Aptly named for its clandestine existence, the Japanese underworld thrives beneath the surface, weaving a subterranean society that infiltrates every corner of Japanese life. The Yakuza, Japan’s infamous mafia, proudly upholds age-old structures and rituals tracing back to the Edo era. In this series of articles, we’ll embark on an encyclopedia-style journey to unearth key elements of this hidden world: traditional customs, specialized professions, and a legendary figures, each intricately woven into the fabric of Japan’s shadowy underworld.
Goodbye Bad Boys
Host clubs in Japan – establishments where female customers often pay exorbitant amounts to flirt and converse with handsome men – have long practiced predatory pricing. If you’ve watched Tokyo Vice, now streaming on HBO Max, or read my book, you’re familiar with the clubs and the problems they can create.
This year, Tokyo authorities and even some host club managers have joined calls to eliminate one such practice that has put countless people into crushing debt: the tab aka urikakekin.
Host clubs are finally getting the crackdown by Japanese authorities for their decidedly un-chivalrous behavior – saddling their female customers with a crushing, bankruptcy-inducing bill. Some of their customers are eventually pimped out by the hosts. Targeting emotionally vulnerable women, host clubs with predatory pricing strategies encourage customers to rack up huge debts by just “putting it on the tab.”
How does this happen? Stick around and I’ll try to explain.
The police are intervening not only to discourage shady business practices BUT because of another side effect–women are increasingly turning to prostitution to get out of debt.
A police investigation in September this year revealed that of 80 prostitutes surveyed in Kabukicho, the city’s biggest red-light district, 40% were earning money to pay off host club debts. It’s not an unintended side effect, either. Women have allegedly been outright pimped or forced to commit other crimes by host club employees to settle the tab. These tabs can amount to millions of yen, for services that are usually never itemized. With no limit to the tab, women invested in these so-called “romance scams”–which sometimes start with hosts targeting women on social media, wooing them into a fake relationship, and luring them to the host club later–don’t even realize the financial cost until it’s too late.
Even after a coalition of over 200 host clubs announced that they will begin policing themselves in December, the parliament is debating new laws which could formally ban the sales system that makes running these clubs such a lucrative deal.
Government officials formally announced their plans to regulate host clubs during a November 14 committee meeting in the House of Councilors, and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made a statement on the issue to the House of Representatives on November 20. The chief of Japan’s National Police Agency went on a very publicized fact-finding stroll through Kabukicho with all the Japanese press present.
Since the announcement on November,, arguably the most famous host and host club manager in Japan, ROLAND (often stylized in capital letters), has made a statement vowing to end the tab system at his establishments. Included in his statement was a call for others to do the same.
The authorities are turning up the heat. On December 15th, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police raided 350 host clubs in Kabukicho, checking to see if they were engaged in illegal activities, such as loan-sharking or any other fraudulent practices. All of this is a step forward.
However the question the western reader may be asking is this: why do women go to these clubs in the first place? Why don’t they just go on a date instead? How did these places become such dens of iniquity?
A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOST CLUBS
Club Ai, pictured below was the original host club and has always run a legitimate business.
Japan has a long-history of turning companionship into a paid service. Despite being densely populated in the cities, many men and women, working long hours and saddled with long commutes, are very lonely. There is little time outside of work to build up interpersonal relationships and Japan has many industries to cater to people’s need for human contact. Even Japan’s lucrative sex-industry, which allows any sexual act to be purchased for a price—as long as it’s not vaginal penetration–may even be said to be part of that world.
If you ask a host or a hostess in Japan what they do for a living, the standard answer, the textbook answer is, “We sell dreams.” For the customer and the client, sometimes that dream they’re selling turns out to be a nightmare, but that’s not always the case. But if you really believe the line that hosts and hostesses are “selling dreams”, then I’d like to sell you a room in Tokyo Tower for a few million yen. ( DM me after reading this article–I’ll cut you a great deal)
Hostess and host clubs are a major part of what in Japan is known as “the water trade”—Mizu Shobai. It’s a term referring to any adult business selling food or drinks (water) to customers with additional services. The drink is usually alcohol and the service is not always just physical, but often an emotional service as well. The clubs are not selling sex per se but they do sell companionship. The price for an evening can be as low as 6,000 to 10,000 yen ($45 to $80) or at a host club, as much as $9,000. The set-ups are remarkably similar. A well-lit but dim room, elegantly designed with sofas and couches grouped in islands along the walls, offering a modicum of privacy. Sometimes gaudy leopard print interiors and shiny mirrors on the wall to convey a sense of greater space. Usually, like a casino, the clubs have no windows and no clocks, so that the customer loses all sense of time while they also lose their money. That’s part of making it another kind of space altogether, where the constraints of ordinary reality are loose and anything seems possible. First-timers pick their companion from a book of photos, like an analog tinder. Sometimes the mama-san or the manager matches the customer with a girl.
