Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club 9780804798556

Citation preview

S TAGE D S E D U C TI O N

S TA G E D S E D U C T I O N SELLING DREAMS IN A TOKYO HOST CLUB A K I KO TA K E YAMA

S TANFORD UNIVERSIT Y PRESS 

• 

S TANFORD, C ALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Takeyama, Akiko, 1970– author. Staged seduction : selling dreams in a Tokyo host club / Akiko Takeyama. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-9124-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—isbn 978-0-8047-9854-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)— isbn 978-0-8047-9855-6 (electronic) 1. Love—Economic aspects—Japan—Tokyo. 2. Man-woman relationships—Japan—Tokyo. 3. Sex-oriented businesses—Japan—Tokyo. 4. Sexual ethics—Japan—Tokyo. 5. Nightclubs— Japan—Tokyo. 6. Tokyo (Japan)—Social life and customs—21st century. I. Title. gt2600.t35 2016 392.60952'135—dc23 2015029298 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion Pro

For all dreamers

CONTENTS



Notes on Japanese Terms and Currency

ix



Prelude

xi

Introduction: Promise of the Future

1

1 The Consumable City

23

2 Commodified Romance

39

3 Entrepreneurial Attraction

71

4 Feminine Restoration

103

5 The Art of Seduction

135

Conclusion: Affect Economy

163



Acknowledgments

175



Notes

179



References

195



Index

209

NOTES ON JAPANESE TERMS AND CURRENCY

In this book, Japanese names are written according to the Japanese order, with the surname preceding the given name. An exception is made for authors whose names have been published using the Western name order. Please note that host clubs and participants are given pseudonyms to maintain confidentiality. Some of the identifiable information concerning my informants is also modified for the same reason. This text uses the modified Hepburn system of romanization. Long vowels are denoted by macrons (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū), with the exception of places or terms that are well known in English (Tokyo or Hokkaido, for example). Currency exchange has been calculated using a rate of 100 yen per US dollar. Though the exchange rate has fluctuated during the period of my fieldwork and follow-up research over the last ten years, this number is a reflection of the average exchange rate between August 2003 and July 2013.

PRELUDE

One late Saturday night in September 2004, I walked alone into Tokyo’s Kabukichō red-light district, the restless heart of the country’s sex and entertainment industry. Among Japanese, Kabuki-chō is commonly referred to as the “sleepless castle” and a “labyrinth of lust.” The district is located in the city’s Shinjuku ward, a major commercial and administrative hub.1 Kabuki-chō is a five-minute walk from Shinjuku eki, the world’s busiest train station. To enter, you walk down a gently sloped grade into a vast arena of adultentertainment offerings.2 The roughly one-quarter-square-mile area is filled with bars, karaoke boxes, game centers, pachinko parlors, hostess clubs, love hotels, and thousands of other sex-related businesses. It reverberates with the aggressive shouts of club promoters, upbeat techno music from karaoke bars, high-decibel mechanical and digital beeps from game centers, and the occasional sirens of patrol cars. When I arrived, darkness had descended and provided a splendid backdrop to a colorful array of billboards and neon signs. Beneath these glowing displays, I watched fashionably dressed women cluster in small groups. Their free-andeasy manner with one another and occasional side glances created unguarded moments in which men would flirtatiously approach them. These advances were part of the night’s entertainment. As I wandered down one of the streets, a young man addressed me from behind, “Hey lady, interested in a host club?” (Onēsan, hosuto kurabu wa ikaga desuka?) Across the district, men in black suits attempt to lure salarymen into hostess clubs and pornographic peep shows. This man was different. He aggressively advertised both himself and his club to passing women. Nervously, I wondered, Why did he approach me? I did not intend to visit a host club that night. I just wanted to observe the street scene. I need to be cautious around men like him, I thought. But

xii    PRELUDE

then again, this was a good opportunity to learn more about the hosting business. I should have dressed up to fit in among the host clubs’ glamorous clientele. My outfit—a simple cotton shirt, a pair of khaki pants, and very little makeup—was not appropriate for clubbing. Should I just walk away or ask where he works? On closer inspection, he looked unlike other hosts who bleached their hair, wore gaudy accessories, and pretended to be playboys. These men vigorously sought to draw women into their respective clubs through their flamboyant performance and casual talk. Their tacky appearance and obsequious approaches amused me, but they were not my type and I shied away from them. This man, however, was clean-cut with short black hair and wore a simple suit. He was very polite. I answered back: “Well, I . . . I am researching host clubs. I came to Kabuki-chō tonight . . . ” I started to say, but he interrupted. “Why don’t you come over and see my host club? It’s only 5,000 yen [about $50] for the first visit. It’s a good deal, isn’t it?” “Not bad at all,” I said. “Where do you work?” “I work for club Orion.” “I have heard of it. It’s a famous club, isn’t it?” “Yes, it is one of the long-standing clubs [in the district]. Unlike a lot of other unknown ones, our club is known for its fair business practices. You can trust us.” His congeniality put me at ease, and I decided to follow him to Orion. I learned he was twenty-three and had started working at the club five months earlier. His host name was Shin, his brother’s name, and he was the eldest son of four children. When Shin finished middle school in Ibaraki, a Tokyo suburb, he started working for his father’s construction company. But he soon quit because of the hard labor. Shin then took a job at a clothing store but grew tired of working under someone else’s supervision. He saw an advertisement for “night work” ( yoru no shigoto) and decided to become a host. Shin told me that he devoted himself exclusively to the hosting business and had no time for a girlfriend.3 Despite our twelve-year or so age difference, I was taken aback by how open Shin was. I began to tell him about my life. I said I was a graduate student in the United States and had returned to Japan for a year to conduct fieldwork. I grew up in Hamamatsu, 130 miles south of Tokyo, where I was an “office lady”

PRELUDE    xiii

(full-time office worker) at an insurance company until 1997, when I quit my job and left home to go to university. Although I did not mention my marital status, the amount I did share with him surprised me. We both sought alternatives to conventional salaryman/housewife roles in Japan’s rigid corporate and family systems. We also aspired to upward social mobility. As our rapport grew, the Kabuki-chō nightlife scene no longer felt so alien to me. I asked Shin if I could conduct my research with him that night, and he agreed. I also questioned whether I should talk to his club manager, but he said it was unnecessary. Hosts are self-employed, independent agents who exercise autonomy over their tables. After passing several clubs and bars, I saw a large black sign with white stylish lettering, “Ladies Only Club, Orion.” Located in a plain, concrete building, Orion had no windows or notable architectural decorations. The entrance was unadorned: no velvet ropes, no curtains, no bouncers. There were a couple of hosts outside, smoking cigarettes and casually talking on the phone. They paid little attention to us. A large, glass showcase stood in the entryway. It featured glossy color headshots of five of Orion’s top-ranking hosts. They were young, handsome men with androgynous features. The photos reminded me of David Bowie in the film Labyrinth or members of Japan’s “visual bands,” known for their flashy outfits, hairstyles, cosmetics, and performances. The hosts’ shaggy, feathered hair with brown highlights framed their pale faces. A few rested their delicate hands against their faces. Others stroked their hair with their long, thin fingers. Some smiled innocently, while others provocatively pursed their rose-colored lips. Once Shin opened the club’s heavy door, it seemed as if a theater curtain had been lifted, and I was thrust onto a stage in the midst of a lively show. In front of me were four or five female customers whose conversations and laughter kept pace with the music’s upbeat tempo. Their fashionable attire accentuated the venue’s modern decor—a calculated palette of white walls, red leather sofas, and round black tables. Indirect lighting cast shadows of the vibrant scene around the room. These elements lent the club an atmosphere much like that of lounges in trendy hotels. As I entered, a couple of hosts greeted me with irasshaimase! (welcome) and deep bows. I sat on a sofa, buffered from the other clients by empty tables. Shin swiftly sat down next to me. “So, what do you think of the club?” His two “helper hosts” assembled beside us. They opened a bottle of shōchū wheat liquor and served it in highball glasses with iced water. Another helper host carefully laid a lace napkin on my lap. They commented on how slow business

xiv    PRELUDE

was and how much my presence had “lightened” the club’s mood. I was then given a toast. “What is your name?” a helper host asked me. “Akiko,” I replied. “No wonder you are so pretty! There are statistics showing that women named Akiko tend to be beautiful,” he said. I doubted there were such statistics, but his remarks reminded me that many Japanese parents, including my own, named their daughters Akiko after the 1959 Miss Universe, Akiko Kojima—the first Asian to ever win the pageant. “Have you ever been told that you look like a TV announcer?” another helper jumped in and asked. The term he used was joshiana, a female announcer typically seen on ­Tokyo-based national broadcasts. The joshiana is a symbol of an ideal Japanese ­femininity—a rare combination of intelligence, beauty, and popularity. “Um . . . no, not really,” I said, but I was flattered. “You know, the kind of announcer at a local station who is lovable . . . but not quite sophisticated!” Everyone at the table, including myself, burst into laughter. Around the club, men provide attentive service to women, as well as their main hosts, as if they were royalty. Hosts would rest their hands on their clients’ shoulders, arms, or laps to gauge their reactions and ensure they were having a good time. If a helper host saw a woman pulling out a cigarette, he would quickly produce a lighter and wait for her to put the cigarette in her mouth. They did the same for the main host as a show of respect. At the table, these men supported the hosts’ flirtatious gestures, felicitously reacting to their jokes and compliments. The hosts’ body movements—lighting cigarettes, mixing drinks, flirting, and laughing—were highly stylized and exaggerated. They made every possible effort to please their clientele. Surrounded by this attention, unusual for women in Japan’s male-centered society, I felt like a celebrity. In the club, women were excused from traditional feminine roles and instead experienced what it was like to be cared for by men. Though I was swept away by all of the attention, I wondered why these hosts asked me such personal questions. Were they actually interested in my research? Or did they simply treat me as they would any client? They asked,

PRELUDE    xv

among other things, how much I enjoyed drinking alcohol, where I lived, and what my hobbies were. I came to realize that their inquiries were designed to gauge my wealth and whether I might solicit their hosting services again. While I contemplated the hosts’ intent, I noticed my knee was slightly touching Shin’s. I straightened myself and slid my leg away. As I was drawn back into the conversation, my pant leg once again rubbed against Shin’s. He inched slightly closer and leaned over to me. “Are you having a good time?” he murmured into my ear. I nodded. His whisper was ticklish, and, mildly affected by the alcohol, I became entranced by the sweet fragrance of his cologne. His subtle gestures had transformed the club’s open space into an intimate environment where his proximity, whether accidental or not, seemed deliberate. Shin conveyed nothing substantive to me in his furtive whispers. However, by withholding the content of these exchanges from others, I grew attracted to him. These feelings arose because of—not despite—the existence of others in the open space. Shin created a fantasy, wherein my sensual experience and cognitive interpretation felt all-encompassing. Orion closed around 1:00 a.m. I paid a total of 5,000 yen, which covered the table charge, a bottle of shōchū, and water. Shin then invited me to a bar for afutā—after-hours activities, in which hosts privately express appreciation to their clients by accompanying them to a restaurant, pub, or karaoke bar. “I usually don’t drink this much, but I feel so good and special tonight for some reason,” he said as he loosened his tie. “So, how common is it for a host to go out with women after hours?” I asked him. “It depends upon the host, but I usually don’t go to the ‘after,’” he ­replied. “When do you go then?” “Only when a client asks me or I feel like inviting a woman to spend more time together. Yeah, I wouldn’t go unless I’m interested in the woman and want to know her better.” His remarks made me wonder if he really was interested in me. No way, I thought to myself. “So, what kind of women are you interested in, as clients?” I continued. “Well, I like a woman who has things that I don’t, like . . . intelligence,” Shin said as he looked straight at me. “I like an intelligent woman,” he repeated, as if to gauge my reaction.

xvi    PRELUDE

“You were hungry tonight, anyway,” I managed to say jokingly. “You don’t understand men’s minds, do you?” he said. Shin looked disappointed and turned his back to me. Changing the subject, I asked Shin about his hosting experience. He told me that he had lost some important clients and was struggling to maintain his sales. The owner recently promoted Shin to kanbu in the club—a position of elevated managerial status. Because of this, he felt too busy to focus personal attention on his clients. “It’s such a critical time for me to keep this position, you know?” he sighed. I was honored that Shin felt comfortable enough to share his vulnerability. But I also understood that by appealing to my omoiyari (sympathies), he expected me to respond sympathetically and contribute to his sales. It was already past three in the morning when he finished telling me about his struggles and motivations, as well as the rewards he sought by hosting. Although I tried to pay the 4,000-yen bill, Shin insisted that it was at his invitation and therefore on him. Outside the bar, it was drizzling. It had been a long day and I was worn out. Shin said that he would help me find a taxi. As we walked, I kept my eyes on the pavement, trying to avoid puddles. When I looked up, we were on Hoterugai (Hotel Street), lined with love hotels—establishments where couples can book rooms for a few hours up to an entire night. Discomfort crept in when I realized where we were. Shin and I were both tired and intoxicated, and I was unsure of his intentions as we continued together at this late hour. Trying to avoid this awkward silence, I said: “I’ve read an account about makura eigyō [literally, ‘pillow business,’ meaning to have sex with clients for money],” I said. “Oh, how did you know about that? What did it say?” “Well, hosts who do ‘pillow business’ intentionally walk this street to lure their clients into the hotels. Those who don’t avoid walking here to stay away from the business.” “These are just building boxes and mean nothing to me,” Shin said. I was impressed by his response. Indeed, in Kabuki-chō, I had often thought about how physical spaces were merely screens upon which people’s desires were inscribed. “Why are we walking here?” I asked, still seeking his real intentions. “It’s a slight shortcut to the main road. No special reason,” he said.

PRELUDE    xvii

At this point, I stopped asking questions. By saying what I knew about his business, I revealed more about my own state of mind than I learned about his. Shin hailed a taxi and I entered the back seat. “Here is my card,” Shin said, reaching into his breast pocket. “Please call me anytime. I will assist you in any possible way.” He then pulled out my card, which I had given him earlier, from his side pocket and looked at it carefully. He leaned toward me, lowering his back. “I will give you a call,” he said. “Thank you and goodbye.” I nodded back. The automatic taxi door shut quietly, muting the street noise of Kabuki-chō. The dazzling neon lights faded into the blackness of the night as the car slowly drove away. I felt a wave of late-night fatigue as if a long, thrilling movie had ended and I was left alone in the dark theater. But it was merely the end of the first act. Shin’s words, “I will give you a call,” echoed pleasantly in my mind and hinted of something more to happen. He told me earlier that he did not like phone calls and would never offer to call clients. I could not help looking forward to hearing from him again. Shin did not follow through on his promise, but he did send me a text message the following day: “How is your research progressing?” I replied and asked to set up an official interview. He wanted me to visit him at Orion again. I sought something more neutral and suggested a coffee shop. My research and Shin’s business interests were evidently at odds. Unsurprisingly, Shin’s texts then took on an indifferent tone. Unlike previous ones, which addressed me by name and involved some back and forth, they became shorter, more general, and less frequent. My anticipation of our friendship and memories of my thrilling night gradually dimmed. A few weeks later, Shin stopped contacting me after I told him that I had received permission to do research at a different host club. •

•

•

Though I ostensibly hung out with Shin for research, I was unsure how to characterize the nature of our relationship. Was it researcher-informant? ­Client-host? Friend-friend? My confusion was compounded by the ambiguous meanings of his suggestive acts: spending time with me, showing his vulnerability, paying the bill, and caring about my work. Did he genuinely want to be my friend? Or was this a business investment aimed at luring me back to his club? A future visit could cost a minimum of 20,000 yen ($200). As I later learned, this rumination is a common experience among host club clients. Women I interviewed had also engaged in extended interior dialogues

xviii    PRELUDE

about their feelings, hosts’ intentions, and anticipated romance. In this sense, my exchange with Shin was not unlike the performance of romance between all of the hosts and their customers. I tasted the experience of what it is like to buy this “staged” seduction. At the same time, I futilely attempted to resolve my feelings of confusion, hope, and despair, which persisted well beyond my immediate encounter with Shin. Just as the host cannot ascertain the full worth of his client in their early meetings—what we might call the initial staging of seduction—the client also does not fully realize the value of the seduction at the moment of their first exchange. The latent value of it comes from the “eclipse”—the not-yet fully realized meanings of these early transactions, which allow us to imagine the horizons of our relationship trajectories. They set a mood for a future, marked by questions of whether it will be prosperous or purposeless. In this respect, the future collapses into the present. At the same time that women fantasize over their futures, the past is inevitably invoked in their visions. Their corporeal experiences of arousal and reverie from their host encounters, for example, are shaped by recollections of former exchanges with these men. They may be remembered as thrilling, rewarding, and pleasurable, or painful, disappointing, and even devastating. This collapsing and stretching of the temporal dimension of value—contouring our orientation toward future experiences and nostalgia over past relationships—is neither determined beforehand nor fixed. It is contingent on how long the process of seduction itself remains in play and what kinds of meanings are attached to the process. Staged Seduction is an ethnographic account of host club participants’ human dramas. Their performances take place in elaborate club spaces and affective cityscapes, against a backdrop of politico-economic rhetoric of structural reforms and enterprising individualism. These accounts unveil how people’s temporal sense of future, present, and past, as well as spatial orientations of here and there, fold into restless feelings of both hope and despair. ­Japan’s expanding service economy evokes and capitalizes on these feelings. As I demonstrate throughout this book, these feelings heighten individuals’ perceptions of freedom, fuel business profit, and reinforce state-sponsored incentives for a prosperous future of the nation.

S TAGE D S E D U C TI O N

INTRODUCTION Promise of the Future

“So do you fall in love with your clients?” A mildly intoxicated young woman poses this question to a man in a shadowy corner of an Osaka host club. Dim light refracts through the club’s opulent fixtures, turning her white cocktail dress deep sepia. It shines on the host’s flaxen hair and reflects off his glittering gold pendant. As they sit together on a red sofa, the host attempts to dodge his client’s penetrating eyes. He appears a bit nervous and chooses his words carefully: “I guess I do [fall in love with my clients]. . . . This is the only place I meet girls.” A melancholy love song playing in the background carries his voice and dramatizes the scene. The woman asks him to repeat what he just said. “This is the only place I can fall in love, right? All my ex-girlfriends were customers.” The host awkwardly shifts his eyes from her face to the floor below. He fid­ gets with a sparkling gold bracelet that peeks out from his casual black suit. The woman’s gaze follows his hands as he proceeds to stroke his slender neck and then comb his tousled hair with his delicate fingers. He feigns tiredness. For clients unfamiliar with these gestures, they might be read as a spontaneous display of sensitivity or even shyness. They belie hosts’ actual intentions, which involve calculated efforts to arouse women’s sensual fantasies. These deft motions are the result of habit—a careful array of movement and body language, repeated again and again with each new client. “How does a relationship develop?” the woman presses him. “I don’t know,” the host answers. “Just a feeling. But you have to be a long-term customer. That’s my experience.” The woman then abandons her solemn look. She nods

2    PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

deeply, pleased with his answer. He looks directly at her and adds: “So you’re in a pretty good spot . . . at least in my eyes.” The woman’s interrogative posture gives way to a warm, inviting, playful stare. She flips her head back and giggles. Then she purposefully touches her forehead against his and places her hand on top of his hand. The host responds by closing his eyes and rolling his head back against the sofa, with a slight smile. He knows he said the right thing and is clearly pleased with her reaction. This typical host club scene, depicted in the award-winning documentary film The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief, is frozen on the screen, allowing the documentary’s viewers to contemplate their euphoric and triumphant expressions.1 The still image of happiness is juxtaposed with voiceover narration by the host: “We have to keep [women] dreaming, so if we have to lie, we lie.” Shot in the Osaka host club Rakkyo, the documentary follows Issei, a twenty-two-year-old host and club owner, and depicts the heartbreaking human dramas surrounding Japan’s underground “love business.” In these clubs, young Japanese men, like Issei, sell love, romance, companionship, and sometimes sex to their female clients. Issei put the business best: “To make it sound cool, we can call it Neverland. Peter Pan took people to a world that doesn’t exist. We take the girls to a dream world. That’s the best way to describe it. Girls spend their money to buy a product, ‘Dream.’”2 For this fantasy, women pay inflated prices for drinks and entertainment offered at host clubs. These sexualized services include flirtatious banter, sweet conversations, and the promise of romantic love from an attractive man. “Sometimes,” the other woman in the film says, “girls really fall in love with their hosts and end up financially ‘worshipping’ them.” Even if the retail price of a bottle of liquor is only a few hundred dollars, hosts can sell it for tens of thousands of dollars as long as women consider it a worthy expense in the pursuit of their desires. And many women do. For them, the host club’s menu of dreams is priceless. •

•

•

The melodrama presented in The Great Happiness Space is typical of popular representations of host-client interactions in Japanese television series, feature films, and other depictions in blogs and online novels. My key informants, however, stressed that if I focused exclusively on host club venues as confined sites, where for a few short late-night hours women could purchase intimate experiences with handsome young men, I would miss the point. The fantasy,

PROMISE OF THE FUTURE    3

excitement, and magical experience that women, as well as men, desire go well beyond these fixed times and formal spaces. Staged Seduction is an ethnographic study about men and women who produce and consume love in Japan’s host clubs. The commodified product negotiated between hosts and clients is not ready made. It is coproduced through flirtatious exchanges, as men and women engage in discreet conversations, stimulating touches, tender gazes, and after-hours exploits. Its value is based on a promised future wherein host and client build a dream world together and set one another’s fantasies into motion. For hosts, the promise is an invitation to make a substantial amount of money out of the relationship; for women, it is a hopeful moment to experience feelings of true pleasure and desirability. Both parties thus fetishize relationships that performatively produce the fantasies they seek. Aside from fantasy, the host club provides a unique window into the commercialization of feelings, emotions, and aspirational efforts in Japan’s structural reforms aimed at deregulating and expanding service sectors. Broadly, this ethnography traces the cultural imaginary and political economy that enables people to buy and sell such fetishized objects as love, dreams, and a hopeful future, as they center on particular notions of time, space, and the self in contemporary Japanese society. These products, which entail imagined time and space, whether it is emerging or vanishing in the minds of social actors, engender restless feelings of hope and anxiety, presence and absence, and ephemerality and eternity. These feelings feed back into how these actors contemplate questions of what they could and should do in the time to come. I argue that the future, as envisioned today, is a political arena in which individuals are equally foregrounded as autonomous and self-responsible ­citizens—they may either freely succeed or fail to realize their dreams—­ regardless of social inequality in a given condition of uncertainty. A social consequence of this kind of politics surrounding future success then creates new ­stratifications—the winner’s group and the loser’s group—based on the state of hopeful mind between those who buy into aspirations of rose-colored prospects and those who don’t. Hope is thus at the center of and at stake in Japan’s so-called hope disparity society (kibōkakusa shakai) in the new millennium.3 To understand why and how certain men and women are compelled to pursue their hopes and dreams, often at great personal and financial cost, I demonstrate the meanings, values, and magical potency that the promise of future and freedom provides in gender-, class-, and age-specific ways. I not only illustrate

4    PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

the actors, scripts, and dramas being performed but also shed light on the ways that the theater itself is constructed for actors to experience what it is like to be a successful citizen.4 I also demonstrate how the pursuit of a future is capitalized on in Japan’s sophisticated service-centered economy. Host clubs, I contend, are one of the most outstanding theatrical manifestations of marketing and profiting from emotions, aspirations, and a particular kind of freedom in that economy. Staged Seduction thus offers an entry point to explore broader questions about future-oriented temporality, perceptions of individual freedom, and moral questions about truthfulness in the highly personalized service and entertainment industries. To inquire about these anthropological and philosophical questions, I use an analytical lens I call “staged seduction.” By this I mean the commercially staged force that seduces people into acting on their desires for self-satisfaction, as well as for meeting others’ ends: increasing business profits and fulfilling their roles as citizens, who participate in political efforts to promote the country’s prosperous future. The book guides the reader on a journey that uncovers the ways that individual consent is crafted to satisfy multiple goals simultaneously, while structural inequalities are relegated to the background. In so doing, it shows the often-invisible affective dimensions of gender politics and class struggle embodying vulnerability, insecurity, and risky endeavors at the heart of sex commerce and neoliberal dreams.

The Rise of Neoliberalism and Host Clubs Not long ago, host clubs were practically unheard of in Japan, unlike hostess clubs or geisha entertainment establishments.5 I first learned about them in the summer of 2001 when I returned from the United States to my hometown of Hamamatsu, located halfway between Tokyo and Osaka. At the time I needed a part-time job and found one working as a secretary at a used-car lot. There I met a Mr. Suzuki, a nineteen-year-old who was new to the company. Unlike the other salesmen, most of whom were older and unremarkable in appearance, Mr. Suzuki had a well-cut shag hairstyle with outward-feathered bangs, a thin body, very smooth skin, and polished nails. He wore a tight-­fitting, Italianmade suit to work every day. When the company president ordered Mr. Suzuki to cut his hair to look like a “respectable” salesman, he refused and said he would quit the job before doing so. As I soon learned, Mr. Suzuki prioritized his self-image over employment security. He told me that work was just a financial means to pursue his

PROMISE OF THE FUTURE    5

dream of becoming a renowned racecar driver. Despite his lack of experience racing cars, he was confident about his future success. His conviction, he told me, stemmed from his experience working as a host in Tokyo with his best friend after high school. He watched his friend become a top-ranking host, earning more than 5 million yen, about $50,000, per month. Hosting, however, was not Mr. Suzuki’s passion, and he reoriented his ambitions. Although he did not say exactly why he quit, he implied that he had been unable to handle the escalation of his clients’ desire for seduction into demands for sex. In his uncompromising individualism, grandiose future dreams, and the precariousness of his present condition—as well as in his troubled relation to sex work— Mr. Suzuki offered a good introduction to the hosting business. Today, it would be difficult to find anyone in Japan unfamiliar with hosting. But for many years, the host club business was relegated to the shadows of Japanese culture. It was perceived as sleazy and immoral by a patriarchal society in which the pursuit of commercialized extramarital sex was an exclusively male domain.6 This perception can be traced to the very first host club, Naito Tokyo (Night Tokyo), which opened in the mid-1960s during Japan’s “leisure boom.” The club began as a dance hall serving mostly upper-class matrons and wealthy widows. They would stop by on their way home from shopping while their husbands worked or engaged in other nightlife activities. Self-employed male dancers were given the name “hosts” (hosuto), referring to their role as entertainers, but their occupation was not considered a profession. Although hosts charmed women with sophisticated conversation, songs, and dance performances, outside the club they were commonly called otoko mekake (male mistresses or lovers) and often labeled as gigolos and pimps.7 Women visited the club in secret to avoid the stigma of socializing with these hosts.8 Early on there were only five host clubs in Tokyo. But the number gradually increased to about twenty in the 1970s and to fifty by the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Nearly all the clubs were located in Kabuki-chō.9 During the 1980s, the negative image of host clubs began to change as the business took off at the height of the “bubble economy.”10 The success of host clubs piqued people’s curiosity about the new business that catered to women’s erotic desires. By the 1990s and into the 2000s, the business grew exponentially and quickly shed its reputation as an obscure sexual subculture. The public came to regard it as a successful business model and an antidote to the recessionary “lost decade.” The business has barely slowed down since.

6    PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

Intense media attention has followed the rise in popularity of host clubs, to the extent that some hosts have enjoyed household name recognition and a few have become genuine celebrities. One of the best known is Reiji, a former host and now club owner in Roppongi, Tokyo’s upscale neighborhood. Reiji has been profiled in Forbes magazine as Japan’s “geisha guy” and praised as an entrepreneur. (Like Madonna and Prince, he is known only by his first name.) In the mid-2000s, he appeared regularly on television variety shows as a professional womanizer and sex therapist. He also started a consulting company, providing businesses with marketing advice, interior design, and female consumer psychology. Shirosaki Jin is another example. Jin distinguished himself as a rarefied densetsu no hosuto (legendary host) who maintained number-one status in Club Ai, the most prestigious host club in Japan, for five years in a row and earned about 100 million yen ($1 million) per year—more than twice the salary of Japan’s prime minister. Japanese television and radio broadcasting, as well as popular news media and women’s lifestyle magazines, featured his lavish living and business endeavors frequently. After solidifying his legacy as a charismatic number-one host in Japan, Jin quit hosting to pursue a career as a media personality and multitalented artist: actor, musician, dancer, and womanizer. In the public eye, Reiji and Jin epitomize the neoliberal promise of a better and more affluent future in the social field of Japan’s entertainment industry: that is, the opportunity and luck, coupled with one’s talent and effort, to become singularly successful, regardless of background. Along with the media production of celebrity life and public interest in the host club phenomenon, Japan’s thriving hosting business has further expanded the country’s sex-related entertainment industry. The estimated annual revenue of Japan’s sex industry accounts for 2.37 trillion yen (roughly $23.7 billion) and is equal to about half the country’s defense budget.11 Put in perspective, Americans spend slightly less than half that of Japan on commercial sex, at an estimated $13.3 billion.12 Japan’s hosting business alone generates estimated annual revenues of about $1.5 billion.13 Mostly found in the big cities, there are today an estimated seven hundred clubs and bars and twelve thousand hosts nationwide.14 Within Tokyo’s Kabuki-chō district alone, more than three hundred establishments and more than five thousand hosts ply an increasingly lucrative trade.15 The emergence of the hosting industry runs parallel to the development of Japanese postindustrial consumer capitalism and neoliberal reforms. It is also a reaction and an adaptation to these changes. Beginning in the 1970s,

PROMISE OF THE FUTURE    7

the national economy shifted from a manufacturing-centered industrial one to a consumer-oriented postindustrial one following the oil shocks, a crisis that pushed Japan to restructure and diversify. As originally envisioned, Japan’s new economy hinged on the development of information technology, finance, real estate, and service and entertainment sectors. In an attempt to first expand domestic consumer markets in the 1980s and then pull the nation out of the recession that took hold soon afterward, the Japanese government began to enact neoliberal reforms to deregulate the national economy, privatize social support networks, and encourage corporations and individuals to participate in the economic reconstruction process. The government started to dismantle the vaunted Japanese-style management system, represented by lifetime employment and seniority benefits, in order to create labor conditions that flexibly adjust to fluctuating demand in the service economy and economic externalities amid globalization. Corporations also adopted a more results-oriented salary system and replaced many lifetime employees with contract workers to cut costs. This transformation was carried out in the name of enhancing individual freedom of choice. In this context, hosts, especially successful ones, symbolically manifested neoliberal ideals and female clients embodied liberated consumer-citizens in the postindustrial culture. Though the host club in general is more accepted today as a business in Japanese society, participants typically do not reveal their association outside the club to avoid prejudice against male sex work and female promiscuity. This ambivalence reflects the new possibilities and constraints they face. Their hopes and concerns thus shed light on the tensions surrounding pervasive gender, sexual, and class norms despite the rapidly changing socioeconomic structure marked by neoliberal reforms and postindustrial consumerism.

Hopes and Dreams Beginning in the 1980s, young Japanese women joined the flexible labor force and progressively gained disposable income in new service industries. At the height of the bubble economy of the late 1980s, they were celebrated as consumer citizens who pursued “a life of [their] own” ( jibun no jinsei) and reveled in their new consumer power.16 Japan’s postindustrial capitalism continued to encourage women to buy more even during the prolonged economic recession that followed the bubble’s collapse in the early 1990s. In marked contrast

8    PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

to the stagnated national economy, women’s wanton spending in the host club became a media spectacle in the postrecession era. Soon after women began to reshape the labor force landscape, a form of labor called furītā (an amalgam of the English loanword “free” and the German word arbeiter, or “worker”), emerged in the late 1980s initially as an alternative lifestyle choice.17 The kind of flexible work epitomized by the furītā aligned with neoliberal values that stressed individual freedom of choice, self-promotion, and independence rather than inflexible positions in rigidly hierarchical corporate structure. Such flexible work grew rapidly in popularity among young women and men, and especially among Japanese companies.18 But while flexible labor and the entrepreneurial self-discipline that it necessitates might initially have begun as a lifestyle choice, today furītā has become an unavoidable economic reality for many.19 One out of every 2.5 workers in Japan is a non-regular worker—more than 20 million who make up 38.2 percent of the workforce, the largest in the country’s labor history.20 The number is ever increasing, especially in service sectors, where low-paid non-regular workers have little chance of securing a regular full-time job. They typically move from one lowpaying job to another. Under these conditions, social mobility is nearly impossible. In this milieu, the image of the hosting business as a successful alternative has become attractive to young men who seek upward mobility in career paths that nurture their creativity and help them get ahead in a given professional field. The Koizumi administration (2001–2006) propelled these changes in consumption and labor by carrying out a comprehensive package of regulatory reforms that effectively shrunk the welfare state, cut corporate taxes, and deregulated the labor market.21 Koizumi Jun’ichiro used popular media and catchy slogans such as “Structural Reforms without Sanctuary,” “No Reform, No Growth,” and “A Japan Where Youth Can Embrace Hopes and Dreams” to promote his economic policies.22 Much like the symbiotic relationship between venture capitalists and start-up entrepreneurs, Koizumi sought to seed incentives for Japanese citizens to cultivate their potential and adapt to new market exigencies. As before, what was striking about these campaigns was the strategic use of promise for a better future to leverage consumer and labor action. The government’s insistence on change, however, has fallen mostly on the shoulders of Japanese youth and the growing ranks of those without secure, full-time jobs. Even so, neoliberal discourses have rearticulated aspiration and speculation as an opportunity for young people to break free from the status quo and bet on their life to “win” a better future. And while there are a handful of successful

PROMISE OF THE FUTURE    9

cases in information technology, financial investment, and professional sports, as well as “legendary hosts,” for many, the adjustment has been accompanied by anxiety and despair. Those who are hopeful about their futures and those who are not have come to terms with this reality, creating the aforementioned “hope disparity society.”23 Indeed, hope and dreams in millennial Japan are no longer simply a personal state of mind. They are closely intertwined with socioeconomic restructuring and as culturally significant resources that are unequally distributed. At the same time, they are rearticulated as individual self-improvement projects that all citizens are equally eligible to undertake for a better future. As I further discuss in Chapter 1, hopes and dreams have become classification markers of the social winners, who have (and will potentially have) realized their dreams, and the losers, who have given up hope, shaping a new class consciousness. In this sociohistorical context, Koizumi’s emphasizing that Japanese youth should “embrace hopes and dreams” has become politically charged even though it originally sought to leverage consumer spending and labor fluidity. Discourses on hopes and dreams have been widely circulated ever since by other political, business, and community leaders alike. Ultimately, the political rhetoric of hopes and dreams functions as an empty promise that draws attention yet merely points to a future direction and is open to multiple interpretations. Citizens thus must envision, feel, and commit to the substance of the message on their own terms. While globalizing neoliberalism has been criticized as a top-down ideology to justify the current capitalist system based on the ruling class’s interests,24 neoliberalism in Japan has been imbricated with the social practice of imagining a national future as much as establishing a free market.25 Imagining a future, though, is not mere daydreaming but a national project in which citizens are expected to participate. The process, as anthropologist Ann Anagnost claims, requires “a futurology, an ability to conceptualize a future that has not only not yet appeared but that, once conceptualized, must be performed into being.” Once performed successfully, a future needs to be continuously imagined and produced anew.26 Otherwise, hopeful states of mind fade away. In this ideology, neoliberalism is a future-oriented venture based on an empty promise—one that citizens are compelled to undertake for their own (and collective) futures. The “empty promise” is so malleable and universally applicable that it is articulated in business fields, too. Within the host club, men describe hosting as a “business of selling dreams” ( yume o uru shōbai), and women often state

10    PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

that they pay for a service wherein they are “allowed to dream” (yume o misasete kureru). From their perspectives, these dreams entail a cluster of emotions, relationships, and visions of future fulfillment. For example, men seek feelings of self-entrepreneurship, competitiveness, and coolness that produce their desirable self-images of masculinity. Women pursue senses of romantic excitement, youthfulness, and lovability that assure their ideal images of femininity. Their aspirational acts consequently fuel their hopeful states of mind and metonymically symbolize potentially successful citizens, thus elevating their social status. While neoliberal societies provide new opportunities for people to dream of alternative ways of achieving professional success, luxurious lifestyles, and fulfillment of dreams, these visions also obfuscate the social and financial constraints on individuals. While Mr. Suzuki may dream of becoming a famous host or a celebrated racecar driver, his actual chance of extravagant success is exceedingly slim. If he does not succeed, as so many like him will not, the neoliberal emphasis on individual agency will make it easy for him to blame himself for his failure. After all, citizens are not forced but enticed to tacitly consent to the aspirational enterprise. The host club thus can be viewed as a microcosm of the socioeconomic dynamics of the neoliberal state. It is a space in which men and women are free to dream but also to fail, free to make their fortunes and to lose them. Likewise, while hosts and clients operate under the belief that they are free agents, we will also see how the deck is stacked against them. Yet, because the host club is also a site in which dreams are not just dreamed but lived, not only kept silent but shared, these spaces of seduction have the potential to help us understand what it is like to live in a future-oriented temporality and commit to an empty promise of hopes and dreams despite the mounting burdens of uncertainty, vulnerability, and fear of failure. The ethnography of such temporality offers us greater insight into the socioeconomic and psychodynamic creation of subjectivity, hopes and dreams, and the aspirational imperative in contemporary Japan’s service economy and the larger global economy.

Values of Service In many ways, the domestic Japanese media’s fascination with host clubs is a reflection of the public’s yearning for extraordinarily affluent images and aspirational vigor that have been missing during the country’s economic downturn.

PROMISE OF THE FUTURE    11

By presenting the club as a fast-paced route to wealth and status for men and a prestaged opportunity for female consumers to satisfy their desires, media images of host clubs serve as screens on which the hopes and dreams of Japanese men and women are projected. In the media, just as in the club, the fascinating image of hosting itself becomes a consumable object. Male and female viewers’ desires are stimulated to incite fantasy, and fantasy is paramount. But unlike the image commodity in the two-dimensional media world, the host club is a live theater in which the bystander actually experiences the real thing. On the stage set in the real world, fantasies are projected, and the stage scene, or the screen image, evolves in response to changing atmospheres, power dynamics, and actors’ interests. Trade in the host club is thus a highly personal and intimate kind of exchange, unlike that in other sectors where products are premade and priced for sale. The immediacy is in a sense similar to just-intime manufacturing—known as the Toyota Production System—whereby parts and finished products are delivered based on demand. In the host club, men provide services to cater to women’s romantic fantasies on demand. This service, however, depends not only on the host’s production of the service commodity but also the consumer need itself. While the host club phenomenon is sometimes cited as another example of Japan’s consumer fads, the host club trade itself magnifies changing forms of labor, consumption, and value operating in the burgeoning service sector. Information, technology, design, leisure, dining, entertainment, beauty, health and well-being, and security are commercialized in an increasingly large segment of the Japanese economy. The service sector today accounts for roughly 75 percent of the country’s national gross domestic product.27 In tandem with larger global economic trends, sales, rather than production, have become the engines of profit making in consumer-oriented postindustrial capitalism. Workers’ creativity, communication skills, and affective capacities are consequently crucial in making value through their services. In this regard the host club accentuates neoliberalism’s emphasis on free trade, self-promotion, and individual creativity.28 By the same token, consumers also play a key role in generating economic value. Without actual purchase, a service produces no economic value no matter how much preparation on the part of the service provider. Unlike manufacturing products, unsold services cannot be held in stock for future sales. The moment of exchange is, after all, most crucial: Karl Marx called the moment the salto mortale of a commodity, or “deadly jump,” meaning sales determine whether a thing—a material object,

12    PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

an immaterial piece of information, or a particular human activity—succeeds or fails to transform its status into a commodity with economic value. If the service provider errs in judgment or performance on sales promotion, then the labor that a service provider has expended ends up economically worthless toil.29 Thus, the politico-economic model assumes that the service provider carries economic burdens when sales fail. In host clubs, hosts face these challenges constantly. Although they fully prepare to host a wealthy woman, for instance, such chances are rare. Even if a host secures a client, he usually provides extended service during “after hours” beyond the physical time and space within the host club. He may meet her on dates in an attempt to create an atmosphere in which she feels as if they are, in fact, a “real” couple. In these venues, outside the formal procedure of the club, a woman may feel uninhibited. Further, these meetings deflect attention from the decisive moment of sale itself to an open-ended relationship just like other intimate relationships. Because of these indeterminate factors, these outings become a gamble for each person.30 Hosts, for example, may wonder if a client is willing to invest both emotionally and financially in their sales success. Women may speculate how well their men will perform as their ideal lovers and satisfy their romantic fantasies. Their emotional, financial, and time commitment may or may not pay off depending on successful delivery of mutual satisfaction. Indeed, economic calculations take place on both sides. The calculation, however, is not limited to economic worthiness. It is extended to include a discursive, symbolic, and affective one spread over time. When the exchange is neither a one-time event nor for a particular commodity but an irreproducible process itself to perform desirable self-images and realize hopes and dreams, the law of salto mortale may need to be modified to include stretching temporality beyond the moment of sale. Criticizing the production-centered Marxist view of the commodity, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has theorized the concept of “commodity situation,” whereby the commodity is not a fixed thing but anything that potentially gains and loses its commodity status in the process of circulation and consumption.31 If the host-client relationship breaks down, the service commodity itself essentially disappears. Yet the sentimental value of the host-client relationship continues to exist in the client’s memories. The money (and sometimes debts when clients disappear without paying bills) is still possessed by the host, and potentially in his own memories and emotions. In fact, the potential economic value of this relationship may precede its actual existence. The host’s aspirations and

PROMISE OF THE FUTURE    13

the client’s dreams may already have aligned in the future-oriented neoliberal cultural ethos before they were actually traded in the host club. Such extended temporality creates other forms of value beyond economic ones. The service provider’s risky undertaking of sales promotion activities may gain value in the form of cultural capital as a hopeful citizen—one who aspires to a better future and who will be potentially successful down the road. His enthusiasm for a better future and courage to take risks may attract other individuals who share the same attitude and shape a social network across different professional fields. Just as class status is not solely determined by economic income, social actions are also multifaceted. Cultural, social, and emotional capital can be accumulated as class markers over the course of both service ­providers’ and recipients’ pursuit of desirable selves and futures. Thus, the service sector, particularly those activities that accompany highly personalized labor and potentially produce greater satisfaction, complicates the value of the service commodity. Its labor is only retrospectively qualified as productive or unproductive. Its temporality—that is, the way the moment of sale collapses discrete boundaries of the past and the future as the exchange cuts across economic, symbolic, and affective values—is a unique element of the service economy.

Of Seduction By bringing workers and consumers into communication with each other to coproduce commodities and values, the service sector could be interpreted as working against the neoliberal conception of autonomous individualism. If service providers’ economic interests rely on consumers, then consumers’ visits to salons, restaurants, or host clubs reveal the providers’ reliance on others to attain a specific self-image, personal care, or a general feeling of well-being. Though individual freedom of choice is in the foreground of buying and selling services, the mutual reliance is a reminder of the dependence of individuals on a social system to attain their desires and needs. Further, it is a key component of seduction itself. Seduction is operated secretly in a way that poststructuralist scholar Jean Baudrillard describes: “I know another’s secret but do not reveal it and he knows that I know, but does not acknowledge it.”32 The interaction through the psychodynamic process of seduction—what Baudrillard calls “an uninterrupted ritual exchange where seducer and seduced constantly raise the stakes in a game that never ends.” He explains, “And cannot end since the dividing line

14    PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

that defines the victory of the one and the defeat of the other, is illegible. And because there is no limit to the challenge to love more than one is loved, or to be always more seduced—if not death.”33 While productive power, including neoliberalism, seeks to be “irreversible, cumulative, and immortal,” seduction is, Baudrillard describes, the “emptiness” beneath, behind, and malleable to such wishes and yet threatens the power with its reversible, mortal, and deceptive nature.34 In common use, seduction is defined as the means by which an individual manipulates his or her appearance, conversation, body language, and gestures to entice the seducee into complying with his or her—usually sexual— wishes. In Baudrillard’s definition, seduction contingently complies with and subverts the logic of rationality, production, and progress that dominate most modern nation-states and capitalist cultures. It is at the “very heart of power and production,” he argues, precisely because it is secretly operated.35 While Baudrillard’s definition adds spatial depth and complexity to our perception of seduction in relation to the power structure, Judith Butler sheds light on the temporal and bodily dimensions within the seductive speech act and its accomplishment. She suggests that seduction is about promise making, that is, unknown bodily communication, placing value on fantasy, reversibility, and indeterminacy:36 Seductive speech is what the body does, is a present action of the body, at the same time that it portends what the body will do. Thus it is, as it were, the body on its way, figured in its possibilities. Since the body cannot be fully known or represented by the promise, the promise cannot be kept, or, rather, it is always a question whether the promise can be kept, whether its “intentions” will be derailed along the way.37

With the incongruence between body and language and the moment a promise is made and when it will be potentially accomplished, Butler points out that seduction provides only the possibilities to bind these elements. Indeed, without the body, no promise can be convincingly made. Without the premise of promise that stands for intention carried through over time, no utterance about the future is believable. Butler’s view provides us an opportunity to critically contemplate the metaphysical convention that weights the mind over the body as language exceeds what is stated and resonates with one’s own yet-to-be realized wishes, dreams, and desires. Unknowable things such as a promise are seductive because they possess the magical quality of making things happen.

PROMISE OF THE FUTURE    15

In seduction, language is not so much constative—transmitting truth and knowing reality—as performative. “Saying, for [a seducer] is in no case tantamount to knowing, but rather to doing: acting on the interlocutor, modifying the situation and the interplay of forces within it,” French literary scholar Shoshana Felman writes. Particularly promise, a performative speech act, “does” something other than what it explicitly claims to do. Thus, doing with language cannot be evaluated as either true or false but as “felicitous or infelicitous, successful or unsuccessful.”38 This does not mean, however, that the performative is outside the referential system of reality. According to Felman, Referential knowledge of language is not knowledge about reality . . . but knowledge that has to do with reality, that acts within reality, since it is itself—at least in part—what this reality is made of. The referent is no longer simply a preexisting substance, but an act, that is, a dynamic movement of modification of reality.39

Felman, along with Butler and Baudrillard, challenges the epistemological conflation among language, knowledge, and truth that discursively produces reality and covers up the fact that the reality can be altered.40 In this vein, seduction, which underlies and acts on the interlocutor secretly, shapes a peculiar dynamic whereby people do things with their speech and bodily acts and modify the reality in which they live. The dynamic challenges the seducer and the seducee to reengage with each other to actualize the performative possibilities and trade fantasies and desires, identities and information, as well as—or even in lieu of—capital. This is the place where social practice of neoliberal imagination and its actual practice meet with seduction. Both operate under the belief of empty promises to successfully entice the other to modify his or her referential world and act out for both the seducer’s and seducee’s ends. Referencing Foucault’s notion of neoliberal governmentality,41 sociologist Nikolas Rose theorizes neoliberal governance as a conduct of governing individuals through freedom, not by force, and “empowers” them to act out: To dominate is to ignore or to attempt to crash the capacity for action of the dominated. But to govern is to recognize that capacity for action and to adjust oneself to it. To govern is to act upon action. This entails trying to understand what mobilizes the domains or entities to be governed. . . . Hence, when it comes to governing human beings, to govern is to presuppose the freedom of the governed. To govern humans is not to crush their capacity to act, but to acknowledge it and to utilize it for one’s own objectives.42

16    PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

Thus, neoliberal governance resonates strongly with interpersonal negotiation skills, both of which entail acknowledging and employing human capacities to control the other for one’s own objectives rather than destroying them to dominate the other. The power of freedom and seduction engenders its controlling possibility and perpetuates it only insofar as social actors and institutions alike engage in and struggle through the process. Foucault’s famous statement reminds us, “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”43 By the same token, power becomes ineffective if it is not practiced ubiquitously. The art of seduction mirrors neoliberal governance and permeates social interactions. The host club stages the game of seduction, inviting both men and women to openly perform the roles of seducer and seducee to fulfill one another’s wishes. Likewise, other businesses and interactions in the highly personalized service sector are shot through with commodified relationships based on the dynamics of seduction. Regardless of the service provided (personal care, counseling, a haircut, wining and dining), individuals bodily communicate each other’s fantasies and desires to be satisfied through (im)material, discursive, and affective exchanges. Seduction is a second level of value, below the one officially being exchanged, and therefore, it tends to be invisible, phantasmic, and indeterminate even though it is powerful in its own way.44 Ordinary exchanges in the service economy vividly display the significance of the enigmatic nature of seduction. Since the host club manifests many of the same socioeconomic dynamics of the larger neoliberal state, it reveals both the secretive operation and magical quality of seduction in the social practice of individual freedom and promise-based aspirations. By bringing individuals together into a mutually dependent relationship, host clubs provide an opportunity for hosts and their clients to project their fantasies onto each other and to see those fantasies reflected through the eyes of someone else. It also creates an occasion for them to critically consider both the socioeconomic realism and ultimate value of their deepest hopes for the future. If to hope is to commit to the future, then to seduce is to commit to others’ desires. Both ultimately promise future self-fulfillment. Achieving an ethnography of seduction is my hope. I believe ethnography—particularly what I call “affective ethnography”—allows us to understand what it is like to be in such a phenomenal world of seduction. At the same time it shows how that world is staged for actors to direct one another’s feelings, thoughts, and acts for mutual satisfaction—a window into the order and disorder of these exchanges. Affec-

PROMISE OF THE FUTURE    17

tive ethnography is thus a tool for me not so much to tell the truth as to enable readers to vicariously empathize with stories about people’s hopes and dreams, which are innately ephemeral. My ultimate goal lies in invoking our own feelings to reflexively sense the often-invisible dimensions of human interactions that are capitalized on at the heart of neoliberal dreams.

Toward “Affective Ethnography” Staged Seduction takes into account the role of affect and the body in ethnographic research of seduction and shows the ways that both emotion and reason serve as a vehicle for analytical insight, critical inquiry into an “unknown territory,” and ethical engagement in the field.45 My ethnographic fieldwork took place over thirty-one months between 2003 and 2013 and included visits to thirteen host clubs, mostly in Kabuki-chō, as well as two in Roppongi and one in Osaka; in-depth interviews with more than fifty hosts, fifteen clients, two club owners, and three managers; and extensive participant observation, which included paying entry fees to experience the seduction of the host club firsthand. As I explained in the Prelude, I initially took advantage of first-timer’s special deals for ladies only—usually 5000–10,000 yen ($50–$100) for two hours or so—but for more systematic access, I received permission from club owners to visit and observe.46 Those I contacted gave their consent willingly to my research. They believed that any sort of media attention, including from overseas anthropologists, served their business interests. I conducted the majority of my work at a Kabuki-chō host club, which I call Fantasy, every night for a total of four months, except for very busy nights when the manager asked me not to come to the club.47 Fantasy is one of the largest, most prestigious, and long-standing host clubs in Japan. It is aggressively advertised in billboard ads and has an outsized presence on the Internet, television, magazines, and popular books. With few exceptions, I was permitted to conduct my research only during the early hours. The club owner explained that the early hours were more lively and spectacular and therefore worth “studying.” Although the owner did not directly state this, the “later hours,” starting at 1:00 a.m., were technically illegal. Japan’s Entertainment and Amusement Law bans any business transactions that involve “intimate” services and physical proximity after 1:00 a.m., even in the red-light districts, in order to “maintain a healthy living environment.”48 Despite this law, most host clubs, including Fantasy, have tacit police permis-

18    PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

sion to conduct business operations as long as the club completely shuts off its exterior lights and appears closed.49 At Fantasy, I was allowed to interview hosts in the back corner, where they typically rested and waited for their clients to arrive for the night’s entertainment. I usually arrived at the club around 6:30 p.m., when the lower-ranking hosts started their shifts and stayed on until 1:00 a.m. I interviewed voluntary interviewees, mostly one-on-one but occasionally in semiformal group conversations. The interviews were confidential amid noisy background music and conversational chatter. As hosts became more comfortable with me, they began to invite me to their tables at the club and to restaurants, karaoke bars, and other clubs and bars as part of after-hours activities. At the hosts’ tables, I interviewed their clients and observed their interactions. I also interviewed women in and outside the club, at their discretion. Sometimes, I conducted interviews at a restaurant, a coffee shop, or a bar of my interlocutors’ choice. I also talked with them over the phone and exchanged text messages. Some invited me to their “private” events. For example, one host invited his client and me to help him move into a new apartment. A female client invited me for an afternoon of cherry-blossom viewing at Shinjuku Park with her, her daughter, and her host. Through multiple, in-depth, and extensive exchanges over time, I gradually came to understand the concerns of both hosts and their female clientele. There are, however, things we can know only through physical experience, interpersonal exchange, and emotional connections, especially so in commoditized intimate relationships.50 Alternative modes of knowing—what might more specifically be called, in my case, empathetic mirroring and imagining—helped me build rapport with my informants. I could identify and trace their desires and experiences through constantly shifting flows of feelings, emotions, (inter) actions, and temporospatial contexts.51 In essence, the mirroring and imagining that I engaged in at the host clubs were themselves a kind of seduction, mutually drawing my informants and me into an exchange that advanced both our goals—my research and their desire to have their own dreams reflected. This reciprocal process enabled new kinds of knowledge to emerge for analysis. Although we recognize that the ethnographer is a situated scholar whose access to information is never entirely objective, a discussion of the ethnographer’s subjectivity and interpersonal experience in the art of seduction hardly ever takes place in print.52 Ethnographers rarely reveal how they are attracted to certain objects of study or seduced into building rapport with their

PROMISE OF THE FUTURE    19

key informants. The invisibility of researchers in ethnographic accounts— and particularly of their subjective, interpersonal, and erotic experiences—is symptomatic, Don Kulick argues, of the “concomitant disciplinary disdain for personal narratives which . . . are often deemed self-indulgent, trivial, or heretical.”53 Under the premise that anthropological knowledge production is (and should be) neutral, objective, and ethical, there was traditionally no room for ethnographers to reflexively take into account their feelings, emotions, or fantasies—much less their physical body, its appearance, or sensations—that underlie observable physical and linguistic exchanges.54 “Critical reflection of emotion is not a self-indulgent substitute for political analysis and political action. It is itself a kind of political theory and political practice, indispensable for an adequate social theory and social transformation,” feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar writes.55 I treat affective ethnography as a feminist-embodied approach to what has been largely dismissed in male-centered enterprise of social sciences and yet has become pervasive and entrenched in today’s market economy and neoliberal governance. How, after all, could I really have elicited anything meaningful about seduction from clinical-style, structured interviews or surveys? The scientific research model, which attempts to eliminate “unreliable” evidence, fails to explore the disordered, the uncertain, and the reversible emotional and bodily registers. But the register makes up a different, illusive, and seductive realm of understanding.56 Experience, affect, and imagination, expressed through rhetorical appeals, poetic performance, and sensory engagement, provoke some of our most creative and intuitive interpretations of the phenomenal world of seduction.57 Ultimately, host-client relationships are not necessarily based on knowing the truth. The hosts I met were not concerned about women’s lies as long as they kept returning to the club. They were more concerned with advancing their dreams of becoming a top-ranked host. Similarly, the clients I interviewed told me that they felt good about themselves, even though they knew their hosts’ flattery and romantic gestures were merely a performance. In seduction, as is sometimes also the case in ethnography, it is not so much the truth that matters as the fantasy, the sensual experience, and the dream. Whenever ethnographers turn their attention to intersubjective interactions and fantasies, they will be pushed to acknowledge the role that their own senses play in their exchanges and interpretations. In my case, the club owners I met saw profit in my research. Some hosts volunteered to “sell” their names to me, and others expected me to become their client. Female clients I found by

20    PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

way of their hosts apparently wanted to fulfill their hosts’ requests and please them through our introduction. I realized that I was sometimes intentionally and other times unintentionally drawn into a game of seduction. An analysis of seduction allows me to reflexively examine the intersubjective relationship between my informants and myself and to explore affective modes of knowing that emerge at the juncture between neoliberalism, the service sector, and seduction. Seduction in the host club has a discursive component (e.g., flirting, compliments, and caring), but it also has a temporal component (e.g., anticipation, waiting for a response, remembering an evening), an emotional one (e.g., excitement, happiness, and fear of rejection), and an embodied one (e.g., mild intoxication, sensual pleasure, and the sense of indebtedness to others’ kindness). It also has an element of contingency. Susceptibility to the seduction of the host varies; it is not something one has total control over, which is precisely why it is such an interesting insight into neoliberal uncertainty. Engaging with the overlap between ethnography and seduction, what I call “affective ethnography”—the method and writing derived, in part, from affective modes of knowing—will lift the curtain for the staged seduction I studied. Seduced by the promise of ethnography even as I am writing the ethnography of seduction, I hope to inspire new ways of exploring social fantasy and social reality, the utopian dreams of the individual, and the interdependency of the world in which we live.58

Chapter Overview Staged Seduction is designed and organized to show different components of dramaturgical seduction through the lens of a Tokyo host club. It starts with the global restructuring embedded in Japan’s politico-economic reforms and manifested in Tokyo’s cityscape. The macro-analysis is followed by micro-­ ethnography both inside and outside a Tokyo host club, as well as the gender politics and class struggle among male and female actors. It focuses on the inner workings of seduction, in addition to the ethics of seduction in governance. Finally, the analytical lens zooms out to tie the different components together to show the nesting process of the staged seduction that orients citizens to aspire to hopes and dreams personally, commercially, and politically. Chapter 1 illuminates how Tokyo has been re-created as a futuristic city since the 1980s. The city embodies an image of itself as a forward-thinking,

PROMISE OF THE FUTURE    21

futuristic place in which individuals perceive their hopes and dreams, as well as despair—what I call an “affective cityscape”—within the structure of the new service economy. I argue that Tokyo provides opportunities for young people to achieve their dreams through flexible labor and lifestyle consumption. By the same token, aspiration itself has been capitalized on and a peculiar kind of class struggle has been shaped in the city’s hypercompetitive environment. Chapter 2 provides a micro-ethnography of the host club Fantasy and demonstrates how the club space is constructed as a stage where participants meet and enact their dramas: hosts and patrons transpire romantic encounters on the “front stage,” and hosts themselves unfold sales competitions on the “back stage.” The dramaturgical stage, which consists of the club’s temporospatial management, actors’ fantasies, and melodramas in motion, directs participants toward the quest for a hopeful future—the future that is at stake in Tokyo’s affective cityscape, and, by extension, Japan’s service-centered economy. Chapter 3 focuses on hosts and explores their paradoxical—commodified yet entrepreneurial—male subjectivity. Although their ambition for upward social mobility depends on their servitude to cater to women’s erotic fantasies, hosts typically craft themselves as professional entertainers, not as sex workers. Expanding the concept of emotional labor involved in seduction, I argue that the laborer—in this case the host—not only manipulates the customer’s feelings to produce satisfaction but also potentially mobilizes those feelings to serve his objectives. The art of seduction thus helps hosts reconcile their paradoxical masculinity. At the same time, they are, ironically, driven to gamble on their future despite high odds of failure. Chapter 4 centers on host club clients, particularly middle-aged women in their mid-thirties and forties. They employ tokimeki (romantic excitement) as a vehicle to resurrect more desirable, vital female selves and to feel empowered in Japan’s youth-oriented consumer society. I argue it is the anticipation of aging rather than actual aging itself that provokes their feelings of vulnerability. As women fear the loss of ideal femininity, their anti-aging efforts are commodified. In the host club, romantic love is offered as a time machine to make a return trip to a youthful and attractive self. I examine the ways in which romantic love empowers women, while it simultaneously stretches out objectification of the female body and feeds consumer capitalism. Chapter 5 unfolds my premise that the art of seduction is at the heart of the host club and, more broadly, Japan’s neoliberal reforms. I show how seduction is played out and nested in the club manager-employee relations, the host-client

22    PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

relationships, and the client’s self-dialogue. I argue that seduction allows different social actors to subtly entice the other(s) into acting out to satisfy both the seducer’s and the seducee’s ends. Due to lack of coercion, the process makes all parties seem autonomous and self-responsible for the consequences, even if their actions are directed by the other actors, theatrical elements, and cultural contexts. In addition, certain forms of deception are made permissible and even required as long as no harm is caused to others’ freedom against their wishes. The Conclusion reiterates my main argument: the host club scene, staged in Tokyo’s dreamlike cityscape, is a critical lens into the service sector of a twenty-first-century neoliberal economy and future-oriented aspirations. The aspirational economy is a constitutive element of a new sense of temporality— particularly an anticipated future. A better future is actively imagined and projected on the present to be performed into being. The future is thus not only present but also imperative. Nonetheless, the increasingly pervasive Western progressive models amid globalization, wherein aspiration is normalized, fetishize the future rather than critically scrutinize it. I propose the importance of ethnographic study and critical examination of the seductive lure of the future.

1 THE CONSUMABLE CITY [It] blows fire, breaking the darkness The super city flies up into the sky ... TOKIO TOKIO flies in the night ... You can obtain whatever you want from A to Z The super city works miracles for the dreaming lovers — Sawada Kenji

“TOKIO,” a song about two lovers in a futuristic city, was released on January 1, 1980, at a time when Japan’s “economic miracle” was in full force. Sung by the androgynous male vocalist Sawada Kenji, it became an instant hit, selling more than three hundred thousand copies. Kenji envisioned “TOKIO,” spelled as English speakers pronounce it, as a “super city”—a place where everything is obtainable and anything is possible. The song’s fantasy was not so far-fetched. Having fully recovered from the devastation of World War II, Japan’s exportbased economy was flooding global markets with high-quality, low-cost industrial goods, while its competitors were still shaking off the previous decade’s oil shocks.1 In the 1980s, Tokyo underwent massive restructuring and achieved great prosperity. Reflecting the lyrics of the song, the city soared into the night sky and turned “into a star”—a global city. Of course, the miracle was not just a gift of economic globalization. Tokyo has been one of the most populated cities in the world since the premodern period when it was called Edo and served as the political capital of the Tokugawa shogunate. Since then, Tokyo has reached prominence for hosting the 1964 Olympics and showcasing Japan’s economic miracle for Western audiences. During the 1980s, Tokyo was reimagined as a global city that would attract greater foreign investment. The results have had far-reaching ramifications. Tokyo today is a “hyper” urban stage, where actors ranging from political leaders to pop stars to consumers project politico-economic interests and sociocultural fantasies. Indeed, the city itself has been rendered into an object of consumption.

