Salon Wanderlust | Tokyo sex wars: Part 2

[Salon Wanderlust: Travel with a passion]

T A B L E_T A L K
Do you hate Bed and Breakfasts? Weigh in on why or why not in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y
Tokyo sex wars
By Karl Taro Greenfeld
Drug demons and sex junkies in Japan's new demimonde
(11/09/98)
On the road with the Smokejumpers
By The King Teen
What happens when a punk-rockabilly band from San Francisco tours the country in a broken-down Big Orange Van?
(11/06/98)
This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news
(11/06/98)
Savvy tips for holiday travelers
By Dawn MacKeen
When can you actually demand money from an airline? Where can you find low-cost holiday fares? Christopher McGinnis knows
(11/05/98)
The Hollywood tourists never see
By Jeff Greenwald
A travel writer finds life-changing adventure on the sound stage of an NBC sitcom
(11/03/98)

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tokyo sex wars
____________________________^{. . . . . P A R T - 2 . . . . .}
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[ GET PART ONE ]
THE ARRIVAL OF 24
"CLASSY LADIES" TO
WORK IN A FLEDGLING
NIGHTSPOT CONVULSES
JAPAN'S NEW DEMIMONDE.

BY KARL TARO
GREENFELD

That February, the drizzle was persistent, an enveloping, ultrafine mist that wilted everything it touched. My enthusiasm for the various articles I had been sent to complete had also dampened as I found I was unable to regain that old Tokyo magic in this sodden, gray city. The streets that I had remembered as being full of hip movers and shakers were traversed by raincoat-clad, umbrella-wielding salarymen and office ladies. The bustle and energy I had hoped would reinvigorate me were nowhere to be found.
I had been at the Ministry of Finance most of the afternoon. That gray brick, concrete and steel bunker that hunkered on a Toranomon city block in central Tokyo was the grubby nexus of an elaborate and particularly egregious, even by Japanese standards, jusen (savings and loan) scandal that was rocking Japanese securities markets and consumer confidence. The usually smarmy ministry officials who, in prior meetings, had always communicated to me a breezy self-confidence regarding their stewardship of the world's second largest economy now seemed markedly downcast. The dingy corridors -- Japanese ministries are always remarkably grimy -- were crowded with slow-walking, shellshocked bureaucrats who, for perhaps the first time in their lives, had no excuses.
"We simply did not know," one assistant minister said of the ministry's role in exacerbating the scandal by throwing more money at it. "We had hoped things would get better."
The mood at the ministry was like the bridge of the Titanic after striking the iceberg. As I was exiting through the lobby, I saw security officers in white caps and gloves seated before vast control panels with bright red and green blinking lights, staring straight ahead, arms at their sides, doing nothing. The ship, plainly, was sinking. And no one knew what to do.