Host clubs were built on the back of hostess clubs and the night life in Kabukicho, Japan’s red light district. Host clubs today have a wider range of clientele but in the early days, they existed as dance halls. Hosts are the male equivalents of hostesses but often without as much finesse, skill, or education—and maybe twice as much hair gel as a hostess would use.
One of the oldest host clubs in existence is Club Ai, founded by ‘The Emperor of Host Clubs’ Takeshi Aida, in 1971. It went out of business once during the pandemic but has re-opened in Kabukicho this year. If you really want to get the best and safest “host club” experience—it’s the place to go.
Aida’s real name was Takeshi Enomoto and he was born in Niigata prefecture. He died in relative poverty on October 25th 2018. I was fortunate enough to meet him when he was in his prime in 1999. Aida got his start at the first host club ever, Naito (Night) Tokyo, which opened a year after the Olympics near Tokyo Station in 1965. The early customers were rich housewives who paid a fee to chat and dance with the handsome young men staffing the woman’s only club.The original layout included a huge dance floor, a bar, and sofa. The basic business model was spartan. The host receives tips from the customers, a cut if he’s designated (shimei) , a kickback on the money spent on booze aka “drinkbacks”. The helper (staff at the club) only receives a very low basic salary. Every week the host has to also pay a fee to the club for working there or he’s “let go”. The host clubs were essentially dance halls staffed with handsome but harmless men. Of course, that business model changed over the decades.
Aida said that a good host required almost all the same skills that a good hostess needed—good memory, conversational skills, charm. A good host had to look handsome in the way that women wanted a man to be handsome but he also had to dance, and dance well. There was western food served and of course, bourbon and whisky, not sake, all things that seemed novel and new at the time. Women in the 70s went there to learn to dance as well. Discos were booming and a host club was a great place to learn before heading to the dance floor.
In Club Ai, dancing with the customers was an essential part of the night. Many other host clubs, with less floor space, decided that wasn’t the case. As times changed and disco died, host clubs became less about dancing and more about romancing.
In Japan’s long forgotten and mythical bubble era (1986-1991) host clubs were at their peak. Newly wealthy real estate brokers, rich divorcées, and celebrities, would give their favorite boy money, gold bars, expensive houses, even a jaguar or fancy cars. This was still a rare thing but it cemented the image of the host as a job where a handsome man with charisma and talent, or a plain man with just enough charisma and charm, could really rake in the yen.
The host entices his customer to help him become the best in his club, the Number 1 host, and she does that by spending money on him. Often, the money doesn’t have to be paid on that day—and can be paid back-later. This presents a problem for the host if his customer skips out on him, leaving him to foot the bill.
By the late nineties, host clubs became a fixture of popular culture. There were manga about hosts, like the 2003 hit, Yaoh (夜王) set in the cut-throat world of Kabukicho nightlife; later manga like Gira Gira, based on real hosts were set in glitzy Roppongi. The payment systems became more complicated and the competition more fierce. Gradually, the dark side of the business emerged as well.
These days, office ladies, college students, housewives, college students and high school girls visit the clubs not just those in the “water trade” (hostesses, cabaret girls, strippers, sex workers). The hosts have a more uniform look, somewhere between K-Pop and J-Pop idols, often almost androgynous. You can see them cruise the streets of Kabukicho. They are usually dapper thin men with colored, blown-dry hair, fake suntans, snazzy suits and charming smiles. The guys that can’t pull off a tan tend to be as white as possible–opting for a near albino skin-tone. Some of them have faces so clean shaven and child-like that they really do seem like baby faces. On a Thursday or Friday night you can catch them chatting up passing females and trying to get them to come and have drinks.
