The Antiprostitution Law of 1957 did not exactly kill the Japanese sex business. Most brothels and girly bars just decided to “re-conceptualize” and take their activities underground. Law enforcement tacitly tolerated the existence of “Turkish baths” and “massage parlors” for the next twenty-five years, as long as these businesses did not become too brazen or make a conspicuous move into mainstream society.

In the 1980s, however, the sex business went overground for the first time in the post-war era, becoming a significant part of the pop cultural zeitgeist. Not only did the greater media attention make more men into sex busness patrons, the news about high salaries paid to sex workers ended up attracting a large number of young women into the field.

As with all Japanese pop-cultural historiography, the changes and fads in the sex industry can be charted almost perfectly by year. The following timeline of the 1980s sex business development is translated from one of the greatest analytical works on Japanese pop cultural history: 『サブカルチャー神話解体：少女・音楽・マンガ・性の３０年とコミュニケーションの現在』 (Subcultural Myth Busting: Thirty Years and the Current State of Girls, Music, Manga, and Sex). Originally published by PARCO in 1993, the book contains post-modern critique on the development of Japanese pop culture from authors Miyadai Shinji, Ishihara Hideki, and Ootsuka Meiko. (A newer version came out in paperback last year.)

Note: the main form of prostitution before the early 1980s sex boom was the “Turkish bath” (トルコ風呂). In Japanese, “Turkish” is toruko, and many new forms of prostitution took the “toru” as a suffix. In 1984, all Turkish baths officially were renamed “soapland” after complaints from the Turkish embassy.

1981 will eternally be recorded as the year of the “Big Bang” in the sex industry. The 1980 opening of the very first “no-panties tearoom” (ノーパン喫茶) in Kyoto launched a huge boom in Osaka at the beginning of 1981, and later, the sparks spread to Tokyo. In the later half of 1981, however, you already started to see the decline of the no-panties tearoom. The excitement shifted to the first-ever “peep room” (のぞき部屋) that opened in Shibuya. At the end of the year, mantoru ["mansion Turkish Bath," underground apartment-based prostitution] grew rapidly, inviting a crackdown by the authorities. By the next year, however, the service changed to hotetoru [call girls who come to patrons' hotel rooms] and “date tearooms.” The “girls of the new sex industry” produced by the sex boom became the core customers of “host clubs,” which rapidly opened one after the other and ushered in a “Gigolo Boom.” As sex businesses rapidly spread in Kabukicho, adult shops also concentrated in the area, which turned into the “binibon (books/magazines rapped in plastic) boom.” After that, urabon and ura-bideo (uncensored and illegal pornographic books and videos) started to be distributed and (porn actress) Aizome Kyōko became popular.

1982 was the year of “individual rooms” and “full service” (本番). After the no-panties tearoom boom ended, there was an influx of the “new sex business girls” into the newly-emerging businesses “fashion massage” and “private-room nudes.” Hotetoru was born out of the strict regulation on mantoru, even to a point of creating “delivery prostitute boys” (出張トルコボーイ). The crackdown on mantoru ended up flaming the fires, causing the appearance of date tearooms even in residential areas. During this era, there existed an incredible segregation in the staffing of the services: the girls who worked at fashion massage were trade school students (専門校学生), the girls at date tearooms were Asian immigrants, and the girls at mantoru and hotetoru were college students and OLs who did not want their faces known.

In 1983, the “new sex biz” reaches its peak. According to the “White Paper on the Sex Business” from the same year, the number of sex businesses doubled from the previous year to a total of 1,406 establishments. Mantoru went from 145 to 234 locations, private-room massage went from 146 to 279, date tearooms went from 61 to 153, and date clubs went from 182 to 379. There was also a new arrival on the scene: the “mistress bank” [clubs that brought together men who wanted mistresses and women who wanted money], with 106 locations. The sex business entered a new period of intense competition. Ideas became the make or break for companies. New “pornography buildings” 5 Doors and Wanderer opened in Kabukicho. Inside the building was Tokyo Lucky Hole — which later became the name of a photo-book from Araki Nobuyoshi. The building also had what can be said to be the precursor to terekura [telephone clubs]: “phone play” (電話遊び). That year, sex biz gals who did not care at all about revealing their faces started to appear on TV, shifting the “co-ed hooker boom” to a “hooker idol boom.” 1983 saw the debut of “no-panties queen Eve” as a mainstream celebrity. The opening of mistress bank “Evening Tribe” (夕ぐれ族) became talk of the town and led to openings of like-minded establishments all over the country.

