Hostess Clubs in Japan

Courtney at Feministing points to a New York Times article on “hostess” clubs in Japan where, to be simplistic about it, basically you pay a premium to have young women flirt with you and also to an enlightening roundup of expert commentary on the issue.

Meanwhile, in a rare instance of core requirements paying off, in college I fulfilled my foreign cultures slot with what turned out to be an extremely interesting class taught by an anthropologist about contemporary Tokyo. One of the things we were assigned was Anne Allison’s book Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. It’ll be a bit outdated by now, but it’s highly recommended. Allison is a trained and skilled academic who went undercover and worked as a hostess and is very skilled at blending her reporting with theoretically informed analysis.

In a related vein, I also highly recommend The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief, a documentary I saw three years ago at SilverDocs. It’s about a (relatively rare) club where the genders are reversed and female clients are catered to by male hosts.