the fascinating but prohibited side of Japan which, like the taboo language it speaks, is out of bounds to foreigners. In the mid-eighties I set off on a five-year linguistic expedition to capture the fiercest and slangiest expressions the Japanese street scene had to offer. I had begun with sampling the scintillating and private amphetamine and opium jargons of drug cliques, and then plowed my way through the lingo of the Koganechō brothels of Yokohama and the flashy Korean Creole of the gangs of Kawasaki. Words poured in: words for guns, words for organs, words for pocket-picking techniques, words describing brothels, bathhouses, massage parlors, and S&M clubs. By 19911 had gathered stacks upon stacks of notes and squeezed them into Japanese Street Slang, which came out the following year.
Even though my slang project was over, I was still going on nocturnal language missions, my tape recorder ready for action. Among the many new slang sources I was meeting in New York that year was a group of captivating women who had worked in some of the most notorious pink salons in Tokyo.
"Geso really means tentacles," the conversation would go, "like the legs of a squid. But in sushi bar lingo geso also means shoes. So when you're in a brothel, geso warui! —the tentacles are bad!—means that the shoes outside the rooms, like the men inside, are in bad shape. Forget the tip, ha, ha! Oh, yes, and tsue, tie, ee, means 'one', 'two', 'three', in striptease. Like, atashi tsue means 'I'm on first'."
"Tell him about vacuum fellatio!"
These women were a slang collector's dream. Cackling, they would chat about "washing hair," "fruit dates," "flower time," and "bowling." Prices were compared, working methods discussed, and women from other red-light branches were bad-mouthed. Before I knew it I had dropped my notebook and was cross-examining my new victims about club fees, S&M registration, and the interior decoration of pink salon sex-booths. Were banquettes covered with leather? Were there tables, and didn't they get in the way? If there was just linoleum on the floor, wasn't it too slippery for specials like "upside-down pot service?"
A strange new world was beginning to unfold. I realized that throughout my years of collecting slang I had been so focused on what people said that I never thought about asking what they did while they were saying it. "A language-hunter hunts language—leave the rest to sociology!" had been my initial motto. But as more and more information came pouring in, the urge to organize it into book form became irresistible. As a precautionary measure, I was going to add a lexical subtitle along the lines of "language from the floating world."
The initial idea had been to stun the Western reader with long alphabetical lists that were meant to unravel the darkest practices of contemporary Japanese parlors, from massage, "health," and S&M clubs to the hard-core soapland bathhouses and the hustler bars. But more anecdotes, more confessions, more reminiscences came flooding in. I was also beginning to search for historical and legal background information. When exactly was the Anti-Prostitution Law passed? Who did what to circumvent it? How can Suzuko get away with what she does in her sex-booth and not be arrested for prostitution? At the Public Library in New York I came across interesting books like Gendai no Baishun to Jinken (Modern Prostitution and Human Rights), Sekkusu to Yu Oshigoto (Sex as Work), and Sei no Ōkoku (The Kingdom of Sex), which confirmed among other things some of the more outlandish tales I had heard about the sex factories of the Ogoto region.
As Japan's Sex Trade was taking shape, it was becoming increasingly less of a language book. I had decided to keep a sampling of the parlor menus—the step-by-step chronicling of what is for sale—but I was now determined to present as clear a picture as I could of this strange and exotic aspect of Japan.
1992 was a particularly interesting year for Japan's red-light scene. The eqonomy had taken an unexpected plunge, and establishments rich and poor were being rattled to their foundations. "The bubble has burst!" everyone gasped. 1992 was also the big year of dyuda —changing from one sex-trade branch to another. Bathhouse masseuses were becoming S&M dominatrixes, health girls were switching to pink salons and back, and pink salon women were turning to image clubs, where to titillate their clients they would disguise themselves as nurses, high school girls, and housewives with aprons and curlers.
Debts were on the rise. Hostesses working in Tokyo's exclusive Ginza District, multi-millionaires in the eighties, could now no longer pay off their credit-card charges. Some turned to prostitution (tengai-dēto, "outside-the-store dates")/ others fled to Korea. Even the popular magazine Asahi Geinō reported in a February 1993 article the scandalous sight of hordes of creme-de-la-creme women scrambling out of bars, running hysterically to Ginza Station to catch the last train because they could no longer afford a cab home.
The sudden recession was affecting everybody. College girls and young secretaries who in the late eighties and early nineties had indulged in fast cars, fancy restaurants, and expensive apartments, now had to face the music. Hardest hit were the shindarera furaito gyaru (Cinderella flight girls). Even when the recession hit they refused to face reality. Right into the autumn of 1992, come Friday afternoon these girls would swarm out of their offices and head for the airports, ready for exotic weekend trips to Guam, Hong Kong, and even Hawaii. The shirōto bumū (amateur-boom) hit the parlors.
It was fascinating to witness the major day-to-day changes in the sex-trade arena as I was writing, interviewing, and probing throughout 1992 and 1993. AIDS consciousness was setting in; an impish bathhouse regular was making a name for himself on the Tokyo scene by confessing, as he left each establishment, that he had AIDS, and that even though you couldn't see it he was close to death. The women flipped out, and small but unmistakable changes appeared on parlor and brothel menus. Uncondomed services were rising in price, and most institutions now tested their women for HIV twice a month, plastering the walls with prominent health certificates. The Utagawa bath-house in Tokyo went even further. Customers who were paying $400 and $500 a session often flatly refused to wear condoms, but, given the go-ahead, became squeamish: "If you let everyone do it without, how do I know you don't have AIDS?" The director, Mr. Fukui Tatsuya, steered the establishment out of these dangerous waters by requiring his soap ladies to wear their blood test results pinned to their robes.
Another phenomenon of the early nineties was the frantic nationwide interest in sadomasochism. Practically every parlor joined in. Some went all the way and specialized in the newest and trendiest forms of bondage; others just quickly dressed a masseuse or two in leather and dispensed whips. But either way, esu-emu (S&M) successfully penetrated the fashion world, soap operas, and TV talk shows, clinching its popularity with the arrival of the Japanese version of Madonna's book SEX in December of 1992. S&M even invaded the temperate realms of Tokyo executive circles: "For the hottest date, get a 3-0 girl! (san-ogyaru)." Her first "O" stands for "office lady" (secretary), her second for ojōsama (princess, or in this case dominatrix), and her third and final "O" indicates that she has an otaku (a home, i.e. one does not have to take her to an expensive hotel to get whipped).
The biggest change on Japan's sex-trade scene was the withdrawal of the Yakuza, the Japanese mob. For years they had openly ruled every aspect of the red-light trade, from delivering napkins, towels, and toothpicks to massage parlors, to deciding which women worked in what brothels and on what days. The Yakuza had imported the Jappayuki (Japan-bound) prostitutes from the Philippines, and later brought in batches of fresher women from Thailand. They had set up and conducted the multi-billion dollar sex-tour business in Bangkok, and then, with the AIDS scare, shifted their trade to the more innocent territories of Vietnam. But sharp new anti-mob laws loosened the Yakuza's grip on Japan's modern pleasure quarters, and the tough men with their full-body tattoos have, for the time being, disappeared from the street corners, the slummy dark entrances of the sex-parlors, the salons, and the clubs.
As my writing continued I decided to add color to the different segments of the sex-trade world by introducing, as a backdrop, Japan's peculiar pornographic scene. In a country where an acrobatic soap lady might service naked clients while swinging from the ceiling, and where agencies like Shibuya Dicks and Come Boy guarantee delivery of a male hustler in 20 minutes, too much pubic hair shown in a magazine