In 1984, as the “New Sex Business Law” brought stronger regulation, the sex sector started to bifurcate in an environment of increased competition. On January 30, National Police Agency announced a large-scale revision to the Entertainment Business Control Law. On February 1, they established the Department to Promote Clean-Up of the Fuzoku Environment. Later on the 20th of that month, they fired the first shot of a heavy barrage. Merchants worried about possible crackdown went ahead and self-censored. Customers stopped being interested as the general amateurism lost its charm. This lead to an emphasis on service and quality, and also, the bifurcation of remaining businesses: businesses that could be proud of rich, professional services and those that were strong in showmanship. Private-room nudes completely died out, but the kyabakura [cabaret-club, cheaper version of hostess club] was born. In August, the “New Sex Business Law” was enacted. In September, the city of Tokyo cracked down on 50 businesses in a mass sweep. Meanwhile everyone gossiped about the existence of a date tearoom where a bunch of 16 year-old Takenokozoku girls would hang out. The Diet saw legislators started to bash magazines Popteen and Girls Life.

1985 was the year that gave birth to terekura [telephone clubs], a drop in customers following the enactment of the New Sex Business Law, and a vicious circle of rip-off joints. The explanation for that first item has been insufficient. “Telephone clubs” — abbreviated, terekura — quickly spread as a way to deal with the New Sex Business Law. The “telephone sex services” that grew out of terekura dragged in low teens. The NTT Message Dial and Q2 Two Shot boom [party lines where men would pay ¥100 a minute to talk to girls, who talked for free] led to today’s “underground two” (裏ツー) [underground party lines], pre-paid two-shot, Q2 message, and sexy message faxes.

In the early 1930s, the prostitution abolition movement — led by women’s, Christian, and socialist groups — strongly petitioned the Home Ministry to abandon the “license system” that essentially legalized the world’s oldest profession in Japan. After mounting domestic and international pressure to stop condoning the practice, the Home Ministry announced in 1934 an intention to abolish Japan’s system of licensed prostitution.

Prostitution, however, stayed legal in Japan until 1958. What got in the way of bureaucratic action?

The pimps.

Their official lobby — National Federation of the Brothel Trade — sponsored and mobilized a large group of Diet members to fight against any government moves to outlaw licensed prostitution. In his excellent book on “moral suasion” campaigns in early 20th century Japan Molding Japanese Minds, Sheldon Garon recalls the following anecdote related to the pimp-politician pushback (bold mine):

Brothel owners made large contributions to the political parties, and they were not shy about offering free favors to the many politicians who frequented the quarters.

Nor were the friends of the brothels within the Diet shy about defending one of Japan’s “beautiful customs.” Their unabashed support of the license system sharply contrasts with the relucatance of late nineteenth-century French parliamentarians to discuss the question of prostitution openly. When Purity Society (純潔会) members in 1931 introduced a bill in the Lower House that would abolish licensed prostitution, Yamazaki Dennosuke responded with a speech laced with obscenities and graphic language. Since lust was absolute, he argued, to try to repress it would only bring on masturbation, the chief cause of respiratory problems. (105)

Faced with this tripartite argument on the grounds of business, culture, and public health, the government had no choice but to back down, and johns everywhere breathed a collective sigh of relief with their healthy, healthy lungs.

Richard Mason’s The World of Suzie Wong is the archetypical postwar Asian-mystique story. Most critiques of the work and especially the film adaptation focus on its problematic depiction of the titular Wong. Often overlooked, however, is the book’s use of an exoticized female characters to set up a specifically expat wish-fulfillment fantasy, rather than a generic male one. Consider:

• The first-person hero, Robert Lomax, was barely scraping by back in England, but after moving to Malaysia he quickly saved enough money to kick-start a hip new career: painter. Now he’s respected as an artist by both the locals and the art world back home. The problem was England all along! That’s the kind of validation that a 9-to-5 gig at the Far East branch of Fotherington Industrial Concerns Inc. simply can’t provide.

• Lomax lives in the “real” Hong Kong. He stayed in the white-person part of town just long enough to confirm its residents’ lack of appreciation for the island, then moved into a cheap hotel on the waterfront with an unapologetically Cantonese name (the Nam Kok). The staff and regulars there warmly accepted him on the spot, and he easily settled into a routine of chatting with local color and snacking on exotic treats bought fresh in the market.
• Lomax has both wisdom and perspective. He’s always right and always cool — James Bond without the assassins. Suzie accuses him of crazy nonsense: he explains with tolerant good humor why she is wrong. Jealous expats lash out at him: He defends himself with quiet dignity, feeling more sympathy than anger. A man tries to buy his wife for the night: Lomax expresses his anger in devastating witticisms. On the rare occasions when Lomax does make a mistake, it’s only because a woman has worked unusually hard to deceive him.