The modern day host isn’t just offering a night of entertainment, he’s promising a “boyfriend experience.” They flirt with the women, pour drinks, light their cigarettes, listen to their tales of woe, sometimes dance with them. They may even offer relationship advice. Many of them are good at getting women to laugh. A huge part of the game is to convince the women to open an expensive bottle of champagne, for which they (the hosts) get a drink back (or a percentage of the charge). If the women become fans of a particular host, they try to spend more so that their man can become “the No. 1 host” — the Academy Award of host life.
It’s all fun and games — but not really. As mentioned above, the bills the female customers rack up can amount to tens of thousands of yen and when it comes time to pay, suddenly the hosts aren’t so charming anymore. In fact, some host clubs use the debt racked up by the women to subtly — and sometimes forcefully — make them work as prostitutes. It’s a business.
Aida, the Emperor of Hosts, would have been shocked to see what the world has become.
The shadier host club owners have the set-up down pat. Many men who run host clubs also have some kind of brothel or other adult entertainment establishment, where they put to work club patrons who can’t pay their tab. While the host clubs in Kabukicho have allegedly stopped paying protection money to organized crime—that’s not always true in reality. Behind the scenes, the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Sumiyoshi-kai, the Inagawa-kai—the three largest yakuza groups are all there to provide muscle and manpower when needed. They also collect fees for their services.
There’s a venue for every type of woman who falls into debt at a hostess club, and she may have a choice of how she wants to work off her debts. Host clubs are usually an over-18 affair, and ID is required at most venues. However, some enterprising “businessmen” will pull in younger girls on purpose, and let them run up a tab—before they spring them with a bill they can’t pay. Sometimes they’ll blackmail the girls by threatening to go to their parents for the money.
Host clubs can also be owned directly by the yakuza or by yakuza associates. The club’s employees often fall somewhere in between.
There is no end to sordid cases revolving around the host-club industry. In 2004 in Hyogo Prefecture, a host club owner lured a 15 and 16-year-old girl into a host club and let them rack up a bill they couldn’t pay. The owner then sold them for $10,000 to a brothel bar owner. They were kept captive in an apartment and forced to have sex with a total of 200 customers in 2 months before being rescued by the police. The traffickers were both charged for violations of the laws banning child prostitution. In 2007, the police arrested a host club owner who had forced a 20-year-old female to work off her 500,000 yen ($3600) bill in a brothel (a so-called Soapland) in Taito-ward. Similar cases come to light every year.
Even when they can pay their bills, the things women do to earn that host club money can drive them into ruin. Eriko Wakisaka, celebrity doctor and writer, would spend $9,000 a night in a host club. In 2016, she was arrested for padding medical bills to the government, in an attempt to make even more money. She needed the extra loot–to pay her host club bills and feed her need for male host attention.
The perils of host clubs can’t be ignored but like hostess clubs, they can also be benign and oddly therapeutic places. They are complicated arenas of adult fantasy. The seminal documentary, released in 2006, The Great Happiness Space: Tale Of An Osaka Love Thief by Jake Clannell captures the mysteries and intricacies of human relationships in one Osaka host club with great depth and insight. It’s done in a series of revealing interviews with the hosts and their customers. It’s one of the best documentaries about Japan ever made.
When I interviewed Clannell in 2011, he told me, “There’s a sort of set of clichés that goes along with that environment. It’s like you walk into a strip club as a man in America—you know it’s a strip club—you become temporarily absorbed in the entertainment of it, which is what you’re paying for, right? And when you watch a television show the reason you sit through commercials is because you want to watch the next episode of Cheers.”
He sees host and hostess clubs as two sides of the same coin; I would agree.
“Everybody SHOULD know what the deal is. But what you’re paying for is to not know what the deal is. You’re paying to be temporarily relieved of that faculty. I think that for most people—for most women it’s an opportunity for them to go somewhere where they can get drunk, they’re not going to get assaulted, and they’ll be taken care of by an institution that’s set up to take care of them. It’s focused on giving these women an entertainment experience—so be it an extremely labor intensive one.”
