Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club - Softcover

Takeyama, Akiko

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804798540 ISBN 13: 9780804798549

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2016

Synopsis

In the host clubs of Tokyo's Kabuki-chō red-light district, ambitious young men seek their fortunes by selling love, romance, companionship, and sometimes sex to female consumers for exorbitant sums of money. Staged Seduction reveals a world where all intimacies and feigned feelings are fair game for the hosts who employ feathered bangs, polished nails, fine European suits, and the sensitivity of the finest salesmen to create a fantasy for wealthy women seeking an escape from the everyday.

Akiko Takeyama's investigation of this beguiling underground "love business" provides an intimate window into Japanese host clubs and the lives of hosts, clients, club owners, and managers. The club is a place where fantasies are pursued and the art of seduction isn't merely about romance; a complex set of transactions emerges. Like a casino of love, the host club is a site of desperation, aspiration, and hope, in which both hosts and clients are eager to roll the dice. Takeyama reveals the aspirational mode not only of the host club, but also of a Japanese society built on the commercialization of aspiration, seducing its citizens out of the present and into a future where hopes and dreams are imaginable―and billions of dollars can be made.

About this title

About the Author

Akiko Takeyama is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Kansas.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Staged Seduction

Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club

By Akiko Takeyama

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9854-9

Contents

Notes on Japanese Terms and Currency, 
Prelude, 
Introduction: Promise of the Future, 
1. The Consumable City, 
2. Commodified Romance, 
3. Entrepreneurial Attraction, 
4. Feminine Restoration, 
5. The Art of Seduction, 
Conclusion: Affect Economy, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

THE CONSUMABLE CITY

[It] blows fire, breaking the darkness
The super city flies up into the sky

...

TOKIO TOKIO flies in the night

...

You can obtain whatever you want from A to Z
The super city works miracles for the dreaming lovers
— Sawada Kenji

"TOKIO," a song about two lovers in a futuristic city, was released on January 1, 1980, at a time when Japan's "economic miracle" was in full force. Sung by the androgynous male vocalist Sawada Kenji, it became an instant hit, selling more than three hundred thousand copies. Kenji envisioned "TOKIO," spelled as English speakers pronounce it, as a "super city" — a place where everything is obtainable and anything is possible. The song's fantasy was not so farfetched. Having fully recovered from the devastation of World War II, Japan's export-based economy was flooding global markets with high-quality, low-cost industrial goods, while its competitors were still shaking off the previous decade's oil shocks. In the 1980s, Tokyo underwent massive restructuring and achieved great prosperity. Reflecting the lyrics of the song, the city soared into the night sky and turned "into a star" — a global city.

Of course, the miracle was not just a gift of economic globalization. Tokyo has been one of the most populated cities in the world since the premodern period when it was called Edo and served as the political capital of the Tokugawa shogunate. Since then, Tokyo has reached prominence for hosting the 1964 Olympics and showcasing Japan's economic miracle for Western audiences. During the 1980s, Tokyo was reimagined as a global city that would attract greater foreign investment. The results have had far-reaching ramifications. Tokyo today is a "hyper" urban stage, where actors ranging from political leaders to pop stars to consumers project politico-economic interests and sociocultural fantasies. Indeed, the city itself has been rendered into an object of consumption.

This chapter traces the historical development and transformation of Tokyo's futuristic cityscape since the 1980s, as the city became a target of state-led neoliberal restructuring. Commerce-centered planning further shaped the production of the city, while consumers were given the keys to the new and exciting wonderland. A flexible labor force rapidly assembled to produce and respond to the resulting demands and desires. I show how Tokyo has shaped such a phenomenal world, an affective cityscape, in which young people visualize and experience their hopes and dreams, as well as despair, as they seek upward social mobility in Japan's service economy. I trace the unprecedented changes in the city's topography and its symbolic meanings before and after Japan's bubble economy in the late 1980s and then during the prolonged post-bubble era. In the face of these socioeconomic shifts, I argue that political and cultural visions of a city as a site where individuals can fulfill their hopes and dreams have not only remained consistent; they have ideologically intensified as a pressing national project.

This imagined space, in turn, evokes an array of emotional and interpretational responses, which shape and fuel what I call "affect economies." These marketplaces — where feelings, emotions, and lifestyles are bought and sold in the form of labor and/or consumption — construct the affective cityscape of Tokyo. Among the most visible sites are Japan's host clubs, located in Tokyo's red-light districts.

Promise of Tokyo

By itself, Tokyo is an economic juggernaut. The metropolis generates more than $1.616 trillion annually, more than a third of Japan's total GDP. Its GDP is equivalent to that of Canada and Australia, the world's eleventh- and twelfth-largest economies, respectively. The annual budget of Tokyo's metropolitan government alone is equal to the size of South Korea's national budget. It is the world's largest metropolitan economy.

Tokyo's global economic strength is the result of multiple state-led negotiations and private-sector projects initiated in the early and mid1980s. Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro (1982–1987) introduced many of these initiatives. Responding to and manipulating business demand for office space and residential demands for affordable housing, Nakasone ardently promoted deregulation of the city's zoning laws and the privatization of government land to build office towers. A year following his election, Japan's Ministry of Construction relaxed building codes, as well as restrictions on commercial zoning and urban fringe land development. The result was an enormous increase in high-rise buildings and city subcenters.

