The Journal of Japanese Studies

In September 2004, Akiko Takeyama walked into Kabukicho, Tokyo's red-light district, and experienced firsthand the district's (in)famous hosts and their aggressive flirtation. Being an inquisitive anthropologist, Takeyama immediately felt some familiarity with the host who approached her—someone pursuing an "alternative" life path to "conventional salarymen/housewives roles" (p. xiii). Feeling "like a celebrity" (p. xiv), Takeyama "grew attracted to" the host (p. xv). Not knowing how to characterize "the nature of [her] relationship" (p. xvii) which involves monetary transactions, this became the initial trigger for Takeyama's long-term research to explore the labyrinth of male escorts in the early 2000s.

Based on frequent visits to host clubs in Tokyo as well as in Osaka in 2003–4 and in follow-up research until 2013 (p. 17), Takeyama unravels what is commonly known as the "Kabukicho Dream," where "people's temporal sense of future, present, and past … fold into restless feelings of both hope and despair" (p. xviii). Suggesting that "the host's aspirations and the client's dreams may already have aligned in the future-oriented neoliberal cultural ethos" (pp. 12–13), she argues that "the art of seduction mirrors neoliberal governance and permeates social interactions" (p. 16).

Staged Seduction is "an account of host club participants' human dramas" (p. xviii), where male hosts sell "romance" to female patrons and simultaneously pursue their own economic goals. According to Takeyama, Tokyo is a "futuristic," "affective cityscape" that provides opportunities for young people to achieve their dreams through flexible labor and lifestyle consumption (p. 32). This cityscape overrides the previous political economic paradigm, she argues, and host clubs offer "the emancipatory possibilities of flexible labor, expressive consumption, and neoliberal subjectivity in the new millennium Japan" (p. 38).

Hosts are "young, handsome men" who are "self-employed, independent agents who exercise autonomy over their tables" (p. xiii). Without formal skills or qualifications, their job is to "arouse women's sensual fantasies" (p. 1) and to "produce and consume love" (p. 3), by entertaining female customers as well as drinking, eating, dating, and having sex with their patrons. Coming from disadvantaged backgrounds, hosts are desperate, aspire to get rich quickly, and seek upward mobility by selling their "love" through "their paradoxical—commodified yet entrepreneurial—male subjectivity" (p. 21). [End Page 186]

In contrast, female clients are mostly sex workers and hostesses, as well as some widows, unhappy housewives, and lonely career women. Their stories reveal multivalent reasons that drive customers to consume hosts' "pseudo-romance" and explain why they often come with considerable disposable income or inheritances. Takeyama argues, "it is the anticipation of aging" that provokes women's fear (p. 106) and spurs them to "battle against" it. Takeyama sees the power of romantic excitement as "a technology of the self" (p. 114), arguing that these women "have become neoliberal female subjects, while simultaneously subjecting to the new mentality of self-governed freedom and feminine power" (p. 132).

Staged Seduction eloquently reveals the particular temporality of hosts and their clients and their self-justifications, which are rigidly bounded in time and space. For hosts, this performance has to be enacted while they are young, mainly in their 20s, and staged in Japan's red-light district (p. 99). This is precisely because this particular configuration of rigid and limited temporality enables them to perform this hyper-demanding job: binge drinking, sleep deprivation, and constantly lying, faking romance and engaging in sex in order to extract enormous sums of money from female clients.

Takeyama calls this "entrepreneurial temporality" and particularizes this as Japan's "affect economies,"¹ as well as reflective of globalizing "neoliberalism." Yet, her subjects' experience intriguingly resonates with the subjectivities revealed in ethnographies of other groups such as Tom Gill's day laborers, Tiantian Zheng's male tongzhi sex workers, and Don Kulick's transgendered travesti prostitutes.² Despite their differences, all of these individuals become enthralled (or survive, in Gill...