response to 2 discussion posts

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:30:05.

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“So do you fall in love with your clients?” A mildly intoxicated young woman poses this question to a man in a shadowy corner of an Osaka host club. Dim light refracts through the club’s opulent fixtures, turning her white cocktail dress deep sepia. It shines on the host’s flaxen hair and reflects off his glittering gold pendant. As they sit together on a red sofa, the host attempts to dodge his client’s penetrating eyes. He appears a bit nervous and chooses his words care- fully: “I guess I do [fall in love with my clients]. . . . This is the only place I meet girls.” A melancholy love song playing in the background carries his voice and dramatizes the scene. The woman asks him to repeat what he just said. “This is the only place I can fall in love, right? All my ex-girlfriends were customers.”

The host awkwardly shifts his eyes from her face to the floor below. He fid- gets with a sparkling gold bracelet that peeks out from his casual black suit. The woman’s gaze follows his hands as he proceeds to stroke his slender neck and then comb his tousled hair with his delicate fingers. He feigns tiredness. For clients unfamiliar with these gestures, they might be read as a spontaneous display of sensitivity or even shyness. They belie hosts’ actual intentions, which involve calculated efforts to arouse women’s sensual fantasies. These deft mo- tions are the result of habit—a careful array of movement and body language, repeated again and again with each new client.

“How does a relationship develop?” the woman presses him. “I don’t know,” the host answers. “Just a feeling. But you have to be a long-term customer. That’s my experience.” The woman then abandons her solemn look. She nods

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Promise of the Future

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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deeply, pleased with his answer. He looks directly at her and adds: “So you’re in a pretty good spot . . . at least in my eyes.” The woman’s interrogative posture gives way to a warm, inviting, playful stare. She flips her head back and giggles. Then she purposefully touches her forehead against his and places her hand on top of his hand. The host responds by closing his eyes and rolling his head back against the sofa, with a slight smile. He knows he said the right thing and is clearly pleased with her reaction.

This typical host club scene, depicted in the award-winning documentary film The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief, is frozen on the screen, allowing the documentary’s viewers to contemplate their euphoric and triumphant expressions.1 The still image of happiness is juxtaposed with voice- over narration by the host: “We have to keep [women] dreaming, so if we have to lie, we lie.” Shot in the Osaka host club Rakkyo, the documentary follows Issei, a twenty-two-year-old host and club owner, and depicts the heartbreak- ing human dramas surrounding Japan’s underground “love business.” In these clubs, young Japanese men, like Issei, sell love, romance, companionship, and sometimes sex to their female clients. Issei put the business best: “To make it sound cool, we can call it Neverland. Peter Pan took people to a world that doesn’t exist. We take the girls to a dream world. That’s the best way to describe it. Girls spend their money to buy a product, ‘Dream.’”2

For this fantasy, women pay inflated prices for drinks and entertainment offered at host clubs. These sexualized services include flirtatious banter, sweet conversations, and the promise of romantic love from an attractive man. “Sometimes,” the other woman in the film says, “girls really fall in love with their hosts and end up financially ‘worshipping’ them.” Even if the retail price of a bottle of liquor is only a few hundred dollars, hosts can sell it for tens of thousands of dollars as long as women consider it a worthy expense in the pur- suit of their desires. And many women do. For them, the host club’s menu of dreams is priceless.

• • •

The melodrama presented in The Great Happiness Space is typical of popular representations of host-client interactions in Japanese television series, feature films, and other depictions in blogs and online novels. My key informants, however, stressed that if I focused exclusively on host club venues as confined sites, where for a few short late-night hours women could purchase intimate experiences with handsome young men, I would miss the point. The fantasy,

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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excitement, and magical experience that women, as well as men, desire go well beyond these fixed times and formal spaces.

Staged Seduction is an ethnographic study about men and women who pro- duce and consume love in Japan’s host clubs. The commodified product nego- tiated between hosts and clients is not ready made. It is coproduced through flirtatious exchanges, as men and women engage in discreet conversations, stimulating touches, tender gazes, and after-hours exploits. Its value is based on a promised future wherein host and client build a dream world together and set one another’s fantasies into motion. For hosts, the promise is an invitation to make a substantial amount of money out of the relationship; for women, it is a hopeful moment to experience feelings of true pleasure and desirability. Both parties thus fetishize relationships that performatively produce the fan- tasies they seek.

