It has been a long time since my last blog post and I have to catch up with the rest of my classmates, so this week 頑張ろうと思っていますね (I am going to do my best). Today in class we have seen a documentary film about an interesting and unique aspect of the japanese urban culture: ホスト(Hosts). The film is called The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief by Jake Clennel.
I was impacted by the film, which is really good in terms of providing a cold-blooded and objective inside look at the hosts world. There is some kind of drama in the way the different testimonies are edited, but there is a remarkably lack of moral judgement. Before watching this I only knew this world by seeing the hosts in the street, and wondering: What kind of woman would pay for such a guy to pretend he is her boyfriend? Although I think this documentary does not cover the whole range of customers and focuses in the ones who have addiction problems (maybe because they are the only ones who agree to collaborate with the film and show their faces), the hosts telling their experiences and talking about their lifes and feelings help you to understand how the business works.
But first I am going to explain briefly what are "Hosts". This is one of the most lucrative aspects of the japanese night life and sex related industry, and one of the most difficult to understand for foreigners as well. If you have the chance to visit Shinjuku's Kabukicho district in Tokyo or Dotonburi Bridge (Next to the Glico Man) in Osaka, you will find dozens of extravagantly stylish boys in their early 20s going around in their striking hairdos trying to pick up girls from early evening until late at night. In the eyes of a foreigner, they look really, really weird, and sometimes it is really hard to guess if it is a man or a woman because of the amount of make-up and hairspray they use. Not all japanese women like that kind of guys, but certainly a large amount of them find them attractive and hire their services.
A host is not a supposed to be a sex worker (although most of them admit they have had sex for money sometimes), what a host does is to try to make a woman happy, release her from the stress of her job or daily life's worries, and make her feel like a princess, attended and pleased. As we could see in the film, they basically pick up their costumers in the street, offer them to have a drink and bring them to the host club. There they chat and drink together and the host's job is to make the costumer feel fullfilled and have a great time. Of course, trying to make those women spend more and more money in drinks and other services at the same time.
Before watching The Great Hapiness Space, I thought that most customers would be middle aged single women who cannot find a man or young girls who want to have fun in a special ocasion like somebody's birthday or bachelorett parties. Most of costumers the documentary shows are prostitutes who want to feel relieved of their dehumanizing job, and seek for attention and afection as a woman. The sick an even wicked thing is that they fall in love with some of the hosts and they become addicted to them, to that "fake love" hosts sell, to the point that some of them have fallen into the sex business to be able to pay the extremely expensive services hosts offer. The normal thing is to spend between 6.000 and 20.000 yen per hour (which is expensive enough to not allowing anybody with an average salary to go everyday), but they talk about people who have spent 300.000 or 400.000 yen in a single night.
Talking about feelings, it is as interesting as sad how both night and sexual based industries compliment each other. Prostitute's damaged mental state and feelings can only be relieved by the affection and love lies of the hosts, who at the same time lose the capability of trusting anybody or even identify their own personality after spending most of their working time lying to people, causing a never-ending problem, a vicious circle. Such a great market for phychiatrists, isn't it?
In the documentary film we have seen in class they talk about Osaka's most popular host club, but if you want to know a little bit about the most popular one in Tokyo you can take a look at this short report courtesy of Japan in Motion :
I enjoy reading your opinions about the film we saw in class. But these posts are supposed to be based on your own research. Where are your own photos? Can you take photos of hosts in Osaka?
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