Salon Wanderlust | Tokyo sex wars

[Salon Wanderlust: Travel with a passion]

T A B L E_T A L K
Where would you go if you had one or two months off? Make plans, imaginary or real, in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y
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)
Death on Ios
By Jeffrey Tayler
Could he recapture his youth with a passionate encounter on Greece's most hedonistic island?
(11/01/98)

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TOKYO SEX WARS | PAGE 1, 2
- - - - - - - - - -
The Tokyo where I came of age, amid the splash and glitter of the bubble economy, the dazzle of a gaudy, turbocharged boom that spit out six-figure salaries and fancy imported suits and allowed me for the first time in my life to feel like a grownup, was gone. Those were years when high school dropout hostesses, fresh off jumbo jet steerage one-way from Vancouver, Los Angeles, London, Stockholm or Melbourne, boasted of saving a million yen a month, and scruffy, snotty punks like myself, hair gelled and smarmy in Italian suits, abounded. We inhabited the neon-lit streets and shrieky nightclubs and black-lit bars with such aplomb because we were sure, totally, that we were in the right place at the right time. The vibe had been rapacious, but with the sense of optimism that springs from believing there is enough to go around.
The city that I flew into that dark February of 1996 was a half-decade removed from the glory of the bubble and mired in myriad political and financial scandals -- the prime minister was teetering, the banking system was on the verge of collapse. The mood of the city was somber. I took as my economic barometer the condition and well-being of Tokyo's foreign hostesses. If during the glory days there had been an insatiable demand for more hostesses, more good-time girls to pour drinks and make small talk with expense account-riding executives grown fat on Japan Inc., there was now a plethora of unemployed Caucasian blondes and brunettes roving the Roppongi and Ginza streets. Expense accounts had been slashed. It was no longer acceptable at Nomura, Dentsu or Mitsubishi to run up multi-thousand-dollar tabs, and the corporate warriors could no longer afford to spend millions of yen wooing these nocturnal flowers with lavish gifts and pecuniary displays of affection. Girls who used to make thousands of dollars a month and revel in diamond and gold perquisites were now unemployed. "One of the first things we slashed was entertainment expenses," said Masa Kobayashi of Sakura Bank. "When times are tough, having a good time is not so much of a priority."
But hostess bars, with their posh atmosphere, steady flow of drinks and beautiful women, had always helped businessmen close crucial deals. Times may have been tough, and businessmen less patient, but the need for a place to entertain clients and get a few cheap thrills ogling sexy, ostensibly available foreign women remained as real as ever. Just because business was down, that didn't mean that business had stopped. "The hostess bar was a business place," said Takeo Hideoka of All Nippon Airways. "That's what it was first and foremost. Take away a place to do business outside the home and office, and the Japanese GNP would suffer even more than it has."
It was the patrons of RIP who fueled the upstart industry that was replacing hostess bars as the evening entertainment of choice for well-heeled Japanese executives.

Samson squatted beside a carbon-caked 250cc motorcycle, his blackened hands twisting and fiddling in an attempt to adjust the Suzuki's carburetor. He had arrived in Japan with just one skill -- he was a whiz at repairing and restoring internal combustion engines. The small garage space he rented in Koto Ward was no larger than a walk-in closet, allowing him to store three motorcycles if they stood handlebar to exhaust. During the day he unfurled a canopy over the sidewalk to stake out a few more precious feet of working space and set to tinkering with motorcycles, scooters, mopeds, even the odd lawn mower or hedge-trimmer. Renowned in this neighborhood as the kuroi tei no gaijin ("foreigner with black hands"), Samson quickly made a reputation for himself as reliable, dependable and, most important of all, trustworthy. He also developed an extensive web of connections that allowed him to traffic in hard-to-trace stolen motorcycle parts, as well as illicit substances that he would transfer from the foreign community to the Japanese community and vice versa.
He stood up when he saw me, wiping his hands beneath a Husqvarno poster of a preposterously top-heavy Latina model leaning forward over a set of chrome handlebars. I had met Samson at RIP, where we were introduced by a mutual acquaintance who knew of my chemical predilections. After unsuccessfully trying to sell me a dodgy watch, Samson told me to come see him at his shop.