Bachelor Party was swarming with salarymen. They sat in black upholstered chairs, beneath a ceiling of black velvet with heavenly constellations of gold, five-pointed stars, sipping scotch and waters, smoking Casters and Mild Sevens and staring at Sindii Starr, who was strutting on an elevated stage, clad in black-strapped stilettos and a gold ankle bracelet. She undulated to the front of the stage, blew a kiss to a gent in the back and then bent over backward so that her face was reflected in a mirror behind the stage and her blond-dyed pubic hair was inches from a bespectacled, intoxicated Sanwa executive.
The crowded club smelled of sweat, smoke and scotch. Girls in various states of undress were working every pit and booth in the joint, straddling salarymen, pressing their breasts into flushed, drunken faces, grinding their buttocks into stiffening trousers. Amid all this, liters of tequila and scotch were disappearing down off-work gullets as fast as the bartenders could ring them up. The businessmen were throwing blue and white 1,000-yen notes and brown and yellow 10,000-yen bills at the girls in frenzied efforts to get more of whatever the girls had to offer. Every once in a while a girl would shout and slap at a guy, and then acquiesce to whatever the man had requested when the appropriate bouquet of bank notes had been proffered. The girls drew the line at biting.
The Sindii Starrs, Dawns, Dixies and Renatas were all big tits and shaved genitalia, thorough wax jobs and lacquered makeup. These were professionals, the best the San Fernando Valley had to offer. And they were here, in Tokyo, and they were the only ones who appeared to be cashing in on a downward economic spiral.
The ambience was vastly different from that at a hostess bar. Hostess bars forced men to be patient. There were rules: You were greeted by the Mama-san, you were shown to your table, you paid for the young lady's time, her drinks, maybe a preposterously overpriced snack, and if you were lucky, after a half-dozen visits, you kissed the young lady on the cheek. After three months and tens of thousands of dollars, you maybe got to sleep with the girl.
But here, at this new breed of Tokyo strip club, the only rule seemed to be to take what you could when you could because who knew when the girl would move on to the next booth. The women were little more than human erotomatons to be fondled and probed by the drunken men. That small hostess bar nicety, of meeting and greeting and pretending to be interested in more than sex, had been jettisoned. Here, you were greeted by a tuxedo-clad Nigerian named Mr. Jackson who led you to a booth, took your drink order and asked you to pick out a girl. When she arrived, her top already open to artificially stupendous cleavage and her vibrator visible in a tiny, leather purse, she asked immediately if you would like a friction dance.
"If hostess bars are a commercialization of the courtship ritual," Rie Sekiguchi, hostess turned journalist, commented, "then Tokyo's strip clubs are the instant ramen-ization of that ritual."
Samson led me though the club to a VIP lounge on the second floor where older versions of the salarymen on the first floor sat in more generously padded chairs, attended to by slightly more attractive versions of the girls on the first floor. We were greeted by Mr. Amano, a youngish Japanese man with long, stringy black hair in an unkempt ponytail. He wore a silver-gray suit, white shirt and a diamond stud earring. Instead of a conventional necktie, there was an intricate black knotting of fabric at his collar that resembled crossed shards of lightning. Carrying a leather notebook and two cellular phones, he showed us to a booth in the middle of the room. A gentleman in a get-up like an Old West saloon barkeep's -- apron, tuxedo shirt and bow tie -- brought us iced oolong tea.
Amano's phones rang incessantly. No matter who was calling, his answers consisted entirely of profuse apologies.
Samson removed from the inside jacket pocket of his made-in-Seoul polyester suit the envelope containing the Polaroids he had shown me back at his shop.
Amano took the Polaroids and shuffled through them perfunctorily, wiping his brow with a damp cloth midway through and then setting them down to apologize on the phone to yet another caller. He pushed the power button on a gray plastic phone, telling Samson that these girls were fine.
Then a barrel-chested Nigerian whose muscle mass appeared to be straining against his starched white shirt and black jacket loomed above Amano's right shoulder. Amano, seeming to sense the Nigerian behind him, flipped through the Polaroids again, holding them a foot to his left so they were in the Nigerian's line of sight.
The clubs were owned by Japanese and managed by a combination of Nigerians and Japanese. (The Nigerians had risen to middle management in the Japanese adult entertainment industry because of their surprising aptitude for the Japanese language and, perhaps more important, the fact that many of them were built like linebackers. It was cost-effective to have managers able to serve duty as bouncers if necessary.)
"Fine, fine," the Nigerian said. Then, looking up at Samson, he added, "That is all we ask for: classy ladies."
He shook his head and shrugged as if the shortage of suitable Caucasian strippers in Tokyo was a genuine tragedy on par with corrupt prime ministers or collapsing savings and loans.

Everywhere I went with Samson, the primary topic of conversation was classy ladies, young ladies or attractive ladies. New clubs were opening at the rate of about one a week. There was Dior in Shibuya, there were six Seventh Heavens scattered around Tokyo, there was Body Heat, Contact, Bachelor Party, Stopless, two Maximuses in Yokohama, one J-Foxx and one One Eyed Jacks. Every new club needed classy ladies, young ladies, attractive ladies. The male patrons of RIP were scheming various means of importing more of these needed females. For a few of the patrons, that meant flying in an old girlfriend or former flame. For others, elaborate subterfuge was involved; there were visa regulations to circumvent, taxes to avoid and bargain airfares to track down. Clubs were paying a premium per girl, 50 percent of her first months' earnings to the "agent" who had introduced her. A skillful operator such as Samson stood to make at least $50,000 for the strippers whose images he was carrying around in his jacket pocket.
Predictably, Randall and Haru had come up with the idea of turning RIP into a strip club. Work had commenced on a small, circular stage in the back, next to a DJ booth. Yet even as he jumped aboard this bandwagon, Randall lamented this new direction in Tokyo night life, putting words to my thoughts when he said, "I'm not crazy about this whole gaijin stripper craze. I liked hostesses. You see, a hostess comes to Japan innocent and then has her heart broken. A stripper doesn't have a heart to break."

