Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

  Two days before, the Shinjuku police had arrested the owner and manager of a club in Kabukicho known as The Mature Hot Wives Party Palace for managing prostitutes. He had been running the establishment for more than a year and raked in close to $400,000. Shimozawa showed us all an advertisement for the club taken from Tokyo Sports, a popular newspaper sold at every train station in the city:

  Hot, mature women starved for love want you to satisfy their needs. There’s nothing better than fooling around with another man’s wife, especially one in her prime. Call now.

  The ads showed several women in their late thirties, most of them with black bars across their eyes, partially obscuring their faces. Akimoto also had been advertising on the Internet and on mobile telephone Web sites. That was a big deal at the time: people using the Internet for criminal activities!

  Another thing about the Web page that was ahead of its time was that if you printed out the home page and brought it with you, you got a discount of several thousand yen. The Web site was very professionally done. It had a full menu of services and options listed, but I couldn’t figure out what they meant. Wakamesake? Shakuhachi?

  Why would they offer sake with seaweed? And shakuhachi? Were they using wind instruments as dildos? Was I not getting something?

  Shimozawa laid it all out for us but didn’t explain the menu.

  “Unlike many sex clubs in Kabukicho, this place was openly providing honban. They had a staff of more than thirty women on call and ten on site at any given time. We suspect an organized crime presence in the background. Any questions?”

  No one raised his or her hand. I did.

  “What’s honban?” I asked.

  Shimozawa looked surprised.

  “You don’t know what honban is?”

  “No.”

  Beanpole giggled.

  “That’s actual sexual intercourse. Insertion of the penis into the vagina,” he answered succinctly.

  “Isn’t that what all the sex clubs are doing?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Well, if the customers aren’t inserting the penis in the vagina, what are they doing with their penises, anyway?”

  Shimozawa laughed. “Have you ever covered the Crime Prevention Bureau before?”

  “Not really.”

  “So you don’t know how this works?”

  “What works?”

  “The whole sex industry.”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, you’d better read up.”

  Nagoya-kun from Kyodo asked if there had been anyone famous there when they’d made the arrests and raided the club. There hadn’t been.

  I had another question: “How many of the prostitutes were arrested?”

  “None.”

  “And the customers?”

  “None.”

  “Just the manager?”

  “Just the manager.”

  People were looking at me as if I were a total idiot. But it didn’t make any sense to me. Why did the cops bust only the manager of the club if there was an antiprostitution law on the books? I realized that I was in completely new territory now. I wanted to ask more, but I felt I was trying the patience of the cops, so I shut up, but there are limits. One of my favorite Japanese sayings goes along the lines: “To not know and to ask a question is a moment of embarrassment; to not know and not ask is a lifetime of shame.” I always thought it was better to look like an idiot and ask a lot of questions about new materials rather than fake it.

  I asked another question: “This club marketed itself as being staffed by all married women, but how many of them were actually married?”

  Shimozawa didn’t even need to look at his notes. “Good question. Only about a third of them were actually married to someone. Most of them were divorced or single.”

  After the lecture, as I was packing up my computer, the detective sitting in the corner came up to me and introduced himself. I was later told that people referred to him as Alien Cop. He was a striking figure. About six feet two—tall for a Japanese guy—very thin, shaved head, and his eyes were jet black, almost all pupil and no white. He was dressed in a dark gray suit, navy blue tie, and a pair of black loafers.

  “You don’t get this stuff, do you? Ever done the police beat before?”

  “I covered the Organized Crime Control Bureau in Saitama.”

  “OC stuff, huh? This is a different ball game.”

  “I can see. I should study up.”

  “Tokyo vice is a complicated thing. Books won’t tell you how it works. You can study the laws, of course, but what’s on the books and what’s enforced—different things.”

  He gave me the card of a bar in Kabukicho.

  “I get out of here at nine. Meet me at this bar. I’ll walk you through Kabukicho, explain the deal to you.”

  I was grateful. It’s not often that a cop decides to take you under his wing. I agreed to meet him, quite happily.

  First, I had to finish up an article I was working on about a “hot wives” club. I typed it up in about an hour and sent it to my editor. Then I walked fifteen minutes to Kinokuniya bookstore, picked up a copy of the Japan Criminal Code and related laws, and started thumbing through the adult entertainment laws. It was not easy to understand. Alien Cop knew what he was talking about.

  The bar where I was supposed to meet Alien Cop was a dive. Tiny. It was more like a walk-in closet. There was a standing bar counter with an obsidian top that ran across the room. There were no windows and no tables to sit down at. It was so dark that when I lit my cigarette it seemed as if I were setting off fireworks. The master of the place was dressed in a tuxedo, and his head was completely shaved. I tried to order a drink, but he said, “You’ll have a whiskey” and poured me one.

  Rule number one of drinking with cops: you are permitted to order only (1) sake, (2) shōchū, (3) beer, or (4) whiskey. Tiki-tiki drinks are not allowed. A dry martini may be acceptable since 007 drank them. Order a Blue Hawaii, and you might as well pack your bags and start covering family affairs.