In the shadowy light beneath the canopy, framed by exhaust pipes and mufflers arrayed on the wall behind him, Samson appeared hauntingly thin, his narrow cheekbones and cleft chin giving him a drawn, hungry look. He had brown hair, which he kept short and well-groomed. By design, there was nothing exceptional about his appearance, save that he always seemed to be smirking around his two prominent buck teeth.
"So how do you know Motoko?" he asked.
"We used to work together," I told him.
He considered my answer, rolling his upper lip beneath his lower as he did so. He posed questions about why I was in Tokyo, about who I worked for.
We spoke of Bangkok, of pharmacies along Patpong, of bars we both knew. The conversation circled around but never quite settled on what I had come to see him about: heroin. I was impatient. My last few darvon were staving off serious discomfort, but I had concluded that in order to successfully research and complete my assignments I would need stronger narcotics.
My plan to wean myself from synthetic and nonsynthetic opiates in Tokyo had failed. I had sniffed what was supposed to be my last bindle of heroin on the plane to Tokyo. The dozen percocet and bottle of valium in my briefcase had been intended as a gradual detoxification kit. But the first morning in Tokyo, awake early because of a discomfiting combination of leg cramps and jet lag, I had wandered in the gray mist to see a sympathetic, elderly doctor I knew who provided me with a few dozen candy-colored darvons and some French tranquilizers called cercine. That had been a few days ago. Now I was running out of pills.
A few minutes later, while Samson washed his hands with powdered soap over a tiny, plastic basin, he said, facing the mirror, "So you're riding the horse?"
After he dried his hands, he removed a bindle of Japanese newsprint from behind the busty Hispanic woman and carefully unfolded it, revealing a mound of brownish powder. He had already pushed in the bike he had been repairing and had shuttered his modest establishment. There was barely room for the two of us to stand without touching. He poured out a small, two-centimeter-long line of the powder on a shiny, vinyl motorcycle seat. I inhaled the powder with a rolled-up 1,000-yen note and handed the note to him.
As we stood face to face in the crowded little garage, we agreed that I would buy the remains of what was in the bindle for 20,000 yen. Samson, relaxing after his day's work, handed me a deck of Polaroids.
"What do you think?" he asked.
The dark, shadowy photographs were of women, in bikinis or naked, with teased, stringy blond hair. Most of the girls were standing, but one or two were lying back on what appeared to be dining room tables holding their feet with their hands to show their splayed genitals to the camera. I was reminded of the Girl Next Door sections of various adult magazines.
"Who are they?" I asked.
Samson explained they were strippers, 24 of them, and they were en route to Tokyo via Vancouver. He had arranged to house, feed and transport these girls, who were to work in Bachelor Party, one of the new strip clubs opening around Tokyo. He had found them through a scout who worked in Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia, hiring girls to dance in the Far East. The new Tokyo clubs were competing for exotic dancers. Samson, along with Shore Patrol and a few other foreign hustlers, had gone into business providing girls for the new Tokyo topless and bottomless clubs. He kept an eye open for out-of-work hostesses and foreign girls fresh to Japan, but the clubs were increasingly requiring the top-heavy, siliconically and collagenically enhanced beauties of the type on the Husqvarna poster. Those sorts, the archetypal lap-dance queens, were harder to come by in Tokyo. Each club needed about 50 girls. For the girl with stupendous cleavage and firm buttocks, the money was very, very good.
"There's a definite shortage," Samson told me, "of classy ladies."
When those girls whose Polaroids Samson had shown me arrived and were ensconced on Japanese executives' laps, Samson would net his biggest score ever. None of the local agents had delivered 24 girls. Bachelor Party, an upstart club in Shibuya, would instantly leap to the fore of Tokyo's new wave of erotic entertainment; Samson would then allow himself to leave Tokyo. He wanted to exit a winner, on the heels of a big score, a memorable move, one the patrons of RIP would be recounting to each other for months to come.
Like so many people I met in Tokyo that dark season, he wanted out.
SALON | Nov. 9, 1998
This is the first of a two-part story. Tomorrow: The girls arrive in town.