Aside from fantasy, the host club provides a unique window into the com- mercialization of feelings, emotions, and aspirational efforts in Japan’s struc- tural reforms aimed at deregulating and expanding service sectors. Broadly, this ethnography traces the cultural imaginary and political economy that enables people to buy and sell such fetishized objects as love, dreams, and a hopeful future, as they center on particular notions of time, space, and the self in contemporary Japanese society. These products, which entail imagined time and space, whether it is emerging or vanishing in the minds of social ac- tors, engender restless feelings of hope and anxiety, presence and absence, and ephemerality and eternity. These feelings feed back into how these actors con- template questions of what they could and should do in the time to come.

I argue that the future, as envisioned today, is a political arena in which individuals are equally foregrounded as autonomous and self-responsible citizens—they may either freely succeed or fail to realize their dreams— regardless of social inequality in a given condition of uncertainty. A social con- sequence of this kind of politics surrounding future success then creates new stratifications—the winner’s group and the loser’s group—based on the state of hopeful mind between those who buy into aspirations of rose-colored pros- pects and those who don’t. Hope is thus at the center of and at stake in Japan’s so-called hope disparity society (kibōkakusa shakai) in the new millennium.3

To understand why and how certain men and women are compelled to pur- sue their hopes and dreams, often at great personal and financial cost, I demon- strate the meanings, values, and magical potency that the promise of future and freedom provides in gender-, class-, and age-specific ways. I not only illustrate

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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the actors, scripts, and dramas being performed but also shed light on the ways that the theater itself is constructed for actors to experience what it is like to be a successful citizen.4 I also demonstrate how the pursuit of a future is capitalized on in Japan’s sophisticated service-centered economy. Host clubs, I contend, are one of the most outstanding theatrical manifestations of marketing and profiting from emotions, aspirations, and a particular kind of freedom in that economy.

Staged Seduction thus offers an entry point to explore broader questions about future-oriented temporality, perceptions of individual freedom, and moral questions about truthfulness in the highly personalized service and en- tertainment industries. To inquire about these anthropological and philosophi- cal questions, I use an analytical lens I call “staged seduction.” By this I mean the commercially staged force that seduces people into acting on their desires for self-satisfaction, as well as for meeting others’ ends: increasing business profits and fulfilling their roles as citizens, who participate in political efforts to promote the country’s prosperous future. The book guides the reader on a journey that uncovers the ways that individual consent is crafted to satisfy multiple goals simultaneously, while structural inequalities are relegated to the background. In so doing, it shows the often-invisible affective dimensions of gender politics and class struggle embodying vulnerability, insecurity, and risky endeavors at the heart of sex commerce and neoliberal dreams.

The Rise of Neoliberalism and Host Clubs

Not long ago, host clubs were practically unheard of in Japan, unlike hostess clubs or geisha entertainment establishments.5 I first learned about them in the summer of 2001 when I returned from the United States to my hometown of Hamamatsu, located halfway between Tokyo and Osaka. At the time I needed a part-time job and found one working as a secretary at a used-car lot. There I met a Mr. Suzuki, a nineteen-year-old who was new to the company. Unlike the other salesmen, most of whom were older and unremarkable in appear- ance, Mr. Suzuki had a well-cut shag hairstyle with outward-feathered bangs, a thin body, very smooth skin, and polished nails. He wore a tight- fitting, Italian- made suit to work every day.

When the company president ordered Mr. Suzuki to cut his hair to look like a “respectable” salesman, he refused and said he would quit the job before doing so. As I soon learned, Mr. Suzuki prioritized his self-image over employ- ment security. He told me that work was just a financial means to pursue his

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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dream of becoming a renowned racecar driver. Despite his lack of experience racing cars, he was confident about his future success. His conviction, he told me, stemmed from his experience working as a host in Tokyo with his best friend after high school. He watched his friend become a top-ranking host, earning more than 5 million yen, about $50,000, per month. Hosting, however, was not Mr. Suzuki’s passion, and he reoriented his ambitions. Although he did not say exactly why he quit, he implied that he had been unable to handle the escalation of his clients’ desire for seduction into demands for sex. In his uncompromising individualism, grandiose future dreams, and the precarious- ness of his present condition—as well as in his troubled relation to sex work— Mr. Suzuki offered a good introduction to the hosting business.

Today, it would be difficult to find anyone in Japan unfamiliar with host- ing. But for many years, the host club business was relegated to the shadows of Japanese culture. It was perceived as sleazy and immoral by a patriarchal society in which the pursuit of commercialized extramarital sex was an exclu- sively male domain.6 This perception can be traced to the very first host club, Naito Tokyo (Night Tokyo), which opened in the mid-1960s during Japan’s “leisure boom.”