“A good host is somebody who is actually talented with people, which not everybody is. The same goes for a hostess. A bunch of guys go to a hostess club and suddenly there is a whole bunch of girls being very nice to them and everybody knows what the deal is. That’s not to say that something real can’t come out of it, but you don’t walk into a hostess bar and think that it’s not one—you walk in and it’s quite clear when you get the bill what the situation is. It’s explicit in the process. If I go to a theater and I buy a ticket and somebody does something on the stage, even though for that moment—if that actor is good enough—I’m lost in the illusion, I still know that it’s a staged and scripted show. Which is what you would hope for. That’s actually the best-case scenario.”
In the final analysis, what host clubs and hostess clubs are selling isn’t a dream—they’re selling an emotional experience.
In Japan, you can of course purchase physical and sexual services. There’s a price for a massage, a price for fellatio and it’s all perfectly legal. However, in the land of the rising sun, even abstract feelings like love, happiness, affection, or intangibles like a romantic relationship (illusionary or not) are products that one can buy as well
Sometimes, all you get for your money is an enjoyable evening onstage in an interactive dinner theater.
Whether you enjoy the performance depends on many things—just don’t imagine that the cast members will accompany you back to your lonely home. Genuine love, as we think of it in the West, is not included in the price of admission.
And the price of attending the performance, if your hosts are unscrupulous, can be very expensive.
Amy Yoshida Plambeck contributed to this article.
Updated: Debt, Deception, and Danger: The Dark Side of Host Clubs and the Fight Against Forced Prostitution Japan’s Japan’s National Police Agency (警察庁) has a few things to say on the issue. The following is a rewrite of their posting about the problem, not a literal translation. If you want to know more here’s the original article. https://npa.go.jp/bureau/safetylife/hoan/hostclubto/hostclubto.html Below is a piece I wrote for The Japan Times in 2014. (Yes, 10 years ago) Host Clubs: A Hot-Bed Of Human Trafficking. https://japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/04/05/national/host-clubs-a-hotbed-of-human-trafficking/
Here’s a summary of the NPA article
The Ugly Business Behind Host Clubs Host clubs—those flashy, neon-lit havens of charm and booze—are a breeding ground for some pretty dark business. You’ve got customers, mostly women, racking up insane tabs they can’t pay. And then the real trouble begins. To cover those bills, they’re forced into prostitution or worse, introduced to shady jobs in the underbelly of Japan’s sex trade. What the law says? It’s illegal, of course. The Prostitution Prevention Law and Employment Security Act strictly forbid coercing someone into selling their body to settle debts, or steering them into harmful, sketchy jobs in the sex industry. But that doesn’t stop it from happening. The police are on it though. They’re cracking down, arresting the ones pulling the strings—whether it’s for violating prostitution laws or breaking other labor regulations. They’re even raiding the clubs to make sure they’re not stepping out of line with entertainment laws. The Arrests – A host club employee strong-armed a female customer to cough up cash to cover her tab. When she couldn’t pay, he introduced her to a recruiter, who placed her in a soapland—a legal front for prostitution. – A host club manager, wanting his cut, introduced another female customer to a soapland owner so she could work off her debt. – Another host club boss? He went further. Demanding repayment, he forced one woman to live in a hotel he’d chosen, where she’d “work off” her debt through prostitution. Speak Up—Don’t Suffer Alone If you’re trapped in this kind of nightmare—forced into prostitution or being hounded for money—report it. Call the police or use their consultation line (#9110). And if you’ve been lured into a bad contract because someone pretended to care about you, that’s a “dating scam.” You can cancel those deals under consumer protection laws. Need help? Here’s where you can get it: – Women’s Support Centers** (For those needing welfare assistance or don’t know where to turn— – Consumer Hotline** (For issues with contracts—dial 188) – Legal Help via Japan Legal Support Center (Houterasu)**—0570-078374 – Sexual Crimes/Violence Hotline**—For victims, call #8891 Host Club Crackdown Meetings The government is watching. They’ve held multiple meetings, laying out the groundwork to tackle these rogue host clubs. It’s all documented—agendas, materials, summaries—transparency in motion. — ——
The problems with host clubs have been known for years. We worked them into the storyline of #TokyoVice, the TV series and I’ve been writing about them since 2014. Ironically, the TV series airing in 2022 helped bring attention to the problem, even though the series is set in 1999. Yamashita-san did an excellent job of portraying a classic parasitical host in the series, a gutsy move for someone who usually plays likable characters.