There were dozens of teased-hair, leather-clad vixens, looking like they were right off the set of a Ratt video, who would drop in to RIP to see Samson, Shore Patrol or any of the other foreign agents who had set them up at their clubs of employment. The girls came looking for a new joint, having heard about a better-paying gig, or they just wanted to talk to another Yank or Aussie or Canuck who would at least pretend to understand what they were going through.
The girls glided in on their strappy stilettos and black-leather bodkins, snapping gum and smelling of hair spray. They would set down their satchels containing G-strings, lubricants, whatever erotic toys or gimmicks they employed in their acts, and then unload to whomever would listen about how Mr. This or That had mistreated them, victimized them or otherwise done them wrong. Inevitably, these malfeasances occurred in the financial realm. Though the girls made the majority of their incomes in tips, their housing and transportation were supposed to be paid by the clubs. Shacked up as they were in tiny, six-tatami-mat, cockroach-infested apartments, many of the girls could not believe that the $700-a-month housing allowances were being legitimately spent.
The male patrons of RIP would gawk at the whining females and shake their heads. We knew they were making tens of thousands of dollars a week. And it was our conclusion they were spoiled rotten by their own good luck. They happened to have landed when Tokyo was uniquely poised to indulge the gluttony of turbocharged foreign strip clubs. Just four years ago this proliferation of topless and bottomless clubs featuring gaijin women was unthinkable. There had always been a few foreigners who worked in the mizu-shobai (water-trade), that catchall term for brothels, massage parlors and strip clubs. But these clubs had been confined to specific areas of the city and were staffed almost entirely by Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos or Thais.
The new generation of strip clubs were in the same sections of town as the foreign hostess bars used to be, often in the very same venues. I was saddened whenever I visited a bar I used to know and found it shuttered or converted to a strip club.

Samson never stopped to wonder at these transformations. He had been in Tokyo for four years. He perceived the atmosphere of anxiety and desperation as one where a foreigner such as himself could prosper. The Japanese were repairing old motorbikes now rather than buying new ones. The Japanese were taking more illegal drugs than ever before. And the Japanese were hungry for a glimpse of foreign pussy. Samson inserted himself into these various markets and was gradually bankrolling a small fortune, more money than he could make back home, wherever that was.
No matter how many girls Samson, Shore Patrol or other "agents" found for the clubs, the clubs always needed more. Samson and Shore Patrol, as they sat at RIP's recently delaminated bar, answering pages and making calls on their mobile phones, had come to resemble the harried businessmen clients of the bars for which they were hiring. Samson and Shore Patrol had taken to renting vans for the evening and shuttling girls from one club to another, alleviating with such stopgap measures the appearance of a shortfall.
But both Samson and Shore Patrol knew there simply weren't enough girls in Tokyo to staff all the clubs that were opening. The foreign stripper population in Tokyo had swelled to approximately 4,000, according to Hideo Yasunobu, a club owner in Shinjuku, "but we could easily employ double that."
The competition among the foreign agents for girls had become so intense that the guys were now poaching girls from one another, employing whatever means were necessary to provide enough girls for their clubs. Occasionally when an attractive girl showed up in RIP, fights would break out between agents over who would represent her and where she should work.
The two leading agents were Samson and Shore Patrol. Neither man succeeded because of natural charisma or charm; there were other men around who had much more of those. They had become the top earning agents because of diligence and hustle. They worked tirelessly, making the rounds of Roppongi nightspots to attempt to shake out one more woman who might be willing to take her clothes off for money. Samson would happily ride his motorcycle up to an Ogikubo gaijin house to check on a rumor of a potential stripper having taken up residence. Shore Patrol sometimes took the train out to Narita airport, waiting in the arrivals lounge to poach newcomer dancers booked into competing clubs.
N E X T+P A G E | Shaking the drabs in the new Tokyo