The club began as a dance hall serving mostly upper-class matrons and wealthy widows. They would stop by on their way home from shopping while their husbands worked or engaged in other nightlife activities. Self-employed male dancers were given the name “hosts” (hosuto), referring to their role as entertainers, but their occupation was not considered a profession. Although hosts charmed women with sophisticated conversation, songs, and dance per- formances, outside the club they were commonly called otoko mekake (male mistresses or lovers) and often labeled as gigolos and pimps.7 Women visited the club in secret to avoid the stigma of socializing with these hosts.8 Early on there were only five host clubs in Tokyo. But the number gradually increased to about twenty in the 1970s and to fifty by the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Nearly all the clubs were located in Kabuki-chō.9

During the 1980s, the negative image of host clubs began to change as the business took off at the height of the “bubble economy.”10 The success of host clubs piqued people’s curiosity about the new business that catered to women’s erotic desires. By the 1990s and into the 2000s, the business grew exponentially and quickly shed its reputation as an obscure sexual subculture. The public came to regard it as a successful business model and an antidote to the reces- sionary “lost decade.” The business has barely slowed down since.

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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Intense media attention has followed the rise in popularity of host clubs, to the extent that some hosts have enjoyed household name recognition and a few have become genuine celebrities. One of the best known is Reiji, a former host and now club owner in Roppongi, Tokyo’s upscale neighborhood. Reiji has been profiled in Forbes magazine as Japan’s “geisha guy” and praised as an entrepreneur. (Like Madonna and Prince, he is known only by his first name.) In the mid-2000s, he appeared regularly on television variety shows as a pro- fessional womanizer and sex therapist. He also started a consulting company, providing businesses with marketing advice, interior design, and female con- sumer psychology.

Shirosaki Jin is another example. Jin distinguished himself as a rarefied densetsu no hosuto (legendary host) who maintained number-one status in Club Ai, the most prestigious host club in Japan, for five years in a row and earned about 100 million yen ($1 million) per year—more than twice the salary of Japan’s prime minister. Japanese television and radio broadcasting, as well as popular news media and women’s lifestyle magazines, featured his lavish living and business endeavors frequently. After solidifying his legacy as a charismatic number-one host in Japan, Jin quit hosting to pursue a career as a media per- sonality and multitalented artist: actor, musician, dancer, and womanizer. In the public eye, Reiji and Jin epitomize the neoliberal promise of a better and more affluent future in the social field of Japan’s entertainment industry: that is, the opportunity and luck, coupled with one’s talent and effort, to become singularly successful, regardless of background.

Along with the media production of celebrity life and public interest in the host club phenomenon, Japan’s thriving hosting business has further expanded the country’s sex-related entertainment industry. The estimated annual revenue of Japan’s sex industry accounts for 2.37 trillion yen (roughly $23.7 billion) and is equal to about half the country’s defense budget.11 Put in perspective, Americans spend slightly less than half that of Japan on commercial sex, at an estimated $13.3 billion.12 Japan’s hosting business alone generates estimated annual reve- nues of about $1.5 billion.13 Mostly found in the big cities, there are today an es- timated seven hundred clubs and bars and twelve thousand hosts nationwide.14 Within Tokyo’s Kabuki-chō district alone, more than three hundred establish- ments and more than five thousand hosts ply an increasingly lucrative trade.15

The emergence of the hosting industry runs parallel to the development of Japanese postindustrial consumer capitalism and neoliberal reforms. It is also a reaction and an adaptation to these changes. Beginning in the 1970s,

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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the national economy shifted from a manufacturing-centered industrial one to a consumer-oriented postindustrial one following the oil shocks, a crisis that pushed Japan to restructure and diversify. As originally envisioned, Japan’s new economy hinged on the development of information technology, finance, real estate, and service and entertainment sectors. In an attempt to first expand domestic consumer markets in the 1980s and then pull the nation out of the recession that took hold soon afterward, the Japanese government began to enact neoliberal reforms to deregulate the national economy, privatize social support networks, and encourage corporations and individuals to participate in the economic reconstruction process.

The government started to dismantle the vaunted Japanese-style manage- ment system, represented by lifetime employment and seniority benefits, in order to create labor conditions that flexibly adjust to fluctuating demand in the service economy and economic externalities amid globalization. Corpora- tions also adopted a more results-oriented salary system and replaced many lifetime employees with contract workers to cut costs. This transformation was carried out in the name of enhancing individual freedom of choice. In this context, hosts, especially successful ones, symbolically manifested neo- liberal ideals and female clients embodied liberated consumer-citizens in the postindustrial culture.

