Issue:
January 2024
How host clubs get their claws into young female customers … and their own employees
One of the big tabloid stories of 2019 was the near fatal stabbing of a 20-year-old man by a 21-year-old woman in an apartment they apparently shared in the Kabukicho entertainment district of Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward. The man worked at a nearby host club, where he entertained female customers with endearing conversation in order to get them to buy expensive drinks. The woman who stabbed him was a manager of a “girls club”, a female cognate of a host club where young women sit with male customers and use their feminine charms to get them to drink. The perpetrator of the stabbing, Yuka Takaoka, later told police that she attacked the man because she had romantic feelings for him and felt the best way for them to remain together forever was to kill him and then kill herself. She didn't quite accomplish this task and ended up dragging the boyfriend’s unconscious body out of the apartment where a famous photo was taken of his bloodied form next to Takaoka as she smoked a cigarette and talked on her phone.
The young man remained unconscious for five days. By some miracle, he not only survived but recovered enough to return to work, where he adopted a new professional moniker that capitalized on the bizarre publicity: Phoenix Luna. In December of the same year, Takaoka was found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison.
A lot can happen in three-and-a-half years. In this case, it was the Covid-19 pandemic, which effectively erased the Takaoka incident from most people’s memory, including that of Karin Amamiya, who often writes about issues related to poverty and people living on the margins of society. In a November 29 posting on the online publication Magazine 9, she wrote that the photo of Takaoka came rushing back to her as she read a story about a young woman who had become a prostitute in order to pay off debts she had run up at the kind of host bar where Phoenix Luna worked. In recent months, the tabloid media had rediscovered host clubs as a lively topic, only now it focused on the customer as victim of the host club system. Takaoka's story had been reported as a one-off about one woman whose attachment to a host drove her to homicide, but now the same impulse – falling in love with the man who is serving you drinks – was being addressed from a different perspective that had much wider ramifications.
This year, those ramifications became so apparent that even the mainstream media started covering host clubs in earnest. National politicians are discussing whether they should regulate such businesses to protect potential customers from extortionate service practices. Amamiya ran through a list of related media stories that appeared in November alone: a young woman arrested for swindling middle-aged men out of ¥150 million to pay her favorite host, who was also eventually arrested for allegedly violating the organized crime law; a host arrested for threatening a customer with violence if she didn’t pay her outstanding tab; another host arrested for serving alcohol to a minor and prodding her into prostitution to pay for it; and another attempted murder of a host by a female customer who had already paid him ¥18 million. In response to these and other stories, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP) submitted a bill in the Diet to “strengthen safeguards against host clubs” with malicious business practices.
A November 28 article in the Asahi Shimbun explained these practices. Although host clubs have been around for years, in the past they tended to target working women and full-time homemakers with money and time on their hands, meaning in both cases older women looking for a bit of attention from young, handsome men. For the most part, these relationships were above board in that the customers understood the dynamic and were willing to pay premium prices for the attention. But some years ago, clubs switched their focus to younger women, specifically women who worked in the so-called “water trade”, meaning the world exemplified by entertainment districts like Kabukicho. These women unwound in host bars where they could be complimented and made to feel important. Invariably, many took the relationships further and fell in love with the hosts, and the clubs themselves realized there was gold in these feelings just waiting to be mined. Now these clubs have expanded their operations to target female university students and other young women who may not work in Kabukicho. In fact, customers who are in debt to a host can settle part of their debt by introducing a friend to the host as a potential customer.
The Asahi cited the example of a 20-year-old woman who started patronizing host clubs when she was only 18. Last fall, she fell in love with a host whom she came to believe was also in love with her. Whenever she went to his club, she would spend up to ¥200,000 on drinks, even though she was underage. He told her, “Money is love,” so she felt that the more she spent, the more he would love her. Eventually, he started giving her “blue invoices”, meaning notes for payments due that simply recorded the amount owed with no items listed. The host introduced her to a “scout” who would help her pay off these debts through prostitution. Having estimated that she had spent about ¥10 million on host clubs over the previous two years and was still in debt to the tune of several million yen, she finally entered a women's shelter and is presently working with a lawyer to settle her debts.
Hidemori Gen, founder of the Council of Fathers and Mothers to Protect Youth (Seiboren), told the Asahi that he had been in Kabukicho for 20 years helping runaways and addressing domestic violence, but since the Covid restrictions were lifted he has spent almost all his time on problems related to host clubs. He estimates there are about 300 clubs in Shinjuku Ward, or 60 more than there were before the pandemic. That is because the age of majority in Japan was lowered to 18 in 2022 (though the drinking age remains at 20), so the target demographic for these clubs became younger and more susceptible to their lure. He found that he was being asked for help by more and more parents of teenage girls. This year alone he has worked on 300 separate cases, more than half of which involved young women forced into prostitution to pay off debts. And he points out that it isn’t just Shinjuku. There are host clubs in cities like Sapporo, Osaka, Okayama, and Kumamoto, and all use blue invoices, which means the extortion has been systematized.
The police say they are cracking down on the practice, but the existing laws are not always effective. From July to November this year, police arrested 126 women in and around Okubo Park for prostitution. About 40% said they needed the money to pay off debts to host clubs, but there is no law regulating debts accrued by patronizing drinking establishments, and local governments are wary of limiting certain businesses’ credit systems. Generally, police can arrest a host for inducement to prostitution, but it's difficult to prove - only 16 have been prosecuted for such a crime in the last 10 years.
