Sex and the City - Image Club

Sex and the city

Tokyo's sex industry caters to myriad male fantasies. There are even clubs where men grope female 'passengers' on fake subway carriages. Gaby Wood explores the paradox of a highly structured society with an unbridled appetite for sex

Gaby Wood

Sat 31 Mar 2001 19.48 EST

The scene is one David Lynch would have envied: curvy red velvet seats swoosh around walls beneath curtains of cut-glass beads; the lighting is a dim, dark pink. Every outfit is culled, in a postmodern sort of way, from some stock American look: the women at the door are dressed the way air stewardesses were in the 60s; the men standing guard are like elegant bellboys; the hostesses are required to wear short skirts, and one of them is a perfect imitation of Audrey Hepburn; the girls who clear the tables are darting about, their long, fishnet legs topped by bunny outfits in baby-pink satin.

Until last year, Tokyo's nightlife or sex life barely made a mark on the average Briton's brain - a geisha might have been imagined, or someone might have repeated the well-worn myth that schoolgirls sell their knickers on the street. But now it conjures up, first and unforgettably, the name of a dead girl. In the long months when Lucie Blackman was missing, attention was focused not just on her disappearance, but also on her circumstances - on the mysteries, to British minds, of the place that she had gone from. Where was the Roppongi district and what was it like? What was a bar hostess expected to do? Was she part of the Tokyo sex industry, and what, if she was, would that mean?

I have come to try and separate the myths of sex - and sexism - in Tokyo from the facts, but the territory turns out to be hard to navigate. Every corner seems to throw up some new paradox that makes it impossible to import and impose Western views. Convenience stores sell glossy magazines that look at first glance as though they could be some version of Smash Hits. They are, in fact, full of teenage girls in swimsuits or hitched-up school uniforms. But at least one in 20 Tokyo high-school girls has been involved in prostitution: if they choose to earn money that way, can we call it exploitation? Papers advertising prostitutes are read unabashedly on the subway. And yet there are other forms of regimentation: within minutes, a visitor to the city will notice that no one crosses the street at a red light, even if the street is clear, and also that if one person does jaywalk, a huge crowd will follow blindly behind. Angela Carter, who lived in Japan for some years, once wrote that 'Few societies lay such stress on public decency and private decorum. Few offer such structured escape valves.'

And here, next door to the seamy club where Lucie Blackman worked, is this high-class joint, the David Lynch masterpiece, which must be about as structured as escape valves get. Glove is the largest hostess bar in the whole of the Tokyo region. It employs 100 hostesses every night, and, unlike many others in Roppongi, is frequented and run mostly by Japanese people. As far as I can tell, there is only one foreign hostess, an Eastern European, and I seem to be the only woman in the club who is not working.

'I've learnt a lot about men since I've been working here,' says Mae, one of the hostesses sent to entertain us.

'Like what?'

'Well, before I came here I didn't think all men were stupid. But now I know they are.'

All of the five hostesses I speak to have a similar attitude. They are sweet, polite, and yet wonderfully cynical. There is nothing, on the face of it, to leave you saddened, and on this evidence you would hardly include the practice of hostessing under the umbrella of the sex industry at all.

In fact, Anne Allison, author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club, makes an important distinction between hostesses and other nightworkers. Other outfits may be staffed by no-pan (meaning 'no panties') singers and waitresses, or girls whose job is to cover men in suds at 'soaplands', or the performers of oral sex in 'pink cabarets'. But one of the universal rules of the hostess service, no matter how classy or sad the bar, is that 'while alluding to sex, [it] cannot proceed to genital penetration or oral sex; and the service is conducted primarily at the level of conversation'.

The heartland of the sex industry is further north, in Kabukicho, an area named after a theatre that was planned here and never built. Near a warren of alleyways famous for its tiny bars, is an endless sprawl of modern streets. Towering, tacky neon announces the delights to be found behind drab curtains in small rooms. Much of the prostitute population is made up of Thai or Filipina women - and teenagers in school uniforms, girls dressed up like office workers or women posing as other people's wives are here for the taking.

I have heard about a relatively new kind of sex club, which simulates the environment of a subway train - taped train noises are pumped into the room and girls hold on to handles hanging from the ceiling as the punters feel them up - so men who might otherwise molest women in real life can confine it to a fantasy. We embark on a search for one of these 'Image Clubs'. We have no address, only a name and a price list, which, in our quest for directions, we show to strangers in the street. 'Shinjuku Peachy Assed Girls' School,' it reads, 'entrance ¥1,000 [£10]. Choice of room ¥2,000. Ripping pants off a school-girl ¥2,000. Two Polaroids ¥2,000. Taking the pants home ¥2,000. Our speciality is the train room - it's so realistic!' Our impromptu guides barely bat an eyelid.

The Image Club train feature is the underground reflection of an underground phenomenon: molesters on the subways, or chikan, are incredibly common in Tokyo - a survey conducted this year found that 72 per cent of teenage girls had been groped on their way to school - and only recently have the police started to take it seriously. Now women are encouraged to report incidents to station staff, while previously, as one former Tokyo resident tells me, they were too ashamed of being harassed to draw attention to it. On the internet, girls now post advice for each other: always have a safety pin to hand in case you need to defend yourself. In December last year, one subway line experimented with a single segregated car for women at night. Plain-clothes policewomen have been hired to patrol certain lines, and posters have been put up to remind people that 'molestation is a crime'. Last year, 1,854 men were arrested for molesting women on trains.

