Japan – Inside Tokyo’s Hostess Clubs

A woman working as a hostess
in a Japanese bar has to concentrate on just one task, keeping the customer
happy.

Happy customers stay longer. They drink
more of the bars’ expensive drinks.

That means more commissions for the hostess
and more profits for the bar.

There are thousands of hostess bars in
Tokyo. Club Lounge Monina is one of the more respectable establishments.

Paid to entertain

The foreign women working there told me
they were not prostitutes but entertainers – but they were not keen to give
their real names for fear of what their friends and families back home might
think of them.

‘Karen’, who is from the Philippines, said:
“Our job is just to talk to people who come in to drink, to sing along
with them on the karaoke machine, to make them laugh and to try to listen to
them.”

She works five nights a week
from Monday to Friday at the club. She says she earns 2,500 yen (£10) an
hour.

But that is just the beginning. Hostess
bars have complicated systems of rewards and bonuses.

“We get tips as well as the
commissions for the drinks and if we invite customers to the bar we get money
for that too,” said Karen.

Hostesses can also go on dinner dates with
customers, known as dohan. They get their dinner paid for and then bring the
customer to the club.

The night we were at Club Lounge Monina one
of the customers was giving out gifts to a couple of the women he was sitting
with.

The women who work there insisted they did
not offer any sexual services to the customers.

‘Vivienne’, who is from Brazil, said she
was worried before she started but she said: “I was so tired of working
in a convenience store. I thought to myself, I will give it a try. That was
two-and-a-half years ago. I’m still here, I think it is OK.

“Maybe some girls work as prostitutes,
I don’t know what goes on in other places, but not here.”

The bar we visited is owned and run by
Monina.

At 34, she is unusually young to be a
hostess boss or mama-san.

“The best hostesses are good looking
for sure, but then it also depends on how they attract customers. It’s not
easy if you’re not smart,” she said.

Stricter controls

Currently most of the women she employs are
from Asia.

“I used to have many girls, from
Cameroon, Senegal, Europeans, Americans, every country but the government’s
become much stricter and also the economy’s not so good. Before it was easier
to give higher wages, but now it’s not,” she said.

The authorities do seem to be tightening up
the immigration rules. In the past many women worked in the entertainment
districts illegally on tourist visas.

That is not so easy these days.

The immigration department says it has
introduced more rigorous checks on young women arriving from certain
countries where they suspect significant numbers of illegal workers are
coming from.

Since 2005 new measures to combat human
trafficking have also been introduced.

Responsibility

Monina said there was only so much a
mama-san can do to ensure the safety of the girls who work for her.

“It’s really the girl’s
responsibility. There are certain rules that you teach the girls, how to tell
who is a good, who is a bad customer for instance, but you cannot control
what they do out of hours. After the club closes it’s up to them to decide
how far they want to go with the customer,” she said.

Hostess bars are part of the mainstream of
Japanese culture. Business deals are done there and clients entertained.
Wives know they are part of life for “salarymen”.

But when you sit there and
watch the young women cuddling up to the older customers, or so drunk they
can barely keep standing to finish their song on the karaoke machine, you
wonder whether it really is that innocent.

Of course there are establishments far more
sleazy than the one we visited.

As Japanese journalist Kentaro Katayama
points out, if a salaryman is looking for sex a hostess club is not
necessarily the best place to find it.

He said: “If you really want to have
sex with somebody it’s much easier to go to a prostitute.

“Going to a hostess club would cost
you more than meeting a prostitute in Tokyo. It is very expensive, and yet
still people like to go.”