  Alien Cop sauntered in thirty minutes late. He wore blue jeans, red sneakers, and an AC/DC shirt. I felt overdressed. He nodded at the master, who nodded back, poured him a shot of Jameson’s, and slid it down the bar to him with the precision of the Scottish curling team at the Olympics. Alien lifted the glass to his mouth in one motion as it slid into his fingers and knocked it down.

  “So what do I call you? Adelstein-san? Jake-san?”

  “Just Jake will be fine.”

  “Okay, Jake-san. So this stuff is a little confusing for you?”

  “Well, yeah. If prostitution is illegal, shouldn’t everything in this area be closed down?”

  “Depends on your definition of prostitution. Let’s go for a walk. I’m off duty, and this is off the record.”

  And so we sauntered out into the night.

  We started our walk in Kabukicho near Tokyo Topless, a legendary strip club. Alien pointed out various types of shops as we passed them and began to expound on the life of a vice cop.

  Kabukicho in the evening in 1999 looked like the Disneyland Festival of Lights Parade, except that the neon signs were advertising blow jobs instead of family vacations. In front of the buildings and in the middle of the streets, touts dressed in formal black suits and white shirts aggressively sought out customers, grabbing sleeves and shoving pamphlets into the hands of meandering salarymen. From some of the buildings, loudspeakers vomited out the husky voices of women advertising sexual pleasures beyond imagining: $200 for forty minutes. A few shops displayed seminude pictures of the women working the club on the lit-up billboards in the shop entrances. Every building seemed to be crammed with shops and bars and covered in signs advertising them.

  “I don’t understand why the prostitutes weren’t arrested on this last case. Did they make a deal or something?”

  “You have to understand that the Prostitution Prevention Law here is really about protecting the prostitutes. You could call it the Pros
titute Protection Law.”

  “How does that work?”

  As we were walking past Bareo, he pointed out a Thai prostitute lurking near an alley, hoping to drum up customers.

  “I could arrest her if she’s openly soliciting. That’s illegal. However, if the guys come up to her, that’s not a problem. Anyway, here’s the deal. After the war, there were lots of people basically selling their own daughters into the sex trade. Kind of like slaves.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, in 1958, prostitution as it used to be was banished. It used to be a licensed industry. The idea was to make sure that women couldn’t be forced into sexual servitude. So basically, the people the law punishes are the pimps, the brothel owners, and the guys who solicit for the prostitutes. The idea at the time was that many of the women in the industry were being coerced into it and if you punished them, it would be punishing the victim. Plus, no one would come forward to the cops. For the john and the hooker, there’s no punishment. If the woman is under twenty, we might put her in a shelter.”

  “Why doesn’t the law punish the customers? Wouldn’t that discourage the trade?”

  “Sure it would, but who the fuck do you think wrote the laws? Guys. Hell, in the 1950s probably half the Diet was frequenting Soapland.3* It was a huge social problem, with girls being sold like cattle, and something had to be done, but that didn’t mean the guys were going to put their own dicks in the sling. So that’s how it stands.”

  “So there’s no punishment for being a prostitute or sleeping with one. What about all the other stuff that goes on here? That’s got to be illegal, right?”

  “Nope. The general rule is that as long as it’s not straight intercourse, a store or shop can offer any kind of sexual service you could want. Just as long as it’s not vaginal penetration with a penis. There are zoning issues and stuff, of course.”

  “That’s why they can advertise, right?”

  “Absolutely. In the newspapers, on billboards, on packets of tissues. Check out this storefront.”

  We were in front of a shop called, more or less, Dick Nurse.

  The billboard displayed pantyless Japanese women in white nurse uniforms complete with little white hats, squatting over an anonymous Japanese man, their hands on his crotch. The ad was not subtle:

  30 minutes, 6,000 yen. Our nurses will nurse your lower body back to health. These trained nurses will examine and explore every nook and cranny of your body and take your temperature, oral or anal, whichever you prefer. Options available.

  “And this is legal, right?”

  “Yes. As long as the girls aren’t fucking the customers—not a problem. Look, you can see we’ve even approved them to do business under the adult entertainment laws.”

  He pointed at the seal on the door.

  I was looking at the options menu, but there were a lot of terms I didn’t understand.

  “What’s this mean?”

  “Anaru name? That’s anilingus. She licks your ass if you pay extra. You also can get a prostate massage. That’s when the girl sticks a finger up your ass while she blows you. Standard stuff.”

  We kept walking. Alien broke down all the shops and businesses for me by types and services.

  There were sexual massage parlors and fashion health shops. Those usually offered hand jobs, blow jobs, and anal massage or anilingus. Some were now offering anal sex. The so-called image clubs were like sexual theme parks. You could choose from several motifs: virgin brides, schoolgirls, nurses, nuns, and animated characters. Most of the girls in those places wore some kind of costume and did some mild role playing, much like the girls at the Maid Station.

  He took me by Shinjuku Joshi Gakuen (Shinjuku School for Girls). This was the most famous spot in Kabukicho for getting serviced by women dressed as schoolgirls. Many schools in Japan require students, male and female, to wear uniforms, and apparently this seems to create some kind of Pavlovian association of school uniforms with the first feelings of lust. At 10 P.M., there was actually a line in front of the place.

