Lucie Blackman Book Hits The Shelves

[Mulboyne]

[floatl][/floatl]This book has been brewing for a while. "Tokyo Hostess: Inside the Shocking World of Tokyo Nightclub Hostessing" by Clare Campbell is primarily about the Lucie Blackman case but also purports to lift the lid on the life of foreign hostesses in Japan. The author, Clare Campbell, is known in the UK for a memoir detailing how her brother, a journalist for the Times, died from drugs so it's always been fairly clear how she planned to approach the subject. An excerpt from the book has now appeared in the Daily Mail so you can see the results first hand:

Daily Mail: Murdered for being a flirt. How Lucie Blackman, the English girl who became a geisha, was lured to her death in the dark world of Tokyo's escort bars
Lucie Blackman thought she was ordinary. Her self-judged ordinariness tormented her more than anything else. 'I constantly hate myself,' she wrote in her diary. 'I'm so average . . .I hate the way I look, I hate my hair, I hate my face, I hate my slanty eyes, I hate the mole on my face, I hate my teeth, I hate my chin. I hate my boobs, my fat hips, my fat stomach. I am so f****** up to my neck in debt and so badly need to do well.' Lucie drank too much, spent too much and her self-esteem was shaky. So, yes, in all of that she was a pretty normal 21-year-old. But even as she wrote those self-deprecating words, she was doing something very out of the ordinary with her life. In the early summer of 2000, Lucie travelled from her home in Sevenoaks, Kent, to work in a hostess bar in Toyko. She was a gaijin (Western) girl, whose blonde foreignness Japanese men were supposed to find alluring. They would pay enormous sums just to sit with gaijin girls in tacky clubs, make conversation in fractured English, have their drinks poured and cigarettes lit. Nothing else was expected or demanded. It was safe, safe, safe. And it was fun, supposedly so. But right now, three weeks into her new career, Lucie was feeling depressed. Getting work had been a breeze, just as her fellow traveller and best friend from school, Louise Phillips, had said it would be. The two of them had done everything together. They worked in the same boring bank in London before becoming British Airways flight attendants, which was terrific to begin with, until the to-and-fro trolley-dollying, permanent jet lag and sleep snatched in some bleak crewroom stripped away their lingering illusions of glamour. And now Lucie and Lou were fluttering their eyelashes in Casablanca, a nightclub in Roppongi, the entertainment district of Toyko. Every night, they were expected to laugh at the (mercifully incomprehensible) smutty jokes of middle-aged men, keep the whisky and tequila flowing, and generally be as genki (lively) as possible
...more...



The rest in the next posts:

[Mulboyne]

(Continued)

Only Lucie wasn't feeling genki today. The cell-like room in the hostel she shared with other gaijin girls - dancers, models, teachers, hostesses - in teeming Tokyo was spinning. Pain shot through Lucie's head as she reached her hand out for the furry rabbit-shaped alarm clock. Why did everything have to have cute animals on it? Everything in Tokyo was cute. But not her. Lucie didn't feel at all cute. Her mouth was parched. She couldn't remember how much she'd had to drink the night before, only that it was a lot.

It was already well past midday. She could hear Louise in the shower ahead of her. Tokyo had been Louise's idea. Why was it always that way? Why did Louise always get there first? Still, Lucie told herself, if her best friend could get the hang of 'Tokes', so could she. When Lucie had told her father Tim about her plans to work as a Tokyo bar hostess, she certainly didn't say 'Hey, Dad, I'm going out to Japan to work on the fringes of the sex industry', he recalls. But that is precisely where she was headed, to try her hand at the less seedy end of what was sometimes quaintly called mizu shobai (the 'water trade') - the night-time entertainment business involving female company and alcohol. All jobs in the water trade involved drinking and sex in some form. But Lucie and Louise had done some research: it seemed that the higher the class of the operation, the less actual sex there was.



They knew the kind of water traders they were going to be. Or they thought they did. There were these supposedly super-exclusive nightclubs where girls just had to listen to men's jokes, light their cigarettes and smile. The idea was to lure a rich catch into a fantasy love affair, while the bill was discreetly settled on a corporate expense account. That was not the same as kayabajura [sic] (cabaret clubs), where kyabajos (club girls) were expected to befriend whoever walked in and get their wallets opened pretty quick.

Slightly below that were the 'snack girls' who worked the more humble bars, the sunakku. You could find these places dotted all over Japanese cities. Below that, well, there was a lot below that. The Japanese appetite for paid-for sex has long intrigued outsiders. Historically, resorting to prostitutes was nothing special to Japanese men, not even ordinary men with families. Wives did not ask, or seemed not to care. Much more shaming for a heterosexual man than seeking sex outside marriage was being over the age of 30 and still single.

