PinkBox Japan

Japanese subculture, Japanese sex clubs, and women in Japan

Book Description
In Pink Box, photographer Joan Sinclair takes us on a journey inside the secret world of fuzokukawaii (commercial sex) in Japan, a world where (cute) collides with consumerism and sex.

Unrivaled in their creativity and the sheer number of choices, the clubs featured in this book offer their clientele every fantasy imaginable. Subway groping, visits to the nurse’s office, and comic book character encounters are just the beginning of the immense list of possibilities that are played out in colorful playrooms for adults where no detail is overlooked. Sinclair’s photographs capture it all, while an introduction by sociologist James Farrer provides a brief history of commercial sex in Japan and places the images in the context of contemporary Japanese culture. spotted in boeboeing.net | Amazon

insightful read >> Pink Box interview with the female photographer

What is it about Japan that makes this industry so ubiquitous?

A 400 year old history of the industry, a lack of a Judeo-Christian religious philosophy, a need for release in an especially tightly wound society, an emphasis on customer appreciation, a set of laws so complex that the industry is virtually legal…

And the costumes and fantasy rooms. What makes them so popular?

In Japan, company uniforms and school uniforms are still widely used. People’s social place is identifiable at a glance by their costume. These clubs allow people to break the social rules, using everyday archetypes. The schoolgirl, the commuting secretary- the women you see every day- are forbidden fruit. These sexualized archetypes are reflected in Japan’s wildly popular dirty comic books.

So, are these clubs legal?

Gray zone. The bottom line is that most of them are officially operating illegally because they don’t have the proper licenses. But, as long as the girls are stopping short of having actual intercourse for money, the clubs are allowed to operate. So, most of the clubs offer absolutely everything imaginable but sex.

The industry is so clean in some ways—another Japanese paradox.

The prices and house rules are all written out in detail. Nothing is left to chance. The services were listed on ‘menus’. The extra services were so creative- to a degree that you just don’t see here.

Were the women all Japanese, or were many Asian immigrants?

The book is about Japanese sex clubs that cater to Japanese men, and the women working in the ones I shot are overwhelmingly Japanese. Generally, they are women who have chosen to do it—middle-class, educated women—not women trying to feed their families or get drugs

But there are neighborhoods in Japan where Thai, Filipina, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese sex workers are brought over by the Japanese mafia to work as prostitutes. A lot of them are working off debt, and they’re forced to overstay their visas.

I chose for editorial reasons to keep that aspect out and limit the scope of the book. But people should know that’s not the whole story. One of the things Westerners kept telling me was: “Find the sad stories; you’re not going deep enough!” But with the Japanese women, I kept looking for psychological damage, exploitation and abuse—and I didn’t find any of it. I found very balanced women making a personal choice. Once in a while one of them would say, “I can’t have one-night stands because I feel I should get paid for them.” Those kind of statements gave me pause.

How much do these girls earn?

In general, about $140,000 per year, about what a first-year lawyer in the US earns. They get a base salary, plus cuts of the extra options, usually 50 percent, and a bit of extra money for being chosen. If you’re working at a health or image club, and you’re chosen from the photo catalog, you might get a $25 bonus for a forty minute session. And that encourages repeat customers, regulars who get hooked on one girl.

Many of the girls are educated and middle class. Do their parents know?

Many clubs offered so-called ‘alibi services’. A lot of the women still lived at home, which is common in Japan for individuals even into their 30s and 40s. They would tell their parents that they were makeup artists or waitresses. If the parents called that line, the club would answer, “Hello, Denny’s”—or wherever the women were pretending to work.

That’s ingenuous.

Well, the clubs compete with each other for the women so fiercely that the women themselves are the prized commodity. The managers really want to keep them so they take good care of them.

What about their futures? Do they get stuck in the sex industry, unable to break the addiction to quick cash, like so many American performers?

A lot of the Japanese women try it for a month or two, then quit, get married, and never tell their husbands. It’s really hard work, and the ones who do it for years don’t stay in the industry for decades. A lot of them have Bachelor’s degrees, since Japan boasts a 99% literacy rate. Generally, they can’t be on drugs—they’d get fired. In Japan, you need to use the more difficult formal form of honorable language to address customers, so any drug or alcohol abuse would be obvious and quickly discouraged. Their social demands are so much more complex than ours.

How did you feel as an American woman and mother encountering Japan’s comparatively more public pedophilic fantasies?

The first thing I had to do was put aside my preconceptions and some of my feelings. The schoolgirl fantasy is ubiquitous in Japan.

It’s a complex subject. A lot of Asian women look younger than they are—especially compared to Western women. But that’s an integral part of the industry, not only in Japan. It’s too critical to ignore just because it might offend.

What did disturb me was the sale of middle-school girls’ uniforms, and videos and magazines that featured young girls. I was surprised and saddened by that. Some of the video footage is taken by men posing as parents. I had more of a problem with that than the fantasies.

Are all of the customers male?

No, there are clubs for women where men provide female customers with services. And their customers are predominantly older women.

The real question is: Who has the power? Is it the customer paying for a fantasy, or the women and men getting paid quite well to tease, flirt, flatter and sometimes satisfy? Was it difficult selecting the photos? Were you concerned about offending readers?

I decided to include some of the racier images. The Japanese sex industry is complicated-it’s bizarre and creative and over-the top and colorful, but the bottom line is what happens inside those private rooms. I wanted the book to be both honest and complete- which means some of the photos are difficult to look at.

So what is the relationship between the mafia and the sex industry?

Most of the clubs are yakuza owned. They often sell oshiburi (moist washcloths) at a premium to the clubs. Extortion.

And every club has a ketsumochi (literally ass-holder), a low level mafia go-between, on the payroll of each club. If a customer is rowdy or rude to a girl, the ketsumochi has the yakuza deal with the troublemakers.

What did the clubs feel like inside?

They were crowded and they stank of whiskey and smoke. They were also claustrophobic and dark, with high volume techno music booming through the speakers. I had to learn to clean my cameras because of all the smoke, and I had a rule never to change to anything about the room or the way the girl was dressed.

How did you take the pictures?

I had both a digital camera and a Mamiya, a medium-format film camera. And because it was so dark, I had an off-shoe cord with a flash that I turned down to 1/16th power and did a little bit of a bounce flash to preserve the ambient lighting (black lights, colorful lights). Some of the private rooms were so small that I didn’t have room to spread out the legs of a tripod, so I used a monopod (camera on a stick!).