24    THE CONSUMABLE CITY

This chapter traces the historical development and transformation of Tokyo’s futuristic cityscape since the 1980s, as the city became a target of stateled neoliberal restructuring. Commerce-centered planning further shaped the production of the city, while consumers were given the keys to the new and exciting wonderland. A flexible labor force rapidly assembled to produce and respond to the resulting demands and desires. I show how Tokyo has shaped such a phenomenal world, an affective cityscape, in which young people visualize and experience their hopes and dreams, as well as despair, as they seek upward social mobility in Japan’s service economy. I trace the unprecedented changes in the city’s topography and its symbolic meanings before and after Japan’s bubble economy in the late 1980s and then during the prolonged postbubble era. In the face of these socioeconomic shifts, I argue that political and cultural visions of a city as a site where individuals can fulfill their hopes and dreams have not only remained consistent; they have ideologically intensified as a pressing national project. This imagined space, in turn, evokes an array of emotional and interpretational responses, which shape and fuel what I call “affect economies.” These marketplaces—where feelings, emotions, and lifestyles are bought and sold in the form of labor and/or consumption—construct the affective cityscape of Tokyo. Among the most visible sites are Japan’s host clubs, located in Tokyo’s red-light districts.

Promise of Tokyo By itself, Tokyo is an economic juggernaut. The metropolis generates more than $1.616 trillion annually, more than a third of Japan’s total GDP.2 Its GDP is equivalent to that of Canada and Australia, the world’s eleventh- and twelfthlargest economies, respectively. The annual budget of Tokyo’s metropolitan government alone is equal to the size of South Korea’s national budget.3 It is the world’s largest metropolitan economy. Tokyo’s global economic strength is the result of multiple state-led negotiations and private-sector projects initiated in the early and mid-1980s. Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro (1982–1987) introduced many of these initiatives. Responding to and manipulating business demand for office space and residential demands for affordable housing, Nakasone ardently promoted deregulation of the city’s zoning laws and the privatization of government land to build office towers.4 A year following his election, Japan’s Ministry of Construction

THE CONSUMABLE CITY    25

relaxed building codes, as well as restrictions on commercial zoning and urban fringe land development.5 The result was an enormous increase in high-rise buildings and city subcenters. That same year, Nakasone’s cabinet also promoted private investment in urban development.6 This eventually led to the breakup and privatization of Japan Railways, which sold off a number of its underperforming assets in Tokyo.7 The “Urban Renaissance,” driven by the mutual interests of state leaders and corporate investors, was becoming a well-orchestrated national project. The burst of urban development that followed fueled an unprecedented boom in the real estate market. In tandem with the strengthening of the Japanese yen and low interest rates that followed the 1985 Plaza Accord, Tokyo’s real estate prices increased to the point that the total value of the city’s land was purportedly worth as much as all the land in the United States.8 With neoliberal reforms enabling extensive deregulation in construction and advanced architectural engineering, skyscrapers in business and commercial areas embodied these lofty visions. The fantastic fevered imaginations of “TOKIO,” the metonym of the Japanese nation-state, seemed to have come true. Nakasone’s initiatives also pressured the metropolitan administration and the central government to accelerate politico-economic reforms and transition Japan from an export-oriented model to one based on domestic consumption. Tokyo metropolitan governor Suzuki Shunichi announced Tokyo’s future as his main goal in the 1986 Long Term Plan of the Tokyo Metropolis: “Ongoing internationalization has opened the possibility of creating a glorious future for Tokyo with the approach of the 21st century. We must make the most of this golden opportunity to build Tokyo into an attractive international city of which our descendants, let alone ourselves, can be proud.”9 The announcement was made shortly after the relocation of the metropolitan government to Shinjuku, one of Tokyo’s gleaming new subcenters. Tokyo residents were attracted to Suzuki’s promise of furthering economic possibilities and prosperity. They elected him to a second term in 1987. While public support for Suzuki’s futuristic vision heralded the flourishing of urban redevelopment projects for the rest of the decade, the significance of Tokyo’s ascent in the global order was not fully understood at that time. Investments in these development projects were still considered highly speculative and risky throughout the 1980s. Despite these national and metropolitan leaders’ popularity, their political vision for the city’s future was vaguely described, at best. Consequently, the city’s future became an open canvas for investors, businesspeople, and citizens to fill with their own desires and fantasies. Individuals

26    THE CONSUMABLE CITY

were asked to buy into the value of Tokyo’s “promise.” These resources might be defined in terms of a better quality of life, new employment opportunities, or real estate. Though labeled as perfect, no-risk investments, there were no guarantees that this promise would actually be fulfilled.10 The 1980s portrait of Tokyo as a futuristic city was an attempt by the government to break free from the past and align with a newly imagined global future.11 During the 1970s, the city grappled with social and environmental ills, called Tokyo problems, caused by rapid industrial development: extreme population density, housing shortages, traffic congestion, and pollution.12 The city’s image became contaminated—literally and figuratively—with the negative consequences of the postwar high-growth period. Due to the foreclosed possibilities in history, globalization functioned, as Anna Tsing eloquently claimed, “like a crystal ball that promise[d] to tell us of an almost-but-notquite-there globality” and urged us “to rush anxiously into the future, afraid to be left behind.”13 In this future-oriented and outward vision, Tokyo was assigned a new role as a “command point” in the global economy.14 The Tokyo Stock Exchange began to launch Japanese government bond futures contracts in 1985. These newly introduced stock index futures and options markets, Hirokazu Miyazaki states, “ostensibly afforded investors in the Japanese financial markets tools for hedging the risks of the Tokyo Stock Exchange-traded stocks’ downward turns as well as new tools for speculation.”15 As strategically utilized in Japanese public discourses, the anticipated success of the city’s financial sector promised a multitude of possibilities and mobilized a host of citizens with different interests to participate in the national project of “making a better future.” Tokyo was thus not merely a physical location but also a cultural icon of the new Japan.16 By distinguishing futuristic Tokyo from the rest of traditional and rural Japan, the key symbols of global modernity and cultural tradition were reproduced and made meaningful as fundamental to the nation’s identity. These regional relations also spawned a set of social affects: anticipation about the national future and nostalgia for the past. As Tokyo became a metonym for the contemporary nation-state, the city’s affluence was equated with national prosperity.17 Framed this way, the city rationalized its massive concentration of the nation’s wealth, human capital, and administration. The fact that a disproportionate distribution of national resources to Tokyo had caused greater regional inequality was conveniently concealed.18 Tokyo functioned as an index of the nation’s future; it could not fail.

THE CONSUMABLE CITY    27

While Tokyo’s role as a showcase for the nation’s possibilities secured massive investment, it also burdened the city with high expectations. In order to maintain its attractiveness to corporations and investors, Tokyo had to remain forever on the cutting edge of technology, perpetually future-oriented in its outlook. In other words, the “ideal city” must be continuously imagined in order for it to successfully come into being and evolve into something new and exciting.19 Cities, human geographer Nigel Thrift points out, must “exhibit intense expressivity.”20 In the case of Tokyo, it is this expression of futurity that is performatively displayed. The future is a collective and synergetic enterprise for various social actors—city planners, dwellers, and spectators—to undertake. This enterprise, combined with the hopeful and prosperous dreams for which Tokyo stood, were mutually constitutive of the cityscape.

Fetishizing the City Tokyo’s cityscape plays an important role in Japan’s consumer culture, particularly visible in its lifestyle advertising. The mass media circulate highly stylized fantasy images through television dramas, fashion magazines, online media, and city information guides, among other means.21 As a result, Tokyo is no longer merely an object of media representation; it has become a medium in which individuals are presented as culturally sophisticated citizens through consumption and leisure. Cityscapes encourage consumers to express their idealized selves, however illusory they might be. Gabriella Lukács describes how Japan’s “trendy dramas” of the late 1980s and 1990s were the result of a partnership between television broadcasters and the leisure industry.22 The dramas were often filmed in easily recognizable, popular locations in Tokyo, such as Shibuya, Odaiba, and the Tokyo Tower. These serialized programs of ten or so episodes were designed to introduce viewers to chic bars, cafés, amusement parks, and sites for romance. Lukács writes, “These shows have turned the whole of downtown Tokyo into a theme park not only for young Japanese living in suburbs and the countryside, but also for youth in Southeast Asia generally where Japanese trendy dramas have great currency.”23 For example, since the 1990s, the Tokyo Tower is no longer a famous landmark of the city but a symbol of love, as it has become Japan’s most popular dating spot. Much like the way New York City is portrayed in the HBO series Sex and the City, the demarcation between regular programming and commercial breaks is

28    THE CONSUMABLE CITY

blurred. As advertisers present the Tokyo cityscape as a locale to be consumed, the endlessly stylish shops, luxurious lifestyles, and flexible work featured in Japanese dramas reinforce these persuasive marketing messages. Viewers enjoy these destinations vicariously through the lens, as actors move through distant but recognizable space. Television dramas are thus not merely passively constructed modes of visual entertainment but portals into the affective experiences of fictitious urbanites in actual locations. Just like Disney films are transformed into theme parks, Tokyo, too, is undergoing “Disneyfication” on a larger scale, according to Lukács and others. In this sense, the city has become a fetishized site of playful consumer activities. Such a metamorphosis was particularly clear in the district of Shibuya. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, the Seibu Saison Group, a business conglomerate of retail stores, railway companies, and marketing units, endeavored to combine city development and marketing to transform this characterless district into a mecca of youth fashion and culture. To accomplish this goal, the company built an enormous theater-like shopping center targeting mainly female consumers. According to sociologist and cultural studies scholar ­Yoshimi Shunya, key to the success of the pioneering project lay in Seibu’s skillful adjustment of reality to fit this image rather than the adjustment of the image to fit reality.24 Put another way, this neighborhood was spatially “staged” to encourage consumers to envision themselves as part of this fabricated cosmopolitan world. For instance, the company concocted European-sounding names for streets such as Supeinzaka (Spanish Slope) and Sentāgai (Center Street) and named its new department store Parco (Italian for “park”). The company consolidated nearby stores into a mall-like configuration and laid them out them so that visitors could wander the streets and see individual stores, restaurants, cafés, street signs, and advertisements. These facades inspire consumers to create their own stories about the experience of being in such a global space. More important, Yoshimi argued, the intentional design stimulated a “mutual gaze” among consumers. Shibuya became “a huge theater where people watch and also display who they are.”25 The success of Parco became the prototype for the later development of megacomplexes in other central Tokyo wards, such as Yebisu Garden Place, Roppongi Hills, and Tokyo Midtown, which added office spaces, hotels, concert halls, museums, movie theaters, private housing, and other facilities in the new millennium. In these staged marketplaces, consumer goods are not the only things being

THE CONSUMABLE CITY    29

bought and sold. Signs, images, and symbolic meanings are information to be consumed by passersby. This information is then imaginatively incorporated into the self-presentations of young, fashion-conscious, and curious visitors. These individuals, in turn, contribute to the collaborative image of a youthful, vital, and innovative cityscape. This dynamic “feedback loop” further motivates consumers to act. The mise-en-scène of the shopping experience—the liveliness of sales locations, the visual effects of stores’ interior and exterior designs, and the vibrant atmosphere created by the stores’ staff and consumers—­ initiates sales and stimulates greater spending.26 Building on Yoshimi’s theorization of urban space as media, Kitada Akihiro argues that Tokyo has become an “advertising city,” where everything becomes a potential advertisement and appeals to its spectators. The distinction between social reality and fantasy blurs. Not only are stores filled with luxurious goods and locations identified as trendy, but consumers themselves also publicize the products they buy. These embodied advertisements include the designer clothes, shoes, and accessories they adorn themselves with while wandering the city; the shopping bags with brand-name logos they carry; and the imported luxury cars they drive through the congested streets. At the same time, marketing campaigns bombard consumers everywhere—from office waiting rooms, to hotel lounges and bars, to shopping malls, to street corners and public transportation depots. Together, the city of Tokyo and its residents mutually constitute a living, breathing commercial for a certain kind of lifestyle.27 Today’s cities, Nigel Thrift writes, are actively engineered to “have ‘buzz,’ to be ‘creative,’ and to generally bring forth power of invention and intuition, all of which can be forged into economic [means].”28 Tourists and consumers from outside Tokyo are compelled to visit and participate in this new consumer-oriented milieu. In the 1980s, nonnatives flocked to Japan’s media capital to experience the kind of consumer lifestyles they saw on television, in advertisements, and in lifestyle magazines. Further, both the city’s development initiatives and the stores’ marketing campaigns appropriated the same concepts and rhetoric used in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. They actively linked the idea of political and cultural freedom to the consumer’s freedom of lifestyle choice.29 In the glare of Tokyo’s cityscape, this kind of lifestyle choice has become especially attractive to women, largely marginalized from Japan’s corporate structures. Advertisers transfigured consumption into an “emancipatory act” and encouraged women to channel their energies into shopping as a means of self-improvement.

30    THE CONSUMABLE CITY

One of the better examples of this new lifestyle was the biweekly magazine Hanako, launched in 1988 and targeted to an audience of socially active young Japanese women in the Tokyo metropolitan area. By profiling women in their roles as newly empowered consumers, Hanako and similar magazines reproduced the association between social emancipation and consumption. In 1989, the media renamed this women’s era after the publication, which was, in fact, a typical Japanese female name but spelled in roman letters. Much like “TOKIO,” which turned the city of Tokyo into a fetish for the listener, Hanako presented images of stylish shops, fashion, and entertainment venues in Tokyo as consumable objects. There was no singular iconic figure for Hanako. She was rather a discursive collective, imagined as a new class of women who had large disposable incomes and savings from their work as corporate “office ladies” and living with their parents. She enjoyed shopping, traveling abroad, and cultivating cultural and aesthetic sensitivities for self-fulfillment. Stylish cafés, fashionable shopping districts, amusement parks, famous theaters, and sophisticated boutiques were all part of the palette from which these women drew in their displays of consumer citizenship.30 Whether they were celebrated as “new women” or criticized as ­selfish consumers, their behavior was the source of a novel consumer identity— self‑­centered, pleasure seeking, and free spending—situated as part of the backdrop of Tokyo’s affective cityscape. Women in the late 1980s and early 1990s were referred to as members of the “Hanako tribe” (Hanako-zoku). Their consumer power was juxtaposed against older frugal, “self-sacrificing” women from previous generations. In these discourses, consumerism was presented as a hip activity that gave individuals a chance to express their personal, cultural, and political views, albeit beliefs within a narrow range of commodified options. Women’s liberal politics had thus become complicit with postindustrial consumerism’s endless pressure on people to solve problems and liberate themselves by exerting purchasing power. Tokyo’s cityscape staged such an activity, yet the city became a fetish, too.

Labor of the City The expansion in buying power and the shift toward consumerism had a particularly profound effect on Tokyo’s labor structure. Japan’s new service-driven economy created an enormous demand for cheap, flexible labor. Women and youth, who were valued primarily as urban consumers, possessed the desirable

THE CONSUMABLE CITY    31

attributes to assume these new roles in this rapidly developing sector. After all, the Hanakos could not be consumers without disposable income. Throughout the mid-1970s and 1980s, young Japanese women increasingly sought job opportunities and career changes from their traditional roles as obedient daughters, caring wives, and devoted mothers. Their married counterparts began to reenter the labor market as part-time workers after their child-care responsibilities had diminished.31 The diversification of lifestyles and the emergence of a consumer-oriented “women’s age” were thus synchronized with this transformation in the labor market. The number of working women rose from 19.8 million in 1975 to 23.7 million in 1985 and from 27 million in 1995 to 27.5 million in 2005. However, women tended to find employment in non-regular positions, with scant social welfare and job security. In 2010, 53.3 percent of female workers in Japan were nonregular employees, climbing from 29.0 percent in 1984, 39.0 percent in 1995, and 51.7 percent in 2005.32 These percentages are roughly three times higher than those for their male counterparts. The average wages for Japanese women were 69.8 percent of men’s in 2009. In Tokyo, which employs 27 percent of the entire working population of Japan, the number of female employees in these roles amounts to 72.3 percent of the entire non-regular labor force, with one third of them part-time workers.33 This gendered division of labor between regular and non-regular employment is an ironic result of the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Law and Worker Dispatch Law, both of which took effect in 1986. Although the EEO Law nominally encouraged women to enter the labor force, female workers were mostly employed as nonpermanent, part-time staff. Japanese corporations managed to get around the law by reducing the number of positions with full benefits; rather than hire more women in regular positions, they replaced regular male workers with temporary female workers. In doing so, they reduced the cost of labor and maintained their competitiveness. The increase in flexible positions also served the country’s shift toward a service-centered economy, in which the labor demand often fluctuated depending on seasonal needs and consumer trends.34 Because of the expansion of the service sector, more young Japanese men also joined the flexible labor market and became the so-called furītā (free worker). These men refashioned their positions as “freedom-seeking alternatives” to Japan’s rigid corporate system. The popularity of non-regular work shifted the meaning of the labor form. Like Hanako, furītā presented an image

32    THE CONSUMABLE CITY

of a noble style of work, differentiated from other forms of marginalized flexible work, the rural male farmer’s seasonal work, and married women’s parttime work. The image of the furītā attracted individuals who sought to freely move from one job to another and pursue what they “really” wanted to do for self-fulfillment. These professions were wide ranging, from creative work— writer, artist, and entertainer—to consultants like fashion advisers, psychological counselors, and financial planners. They also included miscellaneous jobs as assistants in the growing service industries, such as television production, restaurant management, and event planning. Most of the jobs were based in the Tokyo metropolitan area. These service-oriented positions blurred the line between work and play, while also nurturing individual creativity, self-­ management, and confidence for personal and occupational advancement.35 During the era of Japan’s bubble economy, the demand for flexible labor remained high and pay was fairly competitive in the rapidly growing service industries: convenience stores, fast-food restaurants, retail stores, delivery services, and in a booming construction sector. Furthermore, the chronic labor shortage in other fields allowed young men to switch from non-regular positions to full-time regular work when desired. In short, the status of furītā was idealized among individuals who sought to earn a living while pursuing their creative interests.36 This autonomy was particularly striking in contrast to conventional Japanese-style labor management. In these settings, corporations trained their own employees to become “company persons” (kaishaningen), who were most suitable for the corporate system.37 In the 1980s, the flexible work of the furītā thus connoted freedom, pleasure, and self-fulfillment rather than toil, perseverance, and corporate loyalty. Creative work served as a means for self-realization, the attainment of one’s dreams, and emancipation from corporate discipline. While individual-centered work and consumption were hailed as alternative and preferable lifestyle choices in the 1980s, the collapse of the bubble economy in the early 1990s profoundly impacted these occupations. To contend with the economic recession, corporations intensified their replacement of regular workers with non-regular ones to cut labor costs across manufacturing and service industries. These employment shifts created a larger gap between the wealthy and the poor. It increased disparities in stable incomes and welfare benefits and widened divisions in less tangible possessions, such as hope about one’s future. The differences between socioeconomic reality and people’s aspirations further deepened in the prolonged post-bubble era, called the “Lost Two

THE CONSUMABLE CITY    33

Decades.” The precarious employment situation was justified as a difficult but inevitable development necessary to maintaining the global competitiveness of the national economy. The media have closely documented Japan’s growing social and economic inequalities and its unevenly distributed cultural resources such as hopes and dreams, in the post-bubble era. Journalists have sensationalized a few wealthy and successful individuals in their late twenties and thirties who earn over 100 million yen a year (equivalent to six- and seven-figure salaries in US dollars) and continue to enjoy luxurious lifestyles in Tokyo. They have already secured financial resources, social networks, and promising futures early in their ­careers. In contrast, the media have profiled the working poor and highlighted the misery of young non-regular workers who are financially dependent on their parents and foresee no future independence. Today, being a furītā no longer allows Japanese youth to freely choose (or not choose) their source of fulfillment through alternative work styles. Instead, they are often the only alternative and usually involve tacit consent to job insecurity, meager social welfare, and little hope for upward mobility.38 Furthermore, the Japanese government no longer promises general economic growth and social prosperity as the Japanese nation-state has struggled with both prolonged weakness in the global market and a rapidly aging society with a shrinking domestic market. The government itself struggles to provide a sufficient safety net as a result of its decreasing tax revenues. The prevalent collective perception of the future is that the nation has undergone a paradigm shift in economic fortunes. In this context, a new class consciousness, which the Japanese popularly refer to as “winners” and “losers,” has quickly overwritten the 1980s middle-class consciousness—“the middle class of 100 million.”39

Political Economy of Hope As a result of the vanishing prospects of stable future growth, the pursuit of prosperity and well-being has increasingly become an individuated life project. The future has thus become an object for scholars to study, a project for citizens to undertake, and a national goal for politicians to achieve.40 Examining the hopelessness of Japan’s youth, Japanese sociologist Yamada Masahiro described this new social predicament as a “hope disparity society” (kibōkakusa shakai) in his 2004 book of the same title. Yamada explored the bipolarized class consciousness of those who have (and will have) succeeded in realizing

34    THE CONSUMABLE CITY

their dreams and those who have failed. He found that growing numbers of young people do not think their efforts will be rewarded and consequently do not have much hope for the future.41 In these kinds of studies, hope is treated as a scarce resource and a project to help citizens help themselves “win” the future on their own.42 As hopes and dreams entail both a person’s position in the present and his or her visions for the future, class itself becomes a status stretched across time. Class is not just about the resources one has accumulated up to the present. It also includes the potential of what one can accumulate in the future.43 This particular framing of class based on stretching temporality is marked by economic, discursive, and affective elements. Hope is something to be bought and sold, literally and ideologically, as well as aspired to or abandoned. It inspires a sense of fulfillment, delight, anxiety, and despair. It is thus closely intertwined with one’s subjectivity and self-worth that cuts across domains of work, leisure, and life in general. The class distinction between hopeful individuals and those lacking hope is also spatially manifested in the Tokyo topography. For example, a privileged class of Tokyoites, known as the hiruzu-zoku (literally, the “Hills Tribe”), enjoys a productive and playful urban lifestyle in stylish Roppongi Hills, a fifty-fourstory megacomplex of offices, apartments, restaurants, cafés, shops, and leisure venues that opened in 2003. The megastructure includes leading transnational corporations such as Goldman Sachs, Barclays, and Google among its tenants.44 Like Tokyo Tower, Roppongi Hills towers above most of the surrounding buildings in the cityscape and has become a landmark symbolizing the new urban wealth and class divide.45 The landmark attracts wealthy individuals to its high-end, spacious offices and residences with panoramic views of the city. It also draws visitors to the observatory, restaurants, and movie theaters. No matter how bleak Japan’s economic prospects might seem, the complex, adorned with dazzling blue and white lights against the night sky, signals to spectators the glory and magnificence of the city. It echoes the image that “TOKIO” depicted two decades earlier: a “strange excitement in the misty and mysterious city [as if ] a restless amusement park bursts into flames with a flip of a switch.” Nonetheless, the grandeur that Roppongi Hills signifies might be better understood as a magic spell cast over only selected individuals in twenty-firstcentury Japanese society where hopes and dreams are unequally distributed. In the shadow of this glamorous cityscape, the so-called Internet café refugees

THE CONSUMABLE CITY    35

live nearby among these urban elite. The “refugees” are typically young homeless or working poor from outside Tokyo who cannot afford the going monthly rent. They sleep on the sofa in tiny booths at an Internet café and live there for extended periods.46 They possess a small suitcase full of personal items and, in some cases, only a few hundred yen (the equivalent of a few dollars) in their wallets. Inside the café with no windows and dim light, they enjoy virtual views through their computer screens. Sharing a small shower room and eating junk food in their individual booths, they stretch low wages earned from temporary work to survive. They periodically migrate from one Internet café to another without any clear prospects. Just as hope is metaphorically spatialized in the shadows and light of the cityscape, hope in the new millennium is also rearticulated in political rhetoric. The 1999 Economic Council Report, for instance, proposed that the ideal situation for Japan would be “to create a socioeconomy where individuals can have hopes and dreams and actively seek to make them come true.”47 Motivated, in part, by this report, the Koizumi Jun’ichirō administration (2001–2006) relentlessly carried out a series of neoliberal reforms to revitalize the national economy and regain its global competitiveness. Koizumi’s leveraging of hope for the future, however, was quite different from Nakasone’s in the 1980s, when the economy was surging and the future was bright. Hope in those days was associated with actual promises of a positive future. In the recession era, however, hope became linked with avoiding an unwanted future. Koizumi’s rhetoric called for hopes and dreams in the pressing national project to recover economic prosperity and preempt a presumed disaster. Here, the hope was to not lose hope. Despite these differences in emphasis, both visions of hope overlap in terms of an attempt to keep the content vague. Doing so enables leaders to flexibly break away from whatever the status quo is and open a new path toward a better future, one that is always receding into the distance.

Business to “Sell” Dreams In twenty-first-century Japan, where a hopeful attitude is in high demand, the creation of such an attitude is promoted commercially and politically. Host clubs, most of which are located in Tokyo’s Kabuki-chō red-light district in the Shinjuku ward, have increasingly become popular employment and consumption sites to “make one’s dream come true.”

36    THE CONSUMABLE CITY

Today, if places like Roppongi Hills symbolize Japan’s prosperous future for younger generations, the development of Kabuki-chō historically symbolized hope for the postwar generation and still offers the chance to dream for nonelite Japanese youth.48 The district was named after Japan’s traditional kabuki theater in 1948, following its total destruction through a series of air raids during World War II. In the early 1950s, the area was gradually restored, accommodating movie theaters, restaurants, cafés, and bars. These establishments sought to transform Japanese people’s immediate postwar despair into optimism. As entertainment venues in the district proliferated, Kabuki-chō soon became ­Japan’s mecca of sex-related business and entertainment, with soaplands (bathhouses where clients mostly engage in non-penetrative sex with sex workers), strip theaters, and cabaret clubs operating all night long. Known as the “sleepless castle,” the district was and continues to be largely perceived as a den of lust, greed, intoxication, fraud, violence, organized crime, and promiscuity. By 1980, the district drew an estimated five hundred thousand people every day.49 Within a quarter-mile-square area, there are now roughly 80 pink salons (which offer assisted masturbation), 210 love hotels, 50 prostitution clubs, 120 dating cafés, 17 soaplands, 10 peeking rooms, and 20 pornographic bookstores.50 Kabuki-chō is the largest pleasure district in Japan, if not the world. If downtown Tokyo has been “Disneyfied” to excite women’s fantasies on their shopping trips, host clubs have promoted themselves as “Disneylands of the Night” (Yoru no Dizunīrando) through popular television and other forms of media.51 And if Roppongi Hills, situated in the city’s upscale neighborhood, is an elite icon of occupational success in such service sectors as information technology, finance, and law, Fantasy host club is similarly an iconic figure for its reputation. Fantasy is regarded as one of the country’s most prestigious clubs and a popular nightlife spot for women. Many describe it as the “number-one host club in Japan.” The club is neither a glimmering tower like Roppongi Hills nor a shadowy cavern like the Internet cafés, but a kind of intermediary space. It is physically located beneath a self-contained four-story building that includes several host bars, karaoke bars, a darts bar, a mah-jongg parlor, and a Japanese style barbecue restaurant. However, Fantasy’s interior is decorated with a display of dazzling lights and large crystal chandeliers. Creating distance from the everyday grind in the sober, “real” world, the club’s interior decorations invite hosts and their clients to freely project their hopes and dreams for a glamorous lifestyle onto this fantastic space.

THE CONSUMABLE CITY    37

FIGURE 1. 

A client and her host have a flirtatious moment. Photo © Akiko Takeyama.

Hosts describe their business as “selling” dreams to women by providing companionship, love, and sometimes sex for exorbitant sums of money. They hope for upward social mobility through their transactions with women and their ascent of the management hierarchy. Female clients enjoy their flirtatious interactions with attractive men—in exchange for cash—who treat them as VIPs in the club. Women in the club say that they pay for the service to allow them to dream, although not paying for men or sex per se. The host club ­owners and managers I met emphasized that their business nurtures young men’s talent, creativity, and future potential while at the same time provides a rare opportunity for women to enjoy themselves outside their homes, workplaces, and schools. Of course, the club profits from their economic transactions. The hosting business thus accommodates clusters of interests among different social actors and aligns with the visions of a future promoted by Japanese political leaders—to create a society where young men and women can embrace hopes and dreams and vitalize the national economy. •

•

•

In this chapter, I set out to examine how 1980s Tokyo has become a screen upon which differing politico-economic interests and sociocultural fantasies

38    THE CONSUMABLE CITY

are p ­ rojected. Postindustrial consumerism and neoliberal reforms have made the city simultaneously a place in which individuals’ hopes for better, more luxurious lifestyles have grown increasingly prominent, but also a place in which those hopes stand very little chance of realization. As a result of the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy, a new kind of class struggle—one that is less a clash between socioeconomic classes in social relations than it is a battle between one’s present and future conditions—has emerged. In this struggle, the wealthy serebu (celebrity) and the poor haisha (loser) are discursively rendered into lifestyle choices. They represent two divergent paths: following the first, a person willingly makes an emotional adjustment to (re)invest resources in a better future; following the other, a person is reluctant to make that choice.52 Along with the more future-oriented temporal shift, I argue that class is also transformed from a socioeconomic and spatial category (where to belong) to an affective and temporal one (how hopeful one is about the future). Social actors’ aspirations, in turn, feed back into the affective cityscape of Tokyo, where the “miracle must be continually produced anew [so as] to be performed into being.”53 Otherwise, the lure of Tokyo’s futurity will fade away. The host club industry is a critical site from which to observe the ways that individual workers’ and consumers’ hopes and dreams—particularly those of the non-elite—are capitalized on in Japan’s economically, socially, and affectively stratified society. In the following chapters, I illustrate the inner workings of the host club scene that help us reconsider the emancipatory possibilities of flexible labor, expressive consumption, and neoliberal subjectivity in the new millennium Japan. The possibilities are not universal truths but historically defined and culturally practiced. Thus, they are contingent on the ways that social actors’ imaginations and agency navigate their fantasies, hopes, and dreams, abiding by and distancing themselves from prevalent social norms, surrounding gender, sexuality, class, and new possibilities posed by postindustrial consumerism and neoliberal values. The host club scene provides a unique window into the country’s future-oriented social economy unfolding in Tokyo’s affective cityscape.

2 COMMODIFIED ROMANCE

Step off the train at Shinjuku eki, and you will be taken aback by the crush of people. The station, serving well over 3 million passengers every day and connecting to four major department stores, is disorienting even for Japanese people. Without a firm sense of direction, you may be consumed by the underground human waves created by the sheer mass of commuters during rush hours. During these peak times, the traffic is greatest at the western exits, which connect to the commercial and administrative hub of the Tokyo metropolis. Once passengers climb the escalators, they arrive in the shadows of a concentrated cluster of gleaming skyscrapers. Framed by the natural beauty of snowcapped Mount Fuji in the background, the roughly one-square-mile area has become an iconic image of modern Japan. The buildings symbolize Tokyo’s status as a high-tech, global powerhouse. A number of Japan’s largest corporations are headquartered here, including the Olympus Corporation, Fuji Heavy Industries, and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) East. Located among these companies is the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, where thousands of bureaucrats and officials go about the business of administering one of the most populous cities in the world. In addition, the nearby five-star Hilton Tokyo and Park Hyatt hotels, among other luxurious hospitality businesses, cater to millions of tourists. One popular attraction is an observatory at the top of one of the Metropolitan Government’s forty-eight-story twin towers, which overlooks this landscape of buildings, mountains, and bright lights.

40    COMMODIFIED ROMANCE

If you leave Shinjuku eki through the eastern exit, you come upon the Kabukichō amusement and entertainment district. During the daytime, the  narrow streets of Kabuki-chō are mostly empty. After around seven in the evening, when commuters are returning to the train station, the district awakens from its slumber. As the curtain of darkness descends, another night of extraordinary, surreal nightlife begins. If you enter the district at this time, you will pass by colorful neon signs, cramped shops, and seedy bars on mazelike streets. These edifices serve as a backdrop for the intermingling of shop promoters, intoxicated crowds, and occasional sirens from police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks. Kabuki-chō is filled with pedestrians, who share the dirty and littered streets with riders perched on bicycles and scooters, as well as frustrated drivers attempting to navigate these cramped spaces. The smells of ramen noodles, grilled meats and fish, and ethnic and other foods envelop the district. The conspicuous presence of heavyset guards outside the entrances of illicit-looking establishments adds to the aura of danger I initially felt on my first visits. Japanese people commonly believe that Kabuki-chō is run by gangsters, the yakuza. I have observed people putting on their tough guises, giving each other hard looks, or avoiding eye contact altogether. This stark contrast between day and night in the Shinjuku ward, where most of Tokyo’s host clubs are located, adds to the allure of Kabuki-chō’s enchanting and chaotic atmosphere. The district’s myriad visual, auditory, and sensory stimuli are a world apart from the highly sanitized and orderly environment on the opposite side of the station. Japanese mainstream media use this imagery to portray Kabuki-chō as an exotic, otherworldly space within contemporary Tokyo and, by extension, Japan. This contrast is particularly evident in television shows on host clubs, which have appeared regularly on networks’ primetime slots since the early 2000s. The documentary series Jitsuroku! Hosuto no Hanamichi: Shinjuku Saikyō no Iro-otokogundan (Actual recording! Hosts’ prosperous path: The mightiest lady-killers of Shinjuku), produced by Nihon Television Broadcasting and aired in May 2003, is a typical example of Japan’s media representations of Kabuki-chō and host clubs.1 The documentary starts with the typical nighttime view of the district’s multicolored neon lights and taxicabs picking up and dropping off passengers. A deep-voiced narrator states that Kabuki-chō is “right in the center of Shinjuku and symbolizes human lusts deep in the darkness of the Tokyo megalopolis.”2 The piercing wail of an ambulance siren disrupts the narration as the camera cuts

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    41

to a scene of a rescue unit as it tries to stop a young woman from jumping off a multistory building in the district. The camera zooms in on the woman, who is dressed in a casual T-shirt and short pants. Her face is blurred for privacy. The narrator explains, “The cause seems to be love trouble,” anticipating the audience’s expectations. After a few tense moments, the rescuers successfully bring the woman to safety. A large crowd of spectators on the street clap their hands and then quickly disperse, visibly relieved but perhaps also disappointed that nothing has happened. “Even an endangered life,” the narrator comments, “is no more than a sideshow here in the largest pleasure quarter in Asia, the ‘treacherous capital.’ It is a place where anything can happen.” Having established this uneasy tone, the documentary ventures inside a Kabuki-chō host club. The camera shows handsome men flirting with women and drinking with gusto, oblivious to what has just occurred outside. The camera then focuses on thick bundles of 10,000-yen bills on a cashier’s tray—money that women have ostensibly paid to their hosts. The narrator introduces the host club as a space where “women can enjoy a game of romance and indulge in the faint expectation of romantic excitement in exchange for money.” In this fast-paced media narrative, multiple plot lines, darkness, neon lights, taxicabs, sirens, seething lust, greed, love trouble, and the hint of danger contribute to the theatrical effect: the heightened extraordinariness of Kabuki-chō and the host club experience. In the same sense that the fantasy of a futuristic Tokyo actively frames the experiences of residents and visitors in the city’s commercial and administrative hub, the image of exotic Kabuki-chō shapes the dramaturgical stage of the host club. Often lost in these popular representations, however, are the everyday lives and hopes of the hosts and clients themselves. These individuals’ stories reveal both ordinary gendered desires and extraordinary self-fashioning forged in response to such depictions. This chapter provides a micro-ethnography of the host club Fantasy in Kabuki-chō. In contrast to the media’s representation of host clubs as exotic places within familiar locales, the club space is, in fact, carefully staged for participants to meet and enact their own intimate dramas. This guise of extraordinariness is a key feature of these dramatic visions and performances. Nevertheless, in contrast to the tenor of danger and tropes of alienation adopted in the documentary, the people I met sought to make their lives familiar, secure, and meaningful in clubs like Fantasy. The sorts of dramas that men and women describe there are twofold: love dramas, seemingly fated romantic encounters between hosts and patrons; and work-related ones that center on the

42    COMMODIFIED ROMANCE

challenges of competitive entrepreneurship among hosts. The host club serves as a stage and a medium for both. Sociologist Erving Goffman introduced the concept of dramaturgy to explain everyday social interactions in terms of theatrical performance, including stage settings, clothing, speech acts, nonverbal cues, and impression management to create a certain tone and theatrical effect on the audience. 3 While Goffman makes a distinction between a front stage, a back stage, and an offstage, host club interactions demonstrate that such stage boundaries often become unclear to the participants as their bodily inhabitation cuts across artificially created distinctions of front and back stages, on and off times, and real and fantasy worlds. These distinctions are neither fixed nor neatly ordered. Complicating matters further, the host club stage is simultaneously a flirtatious playground for love seekers, a fierce battleground for sales competitors, and a gateway to a future betterment. Human dramas are enacted in the club and continue in dating, texting, and after-hours activities, all to create the illusion of a future together. In this sense, the host club is not the only stage but part of a much larger continuum of seamless everyday social interactions. Such an expansive human life is dramatized and capitalized on in the host club theatrical space, even though actors know that resources are unevenly distributed within and outside the club.

To the Theater A large gate decorated with neon lights frames the main entrance to the Kabuki-chō red-light district. The gate alludes to the huge premodern gates erected in front of Japan’s Edo-period pleasure courts, when guards limited entrance to only the wealthy and samurai classes and kept women from escaping. Today there are no guards to keep women from escaping Kabuki-chō, but women are likely to avoid walking alone in the district late at night, especially on streets with the highest concentrations of sex shops, unless they work there.4 Those who do venture into the area, however, cannot avoid the presence of hosts, who work throughout the district to advertise their clubs. Publicity in the hosting business is aggressive and sweeping. You see large numbers of young men—mostly hosts—hanging out on Sentoraru Dōri (Central Street), the main thoroughfare, especially near the entrance gate. Many smoke cigarettes and talk among themselves while alertly observing women passing by, ready to spring into action and promote their clubs. With their slim b­ odies

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    43

in tightly fitting dark suits, smooth skin, glossy accessories, and expertly set ­medium-length dyed hair, they show off their assets like peacocks preening for potential mates. If you are a well-dressed woman carrying an expensive designer bag or presenting yourself like a party animal, hosts’ eyes will surely lock on. A host may target you. He politely intercepts you, imploring, “Good evening. How about relaxing and enjoying yourself tonight?” Most women ignore these comeons; however, hosts do not easily give up. Without your firm rejection, they sense an opportunity and may casually chase after you and chat you up about their clubs’ special deals for first-time customers, just as Shin did when he approached me on a late Saturday night in September 2004. The offer is usually priced at 5,000 yen, including tax and service charges, for a two-hour trial period. The promotion is called kyacchi (catch) among hosts, meaning catching women on the street like catching fish in a stream.5 The objective is to attract potential customers with good looks, humor, or charm and tempt them to impulsively try a host club. A small group of women, who have perhaps finished dinner together and are hanging out near Kabuki-chō, might be “caught.” They sometimes stop by a host club for drinks or just for fun. A woman alone, like

F I G U R E 2 .   Large billboard advertising host clubs at a street corner in the Kabuki-chō red-light district. Photo © Akiko Takeyama.

44    COMMODIFIED ROMANCE

F I G U R E 3 .   A host chats with a potential female client on Central Street in Kabukichō. Photo © Akiko Takeyama.

me on the night I met Shin, might follow a host to his club out of curiosity, to kill time, or to enjoy herself. There are also women who come to Kabuki-chō to experience what it is like to be served by young, good-looking men. Nonetheless, these women, according to hosts I interviewed, usually do not have the courage to go alone. They generally visit as a group. Thus, one of the oldest, largest, and actively marketed host clubs in Kabuki-chō, Fantasy, developed a relationship with a well-known Tokyo bus tour company in the 1990s to arrange an optional tour to the club for groups of women tourists visiting Tokyo. Fantasy became a tourist spot after the Japanese media sensationalized the club and dozens of books were published about the club owner’s life history and business management. Despite the attention, it rarely brought repeat business or profitability. The club instead relies heavily on word of mouth as its most effective advertising tool, as women typically bring their female friends to the club, at least initially. Hosts call this kind of patron miki (tree trunk), and her friends eda (branches). The eda are considered to have the most potential to become repeat customers since these two groups of women tend to share common interests:

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    45

nightlife activities, drinking alcohol, and having fun. They are great targets for hosts’ seduction. Women often explain to me that their initial visits to host clubs were very casual. From a host’s perspective, however, their casual visits have already been mediated through popular representations or invitations on the Kabuki-chō streets and/or navigated by their miki friends even before hosts seduce them. No matter how a woman first arrives at a host club, if she falls for a host and designates him as “hers,” she will soon start to visit alone. The club then becomes the portal through which she voluntarily traverses to see him. Thus, the theatrical scene is not accidental but carefully staged.

The Staged Market Fantasy, which employs more than ninety hosts, is one of the largest host clubs in Japan and enjoys a near-reverential status in the host club marketplace. Because of its long history, business success, and name value, Fantasy has attracted numerous wealthy clients, including movie stars, to its doors. The club owner, a former “number-one” host in the 1960s who married one of his wealthy clients, opened the club in the early 1970s. Since then the owner has opened two more host clubs in Kabuki-chō and himself become a legendary success story in the hosting trade. Fantasy’s niche lies in the more diverse ages and backgrounds of its hosts and customers than those of the more recently established host clubs. (The newer clubs tend to target young female hostesses and sex workers who stop by after their night’s work.) The club is also one of only a few that has two shifts: ichibu, which runs during the “earlier hours” between 7:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m.; and nibu, which covers the “later hours” between 1:00 a.m. and dawn. The majority of hosts at Fantasy who work the earlier hours are in their early twenties to mid-thirties but also includes men in their sixties who have worked in the hosting business most of their adult lives. They serve an array of female clients: business owners, landlords, wealthy widows, rich housewives, office workers, nurses, and others. Most of these women are in their late twenties to early forties. Like their peers in the newly developed host bars and clubs, hosts who work the wee hours at Fantasy are typically in their twenties. These energetic hosts serve predominantly hostesses and sex workers, including prostitutes, who seek an outlet for their job-related stress, which often involves excessive drinking and partying. Regardless of the hours or clientele, what sets Fantasy apart

46    COMMODIFIED ROMANCE

FIGURE 4. 

Takeyama.

Host portraits in a glass showcase in front of a host club. Photo © Akiko

from its competitors is its reputation for the quality of service the hosts provide and the prodigious amounts of money women spend, especially during the earlier ichibu period. Despite its prominent reputation, however, the club itself is nearly invisible from the street because it is located deep underground in a basement covering only about three thousand square feet of a four-story building. Outside the building’s street-level entrance, visitors examine a large, spot-lit glass showcase featuring poster-sized glossy photos of the club’s top-ranking hosts, who advertise themselves with oblique glances, gentle gazes, and sometimes ecstatic facial expressions. The entrance itself is flanked by bare-breasted and gold-painted statues of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, and Eros, the god of love. Upon entering through an automatic sliding glass door, you descend like Alice in Wonderland into an opulently decorated space, with gold-painted chandeliers, red carpeting, mirrored walls, mosaic tile flooring, and marblelike tables neatly arranged in rows separated by various objects such as goldpainted sphinxes and lions. The impression is of a glittering Las Vegas casino, vaguely reminiscent of Japan’s shakōkai, an exclusive high society in which

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    47

F I G U R E 5 .   Women passersby point at a Kabuki-chō host club’s number-one host. Photo © Akiko Takeyama.

Meiji-period Japanese nobility dressed up in Western clothes and enjoyed parties in a Western upper-class manner. At the bottom of a mirrored staircase, a handful of hosts wait in line, welcoming you, the customer, with a deep bow and the familiar “Irasshaimase!” A live band plays unobtrusive pop music next to the dance floor. A staff member escorts you to your table and seats you on a large, comfortable sofa swathed in dark green leather that runs along the perimeter of the room. (If you are with other female friends, you will be seated together unless you request separate seating.) The night is set to begin. After a few minutes a handful of hosts come and seat themselves on small round chairs directly across the table. The contrast between the cozy sofa and the uncomfortable little chairs implies the power relations at work: you are entitled to relax, and your hosts are there to serve you. The symbolism is soon embodied as hosts start to make drinks for you, usually starting with an alcoholic beverage called mizuwari, a glass of water mixed with alcohol. While making drinks, hosts initiate a conversation, perhaps about the weather or something trivial, and ask if this is your first time visiting

FIGURE 6. 

Club Fantasy’s staircase leads to a “dreamworld.” Photo © Akiko Takeyama.

FIGURE 7. 

The opulently decorated interior of Fantasy. Photo © Akiko Takeyama.

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    49

a host club. They quickly lighten the mood and establish a friendly atmosphere. Meanwhile, if you’re wearing a skirt, another host carefully lays a lace napkin on your lap so that you don’t have to worry about soiling your clothes or exposing yourself if you become mildly intoxicated. The host also provides you with a steaming hand towel that gives off a subtly perfumed fragrance. When you finish wiping your hands with the towel and feel refreshed, your drinks are served as if from the hands of a magician. Hosts at the table look at you and lift up their glasses for a toast—“Kanpai!”—and then lower them slightly in a gesture that acknowledges your superiority and their servitude. The hosts then introduce themselves and hand out their business cards. “Could I ask your name please?,” or “How do you feel today?” a host asks politely. Receiving your answers, a host or two will likely offer comments such as, “Your name is so pretty,” or “I know you get this all the time, but you are so beautiful that I cannot stop looking at you,” or “The scarf fits you perfectly. The color [whatever it is] is now in fashion, isn’t it?” The flattery breaks the ice and energizes the atmosphere at the table. If your drink is getting low, they fill it up and wipe off any water dripping from the glass. If you try to smoke, they are quick to light your cigarette for you. If you need to go to the restroom, a host escorts you to the door. The bathroom is spotless and loaded with amenities—hand soap and lotions, cosmetic paper to absorb oil from facial skin, sanitary napkins, cotton swabs, and small bottles of mouthwash—so you can refresh yourself. Once finished, you find that your escort awaits outside to hand you a fresh steaming hand towel and return you to your table. At the table, hosts attempt to entertain you. They embellish their daily observations of strange people, silly incidents, and breaking news about celebrities. They respond to your stories with exaggerated bodily reactions: joyful facial expressions, merry laughter, and clapping hands. They seem to truly enjoy listening to you no matter what you say. If you have had an awful day, they sincerely listen to you and show their sympathy. They try to turn any anger or frustration you might be feeling into something that you can laugh away or resolve through alcohol. Sensing their attentive subservience, you might enjoy being the center of attention. Receiving their sympathy and encouragement, you might feel that you are much cared for. You might also develop an intimate feeling toward a host or two at the table, or you might simply feel comfortable speaking with a particular host. Carefully observing your body language, facial expressions, voice tone, and reaction

F I G U R E 8 .   A client, her host, and “helper” hosts make a toast for the night’s revelry. Photo © Akiko Takeyama.

FIGURE 9. 

A “helper” host provides a light for a woman. Photo © Akiko Takeyama.

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    51

to other hosts, he will most likely affirm a positive connection with a wink, extended eye contact, casual touching, and so on. Other hosts, who sense that you are not interested in them, will gradually leave the table saying, “Thank you [for the drink],” and giving you a symbolic toast of respect once more. One host leaves your table. Another host comes to meet you. The new arrival essentially repeats the same ritual—making a drink, giving you a symbolic toast, and then handing you his business card. The rotation typically occurs about every fifteen to twenty minutes, and it is not uncommon for many first-time customers to meet fifteen to twenty hosts during the two-hour trial period. The process resembles an intensive speed-dating session: meeting, greeting, and quickly judging one’s compatibility. Once you find a host you like, you can bring him back to your table if you want to talk with him again. Indeed, at any time you can call up a host who is working another table or standing in the hallway for face time. Once called forth, he will sit next to you and engage in a more personalized conversation. Knowing that you are interested in him, he will most likely invite you to an after-hours activity to spend more personalized time and perhaps test the waters for a relationship. If you are noticeably shy or show no initiative, a host will likely ask if he can sit next to you. With your permission, he moves to the sofa next to you and tries to get to know you better. Once he finds something in common, such as a hobby, a favorite music group, or perhaps even blood type, the host will customarily request your cell-phone number so that the conversation can be continued at a later date. If you find a suitable host, you might designate him the next time you visit the club. If you cannot choose, you can contact a host privately. Potential clients are allowed to see multiple hosts outside the club until one is officially designated. This cannot be continued indefinitely, however; it is an unwritten rule that a customer cannot date a host outside the club more than a few times without designating him. And even if you don’t feel like spending money in his expensive club, you might still feel obligated to reciprocate when your host sees you outside during his off hours, especially when he pays for “dates.” After all, it is a wellknown fact that hosts live on what women pay for their professional services. Once you designate a host, however, you lose freedom to switch to a new one. Most host clubs prohibit any change under the designation rule—what they call an eikyū shimei seido (a permanent monogamous designation system). Under this rule, all hosts except the designated host must stop contacting you. Designation here is not just a one-time deal; it is like an engagement or a marriage. Hanging out with other hosts is, therefore, considered to be an “affair,”

52    COMMODIFIED ROMANCE

and a partner change scandalous, similar to cancellation of an engagement, or even comparable to a divorce. Consequently, trouble arises in the host club when “affairs” between women and nondesignated hosts occur. It is not uncommon for hosts to physically fight one another to determine ownership of a client, as backstage competition can easily devolve into an eat-or-be-eaten struggle. This is especially the case when the client is so wealthy that losing her causes a substantial loss to the host. Such battles, often fueled by alcohol, can end in violence and bloodshed. A designated host might have no other choice but to pay a gangster group to solve the issue since, as hosts I interviewed told me, the police usually do not intervene in such business troubles, especially involving contested customer “snatching.” To avoid these situations, Fantasy, as well as most other host clubs, carefully monitors the activities of its employee hosts. The club manager at Fantasy explained to me that he created the designation rule, now fairly standard in the host club industry, to avoid such conflicts and maintain order among hosts. From the perspective of club management, the designation system safeguards its assets, maintains a well-ordered workplace, and helps ensure stable revenue from clients’ switching. The club is thus staged like a shopping mall for female consumers to enjoy each step in the process of self-satisfaction: window-shop, sample some flavors, and make a purchase decision. Their act of purchase, however, is treated as a serious commitment to what they buy. Meanwhile, for hosts, who are simultaneously both commodities and sales representatives, the club is a workplace where they compete against other hosts to sell themselves and make a living. Every aspect of the club—decor, layout, lighting, music, and management system—is carefully calibrated to dramatize their individual stories, women’s extraordinary experience of being in passionate love and men’s fortunes, in ways that not only enhance their self-esteem but also swiftly shift their focal center from the present to the future. The future in the host club and, by extension, highly personalized service economy is seductive enough to mobilize a host of citizens with different interests to perform the imagined future into being.

Fateful Encounter While the host club marketplace is a commercial space where male hosts’ fortunes can change dramatically, it is also a stage on which the romantic dramas of female clients can be performed. For example, Sachiko, an attractive widow

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    53

in her early forties and working mother of two daughters, shared her host club experience with me. One late December evening in 2002, she visited Fantasy with her friend after a year-end party. As a first-time visitor, Sachiko said she was introduced to many hosts who gave her their business cards. One of them was Hikaru, a handsome twenty-nine-year-old. Sachiko told me that she fell for him the moment he walked over and sat at her table. He had short black hair, polite manners, and an athletic build. He didn’t look at all like a typical host. She was attracted to him, she said, because he seemed like a good-looking, ordinary guy who somehow had wandered into the hosting world. She felt like she didn’t belong in the host club scene either, so his presence helped ease her anxiety. While she wanted to get to know him better, his senpai, or senior host, Okita, occupied the seat next to her the entire time and eagerly hit on her. His monopoly prevented Sachiko from speaking freely with Hikaru. Later on in the evening, Okita invited her for an after-hours drink and also brought along some other younger hosts, including Hikaru. In order to get rid of Okita, Sachiko suggested that she would accompany him home by taxi since he was drunk. As soon as she was free of Okita, she called Hikaru from her taxi and told him that she wished to have another chance to get to know him better. She swung back to Kabuki-chō as soon as she learned that he felt the same. Their reunion, she said, was a dramatic moment to her, and she remembers them spending a few romantic hours together at a nearby bar until dawn. During the rendezvous, she opened up to Hikaru about her husband’s recent death due to cancer, the hardships she faced as a single mother, and her growing sense of uncertainty, anxiety, and loneliness. Hikaru, she said, sincerely listened to her and told her that he still liked her no matter what. ­Although she was initially concerned about their age difference, he told her that he did not care about it. She came to believe their meeting was predestined since she was surprised by her uncontrollable passion and the bold way that she had behaved. This evening marked the beginning of her two-and-a-half-year relationship with Hikaru. After their dramatic meeting, Sachiko designated Hikaru and went on to become a regular host club patron, visiting Fantasy at least twice a week, spending thousands of hours and nearly half a million dollars. She helped elevate Hikaru to top-ranking host status within a few months by using her savings and her deceased husband’s insurance money. Thanks to the club’s monogamous designation system, Okita, the senpai host, no longer bothered her. As

54    COMMODIFIED ROMANCE

intended, the rule resolved the potential conflict between the two men, though it also potentially deprived Sachiko, as a consumer, freedom of choice. Nonetheless, Sachiko never entertained the possibility that Fantasy’s designation system exists for the club’s business protection. While she clearly understood that host clubs, in general, are carefully staged to enable “fateful” encounters, she still insisted that her meeting with Hikaru was indeed fated. She explained her reasoning: when she first met Hikaru, he was still new to the business and therefore different from other professional hosts. Sachiko’s is one of the more dramatic stories I encountered in my interviews, but her narrative is typical with respect to the exceptionalism that host club patrons stress when justifying their relationships with hosts. Women in the host club are aware of the general perception of hosts and their female clients as irresponsible, greedy, and promiscuous. Yet they often convince themselves that their particular relationship with their host is special. “Unlike a typical host-client relationship based on business transactions, our relationship is based on mutual understanding and trust,” Sachiko told me.

The Drama Sachiko proudly told me that Hikaru trusts her and therefore willingly shares his future dreams with her. He wants to aid poor children in developing Southeast Asian countries by setting up a nongovernmental organization and building local schools. The hosting job, which he insists is temporary, is just a means to raise seed money for the project. I asked her how serious Hikaru is about his future. Sachiko told me she was initially impressed after hearing about Hikaru’s hard-luck life story. His mother died when he was a teenager, and his strict father raised him and his brother. During the daytime he helped in his father’s electrical contracting construction business, going to school in the evenings at a teijisei, a high school for mostly troubled or disadvantaged working-class kids. Nonetheless, he managed to graduate and continues to work in a job related to electrical contracting during the daytime in addition to hosting at night. Indeed, she has never seen him take a day off work since she met him. Such actions convinced Sachiko of his commitment to realize his future dreams. She was especially impressed after she saw him coaching a junior high baseball team on a Sunday morning and taking her six- and nine-year-old daughters to an amusement park. She realized that he made time to spend with her children

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    55

even though he was clearly exhausted and hung over from hosting. Convinced of his genuine passion and caring about children, she began to actively fantasize a future with him. To Sachiko, her relationship with Hikaru is not just about herself; it is also about her daughters’ well-being. In this context, her patronage goes beyond the here and now of the host club and the ephemerality and transactionality of the host-client relationship. This exceptionalism justifies her host clubbing and excessive expenditure as something profoundly meaningful rather than mere transient pleasure. From this point on, her spending on him became her contribution to his noble dream and also an investment for their future. Like many women who have relationships with hosts, Sachiko differentiates herself from other female clients who she says are easily deceived into believing their transactional relationships are based on genuine love. Despite her keen awareness of typical host-client relationships, her self-projected exceptionalism overlooks her own relationship with Hikaru. While she insists that their relationship is based on mutual trust, I noted that Sachiko never spoke about trusting him but frequently commented that his trust of her was growing. By inference, her love for him is unspoken; all that matters is whether she can gain his love and trust. Sachiko has never missed visiting Fantasy on a Sunday night, the slowest night of the week, so that she can help him avoid the 5,000-yen penalty fee imposed on hosts who draw no clients into the club on Sundays and other selected dates. Sachiko said that Hikaru trusts her more than his other clients, who often break their promises. Thus, Sachiko’s visits to the club on slow Sunday nights are a duty rather than a pastime. It is an embodiment of her commitment to a future with Hikaru. In the host club, such intangible things as a man’s dreams and a woman’s commitment are coproduced and valorized monetarily and symbolically. Regardless of her reasoning, Sachiko’s spending commitments promise Hikaru’s sales and, by extension, the club’s revenues. It also supports his ranking, which symbolically proves his superior masculinity to his peers. In this regard, her consumption is a form of collaborative labor for making the future possible. Although her consumption is unrecompensed monetarily, it is highly rewarded symbolically and emotionally in other forms. For example, Sachiko told me that she felt great satisfaction—and a sense of power—when she made Hikaru Fantasy’s top-ranked host and saw his photographs showcased inside and outside the club. She felt that it was her discovery of his potential and nurturing efforts that had made him a star. She

56    COMMODIFIED ROMANCE

enjoyed the respect and admiration he subsequently gained from his colleagues and from other female clients. Along with his promotions, she was given VIP treatment in the club. The club owner and manager frequently came to her table and thanked her for her business and loyalty. Hikaru’s helper hosts paid their respects to her with better service and verbal compliments. Hikaru himself acknowledged her generosity and treated her as his “special” and “favorite” among his many other clients. As a result, Sachiko symbolically gained her superior femininity as the most desirable woman. This kind of recognition and treatment is significant, especially for Japanese middle-aged women like Sachiko who are largely excluded from Japan’s capitalist corporate ladder and youth-oriented feminine ideal. Sachiko, who is a parttime worker at a family chain restaurant, says that her value has never been officially acknowledged by her employer, despite her belief that she essentially runs the business for the nominal shop manager who is a much younger and less experienced male. Sachiko says about her host clubbing: It is rewarding when [my] effort is acknowledged. I feel good about myself then. . . . I didn’t think that I would ever fall in love with a young handsome man like Hikaru, even though I felt terribly lonely and needed moral support after my husband’s death. Hikaru is young but very mature and reliable. Although I assumed men typically look for younger, better-looking women, he has taught me that that is not always the case.

Sachiko is compensated symbolically and emotionally for her time and money spent at the host club; it helps her gain recognition and self-esteem. From a strictly economic standpoint, Sachiko’s spending would seem to be irrational. Yet it makes sense when we look beyond such a restricted view that is, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues, the historical product of the economyand-culture binary. Supplementing Karl Marx’s economic capital, Bourdieu introduces other forms of capital, including what he calls “symbolic capital,” the capital that represents social recognition, honor, and prestige convertible from and into economic capital.6 His followers have added what they call “emotional capital.” In human interactions, not only economic and symbolic values but also feelings of pride and shame, hope and despair, and empowerment and disempowerment are exchanged, circulated, and accumulated. These feelings are then closely intertwined with existential modes of being, self-worth, and dynamic struggles for class distinction, especially in the society of millennial Japan, where hope is unequally distributed.7

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    57

These symbolic and emotional currencies are particularly applicable to Tokyo host clubs where socially vulnerable men and women struggle to obtain distinction and upward social mobility. It is after all a woman’s excessive spending in the host club that assigns her a leading role on its carefully set stage, where hosts plot “fated encounters” and romantic relationships into their female fantasy scripts. When hosts are at their best, clients can experience a magical transformation like Cinderella undergoes before she meets her prince. The main difference is that in the host club, where the magical experience is a staged commodity, women pay outrageously inflated prices to partake in this magic. In addition, the experience entails women’s serious commitment. They must transform their men into “princes” first in order to play the role of princesses. It costs a woman to buy him stylish clothes and accessories, promote his sales and status in the club, and “invest” in his (and her) future. The more successful and ideal he becomes, the more extraordinary and fantastic her experience becomes. Thus, her magical experience is what she earns. Nonetheless, women tend to downplay monetary spending in their narratives about their love dramas. As Sachiko demonstrates, female clients often interpret their hosts’ love as the reciprocal return of their own care and love, not purchasing power. The narratives themselves are therefore embedded in the staged melodrama of love in the host club and , as I detail in Chapter 4, in the larger social context of Japan’s romance boom.

Another Stage “Ohayōgozaimasu!” The familiar Japanese morning greeting reverberates inside club Fantasy around 6:30 p.m., when new hosts with no sales start work for the day. Although it is evening, it is the beginning of a new day in the nocturnal world of the hosting profession. The club feels radically different at this hour. With its bright incandescent lighting, the evening news on the radio, and the emotionless faces of tired hosts and staff, the usually splendid image of the club is gone. Like the aftermath of a Las Vegas lounge act, the stage is laid bare with rickety lamps, worn-out sofas, and stained walls. A few of the newer hosts can be seen sweeping the floor, wiping tables carefully, and kneeling down to wipe the floor of the ladies’ powder room. Others are replacing burned-out light bulbs, fixing broken pieces of the decor, and setting up tables before the club officially opens at 7:30 p.m.