Karl Taro Greenfeld has written previously for Salon Wanderlust on Ibiza, Samarkand, the expatriate circuit in Asia and Thailand.


	T A B L E_T A L K Where would you go if you had one or two months off? Make plans, imaginary or real, in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y 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) Death on Ios By Jeffrey Tayler Could he recapture his youth with a passionate encounter on Greece's most hedonistic island? (11/01/98) 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 \| PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - The Tokyo where I came of age, amid the splash and glitter of the bubble economy, the dazzle of a gaudy, turbocharged boom that spit out six-figure salaries and fancy imported suits and allowed me for the first time in my life to feel like a grownup, was gone. Those were years when high school dropout hostesses, fresh off jumbo jet steerage one-way from Vancouver, Los Angeles, London, Stockholm or Melbourne, boasted of saving a million yen a month, and scruffy, snotty punks like myself, hair gelled and smarmy in Italian suits, abounded. We inhabited the neon-lit streets and shrieky nightclubs and black-lit bars with such aplomb because we were sure, totally, that we were in the right place at the right time. The vibe had been rapacious, but with the sense of optimism that springs from believing there is enough to go around. The city that I flew into that dark February of 1996 was a half-decade removed from the glory of the bubble and mired in myriad political and financial scandals -- the prime minister was teetering, the banking system was on the verge of collapse. The mood of the city was somber. I took as my economic barometer the condition and well-being of Tokyo's foreign hostesses. If during the glory days there had been an insatiable demand for more hostesses, more good-time girls to pour drinks and make small talk with expense account-riding executives grown fat on Japan Inc., there was now a plethora of unemployed Caucasian blondes and brunettes roving the Roppongi and Ginza streets. Expense accounts had been slashed. It was no longer acceptable at Nomura, Dentsu or Mitsubishi to run up multi-thousand-dollar tabs, and the corporate warriors could no longer afford to spend millions of yen wooing these nocturnal flowers with lavish gifts and pecuniary displays of affection. Girls who used to make thousands of dollars a month and revel in diamond and gold perquisites were now unemployed. "One of the first things we slashed was entertainment expenses," said Masa Kobayashi of Sakura Bank. "When times are tough, having a good time is not so much of a priority." But hostess bars, with their posh atmosphere, steady flow of drinks and beautiful women, had always helped businessmen close crucial deals. Times may have been tough, and businessmen less patient, but the need for a place to entertain clients and get a few cheap thrills ogling sexy, ostensibly available foreign women remained as real as ever. Just because business was down, that didn't mean that business had stopped. "The hostess bar was a business place," said Takeo Hideoka of All Nippon Airways. "That's what it was first and foremost. Take away a place to do business outside the home and office, and the Japanese GNP would suffer even more than it has." It was the patrons of RIP who fueled the upstart industry that was replacing hostess bars as the evening entertainment of choice for well-heeled Japanese executives. Samson squatted beside a carbon-caked 250cc motorcycle, his blackened hands twisting and fiddling in an attempt to adjust the Suzuki's carburetor. He had arrived in Japan with just one skill -- he was a whiz at repairing and restoring internal combustion engines. The small garage space he rented in Koto Ward was no larger than a walk-in closet, allowing him to store three motorcycles if they stood handlebar to exhaust. During the day he unfurled a canopy over the sidewalk to stake out a few more precious feet of working space and set to tinkering with motorcycles, scooters, mopeds, even the odd lawn mower or hedge-trimmer. Renowned in this neighborhood as the kuroi tei no gaijin ("foreigner with black hands"), Samson quickly made a reputation for himself as reliable, dependable and, most important of all, trustworthy. He also developed an extensive web of connections that allowed him to traffic in hard-to-trace stolen motorcycle parts, as well as illicit substances that he would transfer from the foreign community to the Japanese community and vice versa. He stood up when he saw me, wiping his hands beneath a Husqvarno poster of a preposterously top-heavy Latina model leaning forward over a set of chrome handlebars. I had met Samson at RIP, where we were introduced by a mutual acquaintance who knew of my chemical predilections. After unsuccessfully