Though the host club in general is more accepted today as a business in Jap- anese society, participants typically do not reveal their association outside the club to avoid prejudice against male sex work and female promiscuity. This am- bivalence reflects the new possibilities and constraints they face. Their hopes and concerns thus shed light on the tensions surrounding pervasive gender, sexual, and class norms despite the rapidly changing socioeconomic structure marked by neoliberal reforms and postindustrial consumerism.

Hopes and Dreams

Beginning in the 1980s, young Japanese women joined the flexible labor force and progressively gained disposable income in new service industries. At the height of the bubble economy of the late 1980s, they were celebrated as con- sumer citizens who pursued “a life of [their] own” ( jibun no jinsei) and reveled in their new consumer power.16 Japan’s postindustrial capitalism continued to encourage women to buy more even during the prolonged economic reces- sion that followed the bubble’s collapse in the early 1990s. In marked contrast

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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to the stagnated national economy, women’s wanton spending in the host club became a media spectacle in the postrecession era.

Soon after women began to reshape the labor force landscape, a form of labor called furītā (an amalgam of the English loanword “free” and the German word arbeiter, or “worker”), emerged in the late 1980s initially as an alternative lifestyle choice.17 The kind of flexible work epitomized by the furītā aligned with neoliberal values that stressed individual freedom of choice, self-promo- tion, and independence rather than inflexible positions in rigidly hierarchi- cal corporate structure. Such flexible work grew rapidly in popularity among young women and men, and especially among Japanese companies.18

But while flexible labor and the entrepreneurial self-discipline that it neces- sitates might initially have begun as a lifestyle choice, today furītā has become an unavoidable economic reality for many.19 One out of every 2.5 workers in Japan is a non-regular worker—more than 20 million who make up 38.2 percent of the workforce, the largest in the country’s labor history.20 The number is ever increas- ing, especially in service sectors, where low-paid non-regular workers have little chance of securing a regular full-time job. They typically move from one low- paying job to another. Under these conditions, social mobility is nearly impos- sible. In this milieu, the image of the hosting business as a successful alternative has become attractive to young men who seek upward mobility in career paths that nurture their creativity and help them get ahead in a given professional field.

The Koizumi administration (2001–2006) propelled these changes in con- sumption and labor by carrying out a comprehensive package of regulatory reforms that effectively shrunk the welfare state, cut corporate taxes, and de- regulated the labor market.21 Koizumi Jun’ichiro used popular media and catchy slogans such as “Structural Reforms without Sanctuary,” “No Reform, No Growth,” and “A Japan Where Youth Can Embrace Hopes and Dreams” to promote his economic policies.22 Much like the symbiotic relationship between venture capitalists and start-up entrepreneurs, Koizumi sought to seed incen- tives for Japanese citizens to cultivate their potential and adapt to new market exigencies. As before, what was striking about these campaigns was the strategic use of promise for a better future to leverage consumer and labor action. The government’s insistence on change, however, has fallen mostly on the shoulders of Japanese youth and the growing ranks of those without secure, full-time jobs.

Even so, neoliberal discourses have rearticulated aspiration and speculation as an opportunity for young people to break free from the status quo and bet on their life to “win” a better future. And while there are a handful of successful

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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cases in information technology, financial investment, and professional sports, as well as “legendary hosts,” for many, the adjustment has been accompanied by anxiety and despair. Those who are hopeful about their futures and those who are not have come to terms with this reality, creating the aforementioned “hope disparity society.”23

Indeed, hope and dreams in millennial Japan are no longer simply a per- sonal state of mind. They are closely intertwined with socioeconomic restruc- turing and as culturally significant resources that are unequally distributed. At the same time, they are rearticulated as individual self-improvement projects that all citizens are equally eligible to undertake for a better future. As I further discuss in Chapter 1, hopes and dreams have become classification markers of the social winners, who have (and will potentially have) realized their dreams, and the losers, who have given up hope, shaping a new class consciousness.

In this sociohistorical context, Koizumi’s emphasizing that Japanese youth should “embrace hopes and dreams” has become politically charged even though it originally sought to leverage consumer spending and labor fluidity. Discourses on hopes and dreams have been widely circulated ever since by other political, business, and community leaders alike. Ultimately, the political rhetoric of hopes and dreams functions as an empty promise that draws atten- tion yet merely points to a future direction and is open to multiple interpreta- tions. Citizens thus must envision, feel, and commit to the substance of the message on their own terms.