58    COMMODIFIED ROMANCE

Meanwhile, the club manager relaxes at a corner table near the kitchen. He enjoys checking the results of horse races in the sports pages while he waits for the club’s chef to cook his dinner. The smell of steamed rice, miso soup, and grilled fish envelops his corner of the club. Japanese food, however, is not served during business hours since it reminds customers of their day-to-day lives. Only Western food, such as spaghetti, pizza, and pilaf, is offered on the menu. Likewise, all other reminders of everyday life are removed to maximize the club’s theatrical extraordinariness. A couple dozen more hosts gradually arrive. Ten minutes before opening time, upbeat background music is turned up, the lights are turned down, and the workaday tedium is replaced with a pleasant tension that runs throughout the club. Hosts quickly straighten their ties and adjust their appearance. Some hosts reset their hair with blow dryers and hair irons in front of mirrors built into the walls. Others check their facial expressions, like stage actors prepping for a show. They wrinkle their eyebrows and loosen their lips as they rehearse their masculine poses and seductive smiles, making sure their ties are straight, their collars even, and their hair perfect. It’s almost showtime. Showtime differs, however, based on a host’s monthly sales. At Fantasy, hosts’ sales determine not only their individual ranking and wages but also starting

FIGURE 10. 

A host perfects his hair. Photo © Akiko Takeyama.

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    59

times and cleaning duties. When the club formally opens at 7:30, only a third of the hosts employed by the club are actually present. Since business really only gets going after 9:00 p.m., top hosts are privileged to start their work much later. Those who are no longer new but have less than 200,000 yen (about $2,000) in monthly sales must start work by 7:00 and assist the new hosts. Those in the 200,000- to 300,000-yen monthly bracket begin work at 7:30 but are freed from the cleaning obligation. Hosts who have earned more than 300,000 but less than 400,000 yen come in at 8:00, and the lucky ones with more than 400,000 yen do not have to arrive until 8:30. Only a handful of hosts who have earned more than 1 million yen ($10,000) for two consecutive months are acknowledged as distinguished and enjoy the best hours, the coveted 9:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. time slot. These typically veteran topranking hosts usually breeze into the club with their clients already in tow. They often spend only a few hours at the club to show their faces and drop some money. The stratified starting times based on sales, along with the photo displays of top-ranking hosts, are a visual reminder of the club’s rigid hierarchy, impressing on both hosts and clients alike who are the “winners” and who are the aspiring rest. At Fantasy, age, social background, and job tenure do not matter in host rankings; only sales do. Hosts often say, “No sales, no money” and “This is a world where only results speak for themselves.” The backstage of the host club is thus merely another sort of stage designed to support another sort of drama. Rather than fated encounters in which hosts seduce clients, the backstage drama is a Darwinian struggle in which entrepreneurial hosts battle one another over a handful of positions at the top of the hierarchy sales pyramid.

The Severe Business The results-oriented ethos of Fantasy manifests everywhere in the club. The time cards, for example, are located near the front desk in a rack in descending order—the top-selling host at the top and the lowest at the bottom. The rack is set for the top-ranking hosts to easily pick up their cards, placed at eye level, whereas the lower-ranking hosts must bend over or squat down to reach theirs. Near the tiny locker room, a sales chart is attached to the wall. Again, hosts’ names appear in descending order, with top-ranking hosts at eye level and lower-ranked hosts located farther down. Each month the chart is updated weekly for the first three weeks and daily for the final week, showing rank, sales

F I G U R E 1 1 .   The men’s room at Fantasy filled with the club owner’s business lessons. Photo © Akiko Takeyama.

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    61

amount, and designation figures. For hosts, the backstage sales ranking system is a constant reminder that their workplace is primarily a sales battleground. There is no escape from the competitive atmosphere within the club. The men’s room, which I was able to examine one evening before opening time, is no exception. The narrow toilet booth, which is located at the farthest corner from the entrance, is filled with the club owner’s handwritten business lessons, which emphasize money, success, and fame. Highlighted in red ink, they are placed at the eye level of hosts, who must use the urinal built into the wall. They are imperative: “Don’t become a loser!”; “People laugh at you behind your back even though they pretend to be sympathetic!”; “Take advantage of even your own girlfriend until you have your own clients and sales!”; and “Quit the job immediately if you are not self-motivated!” His philosophy at chest level declares: “People and money follow your success. Believe in yourself and work hard until you succeed. If you win, you can indulge in the fame and luxurious life that everyone is so envious of. If you lose, you will be in hell.” The owner’s attitude about money is similarly blunt. “All money is equally honorable and has no distinction in its origin,” a note says on the wall, indicating that even underground dirty money is acceptable. Several hosts I interviewed told me separately that the affluence of the hosting business relies on the money swindlers and embezzlers bring to it.8 Another significant revenue source is the host club’s penalty system. At Fantasy, hosts are penalized 50,000 yen (about $500) if they miss a day of work without twenty-four-hour advance notification. (Only medical reasons substantiated with documentation are excused.) If hosts are late to work, they are charged 500 yen for every ten minutes of tardiness. As mentioned earlier, hosts can have money deducted from their pay for failing to bring in clients on Sundays and other selected days of the month and also for not meeting ticket sales quotas for the club’s special events, such as dinner shows, a Valentine’s Day event, or a Christmas party. The club’s flat fines are regressive, punishing mostly lower-ranking hosts. They also in effect automatically eliminate dead weight from the system, because undesirable or unsuccessful hosts simply quit rather than attempt to confront their employer. If a host wants to quit his job, he must notify the club one month prior; otherwise, he loses his earnings for the month. There is no room for negotiation with the host club management. Hosts are expected to either follow the rules or leave the club. While hosts are eager to distance themselves from the salaryman-centric corporate world outside, the reality is that they operate under even more rigid

62    COMMODIFIED ROMANCE

prerogatives and expectations. One constant is the compulsion to work. As in corporate life, working long hours is the established norm, but in the host club there is no clear boundary between on and off time. There are no scheduled breaks or days off since the club is open 365 days a year. If not entertaining clients, they are expected to be working on club business, talking or texting on the phone with their clients or potential clients, or recruiting on the street. This pressure results in similar instances of workaholism, alcoholism, chronic fatigue, and work-related illnesses such as liver and kidney disease, if not worse, found among white-collar salarymen. Hosts do not get much of a break even outside the club. Unlike most Japanese workers in large corporations, whose work is coerced by mutual surveillance in small groups and peer pressure, hosts operate largely under selfsurveillance and a 24/7 work mentality. Much of it is fear driven. The majority of hosts I interviewed were too afraid to take any days off and miss the chance to meet a rich woman who would surely spend her fortune on someone else. Best-selling hosts were also afraid of losing their wealthy patrons while taking a break. Consequently, hosts I met were constantly working to safeguard rare opportunities and avoid disasters, regardless of their sales ranking. If the management and environment of host clubs were only about fear and punishment, more hosts would leave the workplace much sooner. But the chance of monetary reward and special recognition that the most successful hosts garner is a powerful incentive that overrides punishment or other setbacks. Indeed, such hardship is internalized as a duty to exercise gaman (endurance or perseverance), a positive trait in Japanese culture. The Fantasy club owner, a former host himself, well understands how this psychology works. “It is important to use the carrot and stick wisely,” he repeatedly told me. If quotas and fines are the stick to increase hosts’ self-motivation, the all-important monthly business meeting, among other forms of reward and promotion, functions as the carrot for successful hosts and eye candy for the rest.

Monthly Ritual The monthly sales meeting at Fantasy is held at 6:00 p.m. on the first day of every month. It is mandatory no matter how exhausted or hung over hosts are from the previous night’s final “sales battle” held at the end of the month. A typical meeting begins with the club manager’s low-key announcement of upcoming events, a report on the club’s financial situation, and business trends in

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    63

Kabuki-chō in general. During this time most hosts seem bored, looking down at the floor or showing blank faces. Then comes the moment everyone has been waiting for: the final results of the sales battle. In a dramatic fashion, the manager counts down the top-ten ranked hosts, taking a deep breath at the last. “And number one goes to . . . Ke-n-su-ke again! He had 4.5 million yen in sales last month!” The manager claps his hands and congratulates him, motioning him to come forward. Kensuke stands up and slowly walks to the front of the group. The manager hands the club owner two bricklike envelopes to give to Kensuke. “Congratulations! Great job!” the owner says with a big smile. With a slight bow to show his respect, he hands Kensuke the thick envelopes, which are filled with crisp 10,000-yen notes—the wages and bonus money he has earned. He returns to his seat and casually places the bundles of cash on the table in front of him. The fifty-plus hosts in attendance give him a round of applause and envious looks. The meeting concludes with the club owner’s encouragement for the coming month, punctuated with a hearty “Gambarimashō!” (Do your best!). The hosts disperse, some of them acknowledging Kensuke’s achievement with a slight bow of respect. Kensuke is the top-ranked host for the second consecutive month. In my brief interview with him after the meeting, he said, “It is important for me to keep winning. I try never to be satisfied with where I am in the present even though I’ve become number one. I try to aim at higher goals.” Kensuke’s ambition is widely shared among the top-ranking hosts I interviewed. Nearly every host yearns to be number one. Once this milestone is reached, hosts’ goals change. Most hosts focus their energy on staying number one for as many months as possible, but for those who have stayed on top for many months or even years, the goal often shifts to greater recognition. Typically, the highest achievement for a host is to be known as a “charismatic host” (karisuma hosuto) in his club and become well known in Kabuki-chō. The ultimate acclaim, however, is to be regarded as a “legendary host” (densetsu no hosuto). Only a few hosts, most notably Reiji and Shirosaki Jin, have achieved this stardom in Japan. But no matter their current status, hosts I met constantly avowed to aim higher and renew their goals once they achieved them. While everyone may dream of becoming successful, not everyone’s dream comes true. At the conclusion of Fantasy’s monthly sales meeting, as Kensuke pockets his huge salary and bonus, Masaki, a lower-ranking host in his early thirties and an ex-manager of an izakaya (a bar with a menu of small plates, like a tapas bar) chain restaurant, steps out of a line of hosts and walks to the

64    COMMODIFIED ROMANCE

front desk to receive his monthly compensation. A manager jokingly tosses a thin envelope in the air, saying, “Look, it’s so light it flies in the air like a piece of scrap paper!” Masaki tries to catch it but misses. Everyone around bursts into laughter. Embarrassed, he picks up his earnings, about $1,200, from the floor. Masaki’s humiliation is a reminder to hosts that the host club business is solely dependent on their salesmanship. Their sales are the sum of all alcohol and food sold, excluding service charges, designation fees, and taxes during the month. But hosts receive just under half of what their clients actually pay them—the majority goes to the club. As such, the highest-earning hosts are well treated and respected as the club’s breadwinners while lower-ranking hosts like Masaki must rigidly follow the club rules. Meanwhile, nobody complains about the minor misbehavior and rule breaking of the top-ranking hosts. Hosts gradually adjust to the club’s basic condition that making sales, no matter what the cost, is the only way to survive in the hosting business. They make this adjustment out of necessity, whether they actually believe in the owner’s business lessons and life philosophy or not. When I first met him in 2004, Masaki was struggling to adjust his personal values and sense of morality to fit the club’s uncompromising capitalism. “I first felt sorry for the women,” he told me when I asked him how he reconciled hosting’s competing values. He explained that he used to think hosts ripped off women, charging them ten times what their drinks cost on the market. He was particularly disgusted that hosts more or less thought of them as their money-making machines. Based on his experience working as one of Hikaru’s helper hosts, he told me that Hikaru, for instance, really intended to squeeze every last penny from Sachiko’s savings and her husband’s insurance money. He eventually convinced Sachiko to sell the two-story house she inherited from her husband and received half of the capital gains, roughly 19 million yen ($190,000) in cash. Knowing both Hikaru’s intentions and Sachiko’s future dream, Masaki is disgusted with Hikaru’s morality. “Hikaru is so successful, but he has no humanity,” he said. “I used to think that way. Of course, I don’t want to sell my soul, but I’ve recently come to realize that I cannot survive by that mind-set. I must make a living as well. The host club is a world where you either are defeated by or are defeating others. I struggle with that.” Coming to terms with his inner conflict between the desire for money and the desire for morality, Masaki concluded that providing service equal to the extraordinary amounts of money that women willingly pay is worthy of doing. “If you feel like you are ripping off [clients], that probably means your hospital-

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    65

ity and skill haven’t reached the level of profoundly satisfying your customers, and therefore you can’t ask compensation for it confidently,” he said. Through his observation about women’s expectations in the host club, he added, “[They] want something extraordinary—things they can’t experience in their day-today life—and are willing to pay for the experience even if the result could be harsh and cruel.” Masaki thus tries to overcome his sense of guilt with better service to meet women’s high expectations. The shift in Masaki’s interpretive frame about hosting also has temporal dimensions. His decision to overcome his sense of guilt with improved service is aligned with a reorientation of his negative perception of hosting in the past to its open-ended positive possibilities, if not simply indistinctiveness, in the future. Masaki reoriented his past apprehension about hosting—“It’s wrong to take advantage of women’s weakness to extract money”—to an adjusted morality that says, “It’s a reward for the hard work of profoundly satisfying women.” This realignment allows him to break free from the past (that is, his unsuccessful sales record and discomfort about the club management) and embrace a new commitment of excellence, where he is both successful in his business and free of guilt in the future. Regardless of one’s intentions and morality, one’s effort echoes the basics that the club’s temporospatial formation, as well as monthly meetings, promotes: the sales result is everything.

Hope and Struggle This future-oriented frame functions as a method to be hopeful not despite but because of its indeterminacy. In The Method of Hope, anthropologist Hirokazu Miyazaki says that hope is not an “emotional state of positive feeling about the future or a religious sense of expectation.” Following Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Richard Rorty, Miyazaki treats hope as a method or imperative to reorient knowledge in a temporal sense. “As soon as hope is approached as the end point of a process,” Miyazaki states, “the newness or freshness of the prospective moment that defines that moment as hopeful is lost.”9 In other words, people already know the result of the past and foreclose any possibility there, but the future is always open and possibly full of surprises, chances, and hopeful moments. While Miyazaki focuses on knowledge production that sustains hope, the host club participants also raise the importance of the phenomenological aspects of hope, both as an emotional state and bodily disposition. Hope is not

66    COMMODIFIED ROMANCE

just about reorienting knowledge but also about reorienting existential modes of being that consist of feelings about the future and active engagement with it. In Queer Phenomenology, author Sara Ahmed examines “orientation” and argues that “emotions are directed to what we come into contact with: they move us ‘toward’ and ‘away’ from such objects.”10 In practice, emotions interact with a (re)imagined future and influence whether people move toward or away from it. As Masaki’s case demonstrates, he might be “lost” or “disoriented” when his emotional and bodily disposition, derived from his own ethics and experiences, does not align with an imagined future (in Masaki’s case, the future that Hikaru’s business model represents). Masaki therefore had to reorient and readjust his emotions again until they were aligned. In this regard, hope is an emotional attitude toward the future and bodily inhabitance in it. Hope in this respect has multiple components—one’s knowledge production, emotional orientation, and bodily disposition—that directly and indirectly interact with the world one lives in. Thus, hope is not just a method to reorient knowledge but also a process of readjusting emotions to the imagined knowledge. In the workplace, where the club management never allows hosts satisfaction with the here and now and instead pressures them to constantly aim for higher sales, status, and recognition, hosts not only end up adjusting to and perpetuating the future- and result-oriented club management practices; they also subsume their hardship and exploitative working conditions in the hopes of future success. They do so by employing the same temporal frame that they use to avoid guilt about their own exploitative business practices. Like Masaki, Hide, a lower-ranking host in his early thirties who makes less than $2,000 a month—two-thirds the salary of his previous salaried salesman job—tries to focus on his future-oriented aspirations while patiently waiting for his chance at success. He views his current situation as a personal challenge rather than a structural struggle in the survival-of-the-fittest environment of the host club. “It’s now a time [for me] to persevere for the day when a chance turns in my favor,” he said. “Everyone has a chance. You just never know when you will have one. So, what I can do now is do my best so as to make my own luck or make my own chances.” Despite his low pay and lack of benefits, Hide says hosting is worth the sacrifice, at least temporarily, in order to pursue his dream of becoming an independent business owner. From this perspective, he does not intend to quit or challenge the club’s exploitative system because that would forfeit his own chance of success, even though that chance is extremely slim. Moreover, he

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    67

doesn’t want to sacrifice the investment he has already made. So far he has drained his savings and borrowed some money from his parents since he cannot live on the minimal amount he earns at the club. He has also spent hundreds of hours attempting to recruit potential customers on the streets during the daytime, at evening karaoke parlors, and at bars in the early-morning hours. “If I quit now,” Hide said, “I feel it will have been a complete waste.” His only way out lies in his hope for the future. For both Masaki and Hide, quitting their hosting job would mean foreclosing future possibilities; therefore, persevering becomes a meaningful act of waiting for their moment of redemption. In this sense, they live in the future. Like Masaki and Hide, many other struggling hosts cherish their hopeful fantasy and dwell in the imagined future. Thus, uncertainty about the future pertains not only to insecurity and vulnerability but also to a strong belief in hope and possibilities within the competitive and hierarchical club system. As a result, the nebulous and indeterminate future becomes a site of class struggle. While the future affords hosts unlimited opportunities to dream of a hopeful moment, it strongly prohibits quitting the pursuit itself. In this catch-22 situation, hosts must strive for a better future. Laura Berlant calls this kind of attachment “cruel optimism.” Cruel because even though its presence threatens one’s well-being, the attachment to essentially unachievable fantasies continues to provide subjects with a sense of “what it means to keep on living and look forward to being in the world” no matter how bad the situation is.11 Said another way, people become foreclosed in the open-ended possibilities and future-oriented striving itself. Consequently, as Masaki and Hide demonstrate, they are technically “free” to leave the harsh conditions of the host club but do not. The club takes advantage of hosts’ commitment to uncertain futures and extracts underpaid—and often unpaid—labor as a result. Hosts like Masaki and Hide thus end up voluntarily motivating themselves and perpetuating the exploitative nature of the business. These men are, however, not blindly trapped in a bad occupation. There are very few alternatives for them to embrace similar dreams in Japan’s stagnant economy and seniority-based corporate system. The result is that young Japanese men with poor occupational and educational backgrounds view the host club business as their best bet for the future. Furthermore, they often lose touch with the outside world once they make up their minds to remain within the fantasy world of the host club. Indeed, many hosts become disconnected from old friends, family, and people outside Kabuki-chō. They might occasion-

68    COMMODIFIED ROMANCE

ally hang out with their fellow hosts, but most are too exhausted to do anything else but sleep and rest at home when they are off. As a result, their territorial boundary is largely limited to the Kabuki-chō hosting community, the community where hope, despair, and risky aspiration are normalized. They can theoretically cross the boundary, but most do not.

The Dramaturgy The host club is not merely a store to sell romance; it is a carefully constructed stage designed to stimulate the affect—hopes, dreams, competitiveness, greed, and desperation—of men and women who seek their own happiness. For women, the club is both a marketplace and a stage where they can potentially find partners and direct their own theatrical plays. For men, it is a workplace and a theater in which they potentially can meet well-heeled patrons and change their fortunes overnight. This market differs wholly from the commodity marketplace of consumable goods, where the relationship between cost and benefit is clear and commodities have price tags. It is also different from theme parks such as Disneyland. While theme parks set the stage for visitors to experience thematic nostalgia, fantasy, and exoticism, the stage is usually temporospatially and physically bounded. While the host club stage is physically bounded, the actors’ exchanges extend well beyond the club and potentially transact in shared imaginary futures. Thus, the value of exchange stretches out over time and space. As a result, the relationship between reality and fantasy, commodity and gift, and profit-seeking capitalism and life-enhancing humanism becomes opaque and ambiguous in the quest for a hopeful future. This ambivalent unity allows host club participants to overlook—sometimes willfully and conveniently—each other’s real intentions and the truth to the extent that they can obtain what they want from the relationships. As Baudelaire once stated, “The world functions only through misunderstanding. . . . For if by misfortune people understood one another [precisely], they could never agree.”12 Indeed, much of the host club’s value—the open secret to its promised success in love and money—is that it is an environment specifically designed to facilitate just this sort of mutual misunderstanding and deception. In this way, the host club potentially satisfies multiple actors simultaneously. Women who seek dramatic and/or fateful encounters, mutual trust, or long-term relationships, foreground the noncapitalistic aspects of their host club experience.

COMMODIFIED ROMANCE    69

Consequently, the monetary aspects of their consumption are relegated to mere means for something more profound symbolically and emotionally. Hosts, who skillfully create ambivalence and use it to promote their sales ambitions, weight their salesmanship and financial success over women’s spending power. Despite the premise that money and love are mutually exclusive, the host club milieu allows for a skillful merging of this paradox for the dramatization of transactional yet meaningful fantasy that cuts across economic, symbolic, and emotional distinctions. Thus, the host club is not a self-contained space where participants nurture their hopes and dreams and negotiate their different interests on a front and back stage, or even offstage. The theater is physically set in exotic Kabuki-chō and temporally directed toward an open-ended future in order to capitalize on human dramas and maximize the club’s profit. The staged seduction in the host club promotes a hopeful future as a commodity for sale and also normalizes the quest for it in the context of Japan’s “hope disparity society.” In this respect, the host club is firmly rooted in the soil of serial romanticization—excitement, locality of the city, promise of a future, and power of seduction—within Tokyo’s affective cityscape and, by extension, Japan’s ­service-centered postindustrial economy.

3 E NTR E P R E NE U R IAL AT TR AC TI O N

On a rainy evening in August 2003, I visited the studio apartment of a twentyfive-year-old veteran host named Koji, whom I had interviewed off and on over a period of three months at Fantasy. He had invited me to view his apartment, called a “one-room mansion” in Japanese, so that I could take a look at a “typical” host’s residence. The apartment, which he sublet from another host, was located on the sixth floor of a ten-story apartment complex in Shinjuku, about a twenty-minute walk from Kabuki-chō. I arrived around 6:00 p.m. While most salarymen in Tokyo were preparing to leave work, Koji was just getting ready to go. He was already dressed in a slim-fit, black suit with a loose, glossy, gray tie around his neck when he opened his door. He greeted me at his tiny genkan (entrance) and welcomed me in. Entering his studio, I found a room the size of six tatami mats, or a bit more than one hundred square feet. It wasn’t the opulent host apartment I was expecting based on depictions in Japanese television programs: home theater systems, sleek modernist furniture, closets filled with expensive stage costumes and designer suits, collections of rare wristwatches, bottles of fine perfume, and so on. Koji’s space was spartan. His living quarters contained a rectangular twenty-by-forty-inch coffee table, a worn-out mattress and pillow, a suit, three or so long-sleeved shirts, a few ties hanging from a bar hanger next to his bed, and a yellowed blanket folded up in a corner of the carpeted floor. While I surveyed his living situation, Koji grabbed a plastic bottle of green tea from his tiny, nearly empty fridge and served it to me on the coffee table.

7 2     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

He offered no snacks. He told me that it was typical for him not to eat anything before work and joked that he wanted to maintain his hangurī seishin (hungry spirit). Koji sat on the floor, lit a cigarette, and attentively looked into a hand mirror while he applied dabs of wax to his medium-length hair in order to give it a final spiky look. He grew increasingly irritated with the results. “I hate rainy days,” Koji said wearily. “It’s so hard to set hair because of the moisture in the air.” I sat on the other side of the coffee table and listened to him while taking sips of the chilled green tea. I noticed a hair dryer, a hairbrush, tweezers, an electric shaver, and a half-full bottle of Bulgari cologne, all scattered on the floor. On his plastic coffee table, however, two cell phones from different providers, a cigarette box, a cheap 100-yen lighter, and a metal ashtray were fastidiously arranged in order. “They say that hairstyle is life itself to a host. There are actually a few hosts who will take the day off when they can’t set their hair perfectly,” Koji continued, still struggling with his hair. “Just for their hairstyle, they take a day off?” I asked. “Yeah, hairstyle is that important,” Koji said. “The perfect hairdo boosts your self-confidence, and it reflects in your work. With imperfect hair, you can’t concentrate because your mind is subconsciously concerned with your look, and eventually it ruins the night’s business. That’s why veteran hosts try to avoid such unprofessionalism, even though they have to pay a penalty fee if they skip work.” Not long before I met him, Koji hadn’t needed to worry about such ­matters. Between 1997 and 2002, he was the top-ranked host at a small host bar in Kinshi-chō, a bedroom community in Tokyo, where he said he consistently earned 1 to 2 million yen per month—and as much as 5 million yen (about $50,000) per month at his peak. According to Koji, during that period he enjoyed living in a $3,000-per-month apartment, took taxis everywhere instead of the train, and bought practically anything he wanted without even checking the price tag. In his late teens, he had hordes of cash, prestige and respect among his peers, and the rapt attention of many women. He was living the life of his dreams in the city he had always dreamed about. Then one day, a year and a half before our interview, Koji’s Tokyo dreams fizzled and flickered out like a broken neon sign. One of his clients suddenly disappeared without paying her bill. In the hosting business, hosts are responsible for their clients’ unpaid bills, and Koji could not cover the debt. He was forced to sell everything he owned, including his pricey designer suits and Swiss watches, his computer and TV, even his casual clothes.

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    73

Despite all that he has lost, and despite living in debt with barely enough to survive on, like many hosts in his circumstances, Koji remains optimistic, firmly focused on his future and committed to his craft. “It’s the life of a professional host,” Koji said, speaking of himself in the third person. “It is our business—a business to sell dreams.” If hosting is a business to sell dreams, what are hosts? The most common responses I received were these: hosts are “commodities themselves” ( jibun ga shōhin), “professional entertainers,” “salesmen who promote and sell themselves,” and “self-employed entrepreneurs.” Regardless of the label, a host is expected to be not only a self-commodity but also a provider of physical and emotional labor to satisfy his customers. The multiple and ambivalent roles that hosts play shape a dual sense of the self—as a commodity and a service provider. Despite the often harshly exploitative terms of their employment, hosts I have met take pride in these roles. From this perspective, they are able to self-narrate and present themselves as entrepreneurial professionals. Unlike labor in the industrial economy, which is primarily limited to physical production in the factory, labor in a postindustrial service economy like the host club extends to include emotional labor and transgresses production-sales divisions. Based on her ethnographic study of Delta Airline’s marketing strategy in the 1970s postindustrial US economy, Arlie Hochschild’s classic work, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, has revealed that production and sales of certain feelings are at the heart of the growth of the service sector where satisfactory responses to the customer’s needs and feelings are directly linked to corporate profit making. This kind of labor is, Hochschild has argued, gendered, class marked, and low status.1 Often female providers— waitresses, care workers, flight attendants—are expected to display “extra emotion work—especially emotion work that affirms, enhances, and celebrates the well-being and status of others.”2 Meanwhile, doctors, lawyers, and other people in socially prestigious occupations do not face the same emotional expectations and burdens. While this discussion is invaluable to an understanding of gender and class inequality in new forms of labor, Hochschild and her followers tend to focus on women’s emotional labor, paying scant attention to men’s. They also overlook, or fail to incorporate, interactive aspects of consumers’ reciprocity and temporal factors such as hopes, dreams, and future-oriented aspirations, both of which are capitalized on in contemporary neoliberal market economies. At Fantasy female clients, as well as male hosts, are ­encouraged to reorient their

7 4     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

emotional states in relation to their future goals and satisfy each other emotionally, capitalizing on the process. Hosts, like Koji, perform to provide women emotional satisfaction while avoiding feminization of their labor. Hosts actively play the role of masculine seducer and produce their entrepreneurial self-­identity. The seduction that hosts engage in goes a step further than the theorization of emotional labor that ends when service providers “manage their hearts” and produce certain feelings in their customers. Seduction involves not only evoking and manipulating the others’ feelings to produce satisfaction but also potentially enticing the seducees to serve the ends of the seducers themselves. This subtle power to successfully manipulate the other allows male hosts to downplay their feminized emotional labor and instead highlight their masculine professional status. Hosts’ distinct, masculine subjectivity, which relies on seductive power, becomes relevant in neoliberal values of autonomy, entrepreneurship, and self-responsibility. Hosts’ subjectivity is particularly poignant as they attempt to legitimize their self-autonomy by differentiating themselves from other sex workers, even as they themselves engage in sex work. Similarly, hosts express sympathy for the regimented lives and constricted prospects of salarymen, even while they devote themselves, body and soul, to the unceasing demands of a profession that rarely, if ever, pays off in the present. Nonetheless, hosts’ contradictory subjectivity is revealing. Their articulation is closely related to sociohistorical changes wherein the value of labor, and the self-identity ascribed to such labor, has shifted from stability, ordinariness, and frugality to fluidity, extraordinariness, and extravagance over the last two and a half decades. Hosts’ commodified yet entrepreneurial subjectivity epitomizes a future-oriented class struggle that persuades less-privileged young Japanese men, who have little to lose, to bet on risky aspirations for a better future, even when the pursuit of those aspirations proves speculative and self-exploitative.

Moving “Up” Koji grew up in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, and became a­ dept at sports at an early age. While still a freshman in high school, he was offered a basketball scholarship from a local college, but he badly injured his knee during a summer practice session, effectively ending his academic and athletic

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    75

prospects. Feeling hopeless about his future, Koji dropped out of school, got a job working in construction, and spent a while trying to figure out how he could reset his life. He dreamed of moving to Tokyo, imagining an anonymous city life full of job opportunities, individual freedom, and a sophisticated lifestyle. Tokyo was where the trendy dramas his older sister watched were staged, where the fashionable clothes he admired were designed. Koji’s parents and sister, however, felt he was making a terrible mistake, especially since he had no relatives or acquaintances to rely on in the city. They also expected him to continue their patrilineal household as the eldest son, a time-honored custom in Japanese culture. After a number of drawn-out quarrels with his family, Koji left home for Tokyo when he was seventeen. Once there, he soon learned that he had limited employment opportunities because of his age, educational background, and skill set. He again found work in construction to support himself, and things went well for a while. He got along with his boss, gradually gained his trust, and was promoted to supervisor at a construction site. He earned about 300,000 yen ($3,000) a month and realized that he was much better off financially working in construction than in other low-wage, non-regular jobs. At this point in his life he knew nothing of hosting. Then one day he was talking to a female friend who told him that he had the same features that successful hosts seemed to have—a tall and slim body, a “pretty” face, and a sense of humor—and that he had the potential to become a popular host. She took him to a host bar in Kinshi-chō, which, as he recalls, opened his eyes to a completely different world. In contrast to the dusty, noisy, and sweaty work of the construction site, the host bar was, to him, a refuge of sophistication and glamour. Koji says he was instantly attracted to the concept of dressing nicely, drinking, and flirting with women for a living. After talking with the club’s management, he immediately decided to become a host and quit his construction job even before he officially began to work at the small host bar. Koji was still seventeen when he became a host, an illegal hire. He lied about his age, claiming that he was eighteen to avoid Japan’s Child Welfare Act, which bans minors from working in the sex and entertainment industries.3 (Unlike most other occupations, where background checks are routinely conducted, in Japan’s so-called mizushōbai, or “water trade,” such checks are nonexistent.) While his hiring came easily, success did not.

7 6     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

In the beginning, Koji earned roughly 120,000 yen per month and barely survived his club’s initial three-month training period. His salary was roughly one-third what he had been making in construction. Despite his eagerness to quickly learn the essential business skills and techniques of hosting, there was no official training offered beyond how to make drinks, clean tables, and exchange ashtrays. He eventually began to imitate the styles and techniques of his successful senpai (seniors), carefully studying how they delivered their entertaining stories, performed their attentive ladies-first services, and cast their masculine images. He watched, for example, how another host lit the cigarette of a client in a particularly stylish way and practiced it over and over again himself until he was able to swiftly flip open his Zippo lighter, produce a light, and lay the lighter on his palm to provide the light in one smooth motion. Keeping a journal on current events and jokes that drew spirited laughter or conversation, Koji started to pick up interesting stories and funny lines. He also trained himself to envision what needs a woman in front of him would have based on her outfit, mannerisms, and body language and how he could possibly please her on that information alone. After months of monastic devotion and self-study of women’s wants and desires, Koji’s client base began to grow.

FIGURE 12. 

Takeyama.

A top-ranked host stylizes his smoking posture. Photo © Akiko

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    77

Eight months after he started hosting, Koji’s monthly income had jumped to 600,000 yen, twice what he earned from his construction job. His sales further increased when he realized the relationship between his performed popularity and his sales. “It is after all not the actual taste of a dish that determines the dish’s popularity,” Koji said metaphorically. He explained: Popular opinion shapes what tastes good and influences consumer behavior. Nobody wants to pay a lot of money for unpopular or unwanted things. People try out what seems to be popular, assuming that it must be good since other people think it’s tasty. The more popular a product is, the more appealing it becomes and the more sales it makes.

Based on this inverted logic of the commodity’s content and its popular valorization, Koji suggested that the consumer’s subjective experience of a product is not inherent in its thingness but rather is created through a communicative process. Like artworks and stock prices, the economic value of a service product emerges and is maintained only insofar as many collectively perceive a certain value in it. In this respect, anything can be turned into something popular, valuable, and appealing regardless of its inherent properties. Koji said that he strategically created his image as if he were a popular host. He pretended that he was completely confident in his ability to entertain all sorts of women even though inside he felt insecure. He believed that consumers buy products from confident salesmen. He walked briskly from one table to another, acting as if he were busy and in high demand, handling many customers even though he was merely serving as a “helper” at other hosts’ tables. He also would have his own helper hosts tell his client that he couldn’t return to her table because another client had just opened a new bottle for him, even though it wasn’t true. This was a calculated move, commonly employed by hosts to motivate women to order more expensive drinks and thus bring their hosts back to the table. By strategically leading his clients to compete against one another in their spending to win his attention, Koji fashioned a popular image and appealed to more women. The intensified competition over his attention sometimes led to an auctionlike bidding for his services. It had a snowballing effect on his sales. At the moment of bidding, Jean Baudrillard reminds us, “Exchange value and use value are no longer correlated according to an economic calculus. . . . It no longer takes the form of supply and demand, but of reciprocal wager.”4 In the host club, the higher the bidding, the greater the chance for the client to bring a host back and

7 8     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

monopolize his attention, and the larger the contribution she makes to his sales. Trades in the host club go beyond the realm of routine economic exchange and enter a state of rapt anticipation of future investment, satisfying tenuous goals and self-fulfillment for both the host and customer. The c­ ustomer’s excessive spending, as well as the host’s calculated move, is a form of speculative investment in expected future return. As it can during an auction, the bid amount can jump wildly based on speculative perception of its perceived value; the actual value is, however, unknown and the anticipated result not guaranteed. Koji took advantage of his clients’ fetishizing of—and speculating about—his popularity and became the top-selling host at his bar in less than a year. E. L. McCallum points out that material things, including human bodies, come to manifest intangible values as a result of a dialectical and shifting relation between the subject and the object in socioeconomic, erotic, or religious power dynamism.5 Koji’s value as a fetish object was thus not inherent in his personality or masculinity, per se, but manifested through interactive exchanges. In other words, the object fetishism that triggers bidding competitions in the host club is not based solely on the psychological relationship between the fetishizing subject (female customers) and the fetishized object (hosts’ seductive masculinity); it is the product of seductive interactions staged in the host club. Koji’s case demonstrates that the strategic performance of his popularity (i.e., an object of fetishism), the setting of the club’s competitive milieu (ritual context for fetishism), the evocation of participants’ rivalry (fetishists), and the intensification of bidding itself (degree of fetishism) are all intertwined and fed into one another. The orchestration staged in the host club creates the very synergy that fetishism brings about: hosts work hard to compete against one another, women “fight” over their hosts’ exclusive attention, and the ensuing spectacle fuels the legendary reputation of the host club as an extraordinary place. While the synergetic effect has the potential to expand sales and dramatize human experiences, the fetishized value of popularity is also highly speculative in the making of economic, symbolic, and affective values.

The Rise and Fall Despite the uncertainty that went along with his popularity, Koji said that he was proud of his insight into the hosting business and his rapid career success. More than anything, he said, he enjoyed being at the center of attention and

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    79

having the envy and respect from his peers. The recognition was its own reward; it buoyed his self-esteem and motivated him to succeed further. He did. At the request of the bar owner, he agreed to act as a role model for the other hosts and became a manager of newly hired hosts. His newfound occupational and financial success was noticed outside the workplace, too. For instance, there was the time he went back to Hokkaido to attend a coming-of-age ceremony in his hometown of Tomakomai, a coastal port city about forty miles south of Sapporo. Koji dressed up in a black Armani tuxedo, tie, and shoes, wore a $30,000 Frank Muller wristwatch one of his clients bought for him, and treated his classmates to a meal at a fancy dining bar after the ceremony. Most of his old friends were still college students financially dependent on their parents or newly employed high school graduates making 200,000 yen or less (about $2,000) per month. None of his friends had yet achieved a managerial position or a leadership role at work. Koji was financially far ahead of them; in his splendid outfit he cut a dashing figure. His classmates were impressed with his hosting career and treated him as if he were a local celebrity who had gone off to Tokyo and made it big. Back at home, he finally told his parents, after three years of silence, that he had become a host in Tokyo. Judging from his attire and grooming, his parents thought he must be doing well. Before he returned to Tokyo, they told him not to commit any crimes or cause any trouble. At this moment, Koji said, he felt that he had become truly independent and had made the right occupational choice. Although hosting was still not well regarded in mainstream Japanese society, Koji said that he didn’t care how older, conservative people judged him so long as he was proud of what he had achieved and that other people—­ especially other young and liberal-minded citizens—recognized his success. But, Koji admits, his popularity gradually fed into his arrogance. He told me that his performed confidence became real and he became afraid of nothing. He got into the habit of not contacting his clients except when he needed their financial support. He bluntly told them to visit the club if they wanted to see him. He also asked them to spend more money if they wanted to draw his special attention. Treating some of his clients as if they were his servants and personal piggy banks, Koji systematically extracted money from them. Two of his regulars—both sex workers—were completely under his control. He convinced them that they were essentially so dumb that they would be scammed and hurt by other hosts if he did not intervene to protect them. To ensure they were provided proper guidance and money management, he

8 0     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

persuaded them, for their own good, to stop by his club every night after their work. Acting as a proto-pimp, he paid their bar bills out of their own money and gave them back allowances for transportation, accommodation, food and other necessities. By Koji’s account, they brought 25,000 to 35,000 yen to him every night; he gave 10,000 to 20,000 yen back by telling them that the rest would be saved for their future use. These sex workers, who typically take home only about half of what their clients pay, ended up giving Koji more than half of what they had earned. (Of course, Koji spent all of it.) In exchange, he played the role of caring guardian and big brother who supervised their lives out of his professed concern. Some women, Koji told me, want to be controlled by men so that they can feel how much they are cared for; other women enjoy a masochistic pleasure from their bossy men. Among hosts in the trade, it is a business style known as oraora eigyō (selfishly aggressive or threatening). Oraora eigyō, however, does not work effectively if there is too much fear and threat without adequate relief. To be effective, it must include the right proportion of tenderness, as well as gestures that indicate a man truly cares about his woman and is dependable. Losing the balance causes problems. Twenty-one-year-old Miki, one of the sex workers from whom Koji extricated money, had obediently followed his ­orders and dutifully brought her earnings to him every night for two months. But after becoming increasingly frustrated with the little progress she was making in her romantic relationship with him, she finally asked him what he thought of her and where their relationship was going. Koji, who had anticipated this question based on his past experiences with other clients, responded: You are so special to me, and therefore I don’t want to hurt you. As a host, I have to flirt with other women no matter how much I love you. I know you will be upset if you see me with another woman, even though you understand it is my job. I don’t want you to get hurt. I am also just too busy right now to commit to any relationship. The best way to handle the situation is for me to devote my time and energy to my work and quickly save money so I can open my own club. Then I will make you really happy.

After Koji implored her patience, Miki, who worked at a pink salon (a business where oral sex, assisted masturbation, and other nonpenetrative sex is performed), voluntarily started to service more clients and brought in even more money for Koji, earning more than 2 million yen per month for the following three months. Koji, however, never demonstrated any overt appreciation

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    81

because, according to him, a humble attitude would have positioned him as an indebted gift receiver who is obliged to reciprocate. This undermines his oraora eigyō, shifting the power dynamics. To avoid this, Koji instead took advantage of Miki’s desire for romantic advancement and invited her to help him accelerate the process of opening his own club. The process theoretically meant that her happiness would arrive sooner since his narrative equated realizing his dream with fulfilling her desire. In this imaginary future, Miki was bestowed the opportunity to be Koji’s co-investor and ascend to “special woman” status among his other clients. In this way, Koji attempted to skillfully manipulate Miki’s sense of indebtedness to him for the opportunity. Because of Miki’s continued attachment and enthusiasm for their imagined future together, Koji gradually came to bank on her loyalty and reliability. When she told him that she felt so ill that she couldn’t continue to work or visit the club, he didn’t take her claim seriously. He assumed that once she took some rest, she would take on even more clients as she had done in the past. He encouraged her to continue to visit the club every day, relax, and order expensive bottles of liquor on a monthly tab, allowing him to continue setting sales records. Despite her initial hesitation, Miki followed Koji’s request and proceeded to make him the best-selling host in the history of the club. Miki was too sick to come celebrate his success the following month, however. And when the bill finally came due, Koji discovered that Miki had suddenly disappeared without paying a total of 4 million yen ($40,000), her bill for the entire month. Called “flying away” (tobu) among hosts, conjuring the image of a bird disappearing into the sky and leaving an empty cage behind, it is not uncommon in the hosting business for women to disappear to avoid paying outrageously expensive bills or get revenge for a host’s poor treatment. Koji had seen other hosts get burned this way, he said, but he didn’t think it would ever happen to him. Koji panicked and made a desperate attempt to find Miki. But it was futile: she had already quit her job in Kinshi-chō and disconnected her cell phone; he knew only her name, which was probably fake, and the area where she lived, leading him nowhere. Since he spent money freely, and like many other hosts had a serious gambling addiction, he had almost no savings and no immediate means of repaying the debt. He tried to get a bank loan and a consumer loan, but because of his non-regular occupation he was disqualified. Furthermore, no insurance or assistance was available to cover such an incident. Borrowing money from black-market lenders—an illegal loan with an outrageously high

8 2     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

interest rate and a threatening method of collection—was a last resort, but Koji said he was too afraid to seek that option.6 Meanwhile, the club’s owners sold the unpaid bill to a collection agency, from which he received constant threats. Koji gave up his luxury apartment and sold almost everything he owned, managing to repay 1 million yen, a quarter of his debt. Adding to his financial distress, Koji’s symbolic appeal at the club, which he had consciously built up around a perception of popularity and success, quickly fizzled when it bumped up too publicly against the reality of failure. He told me that he lost popularity among women in the bar and also lost the respect of the helper and junior hosts he mentored; at this point, he realized that his clients and juniors had given him attention and respect because of the spectacle he created, not who he was as a person. It was too late to do anything about it. “I have lost everything,” Koji sighed. “So I feel that once the bubble of popularity burst, everything that I had built up to that point—fame, respect, and the status of being a number-one host—vanished in an instant.” The incident, however, became an opportunity for Koji to examine his hosting career. He told me that he became furious when he first learned about Miki’s disappearance, but his anger faded once he reoriented his energy from the impossibility of finding her to the more realistic possibility of paying back the money that he had taken from her. The universe keeps score, he rationalized, and it was his price to pay this time for the arrogant oraora eigyō he had maintained in the past. Dejected, Koji quit his hosting job at the Kinshi-chō bar and started looking for new work. He keenly felt that he needed to find a new environment where he could start all over again. But he couldn’t think of another occupation besides hosting that would enable him to quickly pay off his debt. He had neither the skills nor the experience needed to get a decent job. Fantasy, the Kabukichō club famous for its wealthy clientele and pricey service, seemed to offer the only way out of his predicament. Based on his past credentials, Koji was confident that he would be successful there, too. But the reality proved otherwise.

Dwelling in Dreams At the time of our meeting, Koji said he had been struggling to find clients for the last five months at Fantasy. Far larger than his old host bar in the suburb, Fantasy was stocked with ambitious, hungry hosts who compete vigorously over clients, particularly the wealthy ones. Furthermore, the Fantasy hosts seemed

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    83

to Koji all first-class professionals worthy of the club’s name value. Koji felt inadequate compared to these hosts and disadvantaged since he could no longer afford the gear necessary to perform as an attractive host. With meager sales, his ranking in the club had plummeted to near bottom, and he was living on about 200,000 yen ($2,000) per month. Most of it, he said, was going to the debt collection company. To survive, Koji borrowed 50,000 yen per month from the club on the condition that he pay it back once he repays the collection company.7 Flat broke, Koji had to stay with one host friend after another, like a refugee moving from camp to camp. Hitting bottom, he found himself living in a kapuseru hoteru (capsule hotel), where mostly men reside in tubes for about 3,500 yen per night. Over the past two decades, increasing numbers of Japanese men—both young and middle-aged—who have lost their jobs and homes and cannot afford to rent an apartment live in these densely packed facilities or in Internet cafés, where snack foods and shower facilities are available at reasonable prices. Those who cannot afford to rent an apartment and migrate from one Internet café to another are called “net café refugees.”8 They have come to symbolize Japan’s seemingly intransigent youth unemployment problem and, particularly, the hope-deprived make-gumi (losers’ group) described earlier. Koji told me that he lived in a capsule hotel for nearly a month in July 2003. Toward the end of his stay, his weight dropped an average of about a kilogram each day as a result of constantly disturbed sleep, poor nutrition, chronic stress, fatigue, and irregular work hours exacerbated by chain smoking and excessive alcohol consumption. His immune system weakened, and it took him longer to recover from illness and colds but Koji could not afford to see a doctor because he had no health insurance.9 Once, when he badly needed to see a doctor, he invited one of his few remaining clients to a “date” at the hospital and had her cover his medical bill. The rest of the time he had no other choice but to endure his poor physical condition and crushing anxiety about his survival. Just before his despair had reached its nadir, a host friend at Fantasy offered Koji the use of his apartment, saving him from homelessness. His friend asked Koji to maintain the lease for him while he lived with his irokano (literally, a “colored girlfriend,” but among hosts it refers to a client who is treated by her host as if she were his girlfriend). The apartment, where I visited Koji in August 2003, was a temporary residence until his friend broke up with his “girlfriend” and returned. Despite his troubles, Koji does not yet intend to quit hosting. He told me that he could not imagine working at a factory or in construction full-time

8 4     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

even though he knows it would guarantee him a more stable income, job security, and social welfare. He describes his motivations: I am still young enough to make a comeback. I want to make it before it becomes too late. Money comes and goes as in the saying kane wa tenka no mawarimono [money goes around and around], but it doesn’t simply flow to you unless you seek it out. I want a fabulous life once again rather than simply accept the fate that I have to live day after day for the rest of my life like I’m already dead.

For Koji, living does not mean simply satisfying basic needs. It means, as he says, “to live a flashy life” (hade ni ikiru), enjoying high-end sports cars, clothes, and places to live. Faced with the choice between an unremarkable but relatively secure existence as a conventional low-wage worker and a shot, however slight, at the glamorous life of a successful host, Koji has, once again, chosen to live in fantasy. “A high standard of living is not just a hope, but a must,” Koji said. At the time I interviewed him, he was still 2.5 million yen (about $25,000) in debt. Koji is a typical host in the sense that hosts are usually young men in their early twenties to mid-thirties who come from working-class backgrounds and do not easily fit into Japan’s normative business world. The majority of hosts I met at Fantasy and other host clubs in Tokyo have limited education—many are high school dropouts—and virtually no chance of achieving socially approved success in Japan’s highly stratified corporate system.10 Most have either abandoned or avoided the salaryman career path. Many became hosts after working minimum-wage temporary jobs, typically as furītā, temporary workers who remain stuck in low-paid jobs. They may have worked as non-regular employees at their local convenience stores and fast-food restaurants, or as factory workers, construction workers, salesmen, or salarymen at small-sized companies in Japan’s newly developed information technology, service, and entertainment industries. Hosts I have interviewed generally view the host club as a new employment opportunity and a backdoor entry into Tokyo’s world of luxury and privilege. Typical hosts come from peripheral, often rural regions of Japan and are attracted by the lure of the Tokyo megalopolis. They share similar stories of despair or frustration relating to their experiences at home, school, work, and future ambitions, which became catalysts for life changes. Tokyo’s futuristic facade appeals to them as a site of opportunity. Having little to lose and lacking alternatives to pursue, these young men tend to be flexible enough to willingly take

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    85

risks. As Koji and other hosts often repeat, “Hosting is a business to sell dreams.” In so doing, they also add that they seek to “realize their own dreams.” Yet, like gamblers, they discount the potential pitfalls while looking toward the glorious future. The acting skill involved to sell hopes and dreams requires considerable talent but also considerable monetary and emotional investment with no guarantee of future returns. More than anything, hosts must convince themselves first and foremost about their better future regardless of present conditions. As Koji’s longing for a “flashy life” succinctly illustrates, hosts, who “sell” women dreams, frequently dwell in a speculative dream world of their own, fantasizing that hosting is the vehicle to achieve the imagined good life in the future.

Love Trade While hosting does not formally require any special skill set to create and sell dreams, it demands devoted effort and self-study in and out of the host club in order to become successful. “Looking at hosts from a distance, wearing nice suits, driving expensive cars, and showing off good-looking chicks, I thought it was cool and easy,” said Yoshi, a twenty-four-year-old former number-one host from Osaka whom I interviewed. “But I found it was actually not so easy once I became a host.” It was in fall 2004 when I first saw Yoshi at Fantasy, where he had just started working a few weeks earlier. As a new host without any clients in Tokyo, he was put in charge of cleaning the club every night before business hours. Hosts I had already talked with suggested that I interview him because they thought he would soon become popular at Fantasy, too. They judged his handsome looks and soft mannerisms as highly favorable to wealthy middle-aged women. From a distance he looked like a beautiful boy in a Japanese comic book, with a small face, narrow eyes, a pointed nose, and thin lips tinged with red that contrasted his smooth, pale skin. He seemed more mature and confident than other new hosts I had met. I approached him when he finally sat down on a sofa and relaxed before the club’s opening and asked him for an interview, the first of many. Yoshi was born and raised in Osaka, went to one of the city’s high schools, and got in trouble with the law at an early age. He didn’t give the impression of someone with a criminal record, but one night he and a runaway friend were wandering around Nanba, one of Osaka’s sprawling sex and entertainment districts, at a late hour and were stopped by police. When the police started giving his friend a hard time, Yoshi said he hit one of the officers so his friend could

8 6     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

run away. He was arrested and received a suspended sentence for assault and obstruction of justice. His brush with the law resulted in expulsion from school at age eighteen, just before graduation. As a result, Yoshi said he went into a tailspin. While staying at his parents’ home in Osaka, he drifted from one temporary job to another—at construction sites, a factory, and an elder care facility. With his police record and incomplete education, he could not secure regular full-time employment. While working as a bartender at a private bar in Nanba, Yoshi was impressed with the flashy hosts who flirted with attractive women and lived extravagantly. At nineteen years old, he made up his mind to become one of them. But as Yoshi soon learned, it wasn’t so easy to “flirt with women.” He first had to learn how to present himself in a way that appealed to women. As in most clubs, however, there was no formal training or manual to guide him. Like Koji, Yoshi had to learn by watching how successful hosts plied their trade in his Osaka club. He also studied women’s fashion magazines and other media to analyze how masculine images are used to evoke female fantasy. He ultimately tried to see things from women’s perspectives so that he could understand their minds and respond to their needs precisely. “Women are much more detail oriented [than men],” Yoshi says. “They carefully observe every detail of a man’s body parts, gestures, and mannerisms and infer his personality, aesthetic sensitivity, and even sexual performance from these details.” For example, a man with well-coordinated slim fingers suggests someone with artistic creativity and a refined touch who cares about details and likely has a feel for sensuous expression in bed. Men with bulky and clumsy hands, however, like farmers, fishermen, and physical laborers, are not good at pleasing women romantically, he said. Conscious of women’s preferences, Yoshi meticulously cleans and maintains his hands, applying hand creams and occasionally a nail topcoat. Indeed, his smooth fingers aestheticize even trivial hand movements he makes, such as when he grabs an ashtray, gestures in conversation, or simply rests one hand on a table. His fastidiousness also extends to his feet. He wears an expensive pair of Italian dark brown leather shoes, for which he said he spent the equivalent of more than $500, to convey an impression of head-to-toe attentiveness. He says that his detail-oriented attitude communicates to women that he never cuts corners, even when it may be necessary, and instead promises highly polished service. Another crucial skill in hosting is communication technique—particularly casual and entertaining conversation. Yoshi says that he used to be too shy

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    87

to speak to strangers and struggled to ask for women’s telephone numbers, a critical first step for a host to advance. His senior host told him to get over his shyness because it made women uneasy. He gave Yoshi a tip: “Try to create and maintain a nice conversational flow. Don’t worry about the content because they usually don’t remember the conversational details they had while drinking. They only remember the fact subconsciously that they had a good time. Avoid awkward silences that they would register as an unpleasant time or incompatibility.” Through trial and error, Yoshi said that he eventually overcame his shyness to the extent that he could maintain a conversational flow and smoothly obtain women’s contact information. While Yoshi fairly quickly acquired the skills necessary to become a competent host, it took him much longer to learn more advanced hosting techniques, such as irokoi eigyō (literally, “sensuous love trade,” a commodified romantic relationship) and makura eigyō (“pillow business,” sleeping with clients for money). One evening, when Yoshi felt that he had just about mastered his self-­ presentation and conversational skills, a woman in her late fifties showed up at his club in Osaka and designated him. She saw him walking in the club and fell for him, he said. By Yoshi’s account, she was the stereotypical middle-aged Osaka woman: outspoken, meddlesome, and bossy. But the woman, a wellknown Osaka antique dealer, was also infamous for her conspicuous spending in the Nanba district. Hosts call such clients futoi kyaku (fat customers) and consider them the holy grail. Over the following month, Yoshi said, the woman came to the club to have a drink with him every night and spent nearly 2 million yen (about $20,000) for the privilege. One night when she became intoxicated, Yoshi escorted her home by taxi. She invited him to come inside her house. He politely declined, saying it was getting too late, but she insisted that she needed his assistance and pulled him out of the cab. She lived alone in a large two-story Japanese-style house in ­Tezukayama, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Osaka, in a home filled with expensive antique vases, tableware, furniture, and other artworks. Yoshi told me that he was flattered that she trusted him enough to invite him in but was anxious about how he should treat her at her private residence. He was seated on a plush sofa in the living room while she served him a cup of Japanese tea and sat down next to him. She then leaned over to put her forehead on his shoulder. Without knowing what to do next, Yoshi said he just sat there nervously and let her borrow his shoulder. He then realized that she was sexually aroused when she put her arms around his neck and whispered

8 8     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

into his ear, “I might be a bit drunk.” Sensing his shyness, she moved in closer and attempted to kiss him, but he dodged her advance. Yoshi told me that he was caught off guard, unprepared for a sexual relationship with a woman who was older than his mother. At the same time, he couldn’t afford to upset her and lose her as a client. “Sorry, I don’t mean to embarrass you,” Yoshi said to her. “I think you are a bit too drunk tonight.” He apologized and asked her to excuse him for the night. Afterward Yoshi said he became so afraid of losing her that he was unable to sleep. The next day his senior host, whose advice he relied on, assumed that he had had sex with the client and asked him how it went. Yoshi told him what had happened. But instead of expressing his sympathy, the senpai firmly admonished him: “You are so naïve. Hosting is not a sugar-coated business. Of course, you had to do it!”

The Sex Work Yoshi understood that makura eigyō is sometimes necessary for hosts to maintain clients and increase sales, but he understood it only in abstract terms. Following through proved challenging, because like other Japanese men, Yoshi said that he grew up believing that middle-aged women, especially married and older ones, were no longer sexual objects. Indeed, fear of losing sexual attractiveness and the desire to transcend ageism are key motivators drawing many middle-aged and older women to host clubs. Nevertheless, Yoshi called the antique dealer the next day to invite her out for dinner. Over the phone, she apologized for her drunkenness and “misbehavior” the night before. Her considerate attitude, Yoshi said, helped him warm to her as a human being, if not as a girlfriend. He decided that he would kiss her that night by persuading himself that kissing is merely a form of greeting and a way for him to show his appreciation. He first took her to a nice Japanese restaurant, then the host club, and finally to a karaoke box, where he kissed her while intoxicated. Once he got through this “first experience,” he said, kissing no longer became a big deal to him. Having sex, however, was another matter. He could not overcome the image etched in his mind that older women’s genitalia were ugly, dirty, and smelly. He had formed this image, he explained, while working as a caretaker for the elderly. He watched a diaper change demonstration for old men and women as part of his training one day and was shocked when he first saw an old woman’s

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    89

genitals. “The image was burned in my memory, with a strong smell of adult urine, and I can’t completely shake it from my head,” Yoshi confessed. He knew that his client was not like the bedridden woman, but psychologically he had difficulty accepting a woman who was older than his mother as his sexual partner. Despite his aversion, he finally convinced himself that it was his job to have sex. Luckily for him, his client was too shy to expose her naked body and insisted that the bedroom be completely dark when they first had intercourse at her house. He willed his erotic imagination in the darkness to arouse himself, he said, but because of his performance anxiety he could not ejaculate and had to fake his orgasm. He felt remorse about his deception but was encouraged by her responses afterward—she apparently was very pleased by his affection after sex when he held her in his arms, kissed her softly, and repeatedly told her how pretty she was. Yoshi had learned such treatment from reading women’s erotic novels to divine the secrets of satisfying female sexual fantasies. His diligent care and erotic endeavors were rewarded in the host club. The antique dealer’s spending increased dramatically, jumping from 2 million to nearly 10 million yen (roughly $100,000) the following month, turning Yoshi into the best-selling host for that month. She treated him as her boyfriend and wanted him to become the club’s number-one host. She was very proud of his outstanding sales record, Yoshi said. She also enjoyed the VIP treatment she received: the club manager gave her a personal welcome every time she arrived; even the club owner occasionally showed up at her table to thank her personally for her patronage. She regularly visited the club a couple of times a week and spent enough money to secure Yoshi’s top spot at the end of each month. Cash practically spilled out of the pockets of Yoshi’s black Armani suit. The woman consistently spent the equivalent of $100,000 to $125,000 each month on him for two years, and with her patronage, he had no rival in the club. Yoshi greatly enjoyed his career success and reputation, which he admits he never could have attained as a high school dropout with a police record. “I felt that money was something that constantly flowed in and fueled my power insofar as I maintained my relationship with her and met her erotic demands,” he said. Yoshi actively engaged in gijiren’ai (pseudo- or virtual romance) and did his best to perform the role of her ideal boyfriend. He called her several times a day to check in and reminded her how much he cared about her. He also visited her home every day after work even when he was drunk and exhausted.11 He tried to satisfy her desire to be with him all the time and frequently accompanied her on shopping trips and other business. Yoshi also took days off to travel

9 0     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

with her to onsen (hot springs) in Japan and even to Guam. On that trip he prearranged a bouquet delivery to the hotel room to give her a pleasant surprise. Returning to the hotel room from dinner and local attractions, he gave her a full body massage to help her relax and then have sex. The more he devoted himself to her, the bigger her desire seemed to grow, and the further Yoshi’s role expanded beyond the bounds of the host bar. In return, she gave him new Louis Vuitton travel bags, pocket money, and the exclusivity that comes with sojourning at luxurious inns where Japanese celebrities and members of Japan’s royal family often stay. What she gave him, Yoshi said, was something that he would probably not have had a chance to own or experience by himself, and therefore her gift expanded his life experience. Most important, he had secured her financial support and maintained his number-one status at the club. Yoshi said that at this point in his career the host club functioned as a “front stage” that allowed him to collect money, that is, recoup unpaid wages for all the irokoi—love- and sex-related—labors he provided outside the host club catering to her desires. His double shift (work inside and outside the club as a host and pseudo-­ boyfriend) further intensified about a year later when another futoi kyaku walked into the club and designated him. She was in her mid-forties, a famous fortune-teller in Osaka who appeared regularly in magazines and on television variety shows in the region. Like the antique dealer, she became smitten with Yoshi and started to frequent the club. By this time Yoshi says that he had set strict criteria for sexual relations with his clients. As the top-selling host, he drew the line at 1 million yen (about $10,000) per month for two consecutive months. In other words, a client had to pay the club 2 million yen (since Yoshi’s take was about half) each month, or 4 million over two months, in order for him to have sex with her. The fortune-teller met the criteria in the second month. His life became a triple shift: after working in the club between 1:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m., he stopped by to see the antique dealer to spend time with her. After a short noontime nap he would leave her, saying that he needed to get home. He then went to see the fortune-teller and spent time with her until early evening, whereupon he left and quickly got caught up on his text messages with other clients, ate and slept, and got ready for another night at the club. He told both his clients that his parents, with whom he lived, were too old to live by themselves and that he needed to check in on them at least once a day. In reality, his parents were in their forties and in excellent health, but he rarely had time to see them. Yoshi said that he was in “work mode” twenty-four hours per day.