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY GREG TUCKER


	T A B L E_T A L K Do you hate Bed and Breakfasts? Weigh in on why or why not in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Tokyo sex wars By Karl Taro Greenfeld Drug demons and sex junkies in Japan's new demimonde (11/09/98) On the road with the Smokejumpers By The King Teen What happens when a punk-rockabilly band from San Francisco tours the country in a broken-down Big Orange Van? (11/06/98) This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news (11/06/98) Savvy tips for holiday travelers By Dawn MacKeen When can you actually demand money from an airline? Where can you find low-cost holiday fares? Christopher McGinnis knows (11/05/98) The Hollywood tourists never see By Jeff Greenwald A travel writer finds life-changing adventure on the sound stage of an NBC sitcom (11/03/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		tokyo sex wars ____________________________^{. . . . . P A R T - 2 . . . . .} [ GET PART ONE ] THE ARRIVAL OF 24 "CLASSY LADIES" TO WORK IN A FLEDGLING NIGHTSPOT CONVULSES JAPAN'S NEW DEMIMONDE. BY KARL TARO GREENFELD That February, the drizzle was persistent, an enveloping, ultrafine mist that wilted everything it touched. My enthusiasm for the various articles I had been sent to complete had also dampened as I found I was unable to regain that old Tokyo magic in this sodden, gray city. The streets that I had remembered as being full of hip movers and shakers were traversed by raincoat-clad, umbrella-wielding salarymen and office ladies. The bustle and energy I had hoped would reinvigorate me were nowhere to be found. I had been at the Ministry of Finance most of the afternoon. That gray brick, concrete and steel bunker that hunkered on a Toranomon city block in central Tokyo was the grubby nexus of an elaborate and particularly egregious, even by Japanese standards, jusen (savings and loan) scandal that was rocking Japanese securities markets and consumer confidence. The usually smarmy ministry officials who, in prior meetings, had always communicated to me a breezy self-confidence regarding their stewardship of the world's second largest economy now seemed markedly downcast. The dingy corridors -- Japanese ministries are always remarkably grimy -- were crowded with slow-walking, shellshocked bureaucrats who, for perhaps the first time in their lives, had no excuses. "We simply did not know," one assistant minister said of the ministry's role in exacerbating the scandal by throwing more money at it. "We had hoped things would get better." The mood at the ministry was like the bridge of the Titanic after striking the iceberg. As I was exiting through the lobby, I saw security officers in white caps and gloves seated before vast control panels with bright red and green blinking lights, staring straight ahead, arms at their sides, doing nothing. The ship, plainly, was sinking. And no one knew what to do. Bachelor Party was swarming with salarymen. They sat in black upholstered chairs, beneath a ceiling of black velvet with heavenly constellations of gold, five-pointed stars, sipping scotch and waters, smoking Casters and Mild Sevens and staring at Sindii Starr, who was strutting on an elevated stage, clad in black-strapped stilettos and a gold ankle bracelet. She undulated to the front of the stage, blew a kiss to a gent in the back and then bent over backward so that her face was reflected in a mirror behind the stage and her blond-dyed pubic hair was inches from a bespectacled, intoxicated Sanwa executive. The crowded club smelled of sweat, smoke and scotch. Girls in various states of undress were working every pit and booth in the joint, straddling salarymen, pressing their breasts into flushed, drunken faces, grinding their buttocks into stiffening trousers. Amid all this, liters of tequila and scotch were disappearing down off-work gullets as fast as the bartenders could ring them up. The businessmen were throwing blue and white 1,000-yen notes and brown and yellow 10,000-yen bills at the girls in frenzied efforts to get more of whatever the girls had to offer. Every once in a while a girl would shout and slap at a guy, and then acquiesce to whatever the man had requested when the appropriate bouquet of bank notes had been proffered. The girls drew the line at biting. The Sindii Starrs, Dawns, Dixies and Renatas were all big tits and shaved genitalia, thorough wax jobs and lacquered makeup. These were professionals, the best the San Fernando Valley had to offer. And they were here, in Tokyo, and they were the only ones who appeared to be cashing in on a downward economic spiral. The ambience was vastly different from that at a hostess bar. Hostess bars forced men to be patient. There were rules: You were greeted by the Mama-san, you were shown to your table, you paid for the young lady's time, her drinks, maybe