Kinki Sex & Love Hotels

By Ivan Corsa & Ed Jacob | Sunday, May 1, 2005

Kinki Sex - Image is Everything

It's 6:45pm on a Friday in Osaka. The rush hour has begun, and the trains are packed with commuters scrunched together like sardines. Except that, strangely, on the busy Midosuji subway line, what should be a suffocatingly crowded train is virtually desolate but for two passengers: A middle-aged salaryman and a petite office lady (or OL). They have the car to themselves.
The salaryman eyes the girl carefully for a few moments, but she pays no attention to him. The train ride is smooth, in fact the train hardly seems to be moving at all. Only the sound of the rails rumbling underneath and the occasional announcements escaping the speakers remind the pair that they're on their commute.

Suddenly, the salaryman puts his briefcase down on the empty seat in front of him and steps closer to the girl, finally placing his hand on her thigh. He begins caressing her hips, slowly working his fingers to the hem of the girl's skirt before gradually hiking it up towards her waist. The woman feigns irritation and tries to pull away. But after a few moments, she turns and reaches for the man's fly, skillfully unzipping it and thrusting her head aside.

Thirty minutes later, the ride is over and the salaryman gets out of the train car. But he's not getting out at a station. In fact, he was never really on a train in the first place. He was merely in a simulation: the "subway" theme room at an "image club", where, shortly, the OL will begin repeating the same scenario with other customers.

The "image club" is the latest among several new fetish fads to become popular in Japan in recent months. In the sex industry, too, innovation is important. Serving as a kind of sexual Disneyland, image clubs allow patrons to fulfill their chikan ("perverted" men with a fondness for "copping feels" on trains) fantasies without risk. The clubs provide "realistic" settings and simulated "situations", where customers can act out their desires. Other popular settings include a doctor's office, a junior high school classroom, the corporate office, and, sometimes, the first class cabin of a JAL 747...
"A lot of these places are not so much for perverts or even people with a particular fetish, although that is a part of it, too," explains Berkeley-trained sociologist Lloyd Stevens, an authority on Japanese social psychology and human sexuality. "Rather, they're places for the curious, and often men come here to have the 'experience'. It's a thrill, a twist, a novelty, and the Japanese are very big on doing the newest, latest thing. For those who are serious about it, the illusion of make-believe provides a certain frisson."

But on a more calculating note, the image clubs function as a tool of traditional business practices by which relations are greased. As Dr. Stevens points out, "A lot of high-ranking company executives see this as a form of entertainment and a 'treat' for a client, a kind of bonus gift for executives of another company with whom they just concluded some very important business. It's basically very expensive entertainment and because it's expensive, unique, and prurient, it's a way to impress others, obviously in a rather titillating fashion."

The men who frequent image clubs may be lonely businessmen, thrill-seekers, or simply sukebe, but the women who work the trade are another lot altogether. It used to be that women working in the industry did so because they had to: they had few, if any, options to support themselves. But, nowadays, turnover is higher. Fewer women enter the trade for the longer term. Rather, more and more young women see part-time work as call-girls, in pink salons, or in image clubs as merely a way to earn a lot of money quickly, so that they can buy that expensive Chanel handbag, or pay the key money on that fashionable one-room mansion in Minami.

21-year-old Mariko is a junior at a well-known and expensive private women's college in Higashi-osaka City. "I've been working part-time at an image club for about four months," she says matter-of-factly. "It's good money. For only one night a week I can earn more money than if I was working forty hours at Mister Donut, or some stupid job like that. At first I was nervous. I had to dress up in a school uniform, and men would come in and pretend like they were my teacher. It was kind of scary, but I got used to it after the first few times. The job's not so bad, plus it gives me a lot of time to meet my boyfriend. Please understand: I'm not a sukebe onna (sexually kinky woman). I'm futsu, just an average girl."

Indeed, Mariko doesn't look the part of someone working in the sex industry. She appears matronly and intelligent, while still effusing youthful purity. When she works, she is part of an illusion. That's all. And her customers buy it again and again. In the sex trade, as in many other spheres of contemporary Japanese life, image is everything.

The Alien, May 1996

Love Hotels

In the land of a thousand neighbors, where mom, dad and their mom and dad and their two children have historically resided under one roof - there has always been the problem of finding a little personal space. And even if you don't live with a lot of other people, sometimes the paper-thin walls of most apaatos keep you intimately involved in the goings on of the next-door Nakamotos. You know she likes it rough, that her Mom is coming to visit and their teenage son is somehow implicated in an incident at school that involves a knife, a reel of duct tape and several feet of rope. Behind closed doors, Japan is a little more exciting than its international image.