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    91

Professionalism Looking back at his love trade, Yoshi said, “Women’s ideal romance entails hard work on the man’s side, and [that] is nearly impossible in the real world,” adding that he works much harder for his clients than he would ever do even for his own girlfriend. Yoshi believes that pseudo-romance must come very close to a woman’s ideal since very few men would make a greater effort than hosts themselves do to please them in exchange for money. “Women visit the club to attain what they cannot have in their everyday lives. Hosts provide it. It’s indeed hard work. That’s why they pay us a lot of money for the service,” he said. At the same time that Yoshi played the role of ideal boyfriend for the benefit of his clients, he performed the role of consummate professional for himself. What Yoshi refers to as professionalism, or “professional consciousness” (puro ishiki), is the medium and spirit to make the impossible possible—allowing women to dream. After all, the love trade he engaged in with his clients was a shigoto (work or profession) that he had chosen. For Yoshi, shigoto entails diligence, perseverance, and patience. He says that he can do things that he is uneasy and embarrassed about, such as flattering women’s beauty, calling them every day, and wearing flamboyant clothes only when he thinks it is part of his shigoto. From this perspective, earning money means suppressing his selfish feelings and emotions. In his opinion, many hosts confuse their clients with personal girlfriends or even servants and get visibly annoyed or upset with them about their behavior and selfish needs. Once hosts become popular and successful, Yoshi says that many become conceited and think that they can do anything they want with their clients, forgetting who is paying for their luxurious privileges. “I have seen so many hosts who became arrogant and eventually lost everything,” Yoshi said. “I don’t want that. The real professional always provides the very best quality of service without fail.” Although Yoshi conceptually differentiated his work from his private life, in reality he had no private time for himself—no girlfriend, time for leisure, hobbies, or relaxation. Much like the harried real estate agent who must constantly deal with clients outside normal business hours, Yoshi’s life similarly overlapped his “work.” Nonetheless, he convinced himself it was part of his occupation. Without the stamp of professionalism, he says, he would likely not work as hard to perform as an ideal boyfriend. In his mind, professionals constantly think about their profession and strive for the advancement. “A professional entertainer in the hospitality industry [sekkyakugyō] is a person who

9 2     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

keeps customers’ needs in perspective in order to better adjust to unexpected circumstances and satisfy [the customer] no matter what,” he said. Yoshi’s professionalism helps him manage his personal feelings and serve his clients even when their requests seem unreasonable to him. His professionalism, however, renders him vulnerable to self-exploitation. When he received a text message at work from the antique dealer that she was feeling an “irresistible temptation,” he dutifully replied, “Me too! The core of my body is wanting you,” even though he was actually turned off. He then gave her an enthusiastic kiss as if he couldn’t contain his passion for her when he saw her later after his work at the host club. He thus synchronized his words and acts, both of which were his professional performance, not to disappoint her but satisfy her needs. Things got more intense at the end of each month, he says, when the sales competition reached its peak. Yoshi drank so much alcohol that he purposely vomited in order to drink more, thus increasing his sales. (This is a typical strategy among ambitious hosts.) He often worked all day, napping to get two to three hours of interrupted sleep at best. He felt as if he were floating in space because of chronic exhaustion, excessive drinking, and stress about sales competition. Under these circumstances, he couldn’t think straight. Even so, he performed his job, as he says, out of “pride and professionalism.” In the production and sales of less tangible commodities such as service, entertainment, and personal care, productivity gains, as Christian Marazzi stresses, “no longer happen within ‘economies of scale.’”12 Instead, productivity is “tied to the production of small quantities of many different products, reducing to zero defective output and immediately responding to the market’s oscillations.”13 In other words, production and sales in the postindustrial service-centered economy cannot rely on mass consumption; it must meet individual consumer’s needs carefully to make a profit. In theory, the faster the turnover, the greater the profit. In practice, however, this entails a strict work ethic and highly personalized care on the part of the service provider. As Yoshi’s professionalism exemplifies, productivity lies in greatly expended unpaid emotional labor inside and outside the “factory” and the “market.” This multilayered labor during and outside club hours thus places the worker in an intensive and extensive work condition, blurring the distinction between work and nonwork. While professionalism enables hosts like Yoshi to capitalize on the energy and resilience of their youth, such never-ending self-development is inseparable from the “gradual erosion of life and spirit by the stress of constantly having

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    93

to remake oneself,” as Ann Anagnost reminds us.14 Yoshi’s patience and professionalism had its limits, eventually wearing thin under the stress of his extreme working conditions and his clients’ ever-growing demands. The antique dealer, for example, became increasingly obsessive after he began seeing the fortune-teller, wanting to know everything he did when he was not with her. She called him ten to twenty times a day and annoyed him. When he blocked all her calls, she called from pay phones and also called at the club where he worked. He could no longer tolerate her jealousy and tried to end their twoyear relationship. He finally told her that he wanted to break up. Hearing this, according to Yoshi, she became hysterical and demanded that he return all gifts she had given him. He ignored her request and finally escaped from her when he moved to Tokyo. With an annual income of about 60 million yen ($600,000), Yoshi explained that he lost his hunger for more money and shifted his focus to symbolic rewards, particularly his desire to become the top-ranked host at Fantasy in Tokyo, the number-one host club in Japan. With a renewed mind-set and goal, Yoshi was highly motivated to polish his professionalism further in the prestigious club. It should be noted that the Japanese word puro (literally, “pro”) that Yoshi and other hosts employ, though it derives from the English word professional, carries a different connotation than in the West, where it typically refers to individuals who have formal education and training in highly specialized fields such as medicine, law, and accounting. The Japanese use of the word is more discursive and inclusive. Particularly, a puro has become, in recent years, one who willingly strives to continuously improve and pursue perfection. For example, a popular documentary series, The Professional, broadcast since 2009 by the NHK national public television network, defines professionals as those who play an important role in a given field and features first-class professionals in various domains such as sports, art, entertainment, fishing, farming, manufacturing, retail, railways, air traffic control, and even janitorial work.15 Whereas puro once described mostly athletes, artists, and entertainers, today it includes a broad swath of business and occupational fields. Hosts have shrewdly exploited this trend to their advantage by differentiating themselves from traditional artisans or entertainers, who must go through an extended apprenticeship before they can produce finely crafted works of art. Hosts aim to quickly acquire the requisite skills to seduce women for the sake of spectacular monetary gains and recognition in the hosting field. For

9 4     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

them, professional entrepreneurship is a way to gain worldly rewards rather than a transcendental state of mind or self-mastery, as advocated by the entrepreneurial craft workers of previous generations.16 Their attempts at the quick turnover for fast cash gain epitomizes Japan’s postindustrial economy, in which production and flexible accumulation of capital have been idealized in terms of economic productivity. In addition, hosts’ professional consciousness coincides with the neoliberal-driven values and ethics of individual creativity, entrepreneurship, and future-oriented aspiration that are continually reinforced as the key to Japan’s competitiveness in the twenty-first century. Neither the club owner nor their clients force hosts like Koji and Yoshi to work long and hard hours inside and outside the club. Most do so willingly, whether motivated by the prospect of future financial reward, by fear of losing what they have already invested, or by their professional pride. Hosts’ seemingly voluntary professionalism is not solely based on their will. It is actually a consequence of their multiple negotiations with their dreams, the demanding nature of their labor, the club’s working environment, speculative sales in the service sector, and changing socioeconomic conditions in Japan.

The Autonomy of Self-Commodification While Japan’s mainstream media hail successful hosts as exemplars of the nation’s new business possibilities, hosts are still stigmatized by Japan’s sex and gender norms. When young female hostesses serve (mostly older) Japanese men, including their sexual needs, they are looked down on as “commercial women,” but their labor is commonly accepted as an extension of women’s unpaid domestic work—their “natural” sex role—in Japan’s male-centered ­society.17 Women’s emotional labor to produce satisfaction for their male counterparts has been thus transmuted into a form of waged labor and systematically incorporated into the capitalist service sector through Japan’s long history of hostess and geisha establishments. But when young hosts enact such female roles in exchange for money, their acts are often viewed as unnatural and therefore, deviant, deceptive, and sleazy. The editor of an influential conservative magazine, Seiron, for example, has harshly criticized hosts’ calculated manipulation of “vulnerable” female customers into excessive spending, writing that they are nothing more than “lowlifes who prey on women.”18 However, the magazine remains silent about female hostesses who employ the same strategies to manipulate their male

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    95

clients. Such a one-sided critique reflects and reinforces Japan’s pervasive male-centered sex and gender norms: men as the breadwinners who financially provide for their dependents; women as the housekeepers who make sure their breadwinners remain healthy, productive, and sexually satisfied. Men who financially depend on their women are looked down on. Furthermore, the sexual value system, as Gayle Rubin insightfully points out, further stigmatizes those who deviate from ideologically defined “good,” “normal,” and “natural” sexuality that is “marital, monogamous, reproductive, and noncommercial” in a male-female couple of the same generation; any sex that violates these rules is “bad,” “abnormal,” and “unnatural.”19 Men such as hosts, who are paid to produce romantic and sexual satisfaction for women, especially women who are older than they are, are stigmatized in multiple ways for their inverted sex role, abnormal sexuality, and sex work. Hosts are well aware of the asymmetry of these norms and acknowledge their occupational status in Japan’s industrial capitalism and corporate society, wherein the gendered division of labor is legitimized. However, they also sense the elevation of their status in the neoliberal values and ethics Japan’s postindustrial economy has promoted. At this juncture, hosts’ social reputation lies somewhere between condemnation of conventionally stigmatized work and celebration of newly idealized entrepreneurship. The owner of Fantasy explained to me that hosts historically have been viewed as “male mistresses” or gigolos; only recently has hosting gained social acceptance as a legitimate business endeavor and form of entrepreneurial professionalism. The ambivalence of their status has allowed hosts to highlight their entrepreneurial identity while downplaying their sex work. Hosts I have interviewed unanimously agree that having sex is inevitable, if not essential, for them to maintain their relationships with their wealthiest clients. Nonetheless, they deny or deflect their associations with sex work in public to avoid social stigma and attempt to better position themselves as professional entertainers. When they do discuss sex, hosts almost always stress self-control over their sexual conduct and sex as a business strategy. Even though Yoshi admits himself a bona fide “pillow host,” for instance, he avoids the label “sex worker.” To him, sex workers, such as so-called delivery hosts and gigolos,20 are like slaves who cannot say no to their clients, whereas hosts can freely decide whether or not to conduct “pillow business.” In his imagination, the sex worker has to have sex “no matter if the client is filthy, sick, and disgusting,” whereas the host has the privilege to choose women who are at least “clean, normal, and dressed up

9 6     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

to visit the club.” His peers similarly have their own justifications, criteria, and rules for sex. Some set the bar at certain sales targets, such as Yoshi’s millionyen earnings for two consecutive months. Others who do not have wealthy clients try to time sex to increase the odds that their clients will fall in love with them. Some others, like Koji, employ an oraora aggressive business style. Implicit in these narratives is that hosts not only maintain their self-­ autonomy but also save face by controlling the terms of sex with their female clients—terms consonant with Japan’s male-centered heterosexual norm that men are sexually active agents and women are passive objects; therefore, sex is something that men do to women.21 Self-autonomy thus differentiates hosts from mere sex workers or sexual objects, while reconciling the dilemma between feminized and stigmatized sex work and masculine and glorified entrepreneurship within their professional subjectivities.22 Some might still point to the fact that hosts’ male sexuality is commodified, and therefore, they are commodities themselves even if hosts succeed in defending what they do. For these bystanders, hosts wittily use the postindustrial logic of commodity value that renders them valuable and even desirable. With this logic, Yoshi, who admits hosts’ occupational status lies at the bottom of Japan’s pyramid-shaped social hierarchy in the model of industrial capitalism, inverts the pyramid as follows: If we take a look at the flow of money that is directed toward something valuable and desirable in society, hosts’ social position reverses. In Japan, salarymen provide financial support to their wives and family and spend money on their hostesses, and those women spend money on their hosts. See, the money doesn’t flow back to the salarymen, meaning they are least valuable and desirable in society.

In this upended food chain, hosts come out on top in terms of their consumability as desirable objects. Such a counterintuitive claim gains currency within the postindustrial consumer logic of commodity value and speculative accumulation of capital. In other words, any thing, including a human being, realizes its economic value only when it appeals to the potential buyer and actually sells itself.23 Otherwise, it has no value. This logic is constantly reiterated in club Fantasy: “No sales, no money.” The essence of such an economy is that the value of a commodity can be performatively created through aesthetic advertising and persuasive marketing, shifting the focal point from the passive commodity object to active salesman-

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    97

ship.24 This kind of trade is therefore open to anyone who can make himself or herself attractive and generate cash flow, regardless of sex, age, or social background. It appears to produce money out of nothing but one’s own body and its desirability. This is how hosts voluntarily commodify themselves: selfcommodification epistemologically saves them from being commodified by someone else, whether by a corporate employer or a female consumer. Though the subtle distinction between self-commodification and commodification by other(s) dissolves ontologically in actual transaction or trading, it is an important distinction for hosts, who attempt to preserve their self-autonomy and professional identity, regardless of their commodity status. What legitimizes the distinction are neoliberal values and ethics of individual creativity and entrepreneurship. Many hosts I interviewed expressed pity for corporate salarymen and their ethics of perseverance, hard work, and company loyalty. Daisuke, a thirty-four-year-old top-ranked host at Fantasy and former bar owner, juxtaposed hosts’ work experiences against those of the stereotypical salaryman: Salarymen in the subway train all look the same and seem so worn out, don’t they? Their unhappiness must come from their loss of self-motivation in their routine, working rigidly eight to five day after day under someone else’s supervision. They must be either busy devoting themselves to someone else or bored to death. [In contrast] hosts are blessed with flexibility and freedom. We are officially confined to the club for only four to six hours a night. The more sales you make, the more you earn. Hosts are more like self-employed entrepreneurs and professional entertainers who rent the host club space to do their own business independently.

Circumventing the limitations built into Japan’s corporate system, hosts take advantage of their freedom (or insecurity) for an uncertain shot at success in the sex and entertainment industry. Their narratives of entrepreneurship echo Japan’s corporate restructuring and neoliberal labor reforms wherein politicoeconomic and popular discourses have increasingly faulted Japan’s paternalistic corporate culture and lack of individual creativity for the apparent decline of Japan Inc. In this sociohistorical context, hosts use both the consumer logic of commodity value (i.e., things that sell are valuable) and neoliberal values of entrepreneurial professionalism (the ability to make the impossible possible creatively) to leverage their self-narrated masculine subjectivity vis-à-vis the

9 8     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

conventionally hegemonic corporate masculinity that is tied to standardized manufacturing, conformity, and perseverance. Here, I note again that hosts’ commodity status and entrepreneurial identity are neither total subordination nor complete self-autonomy. Their meaning making and value creation rely on various—existing and emerging—social discourses on labor, consumption, and citizenship, as well as sex, gender, and sexuality. Their cultural citizenship thus is a result of their creative rearticulation of these discourses to logically justify and symbolically better position themselves not outside but within mainstream Japanese society, even if they dwell in their dreams and fantasy world.

The Meaning of Workplace Hosts’ glamorous professionalism, however, exacts a steep price. The intense competition and pressure to increase sales lead many hosts to live irregular and often destructive lifestyles marked by excessive drinking, chain smoking, sleep deprivation, poor eating habits, and lack of exercise. Some hosts run into physical problems, such as kidney failure and weakened immune systems, typically seen in much older hospital patients. As Koji’s case demonstrates, they often have no health insurance and cannot afford to see doctors when they have health problems. If they quit hosting, often they do not have any unemployment benefits. Lower-ranking hosts like Koji typically make less than 200,000 yen (about $2,000) per month, including tips, which is barely enough to subsist on in Tokyo. For these bottom-feeding hosts, hosting is a loss-leading proposition pending their next big break. For while they must pay their monthly rent and high cell-phone bills, the professional imperative to project the image of a successful, desirable host means they must also continually invest in their appearance: wearing the hottest fashions, carrying the latest cell phones, and so on. This often means they must cut back on other necessities. They eat inexpensive obentō, boxed meals bought at convenience stores, or eat at their clubs when a client orders food. They typically spend very little money on their daytime clothes, often wearing only pajamas and sweat pants. Most mid- and lowerlevel hosts I interviewed share studio-style apartments with other hosts or friends and own few pieces of furniture—sometimes not even a television set. Top-ranking hosts, I found, are also unexceptional in terms of their material possessions, despite what Japanese people are led to believe. Their con-

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    99

spicuous consumption is often limited to publicly visible luxury items such as sports cars, flashy wristwatches, and tuxedos. They typically have no savings and spend everything they make on gambling, drinking, and their junior hosts. Thus, hosts’ professed self-ownership and workplace freedom are belied by the reality that they labor in a highly stressful work environment with little social and job security and often sacrifice their youth and health for their dream of business success. Why do hosts not resist their harsh working conditions or quit their jobs? Challenging the club’s management essentially risks obstructing their own chances at obtaining the glory and success of which they dream. Furthermore, it may jeopardize their legitimacy as socially appropriate male citizens in Japan. Many hosts stress the importance of having a workplace (shokuba) to maintain their male identity. Ryū, a thirty-two-year-old veteran host who had maintained top-ranking status for more than ten years, quit his hosting job but soon returned to work at Fantasy. Like Ryū, hosts are often asked by their clients to quit hosting and become their “only ones.” Ryū thought it would be more profitable to directly receive the full amount that his futoi kyaku spent monthly on him rather than receive only half of it from Fantasy. But he said to me, “Men who don’t have or belong to a workplace are assumed [in society] to be social losers who must financially depend upon someone else.” Ryū did not speak about his own case but instead shared with me a story about a former top-ranking host, Akira, a thirty-one-year-old ex-salaryman at a trading company who quit hosting after a wealthy client had fanatically fallen for him. The woman, he said, did whatever it took to please Akira and gave him everything he wanted, including a custom-built sports car, an apartment, and many other lavish gifts. She also catapulted him to the top echelon of the club. However, she wanted him all for herself and begged him to quit hosting. His desires satisfied, he did just that. But soon after he quit, she no longer attempted to please him and instead became increasingly demanding. The woman at last broke off their relationship, and Akira lost everything, forcing him to retreat to the club. Ryū said, “A host needs a stage where he can perform as a star. Once he steps down from the stage, he becomes an ordinary man. Nobody spends much money on an ordinary person.” The host club, in other words, is more than simply a workplace. Its carefully crafted dramaturgy is an essential component in building a host’s performance as an attractive, desirable, and, above all, valuable commodity that can demand higher prices. For it is only on the theatrical stage that hosts can

1 0 0     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

cast their magical spell, seducing women into acting out to serve their needs; in other times and spaces, their magical power vanishes and their seductive facade diminishes.

Entrepreneurial Temporality Some might conclude that hosts’ self-narrated entrepreneurial identities are entirely false or deceptive (in the Marxist sense of false consciousness), that they merely sell their labor power to the capitalist owner like most contract workers do. Host club management technically treats hosts as self-employed, contract workers for tax purposes, to avoid responsibility for pensions, health insurance, and other benefits.25 This arrangement optimizes its profits and at the same time gives hosts the impression that their net income is higher than corporate wages would be. However, the very structures that produce their socio­ economic insecurity also provide hosts with the necessary authorization for their self-employed masculine identities. The precarious state of hosts’ professional lives creates space for future dreams that steadier, more secure employment would foreclose. Hosts I met are highly aware of the club’s exploitative system. They also know that hosts’ success stories are largely mythical since very few ever succeed in achieving their goals. Nonetheless, they subject themselves to exploitation based on their presumption that they will ultimately succeed and that hosting is merely a temporary occupation until then. From this perspective, their exploitative working conditions become a necessary gateway to get ahead in the world. The temporal gap between future-oriented success and present oppression complicates the notion of economic exploitation in the work of entrepreneurship where risk, hardship, and uncertainty are built in. In their conceptual frame, hosts often transform the gap between their future goals and current situation into a continuous flow, from the passing present to a positive moment yet to come. Hikaru, the twenty-nine-year-old top-ranking host who seduced the widow Sachiko into spending a fortune on him, describes this temporal trajectory: Hosting is a job that you can start out with no special knowledge, skills, and work experience but only your bare body. If you can survive in this competitive environment, you could survive under any circumstances in your life. The entrepreneurial spirit, wisdom, and skill sets you acquire through the hosting ex-

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTRACTION    101

perience will be essential and universally applicable to any other business fields [where] you wish to succeed in the future.

In Hikaru’s narrative, the host club, which welcomes budding entrepreneurs, is a high-pressure incubator that hosts utilize for their growth but eventually walk away from; nonetheless, their bodily acquired attitudes, skills, and knowledge will remain with them even after they leave the host club. This ambivalent temporality, wherein a future and the present coexist, shapes a particular kind of human agency. Much as a virtuoso artist submits to the disciplinary training, diligent practice sessions, and hierarchical apprenticeship necessary to achieve self-mastery—and fully aware that prospects of ultimate success are just as daunting—hosts also view their voluntary subjection as part of their craft. This seemingly obedient act of self-subjection is, however, not mere abandonment of agency but implies, as Saba Mahmood conceptualizes human agency, the “malleability required of someone to be instructed in a particular skill or knowledge—a meaning that carries less a sense of passivity and more that of struggle, effort, exertion, and achievement.”26 In other words, trying something new always entails obedience to pedagogy in the cultivating of necessary skill sets, mentality, and wisdom before one ultimately achieves virtuosity in one’s own field. This model, however, complies with the neoliberal logic of entrepreneurship: high risk, high return; and no pain, no gain. Working under exploitative conditions becomes a necessary cost that hosts pay to continue their pursuit of the glamorous life. Their work and lifestyle thus point to a new form of labor, subjectivity, and class struggle in millennial Japan. As the hosts’ stories illuminate, future aspiration is an imperative and a site of struggle to self-subject to necessary “training” and others’ needs for their own goals. Hosts’ struggles are inevitably entangled with structural factors such as lack of socioeconomic means, safety nets, and established occupational status. But it is more aptly intertwined with affective components (anticipation of success, self-motivation, and fear of becoming losers) and temporal dimensions (exploitation as necessary, temporary hardship for future success). Here, class struggle is not a collective one based on class identity against the capitalist owner but a discrete enterprise to undertake individually in the name of freedom of lifestyle choice and self-responsibility.27 This is especially the case in the context of Tokyo’s affective cityscape and, by extension, Japan’s “hope disparity society,” wherein class is transformed from a socioeconomic and cultural belonging to an affective and temporal aura (how

1 0 2     E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L AT T R A C T I O N

hopeful one seems about the future). The future-oriented aspiration of social actors like hosts feed back into the newly bipolarized class c­ onsciousness—the hopeful (potential) winners and the hopeless losers. Because of, not despite, their marginalization in society and uncertain future prospects, hosts I know bet their future on hosting with the hope of using their occupation to rapidly climb the steep socioeconomic ladder, even though their chance of success is slim. This, however, does not mean they are blindly drawn into the gamble. The conduct of hosts is the result of active negotiation with multiple factors: their own ambitions, clients’ desires, the club’s management system, social norms, consumer logic, neoliberal values, and changing politicoeconomic trends toward speculative accumulation of capital in Japan and the global economy. Within this multilayered context, the nature of chance—unruliness, novelty, and venture—becomes a form of freedom, a freedom that the neoliberal entrepreneurial subject breaks away from the status quo and moves toward a hopeful future. With the attraction of entrepreneurial professionalism in the context of neoliberal Japan, hosts’ paradoxical—commodified yet entrepreneurial—­ subjectivity is reconciled as masculine and agentive: they are independent salesmen who seek phenomenal sales and freedom. The aspiration upholds their entrepreneurial masculine identity despite their beautified appearances and feminized emotional labor. But the masculinity is not the result of their individual agency alone. It is situated in women’s fantasy of ideal masculinity, emotional labor demanded in the service sector, and neoliberal values of entrepreneurship. Hosts’ masculinity thus neither displaces nor reproduces hegemonic salaryman models; it asserts itself subtly, in ways that attract some women to fantasize about the dreams hosts sell, along with their new entrepreneurial masculinity.

4 FE MININE R E S TO R ATI O N

When I first met Megumi, a thirty-one-year-old married mother of three, in the summer of 2003, she was trying hard to rebuild her beauty and confidence through romantic excitement at host clubs. With permission from her husband, Megumi had visited Fantasy once a week for about three months. I met her through Koji, who at the time was Megumi’s designated host. Wanting to learn more about her life story, as well as their romance, I asked her for an interview. One evening before her “date” with Koji, we met at a small upscale darts bar near Fantasy. Megumi lives in Kinshi-chō, a bedroom community northeast of Tokyo, where she was born, and works as a part-time secretary for her husband’s carpentry business a few blocks from their home. Megumi had married her high school sweetheart more than ten years ago. She insisted to me that the marriage was based on love. However, her husband had recently begun to show less interest in her. The change was subtle, she felt. As Japanese men often do, her husband had started calling her Okāsan (mother) soon after she gave birth to their first son. Her neighbors began to refer to her as the wife of Mr. So-and-So or the mother of So-and-So. “Once married,” Megumi says, “women in Japan are not treated as individual women.” In this domestic environment, Megumi confessed, “I feel as if I have lost my feminine attractiveness and self-identity. It’s scary to imagine ending my life like this without ever having been recognized as an individual woman again. What a waste!” After Megumi’s youngest son started primary school four months ago, free-

104    FEMININE RESTORATION

ing up time for her, she decided that she desperately needed to recover her youthful appearance before she became too old. Looking back on her childhood, Megumi said that she used to attract men’s attention without effort. She had several boyfriends when she was a teenager and young adult and had also worked as a part-time hostess for a few years at a local bar before getting married. She missed the fun and vitality she experienced during those times. Wanting to relive the feeling of being an attractive woman, Megumi went to a small host bar in her hometown one night with some high school friends who had similar “midlife concerns.” She was immediately struck by all the attention she received. “In the club, hosts call me by my first name and pay attention to what I’m wearing, my hairstyle, my cosmetics, and give me useful feedback and emotional support,” Megumi said. “Their comments help motivate me to become more beautiful because I know there’s someone who cares about me.” On this particular evening, Megumi was wearing a dark gray cotton miniskirt with a white V-neck frilled silk blouse, her plump body seemingly unsteady in a pair of black high-heeled pumps. She told me she had spent more than two hours preparing for her outing, including a lengthy makeup session, manual straightening of her naturally curly hair with a flat iron, and trying on several outfits to select a fit that was neither too sexy nor too conservative. She said that she enjoyed primping in front of her full-length mirror. “The time I spend caring for myself—me alone—is something I miss in my day-to-day life,” she said, explaining that she had neglected her appearance and feminine bearing for a long time. “I always took care of my children first and then my husband, and taking care of myself was the last thing on my list.” Megumi’s efforts to revive her femininity, however, are a battle against aging and other physical changes wrought by motherhood. Despite her attempts to transform herself from mother figure to fun-loving woman, her habituated bodily dispositions—such as her tendency to walk like a Japanese housewife with bent-in knees and sliding of the feet1—are never free of what hosts describe as seikatsu no nioi (the smell of everyday life). Her looks also gave her away. Her hands, for instance, were dry and cracked, revealing both her age and the effects of daily housework. The belly flab around her waistline hiked up her miniskirt, so she had to constantly pull it down to cover her exposed thighs. She told me that she had gained more than twenty pounds since giving birth to her three children and was now on a diet. Though her age, marital status, and body all signal a passing feminine ideal as defined by Japan’s youth-oriented consumer market, Megumi was unde-

FEMININE RESTORATION    105

terred in her pursuit of an imagined romance with Koji. In her words, “It’s a pleasing experience for a woman to have an attractive young man look into her eyes and say, ‘You are so beautiful tonight,’ even if she knows it is only a performance or a lie. Women pay for it because they want to be allowed to dream.” For Megumi, it did not matter if her romance with Koji was real or commercially performed; the service, for which she spent a minimum of 20,000 yen (about $200) per night, generated excitement and assured her self-worth. Born at the tail end of the Hanako generation, Megumi shares similar desires and concerns with other middle-aged women who came of age during Japan’s bubble economy of the 1980s. Over this period, large numbers of single young women were hired in emerging financial, service, and leisure industries. With their newfound disposable incomes, they were the first generation of Japanese middle-class women expected to take frequent shopping trips abroad, freely spend money on their personal growth, and self-fashion their lifestyles. They were also the first to actively seek freedom from the traditional marriage and family system, which had pressured women of earlier generations to abandon sexual pleasure and “cast aside their womanliness.” As feminist scholar Yamashita Etsuko points out, even though they went on to get married and have children in the new millennium, the Hanakos deviate from the conventional image of Japanese mothers as self-sacrificing and devoted to their children and husbands, patiently tolerating boring house chores.2 Many have avoided the confines of the family order to pursue “a life of their own” Yamashita says. Such attitudes are well supported by recent trends toward late marriage, declining birthrates, and increasing divorce rates in Japan.3 Nevertheless, the Hanakos of today struggle to balance family life and individual desires as they confront aging and anxiety about the future. Among the women I met, aging was equated to loss of allure and self-esteem and was most often cited as their biggest concern. As I observed, Megumi and others not only undertake extensive “anti-aging” efforts but also speak wistfully about their youth, a period when they felt they could freely spend time and money on themselves and enjoy their feminine value at its peak. Such nostalgic memories are not always strictly factual but rather derive from popular narratives and fantasies. The Hanako tribe is, after all, a loose and disembodied representation of consumer citizens made widely visible through the popular media. The majority of this generation of women in fact earned far less than their male counterparts and enjoyed fewer social privileges and leadership roles. In this regard,

106    FEMININE RESTORATION

these acts of nostalgia reveal how people are seduced to return to a utopian past that never really existed. The seductive mechanism of nostalgia—what Susan Stewart refers to as “desire for desire”4—allows people to refuse to “surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”5 In the previous chapter, I illustrated the human dramas of hosts to explore how their subjectivities and class struggles revolve around their sense of professionalism and aspirations for future success, despite being marginalized and stigmatized for providing sex-related emotional labor. In this chapter, I focus on the female clients, particularly middle-aged married women like Megumi, and their desire for romantic excitement to examine the ways that their subjectivity formation and gendered ageism are negotiated in the host club and, by extension, contemporary Japanese society. I also demonstrate the melodramas whereby these women use romantic love—tokimeki excitement—to (re)form their youthful, beautiful, and sexually attractive selves. Technologies of the self, as Foucault defines them, “permit thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”6 The commodified performances of romance in the host club epitomize how female clients employ self-making technologies to overcome their perceptions of the social and material constraints that aging sets into motion. I argue here that it is the anticipation of aging and the imagined future of socially devalued selves rather than age itself that provokes middle-aged women’s—and even younger women’s—fears. Such feelings lead them to either accept aging as a natural process or battle fiercely against it. For those women who choose the latter, an enormous variety of anti-aging commodities, technologies, and supports are commercially available to ease their worry, including host clubs. In these clubs, romantic love is staged for women to initiate with professional seducers and consequently produce their desirable selves.7 Married women’s host club romances, in other words, afford them opportunities to pursue their gendered dreams and fantasies through consumption. By the same token, their hopes and fears are fueled and capitalized on by Japan’s postindustrial consumer market.

Reversible Time Host club dating, Megumi metaphorically explains to me, “has the kick of an energy drink.” A drink that delivers a dose of happiness that reverberates

FEMININE RESTORATION    107

throughout Megumi’s day. “I feel excited and find my life more enjoyable even when I’m just doing boring house chores. With this feeling, I believe I can become a better mother and wife at home and also be a fun woman at the club.” She says that host club dating has enhanced her self-esteem and made her more confident in her appearance and secure in her womanhood. Her host’s flattery and detailed attention, Megumi says, have increased her self-esteem. For example, she started wearing miniskirts after Koji praised her shapely legs and advised her to show them off. She changed the color of her eye shadow after Koji commented that the rose color lightens up her face and matches her cheerful personality. “Such advice helps me better understand my strengths and weaknesses,” she says. “It’s helped me focus on my strengths, instead of the parts of my body I don’t like, in a way that motivates me to become more beautiful.” She adds, “Hosts are essentially pros at female beauty since they follow fashion trends and carefully observe so many women every night. They know how to transform ordinary women into beautiful and attractive ones.” Hosts’ flattery aside, it is the romantic excitement she experiences at the club that has most affected Megumi. Tokimeki, she says, helps arouse bodily memories of her youth and recall flirtatious moments in her past and allows her to anticipate those moments once again. For that reason, she chooses host clubs instead of shopping or spending money at aesthetic salons. “Beauty at a boutique or an aesthetic salon is superficial and transitory since someone else creates it for you and gives it to you,” she said. “But the romantic excitement you experience in a host club inspires you to find your inner beauty.” Megumi’s need for romantic excitement initially sprang from her dissatisfaction with her marriage. Her husband, she said, used to be more caring and romantic, engaging in intimate conversations and showing sexual interest in her: he praised her appearance, cuddled with her, and gave her gentle kisses. But after the children were born, things changed. The mental and physical distance between them grew. Although her husband’s office was very close to home, he frequently left her alone because of overtime work, mah-jongg, drinking, and visits to hostess clubs. Though Megumi felt uneasy about their separation, she was simply too tired to confront him at the end of the day. She tried not to think about it. Only recently has Megumi had more time to consider her life prospects and question her self-identity. Nonetheless, she has not considered divorce or abandoning her family; she insists she just wants to have some romantic “spice” in her everyday life. “I just need mild intoxication with a taste of romantic love,” she said.

108    FEMININE RESTORATION

The host club delivers that. Further, it is a safe environment where she can maintain her family life, too. “It would be scary to meet someone I don’t really know. Who knows if the guy becomes so serious that he ends up destroying your family?” Megumi said. “With hosts, you don’t have that worry since they understand the boundaries.” The boundaries at home are another matter. Having learned from Megumi that she was visiting host clubs for fun, her husband at first objected and stopped her. Megumi appealed, however, for the same equal rights privilege that permitted him to occasionally visit hostess clubs. She convinced him that she too was now entitled to enjoy herself occasionally since she had devoted herself to him and the children for the past ten years. Running out of counterarguments, her husband reluctantly gave her permission but made her promise that she would not have any affairs or let her family obligations slip. He set a curfew to enforce her promise. In return, he offered to babysit the kids for the nights she goes out. •

•

•

Back home by 5:00 a.m., the curfew that her husband has set for her, Megumi washes away her makeup and changes into her one-piece homemaker’s dress. While trying to stay awake, she starts cooking breakfast and prepares obentō boxed lunches for her family. She gets her children up first, dresses and feeds them, and helps them brush their teeth before she wakes up her husband. After seeing them off, she tries to catch up on her lost sleep. Waking up after her host club partying, Megumi admits she feels tired, worn, and haggard. Her daily routine of cleaning, laundry, and grocery shopping starts anew. At the supermarket, she buys discounted items to save money and works part-time at the construction office to earn extra yen for the host club. In spite of her routine, she insists, “In my mind, I feel full of positive energy that makes my life more joyful and meaningful.” She added that her husband and children, as well as her friends, have registered and praised the change in her appearance and attitude. According to Megumi, the romantic experience extends beyond the host club and positively impacts her confidence. “More than anything,” she repeated, “I am surprised that the vitality lasts. I feel like I can enjoy every moment in my life.” Megumi’s remarks echo the popular discourses in women’s fashion magazines that have increasingly promoted women’s reforms of their bodily capacities, not just shapes and appearances. One such capacity is called ren’ai taishitsu

FEMININE RESTORATION    109

(literally, “bodily quality for romantic love”). The term refers to someone who has a tendency to fall in love easily, who is always in love, or who has had various romantic experiences.8 Taishitsu (bodily nature by birth or acquisition) is typically used to describe one’s health, for example, f­utoriyasui taishitsu (the bodily nature that tends to be fat), kyojaku taishitsu (a weak constitution), and taishitsu kaizen (improvement of one’s constitution). Such health-related vocabulary has been applied in popular discourses on romance amid Japan’s neoliberal reforms. A 1990 article in the long-­running and widely circulated women’s fashion magazine an.an, for example, advised female readers how to gradually cultivate ren’ai taishitsu. First, meditate and eagerly wish to develop susceptibility to romance; then, simulate your susceptibility to romance as if you are playing an interactive computer game; finally, do whatever provokes desire for romantic love, for example, drink champagne or read romance ­novels.9 If one follows the program, the article promises, the susceptibility to romance naturally diffuses through the body like air flowing into the lungs. Of course, not all married women share the same transformational fantasies. Hosts describe women’s diverse fantasies with the saying, “If there are ten women, there are ten distinctive colors,” or more literally, “ten people, ten colors” (jūnin toiro). But having dreams is one of the common denominators that host club patrons engage in regardless of different scripts and methods. Women I have met in host clubs often say that they want to “be allowed to dream.” This is the reason that hosts describe hosting as a “business to sell dreams.” If women purchase their own dreams, then what are the actual commodities they pay for? The common responses were that they pay to gain “vitality for the next day,” to reward themselves, to get their “womanliness” back, and to escape from reality. While these dreams may seem trivial to some readers, for middle-aged women bounded by familial and other social obligations, they have special resonance. In some cases, women simply said that, aside from host clubs, they had no other nightlife options, nowhere for them to enjoy themselves alone. In Megumi’s case, her host club ritual is not simply passive escapism or daydreaming. It is an entrepreneurial project that she undertook to transform herself and become a neoliberal subject. Her current perspective of what was valuable in her past demonstrates what she values in her life now. That is, she selectively remembers her fun-loving nature, youthful beauty, and sexual attractiveness. In this way, Megumi’s present experience (re)constructs her imagined past, which she then draws on to satisfy her anticipated future needs.

110    FEMININE RESTORATION

Accordingly, as literary scholar Svetlana Boym asserts, “nostalgia is not always about the past but can be prospective as well.”10 Although a future is commonly understood as the moment that will come after the present, Megumi’s case illustrates that her imagined future has already been present for her to act on to make certain things happen and others prevented. Specifically, she felt that her imagined future—loss of feminine beauty and self-value—was taking place in some way, making her fearful that it will worsen if she fails to take action. Her sensation of aging, along with her obligations to family, led her to believe that she would remain unsatisfied for the rest of her life unless she did something before it became too late. Thus, her selfimage of a sexually attractive young woman, seemingly derived from her feelings, memories, and experiences rather than coercive ideology, became both a guide to and an end point of her self-transformative project. This complex mechanism of nostalgic remembering of a future and a past allows individual actors like Megumi to believe that they are autonomous enough to undertake their self-defined projects and take action to realize their own future goals without subjecting to disciplinary forces and ideologies. Further, the mechanism, wherein time does not flow in a linear progressive way from the past to the present and on to the future, allows them to refuse to “surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”11 Within this temporal frame whereby all spatial others—people, social institutions, and structural environment—are relegated to the background, female clients like Megumi embody self-autonomous neoliberal subjects. They creatively utilize the host club, where the necessary stage, means, and personnel are available for women to liberate themselves and produce their desired futures.

Expiration of Womanliness While married women like Megumi strive to construct their desirable selves by adding extramarital romance to their family-oriented lives, Fumi, a single selfemployed saleswoman in her mid-forties, does so by adding romance to her career-oriented life. Originally from Akita, in Japan’s northern Tohoku region, where women are famous for their ricelike skin color, Fumi won a regional beauty contest when she was a young adult. She never married, however, and now lives alone in a Tokyo apartment. She started her own ladies’ lingerie business in Tokyo about fifteen years ago and worked tirelessly. A few months before we met, a friend and client of hers invited her to Fantasy.

FEMININE RESTORATION    111

Fumi told me that after going to the host club, she realized how much she had devoted herself to her career and neglected caring for herself. For years, she told me, she wore no cosmetics, and simply bound her hair with a barrette. “Before it becomes too late,” Fumi said, “I want to enjoy my private life, too. I want to get my thin body back. I want to enjoy romance. All of these things give me the energy and motivation to work hard.” She now lets her lightly permed brown hair down and wears cosmetics to work. She also has her nails manicured and dresses up for her visits to the club. When she first opened her business, Fumi said that she tried to present herself to be as plain as possible so that she could appeal to her customers as a sympathetic and trustworthy woman and avoid arousing jealousy or envy for her youthful look. She wore simple dark suits and light cosmetics. That all changed after her discovery of the host club. On the night that I interviewed her, Fumi wore matching pink eye shadow, cheek blusher, lipstick, and a flower-printed one-piece dress and a pair of ivory pumps. She also had her nails manicured pink and white with sparkles in the French style. With her lightly curled brown hair let down, her round eyes, accentuated with carefully applied mascara and eyeliner, were appealing. She looked much younger than her age. Interestingly, Fumi’s self-presentation downplayed her occupational identity as an entrepreneurial businesswoman and instead highlighted her gender identity as a youthful and beautiful woman. Juxtaposed with male entrepreneurs, including hosts, who typically foreground their occupational identities and business entrepreneurship, women are clearly expected, in terms of identity, to be the opposite, and their entrepreneurship is located in beauty and love. In the social valuation system, women’s happiness is still measured by their desirability rather than occupational success or social achievement, no matter how capable they are. As feminist journalist Naomi Wolf theorizes, women are still directed to attend to their beauty more than anything.12 Fumi is not alone in this regard. Many middle-aged Japanese women today look younger than ever. This has led to a profusion of competitive age guessing games on Japanese shows and the Internet, where some women in their forties, fifties, and even seventies, look so young they have sparked controversy.13 The notoriety of these age-defying women has spawned the term bimajo (beautiful witch). Despite the sinister ring in English, bimajo is a complimentary term that describes women “over 35 with a radiance that belies their age,” according to the monthly fashion magazine Bist (meaning “beautiful story”), which is aimed at middle-aged women.14 Bimajo have become so popular that the maga-

112    FEMININE RESTORATION

zine has held an annual beauty pageant contest in Tokyo drawing thousands of attractive women since 2010. The bimajo phenomenon is part of a growing trend among an aging Japanese population that is spending more than ever on goods, technologies, and services to reverse the signs of aging. The Japanese market for anti-aging cosmetics, such as wrinkle treatments, was 313 billion yen ($3.1 billion) in 2010, a figure that represented 150 percent growth in 10 years. Anti-aging products in total, including health-related food and vitamin supplements, were more than 10 billion yen in 2011.15 Japan dominates the global skin care market both in per capita spending and total sales, and despite a slumping economy and declining birthrates, the market shows no signs of slowing down. A big reason for this growth is obvious: Japanese w ­ omen’s life expectancy is eighty-seven years, the highest longevity in the world. But instead of reveling in their good fortune and embracing old age, many Japanese women have significantly increased their efforts to avoid aging. Having access to the benefits of a healthy diet, smooth skin, and advanced cosmetic technology, they are expected not just to age gracefully but not to age at all. Unlike Japanese men’s aging, which is associated with the accumulation of economic wealth and advancement of social status, Japanese women’s aging is usually equated to devaluation in popular discourses. The Japanese word obasan (a derogatory term for a middle-aged woman, connoting sexual unattractiveness) is one of the better examples.16 Looking back at her old self, Fumi confessed to me that she looked like an obasan and laughed at the thought. The negative self-image of obasan, she said, pushed her to repeatedly revisit the host club for salvation. Obasan originally meant “aunt” and, by extension, “middle-aged women in general,” connoting intimacy, until the late 1980s when satirical meanings were added to it. A witheringly satirical cartoon series, Obatarian (a combination of obasan and Batarian, the translated title of the 1986 American horrorcomedy feature film The Return of the Living Dead), comically depicted older women who were shamelessly outspoken, pushy, and bossy. Today, obasan increasingly refers to the obatarian and women in general who have lost (or abandoned) socially defined ideal feminine characteristics such as freshness, grace, and modesty.17 It has become an identity category of undesirable women and a potent disincentive against aging in Japan’s male-centered society. For example, Ishihara Shintaro, governor of Tokyo from 1999 to 2012 and the author of the best-selling book The Japan That Can Say No (1989), has called women

FEMININE RESTORATION    113

who have reached menopause babā, an offensive, derogatory term for an old woman, characterizing them as “not only a waste but also sinful” because of their lack of fertility.18 If obasan is a culturally constructed object that pressures women to fight aging or avoid it, there is no escape from onna no shōmikigen (expiration date of womanliness)—a metaphorical reminder that their biological clock is ticking. Shōmikigen (food expiration date) is taken very seriously in the Japanese marketplace, where freshness is everything. The idea of “best by” is applied to womanliness in everyday conversation as if women themselves were consumable objects and obasan were fated to be dumped as garbage. Against this setting, Fumi said, “I didn’t want to give up onna [womanliness] yet. Before it became too late, I felt like doing something about my situation.” Similarly, Megumi was on her journey to restore her onna. Their narratives indicate that onna is not only something that expires but also an object that one can self-produce, restore, or preserve. As such, onna is a cultural construct that women perform into being and perpetuate, not an expression of female biological traits. This concept and practice of onna brings to mind the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s famous assertion more than a half century ago: “One is not born, but rather becomes, [a] woman.”19 It follows that one can, in turn, vacate or discard one’s onna. The socialization process also echoes the more recent theorization of gender as a performative construct. Repetitive performance of feminine speeches and acts, along with womanly costume, hairstyle, and mannerism, creates femininity. Therefore, there is no gender identity before one performs.20 Women in Japan who face aging and loss of femininity thus must contend with the reality that their gender identity—their very social existence—is at risk once they stop performing as outwardly feminine: sexually attractive, lovable, modest, graceful, and, most important, youthful. Some women might simply sabotage their feminine performance, whether to accept aging as a natural biological process or to subvert the cultural construct of femininity. However, women like Megumi and Fumi and others I met in the host club, attempt to foster their femininity through the power of romantic excitement and combat their aging even though they understand it costs more and more to maintain their femininity as they age. These Japanese women’s struggle with aging and femininity provides ethnographic insights into their negotiation processes with different levels of engagement in their gender performance at different life stages.

114    FEMININE RESTORATION

Romance as a Technology of the Self For women who employ romance as a vehicle to maintain their womanliness, the romance does not have to be genuine as long as it satisfies their needs. The romantic love that these women fantasize, I came to realize, is not what is conventionally defined in modern Japan and other societies—courtship before marriage or emotional bonding.21 Rather, romance functions as a technology of the self, a means to stimulate one’s untapped reserves to fully charge potential womanhood: motherhood, business success, sexual attractiveness, or a combination of the three. As a tool of self-fulfillment, it is commonly expressed in such terms as jibun migaki (polishing the self); naritai jibun ni naru (becoming the self who I want to be); jiko kaikaku (improvement of the self); and most often, kawaranakucha ([I] have to change). Thus, women’s romance in contemporary Japan is understood as a more individualistic and self-centered project. The idea and practice of romance as a technology of the self echo Japan’s ren’ai būmu (romance boom), promoted since the early 1990s. In a revision of the traditional script of courtship, romance under the ren’ai būmu has been redefined and promoted as something that, as Saimon Fumi, a popular cartoonist and essayist known as the “Goddess of Romance,” asserts, “generates extraordinary power and emotion” for women to liberate themselves from the status quo.22 Saimon’s message—romance as a savior and a generator of extraordinary experience—was the inspiration for a handful of trendy television dramas with high audience ratings.23 Naturally, Japan’s mass marketers picked up on this new concept and leveraged the euphoria of romantic love to promote lifestyle consumption. In their marketing, the individual, rather than the nuclear family, is the iconic unit of consumption, and heterosexual romance, rather than marriage, is promoted as the ideal avenue for the expression of new womanhood.24 These marketing discourses left the content of romance largely undefined and stressed the bodily sensation of tokimeki excitement as a means for women to cultivate their feminine ideal—youth, beauty, and attractiveness—from within. Unlike romance as a courtship, these vague representations and practices of romance for self-transformation do not discriminate against women based on their age or marital status. They instead invite all types of women to cultivate their own aisareru (desirable and lovable) femininity via fashion, hairstyle, body care, communication skill, and overall presentation of the self.25 After all, discourses and representations in the romance boom, which do not inform the audience of what romance is, simply highlight the value of its effect. As a result,

FEMININE RESTORATION    115

romance, even if it is a commodified one, becomes the ideal means for women with various backgrounds to achieve their individual goals, whether beauty, vitality, companionship, self-fulfillment, or even “doing it all.” Fumi, for example, nurtures her romantic relationship with Daisuke, a top-ranking host, for her self-transformation. She is not interested in courtship or marriage. For starters, a serious relationship would interfere with her busy work schedule. It also entails a commitment and involves family matters that, she thinks, would complicate her current lifestyle. Host clubbing, then, is a convenient way for Fumi to enjoy what she feels is missing from her life, at her convenience, with minimal emotional attachment and time commitment. “Hosts are like buddies to have fun with and like boyfriends to date,” Fumi says. “But unlike typical friends who have their own lives, they are always there [in the club] for you whenever you feel like seeing them. That kind of convenience is valuable to me because my career comes first.” Although Fumi frames her host clubbing as simple and commitment-free, whereby she builds her “have to change” narratives, her relationship with Daisuke is nonetheless complicated and ambivalent. She tries to reciprocate his feelings because she thinks that Daisuke is genuinely interested in her as a woman, not just for her money. Yet she confided to me that she actually likes another host, a friendly senpai of his. Unaware of her true desires, Daisuke sends Fumi text messages every day to show his concern about her business and her life in general. He shares his dreams with her, telling her that he wants to use hosting as a launching pad to open a pub that he and Fumi can happily manage together. Fumi says that Daisuke’s faithful devotion makes her feel obligated to answer his favors monetarily. When she invited him to go to a fireworks display one summer night, for example, Daisuke spent 100,000 yen (about $1,000) on a yukata kimono set so that his outfit would match hers. On that night, she stopped by Fantasy with Daisuke after the fireworks and ordered a 300,000-yen bottle of whiskey to show her appreciation. She ended up paying 700,000 yen with her credit card that night. By spending lavishly on him, Fumi helps ensure Daisuke’s top-ranking status at the club. In a separate interview with Daisuke, he confided to me that even though he likes Fumi as a person, he doesn’t have a genuine feeling of love for her. But he pretends that he is deeply in love with her because that pleases her and because she is a good client who can afford the pricier bottles of liquor. Daisuke had also learned that Fumi recently received a large inheritance from her mother.

116    FEMININE RESTORATION

Although he sensed that she was not so passionate about their relationship, he thought it was due to her personality. Despite their differing motives and understanding, Daisuke and Fumi nurture their relationship. Fumi says that Daisuke’s companionship has filled the void she felt in her career-oriented life, especially after her mother’s unexpected death. Their relationship, she insists, has helped shed her obasan self-image and gain social recognition inside and outside the host club. Inside the club, the owner and the manager often stop by her table and thank her for her patronage. One night when I was with her, the owner came by and repeated how honored and proud he was on behalf of his club to be able to host such a beautiful woman like Fumi. Although she knows it is just flattery, Fumi says being treated as a very important person makes her feel good because she cannot expect it in her everyday life. Outside the club, she has come to realize that her new look has helped her become a role model for her many clients who seek bodily and emotional reawakening. Admitting that her pseudo-romance (giji ren’ai) with Daisuke has been the key for her own self-transformation, Fumi credited her host clubbing for initiating it.

Feminine Power Yuki is another example of the women at Fantasy who attempt to cultivate their bodies in pursuit of romantic love and self-transformation. What sets her apart is her location at the highest end of the economic—and romantic—spectrum. For the past year and a half Yuki has come to the club, playing what she calls a “game to win the heart” (kokoro tori gēmu) of her host and spending on average more than 1 million yen (about $10,000) per month. Long conscious of maintaining her susceptibility to romantic love, Yuki employs romance not only as a technology of the self but also a tool to leverage her “feminine power” to fight against the social disadvantages and devaluation that aging women face and to secure her access to socioeconomic resources. On the night that I first met Yuki, in December 2004, her thirty-four-yearold top-ranking host, Ken, invited me over to sit at her table. Ken’s helper host, whom I had interviewed earlier, thought Yuki would be a good informant and arranged the introduction. Yuki was described as a futoi kyaku (fat customer), the high-spending holy grail of female customers. Approaching her table, I saw what he meant. Unlike most of the others, her table was surrounded by helper hosts and crammed with plates of fruit and appetizers and expensive bottles of

FEMININE RESTORATION    117

wine and liquor, including Remy Martin Louis XIII, an aged cognac that cost more than $3,000 per bottle. Yuki was the center of attention. Dressed in a black low-cut Chanel dress, she wore a diamond-encrusted wristwatch, ring, necklace, and earring combo that projected her wealth and sophisticated taste in fashion. Tastefully applied cosmetics highlighted her handsome features, emphasizing her large eyes, pointed nose, and small doll-like mouth. Her short, straight hair and smooth facial skin projected youthfulness. With her firm and slender body, Yuki looked to me like a model in a Japanese Mrs. fashion magazine shoot. Only her husky voice and the thin wrinkles under her nose (upon close inspection) betrayed her actual age. When I met with Yuki later the next day at a nearby coffee shop, she was casually dressed in a black cotton blouse, a pair of white pants, and sandals, and she carried a brown Louis Vuitton tote bag. Yuki told me that her husband was a wealthy businessman who owned a number of franchise retail stores in the city, and she was a stay-at-home mother of three (one of whom was adopted). They lived in a newly built three-story concrete house with a rooftop swimming pool in Shinjuku. In her narratives, however, she referred to her “wife-and-mother” role as an occupation and the monthly cash gift from her husband as her earnings. Although she did not want to reveal her actual age, she suggested that she was in her early to mid-forties. Like Megumi, Yuki said that she resists being constricted to the role of a housewife solely devoted to her family. She wants, instead, to be in a perpetual state of romance. This, Yuki said, would allow her to maintain her seductive power over men. “When I was young, men constantly approached me and wanted to please me, buying me expensive gifts and treating me at fancy restaurants,” she said. “But today I have to perform as an attractive woman in order to exercise that kind of feminine power.” To preserve her power, Yuki says that maintaining her ren’ai taishitsu is a necessity. It makes her calculated seductive performance appear innocent. Yuki goes to the host club because the romantic excitement she feels there reminds her of her first love and innocence, even though she knows it is staged. To intensify this stimulation and test her power, she told me that she secretly pretends that she is ardently in love with Ken. In fact, she said, she doesn’t really care about him that much. She simply picked a top-ranking host because she assumed he would be highly skilled in the art of seduction. “If you perform as a man’s favorite ‘girl,’ he treats you better,” Yuki said. So she dresses up for

118    FEMININE RESTORATION

him, gazes at him shyly, and wittily responds to his flattery about her beauty: “It is because of you that I can stay beautiful,” she often replies. Yuki quit smoking when she learned that Ken does not like a woman who smokes. She orders expensive bottles of whisky and wine to increase his sales even though she does not drink alcohol. In return she savors the smoothfinished masculinity that Ken displays when wearing his matching Armani suits and cologne, and the chivalrous attention he lavishes on her. He takes her to high-end members-only hotel lounges and fancy restaurants to elevate the romantic atmosphere and joie de vivre. In his text messages, he tells Yuki how beautiful she is and how much he loves her. Such stylized mutual seduction, Yuki says, helps augment her attractiveness and also “beautifies” her daily routine. Yuki’s home life, it turned out, needs beautifying. Though her game of seduction and arousal provides escape at night, during the daytime she feels stressed out and bored—uninspired by her marriage. Yuki says that her husband, like many married Japanese men, expects her to raise the children and take care of all housework and domestic matters in the family. “Being a good wife and mother is very stressful,” she said. “Doing a good job is only good enough. Anything less is a failure.” Typical of middle- and upper-middle-class women her age, Yuki has become a kyōiku mama (education mother), disciplining her two natural-born children to study hard. Because of this effort, she succeeded in getting them into competitive private schools. Her eight-year-old adopted son, however, is falling behind his peers. He hates studying and cannot sit still at his desk. Yuki is at a loss about how to handle the situation. She worries that if she disciplines him too harshly, he will discover that he is adopted—a reality that is kept strictly silent in most Japanese families. Yuki’s husband is no help, either; he is too busy running his businesses to get involved in his children’s education. She has no one else with whom she can share her concerns and feels that she is in competition with other mothers, including her friends, over their children’s achievements. She does not want to show her vulnerability, she said. As a result, she feels isolated, frustrated, and constantly under pressure, despite her outward signs of success. Yuki first sought escape from these routine stressors through conspicuous consumption. “I used to mindlessly spend money on designer clothes, bags, shoes, watches, you name it,” she said. “But I gradually came to realize that material objects do not satisfy my emotional needs after all.” Shopping entertained

FEMININE RESTORATION    119

her only up to the moment of transaction; the purchase itself was a letdown. While looking for something more fulfilling, Yuki decided one day to investigate Fantasy, a host club she had seen on television. She went with a friend and was immediately captivated. She realized that the key ingredient missing in her life was the stimuli she felt in the club’s extraordinary space. Yuki insists, “Women who are in a state of romantic excitement are beautifully radiant.” She says, “It’s about how you feel about yourself, not how you appear to others.”

The Game of Romance Though romantic excitement is more accessible than ever for contemporary Japanese women, the host club’s entertainment is not a ready-made product that women can conveniently purchase and consume. It is a process whereby female clients and their hosts work together to make these women’s lives meaningful, through the use of the theatrical stage the club provides. Female clients actively stage their performances; they plot scenarios in which they enact the roles of desirable women: the lovable heroine, the best friend, the mother figure, the queen, and the maid-servant. In this elaborate drama, the client is simultaneously the producer, director, actress, self-reflexive audience, and critic. Yuki’s own drama began in the winter of 2003 at Fantasy when she designated her first host, Gō, a handsome and witty man in his mid-thirties. Looking back, Yuki insisted that, for her, Gō was a convenient boyfriend and little more. In her relationship with him, Yuki said she carefully strategized her release of personal information and control of their relationship. She lied to him about her age, occupation, and marital status to try to maximize her appraised value and seduce him into falling in love with her. She acted the part of a younger single mother with an adopted child, stealthily utilizing her daytime hours to see him so that her dating would not affect her household responsibilities. Meanwhile, she managed to find out that Gō himself had a wife and two sons. The situation was convenient for Yuki, who never told Gō about her own marriage. Gō did his best to charm her. Like a scene in a movie, he playfully carried her on his back during a rainstorm and both became soaking wet. On another occasion, he appeared with a beautiful bouquet of unique blue roses, to her great surprise. His jokes and stories always entertained her and made her laugh. With Gō, Yuki pleasantly escaped from her everyday concerns. She behaved as if she were an innocent girl excused from the usual social obligations that Japanese women are expected to meet.

120    FEMININE RESTORATION

But after dating nearly every day for three months, Yuki started to seek an exit from the relationship when Gō became more serious. Confident that Gō would never abandon his sons as his father had done to him, she came up with a plot for the perfect ending to their affair. She performed the role of tragic heroine and begged him to leave his family to certify his love to her. As she anticipated, Gō couldn’t bring himself to divorce his wife and abandon his children. Yuki then convinced him that such a relationship would only yield misery and therefore separation was the only choice left for them. They peacefully broke up and Yuki stopped visiting the club. “It was a perfect ending,” Yuki said. “Both of us enjoyed one another and ended our relationship in light of a situation for which nothing could be done, even if we still loved each other. In this way, nobody was hurt and we have only good memories to look back on.” According to her the extramarital romance she sought was merely a whimsical one, not a serious relationship that entailed commitment. Yuki told me that she, after all, still depended on her husband’s financial and emotional support. In the end, Yuki achieved the romantic excitement that she desired and also coproduced and starred in her own socioeconomic drama. Through a wellplotted scenario and persuasive performance she was able to deceive her host and her husband (who was kept in the dark about her “little affair”) and extract their resources—love and money—respectively. In the final act, she was the manipulative agent who subtly mobilized both men to gain what she wanted and celebrate her secretive victory. It would be easy, perhaps, to interpret these acts of deception as evidence of her deceitful character and then stereotype all women as emotional manipulators—as countless popular media representations in Japan repeatedly suggest.26 But as feminist sociologist Beverly Skeggs argues, femininity is “something which is struggled with to gain some value and to ameliorate invalidation. It is a performance not considered to be necessary all the time. . . . [But] to not invest at all in femininity is seen to jeopardize others’ investments.”27 Drawing on Skeggs’s claim, I argue that there is a power dynamic in play that we need to pay attention to when women use manipulative femininity as a negotiation tool to achieve their own goals. While it may appear superficial and deceptive, as Yuki and Megumi exemplify, femininity is something that women can summon to enhance their social value and gain access to what they usually do not have—money, political power, and equal social standing with men, for example. Their seemingly flirtatious and manipulative acts are thus not an ex-

FEMININE RESTORATION    121

pression of their irresponsibility or inferiority. They are an acquired skill used to leverage their interests in a male-centered society. Playing the role of a man’s favorite “girl” at the host club, a respectable mother figure at home, or as a worryfree housewife in public has enabled both women to maneuver their interests as unthreatening citizens in male-centered Japanese society. Such maneuvers are an integral part of an interactive negotiation in which socially marginalized women, due to their limited access to wealth, power, and privilege, attempt to improve their living conditions without losing face or jeopardizing other ­women’s feminine investment. Their gendered performances are thus embedded in a particular power dynamic within socioeconomically specific contexts. While successfully mirroring images of what men and other women in male-centered society expects them to be (or at least to perform) in their negotiations, Yuki is also keenly aware of middle-aged women’s vulnerability in romantic relationships with younger men, like hosts. In youth-oriented Japanese society, where young women, especially attractive, single women, are highly valued and preferred by men, Yuki contends that middle-aged women, who sense the dropping value of their bodies and attractiveness, subconsciously feel ashamed to be “old” and “ugly.” As a result, she says, they trap themselves in excessive self-devotion and spending born of their inferiority complex. Younger hosts take advantage of this complex to obtain women’s (monetary) allegiance. To avoid this predicament, Yuki says that she tries to stay in control by seducing men to fall for her. It’s a bravura setup: Yuki must pretend that she is genuinely in love with the host but also stay coolly “not in love” in her mind. Clearly, the kind of romance Yuki craves entails far more vision, strategy, and “emotion work” than the prosaic requirements of ren’ai taishitsu. Once mastered fully, the seductive feminine power can subvert the conventional practice of women’s love as a form of subordination. Citing Byron, de Beauvoir has pointed out that the word love traditionally meant two different things for men and women, arguing, “Love is merely an occupation in the life of the man, while it is life itself for the woman.”28 Nietzsche wrote that a woman’s love is “total devotion (not mere surrender) with soul and body, without any consideration or reserve,” whereas a man’s love is “want[ing] precisely this love from her and is thus . . . as far as can be from the presupposition of feminine love.”29 Yuki’s logic of seduction inverts this kind of feminine love and promises self-autonomy. Yet, in reality, as Yuki’s next drama demonstrates, the line between the seducer and the seducee becomes far more complicated and ambiguous in the power play of mutual seduction.