While globalizing neoliberalism has been criticized as a top-down ideology to justify the current capitalist system based on the ruling class’s interests,24 neoliberalism in Japan has been imbricated with the social practice of imagin- ing a national future as much as establishing a free market.25 Imagining a future, though, is not mere daydreaming but a national project in which citizens are expected to participate. The process, as anthropologist Ann Anagnost claims, requires “a futurology, an ability to conceptualize a future that has not only not yet appeared but that, once conceptualized, must be performed into being.” Once performed successfully, a future needs to be continuously imagined and produced anew.26 Otherwise, hopeful states of mind fade away. In this ideology, neoliberalism is a future-oriented venture based on an empty promise—one that citizens are compelled to undertake for their own (and collective) futures.

The “empty promise” is so malleable and universally applicable that it is articulated in business fields, too. Within the host club, men describe hosting as a “business of selling dreams” ( yume o uru shōbai), and women often state

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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that they pay for a service wherein they are “allowed to dream” ( yume o misa- sete kureru). From their perspectives, these dreams entail a cluster of emo- tions, relationships, and visions of future fulfillment. For example, men seek feelings of self-entrepreneurship, competitiveness, and coolness that produce their desirable self-images of masculinity. Women pursue senses of romantic excitement, youthfulness, and lovability that assure their ideal images of femi- ninity. Their aspirational acts consequently fuel their hopeful states of mind and metonymically symbolize potentially successful citizens, thus elevating their social status.

While neoliberal societies provide new opportunities for people to dream of alternative ways of achieving professional success, luxurious lifestyles, and fulfillment of dreams, these visions also obfuscate the social and financial con- straints on individuals. While Mr. Suzuki may dream of becoming a famous host or a celebrated racecar driver, his actual chance of extravagant success is exceedingly slim. If he does not succeed, as so many like him will not, the neo- liberal emphasis on individual agency will make it easy for him to blame him- self for his failure. After all, citizens are not forced but enticed to tacitly consent to the aspirational enterprise.

The host club thus can be viewed as a microcosm of the socioeconomic dynamics of the neoliberal state. It is a space in which men and women are free to dream but also to fail, free to make their fortunes and to lose them. Likewise, while hosts and clients operate under the belief that they are free agents, we will also see how the deck is stacked against them. Yet, because the host club is also a site in which dreams are not just dreamed but lived, not only kept silent but shared, these spaces of seduction have the potential to help us understand what it is like to live in a future-oriented temporality and commit to an empty promise of hopes and dreams despite the mounting burdens of uncertainty, vulnerability, and fear of failure. The ethnography of such temporality offers us greater insight into the socioeconomic and psychodynamic creation of sub- jectivity, hopes and dreams, and the aspirational imperative in contemporary Japan’s service economy and the larger global economy.

Values of Ser vice

In many ways, the domestic Japanese media’s fascination with host clubs is a reflection of the public’s yearning for extraordinarily affluent images and aspi- rational vigor that have been missing during the country’s economic downturn.

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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By presenting the club as a fast-paced route to wealth and status for men and a prestaged opportunity for female consumers to satisfy their desires, media im- ages of host clubs serve as screens on which the hopes and dreams of Japanese men and women are projected. In the media, just as in the club, the fascinating image of hosting itself becomes a consumable object. Male and female viewers’ desires are stimulated to incite fantasy, and fantasy is paramount.

But unlike the image commodity in the two-dimensional media world, the host club is a live theater in which the bystander actually experiences the real thing. On the stage set in the real world, fantasies are projected, and the stage scene, or the screen image, evolves in response to changing atmospheres, power dynamics, and actors’ interests. Trade in the host club is thus a highly personal and intimate kind of exchange, unlike that in other sectors where products are premade and priced for sale. The immediacy is in a sense similar to just-in- time manufacturing—known as the Toyota Production System—whereby parts and finished products are delivered based on demand. In the host club, men provide services to cater to women’s romantic fantasies on demand. This ser- vice, however, depends not only on the host’s production of the service com- modity but also the consumer need itself.

While the host club phenomenon is sometimes cited as another example of Japan’s consumer fads, the host club trade itself magnifies changing forms of labor, consumption, and value operating in the burgeoning service sector. Information, technology, design, leisure, dining, entertainment, beauty, health and well-being, and security are commercialized in an increasingly large seg- ment of the Japanese economy. The service sector today accounts for roughly 75 percent of the country’s national gross domestic product.27 In tandem with larger global economic trends, sales, rather than production, have become the engines of profit making in consumer-oriented postindustrial capitalism. Workers’ creativity, communication skills, and affective capacities are conse- quently crucial in making value through their services.