That same year, Nakasone's cabinet also promoted private investment in urban development. This eventually led to the breakup and privatization of Japan Railways, which sold off a number of its underperforming assets in Tokyo. The "Urban Renaissance," driven by the mutual interests of state leaders and corporate investors, was becoming a well-orchestrated national project.

The burst of urban development that followed fueled an unprecedented boom in the real estate market. In tandem with the strengthening of the Japanese yen and low interest rates that followed the 1985 Plaza Accord, Tokyo's real estate prices increased to the point that the total value of the city's land was purportedly worth as much as all the land in the United States. With neoliberal reforms enabling extensive deregulation in construction and advanced architectural engineering, skyscrapers in business and commercial areas embodied these lofty visions. The fantastic fevered imaginations of "TOKIO," the metonym of the Japanese nation-state, seemed to have come true.

Nakasone's initiatives also pressured the metropolitan administration and the central government to accelerate politico-economic reforms and transition Japan from an export-oriented model to one based on domestic consumption. Tokyo metropolitan governor Suzuki Shunichi announced Tokyo's future as his main goal in the 1986 Long Term Plan of the Tokyo Metropolis: "Ongoing internationalization has opened the possibility of creating a glorious future for Tokyo with the approach of the 21st century. We must make the most of this golden opportunity to build Tokyo into an attractive international city of which our descendants, let alone ourselves, can be proud." The announcement was made shortly after the relocation of the metropolitan government to Shinjuku, one of Tokyo's gleaming new subcenters. Tokyo residents were attracted to Suzuki's promise of furthering economic possibilities and prosperity. They elected him to a second term in 1987.

While public support for Suzuki's futuristic vision heralded the flourishing of urban redevelopment projects for the rest of the decade, the significance of Tokyo's ascent in the global order was not fully understood at that time. Investments in these development projects were still considered highly speculative and risky throughout the 1980s. Despite these national and metropolitan leaders' popularity, their political vision for the city's future was vaguely described, at best. Consequently, the city's future became an open canvas for investors, businesspeople, and citizens to fill with their own desires and fantasies. Individuals were asked to buy into the value of Tokyo's "promise." These resources might be defined in terms of a better quality of life, new employment opportunities, or real estate. Though labeled as perfect, no-risk investments, there were no guarantees that this promise would actually be fulfilled.

The 1980s portrait of Tokyo as a futuristic city was an attempt by the government to break free from the past and align with a newly imagined global future. During the 1970s, the city grappled with social and environmental ills, called Tokyo problems, caused by rapid industrial development: extreme population density, housing shortages, traffic congestion, and pollution. The city's image became contaminated — literally and figuratively — with the negative consequences of the postwar high-growth period. Due to the foreclosed possibilities in history, globalization functioned, as Anna Tsing eloquently claimed, "like a crystal ball that promise[d] to tell us of an almost-but-not-quite-there globality" and urged us "to rush anxiously into the future, afraid to be left behind."

In this future-oriented and outward vision, Tokyo was assigned a new role as a "command point" in the global economy. The Tokyo Stock Exchange began to launch Japanese government bond futures contracts in 1985. These newly introduced stock index futures and options markets, Hirokazu Miyazaki states, "ostensibly afforded investors in the Japanese financial markets tools for hedging the risks of the Tokyo Stock Exchange-traded stocks' downward turns as well as new tools for speculation." As strategically utilized in Japanese public discourses, the anticipated success of the city's financial sector promised a multitude of possibilities and mobilized a host of citizens with different interests to participate in the national project of "making a better future."

Tokyo was thus not merely a physical location but also a cultural icon of the new Japan. By distinguishing futuristic Tokyo from the rest of traditional and rural Japan, the key symbols of global modernity and cultural tradition were reproduced and made meaningful as fundamental to the nation's identity. These regional relations also spawned a set of social affects: anticipation about the national future and nostalgia for the past. As Tokyo became a metonym for the contemporary nation-state, the city's affluence was equated with national prosperity. Framed this way, the city rationalized its massive concentration of the nation's wealth, human capital, and administration. The fact that a disproportionate distribution of national resources to Tokyo had caused greater regional inequality was conveniently concealed. Tokyo functioned as an index of the nation's future; it could not fail.

While Tokyo's role as a showcase for the nation's possibilities secured massive investment, it also burdened the city with high expectations. In order to maintain its attractiveness to corporations and investors, Tokyo had to remain forever on the cutting edge of technology, perpetually future-oriented in its outlook. In other words, the "ideal city" must be continuously imagined in order for it to successfully come into being and evolve into something new and exciting. Cities, human geographer Nigel Thrift points out, must "exhibit intense expressivity." In the case of Tokyo, it is this expression of futurity that is performatively displayed.

The future is a collective and synergetic enterprise for various social actors — city planners, dwellers, and spectators — to undertake. This enterprise, combined with the hopeful and prosperous dreams for which Tokyo stood, were mutually constitutive of the cityscape.