122    FEMININE RESTORATION

Winning the Heart Yuki returned to the host club in the summer of 2004, a year after breaking up with Gō. She told me that she could not help longing for the drama she enjoyed with him. Furthermore, she felt she had lost her sense of confidence as a wife and mother when her daughter started misbehaving at school. She also secretly discovered that her husband was having an affair with a younger woman. Instead of confronting her husband about it, Yuki decided to use her knowledge of the affair to gain monetary compensation. This was not the first time her husband had slept with younger women. Playing the dumb wife who was clueless about his affair, she innocently asked him, “You don’t have someone else on your mind besides me, do you? Your mind seems to be elsewhere lately.” Her husband denied any impropriety, but the seed of guilt was planted in his mind, Yuki said. She was soon able to extract 2 million yen (about $20,000) from him, ostensibly to buy a diamond ring and earrings. Instead, Yuki used the money at the host club, where she continued to hone her psychological gamesmanship on men. Her confidence riding high, Yuki said she decided to play another elaborate game of romance in the club. At the start of the game, she said she needed a host with whom she could enjoy having a comfortable yet thrilling love match. Yuki decided to designate Ken, the host she met through her friend Michiko. Ken is a thirty-four-year-old (self-identified) former architect. She described him to me as a relatively quiet and thoughtful-looking man. More important, he ranked among the top three hosts at Fantasy. “I had no special impression of him,” Yuki said recalling their first meeting. “I was just sure that he wouldn’t embarrass me in public, walking together and eating out, since he doesn’t look like the typical host with vulgar mannerisms, dyed hair, flashy accessories, and so forth.” She said that his top-ranking status was attractive to her because it meant that he was a promising womanizer. Since Yuki was attempting to beat a professional host, he seemed like the perfect choice. In Yuki’s mind, the rules of the game were simple: if she succeeded in seducing Ken into becoming serious about their relationship, that is, proposing marriage, she would win. If she began to take the relationship too seriously or commit herself blindly, she would lose. Yuki knew she had to be careful. There is a saying in Japan that “the one who falls [in love] loses” (horetamono make). The person being seduced is at a disadvantage because the seducer can benefit from her devotion and even demand it in the name of love. Thus, while Yuki’s

FEMININE RESTORATION    123

ultimate goal was to win Ken’s heart, it was important for her to keep a psychological distance to maintain her self-autonomy (and reset the game if necessary.) Yuki also assumed that the game would automatically end if she stopped playing it. As she said, “It is just a transactional relationship, and therefore there is no social debt if I cancel the trade.” This assumption, however, was tested as Yuki became increasingly invested, financially and emotionally, in her own game of romance. Despite her casual approach to the selection of a romantic partner, Yuki said she greatly enjoyed their game of mutual seduction in the beginning. She focused intently on her appearance, meticulously applying natural-looking cosmetics, wearing stylish clothes and expensive accessories for Ken so that he could show off his gorgeous new patron to the other hosts at Fantasy. She ordered high-priced bottles of wine and whiskey for Ken’s colleagues and helper hosts, drawing admiring glances from the other tables. Before long, she had helped Ken reach the second-highest rank at Fantasy. Yuki knew that her striking beauty, as well as her spending power, strengthened Ken’s status in the club. She further boosted his ego by crediting his love for her bodily transformation, as Ken tirelessly repeated how beautiful she was and how much he cared for her. By the spring of 2005, after nearly a year of dating him, Yuki thought that she was finally winning his heart. “That boy,” she said to me, “has no doubt that we will be married.” According to Yuki, Ken has not yet officially proposed but talks about his future plans based on the assumption that they are married: opening his own architectural office with her, building her dream house, and having many children together. By her own account, Yuki is 80 percent victorious and must therefore begin the process of finding an exit strategy for the relationship. Ending her love match with Ken, however, turned out to be far more challenging than she had expected. Unlike Gō, Ken is single and does not have a particular weakness that she can exploit in their separation talks. In addition, if she stops visiting the host club altogether, Yuki fears Ken will discuss the particulars of their relationship with their common friend, Michiko. Yuki has not told Michiko about her romantic gamesmanship and the rapid escalation of their relationship. She is particularly afraid that Michiko might accidentally reveal her real identity—her occupation and marital status—and expose other carefully guarded information. Meanwhile, Yuki continues her host club dating, waiting for just the right moment to terminate the relationship. Three months later, Yuki and I meet at a restaurant over coffee. She began by telling me that she has officially received Ken’s marriage proposal. However,

124    FEMININE RESTORATION

to me, she seemed less celebratory and more puzzled about her victory this time. When Ken proposed to her, Yuki said that her first thought was that she had finally completed her sought-after conquest. But she soon felt guilty because she unintentionally accepted his proposal. They became engaged, despite the fact that it was just the latest move in her romantic chess game. Asked why she had accepted Ken’s proposal, Yuki said that she tried everything to discourage him from asking her, but nothing worked. When she told him he was too immature for a marital commitment, Ken told her that he loved who she was and would continue to love her no matter what. When Yuki confessed that she could not bear children due to her hysterectomy, she thought he would give up. He is the oldest son and is expected to carry on his family lineage, she reasoned. Ken held firm and insisted his siblings would carry on the family name. She even told him that she didn’t want to burden him with her adopted son. Yet again, Ken insisted he would be delighted to raise the child. At this point, Yuki says she felt trapped. “It was too embarrassing to come clean or admit that I had been telling lies all along; and there was no other choice but to accept his proposal.” Once she accepted, Yuki began to fear the possibility of retaliation and accusations of bigamy or marriage fraud. She also worried about losing face for herself and her family. Either scenario would be devastating. Further, it would destroy her chances of winning their game of romance. Meanwhile, she continued to spend about a million yen ($10,000) each month at Fantasy. This investment significantly bolstered Ken’s career ambitions. One night he asked her to order a 1.2 million-yen bottle of RomanéeConti, one of the most expensive in the club. He told her it would help him win that month’s sales competition and make him the top host at Fantasy. Yuki says that Ken was testing her loyalty to him as his fiancée. Dodging his request, Yuki told Ken that she could not afford it due to unforeseen expenses at her company. She instead suggested that he ask another client, the wife of a wealthy dentist, since he had often talked about her. Yuki said the woman lusted for Ken and would do anything to monopolize him. Ken took Yuki’s advice and prodded the dentist’s wife into ordering the RomanéeConti on the last day of the month, vaulting him to the top. Ken’s satisfaction, however, was short-lived. The next day he found out that she had left the club without paying her 2.5 million-yen tab. He was stunned when he was told that he was fully accountable for the amount. He desperately tried to find her and collect the money but soon gave up. The only information he had was her name and cell-phone number, which had been disconnected.

FEMININE RESTORATION    125

Ken blamed Yuki for her bad advice. He pleaded with her that if she did not intervene, he would either have to reckon with the yakuza or sell himself to the club owner as free host labor until repayment. Yuki finally decided to lend him 2 million yen. She wanted to settle the match peacefully. Yuki’s costly romantic settlement money turned the tables in her favor. She stopped visiting the club and told Ken she could never see him again until he repaid her the money. She also knew full well that he could not—and would not—do so. But Ken did not give up on Yuki so easily. He continued to call her almost daily, inviting her to the club. First, he gently asked her to stop by for a visit. Then he begged her to save him from his desperate loneliness. Ken became increasingly frustrated by her indecisive attitude regarding their planned marriage. He would ask jokingly if she was actually married to someone else. F ­ inally, Ken began to threaten her with vague intimations of harm. Yuki knew that he was despairing over the sudden loss of two of his wealthiest patrons. When she made it clear that she was never going to see him again unless he repaid her, he offered to cover her host club bills instead of paying her back with cash. Throughout their interactions, Yuki said she wondered if Ken had been manipulating her as much as she had tried to manipulate him, if not more. She suspected that he knew about her marital status. Thus, he pretended he was serious about her to take advantage of her guilty conscience—just as she had done to her husband when she discovered his affair. Her confidence in the role of the “manipulative actress” in their love match was shaken. This uncertainty continues to gnaw on Yuki. Her instinct is to get her money back, or even just a portion of it. As a result, she admits that she cannot walk away from her “transactional relationship” with Ken. She cannot let go. The game of mutual seduction is, as Jean Baudrillard has pointed out, “an uninterrupted ritual exchange where seducer and seducee constantly raise the stakes in a game that never ends. And cannot end since the dividing line that defines the victory of the one and the defeat of the other, is illegible.”30 Thus, seduction is not a unidirectional act. The seducer is also always seduced by the other, whether due to the seducee’s allure or the fantasy the seducer projects onto him or her. In Yuki’s case, she was seduced by the idea of exercising her feminine power to win the love of a top-ranked professional seducer. Her seduction was, after all, motivated by her desire to triumph in her own seductive self-image. The idea that Japan’s sex-related service and entertainment businesses cater to consumers’ desires for their ideal self-images is not limited to host clubs. Well-established ethnographic studies of Japan’s hostess clubs have revealed

126    FEMININE RESTORATION

the ways that sexual desires are imbricated with narcissistic desires. In hostess clubs, where mostly young, beautiful women “sell” their companionship (not sex itself, usually) to male clients, the service that is actually being purchased is the reconstruction of the male patron’s self image—“his projection as a powerful, desirable male.”31 Anne Allison argues that because the service is paid for, “the erotic object is not the woman but the man, and the female is just a device to enhance the male’s self-image.”32 Likewise, whatever her desire may be, a woman in a host club is a consumer not only of male companionship but also of her self-love.

Extramarital Romance While mutual seduction may invalidate the distinction between the seducer and the seducee—and the self and the other—it does not mean that it produces nothing. It still creates opportunities to subtly subvert the traditional concept of women’s love as a form of total subordination and negotiate with such social norms as extramarital-romance-reserved-for-men. Whether commercially staged or not, women’s pursuit of romance outside marriage is not free of familial obligation or social debt. While prioritizing their sexual attractiveness, for example, both Megumi and Yuki still try to meet the social expectations of respectable motherhood. They performatively “keep house” and ply their maternal duties to hide their romantic exploits from their husbands. They also downplay their erotic interests; none of my married informants overtly say that they “buy” men. Megumi’s and Yuki’s performances as respectable maternal figures provide a useful screen for them to comfortably pursue their nonnormative wishes—romantic relationships with men who are not their husbands— while still maneuvering within existing social expectations and moral codes. They secretly, yet boldly violate such gender and sexual norms as passivity in sexual matters, the erasure of sexuality from maternal bodies, and extramarital affairs as an exclusively male prerogative. If these social constraints are the motivation for women to seek alternative lifestyles, media discourses have played a significant role in abetting them. During the 1990s, for example, the social pathology of sexless couples and declining birthrates largely depicted marriage as the antithesis of romantic excitement and sexual pleasure. Meanwhile, women’s extramarital relationships were greatly romanticized. The Japanese box-office hits The Bridges of Madison County (1995) and the domestically produced Shitsurakuen (Paradise lost,

FEMININE RESTORATION    127

1977) both portrayed extramarital romance as a profoundly extraordinary experience. The original novels remain best-sellers. People’s fantasies of engaging in adulterous affairs came to be known as the “Paradise Lost Phenomenon.”33 This, in turn, further stoked the market for television dramas, movies, novels, and soft-core pornography with romance-related content and themes.34 Japan’s host clubs lie at the far end of a continuum of romantic activities where married women’s pursuit of extramarital affairs, called kongai ren’ai (extramarital romance or love), has become socially tolerable. Based on a nation­wide questionnaire of married women taken in 1998, Ogata Sakurako, a freelance reporter and editor for the fashion magazine MORE, declared that women’s kongai ren’ai had become “trendy.”35 Ogata found that 47.1 percent of female respondents fantasized having an extramarital romance and 29.4 percent actually claimed to have had extramarital sex. Making a similar claim, the Yomiuri Weekly newsmagazine’s 2004 special issue, “Wives’ ‘Extramarital Romance,’” tells the story of a thirty-eight-year-old woman who had an extramarital relationship with a former colleague after suffering from a sexless relationship with her husband since giving birth to a child. The affair improved her self-esteem and made her realize that she was still a sexual being even though she became a mother.36 In these narratives, kongai ren’ai is largely accepted, and even idealized, as a technology of the self for these unsatisfied wives. The term kongai ren’ai is now commonly used in Japan’s mass media. It is, however, conceptually differentiated from the conventional meanings of men’s furin (illicit love) and uwaki (affairs). While men’s illicit affairs are generally associated with sexually driven desires, women’s extramarital romance has become socially permissible due to its dissociation from sex per se, even when it includes sexual contact. This is particularly evident in the ways that Megumi and Yuki describe the possibility of sexual relationships with their hosts. Yuki, for example, confesses that she has already had sex with Ken but does not think that her actions were promiscuous or sinful. Although the relationship might appear to others physical and illicit, she just does not see it that way. She stresses that she has never stayed overnight, nor has she neglected her family because of it. In other words, it is not sexual contact that concerned Yuki but the fact that she returned home in the night to her husband and children. Likewise, Megumi does not deny that the potential exists for sexual relations with her host, Koji. She says that if she should succumb, she will keep the matter secret. One out of every three Japanese women allegedly engages in extramarital romance today, and 60 percent report that they are guilt-free about it.37 Thus,

128    FEMININE RESTORATION

the secret with which Megumi contends is very much a public secret—a social fact people widely know but rarely share.38 This kind of secretively conducted romance may be a convenient tool for women, especially ones of the Hanako generation like Megumi and Yuki. They value the care of themselves, as well as their families, in the hope of maintaining their femininity, sexual attractiveness, and self-confidence.39 Women’s kongai ren’ai is thus increasingly a socially sanctioned outlet, a source of well-being, and a means of quick transformation in which they can engage freely insofar as they remain “morally sound.”

Romantic Love Ideology Revisited This particular kind of affective and moral register among married women emerged in the specific context of Japan’s gendered modern history. Feminist scholars have revealed how a romantic love ideology and slogans such as “Good Wife, Wise Mother” have shaped the nation’s marriage and family system and controlled female sexuality since the late nineteenth century.40 Called romanchikku rabu ideorogī in Japanese, a loanword from English, this ideology advances that romantic love (courtship), marriage, and reproductive sex were the ideal sequence of a woman’s life. After marriage and childbirth, women’s bodies were desexualized and their self-fulfillment tied to a respectful caretaking role, not individual pleasure or freedom.41 Under this regime, women were disciplined to cultivate a nurturing maternal love and sensibility instinctually to dutifully fulfill their sex role. Today, women’s sex roles are not so clearly drawn. While women are still expected to fulfill their maternal duties, they are also encouraged to hold on to their individuality and follow the lead of accomplished middle-aged Japanese superwomen who “do it all.” Yuki, for example, told me that her attitude and look are modeled after Matsuda Seiko and Kuroki Hiromi, two “ageless” celebrities now in their early fifties, who are married and have children. Both are well known in the tabloids for their numerous affairs and other digressions. At the same time, they retain a youthful appearance that many Japanese women idealize as the epitome of female attractiveness. While social and market trends have emphasized these emergent changes, socially situated individual women still struggle to negotiate and reconcile the mass of conflicting messages on gender roles, aspiration, and aging. Conservative social discourses still call on middle-aged women—both married and unmarried—to adhere to traditional family-oriented ethics, while neolib-

FEMININE RESTORATION    129

eral values of autonomy and self-fulfillment encourage these same women to seek alternative lifestyles.42 In the conservative narratives, single women are singled out and marked as unfulfilled, with the popular term makeinu (loser dog, like the English “old maid”). This insult is used to describe unmarried women over thirty who have failed to achieve “their most important mission” as women—being chosen by men to marry and procreate.43 Married women who are sexually active or inactive are labeled inran (promiscuous) and obasan, the derogatory identity category for undesirable women, respectively.44 In this no-win situation, romance provides both single and married women a means through which they can pursue new ways of outfitting their selves and lifestyles. For single women like Fumi, romance grants a pardon for their single status and acts as a smokescreen for potential courtship.45 For married women like Megumi and Yuki, it gives them the motivation and energy to be housewives and mothers, as well as fight against the aging process. Nonetheless, heterosexual romance is mandatory for a woman to achieve a meaningful life, according to these popular discourses. While it is more acceptable for women to be single or divorced, to maintain full cultural citizenship they are expected to engage in romance. If they appear to withdraw from their search for romantic love for noticeably long periods, they are pitied for being lonely and solitary. They may be looked down on as women who lack meaning or purpose in their lives and exist in “pseudo-death.”46 Women who make no effort to follow these standards are perceived as less valued individuals. Romance has been thus elevated to sovereign status in the new millennium. One of the consequences of the supremacy of romance is that it pressures women to become a person who succeeds at all costs in her career, marriage, family, hobbies, and of course, romance.47 The “superwoman” template motivates women to achieve the ideal in order to feel more empowered. Invariably, the goal is impossible to obtain, no matter how hard they try.48 The ideal and existential angst over aging then become the bait that Japanese marketing and  advertising firms and hosts alike exploit to cater to women’s needs and desires in exchange for exorbitant sums of money.49 The ideal is possible only by performing as a young, attractive woman in multiple roles on commercially set stages such as host clubs or through the consumption of romance novels, movies, and melodramas. This new model of femininity has been thus increasingly intertwined with romantic love as a technology of the self. Although the content of womanliness and the means of self-fulfillment have thus shifted from the self-devoted

130    FEMININE RESTORATION

­ aternal figure to the new feminine ideal, the self may be “liberated” or sucm cessfully achieved only through what Yuki calls “a knight on a white horse” —that is, on men’s supportive gaze and validation. Neither desexualization in traditional family-oriented motherhood nor resexualization in today’s youthoriented consumer market leads women to a total, self-defined sexuality or a meaningful life independent from the gendered perception of womanhood, defined through masculine expectations and ideals.50 The reason is that the patriarchal heterosexual system hinges on both Japan’s family institution and the romance economy. The institutionalized family system and the forms of capitalized romantic fantasy that I have described are thus two sides of the same coin, as they overlap to produce particular notions of ideal womanhood and social inequality between men and women. Married women’s host club relationships, therefore, reveal their attempts to carve out a narrow path through these seemingly confining notions of woman­ hood from within. On the one hand, it undermines the conventionally hegemonic mother figure as biological trait. It showcases the social role as an effect of ideology and a performative construct. On the other hand, it also reinforces the newly articulated market value of ideal femininity—eternal youth via kongai ren’ai—through consumption. These seemingly separate ways of women’s existence are temporally framed in neoliberal Japan: breaking away from traditional oppression to market-sponsored freedom. In this way, the frame provokes a sense of progress.51

Femininity and Social Change Japanese women’s non-teleological movement has collectively transformed existing gender and sexual ideologies from the past. From the perspective of Western liberal feminists who deploy a teleological goal—equality between men and women—and focus on resistance to domination, however, it might not appear political at all.52 The transformation is, rather, like Megumi’s selective memory, compelling her to transform herself and pave a “road toward the future,” a result of discursive practices of self-transformation projects among women who share a particular social ethos oriented around time and the self. It has not had predetermined goals. Nor have these women framed their projects as a feminist movement. Nonetheless, it is just as problematic to dismiss it by taking liberal feminism as a universal model as celebrating it by accepting the neoliberal concept of freedom at face value.

FEMININE RESTORATION    131

While one’s will against the dominant power is highly valued in liberal feminism, it largely neglects other forms of negotiation processes such as every­day subversions and using the existing system to advance a given situation. Liberal feminism presumes women’s self-autonomy and targets the causes that limit women’s freedom as the problem. Feminist anthropologist Saba Mahmood points out: “In order for an individual to be free it is required that her actions be the consequence of her ‘own will’ rather than of custom, tradition, or direct coercion.”53 The irony is, however, that women, who are free to choose to liberate themselves from social constraints, have no choice because liberal feminist thinking equates desire for a certain kind of freedom to be an ontological reality within the Western liberal tradition. Theorizing neoliberal g­ overnmentality—a particular mentality to govern population through freedom—sociologist and Foucauldian scholar Nikolas Rose states: Through the transformation of subjects with duties and obligations, into individuals, with rights and freedoms, modern individuals are not merely “free to choose” but obliged to be free, to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice. They must interpret their past and dream their future as outcome of choices made or choices still to make. Their choices are, in their turn, seen as realizations of the attributes of the choosing person—expression of p ­ ersonality— and reflect back upon the person who has made them.54

Thus, this kind of freedom is imperative in a neoliberal society. And it goes hand in hand with the principle of liberal feminism in terms of belief in selfautonomy and individual agency over the course of human progression. We should avoid a zero-sum game of progress, self-realization, and human agency. Progress is always a subjective experience in a particular temporal frame, wherein incongruent moments are conceptually grouped into one developmental model. Self-realization is possible only when all social and structural factors, other than individual actors’ intention, choice, and human agency, are dismissed. Human agency cannot be equated universally to one’s will and refusal to accept the status quo. Women’s agency is, Saba Mahmood theorizes, “not as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create.”55 As the Japanese women I introduced here demonstrate, lived experiences entail a myriad of negotiations with other social actors, competing discourses, and the possibilities and limits they find in a given situation. Through the complex negotiation process, women I met in the host club have become neoliberal

132    FEMININE RESTORATION

female subjects, while simultaneously subjecting to the new mentality of selfgoverned freedom and feminine power. This ambivalent freedom is pervasive and entrenched in contemporary Japanese society, from host clubs to Japan’s neoliberal governance. There is no absolute avoidance of it insofar as one cares about one’s social existence as a desirable cultural citizen. In this chapter, I focused on the politics of romantic love, through which culturally specific notions of gender and the life course, two seemingly different spheres, come together as an anti-aging feminine project discursively. I demonstrated how romance has become the pivot point for middle-aged women’s identity formation, as well as its double-edged effect. Women employ romance to refine the self and experience pleasure, while simultaneously reproducing cultural expectations of womanhood. The host club has emerged as a market niche where women can pursue an alternative, idealized self through staged—and often extramarital—romance. Since womanhood has long been conceptualized as a mere transition period from sexually sealed girlhood to desexualized motherhood, their attempts potentially undermine the discriminatory compartmentalization of female sexuality based on age and maternal status. In addition, women hope to increase their ability to manipulate men, and by extension, male-centered social interactions. Still, women’s power of seduction also depends on men to acknowledge its presence and respond to their alluring dispositions. Consequently, married women voluntarily posit their physical attractiveness as essential and engage in elaborate—and expensive— efforts to objectify their bodies as sex objects. In addition, the married women I introduced pursue extramarital romance while simultaneously enacting the role of the respectful mother figure. It is, however, problematic to assume that their performances of ideal motherhood and womanhood merely reproduce Japan’s gender and sexual status quo. Such a view assumes women are submissive and lack agency. It also overlooks nonorganized and nonverbal negotiation processes. Female clients in Fantasy arm themselves through these displays of maternal norms to disguise their affairs. Thus, their conduct was not merely “inscribed” and “governed” but consisted of strategic actions to achieve particular social goals with and through others. Such enactments are also constitutive elements of women’s collective effects to transform the existing double standards they face, such as men’s monopoly over love and sex outside marriage. The new social currency, extramarital romance, is an example of how women’s subversive pursuits have gradually become socially permissible, transform-

FEMININE RESTORATION    133

ing Japan’s gender and sexual norms. Such social changes took shape at the political economic juncture between the “romance boom” and neoliberal reform in contemporary Japan. In the postindustrial consumer age, with its emphasis on individuality and entrepreneurship, the host club is perceived as an accessible (though expensive) medium for women to transform themselves and attain a state of fulfillment. Their efforts to (re)produce their desirability, in turn, feeds into Japan’s affect economy, which capitalizes on women’s feelings, emotions, and desires—including those connected to their fears of aging, hopes for happiness and well-being, and need for romantic excitement. In this respect, selffashioning through a commodified form of romance is not the end result of a capitalist production circuit. It is, rather, at the center of the consumer-­oriented national economy that seduces socially vulnerable people into the dramas unfolding in Tokyo’s affective cityscape.

5 THE ART OF SEDUCTION Seduction [is] a sophisticated art, the ultimate form of power and persuasion. [Seducers] learn to work on the mind first, stimulating fantasies, keeping a [seducee] wanting more, creating patterns of hope and despair—the essence of seduction. Their power [is] not physical but psychological, not forceful but indirect and cunning. . . . A person in love will surrender. —Robert Greene, The Art of Seduction

“I looked pretty stoic and scary, didn’t I?” laughs Takuya, a thirty-six-year-old former host. He is looking at an old photograph taken when he was general manager of Valentine, a small chain of host clubs in Tachikawa, a suburb of ­Tokyo. “A general manager [at a host club] needs to look scary; fear and violence manage [hosts] best.” This photo of a man, staring threateningly at the camera through a pair of sunglasses, looks nothing like the polite and friendly guy in front of me. Dressed in a business suit and sporting a short haircut, Takuya is now the vice president of a small IT company in Tokyo. Originally from Shizuoka prefecture, he moved to Tokyo in the mid-1990s to attend college and start a rock band. He said he became a host after abandoning his dream of becoming a musician. At a host club in Tachikawa, he soon rose to the top ranks and maintained this status for three years. He then married a client, with whom he had fallen in love. After they gave birth, he switched roles from host to general manager of Valentine. Seven years later, at age thirty, he opened his own host club in Kabuki-chō and started a sideline talent agency. Both businesses, however, failed after a few years. He then joined the IT company in 2006. Takuya’s decade-old photo seems to embarrass him, but it also inspires feelings of pride over what he accomplished as a general manager. Takuya explains that one of his most important jobs at Valentine was to direct what he calls the “magic box” (mahō no hako)—a metaphor for the host club. According to him, the box is a Disneyland-like staged theater and utopian community, where

136    THE ART OF SEDUCTION

­ isery and distress are swept away and people’s dreams come true. Takuya says m that the extravagant interior design of the club evokes a sense of extraordinariness, appealing to both women and men. “A host club needs to be a magic box,” he says, “where women can play out their romantic fantasies and hosts can realize their dreams of a luxurious life.” The magic box does not mean much to those who are not invested in it. Just as hosts often claim that they cannot seduce women who are not open to being seduced, the host club managers I interviewed stress that they cannot force hosts to work hard. Seduction cannot not take place without the seducee’s own aspirations, which shape his or her willingness to participate. Seducers must therefore appeal to these desires. In this respect the manager-host relationship is quite similar to the host-client relationship. In both, the seducer (whether host or manager) uses subtle persuasion and manipulation, as well as dramatic, exaggerated performances, to lead the seducee (whether male host or female client) to voluntarily act in the seducer’s interests. These people do so, not out of obligation or compulsion but out of their own desires, self-love, and sense of obligation. Thus, seductive power is not forceful but artful, cunning, and even deceptive. It gains the seducee’s tacit consent and even willingness to act out for the seducer’s ends even if it means his or her own subordination. The art of seduction is at the heart of the host club business. It is the central drama for which the stage is set. Brutal honesty and rigid truths alienate customers, which results in loss of sales. How does morality unfold in the buying and selling of dreams, fantasies, and pleasure? In service industries oriented toward the provision of “hospitality”—or omotenashi (to entertain guests wholeheartedly)—truth may, in fact, be a mark of inhospitality. If managers’ and hosts’ deceit is morally wrong, does it follow that the act of telling people sweet things to make their seemingly unbearable situation bearable is also morally wrong? What if the recipient tacitly demands it? While host club participants’ actions may stem from their fantasies, they are grounded in real-world experiences and followed by social consequences. Further, they are informed by their sense of morality, ethics, and social norms. Their ongoing interactions are instructive to understanding what anthropologist Michael Lambek calls “ordinary ethics.” These are “relatively tacit, grounded in agreement rather than rule, in practice rather than knowledge or belief, and happening without calling undue attention to itself.”1 Against ­Kantian moral philosophy based on principles of rationality, universal law, and metaphysics, anthropological approaches allow us to unpack the delicate nego-

THE ART OF SEDUCTION    137

tiations in which mutual seduction is played out and ethical subjectivities are crafted.2 In the host clubs, these performances of personhood center especially on displays of individualism: responsibility, autonomy, intentionality, and freedom of choice. This chapter demonstrates how seduction is set into motion through a process analogous to theatrical composition and performance. In particular, I illustrate the triangular relationships between hosts, their clients, and the club’s management. Despite their different interests and desires, these people “work” together to realize one another’s ambitions through mutual yet asymmetrical interactions. These performers showcase their ethical sensibilities through narratives.3 The manager persuades his employees to work hard and sell more for their own dreams, while exploiting those dreams for profit. Hosts similarly seduce women into loving them and wanting to please them financially, while taking advantage of their love and generosity. Female clients subtly communicate that they want to be desired by hosts and expect their hosts to assure their desirability even if they end up self-exploiting. In the host club, where hopes and dreams are staged for sale, powerful emotions often trigger seemingly irrational decisions and actions to outsiders. A close analysis of these interactions allows us to probe acts of mutual seduction beneath economic, symbolic, and emotional exchanges. Specifically, we see how these different actors use deception, including self-deception, while optimizing their sense of morality, freedom, and profitability.

The “Magic Box” Host club general managers aim to seduce hosts into becoming hardworking, driven entrepreneurs. These managers are often former hosts themselves. Being thus well aware of their employees’ dreams and anxieties, they work assiduously to promote their business and motivate their hosts to earn more money. “The manager needs to be an object of admiration,” Takuya says. He tells me that he strategically presented himself as a role model for his hosts. His clothing, for example, shows them what they can potentially attain—status, authority, and r­ espect—in the business. Looking at his photograph again, he describes his attire: The suit I am wearing is Versace. Yeah. Gianni Versace, 270,000 yen. I remember this! I liked it a lot. The tie is Bulgari. The shirt is also Versace or Armani. The pair of sunglasses must be either Chanel or Furla. This purse is by Versace too.

138    THE ART OF SEDUCTION

And . . . a 100-yen umbrella! Nobody cares about umbrellas. . . . Oh yeah. I now remember that my favorite designer was Gucci!

Many fashion-conscious, wealthy people whom I met in Tokyo commented that  they think hosts’ gaudy style is tacky and unsophisticated. While I thought that these elites would be most struck by the flamboyant labels inscribed across the hosts’ clothes and accessories, their critical eyes frequently fixated on items like cheap umbrellas, worn-out shoes, and low-end cigarette packs. These ­upper-class individuals are more likely to invest their money in “invisible” consumer goods, like interior design, nightwear, underwear, and footwear. The juxtaposition of cheap umbrellas alongside the bricolage of overly luxurious goods only further cements these class divisions, a clear indication of their status as portentous nouveaux riches. Takuya, however, was not trying to emulate the rich and simply failing to do so. He did not care what elites thought about his particular taste—or his cheap umbrella for that matter. He says that his fashion choices were not a reflection of his personal appreciation for a particular design aesthetic. Rather, he asserts that he selects clothes that provide vivid evidence of his extraordinary affluence, which he uses to motivate the young men in his club to work harder in order to achieve this level of success. In other words, Takuya fashioned his appearance to be a kind of “walking advertisement.” He sought to appeal to his targets in order to set a mood and achieve his own goals. Just as hosts polish their appearance to seduce their clients, managers like Takuya present themselves creatively to entice their hosts to sell more for the club’s profit. When a club manager recruits potential employees by appealing to young men’s desires, he relies on a set of tools similar to that of the host—empathetic understanding, smooth communication, rapport building, and strategic decision making. “The manager must carefully calculate how to best sell his club to job seekers, but it has to be done in a very casual manner,” Takuya says. No matter how inexperienced or unsuccessful they were in their past hosting careers, for example, Takuya explains that he always pretended that he was entirely confident of hosts’ future success. When he sensed nervousness or doubt in job seekers’ eyes, he would randomly point to a host passing by and say, “Look. That is Tsuyoshi. He has been a host here for the last six months, and he had no experience before he joined us. Just like you. Yet he succeeded in making a million yen a month in sales in just three months. Oh, the guy next to Tsuyoshi. Can you see him? That is Makoto. He is another guy who quickly became successful and is now a top-ranking host.” The truth was that neither

THE ART OF SEDUCTION    139

Tsuyoshi nor Makoto succeeded so quickly. Their eventual success came much later. Takuya’s aim was to impress potential hosts and present the fantasy of future success as an easily obtainable goal. Takuya relies on several other tactics to successfully recruit potential employees as well. For those who sought to switch to a new employer when their careers were unsuccessful at other clubs, he might try to convince them that it was their club’s fault, not theirs. He then emphasizes Valentine’s career development plan, consultation and advising, and other kinds of support such as costume rentals, apartment sharing, and pay advances. When a job seeker learns that his wages at Valentine will be lower than his current salary, Takuya enthusiastically introduces the performance-based bonuses, awards, and prizes that could result in significantly higher pay. When candidates raise concerns over commuting distance, he informs them about reasonably priced apartments provided by the club. These were, in fact, tiny rooms shared by other hosts and offered no privacy. The key to recruiting, Takuya stresses, lies in the casual delivery of information. Such a technique allows him to informally correct a piece of misinformation, if necessary, or simply dismiss it as misunderstanding on the receiver’s end. Takuya’s guidance continues after recruitment, as he encourages and manipulates employees’ desires to increase their motivation. He first asks what kinds of things they want to own and how high they wish to climb the club’s status ladder. These material objects could be expensive sports cars, fashionable clothes and accessories, money, or perhaps even a house. Their status goals tend to be the number-one host ranking, shop management, and shop representation. If a host does not have a specific item or status in mind, Takuya assigns him a goal he believes he can achieve. “It does not matter what exactly they desire,” Takuya says. “The most important thing is that they freely imagine what they really want from the bottom of their hearts and become greedy for it. Once one has something he genuinely wants, he thinks about it all the time and tries to find a way to obtain it, no matter what.” Greed, he states, is the driving force of motivation and hard work. Once Takuya has inspired this avarice among his employees, his job is then to help them design concrete plans, working backward from an end point in the future, when they will have achieved these goals. This is a typical plan: if a host aims for material wealth and higher status in the club, Takuya tells him that he needs to sell a million yen per month. Within the first three months, he will drive a European luxury or sports car. He will become a number-one host in six months. And finally, within a year, he will be promoted first to shop

140    THE ART OF SEDUCTION

­ anager and then shop representative. As Takuya points out, this tactic of m breaking down ambitions into pieces and situating these achievements on a time line allows these abstract dreams to become seemingly attainable. Like the club’s female clients whose fears of aging in the future motivate their preventive actions in the present, Takuya’s seduction involves encouraging hosts to imagine a prosperous future and motivating them to realize it. He then uses their goals to define what needs to be done. In this context, hosts reframe present actions as investments that pay dividends over time. These imagined futures are reflected on as if they are already happening. The host club thus represents an ideal workplace where men’s futures may be realized. Nonetheless, these hopeful visions are possible only if men can afford the cost of hard work in the here and now. Because they hinge on hopes and promises for the distant future, hosts’ motivations are fragile—easily derailed when men encounter the inevitable challenges of this precarious occupation. Therefore, managers constantly seek to ignite and reorient hosts’ dreams and fantasies so these young men continue to want more. Takuya emphasizes the importance of everything becoming attainable within a year. He said that young men lose interest if they have to work for someone else. This is particularly the case if it entails hard labor for many years before their dreams came true. “Unlike in the Japanese corporation, where employees are channeled to collective corporate goals and longrange plans,” Takuya explains, “each worker [in the host club] is allowed to seek his own dreams in an intensive and greedy way. They come to assume that the greater efforts they make, the better chances they have to realize their dreams. They push themselves harder when they are still young and energetic.” To the extent that management is able to maintain this delicate illusion, especially among beginner hosts, the “magic box” is buttressed by desire, not force. New employees at Valentine, instilled with a sense of ambition and drive, then learn their position in the hierarchy in the club. Similar to that of other Japanese clubs, the hierarchy at Valentine is based on managerial status and sales rank from top to bottom: the president and club owner; general manager; representative director; shop manager; chief; subchief; and others. Other clubs might have slightly different titles, but the hierarchical order itself is more or less the same and functions similarly. At Valentine, for instance, the junior hosts are not allowed to address the club authorities. They are allowed to speak only to their direct supervisors, who are usually hosts themselves. If a new host asks a question to a subchief or a chief, he is told to ask his supervisor first. This rep-

THE ART OF SEDUCTION    141

rimand serves as a means of enforcing the power distribution across the chain of command. It also regulates hosts’ behavior, especially toward their superiors. The club’s military-like hierarchical system, as Takuya explains, exploits the naïveté of the lower-ranked hosts: the less familiar they are with others, the more distance they feel and the more obedient they become to their superiors. Takuya suggests that they develop an “inferiority complex” as a result of their initial inexperience and lack of sales, the intimidating managers, and their harsh discipline. “Like in the yakuza,” Takuya explains, “the sense of fear and threat of physical violence are highly effective in making hosts obey the rules and maintain order in the club.” Although the host club is not ruled through physical force, managers occasionally conduct coercive exercises to remind hosts of this hierarchy. To get the message across, Takuya says he sometimes imposes a very difficult quota on his subordinates, such as a 300,000-yen sales minimum per club for the day on one of the slowest nights. He typically gives orders in the name of the club owner and president and tells workers that absolutely no one will leave the club until the goal is achieved. The director, who never challenges him in front of the hosts, immediately relays the order to the shop manager, the chief, and the subchiefs. Then they pass it down to the other employees. The order induces a tense atmosphere on the entire floor, Takuya said. When the club does not meet these quotas, hosts may have to work for more than fifteen, and sometimes up to eighteen hours, straight. Their superiors provide no information about when they would be permitted to leave. Despite the hosts’ exhaustion, the management is unswerving in these expectations. In this kind of extreme situation, Takuya says, the senpai (superior) verbally and psychologically abuses the kōhai (junior), who contributes little to the goal. Through this training, hosts quickly learn that the authority’s orders are absolute. The management expects total subordination and obedience, even when not present. This environment encourages top-ranking hosts to maintain their status and power, while lower-ranked hosts seek to increase their sales and overtake these individuals.

Backstage Theater Since Kazuya, the president and club owner, is mostly absent from the day-today operations of Valentine, his attendance at regular events like the mandatory monthly sales meetings has heightened importance. Kazuya and Takuya

142    THE ART OF SEDUCTION

carefully plan these meetings to display their authority and the significance of Kazuya’s presence. First, they always arrive late. Once they park their customized Mercedes-Benzes in front of the club, it is customary for the director and shop manager to rush to their cars and welcome them with deep, respectful bows. Kazuya then walks as stately as a prime minister to the club floor where the meeting is held. Takuya follows him. A typical sales meeting often starts with Takuya stating his strong displeasure with the previous month’s business, over issues such as a host’s misconduct or trouble with a customer at another club. Depending on the severity of the problem, he often berates his employees. Sometimes, he even hits their heads with the flat bottom of an ashtray. If he is really upset, he might overturn a club table, smashing the glass top, leaving shards all over the floor. At this point, the hosts issue a flurry of apologies. A supervisor usually steps forward and apologizes profusely for failing to oversee his host, obliging him to apologize to Takuya, too. Once Takuya’s uncontrollable anger draws the sought-after responses, ­Kazuya coolly intervenes. “Takuya, stop it there! That is enough.” With that cue, Takuya yields to Kazuya, who plays the role of the kind and benevolent owner. Kazuya praises the things that have gone well and congratulates successful hosts with generous cash bonuses. The meetings generally close on a happy note. Kazuya, who has accomplished his mission, then exits the club elegantly, parting with “Good luck to everybody!” amid applause. Takuya explains that their performances have all been plotted in advance but are kept secret from the lower-level employees. Club managers know what will happen and what roles they must play in particular scenes, yet there is no written script or rehearsal. They have to improvise, depending on the scene. Takuya’s anger, the staff ’s reaction, and Kazuya’s benevolence are performances intended to maintain the club’s “carrot-and-stick” management program. These performances further reinforce the magic box analogy of the club’s activities. Takuya tells me that he did not know about this backstage theater until he was promoted to a managerial position. Even now, he is unsure whether ­Kazuya was taking advantage of him through these performances, since ­Kazuya never reveals much about his private life or real state of mind. “Who knows if everything he does and says was some kind of manipulation technique, since he used to be and is still extremely good at seducing women in the exact same way? There is no such thing as an absolute truth in the magic box.”

THE ART OF SEDUCTION    143

Takuya’s remarks illuminate the asymmetrical relationships that constitute the club’s power structure, from the club’s management to their hosts, and finally to female clients. Despite their different interests, desires, and positions, these three parties come together to work for the maintenance and support of one another’s ambitions as if in mutual consent. This labor is carried out in an economy that capitalizes on human affect—feelings, emotions, and desires—to exploit seemingly limitless human resources and endless interactions in economic, symbolic, and affective exchanges. The exchange is then not based so much on what one possesses; it centers on the promise of what one has not yet fully realized, such as economic worth, symbolic recognition, and self-satisfaction. The art of seduction is a form of indirect control over someone else’s conduct. It is an appeal to an as-yet-unfulfilled ambition. This performance contributes to the production of a person’s sense of self-autonomy. These individuals are motivated by their own ambitions and indebted to their self-imposed goals. At the same time, such autonomous subjects are products of the management in the magic box. Their labor is instrumental to the club’s profitability.

The Ethics of Pleasure The schemes and techniques used in seduction are the essence of host club entertainment. The enterprise is predicated on pleasing customers without spoiling their fantasies. Here, the fiction—flattery, flirtation, and dramatization—is tolerated, even encouraged or required, in the service of pleasurable experiences. From the host’s perspective, the basic rules of interaction between the entertainer and the entertained ultimately reduce such ethics to customer satisfaction. One evening at Fantasy, I sat with a group of hosts and met Mr. Minami, a veteran host in his mid-fifties with more than twenty years of hosting experience. He explained to me how he extracts money from his clients. As prologue, he stressed the importance of creative plots devised not to betray but to please his clients in the process. In the performance, “circumstances may justify a lie, particularly in this kind of entertainment business,” he said. “Entertainment is more or less fabricated.” One day in the late 1980s, for example, Minami lost 1 million yen gambling on mah-jongg games. It happened at the height of Japan’s bubble fever, when a number of his clients had become extremely wealthy almost overnight. At the time, he was in his mid-thirties and his portfolio included a rich client named

144    THE ART OF SEDUCTION

Sayuri, a woman in her early fifties. Based on the true story of his gambling misfortune, he concocted a story about losing not 1 million but 10 million yen. Further, he coached his helper hosts in advance to tell her only that he had suffered a huge loss the previous night. When Sayuri showed up at the club and one of Minami’s helper hosts started to serve her a drink, Minami asked to excuse himself from the table. He said, “I do not feel well tonight. Let me be alone for a while.” He moved to an unoccupied table and slowly sat down. He then hunched his shoulders, crossed his arms over his chest, and dropped his head. Minami said that he must have looked terribly sick or depressed to her because he had always acted cheerful and funny in the past. The truth, he confided in me, was that he simply felt tired. He had stayed up the night before playing mah-jongg. Sayuri asked the helper host, “What is wrong with him? Is he all right?” The helper said, “Well, maybe I should not tell you this since it is kind of a private matter. Please keep this between you and me. . . . He apparently lost a lot of money gambling at mah-jongg last night. He must be bummed out.” Minami explains: This is the seeding. The key is to prick her in the beginning instead of providing a whole picture. The psychological shock, along with the withheld information, puts her in a state of light panic and stimulates her to try to better understand the situation out of limited pieces of information. My job is to guide her to see things as I want and tickle her desire to help me.

As expected, the client came over and quietly sat down next to him. She gently put her hand on his shoulder, imploring him, “Are you all right?” Minami ignored her. He waited patiently for her to share what she knew to ensure his plot was working. “I heard about your loss last night. I am so sorry about that.” Even so, Minami shook off her hand as if irritated. He snapped, “It is none of your business. Leave me alone!” Minami’s emotional distance and withheld information further piqued her curiosity and concern. She asked repeatedly, “Please tell me what is going on. I hate to see you so depressed.” He continued to ignore her request. Minami said, “I will manage the situation.” She pressed, “So how much did you lose?” “Ten million [yen],” he finally replied. After a momentary pause she calmly asked, “When do you have to repay it?” “Within a few days. Look, it is none of your business,” he reiterated. “It is my problem.” Minami released additional pieces of information and alternated between emotional displays of weakness, anger, and hopelessness.

THE ART OF SEDUCTION    145

Minami believes his acting compelled Sayuri to understand the situation better and appealed to her sense of compassion. If he had honestly admitted what had happened and begged for her help, Minami said, the result would have been completely different. “She would have told me, ‘That’s your fault, idiot!’ and would lecture him to stop gambling. “Remember,” Minami explained to me, “women are not stupid. Nobody willingly gives you money without a reason. You have to be very creative and skillful to entice them to voluntarily give you money.” He also insisted that the more dramatic a story, the better its chance of motivating women to take action. For Minami, adding one more digit to the actual amount of his debt, along with his convincing performance, dramatized the tragic event. He then transformed the experience into entertainment and gave Sayuri a role to play. Three days later, Sayuri came to the club and gave Minami a paper bag, saying, “Here it is.” He grabbed it and glanced at the unwrapped piles of 10,000yen bills in the bag. “Do not do this kind of stupid thing!” he said. “I did not want to trouble you.” Then, shyly: “Thanks! Let me go pay off my debt right away.” He quickly exited the club and proceeded to a coin locker instead of going to the mah-jongg parlor. He grabbed a few bundles of bills from the bag and put the rest in the locker. He returned to the club and reported to Sayuri, “I have just returned the money. Let me treat you tonight. Order whatever you want to drink!” He covered her bill of about $3,000. Minami then finished one of the best performances of his career. Looking back, Minami said, “I made almost 10 million yen. It is a great deal, is it not, even after I treated her and repaid my debts?” The decisive factor in the performance, he said, was his ability to elicit her compassion for him. She could not think of anything else but to save him. According to Minami, the event became so real to her that she apparently could not recognize it as fiction. For that matter, nobody, including Minami’s helper hosts, knew his actual story. Thus, not only is truth unknowable but Minami’s framing also has influenced the others’ conduct in accordance with his plans. Sociologist Erving Goffman’s notion of theatrical performance and its principle, dramaturgy, provides insight into framing and its effect. Goffman theorizes that social actors, as well as stage performers, manage their impressions to affect the audience’s minds and control their conduct. Minami’s performance exhibits this. As Goffman states, it is “in his interests to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of him. This control is achieved largely by influencing the definition of the situation, which the others come to

146    THE ART OF SEDUCTION

formulate. . . . He can influence this definition by expressing himself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan.”4 Minami’s virtuoso staging, casting, and acting defined the situation and set a tone, just like a director framing a scene in a play. In this theatrical event, actors’ performances are oriented to meet the director’s vision. Nonetheless, his plan, as well as the secret of the ploy, was never fully disclosed.

Persuasive Reasons The notion of dramaturgy allows us to rethink everyday interactions, including commercial entertainment. It presents social contracts as an extension of a kind of theatrical play. Key performers lead others to voluntarily act out arranged plots. It also raises questions about ethics and the accountability of such seemingly voluntary but carefully controlled interactions. This is particularly the case when actors’ decisions are not in their best interests and consequences exceed circumscribed commercial and social stages. Minami’s lies involve exaggerating an otherwise true event so that the story entertains its audience. Instead of honestly telling a woman that he thinks she is fat and ugly, the host says, “I am so attracted to you because I like women who have plump bodies,” or “You are so comfortable to be around. I like you because I tend to be too nervous with beautiful women.” Minami justifies his witty lies as necessary to avoid disappointing or displeasing women. The act of “padding” clients’ bills presents similar justifications. Hosts find it acceptable to add a few thousand yen to the bill if the total is more than a few hundred thousand yen, he says. It is not okay, however, if the bill is only about two dozen thousand yen. The client would likely notice the scam and distrust the host. The bottom line for Minami is that any sort of manipulation is acceptable insofar as it entertains his clients. Thus, lying is, or should be, an expected part of the host club experience. Still, a host must be skilled enough to entice his clients to voluntarily give him money without having his deceptive acts exposed. I asked Minami if he felt any guilt about what he had done to Sayuri. He said no and eagerly defended his actions. “You know what? If I honestly said that I had lost 1 million yen instead of 10 million, she would have laughed at me. [She would find it humorous] that I could not handle such a small debt.” In Minami’s opinion, the whole affair was like a crime scene without a victim. He had successfully plotted a fictional story and persuasively acted it out. His helper hosts

THE ART OF SEDUCTION    147

had enjoyed the performance whether as supporting actors or as audience members. And Sayuri was, after all, happy because of the savior role she assumed. It assured her position as his special client. No one was hurt. I asked Minami how Sayuri was able to raise such a large sum of money on such short notice. He told me that she was already wealthy enough. He added, “Unlike men, women are compassionate beings. They manage to do anything for their beloved men, even if they end up borrowing money from a loan company or prostituting themselves. A very considerate woman keeps the origin of her money from her man so he does not have to know about it and worry about her.” Minami’s remarks resonate with the actions of hosts like Hikaru, who take advantage of women’s compassion to fulfill their own economic desires. I asked Minami, “Is it not wrong to take advantage of such characteristics of women?” “That is their nature,” he said. “They want to do things for their men. I just let them do what they want. That is it.” “But did you not feel sorry for Sayuri, even a little?” I pressed. “No,” he argued, “Should I be punished for receiving some bonus money once in a while, so that my hard work was compensated? I even ‘went down’ on her! She did not fully compensate me for that. She only gave me pocket change [of tens of thousands of yen]. That is worth a booger [for the services I provided].” To Minami, Sayuri was a wealthy housewife of a surgeon. She would have “wasted” the money one way or another. If he had not grabbed his portion, someone else would surely have taken it. As I learned, hosts often use their emotional labor as a logical excuse to take restitution in whatever way they can. Hosts’ justifications provide us with a nuanced picture of what makes certain acts and ethics conceptually possible and even logical. With their logic of compensation and economic vitalization, hosts’ deeds are not only legitimized but also concealed from the public. Hosts and their clients rarely report these acts to the police because of the shame of being involved in mizu shōbai (water trades) and giji ren’ai (pseudo-love) in the first place. The clients of Koji and Ken, introduced in Chapter 3, who disappeared without paying their multimillion-yen bills, are not exceptional. Sayuri and Sachiko, whose hosts took tens of million of yen in cash, have apparently never filed court cases, either. In the host club business, immoral conduct is often silenced as part of the risk people take as participants in sex-related service and entertainment industries. The invisibility of immoral conduct does not automatically free hosts from their ethical concerns, however. On this point, Minami summed up his lengthy

148    THE ART OF SEDUCTION

hosting experience and articulated the intention behind hosts’ presentation of their ethical selves: Hosts try to justify what they do. Otherwise, they can do nothing because of guilty feelings. They are human beings, too. They say various things [to make themselves look better] or simply remain silent about their cruel deeds, but more or less all hosts do the same thing: seduce women into opening their wallets to take their money. They just want to put the self aside, outside the realm of the socially stigmatized view of hosts as lustful, greedy, and untrustworthy, even if it is true.

As Minami explains, their concerns are not so much about whether what hosts actually do is morally correct or wrong; rather, they forge ethical judgments by questioning how persuasive their justifications are. What effects do their actions have on others, and what effects do they have on them? Hosts’ ethical sensibilities are thus full of indeterminate and ambivalent elements. They result from their multilayered negotiations with existing moral codes, social stigma, and these justifications.

Act of Civility Since the key to succeeding in the art of seduction is creating the space for women to dream, hosts comply with women’s wishes and avoid anything that would potentially disturb them. Yoshi, the Osaka host introduced in Chapter 3, for example, said he often wondered how his client, the antique dealer, could afford to spend such seemingly limitless amounts of money. He never once questioned her about it, however, even though she was his virtual “girlfriend” and they met everyday for nearly two years. Although she told him that she had inherited family money, he suspected she was involved in fraudulent criminal activity. Yoshi observed that she was always at home, not work. She would occasionally answer a few phone calls and have brief conversations with unknown persons but did little else. Despite his suspicions, Yoshi said, as long as she paid him in cash, he did not want to know the truth. I asked Yoshi if he was afraid of finding out that the money he received was swindled from others. Yoshi dodged this question and instead portrayed himself as a kind of “savior” to vulnerable people, who seek an escape from their difficult lives: People are not always strong enough to live by social rules and justice. There are some who are so vulnerable that they have to cling to anything to survive

THE ART OF SEDUCTION    149

even though it is just a bundle of straw or a bubble of fantasy. The host club is a place for such women to escape from their day-to-day hardship and enjoy their fantasy. They need it. The host’s job is to embrace their fantasy as if we were unaware of any dark side to their lives, so that their harsh reality is eased enough to be livable. For such women, it is politeness and even a sort of kindness that hosts do not seek painful truths.

The hosts’ desire to ignore or mask these unpleasant truths is an example of what social theorist Slavoj Žižek calls an “act of civility.” Such desire and its enactment feign that they “want to do what the other asks [them] to do, so that [their] compliance with the other’s wish does not exert pressure on her.”5 Žižek contends that acts of civility are displayed in the attitude of respect for others as free and autonomous agents. It entails benevolently forgiving others’ faults and allowing them to be what they think they are. For this reason, lying, which perpetuates the secrecy surrounding the hosts’ skillful extortion techniques, is tolerated, if not promoted. It is a constitutive element of civility. In contrast, hosts believe that when these secrets are exposed, it precipitates feelings of betrayal. It spoils women’s pleasure and hurts their feelings. It is, in other words, an act of incivility. Deception itself is thus not the issue at stake; what is at stake are the other’s experiences of disappointment, distress, and distrust that potentially damage her sense of individual freedom. Within this context, emotional and economic manipulation is not just fine but necessary insofar as it feeds into women’s wishes without disrupting their joy, because the fragile web of civility is, as Žižek claims, the “social substance” of free and independent individuals in modern societies. If this substance disintegrates, “the very social space of individual freedom is foreclosed.”6 Thus, while hosts’ entertainment may be based on deceit, it is also considered a civil act so long as these actions remain hidden. Of course, deception also has pragmatic benefits. Avoiding the truth about the origin of clients’ money shields hosts from legal liability. It also protects the club’s profits. Yoshi told me that he had learned from experience that a host stands to “lose everything” if he finds out about his clients’ embezzlement, fraud, or illicit money. On the one hand, by confronting her or, even worse, reporting her to the authorities, he would upset the client and hurt his sales. On the other hand, if he remained silent, he would risk being charged with aiding and abetting these illegal acts. The money he received would be confiscated. “It just creates pain and no gain on both sides. The police are the one to profit

150    THE ART OF SEDUCTION

from it,” said Yoshi. “So,” he asked rhetorically, “what is the point of seeking the truth? Ignorance is bliss, is it not?” For hosts like Yoshi, disavowal of the truth is not just a “respect of individual freedom.” It is also a clever use of legal principle: the benefit of the doubt. It is also smart business sense. Illegal money is not confiscated unless the host had prior knowledge that it was stolen or embezzled. Hosts’ efforts to profit from their lies may be secretive acts, but they are indeed public secrets—widely known but carefully hidden social facts. Their reputations as “con men” are convenient tools hosts use to deflect the focal center of moral responsibility to clients. A veteran host, Ryū, says: It is already a well-known fact that hosts seduce women into a pseudo-romance and they charge a lot for that. We cannot hide that fact. [But] we can only do so much to seduce women if they are not interested in being seduced. It is surely impossible to force them to patronize us. Thus, there is nothing for us to hide in this process.

In this narrative, Ryū shows how the very stereotype of hosts as swindlers ironically becomes the moral grip that hosts apply to defend their civility. Women are responsible for their deeds. Alluding to the traditional saying, “a wise man keeps away from danger,” Ryū suggests, in effect, that women are asking for the dangers they may encounter in the clubs. Hosts believe women know the truth behind their deceptive facades, just as hosts know their clients’ “true,” yet carefully guarded, desires. Because women are the masters and beneficiaries of men’s acts of civility, these men do not feel morally accountable for their own actions. Undeniably, a social act of civility entails emotion work—the art of managing one’s feelings to tacitly display requested emotions by others. The emotion work is imbricated with gendered social norms and economic value systems. And emotion work, as Arlie Hochschild argues, is gendered. It is expected more from women than from men.7 Even so, women’s work is undermined by a patriarchal social structure, which consigns them to what Ivan Illich calls “shadow work,”8 because women’s socialized emotion work looks effortless enough to be misinterpreted as a natural attribute of their character.9 Thus, their work appears trivial compared to men’s productive waged labor. It is then not only hosts’ cultural logic of civility but also the socioeconomic structures themselves that need to be examined to better understand the effect of naturalization and capitalization of women’s emotional capacity in the host clubs.

THE ART OF SEDUCTION    151

A “Pure Love” The following excerpts are a revealing example of how managing one’s emotions can consume the lives of host club participants. They were translated from the book, 150 Million Yen Romance: Four Years in Love with a Host (2007). The author, a Tokyo woman in her early twenties known only by the pen name “Nao,” based her book on her popular blog, Diary about Tsubasa (Tsubasa no Nikki), written between 2000 and 2006. In the blog, Nao details the moment she had decided to prostitute herself to support a host, Tsubasa, with whom she had fallen in love: July 13, 2000 (Thursday) You no longer stop me, do you? You stopped me the other day when I told you that I would quit my office job to switch to a better paying one [for you]. You are no longer even surprised at hearing that I would work at a “bathhouse.” You calmly responded that you would help me to find one. . . . Why am I shocked? I wonder if I wanted to be stopped. I did not mean to test him. I had already made up my mind. But I am most shocked by the fact that I am shocked. [I know] hosts try to stop it if their clients say they wish to become prostitutes [for them], even though that is what hosts truly want the most. That’s why they secretly desire that their clients fall into prostitution by themselves. They don’t want to intervene. I knew that. That is why I wished I could let him speak his mind.10

Nao’s journey into prostitution could hardly have been predicted based on her upbringing. At the start of her book, she suggests that she grew up as a Tokyo ojōsama (daughter of a high-class family), enjoying an easy route to privilege. She graduated from private schools and worked in a good office job at a trading company in the metropolis. With her parent’s financial assistance, she lived alone in an apartment and was enjoying her life in the big city. Despite her upbringing, she claimed she was “an ordinary girl” who expected to live an ordinary life like her mother’s. She would fall in love with an ordinary man, marry him, and have children. At a friend’s urging, Nao began moonlighting as a part-time hostess to earn extra money for designer products. She began to visit several host clubs for fun. In her blog, she wrote that host clubbing was a way to pass the time until she could meet a “real boyfriend.” She had not met a host she genuinely liked until one night in January 2000 when she stepped into a Kabuki-chō host club.

152    THE ART OF SEDUCTION

Preparing to leave the club after what she described as a “totally disappointing” experience, she met Tsubasa, a top-ranking host. Six months later, she decided to work as a prostitute so she could spend more money on him. Nao reports spending 150 million yen (about $1.5 million) on Tsubasa. She went on dates with him outside the club only three times. She kissed him no more than five times and never had sex with him. Nao’s blog spread through word of mouth and garnered much public attention. It stirred up voyeuristic curiosity about Japan’s host clubs and an ojōsama’s extraordinary story. Nao admits in her blog that she felt conflicted about Tsubasa from the beginning. Though she was immediately attracted to him when they first met, she was also repulsed by his personality and behavior. She writes that he was “very bold, rude, and overconfident.” He would ask her—his client—to light his cigarettes, mix his drinks, and entertain him as if he were a king and she were his servant.11 (This aggressive and threatening business style is known as oraora eigyō among hosts.) However, Tsubasa’s physical beauty, charisma, and status as a general manager and top-selling host in the club overrode this negative impression. She wrote that she was fixated on his handsome facial features and aroused by his deep, masculine voice. She was especially flattered by the fact that he sat next to her, as an “ordinary woman,” who can afford only so much. Vacillating between disgust and fascination, Nao found it impossible to stop thinking about him. Nao’s mixed feelings about Tsubasa reached a critical point on his birthday in February 2000, a month after they met. She visited the host club to celebrate his birthday, planning to order a $1,500 bottle of pink Dom Pérignon that they would toast together. She anxiously waited for him for hours, but he never showed up at her table. Instead, he was busy at other tables greeting customers and drinking the champagne they had bought for him. Nao came to realize how unimportant she was to Tsubasa. She felt lonely and adrift in his sea of popularity. Her disappointment was swiftly forgotten, however, when Tsubasa at last visited her table near closing time. He sat beside her, feigning collapse. He gave her little kisses on her hair, eyelids, forehead, and lips. She knew he was too drunk to recognize her and that he had just kissed multiple women before coming to her table. Still, Nao could not help feeling great pleasure in the fact the he picked her as his final destination. The intoxicated man seemed to open his vulnerable self to her like a little boy. He wrapped his arms around her and laid

THE ART OF SEDUCTION    153

his head on her shoulder. He then fell asleep peacefully on the club sofa. It was only her fourth visit to the club. Her long and painful ordeal was about to begin. Nao tried to steer away from this path. She feared that her longing for Tsubasa foreshadowed a hardship that she would not be able to bear.12 She attempted to erase her memory of him as if nothing had happened. It did not work. She even went to other host clubs to try to meet someone else. But these intentions wilted under her intense longing. Instead of forgetting Tsubasa, she thought about him more and more. She caught herself looking for him in subways, department stores, crowded Tokyo streets, anywhere and everywhere, she wrote. These fruitless searches served only to heighten her desire for him. She felt “crushed by her own feelings.”13 Because she was absorbed by her memories, Nao’s interior life, as she described it, was in constant turmoil. Her interactions with Tsubasa added to her distress. Tsubasa had never easily conformed to the scripted rules expected in a host-client relationship. Tellingly, unlike other hosts, Tsubasa made no effort to contact her after their first meeting. Expecting a sales call at the very least, Nao waited anxiously without a response. Tsubasa’s unpredictable behavior made her wonder if he did not think of her as his client but instead as a woman. By treating Nao so inconsiderately, Tsubasa altered the conventional host-client dynamic. He created a social distance that Nao filled with her own romantic fantasy. Nao reflected on the events of her life that unfolded prior to her encounter with Tsubasa and its possible implications for the future: “I have never had this kind of passion about anyone in my entire life. He must be so special. I might not be able to meet anyone quite like him ever again if I lose this opportunity.”14 Seen through this temporal trajectory, her past experiences and future predictions provided merely reference points for her to assert that the love she felt was exceptional. Nao’s love for Tsubasa was imagined as a once-in-a-lifetime event that needed to take place. In this way, Nao seduced herself into a risky business without being forced.