So if you live in a gaijin apaato with one-inch plywood walls and your screamer girlfriend or man with a moan is tired of biting the pillow, you can make all the noise you want at your nearest no-tell hotel. Or perhaps you simply want to do it in a converted Cadillac, pretend you are on an alien space ship or are curious to see what Hello Kitty Bondage is all about. One thing is for sure. Whatever your fantasy, whatever your desire, they have a room for it.

However, the love hotel is changing - and the news is both good and bad. The good news is they've gone upscale, lost some of their sleazy associations and the decors are somewhat more modern. They've even changed their name. Japanese people never say "rabu hoteru" anymore, and although the abbreviation "rabuho" is still used, the hotels always refer to themselves as "fashion hotels" (in Kansai) and "couples hotels" or "boutique hotels" (in Kanto). Most young people aren't embarrassed about going to them anymore, either. What that means for you, the amorous gaijin, is that it's easier to convince your significant other to visit one of those kinky rooms with round beds and mirrors on the ceiling. In fact, they may even invite you.

The bad news is that as love hotels go stylish, many are getting rid of the exciting theme rooms. They do exist, but its getting harder and harder to find places with bumper cars and bondage slings. In large part, this is due to the introduction of Japan's "New Public Morals Act", which is intended to regulate love hotels and other sex-related businesses. Hotels that have "facilities not required for the basic purposes of guest lodging" (read: that ingenious whip and wash jungle gym) are now categorized as "sex-related businesses" and can only operate in specially designated red light districts such as Shinjuku's Kabuki-cho or the Susukino area of Sapporo.

The act came about largely because the Japanese government was embarrassed by the amount of foreign media coverage of Japan's sex trade, the volume of child pornography and a general Bar-code-hairdo mentality. So they cracked the whip, so to speak. Unfortunately, they didn't realize the media coverage was often envious. Foreigners like love hotels. They're better than sushi, the Sony Walkman and hi-tech toilets. Why don't they have them back home?

Japanzine, September 2002

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THE LOVE HOTEL DIARIES

Love Hotel Diaries are little books left in each room for the customers to write messages to each other. There are jottings by teenagers sharing their first sexual experiences, salarymen and OLs having afternoon trysts, and older married couples in their 40s getting away from the kids for a romantic night. Leafing through the pages, you will find some of the most interesting reading material you've ever come across. These messages come from a popular Osaka Hotel.

Written by: A 19-year-old female who had been dating her partner for about 1 year.

Recently not one single good thing has happened to me. The sex is lousy too. I don't even masturbate. Ahhhhh, I hate being a 19-year-old in this kind of shape. I want to meet someone I can be happy with. All my friends have boyfriends. I've got to find someone!

Written by: A female who met her boyfriend through "konpa" (a matchmaking party).

S-chan, we've been going out for one year now. I hope we'll spend many happy years together in the future. I love you.

Written by: A woman staying in the hotel alone after a fight with her boyfriend.

Of all the hotels I've been to, I've never found one I liked so well as this. It's easy to check in, even for a woman alone. Of course the rooms are clean too. It's not so cheap, but the rooms are nice so it's worth it. I owe a lot to this hotel. I've come here with my boyfriend about 20 times and when we have a fight, I come here alone to get out of our house. I come here a lot. And I'll probably come here again too.

Written by: A female visiting the hotel alone.

He was arrested by the police right in front of my eyes. Do you know how hard being arrested was on him? Do you know how terrible that must have made him feel? And do you know how hard it is on me to be alone? And how much harder it must be on him? Can you imagine how much more terrible his suffering must be, even than mine? No matter how hard you try to imagine it, you can never understand unless you go through it yourself.

But now I'm trying all the time to imagine just a little bit of what he must be feeling. He's going to be away for at least five years. That's a long time. Everyone is telling me not to wait for him. Five years certainly is a long time all right. Maybe I won't be able to wait, but what other choice do I have?

Written by: A lesbian office worker involved in several "open relationships" with other women.

Today one of my bosses asked me to sleep with him. What in the world am I going to do? But he's married. I told him I liked him as a joke but he took me seriously! What am I going to do???

Written by: A 22-year-old Japanese university student studying in Peking, who came with a 33-year-old man who was cheating on his wife. Their whole date was spent in the love hotel.

You can be happy even if your partner is someone else's husband.

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