In this regard the host club accentuates neoliberalism’s emphasis on free trade, self-promotion, and individual creativity.28 By the same token, consum- ers also play a key role in generating economic value. Without actual purchase, a service produces no economic value no matter how much preparation on the part of the service provider. Unlike manufacturing products, unsold services cannot be held in stock for future sales. The moment of exchange is, after all, most crucial: Karl Marx called the moment the salto mortale of a commodity, or “deadly jump,” meaning sales determine whether a thing—a material object,

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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an immaterial piece of information, or a particular human activity—succeeds or fails to transform its status into a commodity with economic value. If the service provider errs in judgment or performance on sales promotion, then the labor that a service provider has expended ends up economically worthless toil.29 Thus, the politico-economic model assumes that the service provider car- ries economic burdens when sales fail.

In host clubs, hosts face these challenges constantly. Although they fully prepare to host a wealthy woman, for instance, such chances are rare. Even if a host secures a client, he usually provides extended service during “after hours” beyond the physical time and space within the host club. He may meet her on dates in an attempt to create an atmosphere in which she feels as if they are, in fact, a “real” couple. In these venues, outside the formal procedure of the club, a woman may feel uninhibited. Further, these meetings deflect attention from the decisive moment of sale itself to an open-ended relationship just like other intimate relationships. Because of these indeterminate factors, these outings become a gamble for each person.30 Hosts, for example, may wonder if a cli- ent is willing to invest both emotionally and financially in their sales success. Women may speculate how well their men will perform as their ideal lovers and satisfy their romantic fantasies. Their emotional, financial, and time com- mitment may or may not pay off depending on successful delivery of mutual satisfaction. Indeed, economic calculations take place on both sides. The calcu- lation, however, is not limited to economic worthiness. It is extended to include a discursive, symbolic, and affective one spread over time.

When the exchange is neither a one-time event nor for a particular com- modity but an irreproducible process itself to perform desirable self-images and realize hopes and dreams, the law of salto mortale may need to be modi- fied to include stretching temporality beyond the moment of sale. Criticizing the production-centered Marxist view of the commodity, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has theorized the concept of “commodity situation,” whereby the commodity is not a fixed thing but anything that potentially gains and loses its commodity status in the process of circulation and consumption.31 If the host-client relationship breaks down, the service commodity itself essentially disappears. Yet the sentimental value of the host-client relationship continues to exist in the client’s memories. The money (and sometimes debts when clients disappear without paying bills) is still possessed by the host, and potentially in his own memories and emotions. In fact, the potential economic value of this relationship may precede its actual existence. The host’s aspirations and

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the client’s dreams may already have aligned in the future-oriented neoliberal cultural ethos before they were actually traded in the host club.

Such extended temporality creates other forms of value beyond economic ones. The service provider’s risky undertaking of sales promotion activities may gain value in the form of cultural capital as a hopeful citizen—one who aspires to a better future and who will be potentially successful down the road. His en- thusiasm for a better future and courage to take risks may attract other indi- viduals who share the same attitude and shape a social network across different professional fields. Just as class status is not solely determined by economic in- come, social actions are also multifaceted. Cultural, social, and emotional capital can be accumulated as class markers over the course of both service providers’ and recipients’ pursuit of desirable selves and futures. Thus, the service sector, particularly those activities that accompany highly personalized labor and po- tentially produce greater satisfaction, complicates the value of the service com- modity. Its labor is only retrospectively qualified as productive or unproductive. Its temporality—that is, the way the moment of sale collapses discrete boundar- ies of the past and the future as the exchange cuts across economic, symbolic, and affective values—is a unique element of the service economy.

Of Seduc tion

By bringing workers and consumers into communication with each other to coproduce commodities and values, the service sector could be interpreted as working against the neoliberal conception of autonomous individualism. If ser- vice providers’ economic interests rely on consumers, then consumers’ visits to salons, restaurants, or host clubs reveal the providers’ reliance on others to attain a specific self-image, personal care, or a general feeling of well-being. Though individual freedom of choice is in the foreground of buying and selling services, the mutual reliance is a reminder of the dependence of individuals on a social system to attain their desires and needs. Further, it is a key component of seduction itself.