Secret Desires About a week later, after Nao had decided to commit herself to the relationship, she received an unexpected call from Tsubasa while she was at work. “You must be playing around; I have not seen you in a while,” he complained to her. Hearing his voice over the phone nearly brought tears of joy to her eyes. She wrote that she became so aroused she “could not stand it anymore.” Nao wanted to see

154    THE ART OF SEDUCTION

him very badly, but her job prevented her. She realized that her 9-to-5 schedule had become an obstacle and did not pay well enough to satisfy Tsubasa financially. Frustrated, she wrote: “I cannot use my time. I do not have much money to spend on him, either. I am helpless.”15 Determined to align her lifestyle with his, Nao began, idly at first, to consider having sex with other men for money. Over the next three months, Nao saw Tsubasa much more frequently, which intensified both her sensual pleasure and spending. Her attitude about prostitution changed. She wrote in early July: “I do not think that [becoming a prostitute for Tsubasa] is a sacrifice. I love him. I just want to satisfy whatever he wishes.”16 Even so, she still wanted Tsubasa to play an active role in making this important decision. She hoped he would show some responsibility for the relationship in exchange for her devotion. Despite her expectations, Tsubasa did not provide what she wanted so easily. She wrote that she had the following conversation with him. July 11, 2000 (Tuesday) Last Friday, Tsubasa tried to entice me to spend money on him. I complained about his sneaky tactics. I told him I wished we could be honest with each other. I said to him, “Listen. I want to do my best to fulfill whatever your wishes are, but I think it is unfair of you to deceptively bait me. As I have promised, I would do anything for you if only you would ask me. If you want the other [person] to obey [your command], I want you to show your responsibility with your own words and attitude.” He replied, “I am just afraid of being rejected whenever I clearly express what I want. That is it.” What a typical answer a host will use to excuse himself! I confronted him and said, “I have never rejected you. I always try to do my best and even try to go beyond my personal limit. It all depends upon your words and attitude as to what extent I can stretch the limit.”17

Nao’s speech indicates her need for Tsubasa to provide her a sincere response to her decision. But, as her continued dialogue with Tsubasa shows, she is unsuccessful. Tsubasa: You are so direct, Nao. Nao: That is right. I do not want to lie or hide anything. I want to be honest about my feelings. All my feelings are genuinely for you. Tsubasa: But, I cannot believe that. I try not to believe in such [a claim].

THE ART OF SEDUCTION    155

He suddenly stood up and left the table for a moment. When he came back, he abruptly said: [Tsubasa:] All right. I should be honest if you are honest and also want me to be so. Prepare 12 million yen (about $120,000) by next Monday! Will you? Nao: 12 million!? I probably could manage that if you wait for a half year. Can you wait? Tsubasa: It means nothing if it is not by next Monday. See? This is why I should not have spoken my mind to you. Nao: I will quit my job and do something else to make much more money. With the retirement money [that Nao has presumably saved] and the new job, I will get 12 million in six months for you. Tsubasa: It is all right. It is impossible. Please forget about this, will you? Do not say such a stupid thing like you will quit your job any more, okay?18 Reflecting on their conversation, Nao wrote: “I am so sad. He does not understand my feelings. He does not even try to. That is why he acts as if he is testing me.”19 Nao’s frustration stemmed not only from her failure to make Tsubasa speak honestly with her but also from the limits of language itself. She states, “We looked at each other and exchanged lots of words. But I wondered what utterances make him believe in me. I wish I could [verbally] demonstrate my love.”20 Her frustration led her to decide to act out what she meant instead of verbally articulating it. Meanwhile, Tsubasa made her responsible for any actions she would take on account of her devotion. “If you want to be involved in my life, you have to accept me as a whole,” he said. “I think it may cause you discomfort. It will not be the same as you just come to see me in the club and enjoy yourself. I wouldn’t want to deprive you of that pleasure. If I choose a girlfriend, I am sure that she would suffer from hardship.”21 Nao said nothing to Tsubasa but wrote, “I am mentally prepared for what I am getting into.”22 Although Nao was well aware of her “irrational” decision to become a prostitute, she also knew that she could not tame her overwhelming attraction to Tsubasa. Convinced that following her true feelings and modifying her expectations accordingly was the only solution to her plight, Nao wrote: I know that what I attempt to do [prostitution] will be an extremely stupid thing. But I do not want a love that counts only on the merits and demerits. Why can human beings not live only with the pure feeling of love? I want to

156    THE ART OF SEDUCTION

become selfless [for love]. . . . Having said that, how can I keep pushing myself only with the feeling of love? I will probably become increasingly greedy, won’t I? I would hate to see myself that way. I don’t want to be puffed up with conceit. I don’t want to think that I have sacrificed something. I do not want to demand reparation. I do not want to be such an ungraceful human being who expects returns. . . . Tsubasa, I no longer expect you to reciprocate my feelings to you.23

Nao’s reflexive narrative detailed in her blog not only leads her to finalize her decision to become a sex worker but also frees Tsubasa from his responsibility in the name of a “pure love.” In this description, Tsubasa exists only as a mirror through which she reflects her ideal self. In other words, Tsubasa is physically absent but imagined everywhere. The art of seduction also requires a new conceptualization of the body and its capacity to convey the unsayable and manipulate others. Indeed, host club participants usually avoid expressing their thoughts and desires overtly. Female clients rarely ask, “Can you seduce me?” “Can you tell me how attractive I am?” This approach is too direct and ruins the intent. The pleasure of seduction has to be delivered in secret. The performance should meet the desires of the seducee. Seduction loses its power if it is self-evident. To accomplish this difficult mission, the hosts I interviewed said that they attempt to pinpoint what a woman’s real desires are. A few of them quoted the saying kayui tokoro ni pinpointo de degatodoku sābisu (service that scratches the exact spot) to express their aims. If a host does not provide this care, a client will be disappointed or irritated. But if a host pleases her precisely as she wishes, she will never let him go. The body is not simply a receptor of sensory stimuli. It mediates one another’s secret desires, indebtedness, pain, and pleasure.

Self-Seduction After considerable reflection, Nao concluded it was nobody’s fault that she had become a prostitute. No one had coerced her into doing it. She wrote: July 13, 2000 (Thursday) It is not you, Tsubasa, who has trapped me [into prostitution]. I have accidentally trapped myself. . . . It will be painful to have to blame myself when I look back. I know that. Even so, I have already made up my mind. I will try not to think of it anymore. . . . I wish I could live only for you, Tsubasa, without thinking anything else.24

THE ART OF SEDUCTION    157

The “accidental trap” that Nao described referred to her own characterization of how she allowed her overwhelming feelings to lead her into a decision that ­others would view as foolish, shameful, or even dangerous. She handily dismissed the decision-making process as an accident. By doing this, she freed herself as well as Tsubasa from these potential accusations—of losing her money to Tsubasa or exposing herself to the stigma of sex work. Instead, she staunchly defends her feelings of love for Tsubasa. Otherwise, the seduction she indulges in dissipates, and her interaction with him will come to an end. To avoid such a disturbance, Nao questions the social norms and moral codes that stigmatize sex work rather than the morality of the occupation itself: It is clear that I am not afraid of sex work itself. I am so afraid of [undoing what I had socially acquired and] becoming nobody. I am so afraid because I know only a superficial world where people judge one another by their occupations and social status. It is nonsense. They are mere social symbols. But I am too used to it to easily abandon the system. I am ashamed of myself [over it].25

Through this statement, Nao attempted to distance herself from the moral pronouncements made of the “superficial world.” She was unable to eschew her sense of transgression entirely. However, by reframing prostitution’s stigma as a conflict of social status, her participation in the business could, in fact, become a meaningful path toward liberation from the status quo. Writing about her first day of sex work, Nao confessed, “It was nothing special. It was not so awful. I did not think it was that hard. I am mentally fine. I am just physically tired, having some muscle aches.”26 A month later she wrote, “I am used to having sex with strangers every day. I just still cannot really get rid of my prejudice [against prostitution].”27 Nao’s seemingly high level of tolerance toward the stigmatization of commercialized sex was, in part, related to her critical stance against the “superficial world.” She attempted to use her bodily senses and the occupation to undo what she had culturally learned and liberate herself so she could fully experience her love for Tsubasa. Her body, she believed, was the means to her liberation. Its capacity to communicate the unsayable to Tsubasa overrode her personal disgust with the profession. Once Nao felt she had reached a higher plane of love with her host, she spent more and more money at the host club. She wrote, “If the amount of money, or price, is the size of love, I want to show that.”28 Indeed, the amounts rose precipitously, starting at 300,000 yen ($3,000), climbing to 800,000 yen,

158    THE ART OF SEDUCTION

then rapidly ascending to 3 million yen (about $30,000) before finally plateauing at 4 million yen per month. She maintained that level for nearly three years, with the exception of two months when she had fallen severely ill. In the process, prostitution provided her not only the financial means to support Tsubasa but also a symbol of her love. “This is not an occupation that I can do for anyone else, including even myself, but Tsubasa,” Nao wrote.29 Tsubasa’s exploitation and her pain arose as symptoms of this “selfless” love. In the winter of 2003, when Nao became too sick to work, Tsubasa expressed serious concern about her health. He suggested that she quit prostitution. Nao interpreted his apprehension as a sign that he was about to end their relationship. She suspected that he had found someone else. Nao wrote, “Unless there is the ‘financial need,’ I cannot believe in myself that I am needed.”30 Nao’s desire for a pure love was possible only insofar as Tsubasa needed her. And his monetary need was the only tangible evidence of her love. She now feared losing it. She decided to leave Tsubasa before he could abandon her and hurt her feelings. A year after their separation in 2003, Nao eventually realized that her love for Tsubasa was ultimately a self-directed, one-sided enterprise. She updated her diary: “It was indeed a narcissistic love, to fulfill myself. Tsubasa took advantage of it. Our relationship was based on that. It was fine. I now think it was fantastic.”31 Nao’s realization suggests that her narcissism enabled Tsubasa’s exploitation of her. What was appealing about Tsubasa, then, was not so much who he was. Rather, it was his ability to (re)direct Nao’s desire back at herself. Nao retrospectively supported this view. She wrote that his taking advantage of her was not only “fine” but “fantastic” because, as she further reflected, he was “my everything.”32 Nao, nevertheless, still embraces her nostalgic memories of Tsubasa. She writes in her diary a year after she broke up with him, “I have been dwelling in the past with Tsubasa.”33 Nao further succeeds in seducing herself into a nostalgic recollection of their romantic moments together wherein she (re)discovers her desirability. In her imagination, the eternal love she describes is built on a frozen past and suspended judgments of whether it is right or wrong, voluntary or coerced. In popular debates over the social inequalities reproduced in the sex work industry, feminist activists and legal scholars raise questions over the distinction between consent and coercion.34 Both of these terms presume a discrete and bounded individual subject who is capable of judging a given situation and making a rational choice. The West-centered concept of liberal subject assumes

THE ART OF SEDUCTION    159

that a person acts either freely or not freely. In this model, there is no room for ongoing negotiations with one’s own feelings, bodily sensations, and memories that enable and hinder certain acts. Actors also grapple with the art of seduction through material and linguistic exchanges with other(s), changing moral and ethical footings, and structural inequality and vulnerability. In this respect, Nao’s experience complicates the notion of liberal subject and individual consent. She followed her own feelings, emotions, and fantasies to become a sex worker and allowed someone else, as well as herself, to exploit her. While technically free to make that choice, she was not still totally free from her internal and external influences, either. In addition, she chose not to self-identify as a causal agent or victim of past events. In contrast to its conceptualization, the liberal subject practically embodies a reflexive negotiation process with the self, as well as with others. Nao’s feelings, conducts, and judgments are not all so personal or private as they are the result of, and a reaction to, her socialization into the “superficial world.” By the same token, the others’ desires and interests are not so alien since they are communicated to the subject, who is expected to respond. Thus, the personal and the social are intertwined so closely that they are inseparable at the nexus of liberal subject formation, the enactment of the desirable self-image, and negotiation with ordinary—tacit and grounded—ethics of love, money, and lifework. Subjectivity that consists of these multilayered processes undermines artificially created boundaries between consent and coercion, and agency and victimhood in everyday life.

The Frame of Seduction The art of seduction in the host club reveals the psychodynamic process of subjectivity formation. Seduction operates by psychological persuasion, not by physical force. It cannot take place without actors’ interest in reciprocation— mutual seduction—whereby each individual desirable self is dramatically produced and one another’s satisfactions are promised. In the host club, where hopes and dreams are staged for sale, powerful emotions often trigger seemingly irrational decisions and actions through monetary, symbolic, and affective exchanges. Nonetheless, those activities come to make sense in a particular temporospatial frame of seduction. The actors—managers, hosts, and their clients—all employ the same frame despite different content, positions, and roles. In the game of seduction, they

160    THE ART OF SEDUCTION

highlight specific aspects of events and downplay everything else to create a picture that seems to be the whole truth, thereby enticing the other to act out accordingly. Takuya, the manager, for example, presented only the most impressive aspects of his club’s “carrot-and-stick” management to his potential employees, implying that quick money was systemically guaranteed. Host Minami staged his gambling woes as a tragedy by exaggerating the amount of his loss and hiding the whole truth from his client. In so doing, both Takuya and ­Minami appealed to their targets’ psychology and mobilized them in accordance with their plans. Nao, the female client, did the same thing to herself. She romanticized sex work as a sacred path to pure love and turned a blind eye to its occupational hazards. By doing so, she justified her deeds and attempted to maintain her mental peace. These actors’ narratives and performances thus create a reflexive, self-referential world, whether it unfolds on the host club stage or online virtual space. And these actors play their games of seduction from within the world they create as the scriptwriters, directors, and actors. The frame of the reflexive, self-referential world allows different actors to experience the same event in their own way and enables multiple realities to coexist. This explains how and why the seducer’s manipulation can be the seducee’s voluntarism; a fabricated story can be ethical entertainment; and one’s desire for selfless love for someone else can be an act of narcissistic desire. At the same time, seemingly immoral acts—lying, deception, and baiting—can be rearticulated as something meaningful and ethical in these actors’ narratives. In this way, host club stakeholders—the manager, hosts, and their clients—can come together to satisfy one another’s interests through maintenance and support of one another’s aspirational efforts. The club provides the opportunity for men and women to realize their dreams through their labor and consumption, while turning their exchanges into profit. Despite asymmetrical power relations in the club, actors align with one another in terms of the aspiration of their self-imposed goals. Nuanced understanding of social phenomena invalidates moral discourses of who is right or wrong and what is moral or immoral, revealing the ways that social actors use their own logic to make their deeds valid in a given social context. The reason, anthropologist Didier Fassin argues, is that moral discourse is “enunciated a priori (it knows where good and evils are located) on the basis of intangible principles,” whereas ethical negotiation creates room for social agents to “locate their good and the bad.”35 Such ethical negotiation makes the aspiration seem endless and its possibility appear limitless as long as mutual exchanges take place. It also intensifies

THE ART OF SEDUCTION    161

the process when greed kicks in. The aspiration is then fueled and exploited as a limitless human resource for the speculative accumulation of capital. The exchange in the host club is based on the promises of what individual actors will obtain rather than trade of what they already have in stock. The promise of an open-ended future, not bound to the materialistic limitations of the here and now, incentivizes these actors to aspire for more and more by constantly renewing their goals. The labor invested is a means for them to gain currency as ideal—hopeful and aspirational—citizens in the stratified-by-hope new millennium. Not only is it instrumental to the club’s profitability; it is also at the heart of the neoliberal governance—governing through individual freedom and accumulating capital speculatively—applied in contemporary Japan and the global economy.

CONCLUSION Affect Economy

Late one evening in August 2005, as I neared completion of my year of fieldwork researching host clubs, I received a call from Yuki, the wealthy housewife and my key informant, whose romantic gamesmanship I related in Chapter 4. “It is a bit too late. But I’m in trouble. There is nobody else but you whom I can talk to about this kind of [stupid] thing,” she said. I knew it was about her relationship with Ken, the host to whom she was recently “engaged.” Sensing her urgency, I agreed to meet with her outside a Royal Host family restaurant in Shinjuku at 10:00 p.m. Yuki was already waiting for me outside when I arrived. After we exchanged greetings, I followed her as she listlessly climbed the stairs to the restaurant’s entrance. In that moment I caught Yuki, who was wearing a vivid yellow cotton shirt and silky white pants, surrounded by bubbles that a group of children were enthusiastically making below. The shiny little orbs hung heavily in the humid night air before finally imploding in the darkness around her body. This image, along with the screeching cicadas, incessant traffic noise, and innocent laughter of the children, heightened my sense of languor in the heat and steam of the summer night. It was a surreal, yet prescient moment. It turned out this was to be a night when my research conviction was shaken. “Everything is performance and a lie,” Yuki said once we had sat down. “It’s just like a bubble.” After many conversations, formal and informal interviews, and extended time spent with Yuki over a three-month period, she confided that all she ever did with her husband, children, hosts, friends, and neighbors

164    AFFECT ECONOMY

was merely bubblelike performance and lying. Once I realized that I wasn’t an exception, and that she was likewise performing for me, I felt as if her trustworthiness, our relationship, and the legitimacy of my research itself had crumbled. Although I had studied about performativity, the postmodern condition, and the problematic Western philosophical tradition of meta­physics, I realized that knowing something and actually being involved in it were two different things. In a panic, I started to ask myself, “Have I just collected a bunch of lies? Likewise, I had to ask Yuki: “Do you mean our relationship is also based on lies and performances? Just like a bubble?” Yuki took my hand and held it on the table. She firmly looked into my eyes and said, “Of course, not. You know that, right?” She said this as if she knew what I wanted to hear. She did so as a host would do to convince his client that their relationship is special no matter how fake his other relationships are. Knowing the trick and yet still sensing Yuki’s confidence in her firm gaze, serious face, and warmth in our held hands, I was caught between my rational thinking and corporeal experience. On the one hand, I thought there was no way for her to be truthful only to me. On the other hand, I simply wanted to believe her, or at least the memory of the time we spent together that was still very real to me. This confusing experience interestingly settled down through paradoxical logic in my mind: If there is no way to find objective truth, why not embrace what seemed real to me? The experience also led me to question what it means to cherish such a fragile “bubble” in a contemporary market economy and what it entails to study such a phenomenon. Like Nao, who followed her powerful feelings toward her host, as I detail in Chapter 5, I decided to examine the feelings, emotions, and desires that underlie symbolic and economic exchanges instead of suppressing or dismissing them, even though I anticipated an uneasy journey in academic writing. A bubble may be thin and hollow. It may indeed be doomed to collapse or dissolve, but it is more than simply an illusion. It exists, even if short-lived, in human perceptions, evoking feelings, setting a mood, and alluding to transient being in time and space. Performances and lies, contra Yuki, are not quite the same thing as fiction. They take place, draw audience responses, and produce social consequences. Both an illusion and a lie are based on the premise that people are capable of knowing what is true and false. But this premise is skewed once ambivalence and indeterminacy are taken into consideration in the human experience.

AFFECT ECONOMY    165

In knowledge production, a critical step is examining phenomena as objects of rational analysis and assigning them meanings, reasons, and values.1 Without this artificial division and qualification, things are inseparable from the rest of the world, and their quality of truthfulness is unknowable.2 Host club participants maneuver the unknown truth to optimize their senses of hope, as well as extraordinariness and amusement. In their exchanges, truth and lies appear and disappear in their fantasies and dreams just like the bubbles of the Tokyo summer night that emerged and dissolved into a sea of blackness. I came to realize that my project had been about the moment of fluidity and indeterminacy both in a Tokyo host club and, on a much larger scale, Japan’s affect economy. Put differently, it is about the human experience of the particular moment, when knowing does not rely on language, reason, or truth but is made up of feelings, emotions, and bodily anticipation of uncertain fantasies, including hopes, dreams, and the future at large. The experience can be simultaneously exciting for its open-ended possibilities and intimidating for its unknown risk. And it is also deeply lodged in the host club stages and nested within the affective cityscape of Tokyo. Why and how do people, particularly the socially marginalized, feel, or try to feel, indebted to aspire to their own dreams through buying and selling the yet-to-be-known future, particularly the promise of love, luxury, and desirable selves, in contemporary Japan? Simply put, what about the bubblelike dream sets human aspirations into motion at the historical juncture of Japan’s postindustrial consumerism and neoliberal reforms? I employed the art of staged seduction as an analytical lens to answer this question. And I wrote an affective ethnography—the method and writing derived from affective mode of knowing—to illustrate the ways host club participants I met attempt to perform their hopeful futures into being and self-fashion their desirable selves in gender-, class-, and age-specific ways. I now want to use the host club phenomenon as a window into the socioeconomic and cultural processes that stage and enable such pursuits in order to critically reflect on the politics of the future, aspirational normalcy, and the commercialization of hopes and dreams in Japan and the global economy.

The Politics of a Future “One defining quality of our current moment,” Vincanne Adams, Michelle Murphy, and Adele Clarke have claimed, “is its characteristic state of anticipation.”

166    AFFECT ECONOMY

Anticipation, the authors say, enables the production of possible futures “that are lived and felt as inevitable in the present, rendering hope and fear as important political vectors.”3 In this rendering, the future is often imagined as a presence-absence since it, by definition, has not yet arrived. But the premise is that it will, no matter how one prepares for it, making preparation essential. The imagined future defines the present’s needs and compels social actors to act out before it becomes too late to make their desirable futures happen (and prevent undesirable ones). This kind of future-oriented aspiration has become pervasive across various social fields on a global scale: the pursuit of desirable selves in consumer societies, economic prosperity in the modern nation-states, speculative investment in financial markets, anticipatory biomedicines in technosciences, and preventive measures in climate change.4 An anticipated future has been at the center of political and social arenas in Japan over the last three decades.5 As I demonstrated in Chapter 1, Japan’s neoliberal governance harnessed the promise of the future in an attempt to persuade financial investors, city developers, business owners, the mass media, and individual citizens to align their own hopes and dreams with the reformists’ ambitions for national economic competitiveness in the new global order. The collective neoliberal policies of Nakasone Yasuhiro (1982–1987), Hashimoto Ryūtarō (1996–1998), and Koizumi Jun’ichirō (2001–2006) discursively led this transformation.6 Nakasone envisioned the expansion of private sectors and domestic consumption as the future of the national economy, privatizing Japan’s state-run railway and deregulating construction and zoning laws in the 1980s. Hashimoto relentlessly promoted three market principles—free, fair, and global—to internationalize Japanese financial markets in the 1990s. Koizumi, believing in creative destruction, called for restructuring the status quo and establishing a “society that enables individuals to have hopes and dreams.”7 The future in these reforms is not simply a moment to come, however. It is a national project for social actors to play their roles for the promise of individual freedom, market expansion, and national prosperity. Among reformist leaders, Koizumi uniquely managed the politics of future temporality and the affect of citizens. He presented himself as a “powerless, ordinary, and virtuous” politician taking on powerful, wealthy, and selfish elites.8 Indeed, within the country’s conservative political circle Koizumi was an odd character for a prime minister: a divorced single father known for his love of karaoke and his medium-length, softly permed hair. More important, he never ingratiated himself with other politicians. Instead, he cultivated an image as

AFFECT ECONOMY    167

a neoliberal lone wolf. He strategically kept himself at a distance within his own unpopular ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and officially declared, “I will destroy the ‘old-style’ LDP to carry out the necessary politicoeconomic restructuring.” Koizumi’s maverick style of leadership drew intense media attention. Unlike past prime ministers, he actively utilized the mass media, including social media, to directly appeal to his audience-citizens “in a dramatic and entertaining manner.”9 His approach, in turn, as political scientist Takashi Mikuriya recounts, “brought a lot of fun for all to watch,” and it came to be popularly known as “Koizumi theater.” Theatrical politics transformed the cauldron of Japanese politics—elections, formation of the cabinet, and the prime minister’s answers in the Diet—into a potential stage.10 Thus, Koizumi gained the larger public support, including young urban voters and women who typically show little interest in politics, that he needed to bypass his opponents.11 The result was that Koizumi’s populism enabled his reform-minded leadership even though he made it clear in his catchphrase, “No Pain, No Gain,” that restructuring would entail citizen sacrifice.12 How and why did the public support such painful reforms? As Kurt Weyland, professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin argues, political populism and economic liberalism are compatible in terms of seeing “individuals, not groups, as the building blocks of economy and politics and advocat[ing] an unmediated relationship between individuals and the state.”13 Koizumi’s individualistic and independent attitude, as well as his popularity, fit well with this profile, embodying a new type of entrepreneurial politician and “fighter” necessary to reform the nation from within. Populist leaders, Weyland also asserts, “arise only under certain institutional conditions, especially in polities with weak parties and a strong, directly elected presidency, and they ally themselves with neoliberal experts only when facing severe crises.”14 Along with weak parties and his strong leadership, Koizumi’s neoliberal reforms still depended on the successful evocation of a national crisis that justified the reforms. It was not Koizumi’s political rationality but his theatrical affect that seduced Japanese citizens into believing in crises and investing in his political promises. Any noncoercive social projects, anthropologist William Mazzarella argues, “must be affective in order to be effective.”15 Political theorist Elisabeth Anker similarly argues, based on her study of American neoliberal state politics, that melodramatic politics, which cultivates what she calls “felt legitimacy” for state action, may be the “most meaningful form of consent to state power.” Anker’s

168    AFFECT ECONOMY

concept of melodrama goes beyond the intimate domestic sphere to include the public realm where political drama publicly animates the nation’s “global and spectacular display of power.”16 In this way, the intimate public is drawn into the affective politics to displace their sense of vulnerability in everyday life onto a dramatic story of nationalistic neoliberal freedom. Desire for self-reform and entrepreneurial spirit among host club participants I met in Tokyo were thus an integral part of Japan’s melodramatic politics of neoliberalism, along with the “have-to-change” social ethos—a mind-set that ultimately feeds back into popular support for the government to carry out a series of future-oriented neoliberal reforms. This synergy resulted in the creation of one of the most stable cabinets in Japan’s postwar era. Koizumi’s successful neoliberal reforms were based on his promise of a better future and emotional appeals to the citizenry. The politics of the future and its appeal to human affect are thus indispensable in neoliberal governance.

Affect and Aspirational Normalcy There seems to be a growing feeling that affect is central to an understanding of our information- and image-based late-capitalist culture. . . . The problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect. —Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect”

What is affect? What about affect is so effective? In the last two decades, temporality, affect, and aspiration have increasingly drawn the attention of critical thinkers, especially among those influenced by Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze. These scholars have proposed affect as a crucial, yet long overlooked domain of Critical Theory.17 In a 1995 article, “The Autonomy of Affect,” philosopher and pioneer of affect theory Brian Massumi defined affect as a mere physiological intensity that is not yet signified socio-linguistically and is therefore autonomous. ­Focusing on the temporal incongruence between the bodily reception of stimuli and the cognitive processing of the signal, Massumi theorizes that it creates a ­lacuna free from the gridlock of sociocultural meanings. This autonomy, he argued, has the potential to “escape confinement in the particular body”and reconfigure the social in indeterminate ways.18 As such, it is a new terrain of Critical Theory.

AFFECT ECONOMY    169

In her edited volume Affective Turn (2007), cultural studies scholar Patricia Clough similarly employed affect to shift the focal point in Critical Theory from Foucauldian discipline of the body to Deleuzian control of bodily matters through information technology. She states, “It becomes possible to think [of] the body as an open system, beyond the containment of the organism, and therefore to think of preindividual bodily capacities or affectivity in relation to the passage from the society of discipline to control.”19 Like Massumi, Clough seeks an alternative perspective in a bodily capacity like the open-ended and free-floating energy that can be exchanged, circulated, and shared among multiple bodies. While their attempts to explore the potential of scholarly unexplored territories for the future of Critical Theory might be important for new socio­ political and epistemic possibilities, their theories of affect have largely removed human subjectivity, feelings, and emotions as ex post facto, after the fact of social individuation and cultural qualification. I am sympathetic to their concerns that the Western philosophical tradition has not systematically theorized the elusiveness of corporeal aspects in human experience. At the same time, I am concerned about the move to inhabit the future as an unoccupied and therefore promising territory. My concerns derive mainly from my ethnographic observation of host club participants. Men and women in the club attempt to enhance their bodily capacities to seek new possibilities and realize their dreams even though their odds of fulfillment are slim. Meanwhile, their pursuit profits the club business and Japan’s service-centered postindustrial economy. The inquiry of new possibility is, as media scholar Lisa Blackman and sociologist Couze Venn point out, “an inherently political project organized around an ethics of hope and optimism for change.”20 If the production of affect theory is a political project, whose project is this and for whom? The theoretical shift toward a future often aligns with neoliberal reforms, developmental models, and progressive thinking across different social fields. One of the common denominators is that these future-oriented projects are all teleological, presuming that the projects are progressing toward their specific goals even though the future is unknown. As a result, hope and optimism for change are intrinsic to these projects and are in danger of what Laura Berllant calls “cruel optimism.”21 In order to understand the seductive imperative itself rather than the possibility of affect, I define affect loosely as bodily capacities to sense events surrounding the body, apprehend them, and (re)orient one’s feelings, thoughts,

170    AFFECT ECONOMY

and acts in order to communicate with embodied others. Affect is also central to subjectivity formation. Thus, affect is multidimensionally relational and interdependent in terms of its locus, movement, and impact. It can be evoked, stirred, and intensified. Nonetheless, it can be never completely captured in time and space for its articulation. It is the art of seduction that ultimately brings affect, anticipation, and aspiration together and holds this contingent dynamic in a delicate balance that could collapse anytime. The art of seduction needs to be taken seriously, as it lubricates liberal democracy, the free market, and individual choices that are officially conducted in the name of protecting individual freedoms and rights but unofficially operated through secrecy, enticement, and deception.

The Seduction of Promise The game of seduction—in which both consent and coercion are ambiguously present—is played in this area. And it is in this area, too, that our everyday understanding of liberty is practiced. —Talal Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.”

Seduction does not force but entices people to feel, think, and act freely in accordance with their own wishes, plans, and sense of indebtedness in a given situation. Individuals are free to act on others as long as their conduct does not go against their will or cause harm to others. In liberal societies, Talal Asad asserts, “seduction is not merely permitted, it is positively valued as a sign of individual freedom. Every adult may dispose of his or her body, affections, and speech at will, so long as no harm is done to the property of others.” From this perspective, the prohibition of seduction between two adults is, Asad continues to argue, “regarded as a constraint on natural liberty itself.”22 Thus, seduction is a triumph of individual freedom and voluntarism in contrast to disciplining forces that are largely considered to constrain individual thoughts and behaviors; at least, so seduction promises in the neoliberal context. Whether sensed, implied, or explicitly uttered, a promise does something other than give us epistemological grounds for expecting a certain situation to develop. It potentially produces something that has not existed previously. For example, a promise produces a fantasy world and gives us pleasure. The romantic conversation between Issei, the Osaka host, and his client in the Introduction illuminates this. “You’re in a pretty good spot . . . at least in my eyes,” Issei

AFFECT ECONOMY    171

said when asked if he ever falls in love with his clients. While Issei’s statement can be interpreted as a constative utterance that conveys a truth, it is, according to him, a performative speech act. “We have to keep [women] dreaming, so if we have to lie, we lie,” he said.23 Meanwhile, his client proves the felicity of his performative speech with her positive body language. Issei obviously said the right thing to please her and feed her romantic fantasy. Although language is often understood as a means of knowing truth, it is here an instrument to massage the other’s ego and open her most inner self to the seducer. For this purpose, truth and falsity do not matter. Issei’s implicit promise has produced the possibility for his interlocutor that she might be able to be his girlfriend in the future even though he had no such intention. By the same token, infelicitous acts could have ruined the whole situation. It is thus in the realm of pleasure and danger, rather than truth and falsity, for its contingent accomplishment. When the seducer makes promises, the seducee creates an imaginary world through which she processes the meaning of promise and her sense of anticipation. Shoshana Felman calls this imaginary world a reflexive, self-referential illusion: the “illusion of a real or extralinguistic act of commitment created by an utterance that refers only to itself.”24 In other words, the seducer’s and anyone else’s utterances trigger the seducee’s self-commitment to her referential system, built upon her own interpretations, rather than transmit the content accurately. In this process, the seducer subtly guides the seducee to direct her desire for him back at herself, because seduction, fundamentally, is a reflexively self-directed activity to fantasize one’s desirable self-image, including one’s future, in a world of make-believe.25 Capable seducers take advantage of the seducee’s desirable self-image to enjoy the game of seduction, yet avoid any responsibility for its outcome. Don Juan, the legendary fictional womanizer says to his seducee Charlotte: “You are not obliged to me for what I say, you owe it entirely to your own beauty. . . . Your beauty is your security.”26 While Don Juan is the speaking subject and Charlotte, particularly her appearance, is the object of his speech, he presents as if she were the real master of her beauty and he were a mere mouthpiece for her. Similarly, his agency is diminished to the extent that he has nothing to do with her sense of insecurity or any other psychological turmoil that his sexual pursuit of her might cause. A skillful seducer like Don Juan not only makes his influence invisible but also directs his seducee to owe what she wishes for even though the seducer is the enabler. Felman calls such a form of indebtedness

172    AFFECT ECONOMY

“reflexive, self-referential debt.” The debt here is contracted between the seducee and her desirable self-image, not between the seducer and the seducee.27 In this way, the seducer simply “holds out to [her] the narcissistic mirror of [her] own desire.”28 Meanwhile, the seducee freely projects her desire on the mirror and commits to her own wishes despite the fact that the seducer’s invisible hand navigates her behind the scenes. The art of seduction that appeals to the others’ desires and controls their conduct is widely practiced in host clubs. Hikaru, the twenty-nine-year-old host who appeared in Chapter 2, for example, shared his dream of building local schools to help poor children in developing countries with his client Sachiko. He appealed to her fantasy of a future with him and guided her to voluntarily assist his dreams financially. In Chapter 5, Minami implicitly promised his wealthy patron, Sayuri, that she would be his special client if she paid his gambling debt of 10 million yen. He staged it so that she would willingly save him. Neither Hikaru nor Minami admitted that they owed their financial gains to Sachiko and Sayuri, respectively. They instead made these women self-­ responsible for their fantasies and desires. Such manipulation entails emotional labor, as well as persuasive speech and bodily acts, for the seducer to appear as if his wish first and foremost is for the fulfillment of the seducee’s.29 The seduction is played out in this ambivalent domain of consent and indebtedness, and reality and fiction collaboratively.

Affect Economy The interplay between individual freedoms and seduction in a liberal sociality resonates with Žižek’s “act of civility” concept and hosts’ logic of h ­ ospitality, both of which promote the art of seduction insofar as it is consonant with the wishes and fantasies of the seducee. The act of civility is, as Žižek argues, at the heart of the “social space of individual freedom.” If the act of civility is to respect others as free and autonomous agents, seduction is to respectfully manipulate agents by staging their interactions, secretively appealing to their desires, and maneuvering their sense of indebtedness to freedom (and selfresponsibility) in everyday life.30 This kind of unseen social conduct—what Foucauldian scholars call conduct of conduct—is at the heart of neoliberal governance. Theorizing about governing the other(s) indirectly in advanced liberal societies, Nikolas Rose states, “To govern is to presuppose the freedom of the governed. To govern humans is not

AFFECT ECONOMY    173

to crush their capacity to act, but to acknowledge it and to utilize it for one’s own objectives.”31 As Koizumi’s political theater demonstrates, neoliberal governmentality encourages people to realize their own hopes and dreams that align with national goals, obscuring the discrete boundaries between the governing state and governed citizens, consent and coercion, and state’s and citizens’ objectives. I call this politico-economic and sociocultural condition an affect e­ conomy. In this economy, promises for a better future are interwoven in economic, symbolic, and affective exchanges. Seemingly autonomous workers and consumers seek to fulfill their own hopes and dreams by meeting the desires of others. Put differently, they seduce one another to satisfy themselves through what I have described as the “art of seduction.” In the context of Japan’s postindustrial consumerism, men and women vigorously pursue goods and services that will enhance their desirability. Flexible labor produces these commodities, while lifestyle consumption increases the demand for them. These efforts to create, sell, and buy desirability intensifies the affect economy. In the global system of millennial capitalism, affect economy is a central domain to appeal for sales and speculatively accumulate capital.32 As Anna Tsing succinctly summarizes, “Speculative accumulation occurs when investors speculate on a product that may or may not exist. Investors are looking for the appearance of success.”33 The economy of appearance and affect then contingently produces value with little cost of raw materials. The performative possibility—doing things with acts, appearances, and affect—shapes a sense that value can be magically produced from nothing. Such a perception opens the door for socially marginalized men and women to use their bodily capacities to produce something valuable performatively and “win” a hopeful future. The host club industry, a manifestation of the Japanese affect economy, creates a space in which neoliberal fantasies of future success seem especially promising compared to the uncompromising corporate world and family system. At the same time, it makes oneself entirely responsible for the outcome of any risky endeavors. While such an individuated pursuit might seem a deeply personal matter, the perception itself is a product of globalizing reformist politics and our changing sense of temporality at the turn of the twenty-first century. Staged Seduction is an attempt to unfold this temporality and ­materiality— particularly the anticipatory and performative one—that we live by today. In this book I have argued that aspirational normalcy complies with futuristic images that are increasingly turned into objects of political fantasy, con-

174    AFFECT ECONOMY

sumer fetishism, and scholarly optimism. Aspiration without coercion makes social actors seemingly autonomous and responsible for the consequences even though the act has been staged, enticed, and profited from in the service-­ centered postindustrial economy. The art of seduction played out in host clubs magnifies a dynamic of the affect economy that is integral to the globalizing neoliberal logic and its conduct: governing through freedom and accumulating capital speculatively. Thus, a lived experience of the art of seduction is closely imbricated with the particular kind of temporality, freedom, and values assigned to a hopeful future in an affect economy. Nonetheless, seduction itself remains hidden. The curtain never falls on the stage of glittering hopes and dreams. On the stage, seduction, not objective truth, is the most valuable currency. Playing games, feeling hopeful even as they know they are also being played, a­ ctors, audiences, and directors performatively enact the psychodynamic drama of seduction, which goes on day and night.34 Some games fail and disappear, but others emerge and multiply. The captivating spell of Tokyo’s affective cityscape saturates the pleasures and dangers of staged seduction.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My journey with this book has been my own future-oriented aspirational project. The odyssey has been full of excitement and anxieties, with countless tears of joy and frustration. All are good memories now. Throughout the course of a decade, I have received a lot of precious guidance, wisdom, and inspiration from many people. First, I wish to thank the Fantasy host club owner and his staff, who generously allowed my extended fieldwork at their club, most of it free of charge. Without their permission to access the club, this book would have never been written. Likewise, I am deeply grateful to my interlocutors in Tokyo for their rapport, open-mindedness, and passion, which sustained my project. Without their rich stories and intriguing interpretations, there is no way that I could have written an affective ethnography. Despite the “special discount” I received at Fantasy, my research and fieldwork for this book were expensive. I am grateful to the institutions that provided grants, fellowships, and awards in various phases over the course of this project. The Japan Foundation Long-Term Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council (SSRC)—Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellowship, Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship, National Science Foundation (NSF) Ethnographic Research Training Grant, Blakemore Freeman Foundation Fellowship, and the University of Kansas’s General Research Fund and University of Illinois’s Graduate Summer Research Award, generously funded my research at different stages. At the University of Kansas, I have also received multiple research travel grants from the Center for East Asian Studies, International Programs, Hall Center for Humanities, and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The George L. Beslow Graduate Fellowship and Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship helped me secure the necessary time to complete my manuscript. The Bestor Prize for Best Graduate Paper, awarded by the Society for East Asian Anthropology for one of my manuscript chapters, was encouraging in my writing journey. The voyage was fruitful, as I had the privilege to present my book project in

176    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

progress to numerous audiences at several institutions. The opportunities were invaluable for me to receive insightful comments, constructive criticism, and analytical cues to solidify my argument. My thanks go to the University of Chicago’s Center for East Asian Studies, University of Pittsburgh’s Asian Studies Center, University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, University of Tokyo and Seoul National University’s joint symposium, University of Toronto’s Asian Institute, University of Virginia’s Anthropology Department, Waseda University’s Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, and Yale University’s Council on East Asian Studies. I am also grateful to the engaging audiences and discussants at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association. My special thanks go to Amy Borovoy, Susan Frohlick, Micaela di Leonardo, Martin Manalansan, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Christopher Nelson, Jesook Song, Ara Wilson, Karin Willemse, and Christine Yano. Especially, I owe Hirokazu Miyazaki for his insight into the interplay among temporality, performativity, and value- and self-making in my project early on. It has been quite an adventure for me to become an academic scholar in the United States after working as an “office lady” at a Japanese corporation. My great debt is to many formal and informal mentors who have guided me patiently along the way: at the University of Oregon, Professors Karen Kelsky, Jeffery Hanes, Michael Baskett, Stephen Kohl, Steven Brown, Lynn Stephen, Aletta Biersack, among other great teachers. They taught me not only the necessary academic skills but also the joy of critical engagement in social issues. I appreciate the friendship, intelligence, and fun times my friends shared with me: Yamamoto Takashi, Peter Tillack, Michael Woods, David N ­ ielson, Tomoko Nielson, Osaka Takako, and Munekage Natsuko. My host family, ­Eugene and Peggy Cairns, highlighted my life with their limitless jokes, laughter, and love. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, my faculty advisers, among many other professors, provided me with a great deal of intellectual guidance and personal support. I thank, first, Karen Kelsky, for guiding me with her critical perspectives, professional development, and, more than anything, entrepreneurial spirit. Nancy Abelmann, who kindly included me in her “Nancy’s Advisee Meetings,” embraced me with her care, positive energy, and keen ethnographic eyes. Martin Manalansan created a comfortable, yet intellectually stimulating environment with his witty remarks, ethnographic sensitivity, and critical thinking. Alejandro Lugo and Brenda Farnell guided me to see the importance of a multilayered history and body movement in anthropological work. During my wonderful graduate life, I want to acknowledge my friends John Cho, Shanshan Lan, Rebecca Nickerson, So Jin Park, Jesook Song, and Nicole Tami.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS    177

At the University of Kansas, my two academic homes, anthropology and women, gender, and sexuality studies, have doubly enriched my life. And my second home, the Center for East Asian Studies, has been an oasis for me. My friends and colleagues closely read different versions of my manuscript and encouraged me to complete it. First and foremost, I thank Kathryn Rhine for her friendship as a writing partner with me when I was constantly revising over the course of six years. She copyedited almost the entire manuscript with her magical touch. I also want to thank Ryan Dohoney, who kindly proofread an earlier version of my manuscript. I also appreciate intellectual and mental support I have received, especially from Don Stull, Allan Hanson, Jane Gibson, David Frayer, and Brent Metz in anthropology; Ann Schofield, Marta Vicente, Hannah Britton, Alesha Doan, John Younger, Ann Cudd, and Ayu Saraswati in women, gender, and sexuality studies; Megan Greene, Michael Baskett, Kelly Chong, Maki Kaneko, Michiko Ito, Eric Rath, Sherry Fowler, Xiao Faye, and Kyoim Yun in the Center for East Asian Studies; and Mary Fry, Ben Chappell, Sherrie Tucker, Tami Albin, Kathy Porsch, and John Shchneiderwind beyond my primary affiliations. Graduate students who helped my research for this project, were terrific. Special thanks go to Stephanie Metzger, Marwa Ghazali, Andrew Gilbert, and Trevor Grizzell. Beyond my home institution, several friends and colleagues sustained my project and nourished my soul. In the field of Japanese studies, I thank the following people for their mentoring, support, and friendship: Gabriel Lukács, Allison Alexy, Anne ­Allison, Marilyn Ivy, William Kelly, Miyako Inoue, Haeng-ja Chung, Michael Firsch, and L ­ orraine Plourde. In the field of anthropology, I appreciate Ann Anagnost, Carla Freeman, Karen Ho, James Igoe, and Andrea Muehlebach, among others, for their advice, encouragement, and comments on my work. In Japan, Ueno Chizuko, Yoshimi Shunya, and Jason Karlin helped me affiliate with the University of Tokyo and provided intellectual stimulation. In my fieldwork, many people advised me to conduct my research safely in the red-light district and connect with the proper informants. I thank Aida Takeshi, Noguchi Sakon, Kurahara Hiroshi, Takano Koki, Tani Yoshiro, Teratani Koichi, and Tezuka Maki. I am grateful to the host club Ai and hosts Rui, Ichi, and Kazuki, among others, for allowing me to use their photographs in this book. I am also indebted to anonymous women I met in the host clubs for their friendship and support for my book project. My gratitude extends to Stig Bjorge, Tamura Kyoko, and Peter Blakely for their assistance to obtain great photographic images for this book, including the cover photo. My old friends Oishi Maiko, Yoshikawa Hiroko, and Nishikawa Atsuko have been very supportive for a long time.

178    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am thankful to Sarah Bishop and Christopher Mullis who provided editorial service on my earlier book draft. A few of the details in Chapter 3 appeared in “Intimacy for Sale: Masculinity, Entrepreneurship, and Commodity Self in Japan’s Neoliberal Situation,” Japanese Studies 30 (2): 231–246. I am grateful to the editor in chief, ­Carolyn S. Stevens, for granting her permission. I am also extremely grateful to Michelle Lipinski, my editor at Stanford University Press, who saw the potential in this project early on and expertly nurtured it along the way. I am indebted to her tireless encouragement, editorial advice, and patience, which helped create an ideal environment for me to work in. Without her confidence in my project, this book might never have come into being. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, whose suggestions for revision helped turn my manuscript into a better book. Cynthia Lindlof, the copyeditor, was amazing in terms of her thorough and attentive, yet very supportive work. Last but very important, I thank my family both in Japan and in the United States. My parents, Yusaku and Tomie, as well as late grandparents Yasutaro and Masawo—none of whom had postsecondary education—have taught me wisdom in life and sensibility communicated nonverbally. They continue to believe in and support me even though they do not know exactly what I have been working on. My best friend and brother, Masato, has demonstrated that miracles can happen when we do not give up working hard. On the US side, my father-in-law, Bill Steele, copy­edited my entire manuscript early on. My mother-in-law, Mary Britton, read the manuscript twice for fun and gave me some ideas for the book cover. My sister-in-law and graphic designer, Jennifer Steele, was an excellent consultant for my use of photographic images in the book. It has been a joy to have such a “family team.” My life partner and husband, William Steele, has always been there for me to assist in numerous ways: editing texts, bringing dinner to my office, and keeping me sane. My life journey, including this book project, has been a three-legged race with him that has doubled bliss and reduced misery by half. Charcoal, our cat and master, has been a tremendous inspiration. His great personality—independence, elegance, and lovability—is my role model though he is a bit manipulative (and aptly nicknamed “Casanova Charcoal” by a neighbor). I look forward to more joyful surprises in the three-legged-with-a-cat adventure. Akiko Takeyama Hamamatsu, November 2015 In memory of my beloved grandmother, Masawo.

NOTES

PRELUDE

1.  Shinjuku’s population as of the 2015 census is 334,363. Population density is now 18,351 people per km2 based on an area of 18.22 km2 (“Population, Area Size, and Population Density by Wards and Cities,” http://uub.jp/rnk/k_j.html [accessed August 25, 2015]). Shinjuku eki, the world’s busiest train station, averages almost 750,000 passengers per day (748,157 according to Japan Railways; see http://www.jreast.co.jp/passenger/ index.html [accessed August 25, 2015]). 2.  Kabuki-chō contains mainly heterosexual-oriented businesses. Shinjuku Nichōme, known as a gay district where bars, restaurants, cafés, and video stores are concentrated, is located a couple blocks away from Kabuki-chō. 3.  His attitude toward flexible work and future dreams seemed to align with that of younger Japanese who were exposed to the so-called yutori kyōiku (a more relaxed education policy), an attempt by Japan’s Ministry of Education in the 1980s to reduce students’ stress and excessive discipline in order to unleash their creativity. INTRODUCTION

1. Clennell 2006. 2.  See Kageyama 1996. 3. Yamada 2004. 4.  Foucault and Watanabe (1978) 2007. 5. Allison 1994. 6. Aida 2004. 7. Ibid. 8.  While there are a few establishments where cross-dressed female hosts entertain, I focus exclusively on the recent development of josei senyō hosuto kurabu (host clubs for women only) since the number of such clubs is rapidly increasing and receiving sensational treatment in the media. 9. Yamagishi 2009: 141. 10. In 1984 Japan’s sex-related amusement business law was deregulated to allow a variety of growing sex-related amusement businesses to run as long as they obtain state permission.

180    NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

11.  Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) is about 500 trillion yen, and the unofficial estimate of Japan’s sex industry is 2.37 trillion yen (Hoffman 2007; Kadokura 2002; McNeill 2003). Japan’s defense budget is set at 1 percent of GDP. 12.  Ronald Weitzer states that in 2006 alone Americans spent “$13.3 billion on Xrated magazines, videos and DVDs, live sex shows, strip clubs, adult cable shows, computer pornography, and commercial telephone sex” (2009: 1). The US economy accounts for an estimated 2010 GDP of $14.96 trillion (World Bank 2015a). 13. Fulford 2004. 14. Ibid. 15.  Accurate official numbers are not available. Unofficial estimates suggest that the number of host clubs in Kabuki-chō is two hundred to three hundred, employing five thousand hosts; figures based on Nakatani (2001: 98), Yamagishi (2009: 130), and information obtained via interviews. According to Yamagishi, there were five host clubs in the 1960s, twenty in the 1970s, thirty to fifty in the 1980s through the early 1990s, and three hundred in the mid-1990s through mid-2000s (2009: 134, 141, 142, 130). 16. Kelsky 2001; Ogura 2003; Sakai 2003; Ueno and Nobuta 2004. 17. Allison 2009: 98; Takahara 2007: 67; Yamada 2004: 116. 18. Smith 2006. 19.  While public discourses surrounding furītā tend to politicize it as a “social problem” or celebrate it as a lifestyle choice, Mark Driscoll argues that the form of labor is a result of a structural shift in the “modes of exploitation of wage laborers” through neoliberal reforms (2007: 173–176). Also see Genda and Hoff 2005; Kosugi 2002. 20.  “Hiseikishain Hiritsu 38.2%, Danjotomo Kakosaikō ni” (2013). 21. Stockwin 2007; Yoda and Harootunian 2006. 22.  The phrase “Structural Reforms without Sanctuary” was chosen as the 2001 buzzword-of-the-year. 23. Yamada 2004. 24.  Marxist scholars, for instance, have criticized neoliberalism as a class ideology for upward distribution of social resources and a covert depoliticizing of structural inequalities on national and global scales (Brown 2003; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Harvey 2005). Foucauldian scholars have argued that neoliberalism is a political rationality that creates docile subjects who believe in “freedom” and thereby willingly govern themselves to become rational and responsible (Burchell 1996; Gordon 1991; Lemke 2001). These scholars have revealed that neoliberalism is not an ontological reality but a constructivist project that attempts to create new norms and rationalities (Brown 2003; Burchell 1996: 22; Dean 1999; Lemke 2002: 55). 25.  Recent work has treated neoliberalism as a social ethos that results from a complex cultural translation process arbitrated in sociohistorically specific local contexts (e.g., L. Hoffmann 2010; Ong 2006; Rofel 2007; Song 2009). I follow their lead here yet try to be aware of critique made by John Clarke: Studies on neoliberalism still tend to treat state policy and political campaigns as if “they translate immediately and unproblematically into practice” (2004: 44). I particularly make an effort to pay careful attention to individual experiences and interpersonal negotiations nested with neoliberal ideologies.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION    181

26. Anagnost 2012: 7. 27.  The service sector accounted for 74.3 percent in 2013 (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, 2013). 28.  For the discussion of intimate physical and emotional relationships for sale, see Brennan (2004), Collins (2006), Constable (2009), Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003), Faier (2009), and Kelsky (2001). 29.  According to Karl Marx, “Although the commodity itself is not harmed, its owner decidedly is” ([1976] 1990: 59). 30.  Susan Strange has provocatively argued that the financial system has rapidly become like a vast casino, what she calls “casino capitalism.” She writes, “In all these markets [the foreign exchange market, bonds, government securities or shares] you may place bets on the future by dealing forward and by buying or selling options and all sorts of other recondite financial inventions” (1986: 1, emphasis added). Then the gain and loss of wealth appears to be a sheer matter of luck rather than hard work (2–3). See ­Comaroff and Comaroff (2000) for more discussion of casino capitalism. 31. Appadurai 1986: 13. 32.  Baudrillard (1979) 1990: 79. 33. Ibid.: 22. 34. Ibid.: 46. 35. Ibid. 36. Butler 2002: 120. 37. Ibid.: 119–120. 38.  Shoshana Felman points out the two views of language: one is a cognitive model that perceives language as an instrument to transmit truth and know reality, whereas the latter is a performative model that treats language as a vehicle to do things with utterances such as making promises and seducing other(s) (2002: 13–14). Felman refers to J. L. Austin’s (1955) 1962 work, How to Do Things With Words. 39. Felman 2002: 51. 40. Butler 2002: 117. 41.  Michel Foucault defines neoliberal governmentality as the “conduct of conduct” that is “any more or less calculated and rational activity, undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge, that seeks to shape conduct by working through our desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs, for definite but shifting ends and with a diverse set of relatively unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes” (Dean 1999: 11, emphasis in original). Like seduction, the conduct of conduct is about suggestive speech and body acts that attempt to manipulate and govern the other’s conduct. Foucault calls this subtle direction of the conduct of the governed the art of government, suggesting that “governing is an activity which requires craft, imagination, shrewd fashioning, the use of tacit skills and practical know-how, the employment of intuition and so on” (ibid.: 18). Also see Foucault (1991) for the discussion of governmentality. 42. Rose 1999: 4. 43.  Foucault (1978) 1990: 93.

182    NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

44.  Baudrillard (1979) 1990: 79. 45.  The binary—of emotion and reason, body and mind, and the subjective and the objective—is not limited to anthropology. It extends to the realm of dominant structures of Western thought wherein these binaries are hierarchically ordered (S. Williams 1998: 748; Bordo 1993; Grosz 1994). Emotions are, as sociologist Simon Williams claims, “seen to be the very antithesis of the detached, scientific mind and its quest for so-called objective ‘truth’ and wisdom,” whereas reason is regarded as the “indispensable faculty” for the acquisition of “reliable” and “valid.” Nonetheless, rationality itself is “a ‘passionately’ held belief or cherished ideal: one which is, in large part, ‘irrational’ or ‘unreasonable.’ Western thought, in other words, displays an ‘irrational passion for dispassionate rationality’” (1998: 748). Going beyond the dichotomy, Henri Bergson, who has been an influential French philosopher on the subject of immanence, argues that “intuition may enable us to grasp what it is that intelligence fails to give us, and indicate the means of supplementing it. . . . Thus, intuition may bring the intellect to recognize that life does not quite go into the category of the many or yet into that of the one; that neither mechanical causality nor finality can give a sufficient interpretation of the vital process” (1998: 177). In my approach, I will contribute to the existing anthropological discussion of what Liisa Malkki proposed as “situated empiricism” (1997: 99). 46.  It was the only time that I responded to a host’s “catch” promotion and followed him to obtain a special deal. From then on, I simply visited a club, usually with another female client whom I befriended. 47.  I also conducted a one-month interview at a host club in Roppongi to make an area comparison to Kabuki-chō. 48.  The law, Fūzokueigyō tō no Kisei oyobi Gyōmu no Tekiseika tō ni Kansuru Hō, established in 1984, bans such “intimate” business transactions usually after midnight in most residential areas, except in certain designated areas such as red-light districts where the transactions are allowed until 1:00 a.m. 49.  A revision of the law and enforcement of penal regulations that took effect in November 2005, however, has forced most clubs to close after 1:00 a.m. and reopen at dawn in Kabuki-chō. 50. Bernstein 2007; Boris and Parreñas 2010; Cheng 2010; Chung 2004; Constable 2003, 2009; Faier 2009; Frank 2002; Frohlick 2013; Hochschild (1983) 2003; Kang 2010; Manalansan 2003; Parreñas 2008, 2011; Yamagishi 2009. 51.  James Clifford has also made a similar observation: “Participant observation obliges its practitioners to experience, at a bodily as well as intellectual level, the vicissitudes of translation” (1983: 119). 52.  The visibility of ethnographer’s feelings, emotions, and theoretical interests apparently risks the methodological and textural authority of accurate representation of the social world in social sciences at large. Pierre Bourdieu, among others, spells out the power dynamism between objectivism and anthropological authority: “Objectivism constitutes the social world as a spectacle presented to an observer who takes up a ‘point of view’ on the action, who stands back so as to observe it and, . . . conceives of it as a totality intended for cognition alone, in which all interactions are reduced to symbolic

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTER 1    183

exchanges. This point of view is the one afforded by high positions in the social structure, from which the social world appears as a representation” (1977: 96). See Fabian (1983), Foucault (1972), Kelsky (2001), Mohanty (1988), and Said (1978) for a discussion of geopolitical and power inequality between Western scholars and non-Western others of their studies. 53. Kulick 1995: 13–14. In ethnographic texts, ethnographers often pull themselves outside their accounts once they introduce their intellectual journey to research sites and establish their authoritative voices in a preface or introduction, if they appear in the text at all (see Clifford 1983, 1988; Kondo 1990; Marcus and Fischer 1986). Don Kulick argues that avoidance of self-reflexivity and erotic curiosity in knowledge production is also a “corollary of myths of objectivity, modernist textual practices, and Protestant prudery” (1995: 14; also see Kulick and Wilson 1995). Also see Kelsky 2001; Kulick 1995; Mohanty 1988; and Said 1978. 54.  More recent work in the so-called reflexive turn since the mid-1980s has largely dismantled the idea and even the possibility of “objective” ethnography (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Kondo 1990; Rabinow 1977, 1986; Tsing 1993). Nevertheless, taboos surrounding scholars’ sexual, sensual, and intuitive experience remain. 55. Jaggar 1989: 171. 56.  See Butler 1990; Haraway 1988; Rubin 1975. 57.  See Cavell 2002: xviii. 58.  Here, language is not so much constative as performative. Felman argues, “[Language in seduction] is a field of enjoyment, not of knowledge. As such, it cannot be qualified as true or false, but rather quite specifically as felicitous or infelicitous, successful or unsuccessful” (2002: 14). CHAPTER 1

1.  The Japanese automobile industry, for example, had surpassed the American car industry in total sales, rattling Detroit’s confidence and threatening trade relations with its biggest and most important trading partner (Silk 1982). 2.  Brookings Institution 2015; World Bank 2015b. Japan’s GDP was the equivalent of $4.601 trillion in 2014, and Tokyo’s, $1.616 trillion. 3.  Financial Bureau of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government 2011: 3. According to the World Bank (2015b), Canada’s GDP was $1.786 trillion, and Australia’s, $1,453 trillion in 2014. Tokyo is thus a leading global financial center. Nearly 30 percent of Japan’s banking, finance, and insurance companies are located in Tokyo; 10 percent of the world’s largest five hundred transnational corporations are headquartered there; and, like New York and London, it dominates stock and bond trading. Tokyo handles 90 percent of Japan’s total stock sales, 50 percent of its total sales in information services, 40 percent of its bank lending, and 30 percent of all sales in commerce (World Bank 2015b: 10). More than half of the country’s corporate headquarters and major stores are located in Tokyo. 4. Sorensen 2003: 526. 5.  Ibid.; Machimura 1994: 120. 6.  Igarashi and Ogawa 2003: 106.