a preposterously overpriced snack, and if you were lucky, after a half-dozen visits, you kissed the young lady on the cheek. After three months and tens of thousands of dollars, you maybe got to sleep with the girl. But here, at this new breed of Tokyo strip club, the only rule seemed to be to take what you could when you could because who knew when the girl would move on to the next booth. The women were little more than human erotomatons to be fondled and probed by the drunken men. That small hostess bar nicety, of meeting and greeting and pretending to be interested in more than sex, had been jettisoned. Here, you were greeted by a tuxedo-clad Nigerian named Mr. Jackson who led you to a booth, took your drink order and asked you to pick out a girl. When she arrived, her top already open to artificially stupendous cleavage and her vibrator visible in a tiny, leather purse, she asked immediately if you would like a friction dance. "If hostess bars are a commercialization of the courtship ritual," Rie Sekiguchi, hostess turned journalist, commented, "then Tokyo's strip clubs are the instant ramen-ization of that ritual." Samson led me though the club to a VIP lounge on the second floor where older versions of the salarymen on the first floor sat in more generously padded chairs, attended to by slightly more attractive versions of the girls on the first floor. We were greeted by Mr. Amano, a youngish Japanese man with long, stringy black hair in an unkempt ponytail. He wore a silver-gray suit, white shirt and a diamond stud earring. Instead of a conventional necktie, there was an intricate black knotting of fabric at his collar that resembled crossed shards of lightning. Carrying a leather notebook and two cellular phones, he showed us to a booth in the middle of the room. A gentleman in a get-up like an Old West saloon barkeep's -- apron, tuxedo shirt and bow tie -- brought us iced oolong tea. Amano's phones rang incessantly. No matter who was calling, his answers consisted entirely of profuse apologies. Samson removed from the inside jacket pocket of his made-in-Seoul polyester suit the envelope containing the Polaroids he had shown me back at his shop. Amano took the Polaroids and shuffled through them perfunctorily, wiping his brow with a damp cloth midway through and then setting them down to apologize on the phone to yet another caller. He pushed the power button on a gray plastic phone, telling Samson that these girls were fine. Then a barrel-chested Nigerian whose muscle mass appeared to be straining against his starched white shirt and black jacket loomed above Amano's right shoulder. Amano, seeming to sense the Nigerian behind him, flipped through the Polaroids again, holding them a foot to his left so they were in the Nigerian's line of sight. The clubs were owned by Japanese and managed by a combination of Nigerians and Japanese. (The Nigerians had risen to middle management in the Japanese adult entertainment industry because of their surprising aptitude for the Japanese language and, perhaps more important, the fact that many of them were built like linebackers. It was cost-effective to have managers able to serve duty as bouncers if necessary.) "Fine, fine," the Nigerian said. Then, looking up at Samson, he added, "That is all we ask for: classy ladies." He shook his head and shrugged as if the shortage of suitable Caucasian strippers in Tokyo was a genuine tragedy on par with corrupt prime ministers or collapsing savings and loans. Everywhere I went with Samson, the primary topic of conversation was classy ladies, young ladies or attractive ladies. New clubs were opening at the rate of about one a week. There was Dior in Shibuya, there were six Seventh Heavens scattered around Tokyo, there was Body Heat, Contact, Bachelor Party, Stopless, two Maximuses in Yokohama, one J-Foxx and one One Eyed Jacks. Every new club needed classy ladies, young ladies, attractive ladies. The male patrons of RIP were scheming various means of importing more of these needed females. For a few of the patrons, that meant flying in an old girlfriend or former flame. For others, elaborate subterfuge was involved; there were visa regulations to circumvent, taxes to avoid and bargain airfares to track down. Clubs were paying a premium per girl, 50 percent of her first months' earnings to the "agent" who had introduced her. A skillful operator such as Samson stood to make at least $50,000 for the strippers whose images he was carrying around in his jacket pocket. Predictably, Randall and Haru had come up with the idea of turning RIP into a strip club. Work had commenced on a small, circular stage in the back, next to a DJ booth. Yet even as he jumped aboard this bandwagon, Randall lamented this new direction in Tokyo night life, putting words to my thoughts when he said, "I'm not crazy about this whole gaijin stripper craze. I liked