After Tokyo's bubble economy burst, the Roppongi district—once an upmarket quarter with exclusive nightlife—became known for its massage parlors and sex clubs, largely staffed by foreigners. It was here that I found myself, one steamy August night, sitting in a darkened strip joint while the police knocked on the door.
Roppongi's unseemliness was tolerated for a while but by the early years of the 21 st century, with an Olympic bid on the horizon, Governor Ishihara had initiated a "Clean Up Tokyo" campaign aimed to make Roppongi respectable again by replacing the clubs with department stores, five-star hotels, luxury residences, and shiny new luxury store/hotel/residence. But as Roppongi was rising skyward, I was descending deeper into the area's underworld.
I went traveling just about as soon as I was able to leave home. It began with a flight to Tokyo, where, aged 19, I spent three months working in a hostess club, then made a loop around the southern hemisphere before returning back to the U.K. for college. A few years later, armed with a degree but few prospects for making anything of myself, I returned to a place where I could at least make someone else of myself and earn a pretty good amount of money doing so: Roppongi.
I returned to Tokyo early 2005. As I had done seven years earlier during my first stint living there, I found work at a hostess club. Hostess clubs are on the outer fringes of the mizu shobai or "water trade," a euphemism for Japan's sex trades. All hostesses were required to do was to look pretty, top up drinks, light cigarettes and make conversation with customers. It was a basic service job dressed up in evening gowns and low lighting. I had enjoyed hostessing the first time around; it was good money and I had liked the artifice of it all, pretending to be a party girl. And it felt just far enough removed from the sex industry to feel safe. Two years after my first trip, however, there had been a murder. An Englishwoman named Lucie Blackman had disappeared while out with a customer beyond the confines of the club—a platonic date known as a dohan. The club charges a fee to the customer for taking the hostess outside and the hostess is required to form an artificial relationship with the customers. The relationship must be convincing enough so that these patrons are willing to pay extra for her company. Many of the clubs have a strict requirement that their employees go on at least one dohan per week; they fire those women who cannot meet the quota, so the pressure to accept a dohan, even from someone who might seem a bit creepy, is strong.
As the investigation into Lucie's disappearance proceeded, it became clear the man accused of her death, Joji Obara, had been drugging and raping women on dohans for years. Police hadn't taken complaints about him seriously, allegedly because they came from women working in the mizu shobai. "The mizu shobai woman," writes Anne Allison in her book on hostess clubs, "is constructed as a female who transgresses her nature." In an interview given to TIME magazine in 2001, one hostess club owner talked about the time he went to the police to report an assault on a staff member: "I am a club owner, and she was a hostess," he said. "They looked down on that. They refused to open a case."
Obara was eventually found guilty of the earlier manslaughter of an Australian hostess, in addition to dismembering and disposing of Lucie's body (which was found seven months later). He was not, however, convicted of her actual murder. Stung by criticism that the police didn't care about women working in the mizu shobai, Tokyo police showed their compassion with a new focus on busting on them. This nicely coincided with the Clean Up Tokyo campaign, with a particular focus on criminal foreigners.
Determined to stay in place, my fellow mizu shobai workers and I took precautions. We walked to and from work via backstreets, wearing nondescript clothes and our hair bundled under baseball caps. We stored our customers' phone numbers under coded names because we had heard that the police were stopping women and going through their phones hoping to find evidence of illegal work. Although none of us actually knew anyone this had happened to, we became inured to the atmosphere of paranoia.
The story of Lucie's murder hung heavy around Roppongi for years afterwards, always within easy reach of a customer—particularly the self-described "playboys" who'd been frequenting the clubs for years—who wanted to scare, or maybe impress, us with their familiarity with Lucie or the suspect. My Tokyo life seemed to orbit around the case. I worked in the same club as Lucie. I was there two years before her disappearance; later the club changed its name and I returned after four years. Barely two months later I was fired for not getting enough dohans, so I moved on to another club.
One beautiful spring afternoon when the cherry trees were in full bloom, I was in my room phoning customers and asking them to take me on a dohan, when another girl in my guesthouse told me she worked at a club where no-one cared if you went on dohans or not. It took a while for her to tell me this was actually a strip club, but by that point, I didn't care. Tired of the dohan expectations and general bullshit, I finally quit hostessing altogether; I wanted to make more money without having to maintain pseudo-relationships with customers, so I started stripping. Coincidentally I found myself again in the same building as where I started, working in a strip club one floor above the club where Lucie had met the man who would eventually dismember her. But the new club was just my kind of place: totally relaxed, no delusions of sophistication like in the hostess clubs or in the "classy" strip clubs where you were expected to wear evening gowns and do your hair and nails. In other words, it was a dive...
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