
In the film, they try to play off dohan like it’s nothing special, but again: CONTEXT. These men are helping the girls earn extra money, they pay a fee for the dohan. They are not just taking them to some cafe, but to super nice dinner places. And while it’s true that dohans are often scheduled for earlier (to encourage attending the club when they drop the girls off), they push to schedule after a club shift. This removes an excuse for the girls to leave, and allows more time to pop into a “love hotel”, of which there are many located in these hostess club areas. The subtle ramp-up of contextual pressure to do this with high-roller customers is what Nancy is facing in the film. And it’s what Dhana and Jamie dealt with head-on, with two very different results…
Some hostesses in the doc try to blame alcohol for the pushiness of their customers — like guys only try to get fresh with them if they drink too much. But they’ve fundamentally misunderstood the reason why Japan has copious drinking. It’s precisely because it allows a culturally-acceptable excuse to do what you’d like to do but are normally too polite for. This is why in the film, Nancy’s Japanese boyfriend and parents try to explain that working at night where there is alcohol is “bad”, and why it’s illegal. Japan is too subtle to outright ban hostessing (or prostitution, for that matter), so instead they find ways to ban things that enable it. A western girl can’t work in a place with alcohol, i.e. she can’t get exposed to what the men there will eventually try. Same with dancing. Japan wanted to crack down on drugs and club life, so they tried to enforce a rule against dancing after certain hours in places that serve alcohol. Cops would bust into nightclubs and turn off the music, turn on the lights rather than searching people for drugs. Again, read between the lines.
The reality is that hostessing is an inherently exploitative business, and everyone who’s worked in it long enough knows it. But it’s part of the nine that’s heard and not said. The same female club manager that gave the BS mizu shobai explanation also claims that they fire girls who they know had sex with customers. HA! What a line. Firstly, everyone knows not to talk about it. Secondly, there’s too much competition and no club wants to lose a high roller regular. You fire the girl that he likes the most: she goes somewhere else, he goes with her. Bad business. Plus, guys bragging that they heard this one guy saying he got laid with a hostess is good for business. It keeps other guys hopeful. The only crime, like most things in Japan, is being blatant about it. So if a guy does shoot his mouth off, I’m sure this manager “Maria” would say “oh, but you know, guys talk big when drinking. We didn’t think it was really true.” Plausible deniability is the name of the game. Again: everything is about reading the air.
Jamie, the real-deal ’90s big-baller hostess, finally gets into all this in telling about her harrowing experience being forced into having a Yakuza (gangster) patron. And Dhana tells about the other side of that: a guy who pursued her for years, and she kept telling “no” until he eventually stopped coming to the club. Actually, these clubs are so expensive that customers often stop coming after a few years, so she managed to avoid any negative effects. But the thing is, this pushiness isn’t just from high-rollers and Yakuza… these guys could’ve used their influence much more aggressively if they wanted. Probably they were just being so polite because these were White hostesses… uncharted territory. There are no guarantees in this area, especially not for the more typical Asian hostesses. But this world can easily turn very ugly even for the pretty little foreign girls. Look up the case of Lucy Blackman, for example.
Honestly, this whole production is pretty horribly-directed, with super cheesy music, but the doc does talk to a wide variety of “experts” who have solid insights. I especially liked the tracing of Geisha culture to this cheaper, modern version of the same. There’s so much more that could be dived into about the inherent racism in the business though. They talk to fresh-faced white girls, which immediately limits the perspective of this doc to a specific kind of hostess club. If they talked to Japanese hostesses, or clubs that had SE Asian hostesses, they’d truly see the breadth of what can happen in the biz, and how wrong it can (and often does) go. The industry is rife with perpetuations of the kind of forced prostitution and human trafficking that have been persisting since long before Japan’s infamous “comfort women” during WWII…
Suggested reading for more info on the real Japan: the novels Tokyo Underworld, Confessions of a Yakuza, Tokyo Vice, and the film The Great Happiness Space. OH, and for books about what hostess clubs are really like (not the versions experienced for a few months by expat ladies researching college papers or making a few bucks on summer break), I’d advise reading one actually written by a Japanese lady, like Nobuko Yamasaki’s Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire. I did appreciate the insights that eventually come out from some of the women here, but overall this is a pretty rosy depiction of the industry from what I can tell. And this is just the top level. Don’t even get me started on the actual prostitution industry in Japan…