trying to sell me a dodgy watch, Samson told me to come see him at his shop. In the shadowy light beneath the canopy, framed by exhaust pipes and mufflers arrayed on the wall behind him, Samson appeared hauntingly thin, his narrow cheekbones and cleft chin giving him a drawn, hungry look. He had brown hair, which he kept short and well-groomed. By design, there was nothing exceptional about his appearance, save that he always seemed to be smirking around his two prominent buck teeth. "So how do you know Motoko?" he asked. "We used to work together," I told him. He considered my answer, rolling his upper lip beneath his lower as he did so. He posed questions about why I was in Tokyo, about who I worked for. We spoke of Bangkok, of pharmacies along Patpong, of bars we both knew. The conversation circled around but never quite settled on what I had come to see him about: heroin. I was impatient. My last few darvon were staving off serious discomfort, but I had concluded that in order to successfully research and complete my assignments I would need stronger narcotics. My plan to wean myself from synthetic and nonsynthetic opiates in Tokyo had failed. I had sniffed what was supposed to be my last bindle of heroin on the plane to Tokyo. The dozen percocet and bottle of valium in my briefcase had been intended as a gradual detoxification kit. But the first morning in Tokyo, awake early because of a discomfiting combination of leg cramps and jet lag, I had wandered in the gray mist to see a sympathetic, elderly doctor I knew who provided me with a few dozen candy-colored darvons and some French tranquilizers called cercine. That had been a few days ago. Now I was running out of pills. A few minutes later, while Samson washed his hands with powdered soap over a tiny, plastic basin, he said, facing the mirror, "So you're riding the horse?" After he dried his hands, he removed a bindle of Japanese newsprint from behind the busty Hispanic woman and carefully unfolded it, revealing a mound of brownish powder. He had already pushed in the bike he had been repairing and had shuttered his modest establishment. There was barely room for the two of us to stand without touching. He poured out a small, two-centimeter-long line of the powder on a shiny, vinyl motorcycle seat. I inhaled the powder with a rolled-up 1,000-yen note and handed the note to him. As we stood face to face in the crowded little garage, we agreed that I would buy the remains of what was in the bindle for 20,000 yen. Samson, relaxing after his day's work, handed me a deck of Polaroids. "What do you think?" he asked. The dark, shadowy photographs were of women, in bikinis or naked, with teased, stringy blond hair. Most of the girls were standing, but one or two were lying back on what appeared to be dining room tables holding their feet with their hands to show their splayed genitals to the camera. I was reminded of the Girl Next Door sections of various adult magazines. "Who are they?" I asked. Samson explained they were strippers, 24 of them, and they were en route to Tokyo via Vancouver. He had arranged to house, feed and transport these girls, who were to work in Bachelor Party, one of the new strip clubs opening around Tokyo. He had found them through a scout who worked in Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia, hiring girls to dance in the Far East. The new Tokyo clubs were competing for exotic dancers. Samson, along with Shore Patrol and a few other foreign hustlers, had gone into business providing girls for the new Tokyo topless and bottomless clubs. He kept an eye open for out-of-work hostesses and foreign girls fresh to Japan, but the clubs were increasingly requiring the top-heavy, siliconically and collagenically enhanced beauties of the type on the Husqvarna poster. Those sorts, the archetypal lap-dance queens, were harder to come by in Tokyo. Each club needed about 50 girls. For the girl with stupendous cleavage and firm buttocks, the money was very, very good. "There's a definite shortage," Samson told me, "of classy ladies." When those girls whose Polaroids Samson had shown me arrived and were ensconced on Japanese executives' laps, Samson would net his biggest score ever. None of the local agents had delivered 24 girls. Bachelor Party, an upstart club in Shibuya, would instantly leap to the fore of Tokyo's new wave of erotic entertainment; Samson would then allow himself to leave Tokyo. He wanted to exit a winner, on the heels of a big score, a memorable move, one the patrons of RIP would be recounting to each other for months to come. Like so many people I met in Tokyo that dark season, he wanted out. SALON \| Nov. 9, 1998 This is the first of a two-part story. Tomorrow: The girls arrive in town. Karl Taro Greenfeld has written previously for Salon Wanderlust on Ibiza, Samarkand, the expatriate circuit in Asia and Thailand.