[Anchorman]

Mayu Kamei fulfilled her childhood dream of getting a career position at a major wedding planner company only to chuck the job in so she could become a sex worker. She is, according to Spa! (9/18), one of the growing number of Japanese who are throwing all caution to the wind so they can search for a place where they're wanted.

Kamei (it's not her real name, by the way), set her mind on becoming a wedding planner when she was a little girl.

After graduating from a top public university, she snared a place working for one of the biggest names in Japan's bridal business.

But things didn't quite turn out as she'd expected.

"I'd joined the company thinking I was going to be planning all sorts of wonderful weddings and they sent me out doing door-to-door sales," she moans to Spa!

While out on the beat, Kamei was greeted by scowling faces and slammed doors. That is, of course, if the doors were even opened in the first place. Work some become a grind.

"With people telling me all the time that they didn't need what I was selling, or weren't interested in what I had to say, I really began to doubt my own character," she says. "I was always asking myself things like 'Is it me who's not needed?' or 'Is it me who's not interesting?'"

Fed up to the back teeth with rejection, Kamei threw in the towel even though she had managed better sales than anybody else in the company. When she told her employers she wanted to quit, many co-workers rallied behind her and urged her to stay on.

Even though Kamei says she was thrilled when everybody tried to get her to stay on, she'd had enough of the loneliness of door-to-door sales and was sick of the company. A chance meeting with an old high school friend firmed her decision.

"My friend was working in a 'health' sex business and she told me all about it," Kamei says. "I was so envious to hear that customers would go to her workplace just to see her."

At 25, Kamei pulled the plug on the bridal business and started working in an imekura cosplay sex joint in Tokyo's Kabukicho entertainment district.

"I was really moved because not only would customers hand over their money, they'd also thank you once the session was over," Kamei, now 28, tells Spa! "I really felt like I was alive."Kamei has since had stints working in all sorts of sex businesses, including S&M clubs, and now works in a soapland where she lubes up her body and uses it as a sponge to wash her male clients before generally engaging in coitus. She also takes home an average monthly pay packet of 600,000 yen.

"But it's not the money that makes the job important for me; it's the fact that my customers need me. Boy, I'd even be willing to foot the price of reserving my services because of the joy the job brings me," she tells Spa! with a giggle. "Even when a customer turns up just before closing time, I see that as proof that I'm needed and my bosses want me, so it makes me try harder on the job." (By Ryann Connell)