  “Have you ever been inside?” I asked Alien.

  “No, not for business or pleasure. It’s a popular place, though. There’s a huge selection of uniforms, a copy of practically every uniform from every high school in Tokyo. It gets some guys pretty hot.”

  Of course, at every one of these places, as soon as they saw my face, they immediately told Alien, “No foreigners allowed.”

  That was one reason I don’t think I ever really got to explore Kabukicho as well as my coworkers did, which was probably just as well.

  Alien did manage to get me into a couple of lingerie pubs, a cabaret, and some other seedy places where I normally wouldn’t have had access. Of course, I footed the bill.

  Some pubs offered blow jobs to the clients. There were still one or two pink salons, where, for 3,000 yen (about $30), you would go in and order a cup of coffee, and while you were drinking it, one of the female staff would unbutton your pants, wash your penis with a warm towel, and then fellate you. I have to take his word for it because foreigners were banned from entry, of course.

  There were strip clubs where audience participation was allowed. Alien dragged me into one of the smaller ones; it might have been Art Shower—the name escapes me. The club was like a giant living room with a large round platform in the middle surrounded by tables with yellow tablecloths on them and chairs that looked as if they were covered in red velvet. The dancer was gyrating to Japanese pop. She stripped off everything, and then she masturbated onstage, making high-pitched squealing noises while spreading her legs in the butterfly pose. She was supposed to be versed in the arts of the “flower train.” That is to say, she was supposed to be able to hold a pen in her vagina and write things or shoot blow darts. We weren’t in luck that night because there was no such spectacular performance.

  The club smelled of piss, ammonia, sweat, cigarettes, musk, and body fluids. The smell of woman was pungent and powerful. At the end of the performance some of the customers were invited to masturbate the dancer onstage with a vibrator at the conclusion (irepon). We didn’t stay long. Alien didn’t seem particularly interested in any of it. He was very much into his role as a tour guide. He ran through the entire hidden language of strip clubs for me, elaborating on the difference between “pachinko” and “open.” Some of the strip clubs had separate rooms where you could go with a dancer and she would do what it took to make you ejaculate for an extra fee. The strip clubs employing foreigners were often said to offer actual intercourse as part of the package.

  We next walked past the host clubs. He showed me the giant amusement center/office building Furinkaikan, which was where all the local yakuza congregated during the day and night. There was a giant open-space coffee shop on the ground floor. There were more than a hundred different yakuza groups with offices and business in Kabukicho, and Furinkaikan was their Grand Central Station and their convention hall.

  We walked past the love hotels and the Thai prostitutes standing near the park close to Okubo station. Iranian males were servicing gay Japanese men in the restroom of another park in the area. There were several bars staffed by transsexuals and even a few bars offering drag queen performances.

  On a narrow road to Koma Stadium, a pencil-thin building with a sign advertising THE SEXUAL HARASSMENT CLINIC caught my eye. Alien said it was another variation of the nurse-themed image club. However, it had a real ob-gyn examining table with stirrups, making it all the more “authentic.”

  The most memorable sex club of the evening was Bareo. It had an actual subway car inside, and when you paid your cash and got onto the train, one of the girls, pretending to be another passenger, would board the train and molest you, whisper in your ear, stick her hands down your pants, and perform other lewd acts. For an extra fee, you could take one of the girls out on a date and she would molest you on an actual train. This was the hot sex club at the time. There were already one or two clubs where men could pay for the privilege of pretending
to molest a woman on a subway train, but the role reversal was what made this club such a hit.

  Amaenbo was close to City Hall and supposedly popular with midlevel bureaucrats. They had a glass toilet that would let you see your hostess perform any of the standard bodily functions. You could stick your head in the bottom and be pissed on if that was your thing.

  I didn’t find any of this as disgusting as I thought I would. However, I passed on a chance to see the magic toilet in action.

  We dropped in at one S-and-M club. Alien knew the owner, a short little bald guy with a ponytail who wore a sarong, and chatted him up. The owner let me peek at the show behind the curtain. In the center of a huge room filled with eight or nine tables, there was a small platform, and on it was a dominatrix clad entirely in leather. Her breasts jutted out of her leather blouse, and the nipples were pierced with what looked like safety pins. Her hair was pulled back in a bun. The only thing not leather on her was a huge white strap-on dildo, which she was using to sodomize a middle-aged man in a navy blue suit.

  I didn’t need to see more. We went back to the street.

  By one in the morning there were several Chinese prostitutes walking the streets openly. They didn’t seem to care whether I was Japanese or not. I had to peel one off every five minutes.

  Around two in the morning, Alien took me to a no-panty shabu-shabu restaurant where half-nude young women prepared beef dishes at your table and flirted with you while you ate. I picked up the tab for that, too.

  “So, I get the picture. Well, what is illegal besides actual normal sexual intercourse?”

  “Not much. Hard-core pornography. Uncensored stuff.”