T A B L E_T A L K

Travelers discuss their love of Venice in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

__SEX AND THE SALARYMAN .|. PAGE 2 OF 2

Shinichi Itoh does not own a portable telephone. He oversees an entire switchboard at a Tokyo "telephone club." Business, he reports, has dropped by a third over the past several months. Itoh's club looks like a karaoke parlor, with knee-high velour seats, glass tables and gold-accented wallpaper. But instead of booths with sound equipment and colored lights, there are stalls with telephone extensions. Men pay about $35 for up to two hours here. During this time, Itoh will direct incoming calls to the men at random, or with regard to special requests. The calls come from women who have been handed toll-free numbers, typically distributed inside packets of free tissue handed out near train stations.

The men are almost always looking for some form of sex, says Itoh. Women callers usually want money, he adds, although a percentage are simply lonely and seek a conventional date or phone sex. The link between telephone clubs and teen prostitution is no secret. Several times last year, groups of two or three girls under 16 years old were arrested for robbing middle-aged men after meeting them through a telephone club and inviting them to a hotel. School officials and Diet (parliament) members have called for new restrictions on the clubs. But the enterprises and their cartoonish billboards, posters, placards (usually held up outside train stations by sullen, broken-looking 50-something men), stickers, flyers, brochures and tissue paper packets still litter the cityscape.

Tokyo has no red-light district. Rather, no part of the city is free of sexual enterprises. Turn a corner in Shimbashi, mere steps away from high-class Ginza, and you find the Apple Club, where child pornography, vials of women's urine with verifying photos, "lifelike" inflatable dolls and gynecology textbooks are on sale. Take the train to Tateyama, a seaside resort area two hours out of Tokyo, and you find, facing the station, a day-glo green and pink cloth banner touting a nearby hotel's live S&M show and "oral time," otherwise known as fellatio. Slip into a phone booth in Toritsu Daigaku, one of Tokyo's most expensive neighborhoods, and you can see business card-sized ads for prostitutes -- "18-21, part-timers, anal-OK" -- pasted to the glass.

To the casual observer, it seems obvious that Japan's famously disciplined work force stays that way in part because, for men at least, frustrations are routinely vented into heavy drinking and expensive sex. Considered normal, such habits do not often entangle salarymen in a way that interferes with their career commitments.

For increasing numbers, however, this lifestyle is no longer viable. With companies cutting bonuses and downsizing, the certainty with which salarymen can plan their future is plummeting. More important, perhaps, is that the traditional relationship-driven business model is being pushed aside amid calls for greater transparency in corporations and regulatory agencies. Companies such as Fujitsu Corp. are moving from seniority-based to performance-based salary and promotions, which tends to make personalized relationships less crucial to career advancement.

This, in turn, is cutting into commercial sex, long a favored cement for holding together relationships in Japan. Simple cash bribes will always be popular as a motivational tool -- but sometimes, even money cannot establish or sustain personal trust as firmly as an expenses-paid night of debauchery can.

Jana Whitfield is a 22-year-old business administration student from Vancouver. She was recruited for a summer hostessing job in Tokyo through a Canadian agency. Although hostessing can mean anything from ultra-attentive waitressing to delivering blow jobs under a table, in most cases, groping, mouth-kissing and anything more intimate than that are prohibited. Some hostesses have sex with clients, but almost never inside the hostess club itself.

Although she never got into prostitution, Whitfield has made friends with some of her customers. One regular she calls George, the vice president of a real estate firm, used to bring groups of two to three clients along with one or two other male members of his firm, recalls Whitfield.

"The bills would hit over 200,000 yen ($1,600) a lot of the time," she says. "He used to brag to me that he could spend as much as he wanted. I believed him."

George still comes around regularly, but he's usually by himself, says Whitfield. The hostess club gives him free drinks, she says, because he was so good to them in the past.

"He told me his business isn't going great," says Whitfield. "He doesn't have so many clients to butter up, I guess."

The hostess business has been in decline for some time, closely tracking the overall economy. At the same time, increasing competition has come from strip clubs featuring Western dancers.

George is likely a small-timer compared to the 112 Finance Ministry bureaucrats "disciplined" two weeks ago for accepting "lavish entertainment" paid for by private financial firms and others. Some of the officials were dismissed, others suspended, given pay cuts or officially reprimanded. English translations of the mainstream dailies offered no details on exactly how lavish the entertainment was, though readers who have followed the news know by the amounts, typically several hundred dollars per person, that it is likely to have involved paid-for female companionship at some level.

Shukan Post, a weekly newsmagazine, reported on a party for Finance Ministry officials, paid for by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, which must lobby Finance for its budget. Although the cost was between $800 and $1,000 per person, the feted few were six mid- to low-level bureaucrats, according to the Post.

The evening began with eight geisha girls seated among the six officials. After consuming "fancy foods and Japanese sake," according to the Post account, the bureaucrats made small declarations of their loyalty to one another. The festivities proceeded with a few rounds of karaoke to a live band. Then the youngest-looking of the geisha joined the band for a rock song. Then, the Post relates, the geisha "started dancing, moving their hips. They rolled up the hems of their kimonos to their hips, exposing their panties ... After that, the lights were dimmed and a go-go dance started. The geisha girls started stripping the government officials down to their underwear. They danced together closely with the geisha girls and some of them pushed the girls onto the floor. They were limited to kissing them. When one of the officials tried to do something more than that, the spotlight was trained on him. He came back to his seat for a while and then started dancing again with the geisha girls."

Twenty-four of these parties were held in 1994, according to the Post, and 23 in 1995.

Like most Japanese publications, the Post tends to blend commentary into its news reports. Of the bureaucrats' bacchannalia, the Post concludes: "This is the kind of party that government bureaucrats like the best. The MHW pays for this type of entertainment for MOF officials repeatedly from summer until the budgeting for the next fiscal year is finalized ... Bureaucrats never talk about the parties they attend. Also, they do not speak of the people who attended with them. They commonly share this kind of shame. The ties established through this type of event lead them to their business -- allocating budgets ... No record will ever be found in the MHW's books because the parties are normally paid for by private companies. The bills are sent by the restaurants to these companies behind the scenes."

In part because of stories like this, but mostly because no one can credibly deny any longer the need for economic reform, the attitude toward this traditional commingling of sex and business has shifted. From the press to the public, and to businessmen themselves, the old ways of relationship-building through debauched male bonding are on their way out.

Looking out the ninth-story window of Merrill Lynch's office across the street from the Imperial Palace, Hidemi Fukuhara gives a wistful autopsy on the night life of Tokyo financial elites. Fukuhara, president of Merrill Lynch Capital Management Co. Ltd., compares the mood to the final days of the Showa period (1926-1989):

"When the Showa emperor (Hirohito) was seriously ill -- he was dying, in fact -- everyone stopped all the entertainment. Even though it was the season for year-end parties and so on, there was a consensus that we wouldn't do that -- no entertainment, no parties, no shopping. I'm not saying it's that extreme now, but the past few weeks have felt similar. With so many senior people in the Ministry of Finance being accused or arrested, there is a new interpretation of entertainment -- it's a vice. It's not because we don't have the money for entertainment. It's because there is pressure that it is not the thing to do. It has become very quiet. That's too bad."
SALON | May 8, 1998

Dave McCombs, the former editor of Tokyo Journal, is a Tokyo freelance journalist who writes about finance, digital media and business folklore for the Asahi Evening News and other publications.