Female Empowerment in a Tokyo Host Club?

Introduction
The turn of century brought about an economic shift, followed by an ideological shift, leading to the prevalence of the host clubs subculture nowadays in Japan. Host clubs were virtually unheard of until the recent years, where media attention paved the way for the swiftly gaining popularity subculture. There are an estimated 200 host clubs in the Kabuki-chō district in Tokyo alone (Takeyama, 2005), and there are other, similar, flourishing grounds in Osaka and Nagoya.

In Japan, hierarchy is still an integral part of the people’s lives, and this contributes to the importance of appearance of social status to the Japanese. Hence, their consumer culture is targeted at the extremes of brand names: the expensive and the exclusive (Ardnt, 2003; Bardsley and Hirakawa, 2005) and this culture is largely supported by women who have large disposable incomes (Friedman, 1992). Therefore, it is hardly any wonder that the host clubs are flourishing despite the current decline of the Japanese economy, and as Takeyama says, host clubs are an “example of Japan’s fad-driven consumer culture”.

These host clubs train hundreds of applicants[1] before finally selecting a rare outstanding few to become actual hosts of their clubs. The hosts are trained in the art of seduction and about the female psyche (Takeyama, 2006), which enables them to eventually gain control from their clients and manipulate them.


Outward Signs of Female Empowerment
A single client can be attended by up to six or seven hosts in a single night, namely her chosen favorite host and a group of “helper” hosts, unless she is a newcomer[2]. The service of a single woman by several handsome men who compliments and fawns over her every move and gesture can be described as a parallel to a harem. Like the practice in any harem, the one in position of power, in this case, the female client; chooses her companions out of a whole selection of candidates and any of the chosen may lose his favored status at anytime. As it is usually men who have harems, this practice is a clear sign of position of power for the female client. In addition, it is usually men who approach women to initiate dating, but this is reversed in the clubs, as the clients approach their hosts and request for dates outside of club hours. As such, women transgress traditionally accepted social norms of gender behavior, blatantly challenging it, and empowering themselves.

These host clubs offer customized services[3], tailored perfectly to suit the individual needs of each and every client. The hosts also pay special attention to their clients’ physical appearances and offer up compliments, boosting the self-confidence of their customers, especially the married ones, whose husbands seldom notice any outward changes in them. In a male-dominated society like Japan, where women are often designated background roles and are overlooked by their male counterparts (Iwao, 1992), this could be said as an empowerment for the Japanese women, as the hosts make conscious efforts to take notice of them and put them in a position of priority and status, something she could never get outside of the clubs.

The clients, like any other customer, reserve the right to end their patronage of the clubs if so displeased. Some women, attending such clubs for thrills and adventure, find it lacking and never returned to the clubs again, despite the glitter and frills of the lurescast by the hosts[4]. It is a significant exercise of freedom of choice by the women and is unfettered by the confines of gender norms.

The lavish spending women indulge in at the clubs clearly reflects their status in Japan as major players in terms of consumer culture (Cullen, 2002; Takeyama, 2005; Wright). As Friedman suggested, many Japanese women view marriage as an inevitable hurdle they must go through in life, marking the end of their independence and freedom, so they tend to enjoy it the best they can through shopping, traveling and other forms of entertainment. In this way, it is also possible that the women are making use of the hosts as a form of fantasy escapade, where they can make their lives more endurable and woman-friendly. Furthermore, this could also present an opportunity for women to thumb their noses at the “geisha club” (Takeyama, 2005) and mizu shōbai catering to men.


Analysis of the Empowerment: Fact or Facade?
Yet, despite all the outward signs of female dominance and empowerment in this game of “commodified romance” (Takeyama, 2005), females rarely come out the winner. Often, they suffer financially and emotionally, sometimes even morally. Analysts of this subculture have all converged on one idea: women are not seeking sex, but romance when going to the host clubs. While it is possible for men to seek sexual gratification without love, the reverse is seldom true for women (Takeyama, 2005).

The art of seduction that the hosts learn allows them to slowly subvert the power from the female client to themselves, as they initially act subservient and do everything they can to secure the affections of that client. The host manipulates his clients’ emotions to the extent where they would provide whatever the host demands of them. Many of such women claim to lavish gifts and spend freely at the clubs out of their own free will, however, the truth is, there is no real freedom of choice, for their emotions are being manipulated by the host (Takeyama, 2006). These women are captives and victims of their own feelings, ingeniously exploited by the host.

Some of these women state their reasons for their monetary contribution to their hosts[5] as being a form of expression of her own success. Japanese women are generally unable to “express [their] value as a woman, or professionally” (Takeyama, 2005; Iwao, 1992), and for these host clubs regulars, they seek an alternative way of expressing their self worth, for their men’s success seems to imply their own success. This clearly shows a deep-rooted gender ideology within the Japanese woman’s psyche that they are unable to reject; and to them, only men’s successes matter, and women’s success can only be measured by the success of the men they support, instead of through their own work.

There is probably a subconscious desire in these frequenters of the host clubs to relinquish control over to men, namely the hosts. A veteran host, Nishimura, frequently receives dozens of mobile phone messages daily from his regulars[6], asking him for advice with regards to their own lives. This communicates their clear desire to him for him to assume control, whether they realize it or not. As such, the presence of host clubs is clearly not an empowerment, paradoxically; it is an enforcement of gender roles within Japan. Women who frequent host clubs are usually the ones whom are neglected by their husbands, whom are so indifferent to them to the point that these women feel they are not being controlled enough and need to seek out alternative sources of control over themselves.