Samu Yamamoto, an expert in these matters, thinks it's possible that the train rooms in sex clubs have arisen in response to the crackdown on the real trains. 'The customers at Image Clubs are mainly doctors or lawyers or teachers,' he tells me, 'professionals who can't do that kind of thing on the train, so they do it where they legally can.'

Yamamoto, now a middle-aged man, has been groping women on trains since he was 17. At the peak of his activity, he would ride around Tokyo from morning until night, and molest about 10 women a day. He is famous in Japan because he wrote a memoir about his experiences, Diary of a Chikan, in 1996. The book received so much attention that he wrote another, Peeper, the same year, and in 1998 he came up with Confessions of a Chikan. When his books were published, he became a kind of cult hero, and he now writes about the sex industry for various magazines. Even his wife, whom he claims he met by molesting her on the subway, thinks he is just a journalist.

Yamamoto has become a kind of sexual philosopher - he has strong views about male and female sexuality, he knows about the sex industry, he is interested in the 'addiction' that made him a chikan, what makes, as he puts it, 'desire overcome reason'. But he is also an emblem of a certain contemporary situation. He became a pop cultural figure at a time when women's rights were still something of a joke and now he laments the fact that young women have become more independent, or - as he prefers to say - more selfish. Yamamoto embodies the transition, or two-way traffic, between sexual fantasy and sexist reality. For instance, he is now a director of porn videos: he films people being molested on trains. He also contributes illustrations to adult comics. His family still believes that his memoirs are a fiction. In Yamamoto's career, as in Tokyo itself, fantasy is not hidden underneath reality - the two coexist side by side.

My attempt to get into an Image Club was doomed to failure, since they only admit Japanese men. So I ask Yamamoto if he's been to the train rooms, and what he makes of this curious parallel reality. He tells me he went to one for 'research'. 'I found it boring,' he says. 'It's different from reality, because the girls are standing in front of you, prepared to be felt up - it's their job. Whereas as a professional, I was prepared to be caught. The environment is like a stage set. I found it totally unexciting; there was no thrill.'

If, in the sex industry, little has altered, then the speed with which changes are being made for women on other echelons is surprisingly fast. 1999 saw the passage of a Basic Law for Gender Equality, and an Equal Employment Opportunity Law. An anti-stalking law was passed last year, and this month, Japan's first law on domestic violence will be submitted. Some months ago, there was a dramatic victory for equal rights when, in the most high-profile sexual harassment, or seku-hara , case Japan has ever seen, the once- popular governor of Osaka pleaded guilty to the indecent assault of a 21-year-old member of his campaign staff. 'I did not sense the woman was annoyed,' he said in his defence, 'because she did not resist much when I slipped my hand inside her pants.' He was forced to resign and was replaced, symbolically, by a woman.

And yet Professor Sumiko Iwao, a member of Japan's Office for Gender Equality, said recently that 'Japanese women are still not sure what feminism is'. Even the word seku-hara is an import from the West, an abbreviation of the term 'sexual harassment'. I ask Dr Dolores Martinez, who teaches anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, if she thinks feminism has reached Japan. 'Japanese feminists would say it has,' she replies. Martinez says that many of them believe too much of imported feminism is based on Western agendas, and that Japan must set its own. 'For example, the fact that menstrual leave was introduced - that women are entitled to take two days off work a month - was seen as a great victory, whereas in the West, women are unlikely to draw attention to the fact that they menstruate.' Fewer women are concerned about the sex industry than they might be in the West, Martinez explains, partly because a large percentage of those workers are not Japanese, and partly because Japanese feminists have other axes to grind. 'Their political activism is related to the protection of the environment, or improving conditions within the family home - issues that we might not necessarily call feminist.'

There is a reason for this internal logic. Mika, a 38-year-old Japanese woman, worked as a designer in an architects' firm in Tokyo, then married a South African; they have a young child and live in London. 'Life for women in Japan is not just a question of women's rights,' she says, 'the whole culture is involved. It might look unequal to an outsider, but women have power in the home, including financial power. The woman has total power over how the money is spent, and over the children's education, for example.

'I see old friends in Japan and they have absolute security, whereas here women are expected to be breadwinners as well. In Japan the man is the breadwinner, and women can concentrate on everything inside the home and the family. Japanese women have such a comfortable lifestyle. Japanese women live much longer than men. Actually, more pressure is on the man, that's why there is so much suicide, and so many disappearances. In society we don't have many rights, but in the family we do.'

I ask if she thinks it matters, then, that the career situation is not equal.

'I don't know,' Mika replies. 'What is a woman's happiness? If you have a dream to be a doctor or a lawyer, maybe Japan is not a good place, but that's changing. In my case, I am happy to be with my child.'

As ever, the myths and superficial facts of sexism, and sex, are nowhere near the complicated truth. Though Mika is a long way from Tokyo's nightlife, her words of confidence might just as easily have been expressed by the hostesses at Glove - by Anna, for example, who told me that she feels she works too hard, but doesn't mind because she earns good money; or by Mariko, who teaches in a primary school by day and works as a hostess to make up her salary. All of these women have chosen how to live their lives. 'In some ways,' Mika says of Japanese women, 'if you see deep inside, we have freedom.'

• Additional reporting by Jonathan Watts.

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