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

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

Anne Allison. University of Chicago Press, $37 (228pp) ISBN 978-0-226-01485-2

Japanese companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to hostess clubs that provide certain employees a release from job tensions. Here hostesses perform ritualized tasks--lighting cigarettes, pouring drinks, conversing in a stylized flirtatious manner--and while there is an erotic charge, the sex is implied, not performed. Duke University cultural anthropologist Allison's account of the four months she spent as a hostess at Bijo, a high-class Tokyo hostess club, is the first written description, in English or Japanese, devoted wholly to these after-work hangouts for corporate, white-collar sarariiman (``salaryman,'' an English/Japanese linguistic concoction). Allison has not written a voyeur's account, but a soundly researched study that provides substantial insights into the meanings of work and play for the Japanese. Whatever else they may do, the hostesses' first duty is to emphasize the client's strengths and his status as a desirable male, which, Allison argues, helps create the ideal sarariiman , one committed first and foremost to his job. Allison interviewed not only the hostesses and other Bijo staffers, but also wives of the men who frequent the club, club neophytes, managers of other hostess clubs, Japanese sociologists, journalists and others. Unlike previous books on Japanese nightlife, Allison's ethnography views Japanese night life from the eyes of a woman and feminist anthropologist. If the writing is occasionally dryly academic, Nightwork nonetheless provides valuable, thought-provoking reading for those interested in Japan, contemporary society or in gender roles. (Apr.)