The CDP bill would promote the use of existing laws to address host clubs’ malicious practices, but would not create any new ones. On November 16, the head of the consumer agency said women who incurred debts with host clubs could use the Consumer Contract Law to cancel debt contracts with the clubs, and there is actually a law that prohibits using “affection” to lure someone into a contract. However, violations of these laws are often difficult to prove in court. New club patrons are initially charged low prices for drinks, and as the customer falls under the spell of a host, the prices go up astronomically. The relationship with the host progresses from that of a friend to that of a potential and sometimes actual lover. At this point, the host usually declares that the customer is his favorite. They may, in fact, even start living together.
An article that appeared on November 30 on the website Aera.dot said that most hosts, who tend to be not much older than their targets, use a manual, which means the clubs themselves supervise these romantic scams. Depending on how much money they bring into the club, the hosts are ranked, and those lower on the list often have to do extra work like cleaning the restrooms. The object is to juggle as many regular customers as possible, and often the host will lock in customers by telling them something like, “We can reach Number 1 together.” The manual also provides tips on how to prevent customers from patronizing other host clubs. (“If you do, it means you don't want me anymore.”) Customers who agree to support favorite hosts at all costs are called “aces”, which means they can be counted on to walk the streets as prostitutes to pay off their debts. Some even agree to travel overseas as part of trafficking schemes to earn money as prostitutes for their hosts. That's why the hosts introduce the customers to scouts or agents, since that way the host himself cannot be prosecuted for inducement. The problem has become so widespread that U.S. and Australian immigration authorities have begun paying closer attention to single Japanese women trying to enter their countries as tourists, so now these women tend to go to Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and Dubai.
The sponsor of the CDP bill is Upper House Diet member Ayaka Shiomura, who told Aera.dot that she had received pushback from people who think the government should not waste money on women who exercise such poor judgment. She stressed that the proposal comes with no tax liabilities; that it is simply a means of focusing currently available resources on the problem, as well as an instrument that would publicize the problem more widely. The public criticism, she believes, is meant to demean women. Men who patronize hostess clubs, she points out, tend to be older, salaried employees who simply lose part of their savings when they are scammed, but the victims of host clubs are young and naive, and have no financial backup, so they have to sell their bodies to square their debts. The two situations cannot be compared. In her Magazine 9 post, Amamiya also talks about widespread discrimination against these women, not to mention the hosts who exploit them (Phoenix Luna grew up in an orphanage and was homeless before he was recruited as a host), since both groups tend to be “refugees from mainstream society”.
As it turns out, the hosts themselves are also victims, as explained in a December 7 article in the business magazine Diamond Online. Hosts are often given monetary quotas by their employers and thus have to pay these quotas whether they earn them or not, so the debts that customers run up are actually debts that the hosts owe the clubs. The hosts are essentially sub-contractors responsible for their business dealings. Often, they are as much victims of the system as the customers are.
Clubs get their claws into hosts in other ways. The Diamond article cites the story of a host in his early 20s they call Takuya, who had been working only five months when he was forced to sign a letter of agreement to compensate the club’s management for a penalty he had incurred. The penalty stemmed from an incident in early November when Takuya was helping an older host entertain a regular customer. During a conversation, Takuya told the customer how, on a company trip, he had been pressured by a supervisor to patronize a brothel, because he needed to experience monetized sex in order to be an effective service industry worker. He went to the brothel and paid the woman who served him, but they only talked for the allotted time and did not engage in any sexual activity.
The club’s management found out about this story and confronted Takuya, saying that what he had told the customer reflected badly on the business. Although he offered to apologize to both the senior host and the customer, the managers wanted something more and kept pressing him to come up with a better solution. The interrogation lasted for hours until Takuya broke down and signed a pre-drafted letter saying he would pay the club ¥200,000 a month for more than a year as compensation. Since the letter was written as a form with blank spaces for yen amounts and dates, and was already signed by a club executive who was not present, Takuya knew that the shakedown was something the club had done before with other hosts. Ostensibly, the club was protected from charges of extortion or fraud because the form made it seem as if the repayment was Takuya’s idea.
Takuya eventually went to Seiboren, which put him in touch with media that would publicize the story to show that the systemic victimization carried out by the clubs extended beyond female customers. The Asahi story said police believe these clubs are not being operated by traditional organized crime groups, which are controlled by the Organized Crime Law, but rather by so-called mobile criminal organizations, which operate through social media connections, thus making them more difficult to locate and prosecute. Some, in fact, are based overseas. Police think that the money earned by host clubs end up making its way to these groups and even traditional organized crime groups. A December 19 article in the Tokyo Shimbun suggested how ineffective the police have been in combating the problem. On December 15, officers attempted to visit all 299 host clubs in Kabukicho to check whether they had menus listing prices for food and beverages, in accordance with the law. Seventy-five percent of the 176 clubs they checked had no menus, but another 123 clubs could not be checked because they were closed when the police arrived, implying they were purposely avoiding inspection.
Most media stories suggest that only a large-scale, nationally coordinated effort can address such amorphous criminal entities effectively. During a Lower House budget committee hearing on November 24, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said the central government was working on measures to address the host club issue based on the assumption that criminal organizations were behind the malicious practices. If these measures progress beyond the talking phase, the police will have their work cut out for them.
Philip Brasor is a Tokyo-based writer who covers entertainment, the Japanese media, and money issues. He writes the Japan Media Watch column for the Number 1 Shimbun.
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