A single man might be disbarred from promotion or even renting a flat, on the grounds he would be incapable of keeping it in any kind of order. So being married was good. Having sex on the side was not all bad. Indeed, erotic and sexual themes had been a traditional part of Japanese culture for centuries, with none of the shame or religious concepts of sin associated with sex in the West. There was another historical phenomenon, the geisha - the exquisitely mannered, doll-like women to whom modern-day hostesses are sometimes compared. Geisha were traditionally trained to entertain their customer by reciting verse, playing musical instruments or engaging in light conversation. They may have flirted, but they did not have paid sex with clients - and in that sense, the hostess/geisha comparison was accurate.

The literature Lucie read before leaving home told her she would need 'conversational skills' and a 'bubbly personality'. Well, she had both of those; she'd shown that working the aisles with boring old BA. The received wisdom was that Japanese men liked to be treated as pampered little boys. As a former flight attendant, Lucie was an expert. She was made for hostessing. Her new job, she told her sister Sophie, would be 'like being an air hostess without the altitude'.

Lucie Blackman was bright, intelligent and attractive. At 18, she had left her fee-paying girls' school with three A-levels, but going to university had not been on her agenda. She wanted to get out into the world as soon as she could. Most of all, she wanted financial independence. Her early childhood had been happy enough. Her father Tim was a self-employed builder turned property developer, and her mother Jane had trained as a reflexologist. Lucie was the eldest, followed by Sophie, two years younger, then their brother Rupert, five years Lucie's junior.

The family holidayed in Spain and on the Isle of Wight, where Tim, a keen member of the classic and vintage yacht club, kept a beautiful 33ft Bermudian sloop, all teak and gleaming brass, called the Bettine. It was, in every sense, a comfortable Home Counties upbringing. But as Lucie reached adolescence, home became a war zone. Tim had several affairs, finally walking out when Lucie was 17. Lucie (with Sophie and Rupert) stayed with her mother in Sevenoaks and hardly saw her father for the next two-and-a-half years. She hated the mess her parents had made. When they communicated at all, it was to row about money.

Her mother was having to scrimp and save, and that was certainly not Lucie's style. She'd always been as hardworking-and as self-sufficient as she could be, augmenting her pocket money with babysitting and a job in Pizza Hut. Now she had the chance to get away from the tensions at home, enjoy herself and make lots of money at the same time. Lucie and Louise's idea of going to Tokyo came from Louise's older sister Emma, who had just returned after working as a 'hostess' in the city. It was safe and fun, she told them.

Some girls signed up with recruiting agencies in London, but there was no need for that. They just had to go to Narita airport and pick up Tokyo Classified magazine. There would be loads of job ads - they could take their pick. You were supposed to work in a place for three months minimum, but some clubs would hire for shorter periods or even offer a couple of nights' trial, she told them. It would be easy - a big laugh. For Lucie, telling her parents the whole truth was obviously out of the question. So she told her father that she would be working in a bar and staying in a flat owned by her friend Louise's 'aunt' - who, conveniently enough, was Japanese and lived in the capital.

They'd get cheap tickets courtesy of her old employers, BA, and be in and out of Japan on a 90-day tourist visa. She'd be home by the beginning of August. Or maybe she'd go and see more of Asia, get to Thailand and end up in Australia. She told Sophie that she would be back before anyone knew she'd even been away, and after that she was going to train as a primary school teacher. But whatever happened, she would earn enough in Japan to pay off her credit card debts and then some. It was all going to be fantastic.

On May 3, 2000, Lucie slept fitfully in her bedroom at home in Sevenoaks. She had already stripped the room as if she wanted the break to be absolute this time. Posters were taken off the walls, books and cuddly toys packed away. Every record of her childhood and teenage years she'd ever kept had been thrown out or put in the loft. Her mother put a card with guardian angels on it in her handbag and scattered New Age healing crystals in her luggage to be on the safe side. Lucie shrugged. That was how Mum was. Still Jane fretted. 'Are you sure you're going to be all right? Are you sure it's safe?' And the more she fussed, the more determined Lucie was to go.