hostesses. You see, a hostess comes to Japan innocent and then has her heart broken. A stripper doesn't have a heart to break." There were dozens of teased-hair, leather-clad vixens, looking like they were right off the set of a Ratt video, who would drop in to RIP to see Samson, Shore Patrol or any of the other foreign agents who had set them up at their clubs of employment. The girls came looking for a new joint, having heard about a better-paying gig, or they just wanted to talk to another Yank or Aussie or Canuck who would at least pretend to understand what they were going through. The girls glided in on their strappy stilettos and black-leather bodkins, snapping gum and smelling of hair spray. They would set down their satchels containing G-strings, lubricants, whatever erotic toys or gimmicks they employed in their acts, and then unload to whomever would listen about how Mr. This or That had mistreated them, victimized them or otherwise done them wrong. Inevitably, these malfeasances occurred in the financial realm. Though the girls made the majority of their incomes in tips, their housing and transportation were supposed to be paid by the clubs. Shacked up as they were in tiny, six-tatami-mat, cockroach-infested apartments, many of the girls could not believe that the $700-a-month housing allowances were being legitimately spent. The male patrons of RIP would gawk at the whining females and shake their heads. We knew they were making tens of thousands of dollars a week. And it was our conclusion they were spoiled rotten by their own good luck. They happened to have landed when Tokyo was uniquely poised to indulge the gluttony of turbocharged foreign strip clubs. Just four years ago this proliferation of topless and bottomless clubs featuring gaijin women was unthinkable. There had always been a few foreigners who worked in the mizu-shobai (water-trade), that catchall term for brothels, massage parlors and strip clubs. But these clubs had been confined to specific areas of the city and were staffed almost entirely by Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos or Thais. The new generation of strip clubs were in the same sections of town as the foreign hostess bars used to be, often in the very same venues. I was saddened whenever I visited a bar I used to know and found it shuttered or converted to a strip club. Samson never stopped to wonder at these transformations. He had been in Tokyo for four years. He perceived the atmosphere of anxiety and desperation as one where a foreigner such as himself could prosper. The Japanese were repairing old motorbikes now rather than buying new ones. The Japanese were taking more illegal drugs than ever before. And the Japanese were hungry for a glimpse of foreign pussy. Samson inserted himself into these various markets and was gradually bankrolling a small fortune, more money than he could make back home, wherever that was. No matter how many girls Samson, Shore Patrol or other "agents" found for the clubs, the clubs always needed more. Samson and Shore Patrol, as they sat at RIP's recently delaminated bar, answering pages and making calls on their mobile phones, had come to resemble the harried businessmen clients of the bars for which they were hiring. Samson and Shore Patrol had taken to renting vans for the evening and shuttling girls from one club to another, alleviating with such stopgap measures the appearance of a shortfall. But both Samson and Shore Patrol knew there simply weren't enough girls in Tokyo to staff all the clubs that were opening. The foreign stripper population in Tokyo had swelled to approximately 4,000, according to Hideo Yasunobu, a club owner in Shinjuku, "but we could easily employ double that." The competition among the foreign agents for girls had become so intense that the guys were now poaching girls from one another, employing whatever means were necessary to provide enough girls for their clubs. Occasionally when an attractive girl showed up in RIP, fights would break out between agents over who would represent her and where she should work. The two leading agents were Samson and Shore Patrol. Neither man succeeded because of natural charisma or charm; there were other men around who had much more of those. They had become the top earning agents because of diligence and hustle. They worked tirelessly, making the rounds of Roppongi nightspots to attempt to shake out one more woman who might be willing to take her clothes off for money. Samson would happily ride his motorcycle up to an Ogikubo gaijin house to check on a rumor of a potential stripper having taken up residence. Shore Patrol sometimes took the train out to Narita airport, waiting in the arrivals lounge to poach newcomer dancers booked into competing clubs. N E X T+P A G E \| Shaking the drabs in the new Tokyo - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY GREG TUCKER