Seduction is operated secretly in a way that poststructuralist scholar Jean Baudrillard describes: “I know another’s secret but do not reveal it and he knows that I know, but does not acknowledge it.”32 The interaction through the psychodynamic process of seduction—what Baudrillard calls “an uninter- rupted ritual exchange where seducer and seduced constantly raise the stakes in a game that never ends.” He explains, “And cannot end since the dividing line

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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that defines the victory of the one and the defeat of the other, is illegible. And because there is no limit to the challenge to love more than one is loved, or to be always more seduced—if not death.”33 While productive power, including neoliberalism, seeks to be “irreversible, cumulative, and immortal,” seduction is, Baudrillard describes, the “emptiness” beneath, behind, and malleable to such wishes and yet threatens the power with its reversible, mortal, and decep- tive nature.34 In common use, seduction is defined as the means by which an in- dividual manipulates his or her appearance, conversation, body language, and gestures to entice the seducee into complying with his or her—usually sexual— wishes. In Baudrillard’s definition, seduction contingently complies with and subverts the logic of rationality, production, and progress that dominate most modern nation-states and capitalist cultures. It is at the “very heart of power and production,” he argues, precisely because it is secretly operated.35

While Baudrillard’s definition adds spatial depth and complexity to our perception of seduction in relation to the power structure, Judith Butler sheds light on the temporal and bodily dimensions within the seductive speech act and its accomplishment. She suggests that seduction is about promise making, that is, unknown bodily communication, placing value on fantasy, reversibility, and indeterminacy:36

Seductive speech is what the body does, is a present action of the body, at the same time that it portends what the body will do. Thus it is, as it were, the body on its way, figured in its possibilities. Since the body cannot be fully known or represented by the promise, the promise cannot be kept, or, rather, it is always a question whether the promise can be kept, whether its “intentions” will be derailed along the way.37

With the incongruence between body and language and the moment a prom- ise is made and when it will be potentially accomplished, Butler points out that seduction provides only the possibilities to bind these elements. Indeed, without the body, no promise can be convincingly made. Without the prem- ise of promise that stands for intention carried through over time, no utter- ance about the future is believable. Butler’s view provides us an opportunity to critically contemplate the metaphysical convention that weights the mind over the body as language exceeds what is stated and resonates with one’s own yet-to-be realized wishes, dreams, and desires. Unknowable things such as a promise are seductive because they possess the magical quality of making things happen.

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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In seduction, language is not so much constative—transmitting truth and knowing reality—as performative. “Saying, for [a seducer] is in no case tan- tamount to knowing, but rather to doing: acting on the interlocutor, modify- ing the situation and the interplay of forces within it,” French literary scholar Shoshana Felman writes. Particularly promise, a performative speech act, “does” something other than what it explicitly claims to do. Thus, doing with language cannot be evaluated as either true or false but as “felicitous or infe- licitous, successful or unsuccessful.”38 This does not mean, however, that the performative is outside the referential system of reality. According to Felman,

Referential knowledge of language is not knowledge about reality . . . but knowl- edge that has to do with reality, that acts within reality, since it is itself—at least in part—what this reality is made of. The referent is no longer simply a preexisting substance, but an act, that is, a dynamic movement of modification of reality.39

Felman, along with Butler and Baudrillard, challenges the epistemological conflation among language, knowledge, and truth that discursively produces reality and covers up the fact that the reality can be altered.40 In this vein, se- duction, which underlies and acts on the interlocutor secretly, shapes a pecu- liar dynamic whereby people do things with their speech and bodily acts and modify the reality in which they live.

The dynamic challenges the seducer and the seducee to reengage with each other to actualize the performative possibilities and trade fantasies and desires, identities and information, as well as—or even in lieu of—capital. This is the place where social practice of neoliberal imagination and its actual practice meet with seduction. Both operate under the belief of empty promises to suc- cessfully entice the other to modify his or her referential world and act out for both the seducer’s and seducee’s ends.

Referencing Foucault’s notion of neoliberal governmentality,41 sociologist Nikolas Rose theorizes neoliberal governance as a conduct of governing indi- viduals through freedom, not by force, and “empowers” them to act out:

To dominate is to ignore or to attempt to crash the capacity for action of the dominated. But to govern is to recognize that capacity for action and to adjust oneself to it. To govern is to act upon action. This entails trying to understand what mobilizes the domains or entities to be governed. . . . Hence, when it comes to governing human beings, to govern is to presuppose the freedom of the gov- erned. To govern humans is not to crush their capacity to act, but to acknowl- edge it and to utilize it for one’s own objectives.42

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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Thus, neoliberal governance resonates strongly with interpersonal negotiation skills, both of which entail acknowledging and employing human capacities to control the other for one’s own objectives rather than destroying them to dom- inate the other. The power of freedom and seduction engenders its control- ling possibility and perpetuates it only insofar as social actors and institutions alike engage in and struggle through the process. Foucault’s famous statement reminds us, “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”43 By the same token, power becomes inef- fective if it is not practiced ubiquitously.