Fetishizing the City

Tokyo's cityscape plays an important role in Japan's consumer culture, particularly visible in its lifestyle advertising. The mass media circulate highly stylized fantasy images through television dramas, fashion magazines, online media, and city information guides, among other means. As a result, Tokyo is no longer merely an object of media representation; it has become a medium in which individuals are presented as culturally sophisticated citizens through consumption and leisure. Cityscapes encourage consumers to express their idealized selves, however illusory they might be.

Gabriella Lukács describes how Japan's "trendy dramas" of the late 1980s and 1990s were the result of a partnership between television broadcasters and the leisure industry. The dramas were often filmed in easily recognizable, popular locations in Tokyo, such as Shibuya, Odaiba, and the Tokyo Tower. These serialized programs of ten or so episodes were designed to introduce viewers to chic bars, cafés, amusement parks, and sites for romance. Lukács writes, "These shows have turned the whole of downtown Tokyo into a theme park not only for young Japanese living in suburbs and the countryside, but also for youth in Southeast Asia generally where Japanese trendy dramas have great currency." For example, since the 1990s, the Tokyo Tower is no longer a famous landmark of the city but a symbol of love, as it has become Japan's most popular dating spot.

Much like the way New York City is portrayed in the HBO series Sex and the City, the demarcation between regular programming and commercial breaks isblurred. As advertisers present the Tokyo cityscape as a locale to be consumed, the endlessly stylish shops, luxurious lifestyles, and flexible work featured in Japanese dramas reinforce these persuasive marketing messages. Viewers enjoy these destinations vicariously through the lens, as actors move through distant but recognizable space. Television dramas are thus not merely passively constructed modes of visual entertainment but portals into the affective experiences of fictitious urbanites in actual locations. Just like Disney films are transformed into theme parks, Tokyo, too, is undergoing "Disneyfication" on a larger scale, according to Lukács and others. In this sense, the city has become a fetishized site of playful consumer activities.

Such a metamorphosis was particularly clear in the district of Shibuya. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, the Seibu Saison Group, a business conglomerate of retail stores, railway companies, and marketing units, endeavored to combine city development and marketing to transform this characterless district into a mecca of youth fashion and culture. To accomplish this goal, the company built an enormous theater-like shopping center targeting mainly female consumers. According to sociologist and cultural studies scholar Yoshimi Shunya, key to the success of the pioneering project lay in Seibu's skillful adjustment of reality to fit this image rather than the adjustment of the image to fit reality. Put another way, this neighborhood was spatially "staged" to encourage consumers to envision themselves as part of this fabricated cosmopolitan world.

For instance, the company concocted European-sounding names for streets such as Supeinzaka (Spanish Slope) and Sentagai (Center Street) and named its new department store Parco (Italian for "park"). The company consolidated nearby stores into a mall-like configuration and laid them out them so that visitors could wander the streets and see individual stores, restaurants, cafés, street signs, and advertisements. These facades inspire consumers to create their own stories about the experience of being in such a global space. More important, Yoshimi argued, the intentional design stimulated a "mutual gaze" among consumers. Shibuya became "a huge theater where people watch and also display who they are." The success of Parco became the prototype for the later development of megacomplexes in other central Tokyo wards, such as Yebisu Garden Place, Roppongi Hills, and Tokyo Midtown, which added office spaces, hotels, concert halls, museums, movie theaters, private housing, and other facilities in the new millennium.

In these staged marketplaces, consumer goods are not the only things being bought and sold. Signs, images, and symbolic meanings are information to be consumed by passersby. This information is then imaginatively incorporated into the self-presentations of young, fashion-conscious, and curious visitors. These individuals, in turn, contribute to the collaborative image of a youthful, vital, and innovative cityscape. This dynamic "feedback loop" further motivates consumers to act. The mise-en-scène of the shopping experience — the liveliness of sales locations, the visual effects of stores' interior and exterior designs, and the vibrant atmosphere created by the stores' staff and consumers — initiates sales and stimulates greater spending.

Building on Yoshimi's theorization of urban space as media, Kitada Akihiro argues that Tokyo has become an "advertising city," where everything becomes a potential advertisement and appeals to its spectators. The distinction between social reality and fantasy blurs. Not only are stores filled with luxurious goods and locations identified as trendy, but consumers themselves also publicize the products they buy. These embodied advertisements include the designer clothes, shoes, and accessories they adorn themselves with while wandering the city; the shopping bags with brand-name logos they carry; and the imported luxury cars they drive through the congested streets. At the same time, marketing campaigns bombard consumers everywhere — from office waiting rooms, to hotel lounges and bars, to shopping malls, to street corners and public transportation depots. Together, the city of Tokyo and its residents mutually constitute a living, breathing commercial for a certain kind of lifestyle. Today's cities, Nigel Thrift writes, are actively engineered to "have 'buzz,' to be 'creative,' and to generally bring forth power of invention and intuition, all of which can be forged into economic [means]."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Staged Seduction by Akiko Takeyama. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804798540
• ISBN 13: 9780804798549
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248