Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club

"Her research was conducted in the late 1980s, when she worked in one of the hostess bars in Tokyo, serving drinks to businessmen. The 1980s was still a period of economic growth in Japan. Lots of companies had an entertainment budget to send their male workers to the hostess clubs after work, so the men could build a collective masculinity and come back into the office to work harder the following day. The first time I read this book was in the early 2000s and it was striking for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a very unusual topic through which to study broader Japanese society. You wouldn’t immediately assume that hostess clubs could tell us something general about Japanese society. Also, coming from Japan, people’s practices were familiar, like businessmen visiting hostess clubs after work, but I was struck by how they reveal more fundamental ideas about people’s perceptions of place and identity in Japan. “Even within marital relations, love is expected only in an abstract way, not something that necessarily characterises marriage in real life” But this book was written over 20 years ago and I think things have changed a lot. Because of the economic downturn many companies don’t have the money to budget for this kind of stuff. And the younger generation don’t really want to go drinking after work with their bosses. So, today, as I read this book, many of these phenomena might sound almost historical, but I feel this book still shows something that people today are struggling against in Japan. Many people—and even the state—are aware that Japanese society needs to change, especially in terms of gender inequalities. But it is so hard to see changes and improvements. To understand why gender inequality persists in contemporary Japan, I think we have to understand what was happening in the 1970s and 1980s. This book shows what was seen as ideal, and how separation between the masculine and the feminine spheres was promoted and institutionalised. And how the present situation still draws upon the norms and cultures of those periods. I think it has changed a little bit, but there hasn’t been drastic change. The government has tried to increase the percentage of women in senior positions. But just saying we need more women on the top won’t help. Institutional changes are also necessary. I think it does both to some extent. Certainly the role of women in society has expanded. Now dual income families exceed single income families in which men are the dominant breadwinners. But the underlying ideas that we see in Anne Allison’s book die hard. Those ideas, like the gendered divisions of labour, were not simply imposed upon people by the state, but also seen as ideal. So, I feel that today many women are struggling between two competing ideologies, that they should work, but also that they should be good mothers."