(Continued below)

[Mulboyne]

(Continued)

The gaijin girls who poured into Narita airport daily fell into two categories: those who were there for fun, and those who needed the money. The funseekers like Lucie Blackman came from privileged backgrounds in America or Europe, or were from Israel, Canada or Australia. Many viewed the work as a means of topping up their cash with a little bar work while on the global circuit. It was the old 'working my way round the world, with a bit of waitressing on the side' routine, updated for glossier times. The more mercenary, especially those from Russia, were in the business to pile cash for taking home. To those they entertained, however, the fun-seeking gaijin were the most prized. The men lapped up their wide-eyed attentiveness and breathy giggles; they just loved being with them.

They could have been conversing in their native tongue with beautiful Japanese girls who were just as eager to please, but instead they chose to listen to the dirty jokes of some blonde from Leeds. Why? All sorts of psychosexual and cultural reasons had been offered over the years for what is a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. These gaijin-obsessed men were, for the most part, in their 40s and 50s. To them, the girls were like something from imported American TV shows of the Sixties - the perfect girlfriend or hi-honey-I'm-home wife who is always up for a drink or a flirt, who never scolds or criticises. Professor Anne Allison, a Chicago academic and anthropologist, worked as a Tokyo hostess in the 1980s and subsequently wrote a study on the sexualised atmosphere of Japan's nightclub scene. She explains: 'Japanese sex, like Japanese society, is ordered and orderly. Japanese men like to know exactly what is expected of them and how they are meant to behave before entering any situation. And in the hostess clubs, they know that the only thing on offer is titillation.

'You tell him you wish he was your lover. He tells you he would like to take you home. You say that would be lovely, but my sister is in town and I have to show her the sights. It is the answer he was expecting; he might well have been frightened at any other. Japanese men certainly fantasise about sleeping with Western women, but the reality of having one as a wife or mistress frightens them. We might intrigue them, and there is certainly kudos in having a Western woman on your arm, but Western women are known to have opinions, to be neither obedient nor subservient. The men are much happier to keep their fantasies in the safe world of the hostess bars, where they can pretend it is true for an evening.'



In the men's eyes, Filipina or Thai girls worked the water trade for money. And why else would a Japanese girl do it except that she needed the cash? (In fact, Japanese hostesses were paid marginally more than their American or British counterparts.) But in their illusory world, the freckle-faced fantasies from Sevenoaks or Seattle chose to do it. They were nice girls from good families, so they must really like them. And the illusion had to be protected. Sometimes a party of men would turn up with foreign business partners in tow to celebrate a deal. But it never seemed to work. The play acting was too obvious - ludicrous even - especially if the customer came from somewhere near home.

One girl from Yorkshire, who had gone out to Japan as a teacher but found the water-trade money too tempting, recalled how Western businessmen were sometimes brought into the club where she worked. 'But they'd always be uncomfortable,' she said, 'however drunk they got - especially about white women having to play subservient to the Japanese, getting them towels, lighting every cigarette, doing the ultra-deferential bit. 'They'd look at the floor, and not talk to you out of embarrassment.' In fact, the really upmarket clubs discreetly barred 'Western' customers altogether.

The Japanese male psyche was alien and complex, but Lucie had done her homework. She understood the conflict between tatemae, the public face of an individual, and honne, the real self of private thoughts and feelings that her hosts were so anxious to keep hidden. So were the smart executives and ageing playboys who routinely bought the company of blonde gaijin girls in hostess bars for a little ego-boosting flattery ever tempted to seek something extra? Of course they were.

Lucie phoned her mother once to tell her that a customer had offered her 'a fantastic sum of money to sleep with him'. She had laughed off the proposal, reminding her mother that her job was to pour drinks, light cigarettes and 'discuss boring subjects like volcanoes'. Lucie never considered herself to be a prostitute. And she wasn't. But her tragedy was that it didn't matter what she thought she was. It was what one customer in particular judged her to be - with truly terrifying consequences.

[akatsuka]

as this is a book, how accurate is it? Gosh how naive she was!

Is it true she was illegally working in Japan on a 90-day holiday visa?

[Greji]

Is it true she was illegally working in Japan on a 90-day holiday visa?

Gosh! Do mizu shobai fg girls do that?

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

The way the writer has emphasized Blackman's angst and troubles, it almost looks like she's saying Obara did her a favor by bumping her off...

[Mike Oxlong]

Barack Hussein Obara? I'm surprised someone hasn't pinned this on him too...

[IkemenTommy]

"The shocking true story of the western girls who work as Tokyo's nighclub hoestesses..."
dum dum dum...
I will give this Clare hoestess major props if this book even makes any of the bestseller lists.

[akatsuka]

Gosh! Do mizu shobai fg girls do that?

haha... true.. guess i was just shockde that a girl from england would do that. i know she was going for the 'get rich quick' plan and didnt intend to stay long, but i cant believe she was that naive. but i guess some girls are.

i noticed the daily mail article called her a 'geisha'...