184    NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

7. Ibid.: 107. In the central city wards, the Ministry of Finance also sold off civil workers’ housing units, training facilities, and other government sites. 8.  Inoue et al. 1990: 38. 9.  Tokyo Metropolitan Government 1987: 50, cited in Saito and Thornley 2003: 671. 10.  Nigel Thrift writes, “Value increasingly arises not from what is but from what is not yet but can potentially become, that is from the pull of the future, and from the new distributions of the sensible that can arise from that change” (2008: 31, emphasis in original). 11.  What Ann Anagnost defined as neoliberalism, that is, “a ‘new freedom’ that negates the value of what came before” (2012: 13). 12. Isomura 1982. The city was further blamed for the glaring inequality that existed between urban cities and rural villages. During this period “Tokyo mondai” (Tokyo problems) became a catchphrase that underscored the city’s outsized influence in Japanese society and the intimate ties between the centralized bureaucratic government and monopolistic corporate conglomerates that its “central management function” role appeared to support (Komiya and Yoshida 1979: 27). 13. Tsing 2000a: 332. 14. Sassen 2001: 3. 15. Miyazaki 2013: 14. 16.  Japan’s internationalization (kokusaika) also promoted a new national cultural identity. Jennifer Robertson notes that while the loan word from English gurōbarizēshon in Japanese referred to “‘hard’ economic and political linkages between Japan and other nation-states,” Japan’s internationalization was often used to convey the “self-conscious pursuit of ‘soft’ or affective social relations within Japan” (1998a: 113). 17.  Richard Child Hill and June Woo Kim point out that Tokyo is “not parting company with the Japanese nation and central state” (2000: 2178). They are bureaucratically integrated in many ways, and Tokyo is “a national champion” (ibid.). 18. Machimura 1994: 166. 19.  The irony is, however, as Ann Anagnost points out, that “the miracle must be continually produced anew. . . . It requires a futurology, an ability to conceptualize a future that has not only not yet appeared but that, once conceptualized, must be performed into being” (2012: 7). 20. Thrift 2004: 57. 21.  Marilyn Ivy (1993) has argued that the interrelated forces of consumerism, urbanization, and expansion of the media—TV, publishing, and the cinema—were most influential in the 1980s and 1990s (see also Clammer 1997: 23–24; Lukács 2010). 22. Lukács 2010. 23. Ibid.: 125. 24. Yoshimi 2011: 289. 25. Ibid. 26. Thrift 2004: 68. 27. Kitada 2011: 5, 50. 28. Thrift 2004: 58. In his book The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida (2002)

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1    185

also discusses how people of the so-called creative class come to major postindustrial US cities and regions such as Silicon Valley in California, San Francisco, and Seattle. 29.  A. Miura 2005: 105; see also Ueno 1987. 30. Yoshimi 1987: 302. 31. Honda 2010. 32. Honkawa 2010. 33.  Inoue et al. 1990: 27. 34.  When first introduced, the Worker Dispatch Act limited the occupations and industries that could hire dispatch, or temporary, workers. The law was amended in 1999 and 2004 to weaken the restrictions and now covers most clerical jobs and manufacturing industries. As a result, numbers of dispatch positions have greatly increased and the worker dispatch industry generated 4 trillion yen in 2005 (Fu 2011: 2). 35. Abe 2006. 36. Lukács 2013. 37. Allison 1994; Kondo 1990. 38.  Needless to say, the so-called NEET (fifteen- to thirty-four-year-old singles who are not in education, employment, or training) face deeper uncertainties. 39. Kelly 2002: 236; Miyazaki 2010: 239; Sato 2000; Yamada 2004. 40. Genda 2006: 18. The University of Tokyo, for example, inaugurated a new project called “hopology” (kibōgaku) in 2005 in order to study hope scientifically. 41. Yamada 2004: 15. In his popular novel Kibō no Kuni no Ekusodasu (Exodus from the hopeful country), renowned social critic Murakami Ryū similarly claimed, “There is everything but hope in Japan” (2000: 309). The provocative claim has sparked public debate and soul searching since then. See Miyazaki (2010: 241–244) for the further discussion of Murakami’s approach to the condition of no hope and Japan’s financial market. 42.  In a relatively wealthy society, Hirokazu Miyazaki points out that “humans do not live on bread. They live on hope. The stratification of the new economy has created stratification by hope” (2010: 240). 43.  Miyako Inoue has argued the idea of upward social mobility started referring “not so much to actual material social relations between classes, but to itself as a sign of a sign without reality” in the time when the economic disparity was growing faster (2006: 200). 44.  This upscale tower development was executed collaboratively by the Tokyo metropolitan government; Mori Building Co., Ltd., a private city developer and property management firm; and Asahi Television Broadcasting Company to remodel the seedy Roppongi neighborhood into a prominent business and entertainment center immediately after the collapse of the bubble economy. 45.  On April 25, 2003, the same day that Roppongi Hills opened, the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications announced that Japan’s overall unemployment rate reached 5.4 percent, the worst since data collection began in 1953. Moreover, the unemployment rate for individuals aged fifteen to twenty-four reached 13.2 percent (“Overall Unemployment Rate” 2003). Based on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development definition of poverty—the share of individuals with a disposable

186    NOTES TO CHAPTERS 1 AND 2

income of less than 50 percent of the median for the entire population—Japan’s poverty rate in 2009 was 16.0 percent. That percentage was the highest over the past decade within Japan. Further, it was the second highest among advanced capitalist societies, after only the United States (Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare 2010). 46. Allison 2013. 47. Keizaishingikai 1999. 48.  Japanese elites—government officials, corporate CEOs, and wealthy landowners and building owners—visit Tokyo’s first-class hotels, restaurants, and bars and clubs in the city’s upscale neighborhoods of Akasaka, Ginza, and Roppongi. 49. Shinkōkumiai 2009: 91. 50. Yoshimi 1987: 271. 51. Jun’pei 2002: 11. 52. Ibid.: 124. 53.  Ann Anagnost writes this regarding global futures in East Asia (2012: 7). CHAPTER 2

1.  Among the abundance of programs on the air, the Nihon Television Broadcasting network’s Sūpā Terebi Shirīzu (Super television series) and Antena 22 (Antenna 22) featured hour-long documentary programs on host clubs every year between 2003 and 2006. These prime-time shows sensationalized exposés of the host club scene and delivered high television ratings for the network. Unlike any other topic on the documentary series the host club has been featured regularly to indulge the audience’s curiosity about and empathy for other people’s extraordinary lives. The audience has in turn become intimately familiar with top-ranking hosts in Kabuki-chō and their high-spending female clients. More recently, Asahi Television’s London Hearts, which used to have a segment called “Stinger” in the early 2000s, resumed introducing hosts and their seduction techniques in 2010. 2.  Emphasis added. 3. Goffman 1959. 4. Terui 2005: 23. In the event that they visit Kabuki-chō, they probably go to the west side for the cinemas, restaurants, and bars. 5.  The increase in such hosts’ touting, along with the rapid growth of the host club business, has become annoying and troublesome to many. As a result, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government put into effect a new regulation, “Rules to Prevent Troublesome Behaviors” (meiwaku bōshi jōrei), in April 2005. It bans street vendors, as well as hosts, who insistently solicit potential customers. If they are caught, they may be fined up to 500,000 yen or imprisoned for up to six months. Despite the regulation, hosts’ come-ons are not disappearing but have become covert, with “catching” occurring on the narrower streets and behind buildings. 6. Bourdieu 1986: 119. 7.  Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, “The social agents . . . are producers not only of classifiable acts but also of acts of classification which are themselves classified” (1984: 467; also see Ferguson 1999: 94). Class struggle is the lived experience itself that consists of a series of discrepant pursuits and limits on status mobility. Status is thus not entirely

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 2 AND 3    187

determined by economic factors, but it both opens and shuts off certain access to economic opportunity, jobs, education, and other forms of social resources (Bourdieu 1984: x). Taking this claim to the realm of narratives, lifestyles, and discursive practices of self-fashioning, Nancy Abelmann states, “Class—and social mobility—is not a thing to be catalogued and charted but is, rather, a project that happens partly through narrative” (2003: 20; also see Somers 1997: 87). Class difference is not simply projected onto people or inscribed into their bodies; rather, it is fashioned, narrated, and negotiated within specific contexts of power relations. 8.  Hosts I met explained that such illegal money is not confiscated under the current legal system unless the host club had prior knowledge that it was stolen or embezzled. For this reason, neither the club managers nor hosts bother to examine the source of money—even if they suspect something is wrong. 9. Miyazaki 2004: 5; 8. 10. Ahmed 2006: 2. 11. Berlant 2006: 21. 12.  Baudelaire, “My Heart Laid Bare,” cited in Felman 2002: 16. CHAPTER 3

1.  Examining emotional labor among Delta flight attendants in the 1980s postindustrial US society, Hochschild’s pioneering work revealed that the flight attendants were expected to display emotional expressions of joy and happiness, to create a friendly and at-home atmosphere in the sky, and to satisfy their customers’ flying experience with Delta (Hochschild [1983] 2003: 7). 2. Ibid.: 165, emphasis in original. Also see Hochschild (1979) for her discussion of emotion work and social structure. 3.  Koji violated both the Child Welfare Act and Japan’s Act for Prohibiting Minors from Drinking. 4. Baudrillard 1981: 116. 5. McCallum 1999: 148, 158. 6.  A host who used to work for a black-market lender told me that the lender’s interest rate was exceptionally high, often described in vernacular terms as toichi (literally, “10 for 1,” meaning that the interest rate rose 10 percent every ten days). 7.  This practice is illegal under Japan’s Basic Labor Law. 8.  Iida and Amamiya 2009: 16; Jiyūkominsha 2011: 485; Kawasaki 2007. 9.  National health-care insurance (Kokumin Hoken) is available for self-employed workers like hosts, but many hosts do not pay into the system. 10.  A few hosts who claim to have attended college, especially prestigious ones, have created a special niche within the hosting business selling themselves as interi ­hosuto (intellectual hosts), but they are the exception. 11.  This was calculated. Revealing his private self in the “offstage” appeals to women’s desire to be thought of as special, Yoshi said. 12. Marazzi 2011: 21. Admitting that material labor still comprises a quantitative majority of the world’s labor force, however, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri contend that

188    NOTES TO CHAPTERS 3 AND 4

qualitatively the world economy is moving toward immaterial labor, the labor that produces information, design, and communications—commonly known as the information age and new economy. For more on this global economic trend, see Hardt and Negri (2004). Also see similar discussions in Lazzarato (1996); Marazzi (2011); and Virno (2003). 13. Marazzi 2011: 21. 14. Anagnost 2012: 14–15. 15.  NHK, “The Professional,” http://www.nhk.or.jp/professional/search/index.html (accessed September 6, 2015). 16.  See Kondo 1990: 238–240; Rath 2004. 17.  Anne Allison’s Nightwork argues that Japanese hostesses switch between maternal and sexual figures, both of whom provide different kinds of “care” (1994: 29). 18.  “Henshūchō kara no Messeji” 2000. 19. Rubin 1984: 280–281. 20.  Delivery hosts are ordered by women online; such hosts arrive at specified locations for dating, entertainment, and sex. 21.  Anne Allison insightfully states, “Sex, typically, is something that is done [by men] to [women]” (1996: 62). 22. Takeyama 2010. 23.  See Baudrillard 1981. 24.  According to Wolfgang Haug, commodity aesthetics that consists of two kinds of beauty—appearance that appeals to the senses and sensuality that stimulates the onlooker’s desire to possess and the impulse to buy—is more important than the commodity itself to sell (1986: xx). In other words, appearance and sensuality are the instruments of accumulating capital, and “whoever controls the product’s appearance can control the fascinated public by appealing to them sensually” (17). This means that creative human beings make the object sensually appealing and gain a nuanced form of controlling power (47). 25.  This kind of labor form—contract-based temporary work without benefits—is expanding in Japan’s neoliberal situation where labor restructuring has been a central feature. It has been a general trend to replace regular full-time employees with contract workers to reduce labor costs and maximize corporate profit. 26.  This type of human agency also echoes Foucault’s notion of care of the self, whereby one pursues a “certain kind of state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (Mahmood 2001: 210). 27.  Jean and John Comaroff state, “As neoliberal conditions render ever more obscure the rooting of inequality in structures of production, as work gives way to the mechanical solidarities of ‘identity’ in constructing selfhood and social being, class comes to be understood, in both popular and scholarly discourse, as yet another personal trait or lifestyle choice” (2000: 306). CHAPTER 4

1. Kondo 1990: 17. 2. Yamashita 1996: 40. 3. Yamashita 1992.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4    189

4.  S. Stewart 1984: 23. 5. Boym 2001: xv. 6. Foucault 1988: 18. 7.  Host clubs are by no means the exclusive domain of middle-aged women. They are quite popular, for example, among younger women, including hostesses and other sex workers. However, in this chapter, I focus primarily on middle-aged patrons because Fantasy, where I conducted most of my fieldwork, was particularly known for catering to somewhat older clients and because the interactions between middle-aged, largely middle- or upper-class female clients and younger, largely working-class male hosts are particularly illustrative of the gendered ageism that characterizes the “game of romance” as it plays out in Japanese host clubs. 8. Sakai 2003: 22. 9.  “The Way to Make Ren’ai Taishitsu” 1990: 13. 10. Boym 2001: xvi. “Fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future. Consideration of the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tale” (ibid.) Megumi’s selectively imagined past and future are indeed inseparable from her present needs—needs that encourage her to undertake her own project of the self. 11.  Ibid.: xv. 12. Wolf 1991. 13.  One such woman, Masako Mizutani, is in her mid-forties and has caused a sensation for looking half her age. Some have wondered about the authenticity of her online photographs. 14. Baseel 2014. 15. Yamamoto 2012: 6. 16.  See Lock (1993) for the cross-cultural analysis of aging, particularly menopause in Japan and North America. 17. Tanaka 2011: 104. 18. Ibid.: 53. 19.  De Beauvoir (1949) 2010: 303. 20. Butler 1990; Halberstam 1998; Kimmel 2008; Muñoz 1999; Robertson 1998b. 21.  Cole and Thomas 2009; Giddens 1992; Hirsch and Wardlow 2006; Padilla et al. 2007. 22.  Saimon wrote that romance offers salvation from loneliness and “generates extraordinary power and emotion and surprises the self ” (1990: 32). 23. Saimon’s Tokyo Love Story (1991), among other hit love comedy TV shows such as Aishiteiru to Ittekure (Tell me you love me, 1995) and Long Vacation (1996), generated very high audience ratings. The theme song of Long Vacation, “Ai wa Totsuzen ni” (Love appears out of the blue), became a hit song along with other theme songs such as “Love, Love, Love,” and “La.La.La Love Song” in the 1990s. 24. Takeyama 2005. 25.  A model and daughter of a famous actor, Nitani Yurie, wrote about her courtship with a popular singer in Japan, Gō Hiromi, and the reasons that he chose her over

190    NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

a popular female singer, Matsuda Seiko, in her 1990 best-selling book, Aisareru Riyū (Reasons to be loved). The title contributed to fervent discussions on how to become a lovable woman, how to win a man’s heart, and how great it is to be loved in women’s fashion and information magazines. 26.  Ogasawara (1998) discusses the subversive elements of Japanese female office workers at their workplace. Iwao (1993) depicts Japanese housewives’ unofficial, manipulative power in the domestic sphere. 27. Skeggs 1997: 108. 28.  De Beauvoir (1949) 2010: 715. 29.  Nietzsche, cited in ibid. 30.  Baudrillard (1979) 1990: 22. 31. Allison 1994: 22; Parreñas 2008. Also see Frank (2002) for the similar observation in the US gentlemen’s clubs. 32. Allison 1994: 183. Allison states, “Other clubs in the mizu shōbai [the “water trade” or nightlife industry] provide the service of masturbating a man to ejaculation. In the hostess club, by contrast, the masturbatory ejaculation is of the ego only” (ibid.). 33. Ryang 2006: 96. 34. Lukács 2010. 35. Ogata 2001. 36.  J. Miura 2004: 13. The article was based on questionnaires completed by five hundred married men and women aged thirty-five through forty-five. 37. Ibid.: 12. Fujin Kōron, a women’s opinion magazine, similarly reports that women value the positive effect of extramarital romance to build their self-confidence as women through receiving kind words, exchanging care and affection, and attaining a peaceful mind (Nohara 2004: 35). 38.  Secret, which is something that is kept unknown or unseen by others, is different from silence. “There is,” Foucault points out, “no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things” (Foucault [1978] 1990: 27). 39.  J. Miura 2004: 13. 40. Ogura 2003: 23; Robertson 1998b: 66; Ryang 2006; Ueno 1994; Uno 1991. 41. Alexy 2011; Allison 1994; Amano 1987; Borovoy 2005: 114; Ivy 1995; Robertson 1991; Ryang 2006: 95; Uno 1993: 305. 42. Kameyama 2004; Ueno and Nobuta 2004. 43. Sakai 2003: 174. While men are considered losers only in terms of their occupational failures, women’s achievement is still framed in terms of marriage, child rearing, and lovability. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46.  “Ren’ai Shijōshugi” 2005: 19. 47.  Sakai Junko, the feminist writer, insists that increasing numbers of women pursue success in their career, child rearing, and care of the self (Saito and Sakai 2006: 47). Backing Sakai’s view, Kameyama Sanae, who wrote the book Otto to wa Dekinaki Koto

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 4 AND 5    191

(Things I cannot do with my husband) based on her interview research, also describes how the ideal among middle-aged women typically involves juggling family, career, romance, and/or hobbies to achieve their self-fulfillment (2004: 24). 48. Kameyama 2004: 24; Saito and Sakai 2006: 47. 49.  A. Miura 2005: 114. 50. Butler 1990: 30. As Judith Butler asserts, the transcendental model of a genderneutral society is culturally unimaginable and politically impracticable. 51.  Here progress does not have to be an empirical one. “Progress” is, as Reinhart Koselleck argues, a perception that “reduce[s] the temporal difference between experience and expectation to a single concept” ([1976] 2004: 282). 52.  Mahmood elaborates this point and states, “As in the case of liberalism, freedom is normative to feminism: critical scrutiny is applied to those who want to limit women’s freedom rather than those who want to extend it” (2001: 207). 53. Ibid. 54. Rose 1999: 87. 55. Mahmood 2001: 203. CHAPTER 5

1. Lambek 2010: 2. 2.  A recent anthropological trend, called “ethical turn,” calls for attention to such grounded ethics in everyday lives (what Michael Lambek calls “ordinary ethics”) as “part of the human condition” (2010: 1). Ordinary ethics, as Lambek argues, leads us to recognition of “the complexity and perhaps inconsistency of human action and interaction, a complexity that . . . is neglected in much social theory, leading to various kinds of reduction and caricature” (9). 3.  In this view, Saba Mahmood states, “the specific styles and formal expressions that characterize one’s relationship to a moral code are not contingent but necessary means for understanding the kind of relationship established between the self and structures of social authority, between what one is, what one wants, and what kind of work one performs on oneself in order to realize a particular modality of being or personhood” (2003: 846). 4. Goffman 1959: 3, emphasis added. 5. Žižek 2008: 18. 6. Ibid.: 19. 7.  Hochschild (1983) 2003: 165. 8. Illich 1981. Citing Illich, Hochschild offers housework as an example of shadow work; it is neither paid nor counted as labor but is crucial to getting things done. The trick to doing it well, Hochschild writes, is to “erase any evidence of effort, to offer only the clean house and the welcoming smile” ([1983] 2003: 167). 9.  In this respect, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which is often referred to as habituated way of bodily dispositions and skills (e.g., driving a car and using a computer), can be expected to incorporate feelings and emotions as part of the habituated second nature. In Bourdieu’s words, habitus is “system of durable, transposable

192    NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 AND CONCLUSION

dispositions,” which is a product of history (1986: 53, 54). Nonetheless, it is internalized “as a second nature and so forgotten as history” (56). Thus, habitus is, as Bourdieu states, “spontaneity without consciousness or will,” just like human feelings and emotions that are considered as such. 10. Nao 2007: 155–158. 11. Ibid.: 8. 12. Ibid.: 9. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid.: 89. 15. Ibid.: 11–12. 16. Ibid.: 40. 17. Ibid.: 149–150. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid.: 150. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid.: 151. 22. Ibid.: 155. 23. Ibid.: 156. 24. Ibid.: 155–158. 25. Ibid.: 168. 26. Ibid.: 173. 27. Ibid.: 230. 28. Ibid.: 51. 29. Ibid.: 254. 30. Ibid.: 328. 31. Ibid.: 344. 32. Ibid.: 339. 33. Ibid.: 344. 34. Dworkin 1993; MacKinnon 1989; O’Neill 2001; Rubin 1984; Weitzer 2010. 35. Fassin 2008: 339. CONCLUSION

1.  De Certeau 1984: 64–65. 2.  David MacDougall, who theorizes the corporeal image in visual imagination and ethnography, calls the origin a “microsecond of discovery, or knowledge at the birth of knowledge.” At this point, thought is, as MacDougall writes, “still undifferentiated and bound up with matter and feeling in a complex relation that is often later lost in abstraction” (2006: 1). 3.  Adams, Murphy, and Clarke 2009: 246, 248. 4. Cooper 2008. 5.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty stresses the phenomenology of perception and argues that time exists “not as an object of our knowledge, but as a dimension of our being” ([1962] 2003: 482–483). In reality, temporality is closely intertwined with epistemological percep-

NOTES TO CONCLUSION    193

tion and the phenomenological sense of what is ahead, behind, and anticipatory in the present. A past event might collapse and haunt one in the present. The present, however, is, never captured, as it is always passing. A future might be present, evoking a sense of hope or fear about what one is undertaking now. Thus, time is not a natural element that exists in the world but is lived and therefore highly contingent and political. Nonetheless, study of time, especially the future, has been neglected, for example, in anthropology, in contrast to its close attention given to the past and the present (Munn 1992: 116). 6.  Kabashima and Steel 2010: 108. 7. The 2001 Council Report on Economic and Fiscal Policy, Structural Reform of the Japanese Economy: Basic Policies for Macroeconomic Management, promoted sōzōteki hakai (creative destruction) and seiiki naki kōzōkaikaku (restructuring without sanctuary) as the backbone of his policy. 8.  Kabashima and Steel 2010: 102. 9.  Kabashima and Steel 2007: 102, 97. 10. Tase 2006. Also see Kaneko 2005. 11.  According to a survey conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the “turnout of voters aged 20–24 rose to 43.28% from 32.39% over the same period, and those aged 25–29 increased to 48.83% from 38.47%. Those 30–34 years old grew to 56.71% from 46.23%. Every age group enjoyed a rise of more than 10 percentage points in voter turnout” (Nishida 2005). 12.  Populism is, as Kurt Weyland defines it, “a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers” (2003: 1097). Also see Otake (2006) for the discussion of Koizumi populism and its strategy. 13. Weyland 1999: 381–382. 14. Ibid.: 397. 15. Mazzarella 2009: 299. 16. Anker 2014: 27, 3. 17. Bergson 1998; Clough and Halley 2007; Deleuze 1986, 1989, 1990; Deleuze and Guattari 1983; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Hardt and Negri 2004; Massumi 1995, 2002; Sedgwick and Frank 2003; K. Stewart 2007. 18. Massumi 1995: 96. 19.  Clough and Halley 2007: 8. 20.  Blackman and Venn 2010: 14. Emily Martin also cautions that affective theory, which is tied to contemporary neuroscience research, “joins the effort to banish subjectivity from human experience and introduces the apparently compelling merits of a certain kind of potentiality” (2013: 149). 21. Berlant 2006: 21. 22. Asad 2009: 31. 23.  Speaking of the seducer in general, Shoshana Felman insightfully points out, “Although he has no intention whatsoever of keeping his promises, the seducer, strictly speaking, does not lie, since he is doing no more than playing on the self-referential property of these performative utterance” (2002: 17).

194    NOTES TO CONCLUSION

24. Ibid.: 17. 25.  Jean Baudrillard asserts, “What seduces is the fact that it is directed at [us]” and is therefore “always a matter of self-seduction” ([1979] 1990: 68). 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Felman 2002: 17. 29.  These two types of speech acts are both contrasted, in turn, with a third type, called “perlocutionary acts,” consisting in the production of effects on the interlocutor (surprising, convincing, deceiving, misleading, and so on) (ibid.: 8). 30. Žižek 2008: 19. 31. Rose 1999: 4. 32. Baudrillard 1981; Featherstone 1991; Hardt 1999; Lazzarato 1996. Michael Hardt argues that these sectors are “focused on the creation and manipulation of affects,” and the labor that produces immaterial commodities such as information, knowledge, and affect is now at the “very pinnacle of the hierarchy of labor forms” (1999: 96, 90). 33. Tsing 2000b: 141–142. She continues, “They cannot afford to find out if the product is solid; by then their chances for profit will be gone” (ibid.). 34.  Baudrillard reminds us, “There is no active or passive mode in seduction, no subject or object, no interior or exterior: Seduction plays on both sides, and there is no frontier separating them” ([1979] 1990: 81).

REFERENCES

Abe, Masahiro. 2006. Sakushusareru Wakamonotachi: Baikuraidābin wa Mita! [The youth who are exploited: Motorbike deliverymen saw it!]. Tokyo: Shūeisha. Abelmann, Nancy. 2003. The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Adams, Vincanne, Michelle Murphy, and Adele E. Clarke. 2009. “Anticipation: Technoscience, Life, Affect, Temporality.” Subjectivity 28: 246–265. Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Aida, Takeshi. 2004. Hosuto Ō: Aida-ryū Tenka Muteki no Keieijutsu [The king of hosts: Aida-style invincible strategies for business management]. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo. Alexy, Allison. 2011. “Intimate Dependence and Its Risks in Neoliberal Japan.” Anthropological Quarterly 84 (4): 895–917. Allison, Anne. 1994. Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a ­Tokyo Hostess Club. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in ­Japan. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ———. 2009. “The Cool Brand, Affective Activism and Japanese Youth.” Theory, Culture & Society 26 (2–3): 89–111. ———. 2013. Precarious Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Amano, Masako. 1987. Jiritsu Shinwa o Koete: Onnatachi no Sei to Sei [Beyond the myth of independence: Women’s sexuality and life]. Tokyo: Yushindo Kōbunsha. Anagnost, Ann. 2012. “Introduction: Life Making in Neoliberal Times.” In Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times, ed. A. Anagnost, A. Arai, and H. Ren, 1–27. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Anker, Elisabeth R. 2014. Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. A. Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

196    REFERENCES

Asad, Talal. 2009. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” In Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, ed. T. Asad, W. Brown, J. Butler, and S. Mahmood, 20–63. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley. Asad, Talal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, eds. 2009. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley. Austin, J. L. (1955) 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Baseel, Casey. 2014. “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number! Japanese Beauty Pageant for Women over 35 Crowns Newest  Winner.” Rocket News 24, December 25. http:// en.rocketnews24.com/2014/12/25/age-aint-nothing-but-a-number-japanese-beauty -pageant-for-women-over-35-crowns-newest-winner/. Baudrillard, Jean. (1979) 1990. Seduction. Reprint, New York: St. Martin’s Press. ———. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press. ———. 1998. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage. Bergson, Henri. 1998. Creative Evolution. Mineola, NY: Dover. Berlant, Lauren. 2006. “Cruel Optimism.” Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17 (3): 20–36. Bernstein, Elizabeth. 2007. Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blackman, Lisa, and Couze Venn. 2010. “Affect.” Body & Society 16 (1): 7–28. Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boris, Eileen, and Rhacel Salazar Parren?as. 2010. Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care. Stanford, CA: Stanford Social Sciences. Borovoy, Amy. 2005. The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependency, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1986. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Brennan, Denise. 2004. What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brookings Institution. 2015. “Global Metro Monitor 2014.” http://www.brookings.edu/ research/reports2/2015/01/22-global-metro-monitor (accessed August 25, 2015). Brown, Wendy. 2003. “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory & Event 7 (1). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.1brown.html (accessed on August 25, 2015). Burchell, Graham. 1996. “Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self.” In Foucault

REFERENCES    197

and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government, ed. A. Barry, T. Osborne, and N. Rose, 19–36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. ———. 2002. “Afterword.” In The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, by S. Felman, 113–123. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cabinet Office, Government of Japan. 2013. “GDP Composition by Sector.” http://www .esri.cao.go.jp/jp/sna/data/data_list/kakuhou/files/h25/sankou/pdf/seisan20141225 .pdf (accessed August 24, 2015). Cavell, Stanley. 2002. “Foreword.” In The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J.  L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, by S. Felman, xi–xxi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cheng, Sealing. 2010. On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Child Hill, Richard, and June Woo Kim. 2000. “Global Cities and Developmental States: New York, Tokyo and Seoul.” Urban Studies 37 (12): 2167–2195. Chung, Haeng-ja. 2004. “Performing Sex, Selling Heart: Korean Nightclub Hostesses in Japan.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Clammer, J. R. 1997. Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Clarke, John. 2004. “Dissolving the Public Realm? The Logics and Limits of Neo-liberalism.” Journal of Social Policy 33 (1): 27–48. Clennell, Jake, dir. 2006. The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief. 76 minutes. New York: Jake Clennell Productions. Documentary film. Clifford, James. 1983. “On Ethnographic Authority.” Representations 2: 118–146. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clough, Patricia T., and Jean O. Halley. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cole, Jennifer, and Lynn M. Thomas. 2009. Love in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Collins, Patricia H. 2006. “New Commodities, New Consumers: Selling Blackness in a Global Marketplace.” Ethnicities 6 (3): 297–317. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2000. “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” Public Culture 12 (2): 291–343. Constable, Nicole. 2003. Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail-Order” Marriages. Berkeley: University of California Press.

198    REFERENCES

———. 2009. “The Commodification of Intimacy: Marriage, Sex, and Reproductive ­Labor.” Annual Review of Anthropology 38: 49–64. Cooper, Melinda. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press. De Beauvoir, Simone. (1949) 2010. The Second Sex. Reprint, New York: Random House. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dean, Mitchell, ed. 1999. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: SAGA Publications. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1990. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. M. Joughin. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Driscoll, Mark. 2007. “Debt and Denunciation in Post-bubble Japan: On the Two Freeters.” Cultural Critique 65: 164–187. Dworkin, Andrea. 1993. “Prostitution and Male Supremacy.” Paper presented to symposium “Prostitution: From Academia to Activism,” sponsored by Michigan Journal of Gender and Law at the University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor, October 31, 1992. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie R. Hochschild. 2003. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan Books. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Faier, Lieba. 2009. Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fassin, Didier. 2008. “Beyond Good and Evil? Questioning the Anthropological Discomfort with Morals.” Anthropological Theory 8 (4): 333–344. Featherstone, Mike. 1991. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage Publications. Felman, Shoshana. 2002. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Financial Bureau of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. 2011. Report on Tokyo-to no Zaisei [Financial policies of Tokyo metropolis]. Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

REFERENCES    199

Florida, Richard L. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York, NY: Basic Books. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. (1973) 2006. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books. ———. (1978) 1990. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Trans. R. Hurley. Reprint, New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1988. “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. H. Hutton, 16–49. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. ———. 1991. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. M. Foucault, G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel, and Moriaki Watanabe. (1978) 2007. Tetsugaku no Butai [The stage of philosophy]. Reprint, Tokyo: Asahi Shuppan. Frank, Katherine. 2002. G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Frohlick, Susan. 2013. Sexuality, Women, and Tourism: Cross-Border Desires through Contemporary Travel. London: Routledge. Fu, Huiyan. 2011. An Emerging Non-regular Labour Force in Japan: The Dignity of Dispatched Workers. New York: Routledge. Fulford, Benjamin. 2004. “Memoirs of a Geisha Guy.” Forbes, January 12. http://www. forbes.com/global/2004/0112/081.html. Genda, Yuji. 2006. Kibōgaku [Hopology]. Tokyo: Chūōkōron Shinsha. Genda, Yuji, and Jean Hoff. 2005. A Nagging Sense of Job Insecurity: The New Reality Facing Japanese Youth. Tokyo: International House of Japan. Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Gordon, Colin. 1991. “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction.” In The Foucault ­Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. M. Foucault, G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller, 1–52. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greene, Robert. 2001. The Art of Seduction. New York: Viking. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. 2010. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosz, E. A. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

200    REFERENCES

Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna J. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599. Hardt, Michael. 1999. “Affective Labor.” boundary 2 26 (2): 89–100. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haug, Wolfgang F. 1986. Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. “Henshūchō kara no Messeji” [Message from the editor]. 2000. Seiron. http://www .sankei.co.jp/seiron/koukoku/2000/0004/message.html (accessed June 15, 2004; site discontinued). Hirsch, Jennifer S., and Holly Wardlow. 2006. Modern Loves: The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship & Companionate Marriage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. “Hiseikishain Hiritsu 38.2%, Danjo tomo Kakosaikō ni” [The ratio of non-regular workers 38.2%, the worst ever for men and women]. 2013. Nihon Keizai Shimbun, July 13. http://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXNASFS1203R_S3A710C1EA1000/. Hochschild, Arlie R. 1979. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85 (3): 551–575. ———. (1983) 2003. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hoffman, Lisa M. 2010. Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China: Fostering Talent. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hoffman, Michael. 2007. “Japan’s Love Affairs with Sex.” Japan Times, April 29. http:// www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2007/04/29/to-be-sorted/japans-love-affairs-with-sex/# .VdR51lOqqkp. Honda, Kazunari. 2010. Shufu Pāto: Saidai no Hi-Seiki Koyō [The housewife’s part-time work: The largest pool of non-regular employment]. Tokyo: Shūeisha. Honkawa, Yutaka. 2010. Tōkei Dēta wa Omoshiroi! Sōkanzu de Wakaru Keizai, Bunka, Sesō, Shakaijōsei no Uragawa [Statistical data are interesting! Understanding the hidden sides of economics, culture, social conditions, and social situations through correlational charts]. Tokyo: Gijutsu Hyōron Sha. Igarashi, Takayoshi, and Akio Ogawa. 2003. “Toshisaisei” wo Tō: Kenchiku Museigenjidai no Torai [Questioning the “urban revitalization”: The arrival of the age of no architectural regulations]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Iida, Yasuyuki, and Karin Amamiya. 2009. Datsuhinkon no Keizaigaku: Nihon wa Mada Kaerareru [Economics to get out of poverty: Japan can still transform]. Tokyo: Jiyūkōminsha. Illich, Ivan. 1981. Shadow Work. Cape Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town. Inoue, Junichi, Hiroshi Suzuki, Itsutomo Mitsui, and Tetsuro Kato. 1990. Tokyo: Sekai-

REFERENCES    201

toshika no Kōzō [Tokyo: The structural process of becoming a world city]. Tokyo: Aoki Shoten. Inoue, Miyako. 2006. Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Isomura, Eiichi. 1982. Toshimondai no Keifu [Genealogy of urban problems]. Tokyo: ­Tokai Daigaku Shuppankai. Ivy, Marilyn. 1993. “Formations of Mass Culture.” In Postwar Japan as History, ed. A. Gordon, 239–258. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Iwao, Sumiko. 1993. The Japanese Woman: Traditional Image and Changing Reality. New York: Free Press. Jaggar, Alison M. 1989. “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.” Inquiry 32 (2): 151–176. Japan Railways. Accessed August 25, 2015. http://www.jreast.co.jp/passenger/index.html. Jiyūkōminsha. 2011. Gendaiyōgo no Kisochishiki [Basic knowledge for contemporary vocabularies]. Tokyo: Jiyūkōkuminsha. Jun’pei. 2002. Karisuma Hosutotachi no “Teiōgaku” [“Kinglike ways” of charismatic hosts]. Tokyo: Mirion Shuppan. Kabashima, Ikuo, and Gill Steel. 2007. “How Junichiro Koizumi Seized the Leadership of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party.” Japanese Journal of Political Science 8 (1): 95–114. ———. 2010. Changing Politics in Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kadokura, Takashi. 2002. Nihon “Chika Keizai” Hakusho: 23.2–chō En! Kyōi no Angura Manē [Japan’s “underground economy” white paper: 2.33 billion yen! Amazing underground money]. Tokyo: Shodensha. Kageyama, Yuri. 1996. “In Japan, Host Clubs Give Women Dream Dates.” Times/Beaver Newspapers, Inc., Pennsylvania, October 2. https://news.google.com/newspapers ?nid=2002&dat=19961002&id=galUAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ljsNAAAAIBAJ&pg=1362,30 5688&hl=en. Kameyama, Sanae. 2004. “Otto towa Dekinai” Koto [Things that “I cannot do with my husband”]. Tokyo: WAVE Shuppan. Kaneko, Masaru. 2005. “Seiji no Baburu: Jinsei no Iyoku Hikui Wakamono wo Yowaseta ‘Koizumi Gekijō’” [The political bubble: The “Koizumi theater” that drew the youth with little will]. Asahi Shimbun, September 27, Evening Newspaper, 14. Kang, Miliann. 2010. The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kawasaki, Shohei. 2007. Netto Kafe Nanmin—Dokyumento “Saiteihen Seikatsu” (Net café refugees—a documentary of “lives at the bottom of the economic heap”). Tokyo: Gentōsha. Keizaishingikai (The Economic Council). 1999. Keizaishakai no Arubeki Sugata to

202    REFERENCES

Keizaishinsei no Seisakuhōshin [Ideal state of social economy and policy for economic revitalization]. http://www5.cao.go.jp/99/e/19990705e-keishin.html (accessed August 24, 2015). Kelly, William W. 2002. “At the Limits of New Middle Class Japan: Beyond ‘Mainstream Consciousness.’” In Social Contracts under Stress: The Middle Classes of America, Europe, and Japan at the Turn of the Century, ed. O. Zunz, L. J. Schoppa, and N. ­Hiwatari, 232–254. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Kelsky, Karen. 2001. Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kimmel, Michael S. 2008. The Social Construction of Gender Relations. New York: Oxford University Press. Kitada, Akihiro. 2011. Zōho Kōkoku-toshi Tokyo: Sono Tanjo to Shi [The revised advertisement city, Tokyo: Its birth and death]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo. Komiya, Shohei, and Hideo Yoshida. 1979. Tokyo Mondai [Tokyo problems]. Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten. Kondo, Dorinne K. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. (1976) 2004. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Reprint, New York: Columbia University Press. Kosugi, Reiko. 2002. Jiyū no Daishō—Freeter: Gendaiwakamono no Syūgyoishiki to Kōdō [The price of freedom—Freeter: Work consciousness and behaviors among contemporary youth]. Tokyo: Nihon Rōdōkenkyu Kikō. Kulick, Don. 1995. “Introduction.” In Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork, ed. D. Kulick and M. Wilson, 1–28. London: Routledge. Kulick, Don, and Margaret Wilson, eds. 1995. Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork. London: Routledge. Lambek, Michael. 2010. “Introduction.” In Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action, ed. M. Lambek, 1–36. New York: Fordham University Press. Lemke, Thomas. 2001. “‘The Birth of Bio-politics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the College de France on Neo-liberal Governmentality.” Economy and Society 30 (2): 190–207. ———. 2002. “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique.” Rethinking Marxism 14 (3): 49–64. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 1996. “Immaterial Labor.” In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. P. Virno and M. Hardt, 7: 133–147. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lock, Margaret M. 1993. Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lukács, Gabriella. 2010. Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

REFERENCES    203

———. 2013. “Dreamwork: Cell Phone Novelists, Labor, and Politics in Contemporary Japan.” Cultural Anthropology 28 (1): 44–64. MacDougall, David. 2006. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Machimura, Takashi. 1994. “Sekaitoshi” Tokyo no Kōzō Tenkan: Toshi Risutorakucharingu no Shakaigaku [The structural shift of the “global city,” Tokyo: Sociology of urban restructuring]. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai. MacKinnon, Catherine A. 1989. “Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: ‘Pleasure under Patriarchy.’” Ethics 99 (2): 314–346. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology 16 (2): 202–236. ———. 2003. “Ethical Formation and Politics of Individual Autonomy in Contemporary Egypt.” Social Research 70 (3): 837–866. Malkki, Liisa H. 1997. “News and Culture: Transitory Phenomena and the Fieldwork Tradition.” In Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, ed. A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, 86–101. Berkeley: University of California Press. Manalansan, Martin F. 2003. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marazzi, Christian. 2011. Capital and Affects: The Politics of the Language Economy. Trans. G. Mecchia. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Martin, Emily. 2013. “The Potentiality of Ethnography and the Limits of Affect Theory.” Current Anthropology 54: 149–158. Marx, Karl. (1976) 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Reprint, London: Penguin Books. Massumi, Brian. 1995. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31 (Autumn): 83–109. ———. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mazzarella, William. 2009. “Affect: What Is It Good For?” In Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, ed. S. Dube, 291–309. New Delhi: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. McCallum, E. L. 1999. Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism. Albany: State University of New York Press. McNeill, David. 2003. “Running the Sex Trade Gantlet: Voracious Sex Market and Lax Laws Encourage Abuse.” Japan Times, November 11. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/ community/2003/11/11/issues/running-the-sex-trade-gantlet/#.VdvthdOqqko. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1962) 2003. Phenomenology of Perception. Reprint, London: Routledge.

204    REFERENCES

Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare. 2010. “Heisei 22 nen Kokumin Seikatsu Kisochosa no Gaikyō” [2010 Summary of basic research of national lifestyle]. http://www. mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/k-tyosa/k-tyosa10/2-7.html (accessed August 25, 2015). Miura, Atsushi. 2005. Shōhinomonogatari no Sōshitsu to Samayō “Jibunrashisa” [The loss of consumption stories and wandering “selfness”]. In Datsu-Aidentiti [Deconstructing identity], ed. C. Ueno, 103–135.Tokyo: Keisō Shobo. Miura, Junichi. 2004. “Future Economic Trends Require Watching.” Daily Yomiuri, July 20, Morning Newspaper, 8. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2004. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2010. “Temporality of No Hope.” In Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, ed. C. J. Greenhouse, 238–250. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2013. Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mohanty, Chandra T. 1988. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30: 65–88. Munn, Nancy D. 1992. “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1): 93–123. Muñoz, José E. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Murakami, Ryu. 2000. Kibō no Kuni no Ekusodasu [Exodus in the hopeful country]. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. Nakatani, Akihiro. 2001. Hosutoō ni Manabu 82 no Seikōhō [82 Success tips that we learn from the king of the host]. Tokyo: Sōgōhōrei. Nao. 2007. Ichiokugosenman-en no Koi [150 Million yen romance: Four years in love with a host]. Tokyo: Ozora Shuppan. Nishida, Mutsumi. 2005. “‘Koizumi Theater’ Pulling in Youth.” Nikkei Weekly. December 26. Nohara, Hiroko. 2004. “Kongairen’ai no Ganbō wa Arimasuka?” [Do you have desire for extramarital romance?]. Fujin Kōron 84 (21): 30–37. Ogasawara, Yuko. 1998. Office Ladies and Salaried Men: Power, Gender, and Work in Japanese Companies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ogata, Sakurako. 2001. MORE Report no 20 nen: Onnapitachi no Sei wo Mitsumete [20 Years since the MORE report: Looking at women’s sexuality]. Tokyo: Shūeisha. Ogura, Chikako. 2003. Kekkon no Jōken [Conditions for marriage]. Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha. O’Neill, Maggie. 2001. Prostitution and Feminism: Towards a Politics of Feeling. Cambridge: Polity. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

REFERENCES    205

Otake, Hideo 2006. Koizumi Junichirō: Popurizumu no Kenkyū—Sono Senryaku to Shuhō [Koizumi Jun’ichirō: The study of populism—its strategies and methods]. Tokyo: TōYō Keizai Shimbunsha. “Overall Unemployment Rate, 5.4 Percent, and the Youth Unemployment Rate, 13.2 Percent, Hit Record High in March” [Sangatsu no kanzenshitugyoritsu akka 5.4%, jakunensō 13.2% de saiaku]. 2003. Asahi Shimbun, April 25, Evening Newspaper, 2. Padilla, Mark, Jennifer S. Hirsch, Miguel Munoz-Laboy, and Robert Sember, eds. 2007. Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Parreñas, Rhacel S. 2008. The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2011. Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. “Population, Area Size, and Population Density by Wards and Cities.” Accessed August 25, 2015. http://uub.jp/rnk/k_j.html. Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1986. “Representations Are Social Facts.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. J. Clifford and G. Marcus, 234–261. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rath, Eric C. 2004. The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Rebhun, Linda-Anne.1999. The Heart Is Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. “Ren’ai Shijōshugi.” 2005. an.an 1445: 1–26. Robertson, Jennifer E. 1991. “Introductory Essay: Gender and the State in Japan.” Anthropological Quarterly 64 (4): 163–164. ———. 1998a. “It Takes a Village: Internationalization and Nostalgia in Postwar Japan.” In Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. S. Vlastos, 110–129. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1998b. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rose, Nikolas S. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press. ———. 1984. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” In

206    REFERENCES

Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. C. S. Vance, 267–319. Boston: Routledge. Ryang, Sonia. 2006. Love in Modern Japan: Its Estrangement from Self, Sex, and Society. Milton Park, UK: Routledge. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Saimon, Fumi. 1990. Ren’airon [Discussion on romance]. Tokyo: PHP Kenkyūjo. Saito, Asato, and Andy Thornley. 2003. “Shifts in Tokyo’s World City Status and the Urban Planning Response.” Urban Studies 40 (4): 665–685. Saito, Tamaki, and Junko Sakai. 2006. “Seiai” kakusa-ron: Moe to mote no aida de [Discussion on sexual inequality: Between the affect of “otaku” subculture and sexual attractiveness]. Tokyo: Chuō Shinsho. Sakai, Junko. 2003. Makeinu no Tōboe [Barking of the loser dog]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sato, Toshiki. 2000. Fubyōdōshakai Nihon: Sayonara Sōchūryū [Unequal society Japan: Good-bye to the all middle-class]. Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shinkōkumiai, Kabuki-chō Shōtengai. 2009. Kabuki-chō no 60 nen [60 Years of Kabukichō]. Tokyo: Kabuki-chō Shōtengai Shinkōkumiai. Silk, Leonard. 1982. “Surviving the Recession.” New York Times, January 10. http://www .nytimes.com/1982/01/10/us/surviving-the-recession-surviving-th-e-recession.html. Skeggs, Beverley. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Smith, Colin S. 2006. “After Affluence: Freeters and the Limits of New Middle Class Japan.” PhD diss., Yale University. Somers, Margaret R. 1997. “Deconstructing and Reconstructing Class Formation Theory: Narrativity, Relational Analysis, and Social Theory.” In Reworking Class, ed. J. R. Hall, 73–105. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Song, Jesook. 2009. South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sorensen, André. 2003. “Building World City Tokyo: Globalization and Conflict over Urban Space.” Annals of Regional Science 37: 519–531. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stewart, Susan. 1984. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stockwin, J. A. A. 2007. “From Koizumi to Abe: Same Bed, Different Dreams?” Japanese Studies 27 (3): 223–230. Strange, Susan. 1986. Casino Capitalism. Oxford: B. Blackwell. Takahara, Motoaki. 2007. “Nihon Tokushuseiron no Nijūno Isan: Seishainshikou to Koyōryūdōka no Jirenma” [A legacy of the discussion on Japanese uniqueness: The

REFERENCES    207

dilemma between regular employment and the flexibilization of labor]. In Wakamono no Rōdō to Seikatsusekai: Karera wa Donna Genjitsu wo Ikiteiruka [Young people’s work and living: What kind of reality do they live?], ed. Y. Honda, 23–73. Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten. Takeyama, Akiko. 2005. “Commodified Romance in a Tokyo Host Club.” In Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan, ed. M. J. McLelland and R. Dasgupta, 200– 215. London: Routledge. ———. 2010. “Intimacy for Sale: Masculinity, Entrepreneurship, and Commodity Self in Japan’s Neoliberal Situation.” Japanese Studies 30 (2): 231–246. Tanaka, Hikaru. 2011. “Obasan” wa Naze Kirawareruka [Why are “middle-aged women” disliked?]. Tokyo: Shūeisha. Tase Yasuhiro. 2006. “Curtain Drawing on ‘Koizumi Theater’ of Many Surprises.” Nikkei Weekly, July 3. Terui, Kōei. 2005. Sakariba no Toshi Shakaigaku [Urban sociology on amusement districts]. Tokyo: Hekitensha. Thrift, Nigel. 2004. “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect.” Geografiska Annaler 86 (1): 57–78. ———. 2008. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Milton Park, UK: Routledge. Tsing, Anna L. 1993. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-theWay Place. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2000a. “The Global Situation.” Cultural Anthropology 15 (3): 327–360. ———. 2000b. “Inside the Economy of Appearances.” Public Culture 12 (1): 115–144. Ueno, Chizuko. 1987. “Watashi” Sagashi Gēmu: Yokubo Shiminshakairon (The game to seek the “self ”: Discussion on civil society of desire). Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo. ———. 1994. Kindai Kazoku no Seiritsu to Shūen [The establishment and end of the modern family]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Ueno, Chizuko, and Sayoko Nobuta. 2004. Kekkonteikoku: Onna no Wakaremichi [Empire of marriage: A crossroads for women]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Uno, Kathleen S. 1991. “Women and Changes in the Household Division of Labor.” In Recreating Japanese women, 1600–1945, ed. G. L. Bernstein, 17–41. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1993. “The Death of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’?” In Postwar Japan as History, ed. A. Gordon, 293–322. Berkeley: University of California Press. Virno, Paolo. 2003. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e). “The Way to Make Ren’ai Taishitsu.” 1990. an.an 746: 124–128. Weitzer, Ronald. 2009. “Sociology of Sex Work.” Annual Review of Sociology 35 (1): 213– 234.

208    REFERENCES

———. 2010. Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry. New York: Routledge. Weyland, Kurt. 1999. “Neoliberal Populism in Latin America and Eastern Europe.” Comparative Politics 31 (4): 379–401. ———. 2003. “Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Latin America: How Much Affinity?” Third World Quarterly 24 (6): 1095–1115. Williams, Simon J. 1998. “Modernity and the Emotions: Corporeal Reflections on the (Ir)Rational.” Sociology 32 (4): 747–769. Wolf, Naomi. 1991. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York: W. Morrow. World Bank. 2015a. “GDP (Current US$). http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP .MKTP.CD (accessed August 24, 2015). ———. 2015b. “Gross Domestic Product 2014.” World Development Indicators Database, September 18. http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf. Yamada, Masahiro. 2004. Kibōkakusa Shakai: “Makegumi” no Zetsubōkan ga Nihon o Hikisaku [Hope disparity society: The sense of despair among the “loser’s group” tears off Japan]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo. Yamagishi, Reiko. 2009. “A Promised Land for Men: The Rising Popularity of Hosts in Contemporary Japanese Society.” PhD diss., National University of Singapore. Yamamoto, Yuki. 2012. “Yokubō” no Māketeingu [The marketing of “desires”]. Tokyo: Discover Twentyone. Yamashita, Etsuko. 1992. Sayonara Hanako-zoku: Onnatachi wa Naniwo Motome Dokoe Yukunoka? [Goodbye, the Hanako tribe: What do women pursue and where do they go?]. Tokyo: Best Sellers. ———. 1996. Feminizumu wa Doko he Ittanoka: “Shufu” Kaitairon kara Shufu Bessei made [Where has the feminism gone? From discussion of deconstructing “housewives” to the system of wives retaining separate family names]. Tokyo: Yamato Shobo. Yoda, Tomiko, and Harry D. Harootunian, eds. 2006. Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yoshimi, Shunya. 1987. Toshi no Doramatsurugi: Tokyo Sakariba no Shakaishi [Dramaturgy of the urban city: Social history of Tokyo amusement districts]. Tokyo: Kōbundo. ———. 2011. “The Market of Ruins, or the Destruction of the Cultural City.” Japan Forum 23 (2): 287–300. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.

INDEX

Act, xvii, 14, 29, 52, 57, 67, 75, 79, 101, 110, 120, 125, 136, 146, 148–50, 155, 160, 166, 170–74, 185n34, 187n3; civil act, (see civility), 149; speech and bodily act, (see also body), 15, 172 Action, 13, 132, 167 Actor, 6, 189n25; actors align with one another, 160; actors’ interests, 11; clients, xiii–xviii, 1–3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 16–19, 21, 36–37, 41, 45, 51–52, 54–57, 59, 61–62, 64, 72–73, 77–83, 85, 87–88, 90–96, 99, 102, 106, 110, 116, 119, 126, 132, 137–38, 140, 143, 146–47, 149, 150–51, 156, 159–60, 171, 186n1, 189n7; club manager, xiii, 17, 21, 37, 52, 56, 58, 62–64, 79, 89, 116, 135–138, 140–142, 152, 159–160, 187n8; club owners, 17, 19, 37; hosts, xii–xviii, 1–3, 5–7, 10, 12, 16–21, 36, 41, 42–47, 49, 50–59, 61–64, 66–68, 72–75, 77–86, 88, 91–102, 104, 106, 108–9, 111, 116, 119, 121–23, 127, 129, 135–53, 156, 159–60, 163, 172, 177, 179n8, 180n15, 186nn1, 54, 187n8, 9, 10, 188n20, 189n7 Adams, Vincanne, 165, 192n3 Advertisement, xii; “advertising city,” (see also Tokyo), 29; aesthetic advertising, 96; aggressively advertised, xi, 17; lifestyle advertising, 27; “walking advertisement,” 138 Affect, 19, 24, 68, 119, 133, 145, 163, 172–74, 194n20; affect and aspirational normalcy, 165, 168, 174; central to subjectivity formation, 170; affect theory, 168, 169; “The Autonomy of Affect,” (see also Massumi, Brian), 168; bodily capacities or affectiv-

ity, 169; human affect, 143, 168; politics of future temporality and the affect, 166; social affects, 26; the role of affect and the body, 17; theatrical affect, 167 Affect economy, 133, 163, 165, 172–74 Affective, 184n16, 193n20; affective and moral register, 128; affective and temporal aura, 101; affective capacities, 11; affective cityscape, 21, 24, 30, 69, 101, 133, 165, 174; affective dimensions of gender politics and class struggle, 4; affective ethnography (see also ethnography), 16, 19, 20, 165, 175; affective exchanges, 16, 143, 159, 173; affective experience, 28; affective mode of knowing, 165; affective politics, 168; Affective Turn, (see also Clough, Patricia), 169; affective values, 13, 78; affectively stratified society, 38 Affluence: city’s affluence, 26; affluence of the hosting business, 61; affluence of the service economy, 173; extraordinary affluence, 138 Age, xii, 3, 31, 53, 59, 74–75, 79, 85–86, 97, 104–6, 111, 117–19, 133, 135, 165, 188n12, 189n13, 193n11; ageism, 88; aging and loss of femininity, 113; anti-aging efforts, 21; anti-aging feminine project, 132; discrimination against women based on their age or marital status, 114; gendered ageism, (see also gender), 106, 189n7; men’s aging, 112; not to age at all, 112; obasan (middle-aged women), 112–13, 116, 129; struggle with aging, 113; women’s aging, 31, 112

210    INDEX

Agency, 10, 38, 82, 102, 132, 135, 171; agency and victimhood, 159; autonomous agents, 149, 172; free agent, 10; human agency, 101, 131, 188n26; manipulative agent, 120; masculine and agentive, 102; sexually active agent, 96; women’s agency, 131 Ahmed, Sara, 66, 187n10 Allison, Anne, 126, 177, 179n5, 180n17, 185n37, 186n46, 188nn17, 21, 190nn31, 32, 41 Alternative, 18, 32–33, 126, 129, 132, 169; alternative lifestyle choice, 8; alternative modes of knowing (see also knowing), 31; alternative to, xiii, 31; alternative ways of achieving, 10; alternative work styles, 33; lacking alternatives, 84 Anagnost, Ann, 9, 92, 177, 181n26, 184nn11, 19, 186n53, 188n14 Anker, Elisabeth, 167, 193n16 Anticipation, xvii, 20–21, 101, 106, 170–71; anticipated future, xviii, 22, 109, 166; anticipated result, 78; anticipated success, 26; anticipation of aging, 21; anticipatory biomedicines, 166; bodily anticipation, 165 Anxiety, 9, 34, 53, 83, 137, 175; aging and anxiety, 105; anxiety and despair, 9; hope and anxiety, 3; performance anxiety, 89; anxiously, 26, 152, 153 Appadurai, Arjun, 12, 181n31 Appearance, 4, 14, 19, 58, 98, 107–8, 123, 138, 171, 188n24; appearance of success, 173; economy of appearance and affect (see economy), 173; youthful appearance, 104, 128 Art, 42, 93, 165, 181n41; art of managing, 150; art of seduction, 16, 18, 21, 117, 135–36, 143, 148, 156, 159, 170, 172–74 Asad, Talal, 170, 193n22 Aspiration, 8, 21–22, 101–2, 128, 160–61, 168, 170, 173–74; aspiration of their selfimposed goals, 160; aspiration process, 173; aspiration without coercion, 174; futureoriented aspiration (see also future), 22, 66, 73, 94, 102, 166, 175; promise-based aspiration, 16; risky aspiration, 68, 74 Aspirational, 168; aspirational economy, 22;

aspirational efforts, 3, 160; aspirational enterprise, (see enterprise), 10; aspirational normalcy, 165, 174; ideal—hopeful and aspirational—citizens, 161 Attraction, 39, 71, 102, 155; attracted to, 18, 25, 53, 75, 146, 152; attractive, 2, 8, 25, 29, 37, 52, 83, 86, 99, 104–5, 107, 112, 117, 121– 22, 129; attractive self (see the self), 21, 97; attractiveness, 27, 118, 121; female attractiveness, 103, 128, physical attractiveness, 132; sexual attractiveness, 88, 106, 109–10, 113–14, 126, 128 Austin, J.L., (see also performative), 167, 181n38 Autonomy, xii, 32, 74, 94, 96, 129, 137, 168; autonomous and self-responsible citizens, 3; autonomous individualism, 13; “The Autonomy of Affect” (see affect; Massumi, Brian), 168; free and autonomous agents, 149, 172; selfautonomous neoliberal subjects, 110; selfautonomy, 74, 96–98, 121, 123, 131 Baudrillard, Jean, 13–15, 77, 125, 181n32, 182n44, 187n4, 188n23, 190n30, 194nn25, 32, 34 Beauty, xiv, 11, 46, 91, 107, 112, 114–15, 118, 123, 152, 171, 188n24; beautiful, xiv, 49, 85, 104– 7, 111, 116, 118–19, 123, 126, 146; beautifying, 118; beauty and confidence, 103; beauty and love, 111; beauty and self-value, 110; beauty myth, (see Wolf, Naomi), 111; bimajo (beautiful witch), 111–12; female beauty, 107; inner beauty, 107; natural beauty, 39; youthful beauty, 109 Belief, 10, 15, 56, 131, 136, 182n45; belief in hope and possibilities, 67; belief of empty promises, 15; belief that they are free agents, 10; believing in crises, 167 Berlant, Laura, (see also “cruel optimism”), 67, 169, 187n11, 193n21 Body, 19, 21, 74–75, 86, 89–90, 92, 97, 100, 104, 107, 109, 111, 114, 117, 121, 157, 163, 168– 70, 181n41, 182n45; affect and the body, 17; bodies as sex objects, 132; bodily, 14, 18, 19, 49, 107, 123, 157, 165, 168; bodily acts, (see also act), 15, 172; bodily capacities,

INDEX    211

108, 169, 173; bodily disposition, 65–66, 104, 191n9; body and language, 14; body as an open systems, 169; body language, 1, 14, 49, 76, 171; body movement, xiv, 176; embodying, (see also embodiment), 4, 167; Foucauldian discipline of the body, 169; Deleuzian control of bodily matters, 169; ren’ai taishitsu (bodily quality for romantic love) (see also romantic love), 108; temporal and bodily dimensions, 14; the body and its capacity, 156; what the body does, 14 Boundary, 62, 68; artificially created boundaries, 159; discrete boundaries, 13, 173; stage boundaries, 42; territorial boundary, 68 Bourdieu, Pierre, 56, 182n52, 186nn6, 7, 187n7, 191n9, 192n9 Boym, Svetlana, 110, 189 Bubble, 143, 163–64, 170, 185; a bubble of fantasy, 149; bubble economy, 5, 7, 24, 32, 38, 105, 185n44; bubblelike dream, 165; bubblelike performance and lying, 164; post-bubble era, 24, 32–33 Business, xiv, xvi–xviii, 2, 4–7, 17–18, 24–25, 28, 35, 44–45, 49, 51–54, 56, 58–62, 64–67, 72–73, 76, 84–85, 87–89, 91, 93–97, 99, 101, 103, 109–11, 114–15, 135–37, 142, 144, 147, 150, 153, 157, 166, 169, 179nn5, 10, 182n48, 185n44, 186n5; business interests, xvii, 17; business of selling dreams, 9; business profit, xviii, 4; business style, 80, 96, 152; entertainment business, 125, 143; exploitative business practices, (see also exploitation), 66; hospitality business, 39; hosting business, xii, 5–6, 8, 37, 42, 45, 64, 72, 78, 81, 187n10; “love business,” (see also love), 2; makura eigyō (pillow business), xvi, 87, 88; sex-related business, xi, 36; business model, 5 Butler, Judith, 14–15, 181nn36, 40, 183n56, 189n20, 191n50 Capital, 15, 23, 29, 41, 64, 173–74, 188n24; accumulation of capital, 94; capital accumulated (see class), 13; cultural capital, 13; economic capital, 56; emotional capital,

13, 56; human capital, 26; speculative accumulation of capital, 96, 102, 161, 173; symbolic capital, 56 Capitalism, 7, 11, 64, 68; advanced capitalist societies, 186n45; capitalist cultures, 14; capitalist corporate ladder, 56; capitalist service sector, 94; capitalist system, 9; capitalize on, 69, 74, 92; casino capitalism, 181; industrial capitalism, 95, 96; postindustrial consumer capitalism, 6, 21; late-capitalist culture, 168; noncapitalistic aspects, 68; venture capitalists and start-up entrepreneurs, 8 Celebrity, xiv, 38, 79; media production of celebrity, 6 Chance, 8, 10, 30, 36, 38, 53, 62, 66, 77, 84, 90, 102, 145; opportunities, 10, 21, 26, 31, 75, 106, 126; opportunity (see also gamble), 8, 16, 11 Choice, 18, 29, 38, 52, 83–84, 120, 122, 124; lifestyle choice, 8; fashion choice, 138; future as outcome of choice, 131; individual freedom of choice, 7, 8, 13; occupational choice, 79; rational choice, 158 Citizen, 10, 13, 26, 99, 167; audience-citizens, 167; autonomous self-responsible citizens, (see also autonomy), 3; consumer citizens, 30, 105; consumer citizenship, 30; cultural citizenship, 98, 129; culturally sophisticated citizens, 27; emotional appeals to the citizenry, 168; governing state and governed citizens, 173; hopeful citizen, 13; successful citizen, 4, 10; unthreatening citizens, 121; young and liberal-minded citizens, 79 City, xi, 4, 20–21, 23–30, 34, 36, 41, 72, 75, 79, 85, 117, 151, 166, 184nn7, 12, 185n44, 186n48, 189n13; advertising city, 29; affective cityscape, 21, 24, 30, 38, 69, 101, 133, 165, 174; city as a fetishized site, 28; city development, 28–29; city’s affluence, 26; city’s future, 25; consumable city, 23; futuristic city, 20, 23–24, 26; global city, (see also globalization), 23; political and cultural visions of a city, 24; super city, 23; Tokyo’s cityscape (see also Tokyo), 20, 27, 29–30

