Although she's still only 22, Veronica Solano thinks that she has got the world pretty much figured out.

With easy self-assurance each night she deploys a dazzling smile and a form to entice men to spend hundreds of dollars to enjoy her company at the Flamingo Bar, a dark and smoky nightclub where she works. And by all accounts, since arriving in Japan from her native Costa Rica four years ago, she has been a smashing success.

By now, this four-year veteran of Japan's hostess club scene says she is scarcely troubled by the stereotype that the Japanese businessmen flock to this bar and dozens of others like it in Roppongi, one of Tokyo's largest entertainment districts, because of their abiding fantasy about sex with a Western woman.

''They ask for sex all the time, but that happens wherever I go outside, too,'' said Ms. Solano, who said that regular visitors to the Flamingo Bar have plied her with countless gifts, from luxury handbags to expensive jewelry in pursuit of their quest. ''It's just a game, and as long as you know how to play it right, there's no problem.''

Such thinking has long held sway among the would-be models, aspiring dancers and other footloose adventurers who have flocked here in response to promises of recruiters or plain word-of-mouth stories about the easy money to be made in the hostess business.

But the hostess clubs have been under a harsh spotlight since the sudden disappearance in early July of Lucie Blackman, a 22-year-old former British Airways flight attendant who came here to live the hostess life -- a burgeoning demimonde of gangsters and women who often end up flirting with prostitution.

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