[Cyka UchuuJin]

haha... true.. guess i was just shockde that a girl from england would do that. i know she was going for the 'get rich quick' plan and didnt intend to stay long, but i cant believe she was that naive. but i guess some girls are.

i noticed the daily mail article called her a 'geisha'...

why would you be shocked? every single issue of company or british cosmo are filled with 'i went to macau/japan/thailand/greece as a holiday hostess and got raped/kidnapped/held hostage.

[Greji]

why would you be shocked? every single issue of company or british cosmo are filled with 'i went to macau/japan/thailand/greece as a holiday hostess and got raped/kidnapped/held hostage.

You're just jealous 'cause nobody wants a Russian holiday hostess (except Kankyu guys).....

[Cyka UchuuJin]

You're just jealous 'cause nobody wants a Russian holiday hostess (except Kankyu guys).....

yep, you've got me sussed. i really wish i could go to one of those places pretend to be excited about all the drunken twentysomethings on their package holiday. sounds like a dream job.

[Mulboyne]

[Mulboyne]

[Mulboyne]

[Mulboyne]

[Behan]

I can only hope that his cellmates give him at least a little of what he has done to others.

[Cyka UchuuJin]

no one knows how to sensationalise a story like the british. if the vice-consul was 'taken aback' at the stories of the dohan competitions and what else they got up to, then he was either brand new to japan or a total moron. those diplomatic sorts are always out on the town.

the story is very sad for sure. and it's a perfect example of how fucked up the japanese legal system is. but there is no such thing as making shedloads of money for just standing around looking pretty, making conversation, and batting your eyelashes. unless you're a supermodel. or a hooker.

girls all over the world have heard the lucie blackman story and the magazines are always publishing stories about how they go with the promise of easy money and then are shocked and horrified when the sex element comes up.

the sad thing about this book is that girls are going to read it and still think 'wow, i could go to japan for a couple months and make some quick money. but i'll be smarter than lucie was and go to work in a better club where they don't treat the girls like that'.

unless the whole foreign hostess thing gets shut down, there will be more stories like this one. fact.

[akatsuka]

unless the whole foreign hostess thing gets shut down, there will be more stories like this one. fact.

completely true.

thing is, i believe there will be more female foreigners murdered in japan whether they are hostesses or not. like lindsay ann hawker, girls seem to become 'accustomed' or naively 'used' to the 'safeness' of japan and do things they wouldnt dream of doing in their home country. such as going in a strange man's home alone.

[Greji]

and do things they wouldnt dream of doing in their home country. such as going in a strange man's home alone.

Well, I suppose that you are including hotel rooms as well. By that I can assume that you are not planning on getting laid by anyone you haven't known for 37 years and four months....

[nottu]

[Greji]

That's a respectable time frame.

I prefer more of the direct sprint to the strange girl's home/hotel room, NLT 2 mins 31 seconds after meeting (if not sooner)...

[FG Lurker]

unless the whole foreign hostess thing gets shut down, there will be more stories like this one. fact.

As opposed to all the other countries of the world where young women are perfectly safe and never end up drugged, raped, and/or dead...?

Japan isn't perfect but I don't think it's all that high on the "dangerous place to visit and work" list. Not making light of what happened to Blackman or Hawker, just looking at the overall situation.

[Samurai_Jerk]

As opposed to all the other countries of the world where young women are perfectly safe and never end up drugged, raped, and/or dead...?

Japan isn't perfect but I don't think it's all that high on the "dangerous place to visit and work" list. Not making light of what happened to Blackman or Hawker, just looking at the overall situation.

No shit. Any girl who goes anywhere in world to make easy money in a job that's "not technically prostitution" is asking for trouble.

[Cyka UchuuJin]

As opposed to all the other countries of the world where young women are perfectly safe and never end up drugged, raped, and/or dead...?

Japan isn't perfect but I don't think it's all that high on the "dangerous place to visit and work" list. Not making light of what happened to Blackman or Hawker, just looking at the overall situation.

i was only referring to japan at the moment. of course it happens all over the world, and there are other stories out there of girls who have gone to HK, thailand, etc with the easy money hostessing/modelling/dancing jobs and have gone missing. obviously the lucie blackman one is of the most relevance as this is a japan forum. and it's a really fucked up legal case.

[FG Lurker]

i was only referring to japan at the moment.

My point was two-fold, though I didn't really state the second part clearly.