The art of seduction mirrors neoliberal governance and permeates social interactions. The host club stages the game of seduction, inviting both men and women to openly perform the roles of seducer and seducee to fulfill one anoth- er’s wishes. Likewise, other businesses and interactions in the highly personal- ized service sector are shot through with commodified relationships based on the dynamics of seduction. Regardless of the service provided (personal care, counseling, a haircut, wining and dining), individuals bodily communicate each other’s fantasies and desires to be satisfied through (im)material, discur- sive, and affective exchanges. Seduction is a second level of value, below the one officially being exchanged, and therefore, it tends to be invisible, phantas- mic, and indeterminate even though it is powerful in its own way.44

Ordinary exchanges in the service economy vividly display the significance of the enigmatic nature of seduction. Since the host club manifests many of the same socioeconomic dynamics of the larger neoliberal state, it reveals both the secretive operation and magical quality of seduction in the social practice of individual freedom and promise-based aspirations. By bringing individuals together into a mutually dependent relationship, host clubs provide an oppor- tunity for hosts and their clients to project their fantasies onto each other and to see those fantasies reflected through the eyes of someone else. It also creates an occasion for them to critically consider both the socioeconomic realism and ultimate value of their deepest hopes for the future.

If to hope is to commit to the future, then to seduce is to commit to others’ desires. Both ultimately promise future self-fulfillment. Achieving an ethnog- raphy of seduction is my hope. I believe ethnography—particularly what I call “affective ethnography”—allows us to understand what it is like to be in such a phenomenal world of seduction. At the same time it shows how that world is staged for actors to direct one another’s feelings, thoughts, and acts for mutual satisfaction—a window into the order and disorder of these exchanges. Affec-

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tive ethnography is thus a tool for me not so much to tell the truth as to enable readers to vicariously empathize with stories about people’s hopes and dreams, which are innately ephemeral. My ultimate goal lies in invoking our own feel- ings to reflexively sense the often-invisible dimensions of human interactions that are capitalized on at the heart of neoliberal dreams.

Toward “Af fec tive Ethnography”

Staged Seduction takes into account the role of affect and the body in ethno- graphic research of seduction and shows the ways that both emotion and rea- son serve as a vehicle for analytical insight, critical inquiry into an “unknown territory,” and ethical engagement in the field.45

My ethnographic fieldwork took place over thirty-one months between 2003 and 2013 and included visits to thirteen host clubs, mostly in Kabuki-chō, as well as two in Roppongi and one in Osaka; in-depth interviews with more than fifty hosts, fifteen clients, two club owners, and three managers; and ex- tensive participant observation, which included paying entry fees to experi- ence the seduction of the host club firsthand. As I explained in the Prelude, I initially took advantage of first-timer’s special deals for ladies only—usually 5000–10,000 yen ($50–$100) for two hours or so—but for more systematic ac- cess, I received permission from club owners to visit and observe.46 Those I contacted gave their consent willingly to my research. They believed that any sort of media attention, including from overseas anthropologists, served their business interests. I conducted the majority of my work at a Kabuki-chō host club, which I call Fantasy, every night for a total of four months, except for very busy nights when the manager asked me not to come to the club.47 Fantasy is one of the largest, most prestigious, and long-standing host clubs in Japan. It is aggressively advertised in billboard ads and has an outsized presence on the Internet, television, magazines, and popular books.

With few exceptions, I was permitted to conduct my research only during the early hours. The club owner explained that the early hours were more lively and spectacular and therefore worth “studying.” Although the owner did not directly state this, the “later hours,” starting at 1:00 a.m., were technically ille- gal. Japan’s Entertainment and Amusement Law bans any business transactions that involve “intimate” services and physical proximity after 1:00 a.m., even in the red-light districts, in order to “maintain a healthy living environment.”48 Despite this law, most host clubs, including Fantasy, have tacit police permis-

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction, edited by Akiko Takeyama, Stanford University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from ku on 2017-02-03 20:33:24.

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