If you want to hear the mens 뉴욕 밤알바 perspectives on working in the clubs that are hosting, listen to the 24th episode of GPod featuring Anthony Joe. There are a lot of Japanese works of fiction, like TV series, novels, video games, manga (and anime adaptations), that revolve around hosts or hosts clubs, such as 9th Circle, Bloodhound, and the lighter-hearted Ouran High School Host Club. Many Japanese fictional works showcase the acceptance of the Kyabakura Hosts into general society.
Hostess clubs are common features in Japans late-night entertainment scene, East Asian countries, and other areas with large Japanese populations. Hostess clubs and hosts are considered to be a part of the Mizu Shobai (literally, water trading), a business in the Japanese night-time entertainment business. In 2007, the Japanese government began taking measures against hostess clubs, leading many clubs to close down, with many hosts being arrested and deported.
Japan promised to crack down on the illegal hiring of foreigners at Hostess bars, but a 2006 undercover operation found several Hostess bars were prepared to illegally hire a foreign woman. Now, according to strict laws, it is only legal for foreign women to work as hosts if they are Japanese citizens or hold a legitimate marriage visa.
While it is now illegal for foreigners to work at a Japanese hostess club if they are not Japanese citizens or have a spouse visa, many women are still finding jobs in the occupation, which is seen by some as the modern-day incarnation of the geisha. For Japanese women, and female immigrants, deciding to become a hostess reflects an inhospitable social environment. The circumstances of the adult Japanese women working in the sex-work mainstream industries that are the main focus of the present book are different from the circumstances of migrant women from abroad working in underground industries.
It is women working in that industry who are subject to right-wing rhetoric and interventions from activists focused on Japanese women. The story of how the Japanese business sector has combined their business activities with sexual exploitation of women in the entertainment business outside the working hours shows, in concrete terms, how the official gains of women are being eroded by the parallel trends towards sexualization and the consolidation of a sexualized industry. The integration of such settings into everyday conduct of white-collar employment in Japan makes the middle-class labor market sexual, and thus inhospitable for young women, who are made to feel that they have sexually-based status by their male colleagues doing business in settings which operate entirely based on sex-subordinate roles for women.
In many ways, the very things that make sex work attractive for some young women are the very things that make it problematic as a job. As irregular workers in stigmatized work formally separated from the ordinary categories of labor, women in sex industries are given very little control over often-risky and unsafe conditions for their work. There is, however, a general denial, including among feminists in Japan, that housemaids are at all at risk for prostitution and sexual violence.
Even forty years on, more than 46 percent of men responding to a wide-ranging 2003 survey still think that patronizing sexual-industry venues offering work for hosts cannot be avoided in Japan.
A recent article in The New York Times described a Japanese hostessing career involving entertaining men in venues where customers paid heavily for flirting with young women and drinking alcohol (services which did not generally include prostitution). If you are unfamiliar with kyabakura (a portmanteau of Japanese pronunciations of cabaret and club ), it is essentially where men pay lots of money to drink and chat with beautiful women. While there can be some shady stuff going on around the kyabakura, pretty much the entire activity in the kyabakura itself is totally innocent, as long as you think that getting wasted as girls talk to you as though you are some sort of famous person is totally innocent.
Typically, the hostesses of kyabakuras will not have sexual relations with customers, and men are forbidden to touch the females breasts and other body parts, but recently, it seems that more places are permitting this. Kyabakura hosts often also hire a female bartender, often highly trained in mixing, and may also be the head of staff or mamasan[citation needed]. They may be seen as a modern-day equivalent to geishas, providing after-work entertainment for groups of wage earners.
There are various types of clubs, and I believe that I had experiences working in them all, kyabakura, lounges, girls bars, and top-end clubs. As the Hostess (and the only foreigner) in a very well-respected club at Kitashinchi, the hottest Hostess Club spot in Osakas Umeda, I was lucky to get to know many interesting people through my job. Japan is also filled with hostess clubs — places where women go to flirt with handsome men and get treated like kings.
In an era when women are becoming stronger and running the show all over, the host club is where men can still feel like men (without sex, of course).
While the hostess clubs are obviously gendered by how women are serving men, studies also have revealed the complexities of the internal gender dynamics, and sometimes even the tensions, between the hosts, as well as how male patrons frequently try to alleviate problems among hostess, and even between hosts and mom-san. At one extreme, hostsesses comprise Ginza-districts luxurious clubs; at another extreme, they are migrant sex workers under conditions of involuntary servitude. In December 2009, a labor union called Kyabakura was formed to represent hostessing workers at bars.
The #MeToo movement experienced a false dawn, as it failed to recognize that, beneath the sexual harassment and assault of working women, was the shadow cast by the countrys culture of corporate hostessing. Comfort Women and Corporate Japan After Occupation provides a snapshot of the Japanese hostess industry during its years of economic prosperity after the war. Tokyo Girls is a 2000 documentary featuring four Canadian women who recount their experiences working as hosts in Japan.