First is that young females disappear everywhere, it is most definitely not a problem unique to Japan or something caused by something fucked up about Japan in particular. It's a fucked-up-human thing.

Second though is that somehow cracking down on young gaijin working as hostesses would have very little (zero?) effect on the crazies like Obara. If he hadn't had gaijin hostesses to pursue he would have focused on eikaiwa teachers, or tourists, or (place list of other professions here...) I highly doubt it was the availability of gaijin hostesses that gave Obara the desire to rape and kill.

[Mulboyne]

Here's a critical view of the book by Susanna Jones, who is a British author who wrote her first book while working in Japan

Guardian: Tokyo Hostess by Clare Campbell

It's time we in the west became more adult about Japan. Far from being a mysterious place full of murderous sexual deviants, it's actually pretty safe, says Susanna Jones

Clare Campbell's Tokyo Hostess is mainly concerned with the disappearance and killing of Lucie Blackman. The outlines of the story – Blackman's life, the discovery of her remains in a cave, her family's long campaign for justice – are well-known. Alongside this, Campbell tells the stories of Carita Ridgway, an Australian hostess who died at the hands of the same man, Joji Obara, in 1992, and Lindsay Ann Hawker, a British English teacher who was murdered in 2007 by Tatsuya Ichihashi. The narrative is intercut with Campbell's research into the nightlife of Tokyo's Roppongi district, where Blackman worked, pouring drinks and laughing politely at the jokes of drunk businessmen, earning money to pay off her debts. Campbell's research is thorough and the book teems with the voices of family members, friends and the characters who populate Roppongi. But why is Hawker's murder included in the narrative? She had no connection with Roppongi or the sex industry. "I wanted to know just why so many girls chose to go to Japan, either to work as teachers, hostesses or frequently both," Campbell writes, casually lumping together a diverse group of people.

But surely their reasons for going are very different. For hostesses, Tokyo offers 24-hour partying and easy money paid in cash so that one can work illegally on a tourist visa. It's a heady lifestyle, though not without its humiliations. Hostesses have to prove themselves popular to earn money; they have to be both deferential and competitive. Meanwhile, most of the thousands of foreigners in Japan are, perhaps too boringly for Campbell, teaching English. Roppongi is small and easy to avoid.

Campbell draws attention, rightly, to the western media's fascination with these cases. She criticises the "racial stereotype of perverted Oriental and pale-skinned victim", but is guilty of similar stereotyping. When an eager customer emails a hostess friend of Blackman's after Obara's arrest, it is suggested that he represents "the eternal up-for-itness of the Japanese male". Western women are always "girls", open-eyed and vulnerable. Of the tabloids' attempts to interpret Hawker's death, she asks: "Was it exquisitely Oriental or just plain barking mad?"

Good question. The connection between the deaths of Blackman and Hawker is probably this: they were targeted by horrifyingly dangerous men. Japan is a relatively safe country, so these women may have been less careful than they would have been in Britain. They stood out physically and this would have made them vulnerable, but as Richard Lloyd Parry wrote in the Independent (quoted by Campbell): "The notion that Japanese men are 'obsessed' with western women is a lazy cliche."

It's a cliche that Campbell perpetuates. For her, it's all about sex – Japanese sex. She writes: "I did not ... believe that I could ever fully comprehend Japanese culture or sexuality." Does any other culture suffer the insult of being continually reduced to a puzzle that can never be "comprehended"? "What were they really thinking, all those salarymen and office ladies, as they shuffled robotically around [Tokyo's] underground labyrinths?" she asks, as if commuters in other countries have thought bubbles over their heads.

After a depressing afternoon reading about the wasted lives of these bright young women who lived in the city I lived in and loved for many years, I went for a walk near my home in Brighton. Soon, I was in Waterloo Street where, in 2003, music teacher Jane Longhurst was murdered by Graham Coutts, who had an obsession with extreme pornography and who drew nooses on photographs of women. He kept her body in a storage centre before dumping and setting fire to it. It's hard to imagine anything more appalling. But was it exquisitely British or just "plain barking mad"? Transfer the details of the crime to Japan and then how does it look?

We should grow up about Japan, stop wondering whether or not we can comprehend it and just try to get to know it a bit better. This book, though sharply written and not without genuine sympathy for its subjects, is too excited by the sensational to be much help.

[Cyka UchuuJin]

Here's a critical view of the book by Susanna Jones, who is a British author who wrote her first book while working in Japan

Guardian: Tokyo Hostess by Clare Campbell

excellent review.

[Samurai_Jerk]

excellent review.

I second that.