Last March, two top-level Finance Ministry officials resigned after admitting that they accepted, among other blandishments, prostitution services paid for by Harunori Takahashi, the president of the bankrupt Tokyo Kyowa Credit Cooperative.
This April, in a scandal that led to the departure of the finance minister himself, Hiroshi Mitsuzuka, two ministry officials were found to have been entertained by Dai Ichi Kangyo bank executives, who were told exactly when audits were scheduled. The two officials were not taken for an especially expensive meal of sushi and ginjo (the champagne of sake); rather they were treated to a long evening of no-pan shabu shabu. "No-pan" is the Japanization of "no panties" and shabu shabu is a cooked-at-table beef soup. Here, panty-free waitresses deliver platters of thinly sliced beef and vegetables, pour beer and attend closely to customers' conversation.
A decade from now the aesthetically advanced, if ultimately juvenile, debauchery favored by the business class may be confined to the fond memories of retired board members and elite bureaucrats. But like Japan's immense residual wealth -- for example, the 1.2 quadrillion yen in pensions and personal savings -- the sex trade still has a long way to fall.
Reiko Shimada has five phones. With her, that is. She has more at home, she explains, reaching into a lipstick-red Louis Vuitton handbag to extract a collection of palm-sized portables.
Her favorite, a digital wrapped in a pink, quilted Hello Kitty case, is small enough to fit in a man's shirt pocket. But it is not the phone's compact utility that appeals to Shimada; it is the man who paid for it.
"He made us laugh. He brought nice gifts, and he always paid first," says Shimada, 18. Like the other phones in her possession, the Hello Kitty unit belonged to a salaryman, one of a dozen or so who paid between $260 and $1,000 to have sex with Shimada's associates, mostly 15- to 18-year-old students. When a new customer was introduced, always by referral, the first thing he did was present his "date" with an activated portable telephone. That way, he could reach her without worrying about a parent picking up or listening to the message.
Once a girl quit or decided she wanted a new "uncle," she surrendered the phone to Shimada, who started looking for someone new to answer the call.
At least that's how it used to work. Shimada quit pimping months ago, discovering she could make as much money with fewer hassles as a media whore. Her first customer was part of a three-man TV camera crew on patrol around a massive postmodern fountain outside Tokyo's Ikebukuro station. Agreeing to digitally scramble her face, they filmed an interview with Shimada, wherein she produced the five phones, talked about her favorite clients, told how much she and her girls make and explained why they do it -- all the basics of the enjo kosai ("subsidized dating") business. Afterward, she gave the interviewer her card, and he gave her 20,000 yen (about $150).
The day after her interview aired, Shimada received calls from print journalists, including some from British, German, Swedish and American publications, and television producers who had seen the interview and tracked her through the station. They all wanted to interview her or the girls who worked for her. Most offered cash. These jobs led to others and, eventually, to book and screenplay offers.
A sunny, fast-talking Tokyo teen with long, streaked hair, Shimada admits she feels lucky to have won the attention. Part of it, she says, is knowing the right answers. "I would always tell them, 'It's kind of exciting,'" she says, describing her response to the question, "What is it like being with an older man?" The quote would invariably end up in the headline or slapped across the television screen in big, lurid characters.
Timing also played a part. Last fall, scarcely a day passed in Japan without a report on enjo kosai being published or aired. The stories seldom went below the skin. Much of it seemed more like titillation than reportage -- lots of visuals of uniform-wearing schoolgirls and much discussion about virginity, prices and number of dates. With the media heat, it was easy to believe that half the nation's high school girls were nightly screwing half of Japan Inc.'s mid- to upper-level managers. Indeed, a headline in the Mainichi Daily News last fall read: "Poll: Schoolgirls say prostitution OK." The survey itself, however, revealed that 56.3 percent of respondents said that they were "extremely reluctant" to take part in prostitution and among those who said they knew what enjo kosai was, 82 percent said they had never been involved in it. Only 12.5 percent answered that they had "no particular reluctance" to participate.
Teenage prostitution is hardly new to Japan. Enjo kosai departs from tradition only in that the girls basically work for themselves. Prostitution was once considered honorable, in fact, if practiced at the highest levels. It was not unheard of for parents to sell their daughters into the trade. And one of the two most common themes of kabuki, the traditional Japanese theater of commoners, is called mi-uri, the selling of human life. In its most typical form, mi-uri features a woman selling herself into prostitution to save her parents or husband, or being traded away secretly by a desperate or dastardly family member.
Shimada is still working on her book. The screenplay offer has withered, though, after a few meetings and one too many ambiguous come-ons by its ostensible backer. And she has no plans to go back to pimping. It's harder to find customers these days, she says, especially ones that pay over the $265 minimum, bring designer accessories for gifts and treat girls to expensive restaurants.
(This was from the published writing of Dave McCombs in "Salon Wanderlust - Sex and the Salaryman", from the website www.salon.com)
1 comments:
damn.. where'd you get hold of this? very interesting, and very insightful. no-pan-shabu-shabu helped, i see!
Post a Comment