On its own, none of this is surprising. Rare is the author who would write a first-person narrative based loosely on their personal adventures in which the protagonist is an asshole without any friends. But consider the other foreigners Lomax runs into, neatly classifiable into three types:

• Sailors - Although they, too, visit the dark underbelly that Lomax calls home, they don’t belong there the way that he does. Their transient nature only underlines Lomax’s firmly ensconced status.

• Fellow Male Expats - These are either oblivious government bureaucrats with no private lives or timid half-tourists who envy Lomax’s insider status. A couple try to usurp him through crude application of wealth or power, but inevitably fail. Unlike Lomax, they just aren’t street.
• White Women - They’re catty! They’re neurotic! They’re totally harshing the Hong Kong buzz! The one exception is Lomax’s nurse friend Kay, who ends up one of the most intriguing characters in the book simply because she isn’t explicitly drawn as a one-dimensional shrew. (This is because the story requires that she do Lomax a favor later. After this, she quietly vanishes.)

Lomax is alone among foreigners in that he likes Hong Kong and it likes him back. His casual superiority over the sailors also symbolizes his status as a new man, a postwar man, no longer a slave to the I-will-always-love-you-but-I-must-return-to-my-true-home Sayonara narrative.

Suzie Wong wasn’t the first English-language fantasy about a white man being accepted and loved by an exotic foreign land — Imperial British writing on India, for example, is a can of worms I am carefully leaving closed here — but it was influential in modernizing the idea, bringing it closer to reality. To be hip like Tarzan, you had to be marooned in Africa and spend your formative years working out in the jungle, but to be hip like Lomax, you just had to head east and loaf in a seedy bar with good-natured hookers. That’s progress.

Nanpa (軟派): like genki and kawaii, it’s a word that everyone in Japan knows, whether they speak the language or not. In today’s parlance, nanpa means something like “the act of a man hitting on female strangers [especially in the street].” However, this modern usage (along with the modern habit of writing it in katakana: ナンパ) only sprung up in the last two or three decades. The word itself is much, much older.

Nanpa apparently dates back to Edo time but was certainly in popular use during the Meiji period. Back then, it was written in kanji (軟派) and used in relation to its antithesis — kōha (硬派). The words mean “soft faction” and “hard faction,” respectively, and at the time, denoted diametrically opposed philosophical outlooks. Softs were thoughtful, introverted and open to compromise; Hards were aggressive, inflexible, and beat up Softs for kicks.

You can find numerous examples of the words nanpa and kōha being used to bisect various social groups, ranging from newspaper reporters (Softs did society and the arts, Hards did politics) to black marketeers operating in early 20th-century China (Softs dealt drugs, Hards ran guns). The usage that eventually evolved into the modern meaning, however, was the one that applied to young men. Simply put: Softs liked women, and Hards didn’t.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. Hards liked some women just fine: mothers, wives, and respectable spinsters. They were happy enough to jump through societal hoops and set up their own household, complete with standard-issue heirs. But they were only really comfortable in the company of other men.

Softs, on the other hand, loved women, and I mean loved women. They dressed sharp, preferred conversation to fighting, and always tried to be where the women were. (It’s worth noting that nanpa was also used as an adjective to describe women who would respond to such advances.)

In his novel Vita Sexualis, Mori Ōgai put it like this:

The Softs were the ones who looked at those funny [dirty] pictures. Back then, booklenders would pile books high on their back and walk around bent over under the weight like pilgrims. The bottom of the pile was a box with a drawer. This drawer was where they always kept the funny pictures. Many Softs borrowed these from the booklenders, and some even had private collections of books like that. The Hards wouldn’t have dreamed of looking at pictures like that. They would read books about a boy named Hirata Sangorō instead. These related a tale of love between this kid Sangorō and an older guy, a tough guy with his hair in the shamisen-pick style. It had jealousy. It had samurai posturing. I think maybe the two of them died in battle in the end, after a series of lesser tragedies. There were pictures in this book too, but they didn’t show the really ugly scenes.

Maybe it’s a little too simplistic to view this situation through post-Sexual Revolution eyes and decide that Soft = straight / Hard = gay, but you could certainly make a strong case for homoeroticism on the Hard side. What separated Softs from Hards was not “sexuality” in the modern sense, but their approach to the “gender line” in a broader sense. And note that at the time, the men who crossed into the company of women, the Softs, were the ones considered decadent and unmanly. Not that they cared.

As the decades rolled on and Japan’s sexual politics changed, this philosophical division between Softs and Hards became less relevant. Practical issues of who was willing to take up arms and join the (hetero-)Sexual Revolution took precedence. Finally, sometime in the ’70s or ’80s, nanpa stopped being something you were and became something you did — on street corners. Of its 19th-century roots, only a faint sense of mustachioed disapproval remains.