212    INDEX

Civility, 148–50; act of civility, (see also Žižek, Slavoj), 149–50, 172; civil act, 149; cultural logic of civility, 150 Class, 3, 7, 30, 47, 54, 56, 73–74, 83–84, 93, 101–2, 105–6, 118, 151, 165, 184n28, 185nn28, 43, 186nn48, 7, 187n7, 188n27, 189n7; class distinction, 34; class division, 138; class ideology, (see also ideology), 180n24; class markers, 9, 13; class struggle, 20–21, 38, 67, 74, 101, 106; Hills Tribe, 34; hope disparity society, (see also hope, Yamada, Masahiro), 3, 9, 33, 69, 101; Internet café refugees, 34; new class consciousness, 9, 33; subjectivity and class struggle, 101, 106; taste, 77, 107, 117, 138; the hopeful winners and the hopeless losers, 102; those who have hopes and those who have not, 9; transformation of class, 38; upper-class matrons and wealthy widows, 5; winner’s group and loser’s group, 3 Clough, Patricia, (see also Affective Turn), 169, 193nn17, 19 Commerce, 24, 183; sex commerce, 4; ­commerce-centered planning, 24 Commercial, xi, 25, 27, 29, 39, 41, 52, 146, 180n12; commercial sex, 6; “commercial women,” 94; commercialization of feelings, 3; commercialization of hopes and dreams, 165; commercialized extramarital sex, 5; commercially set stage, 129; commercially staged force, 4 Commitment, 52, 57, 65, 120, 124, 171; emotional, financial, and time commitment, 12; time commitment, 12, 115; commitment to others’ desires (see seduction), 16; commitment to the future, 54–55, 67 Commodity, 11–12, 57, 68–69, 73, 77, 96–99, 177, 181n29, 188n24; a commodity with economic value (see also value), 12; commodity situation, (see also Appadurai, Arjun), 12 Commodified, 3, 16, 30, 96–97; commodified performances, 106; commodified yet entrepreneurial, 21, 74; commodified romance, 87, 115, 133; commodified self, 97 Communication, 11, 13, 86, 114, 138; bodily

communication, 14; communicative, 77; conversational, 18, 87 Competitiveness, 10, 31, 35, 68, 94, 166; bidding competitions, 78; city’s hyper competitive environment, 21; competitive and hierarchical club system, 67; competitive milieu, 78; global competitiveness, 33; sales competition, 21, 92, 124 Consent, 17, 172–73; agreement, 136; as if in mutual consent, 143; consent and coercion, 158–59, 170, 173; consent and indebtedness, 172; consent to, 10, 33, 167; individual consent, 4, 159; seducee’s tacit consent, 136 Constraints, 10, 126, 131; financial and social constraints, 10; possibilities and constraints, 7; social and material constraints, 106 Construction, xii, 24–25, 32, 54, 75–77, 83–84, 86, 108, 166; construct their desirable selves, 110; cultural construct, 113; economic reconstruction, 7; performative construct, 113, 130; (re)construction of imagined past, 109 Consumer, 7–9, 24, 27–31, 54, 77, 81, 92, 96–97, 102, 104–6, 126, 130, 133, 138, 166, 174; consumer capitalism (see also capitalism), 6, 21; consumer need, 11; consumer spending, 9; female consumer psychology, 6; Japan’s consumer culture, 27 Consumption, 8, 11–12, 23–24, 27, 29–30, 32, 35, 38, 55, 69, 83, 92, 98–99, 106, 114, 129–30; conspicuous consumption, 118; consumability, 96; domestic consumption, 25, 166; labor and consumption, 160; lifestyle consumption, 21, 114, 173 Control, 16, 20, 79, 93, 119, 143, 145, 188n24; carefully controlled interactions, 146; controlled female sexuality (see also sexuality), 128; in control, 121; self-control, 95; society of discipline to control, 169; uncontrollable passion, 53 Corporate system, 67, 84, 97; corporate discipline, 32; corporate ladder, 56; corporate life, 62; corporate loyalty, 32; corporate profit making, 73; corporate restructuring, 97; corporate salarymen,

INDEX    213

97; corporate society, 95; corporate structure, 29; corporate world, 61, 173; corporate masculinity (see also masculinity), 98; corporate and family system, 31, 173; corporate culture, 97 Creative, 19, 29, 110, 145, 184–85n28, 188n24; creative destruction, 166, 193n7; creative plots, 143; creative rearticulating, 98; creative work, 32; individual creativity, 11, 32, 94, 97 Crisis, 6, 167 “Cruel optimism,” (see also Berlant, Lauren), 67, 169 De Beauvoir, Simone, 189–90 Debt, 72–73, 81–84, 123, 126, 145–46, 176; indebted, 81; indebted to, 143, 165, 177; indebtedness to, 20, 81, 172; “reflexive, self-referential debt,” 172 Deception, 22, 68, 89, 120, 137, 149, 160, 170; deceptive, 14, 94, 100, 120, 136, 146, 150; lying, 146, 149, 160; self-deception, 137 Decision, 52, 65, 138, 154–57; decisionmaking, 157 Desirability, 3, 97, 111, 133, 137, 158; desirable and lovable, 114; desirable cultural citizen, 132; desirable futures, 166; desirable male, 126; desirable objects, 96; desirable self, 10, 12, 159, 171–73; desirable women, 119; desirable self-image, 10, 12, 159, 171–73; valuable and desirable, 96 Desire, xvi, 2–5, 11, 13–16, 18, 24–25, 41, 76, 81, 88–90, 93, 99, 102, 105–6, 109, 115, 125–27, 129, 131, 133, 136, 140, 143–44, 147, 149–51, 153, 156, 158–60, 164, 168, 171–73, 181, 187n11, 188n24; appeal to the others’ desires, 172; desire for, 4–5, 64, 81, 106, 168; desire for romantic love (see also romantic love), 109; economic desire, 147; fantasies and desires, 15–16, 25, 172; gendered desires, 41; narcissistic desire, 126, 160; sexual desire, 126 Discipline, 141, 179; corporate discipline, 32; disciplinary force, 110; disciplining 118, 170; entrepreneurial self-discipline (see also entrepreneur), 8; Foucauldian discipline of the body, 169

Discourse, 160, 188nn19, 27; competing discourses, 131; discourses on hopes and dreams, 9; marketing discourses, 114; moral discourses, 160; neoliberal discourses, 8; popular discourses on romance (see romance), 109; public discourses, 26, 180; social discourses, 98, 128 Disneyland, 28, 36, 57, 68, 135; “Disneyfication,” 28; “Disneylands of the Night,” 36; Disneyland-like staged theater and utopian community, 135; compared to Disneyland and other forms of entertainment (see also magic box), 57; like Disney films, 28 Drama, 20–21, 41, 54, 59, 119–22, 136, 168, 174; dramatic, 41, 53–54, 63, 68, 136, 145, 167–68; dramatize the tragic event, 145; dramaturgical seduction, 20; dramaturgical stage, 21, 41; dramaturgy, 42, 99, 145–46; everyday interactions as an extension of a kind of theatrical play, 146; human drama, 2, 69, 106; love drama, 41, 57; melodrama, 2, 57, 168; script, 4, 57, 109, 114, 142 Dream, 2, 5, 10, 19, 35–37, 55, 63–64, 66–67, 81, 85, 91, 99, 105, 109, 123, 131, 135, 148, 172; dreams come true, 136; neoliberal dreams, 17; not just dreamed but lived, 10; realize dreams, 3, 12, 14, 54, 85, 136, 140, 160, 169, 173; seemingly attainable dream, 140; selling dreams, 9; utopian dreams, 20 Embodiment, 55; embodied, 7, 20, 25, 29, 47, 170; embodying, (see also body), 4, 167; feminist-embodied approach, 19 Emotion, 19, 73, 114, 121, 150, 182n52, 187n2, 189n22; emotion and reason, 17, 182n45; emotional, 18, 24, 144; emotional adjustment to, 38; emotional and bodily, 19, 66; emotional attitude, 66; emotional capital (see also capital), 13, 56; emotional investment, 85; emotional manipulators, 120; emotional orientation, 66; readjusting emotion, 66; rewarded symbolically and emotionally, 55; symbolic and emotional currencies, 57 Emotional labor, 73–74, 92, 94, 102, 106, 147,

214    INDEX

172–73, 187n1; emotion work, 73, 121, 150, 187; feminized emotional labor, 74, 102 Enterprise, 27, 101, 143, 158; aspirational enterprise, (see aspirational), 10; enterprising individualism, (see also individualism), xviii; male-centered enterprise, 19 Entertainment, xi, 2, 4, 7, 11, 17–18, 28, 30, 36, 40, 57, 75, 84–85, 92–93, 97, 119, 125, 143, 145–47, 149, 185n44, 188n20; entertainment sectors, 7; ethical entertainment, 160; highly personalized service and entertainment industries, 4, 16, 52; sex-related entertainment industry, 6 Enticement, 170; not forced but enticed to, 10 Entrepreneurship, 10, 42, 74, 94–97, 100, 102, 111, 133, 177; entrepreneurial politician, 167; entrepreneurial professionals, 73; entrepreneurial project, 109; entrepreneurial self-discipline, 8; entrepreneurial self-identity, 74; entrepreneurial spirit, 100, 168, 176; entrepreneurial temporality, 100; neoliberal logic of entrepreneurship, (see also neoliberalism), 101 Erotic, 5, 19, 78, 126, 183n53; erotic fantasies, (see also fantasy), 21; erotic imagination, 89 Ethics, 20, 66, 94, 97, 136, 143, 146–47, 159, 169, 191n2; ethical and meaningful, 160; ethical engagement, 17; ethical footings, 159; ethical judgments, 148; ethical selves, 148; ethical sensibilities, 137, 148; ethical subjectivities, 137; “ethical turn,” (see also Lambek, Michael), 191; ethics of pleasure, 143; ethics of seduction (see seduction), 20; family-oriented ethics, 128; morality, 64, 65, 136–37, 157; neoliberal values and ethics, 95, 97; “ordinary ethics,” 136, 191n2 Ethnography, 3, 10, 16–17, 183, 192n2; affective ethnography, 16, 19–20, 165, 175; ethnographic fieldwork, 17; ethnographic sensitivity, 176; ethnography and seduction, 20; ethnography of seduction, 16, 20; micro-ethnography, 20–21, 41; promise of ethnography, 20 Exceptionalism, 54–55 Exchange, ix, xviii, 11–13, 18, 26, 37, 41, 68, 76–78, 80, 91, 94, 125, 129, 154, 181n30;

affective and discursive exchange, 16, 173; economic, symbolic, and affective exchanges, 143, 182n52; exchange based on promises, 143, 161, 173; flirtatious exchanges, 3; personal and intimate kind of exchange, 11; monetary exchange, 159 Experience, xvi, 1, 3–5, 17–19, 24, 28–29, 41, 52–53, 64–65, 68, 77, 82, 88, 90, 100, 105, 107–9, 114, 127, 131–32, 138, 143, 145–46, 148–49, 152, 157, 159–60, 180n25, 182n51, 183n54, 187n1, 191n51; affective experience, 28; bodily experience, 18; corporeal aspects in human experience, 169; corporeal experience, xviii, 164; desires and experiences, 18; experience of what it is like, xviii, 4, 44; human experience, 78, 164–65, 169, 193n20; lived experience, 131, 174, 186n7; magical experience, 3, 57; sensual experience, xv, 19 Exploitation, 158, 180n19; economic exploitation, 100; exploitative nature of the business, 67; exploitative working conditions, 66, 100–1; self-exploitation, 92 Failure, 82, 98, 118, 155; fear of failure, 10; free to dream but also to fail, 10; high odds of failure, 21 Family, xiii, 56, 67, 75, 90, 96, 107–8, 110, 114–15, 117–18, 120, 124, 127–30, 148, 151, 163, 173, 176–78, 191n47; familial obligation, 126; family institution, 130; family life and individual desires, 105; family order, 105; family-oriented ethics, 128; family-oriented lives, 110; marriage and family system, 105, 128; traditional family-oriented motherhood, (see also mother), 130 Fantasy, xv, 1–2, 11, 14, 17–18, 21, 23, 27, 29, 36, 41–42, 44–45, 48, 52–55, 57–63, 67–69, 71, 73, 82–86, 93, 95–99, 102–3, 110, 115–16, 119, 122–25, 132, 139, 143, 149, 170–72, 174–75, 189n7; erotic fantasies, (see also erotic), 21; romantic fantasy, 130, 153, 171; set one another’s fantasies into motion, 3; social fantasy and social reality, 20 Fassin, Didier, 160, 192n35

INDEX    215

Fate, 84; fated to, 113; fateful encounters, 54, 68; seemingly fated romantic encounters, 41 Fear, 10, 20–21, 62, 80, 124, 135, 141, 166, 193n5; fears of aging, 133, 140; fear of becoming losers, 101; fear of losing, 88, 94 Feelings, xv, 10, 16–19, 21, 66, 73–74, 91–92, 106, 110, 115, 133, 135, 143, 149, 152–59, 164–165, 169, 182n52, 191–92n9; commercialization of feelings, (see also commercial), 3; customer’s needs and feelings, 73; feelings of both hope and despair, xviii, 56; restless feelings, xviii, 3 Felman, Shoshana, (see also performative), 15, 171–72, 181nn38, 39, 183n58, 187n12, 193n23, 194n28 Femininity, (see also onna, womanliness), xiv, 10, 21, 56, 104, 113–14, 120, 128–30; feminine, 103–5, 110, 112–14, 130; feminine ideal, 56, 104, 114, 130; feminine power, 116–17, 121, 125, 132 Feminist, 105, 111, 120, 128, 158, 190n47; feminist movement, 130; feminist philosopher, 19, 113; feminist-embodied approach, (see also embodiment), 19; liberal feminist thinking, 131; Western liberal feminists, 130 Fetishism: consumer fetishism, 174; fetishized future, (see also future), 3; fetishized objects, 3, 78; fetishized site, 28; fetishized value, 78; fetishists, 78; financially ‘worshipping,’ 2; a fetish (see also Tokyo), 30 Fiction, 143–45, 164, 172; creative plots, 143; phenomenal world, 16, 19, 24; reflexive, self-referential illusion, 171 Flexibility, 97; flexible labor (see nonregular worker), 8, 21, 24, 30–32, 38, 173; flexible lifestyle, 173 Foucault, Michel, 15–16, 43 106, 179n4, 181nn41, 183n52, 188n36, 189n6, 190n38 Frame, 65–66, 100, 110, 130–31, 159–60; frame of seduction, (see also seduction), 159; framing, 34, 145–46; framing a scene in a play, 146 Freedom, xviii, 15–16, 22, 29, 31–32, 51, 97, 99, 101–2, 105, 128, 130–32, 149, 168, 170–

74, 180n24, 184n11, 191n52; a particular kind of freedom, 4; free from the status quo, 8; freedom of choice, 7–8, 13, 54, 137; freedom of the governed, 15, 173; individual freedom, 4, 7–8, 13, 16, 75, 149–50, 161, 166, 170, 172; liberation, 157; promise of future and freedom (see also future; promise), 3 Future, 1, 3–5, 9–11, 14, 16, 32–38, 42, 52, 54–55, 57, 64–69, 73–75, 78, 80–81, 84–85, 100–2, 105–6, 110, 123, 130–31, 138–40, 153, 161, 165–66, 168–69, 171–75, 179n3, 181n30, 184nn10, 19, 189n10, 193n5; better future, 8–9, 13, 22, 26, 35, 38, 67, 74, 85, 168, 173; fetishized future, (see also fetishism), 3; future success, 3, 5, 66, 101, 106, 138–139, 173; future-oriented aspiration, 22, 66, 73, 94, 102, 166, 175; futuristic, 20–21, 23–24, 26, 41, 84, 174; futurity, 27, 38, futurology, 9, 184; global future, (see also globalization), 26, 186n53; “making a better future,” 26; performed into being, 9, 22, 38, 184; prosperous future of the nation, xviii; promise of future and freedom (see promise), 3; seductive lure of future, 22; uncertain futures, 67 Gamble, 21, 102; bet on their life to “win” (see also life and chance), 8; gambling, 12, 81, 99, 143–45, 160, 172; game of romance (see also romance), 41, 122–24, 189n7 Game, xi, 13, 109, 116, 118–19; game of romance, 41, 122–24, 189; game of seduction, 16, 20, 118, 159, 170–71; gamesmanship, 122–23, 163; love match, 122–23, 125 Geisha, 4; geisha establishment, 94; “geisha guy,” 6 Gender, 3, 38, 98, 126, 130, 132–33, 165, 176, 191n50; gender and the life course, 132; gender and sexual ideologies, (see also ideology), 130; gender and sexual status quo, 132; gender as a performative construct, (see also construct), 113; gender identity, (see also identity), 111, 113; gender inequality, (see also inequality), 73; gender norms, (see also norms), 94–95; gender politics, 20; gender roles,

216    INDEX

128; gendered ageism, (see also ageism), 106, 189; gendered division of labor, 31, 95; gendered dreams and fantasies, 106; gendered modern history, 128; gendered perception of womanhood, 128 Globalization, 7, 22–23, 26; a global space, 28; an almost-but-not-quite-there globality, 26; criticized as a top-down ideology, 9; future-oriented aspiration of a global scale (see also aspiration), 166; global city, (see also city), 23; global competitiveness (see also nation), 33; global economic trends, 11; global economy, 10, 26, 102, 161, 165; global future, 26, 186; global markets, 23; global order, 25, 166; global restructuring, 20; globalizing neoliberal logic (see also neoliberalism), 174; globalizing neoliberalism, 9; globalizing reformist politics (see also neoliberalism), 173; symbol of global modernity (see also Tokyo), 26 Goffman, Erving, 42, 145, 186, 191n4 Guilt, 65–66, 127, 146; guilty conscience, 125; guilty feelings, 148; seed of guilt, 122 Hierarchy, 37, 194n32; hierarchical, 140–41, hierarchical apprenticeship, 101; hierarchical club system, 67; hierarchical corporate structure, 8; hierarchical sales pyramid, 59; social hierarchy, 96 Hochschild, Arlie R., 73, 150, 181n28, 82n50, 187nn1, 2, 191nn7, 8 Hope, 20, 32–37, 65–69, 83–84, 101–2, 128, 132, 161, 165–66, 185nn40, 41, 193n5; discourses on hopes and dreams (see also discourses), 10; hope and despair, xviii, 56, 135; hope and dreams as classification markers (see also class), 9; hope and optimism, 169; hope as a method, (see also Miyazaki, Hirokazu), 65; hope as a process of readjusting emotions, 66; hope disparity society, (see also class, Yamada Hamashiro), 3, 9, 33–34, 69, 101; hope for the future, 34–35, 67; hope for upward social mobility, 37; hope-deprived makegumi (losers’ group) (see class), 83; hopes and dreams, 3, 9–12, 17, 20–21, 24, 33–38,

69, 85, 137, 159, 166, 173–74; political rhetoric of hopes and dreams, 9; society wherein individuals cherish hopes and dreams, 67 Hopeful, 27, 35, 38, 140, 185n41, hopeful and aspirational, (see also aspirational), 161, hopeful citizen, (see also citizen), 13, hopeful fantasy, 67; hopeful future, (see also future), 3, 21, 68, 69, 102, 165, 173, 174; hopeful individuals, 34, hopeful moment, 3, 65, 67, hopeful states of mind, 9, 10; hopeful winners, (see class), 102 Hopeless, 75, 102; hopeless losers (see class), 9; hopelessness, 144 Hospitality, 39, 64, 91, 136; ethics of pleasure (see also act of civility), 143; hospitality business, 39; hosts’ logic of hospitality, 172 Hosts, (see actor): legendary host, 6, 9, 63; “male mistress,” 95; not considered a profession, 5; number one host, 6, 63; role as entertainers, 5; self-employed male dancers, 5; sleazy, 5, 94; top-ranked host, 19, 55, 63, 72, 76, 93, 97, 125; womanizer (see also seducer), 6, 122, 171 Host club, ix, xi–xii, xvii–xviii, 1–13, 16–18, 20–22, 24, 36–38, 40–47, 49, 51–57, 59, 61–62, 64–69, 73, 77–78, 84–85, 88–90, 92–93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 106–13, 115–17, 119, 121–23, 125–27, 129–33, 135–37, 140–41, 143, 146–47, 149–53, 156–57, 159–61, 163, 165, 168–69, 172–75, 177, 179n8, 180n15, 182n47, 186nn1, 5, 187n8, 189n7; a dream world, 2–3; accepted as a business, 7; Fantasy, 17–18, 21, 36, 41, 44–45, 48, 52–55, 57–61, 63, 70, 73, 82–85, 93, 95–97, 99, 103, 110, 115–16, 119, 122–24, 132, 143; hosting, xii, xv–xvi, 5–6, 8–9, 11, 23, 37, 42, 45, 53–55, 57, 64–68, 72–73, 75–79, 81–83, 85–87, 93, 95, 98–100, 102, 109, 115, 138, 143, 148, 187n10; hosting as a window, 165; hosting business, xii, 5–6, 8, 37, 42, 45, 64, 72, 78, 81, 187n8; Neverland, 2; Valentine, 135, 139–41 Hostess club, xi, 4, 107–8, 125–26, 190n32; hostesses, 45, 94, 96, 188n17, 189n7 Housewife, xiii, 45, 104, 117, 121, 129, 147, 163, 190n26

INDEX    217

The Hanakos, 31, 105; the Hanako generation, 128; the “Hanako tribe,” 30 Identity, 15, 26, 100, 123, 132, 184n16, 188n27; class identity, (see also class), 101; consumer identity, 30; entrepreneurial identity, 74, 95, 98, 102; gender identity, (see also gender), 111, 113; identity category, 112, 129; male identity, 99; national identity, 184; professional identity, 97; selfidentity, 74, 103, 107 Ideology; class ideology, (see also class), 180n24; disciplinary forces and ideologies, 110; gender and sexual ideologies, (see also gender), 130; ideological, 34, 95, ideology of hope, (see also hope), 9; romantic love ideology, (see also romantic love), 128 Image, 11, 27, 29–30, 177–78; affluent images and aspirational vigor, 10; cultural imaginary, 3; desirable self-image (see also desirable), 10, 12, 159, 171–73; futuristic images, 174; ideal images of femininity (see also femininity), 10; masculine images, 76; media images of host clubs, 10, 86; mirroring images, 121; self-image, 4, 10, 12–13, 112, 116, 125–26; social practice of neoliberal imaginary, 15 Imagined, 9, 22–24, 26–27, 30, 42, 85, 105–6, 109–10, 153, 156, 189n10; imagined future, (see also future), 52, 66–67, 81, 106, 110, 140, 166; imagined time and space, 3 Indeterminacy, 14, 65, 164–65 indeterminate, 12, 148; indeterminate future, 67 Individuality, 128, 133; individual choice, 170; individual creativity, 11, 32, 94, 97; individual freedom, 4, 7–8, 13, 16, 75, 149–150, 161, 166, 170, 172; individual self, 9; individualism, 5, 13, 137; enterprising individualism, (see also enterprise), xviii Inequality, 184n12, 188n27; geopolitical and power inequality, 183n52; gender inequality, (see also gender), 73; social and economic inequalities, 33; regional inequality, 26; social inequality, 3, 130, 158; structural inequalities, 4, 180n24 Inferiority complex, 121, 141

Information, ix, 11–12, 15, 18, 27, 29, 76, 87, 119, 123–24, 139, 141, 168–69, 176, 180n15, 183n3, 188n12, 190n25, 194n32; control information, 119–20; information technology, 7, 9, 36, 84, 169; withhold information, xv, 144 Intention, xvi, xviii, 1, 14, 64–65, 68, 131, 148, 153, 171, 193n23; intentionality, 137 Interaction, 13, 16–19, 37, 42, 56, 78, 125, 132, 136–137, 143, 146, 153, 157, 172, 182, 189, 191, asymmetrical interactions, 137; hostclient interactions, 2; seductive interactions, 78; social interactions, 16, 42, 132 Interest, 9, 25–26, 44, 52, 69, 82, 103, 107, 121, 136–37, 140, 143, 145–46, 159–160, 167, 181n41, 182n52, 187n6; actors’ interests (see also actor), 11; business interests, xvii, 17; economic interests, 13, 23, 37; erotic interests, 126; mutual interests, 25 Interpretation, xv, 19, 24, 171, 175, 182n45; multiple interpretations, 9 Intersubjective: intersubjective interactions, (see also interaction), 19; intersubjective relationship, 20 Intimacy, 112, 177; intimate, 11, 41, 107, 184n12; intimate business transactions, 182n48, intimate environment, xv; intimate experiences, 2; intimate feeling, 49; intimate relationship, 12, 18, 181n28; intimate services, 17, the intimate public, 168 Investment, 9, 23, 25–27, 55, 67, 120–121, 124, 140; business investment, xviii, emotional investment, 85, future investment, 78; speculative investment, 78, 166 Jaggar, Alison M., 19, 183n55 Japan Inc., 97; Japanese-style labor management, 32; Japanese-style management system, 7 Kabuki-chō, (see red-light district), xi–xiii, xvi–xvii, 5–6, 17, 35–36, 40–46, 53, 63, 67–69, 71, 82, 135, 151, 179n2, 180n15, 182nn47, 48, 49, 186nn1, 4 Kitada, Akihiro, (see also advertising city), 29, 184n27

218    INDEX

Knowing, 18–20, 51, 64, 87, 164–65, 171; affective mode of knowing (see affective), 165; alternative mode of knowing, 18; unknowable, 145, 165; unknown territory, 17 Knowledge, 15, 49, 65, 100–1, 122, 136, 150, 181n41, 187n8, 192nn2, 5, 194n32; knowledge production, 19, 65–66, 165, 183nn53, 58; language, knowledge, and truth, 15 Koselleck, Reinhart, 191n51 The Koizumi administration, 8, 35; Koizumi Jun’ichirō, 8–9, 166–168; “Koizumi’s political theater, 173; Koizumi populism, 167, 193n12; “Koizumi theater,” 167 Kulick, Don, 19, 183n53 Labor, xii, 7–9, 11–13, 55, 67, 94, 97–101, 125, 140, 143, 150, 160–61, 186n45, 187nn1, 12, 188n12, 25, 191n8, 194n32; emotional labor, 21, 73–74, 92, 94, 102, 106, 147, 172– 73, 187n12; flexible labor, 8, 21, 24, 30–32, 38, 173; fulltime job, 8; furīta (freeter), 8; irokoi—love and sex-related—labors, 90; labor conditions, 7; labor history, 8; labor market, (see also neoliberalism), 8, 31; laborer, 21, 86, 180n19; non-regular work, 8, 31, 33; paid labor, 84; sex work, 5, 21, 36, 45, 74, 79–80, 95–96, 156–60, 189n7; young Japanese workers, 62 Language, 155, 165, 181n38; body language, 1, 14, 49, 76, 171; doing with language, 15; felicitous or infelicitous, 15, 183n58; gesture, 49; modification of reality (see reality), 15; performative, 183n58 Liberal: economic liberalism, 167; liberal democracy, 170; liberal feminism, 130–31; liberal society, 131, 170–72; liberal subject, 158–59 Life, xii, 26, 32–34, 41–42, 44, 54, 58, 61, 64–65, 68, 72–73, 75, 90–92, 100–1, 103–5, 107–13, 115–16, 118–19, 121, 128–30, 132, 136, 142, 151, 153, 155, 159, 168, 172, 176–78, 182n45; bet on their life to “win” (see also gamble), 8; fabulous life, 84; one’s own life, 7 Lifestyle, 6, 27, 29–30, 34, 36, 75, 114–15, 154, 187n7; dream lifestyle, 21, 36, 173; lifestyle

choice, 8, 29, 32, 38, 101, 180n19, 188n27; luxurious lifestyles, 10, 28, 33, 38 Logic, 96, 102, 160; cultural logic of civility (see civility), 150; globalizing neoliberal logic, (see globalization), 174; inverted logic, 77; logic of commodity value, (see also value), 96–97; logic of compensation, 147; logic of hospitality, (see hospitality), 172; logic of production, 14; logic of seduction, 121; paradoxical logic, 164; neoliberal logic of entrepreneurship, (see also entrepreneurship), 101 Lovability (see also desirability), 10, 178, 190; lovable, xiv, 113–14, 119, 190n25 Love, xi, xvi, 14, 21, 27, 36–37, 41–42, 46, 52, 68–69, 80, 85, 90–91, 103, 115, 117, 119–28, 135, 137, 147, 153–58, 160, 166, 171, 176, 189n23; a man’s love, 121; a “pure love,” 151, 155; beauty and love, 111; eternal love, 158; ethics of love, 159; fall in love, 1–2, 56, 96, 109, 151; fetishized objects, 3; genuine love, 55; illicit love, 127; love and money, 68, 120; love and sex, 132; love and trust, 55; “love business,” (see business), 2; love drama, 41, 57; love match, 122–23, 125; love trade, 87, 91; melodrama of love, 57; narcissistic love, 158; promise of love, 165; “selfless” love, 158; self-love, 126, 136; women’s love, 121 Lukács, Gabriella, 27–28, 177, 184nn21, 22, 185n36, 190n34 Magic, 135–37; captivate spell, 174; magic box, 135–36, 140, 142–43; magic spell, 34; magical, 3, 57, 100, 173; magical quality, 14, 16 Mahmood, Saba, 101, 131, 188n26, 191nn52, 55, 3 Male-dominance: male domain, 5; malecentered, 19, 132; male-centered sex and gender norms, 95–96; male-centered society, xiv, 94, 112, 121; patriarchal heterosexual system, 130; patriarchal society, 5; patriarchal social structure, 150 Management, 7, 21, 37, 62, 66, 75, 79, 99, 137, 139–43, 184n12, 185n44, 193n7; business management, (see business), 44; “carrot-

INDEX    219

and-stick” management, 142, 160; club management, 52, 61, 65–66, 100; impression management, 42, 145; labor management, (see labor), 32; management system, 77, 102; self-management, 32 Marazzi, Christian, 92, 187n12, 188nn12, 13 Market, 8, 19, 25, 31, 33, 45, 64, 68, 73, 81, 92, 127–28, 132, 164, 166, 181n30, 185n41, 187n6; consumer market (see also labor market), 104, 106, 130; free market, 9, 170; global markets, 23; global skin care market, 112 Marx, Karl, 11, 56, 181n29; Marxist, 12, 100, 180n24, Masculinity, 10, 55, 78, 118, 177; corporate masculinity, (see also corporate), 98; entrepreneurial masculinity, 102; masculine, 58, 96, 102, 130, 152; masculine identity, 100, 102; masculine images, 76, 86; masculine subjectivity, (see also subjectivity), 74, 97; paradoxical masculinity, 21; the role of masculine seducer, 74 Massumi, Brian, (see also “The Autonomy of Affect”), 168–69, 193nn17, 18 Mazzarella, William, 167, 193n15 McCallum, E.L., 78, 187n5 Media: an object of media representation, 27; documentary film, Great Happiness Space, 2; media spectacle, 8; representations of host clubs, 2, 40–41, 45 Memory, xvii, 89, 120, 153, 159, 164; bodily memories, 107; memories and emotions, 12; nostalgic memories, 105, 158; nostalgic remembering, 110; recollection, xviii, 158; remembering, 20, 109; selective memory, 130 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 192n5 Metaphysics, 136, 164; metaphysical, 14 Miyazaki, Hirokazu, (see also hope as a method), 26, 65, 184n15, 185nn39, 41, 42, 187n9 Money, xvi, 2–3, 12, 37, 41, 46, 51, 53–54, 56, 59, 61, 63–64, 67, 69, 77, 79, 80–82, 84, 87, 89–91, 93–94, 96–99, 105, 107–8, 115, 118, 120, 122, 124–25, 129, 137–39, 143–52, 154– 55, 157, 159–60, 187n8; cash, 37, 63, 72, 89, 94, 117, 125, 142, 147; cash flow, 97; extract

money, 65; monetary, 57, 62, 69, 85, 93, 121–22, 158–59; in cash, 64, 147–48 Morality, 64–65, 136–37, 157; immoral, 5, 160; immoral conduct, 147, 160; Kantian moral philosophy, 136; moral, 56, 128, 150, 157; moral and ethical footings, 159; moral code, 126, 148, 157, 191n3; moral discourses, 160; moral questions, 4; moral responsibility, 150 Mother, 31, 53–54, 89, 103, 107, 115–19, 121–22, 127–28, 151, 178; education mother, 118; “Good Wife, Wise Mother,” 128; mother figure, 104, 110, 119, 121, 130, 132; Japanese mothers, 105 ; single mother, 53, 119; wife and mother, 33, 107, 117–18, 122, 129 Motherhood, 104, 114; desexualized motherhood, 132; family-oriented motherhood, 130; respectable motherhood, 126 Motivation, xvi, 84, 111, 126, 129, 139–40; motives, 116; self-motivation, 62, 97, 101 Mutual, 12–13, 25, 28, 54–55, 62, 68, 160; mutual consent, (see also consent), 143; mutual satisfaction, 16; mutual seduction, (see also seduction), 118, 121, 123, 125–26, 137, 159; mutual yet asymmetrical, 137 Nao, 151–60, 164, 192n10 Nation, 7, 27, 94, 128; future of the nation, xviii; 4, 9, 26; international, 25; internationalization, 25, 184n16; nation-state, 14, 25–26, 33, 166, 184n16; national, xiv, 25, 93, 166, 180n24, 184n17, 187n9; national crisis, 167; national economy, 7–8, 33, 35, 37, 133, 166; national goals, 33, 173; national identity, 26, 184n16; national project, 9, 24–26, 35, 166; national prosperity, 26, 166; national resources, 26; nationalistic, 168; transnational, 34, 183 Narration, 2, 40; narrate, 73, 100, 187n7; Narrative, 19, 41, 54, 57, 81, 96, 101, 105, 113, 115, 117, 127, 129, 137, 150, 156, 160, 187n7; narrator, 40–41 Neoliberalism, 11, 14, 20, 168, 180nn24, 25, 184n11; globalizing neoliberalism, (see also globalization), 9; neoliberal, 7–8, 13, 15, 20, 38, 166–67, 170, 188n27; neoliberal

220    INDEX

dreams, 4, 6, 17; neoliberal economy, 22, 73; neoliberal freedom, 168, 173; neoliberal governance, 15–16, 19, 132, 161, 166, 168, 172–73, 181n41; neoliberal logic, 174; neoliberal reforms, xviii, 3, 6–8, 21, 24–25, 35, 38, 109, 133, 165, 167–69, 180nn19, 22; neoliberal situation, 188n25; neoliberal societies, 10; neoliberal state, 10, 16, 167; neoliberal values, 8, 38, 74, 94–95, 97; “No Reform, No Growth” (see also the Koizumi administration), 8 New economy, 7, 185n 42, 188n12 New millennium, 3, 28, 35, 38, 105, 129, 161; millennial Japan, 9, 56, 101, Night, xi–xiii, xvi–xvii, 2, 5, 17–18, 23, 34, 36, 40, 42–45, 47, 50, 54–55, 62, 72, 80, 83, 85, 87–90, 97, 104–5, 107, 111, 115–16, 118, 124, 127, 144, 151, 163, 165, 174; nightlife, xiii, 5, 36, 40, 45, 109, 190n32; “night work,” xii Norm, 62, 180n24; aspirational normalcy, 165, 168 174; gender, sexual, and class norms, 7; heterosexual norm, 96; maternal norms, 132; normalized, 22, 68; normative, 84, 191n52; sex and gender norms, (see also gender), 94–95, 126, 133; social norms, 38, 102, 126, 136, 150, 157 Nostalgia, xvii–xviii, 26, 68; nostalgic, 105, 158, 189n10; mechanism of nostalgia, 106, 110 Obasan, 112–13, 116, 129 Ogata, Sakurako, 127, 190n35 Onna, (see also femininity, womanliness), 113; a cultural construct, 113; expiration date of womanliness, 113; give up, 43, 113, 124–25, 17 Ordinariness, 74; extraordinary, 10, 41, 49, 52, 57, 64–65, 74, 78, 114, 119, 127, 138, 186n1, 189n22; extraordinariness, 41, 58, 74, 136, 165; ordinariness, 74; ordinary, 16, 41, 53, 99, 107, 136, 151–52, 166; “ordinary ethics,” (see also ethics), 136, 159, 191n2 Orientation: career-oriented, 110, 116; consumer-oriented, 7, 11, 29, 31, 133; disorienting, 39, 66; export-oriented, 25; family-oriented, 110, 128, 130, 166, 169; future-oriented, 4, 9–10, 13, 22, 26–27, 38,

66–67, 73–74, 94, 100, 102; reorientation, 65–66; result-oriented, 7, 59, 66; serviceoriented, 32; spatial orientation, xviii, youth-oriented, 21, 56, 104, 121, 130 Passion, 5, 55, 92, 153, 175, 182n45; dispassionate, 182n45, passionate, 52, 116 Past, xvi, xviii, 13, 26, 65, 80–83, 106–10, 116, 130–31, 138, 144, 153, 158–59, 167, 186n45, 189n10, 193n5 Pay, xvi, 2, 10, 32, 37, 51–52, 57, 61, 64–66, 72, 77, 80, 82–83, 90–91, 93, 98, 101, 104–5, 109, 120, 139–40, 145, 154, 187n9; better paying job, 75, 151; low-paying job, 8; “pay off,” 12; underpaid, 67; unpaid, 67, 72, 90, 92, 94, Performance, xii, xviii, 12, 19, 42, 78, 89, 92, 99, 105, 113, 117, 120, 137, 139, 143, 145, 147, 156, 163 Performative: do things with speech and bodily acts, 15; Felman, Shoshana, 15, 171–72, 181nn38, 39, 183n58, 187n12, 193n23, 194n28; performative construct, 113, 130; performative possibility, 15, 173; performatively, 3, 27, 96, 126, 173–74; performative speech, 15, 171; performativity, 164 Persuasion, 135–36, 159; persuasive, 28, 96, 120, 146, 148, 172 Phenomenon, 112, 127, 164; host club phenomenon, 6, 11, 165; phenomenal world, 16, 19, 24; phenomenological, 65, 193n5; phenomenology, 65, 192n5, Political economy, 3, 33; politico-economic, xviii, 12, 20, 23–24, 37, 97, 102, 167, 173 Politics: affective politics, 168; gender politics, 4, 20; melodramatic politics, (see also Anker, Elisaeth), 167–68; politics of future, 3, 166, 168; politics of romantic love (see also romantic love ideology), 132; reformist politics, 173; theatrical politics, (see also “Koizumi theater”), 167; women’s liberal politics, 30 Popularity, xiv, 6, 8, 25, 31, 152; fetishized value of popularity, 78; performed popularity, 77–79; popularity and success, 82; populism, 167, 193n12

INDEX    221

Postindustrial economy, 69, 94–95, 169, 173–74; postindustrial, 73, 185n28, 187n1, postindustrial consumer capitalism, 6–7, 11, 106, postindustrial consumerism, 7, 30, 38, 133, 165; postindustrial culture, 7; postindustrial logic of commodity value, (see also value), 96–97; postindustrial service economy, 73, 92 Power, 11, 29–30, 47, 55, 57, 69, 74, 78, 81, 89, 100, 113–14, 116–17, 120–21, 123, 125, 131–32, 135–36, 156, 160, 167–68, 182n52, 183n52, 187n7, 188n24, 189n22, 190n26, 193n12; power distribution, 141; power structure, 14, 143; powerful, 16, 62, 126, 137, 159, 164, 166 Precarity: insecurity and vulnerability, 67; job insecurity, 33; precarious employment, 32; precarious occupation, 140; precariousness, 5; sense of insecurity, 171; precarious state, 100; socio-economic insecurity, 100; uncertainty, 3, 10, 20, 53, 67, 78, 100, 125 Prejudice: against male sex work and female promiscuity, 7; against prostitution, 157 Presence, xiv, 17, 40, 42, 53, 67, 132, 142, 166; presence and absence, 3 Present, xviii, 5, 14, 22, 28, 34, 38, 52, 59, 63, 73–74, 85–86, 100–1, 109–11, 138–41, 166, 170, 175, 189n10, 193n5 Price, 2, 25, 68, 72, 77, 82–83, 98–99, 157; inflated prices, 2, 57; priced, 11, 43, 123, 139; price tags, 68, 72; pricey, 72 worthy expense (see also value-making), 2 Product, 2–3, 11, 56, 77–78, 112, 119, 143, 151, 173, 180n11, 183n53, 188nn24, 27, 192n9, 194n33; production, 6, 11–12, 14, 24, 32, 73, 92, 94, 133, 143, 165–166, 169, 183n53, 188n27, 194n29; productive, 128, 150, Professionalism, 91–95, 97–98, 102, 106; professional consciousness (puro ishiki), 91; professional field, 8, 13; professional success, 10 Profit, 11, 19, 68–69, 92, 137–38, 149–50, 160, 188n25, 194n33; business profit, xviii, 4; profitability, 44, 137, 143, 161; profitmaking, 11, 73 Progress, 80, 175, 191n51; a sense of prog-

ress, 130; a teleological goal, 130; linear progressive way, 110; production and progress, 14; progress as a subjective experience, 131; progressing, xvii, 169; progressive thinking, 169; Western progressive models, 22 Project, 16, 25, 28, 34, 36, 54, 98, 114, 165, 175– 78, 180n24, 185n40, 187n7; entrepreneurial project, 109; feminine project, 132; future-oriented project, 169; individual project, 9, 33; national project, 9, 24–26, 35, 166; political project, 169; project of the self, 110, 189n10; self-transformative project (see also self-transformation), 110, 130; social projects, 167 Promise, xvii, 33, 86, 108, 140, 171; empty promises (see also neoliberalism), 9, 15; performative utterances, 15, 193n23; political promises, 167; promise as seductive, 14; promise-based aspiration, 16; promise of ethnography, 20; promise of romantic love, 2; promise of love (see also love), 165; promise of the future, 1, 3, 6, 8–10, 16, 35, 69, 143, 161, 166, 168, 173; promise of Tokyo, 24–26; promise making, 14, 181n38; seduction of promise, 170; strategic use of promise (see also strategy), 8; the premise of promise, 14 Promotion, 12–13, 43, 62, 175, 182n46; selfpromotion, 8, 11 Psychodynamism: psychodynamic creation, 10; psychodynamic drama of seduction, 174; psychodynamic process of seduction, 13, 159 Psychology, 62, 160; psychological shock, 144 Rationality, 9, 15, 28–29, 32, 61, 68, 82, 90–91, 99, 109, 113, 118, 121, 131, 149, 172, 180n24, 182n45; reasons, 61, 165, 189n Reality: economic reality, 8, 32; modification of reality, 15; real world, 11, 91; socioeconomic realism, 16; unavoidable economic reality, 8 Recession, 7, 32, 35; “lost decade(s),” 5; postrecession, 8 Red-light district, (see also Kabuki-chō), xi, 17, 24, 35, 42, 182n48; gay district, 179n2

222    INDEX

Reflexibility: reflexive, 17, 19–20, 119, 156, 159–60, 171–72, 183n54; reflexive selfreferential world, 160; reflexive self-­referential debt, 172; self-reflexivity, 183n53 Reform, 8, 97, 133, 167, 193n7; neoliberal reforms (see also neoliberalism), 7, 21, 25, 35, 38, 109, 165, 167–69, 180n19; politicoeconomic reforms, 20, 25; reformist leaders, 166; reformist politics, 173; selfreform (see also the self), 168; structural reforms, xviii, 3; women’s reforms of their bodily capacities, 108 Relationship, xvii–xviii, 1, 3, 8, 16, 44, 51, 68, 77–78, 80, 87–89, 93, 99, 115–16, 119–20, 122–23, 125, 127, 154, 158, 163–64, 167, 181n28, 191n3; host-client relation, 12, 19, 54–55, 136, 153; manager-host relationship, 136; rapport, xiii, 18, 138, 175; researcher-informant, xvii; senpai, 53, 76, 88, 115, 141 Resources, 9, 26, 34, 38, 42, 116, 120, 180n24, 187n7; limitless human resources, 143; unevenly distributed cultural resources, 33 Responsibility, 100, 137, 154, 156, 171; blame himself for his failure, 10; irresponsible, 54; moral responsibility, 150; responsible for, 72, 150, 155, 173–74, self-responsibility, 3, 22, 74, 101, 172, 189n10 Rhetoric, xviii, 29, 35; catchy slogans, 8; political rhetoric of hopes and dreams, 9; rhetorical appeals, 19 Risk, 13, 24, 26, 85, 99–101, 113, 147, 149, 165, 182n52; risky business, 153; risky endeavors, 4, 13, 68, 74, 173 Role, 4, 19, 26, 79–80, 90, 93, 116–17, 120–21, 125–26, 128, 130, 132, 137, 142, 145, 147, 154, 178, 184n12; conventional salaryman/ housewife roles, xiii; traditional feminine roles, xiv; roles of desirable women, 119; role as entrepreneurs, 5; role of princesses, 57; role of masculine seducer, 74; role of ideal boyfriend, 89, 91; roles of seducer and seduced, 16; gender roles, 128; Tokyo’s role, 27 Romance, xviii, 2, 27, 39, 57, 68, 103, 105–6,

111, 115, 119, 130, 150–51, 189n22, 191n47; extramarital romance, 110, 120, 126–27, 132, 190n37; game of romance, 41, 122–24, 189n7; heterosexual romance, 114, 129; ideal romance, 91; love match, 122–23, 125; popular discourses on romance, 109; pseudo- or virtual romance gijiren’ai, 89; ren’ai taishitsu (bodily quality for romantic love), (see also the body), 108–9, 117, 121, 189n9; romance and middle-aged women’s identity formation (see also women), 132; romance as a technology of the self, (see also romantic love, technology of the self), 114, 116, 127, 129; romance as a vehicle, 114, 116; romance boom, 57, 114, 133; romantic excitement (or, tokimeki), 10, 21, 41, 103, 106–7, 113–114, 117, 119, 120, 126, 133; romance for self-transformation (see also self-­ transformation), 114; staged romance, 106, 126; supremacy of romance, 129 Romantic love, (see also romance), 2, 21, 106–7, 109, 114, 116, 128–29; courtship, 114–15, 128–29, 189n25; politics of romantic love, 132; romantic love and selftransformation (see also subjectivity), 116; romantic love ideology, 128 Rose, Nikolas, 15, 131, 172, 181n42, 191n54, 194n31 Rubin, Gayle, 95, 183n56, 188n19, 192n34 Salaryman, 61, 84, 97, 99, 102; conventional salaryman/housewife roles, (see role), xiii Sales, xvi, 4, 11, 55, 57, 64, 66, 69, 73, 77–78, 83, 88, 94, 96, 98, 102, 112, 118, 136–138, 141, 149, 153, 159, 173, 177, 181n28, 183nn1, 3; based on sales, 58–59; sales competition, 21, 29, 42, 59, 61–63, 92, 124; sales promotion, 12–13; sales rank, 61–62, 140; sales record, 65 81, 89; salesman, 4, 64, 66, 69, 73, 77, 84, 96, 102, 110; monthly sales meeting, 62–63, 141–42 Salto mortale, (see also Marx, Karl), 11–12 Salvation, 112, 189n22 Secrecy, 149, 170; invisibility, 19, 147; secret, 5, 13, 68, 89, 127–28, 142, 146, 149–150, 156, 190n38; public secret, 128, 150; secret

INDEX    223

desires, 153, 156; secretary, 4, 103; secretive, 16, 120, 150; secretly, 13–15, 117, 122, 151; secretly, yet boldly, 126 Security, 4, 11, 171; job security, 31, 84, 99; job insecurity, 33; insecurity, (see also precarity), 4, 67, 97, 100, 171 Seduction, xviii, 3, 10, 13–22, 45, 74, 140, 157, 160, 171, 181n41, 183n58, 186n1; a key component of seduction, 13; art of seduction, 16, 18, 21, 117, 135–36, 143, 148, 156, 170, 172–74; dramaturgical seduction, 20; enigmatic nature of seduction, 16; ethics of seduction, 20; ethnography of seduction, 16, 20; inner working of seduction, 20; mutual seduction, 118, 121, 123, 125–26, 137, 159; phenomenal world of seduction, 16, 19; power of seduction 69, 132; psychodynamic process of seduction, 13; seducer, (see also host), 13, 15, 16, 22, 121–22, 125–26, 136, 160, 171–72, 193n23; seductive, 14, 19, 78; self-seduction, 158, 194n25; staged seduction (see also stage), 4, 20, 69, 165, 174; susceptibility to the seduction, 20 Self, xiii, 3, 10, 16, 19, 21–22, 29, 36, 41, 55, 61–62, 76, 78, 85, 87, 94–95, 99, 106, 111, 119, 136, 152, 159, 165, 177, 183n53, 184n16, 187nn7, 11, 188nn24, 189nn10, 22, 191n3; care of the self, 104, 128, 188n26, 190n47; commodified self, 97, 133; presentation of the self, 114, 148; selfautonomy, 74, 96–98, 110, 121, 123, 131; self-confidence, 72, 128, 190n37; selfemployed, xiii, 5, 73, 92, 97, 100, 110, 137, 187n9; self-esteem, 52, 56, 79, 105, 107, 127; self-fulfillment, 128–29, 191n47; self-identity, 74, 103, 107; self-image, 4, 13, 112, 116, 125–26, 159, 171, 173; selflove, 126, 136; self-promotion, 8, 11; self-realization, 32, 131; self-referential, 160, 171–172, 193n23; self-satisfaction, 52, 143; self-seduction, 156, 194n25; self-transformation (see also romantic love), 114–116, 130, 168; selfless, 156, 158, 160; technology of the self, 127, 129 Sense, 19, 56, 105, 159, 165, 173, 188n24; bodily senses, 157; phenomenological

sense, 193; new sense of temporality, 22; sensation, 110, 114; sensational, 179; sense of, 10, 34, 39, 53, 55, 64–65, 67, 73, 75, 100–1, 106, 122, 130, 136–37, 140–41, 143, 145, 149, 157, 163, 165, 168, 170–72; sense of guilt, 65; sense of hope, 165, 193n5; sense of indebtedness, 20, 81; sense of morality, 64, 136–37, sense of temporality, xviii, 22, 171, 173; sensibility, 128, 137, 148; sensitivity, 1, 30 86; sensual, xv, 1, 19–20, 154, 183n54, 188n24; temporal sense, xviii, 65 Service, xiv–xv, xviii, 3–4, 7–8, 10, 20–22, 24, 30–32, 36–37, 43, 46, 56, 64–65, 69, 73–74, 77, 80, 82, 84, 86, 91–92, 94, 102, 105, 112, 125–26, 136, 143, 156, 169, 173–74, 177, 181n27, 190n32; intimate service, 17; ladies-first services, 76; personalized service, 16, 52; produce satisfaction, 21, 74, 94; professional services, 51; service commodity, 11–13; sexualized services, 2 Service economy, xviii, 7, 10, 13, 16, 21, 24, 52, 73, 173; service sector, 3, 8, 11, 13, 16, 20, 22, 31, 36, 73, 94, 102, 181n27; servicecentered, 4, 21, 31, 69, 92, 169, 173–74 Sex, xi, xvi, 2, 4–6, 21, 27, 36–37, 42, 45, 74–75, 79–80, 85, 88–90, 94–98, 106, 125–28, 152, 154, 156–60, 179n10, 180nn11, 12, 188nn20, 21; normal sex, 95; sex commerce (see also commercial), 4; sex role, 94–95, 128; sexless couple, 126 Sex work, 5, 21, 36, 45, 74, 79, 80, 95–96, 156– 60, 189n7; prostitute, 45, 151–152, 154–56; prostitution, 36, 151, 154–58 Sexuality, 38, 95–96, 98, 126, 130, 176; abnormal sexuality, 95; female sexuality, 128, 132; heterosexual, 96, 114, 129–30, 179n2; promiscuity, 36; sexual, 5, 7, 14, 86, 89–90, 94–95, 107, 109, 112, 114, 126–27, 132, 171, 183n54, 188n17; sexual attractiveness, 88, 106, 109–10, 112–14, 126, 128; sexual ideologies, 130; sexual norms, 126, 133; sexual objects, 88, 96; sexual performance, 86; sexual pleasure, 105, 126 Sexualized, 2; desexualized, 128, 132 Silence, xvi, 79, 87, 190n38; silenced, 147; silent, 10, 94, 118, 148–49 Skeggs, Beverly, 120, 190n27

224    INDEX

Social mobility, xiii, 8, 21, 34, 33, 57, 185n43, 187n7; elevating social status, 10; status mobility, 186n7 Socioeconomic, 10, 24, 32, 94, 100–2, 116, 120, 165; socioeconomic dynamism, 16, 78; socioeconomic reality, 16, 32; socioeconomic structure, 7, 150; socioeconomic transformation, 9, 38 Space, xv, 2–3, 10, 12, 21, 24, 28–29, 36, 40–42, 46, 52, 68, 71, 92, 97, 100, 119, 148–49, 160, 164, 170, 172–73; distance, 28, 35–36, 61, 85, 107, 123, 139, 140–141, 144, 153, 157, 167; proximity, xv, 17; spatial, xviii, 14, 38, 110; topography, 24, 34 Spectacle, 78, 82, 182n52; economy of appearance and affect, 173; spectator, 27, 29, 34, 41 Stage, xiii, 21, 23, 41, 71, 99, 110, 113, 119, 136, 145–46, 167, 174; backstage, 52, 59, 61, 142; club stage, 16, 42, 68, 160, 165; dramaturgical stage, 41, front stage, 21, 42, 90; off stage, 69; stage scene, 11; staged seduction (see also seduction), xviii, 4, 20, 69, 165, 174; staged, 16, 22, 28, 30, 41, 45, 52, 54, 57, 75, 78, 106, 117, 126, 132, 135, 137, 159, 160, 172; staging and casting, 46 Status quo, 35, 102, 114, 131–32, 157, 166; break free from the status quo (see also freedom), 8 Stewart, Susan, 189n4, 193n17 Stigma, 5, 95, 148, 157; prejudice, 7, 157; promiscuity, 36; shame, 56, 121, 147, 157; sleazy, 5, 94; stigmatized, 94–96, 106, 148, 157 Strategy, 73, 92, 121, 123, 193n12; business strategy, 95; calculated effort, 1, 12; strategic, 78, 132, 138; strategic use of promise (see also promise), 8; tactics, 139–40, 154 Structure, 21, 30, 150, 183n52, 187n2; structural inequalities, 4, 159, 180n24; structural reforms, xviii, 3, 180n22; structural shift, 180n; structural struggle, 66 Subjectivity, 102–5, 193n20; commodified yet entrepreneurial subjectivity, 74; contradictory subjectivity, 74; ethical subject, 18, 137; male subjectivity, 21, 74, 97; neoliberal subjectivity, 38; professional subjectivities (see also masculinity), 96; socioeconomic and psychodynamic cre-

ation of subjectivity, 10; subjectivity and class struggle (see also class), 74, 101, 106; subjectivity and self-worth, 34; subjectivity formation, 106, 159, 170 Subordination, 98, 121, 126, 131, 136, 141; subjection, 101, 110, 132 Success, 28, 36, 68–69, 78–79, 81, 89, 97, 100–2, 111, 114, 118, 138–39, 190n 47; business success, 45, 99, 114, future success, 3, 5, 66, 101, 106, 138–39, 173; professional success, 10; successful, 4–10, 12–13, 15, 33, 57, 61–65, 75–76, 82, 84–86, 91, 94, 98, 138–39, 142, 167–68, 183n58, Synergy, 27, 78, 168 Tacit (see also strategy), 17, 33, 136, 159, 181n41 Temporality, 4, 66, 100–1, 168, 174, 176, 192n5; changing sense of temporality, 173; ephemerality and eternity, 3; extended temporality, 12–13; imagined, 3, 9, 22, 24, 26–27, 30, 42, 52, 66–67, 81, 85, 105–6, 109–10, 140, 153, 156, 166, 189n10; live in the future-oriented temporality (see future), 10; stretching temporality, 12, 34; temporal, xviii, 14, 20, 38, 65–66, 73, 100–1, 110, 131, 153, 168, 191n51; temporary, 3, 26, 31, 35, 54, 83–84, 86, 100–1, 106, 185n34, 188n24; time, xi–xviii, 3–4, 8–9, 12, 14, 16, 18, 21, 23, 25, 29, 31–32, 34, 37, 40, 43–44, 47, 49, 51, 53–54, 56, 58–59, 61–63, 66, 68, 75, 79, 80, 82–91, 94, 96, 100, 103–8, 110, 115, 120, 122, 124, 128, 130, 139–40, 143, 151–52, 154, 160, 163–64, 169–70, 173, 175, 177, 182n46, 185n43, 186n1, 188n25, 192n5, 193n5; worthiness spread over time (see also value), 12 Theater, xiii, xvii, 4, 11, 28, 36, 42, 68–69, 71, 141–42, 167, 173; theatrical, 4, 22, 41–42, 45, 58, 68–69, 99, 119, 137, 145–46, 167; theatrical effect, 41–42. Tokyo, ix, xi–xiv, 4–6, 20–41, 44, 57, 69, 71–72, 75, 79, 84–85, 93, 98, 101, 103, 110, 112, 133, 135, 138, 151, 153, 165, 168, 175–77, 183nn2, 3, 184n 17, 185n44, 186n48, 189n23; a cultural icon, 25–26; a fetish, 30; “advertising city,” 29; Edo, 23, 42; “Disneyfication,” 28; futuristic city, 20, 23–24, 26; global city, 23; TOKIO, 23, 25,

INDEX    225

30, 34; Tokyo problem, 26, 184n12; Tokyo’s affective cityscape (see also affective cityscape), 21, 30, 38, 69, 101, 133, 165, 174 Theory: Critical Theory, 168–69; affect theory, (see also affect) 168–69; political theory, 19; social theory, 19, 191n2 Temporospatial, (see also space, temporality), 18, 21, 65, 68, 159. Trade, 6, 11, 15, 45, 75, 78, 80, 85–86, 97, 123, 147, 161, 183n1, 190n32; free trade, 11; love trade (see also love business), 87, 91; water trade, 147, 190n32 Tradition, 26, 131, 164, 169; traditional, xvi, 26, 31, 36, 93, 105, 114, 121, 126, 128, 130, 150, Truth, 15, 17, 19, 68, 136, 138, 144–45, 148–50, 160, 164–65, 171, 174, 181n38, 182n45; absolute truth, 142; truth and falsity, 171; true or false, 15, 183n58; truthfulness (see also moral questions), 4, 165; unknowable, 145, 165 Tsing, Anna L., 26, 173, 183n54, 184n13, 194n33 Uncertainty, 3, 10, 20, 53, 67, 78, 100, 125 Upward Social Mobility, (see social mobility) Urban development, 25; city development, 28; Urban Renaissance, 25; urbanization, 184n21 Value, xviii, 3, 10–14, 16, 38, 45, 56, 64, 74, 77–78, 83, 94, 97, 102, 109, 120, 129, 165, 174; affective value, xviii, 11–13, 16, 34, 38, 78, 143, 159, 173, 184nn10, 11; economic value, 11–12, 77, 96, 150; commodity value, 96–97; neoliberal values, 8, 38, 74, 95, 97, 102; symbolic value, 12–13, 24, 29, 51, 56–57, 69, 78, 82, 93, 137, 143, 159, 164, 182n52; systems of values and ethics, 94–95, 97; values of service, 10, 13 Victory, 14, 120, 124–25; winner, 3, 9, 33, 59, 102; winning, 2, 63, 123–24 Vision, xviii, 10, 24–26, 32, 34–35, 37, 41, 73, 121, 138, 140, 146; envision, 3, 7, 9, 28, 76; visions of, 10, 24, 35, 37 Vulnerability, xvi, xvii, 4, 10, 21, 67, 118, 121, 159, 168; vulnerable, 57, 92, 94, 133, 148, 152

Wealth, xv, 11, 26, 34, 112, 117, 121, 139, 181n30 Well-being, 11, 13, 33, 55, 67, 73, 128, 133; happiness, 2, 20, 68, 81, 106, 111, 133, 187n1, 188n26 Wish, 101, 109, 139, 149, 151, 155–56, 172, 175, 177; wishes, 14, 16, 22, 126, 148–49, 154, 156, 170–72 Wolf, Naomi, (see beauty myth), 111, 189n12 Women: as consumer citizens, 7; married women, 32, 106, 109–10, 127–30, 132; middle-aged women, 21, 56, 85, 88, 105–6, 109, 112, 121, 128, 132, 189n7, 191n47; single women, 121, 129; young women, 8, 105–6, 121–22; “women’s age,” 31; women’s emotional labor, (see also emotional labor), 73, 94; women’s extramarital romance, 126–27; women’s fantasies, 11, 21, 36, 102; women’s pursuit, 127 Womanliness, (see also femininity, onna), 105, 109–10, 113–14, 129; womanhood, 107, 114, 130, 132 Work: contract workers, 7, 100, 188n25; creative work, 32; emotion work, 73, 121, 150, 187n2; flexible work, 8, 28, 32, 179n3; full-time regular work, 8, 32, 86, 188n25; furītā (free worker), 31, lowwage worker, 75, 84; part-time worker, 4, 31–32; temporary work, 35, 185n34, 188n25; shadow work, 150, 191n8, “night work,” xii; non-regular work, 8, 31–33, 75, 81, 84; shigoto (work or profession), 91; work-related illness, 62; working poor, 33, 36; workplace, 37, 52, 61–62, 66, 68, 79, 98–99, 140, 190n26 Yamada, Masahiro, (see hope disparity society), 33, 179n3, 180nn17, 23, 185nn39, 41 Yoshimi, Shunya, 28–29, 177, 184n24, 185n30, 186n50 Youth, 8–9, 27–28, 30, 33, 36, 83, 92, 99, 104–5, 107, 114; vitality, 104, 108–9, 115; youthful, 111, 113, 128; youthfulness, 10, 117; youth-oriented, 21, 56, 104, 121, 130 Žižek, Slavoj, (see also Civility), 149, 172, 191n5, 194n30