Host club debts: Japan’s hidden youth poverty – Part II

Any visitor to Tokyo will step into Shinjuku at least once. It is where the world’s busiest train station accommodates 2.7 million passengers per day and where the Tokyo Metropolitan Government manages GDP as large as the Netherlands’. It is also the home of the largest red-light district in Japan, Kabuki Cho.

Kabuki　Cho’s name comes from the post-war plan to rebuild it as a theater area. Instead, it has become a multifaceted entertainment center with bars, restaurants, hotels, shopping centers, pachinko parlors and many more. The latest epicenter in Kabuki Cho is Okubo Park, the meeting spot for women and girls seeking male customers. In 2023, 140 women from age 17 to 56 were arrested around Okubo Park. The vast majority (109) were in their teens and their 20s, and 43 percent of all cited visits to “host clubs” and underground idols as reasons for prostitution.

Investing in “Host Club”

The host club is a type of bar/nightclub where female customers pay an overpriced table fee (e.g., $100-150 for 2 hours) and beverages (e.g., $500 for a bottle of champaign) to have drinks with the male staff of their choice. It is a flip of the hostess club with women serving men. Since the first one appeared in 1996, host clubs have gradually expanded, reaching around 1,000 nationwide, one-third of them in Kabuki Cho.

Hosts are slim, charming, fashionable and young, mostly in their 20s. In the past, the main customers at host clubs were wealthy older women with excess income to spare. Yet, the trend has shifted, and younger women, including teens, flock to host clubs now.

They invest in a particular host by nominating him (once a favorite is picked, he will be the to-go guy at the club) and ordering expensive drinks through him, which will be recorded as his sales. Young women spend all they have on him, fall into debt, some as big as several million dollars, by frequenting him on a pay-later tab system, and resort to prostitution. Many of them end up working in the Kabuki Cho sex industry while hundreds of women have been sent to prostitute in the US, Australia, Canada and other foreign destinations.

Desperate dependency

The host club system does not only build on the vulnerability of women and girls but also of young hosts who face strict sales demands and fierce competition. Host performances in terms of the number of client nominations and total earnings are displayed in public, which can feather or shatter their self-esteem. Top-level hosts can make hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly and are treated as celebrities, scoring TV appearances, but this is an exception, not a rule. Some host clubs provide manuals to guide hosts into attracting and trapping women.

Women and girls who sell themselves for their hosts call it “love” and “devotion.” The lure of the hosts is not physical intimacy (they may or may not have sexual relationships with their clients) but emotional and psychological dependency. The hosts listen to their female clients intently, remember big and small details about them and their life stories, call them princesses, make them feel special and form a pseudo-romantic relationship.

Support for young women

The government and police have begun to act, setting up hotlines for victims and their families of host club debts. Yet, assistance to women and girls willing to risk financial and physical ruin for a fictitious love relationship requires psychosocial support in addition to financial rescue.
In July 2023, a non-profit group, the Council of Fathers and Mothers to Protect Youth, was established in Kabuki Cho to offer advice and counseling on issues related to host club debt and prostitution.

Why do these women and girls crave attention from the hosts, knowing that it comes with a hefty price tag? Do they have any alternatives to those relationships that can only thrive behind closed doors at night? And what were other motives for prostitution among those who did not cite host clubs as the reason? The answers may lie in the social, economic and emotional state of young women in Japan.