The clubs often use a relatively low first-time fee to lure in newcomers (Cullen, 2002) and from there, seduce her to continuously return, with increasing tabs[7] for the subsequent visits, and many women eventually find themselves in severe debt from frequenting the host clubs. There are many cases in which the host club regulars turn to plying the sex industry in order to pay off the debts and continue supporting their favored hosts, whom they believe to be their “boyfriends” (Takeyama, 2005; Cullen, 2002; McCurry, 2004). These women often end up having the hosts dump them as soon they become impoverished[8] and are unable to pay for the company of the hosts anymore. Such a display of blatant emotional abuse by the hosts of the women shows that men are the truly empowered ones in the arrangement.

The existence of host clubs in patriarchal Japan could, on the surface, signify a step forward for women in the power scale between men and women. Superficially, it seems that women weld ultimate power in the economics of existence of the host clubs; however, further analysis of this host club phenomenon strips away the thin layer of facade to reveal a paradoxical truth. When the women are using money to ensure romantic and dedicated services from the male hosts, they seem to desire female empowerment; but in actuality, they subconsciously deviate towards surrendering to traditional gender norms and enforcing its existence within the Japanese society. The empowerment is, thus, but a beautiful illusion and fantasy, much like the host clubs themselves.

Footnotes:
[1] The potential hosts undergo rigorous courses of how to bow, serve, dress and conduct themselves, in order to provide highly individualized and attentive care to their female clients.
[2] Newcomers are greeted by the entire staff, from which she chooses her desired companions for the night.
[3] Customized services include linen napkins to place over the laps of clients who wear short skirts to ensure her modesty, and waiting for them outside the ladies’ room with a hot hand towel (Takeyama, 2005). While all these could be read as general signs of chivalry in Western culture, the idea of subservient males attending to females is virtually unheard of in a male-dominated society like Japan. And this is precisely the marketing point of the host clubs, where they play on the chivalrous, gentlemanly characteristics absent from the general male populace in Japan, and the clients willingly pay the price for such services (Cullen, 2002). Such services could never thrive in a Western culture, for chivalry is taught as a virtue and provided freely.
[4] Ryu, a veteran host, admitted, “Hosts can only seduce women who are willingly seduced, for whatever reason. Women who are not interested in [romance] are not seduced no matter what we do” (Takeyama, 2006), indicating that the women are in control as long as they do not fall for the lure cast by the hosts.
[5] Hosts are socially ranked in the clubs at which they work by their income from their clientele. The more his clients pay per visit, the higher his ranking in the club as a top veteran host.
[6] The messages range from “declarations of love to a request for advice over a possible job change”.
[7] The companionship and food do not come cheap, and the client is required to pay for the time of the hosts accompanying her, as well as all the food and beverages they consume at that table, even if she does not consume anything herself and it is possible for bills in a single night to run upscale in the thousands.
[8] Nakamura Usagi, a writer, is reputed to have spent close to 15 million yen at such clubs when she fell in love with one of the hosts(Kadri, 2003 , Takeyama, 2005; Bardsley and Hirakawa, 2005). She claims to have been disillusioned by the whole experience and is now married to a gay whom she met in a gay bar (Bardsley and Hirakawa, 2005).

The future of robots and humans

Technology is advancing at such a fast pace that it probably won't be long before the techno-giant, Japan, perfects and produces a perfect replica of a human in synthetics, i.e. a robot. Yet, like cloning, the issue of producing a totally human-like robot has been a source of much discourse since the dawn of the millenia, with many films such as Terminator, IRobot, A.I. and much much more, shedding light on an unspoken fear of a future with robots deeply intertwined in the lives of humans. Much of the discourse centres around the intelligence of the robots, their capabilities, the autonomy of will , and their emotions.

Recently, I bought and watched a Japanese anime, Chobits, which features exactly all these fears and discourse. In the anime, a boy moves from his rural home to Tokyo to enter preparatory school. The story is set in a parallel time to existing modernity, with all artifacts and characteristics of life similar to now, except that computers are in humanoid forms instead of the current boxy shape. He, being too poor to afford the price tag on the persocoms (which refers to the humanoid robots/computers), finds one in a trash area. He starts her up and eventually, through many experiences and much time, falls in love with her. Ordinarily, persocoms are devoid of emotions and free will, much like the standard PC that we have now, but the persocom that the protagonist picks up is special, capable of exercising free will and experiencing emotions like happiness, pain and love. The persocom, named Chi, falls in love with her owner too, even before he was able to come to terms with his own feelings with a persocom.

There are several key points to note about this anime. The anime theme of romance between a robot and human transcends and challenges existing notions that it is impossible to have a future with robots and it brings to mind questions about the value of programming robots to have emotions, if it were possible to do so. Further, the author deliberately names the humanoid computers as persocoms, which could mean "personal computer" or "person computer", depending on how you interpret it. Are persocoms, or robots in general, just so simply a computer, or is there more to it? Throughout the story, the author often has the characters (and the audience) question the value of persocom-human relationships, often sidelining them in comparison with human-human relationships. Eventually, my interpretation of what the author ultimately wants to say is this: it doesn't matter who or what your beloved is, it doesn't matter what s/he can or cannot do; because, ideally, love is unconditional.

Even though the ultimate subtext the author wishes to bring forth is that of romantic idealism, the anime still uncovers and unravels much of the discourse about robot-human relationships, putting it, instead, in a positive light that sets it apart from the existing literature and cultural media on it.

Should we arrest the intelligence and autonomy of will of robots to prevent them from taking over the world? Should we spare them from the weakness and vulnerabilities of experiencing human emotions? Are robots better than humans or vice versa? You decide after watching Chobits.