ASIA NEWS

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m mildly drunk at work, so here’s some racy TUPNewsExtra! In a departure from our usual practice all of this information is second- or third-hand, but I still felt it worth reporting.

A colleague of mine (male, Malay, Muslim and married) recently visited Japan’s Tokyo for a conference, and hooked up with a Japanese friend living there. It turns out that Japan really is a nation of perverts - but an impressively innovative bunch of perverts.

First off, even karaoke, innocent pissed-up entertainment in Western Europe, has a seedy undertone in Japan. If you visit Martha Lane Fox’s “authentic” private booths in Soho, you will probably not be invited to take your pick from a line-up of young girls, for a companion who will sit on your knee, laugh at your jokes and duet with you. Hmmm.

Next up are the rather disturbing “scenario” clubs, where different rooms are made up to represent a subway carriage, a locker room, a classroom (!) etc. Here you will hang on to a pretend strap surrounded by hostess girls in commuter clothes while a tannoy issues instructions – move closer to the girl, now everybody grab a whatever, etc. Unbelievable. My colleague wasn’t allowed in to this one, though, as he is not Japanese.

Pushing it a bit further are Soapland bars, mostly located in the Yoshiwara district of Japan. Here you are taken to a private room and bathed by a soaped-up naked Japanese girl. You lie on your back on a rubber mattress and she squirms around you, even under your legs – as in, between your back and the mattress. Then, if you want, sex.

My colleague did actually go to one of these, although I don’t know how far it went. He remarked that it was “nice to leave a club feeling nice and clean, rather than grimy like you usually do.”

Finally and most appalling/fascinating are the kaiten-eros bars. Kaiten-sushi is the Japanese term for those conveyor belt sushi places. At a kaiten-eros bar, you sit in a three-sided booth, with the open side facing a stage. Some girls dance on the stage, but a line of girls walks in a circle in front of the booths (unfortunately they are not literally on a conveyor belt). If you see one you like, you simply call her in to your booth.

So far, so uniquely demeaning. Here’s where it gets really odd: the girls only perform oral sex, and, as my colleague put it, everything has to be “done and dusted” within about ten minutes, or they will just leave. However! You are not paying on a per-transaction basis – rather, you pay by the hour and can take advantage of the services as much as you want – an “all-you-can-be-eaten” offer, to put it crudely.

Again: from a moral angle, pretty awful; from a consumer choice angle, laudable.