4.5

Though he is told to work hard as a man, the image is also floated of the male who is tough, in control, and entitled to have his pleasures and desires satisfied by a woman who is not his wife [...] Yet not only does this image cost money--what a man must continue to work hard to earn--but the man is kept so busy working that his ability to enjoy the sexual fruits of his success may easily become impaired [...] It is a sign of what corporate Japan takes from a man and a charge that corporate careers leave even the most successful white-collar workers crippled and incomplete. (p.191)

I get the sense that a lot of people who picked this up were expecting a much more narrativized account of the author's time working as a hostess at a Japanese host club as part of her research into the titular topic. I did too, frankly, but given that this is an expansion of her doctoral thesis, this is much more academic than salacious.

And she really does leave no stone unturned when it comes to sources and further reading opportunities; her bibliography is impressive and includes Japanese scholars, western scholars of Japanese studies, mangaka, theorists from the Frankfurt School of thought, and Marx himself -- all in pursuit of the answer to her central question: 'why are Japanese salarymen so obsessed with hostess clubs that the entirety of corporate culture revolves around them?'

We get her answers to that question in due time, but we get more than that because this is a wonderfully intersectional approach to this subject. We talk about the construct of marriage in Japan and how it's socially re-enforced, we talk about the relationships this construct leads to between wives and husbands and mothers and sons, and how it is cyclical by design. We talk about how the Japanese workplace has incredibly malleable boundaries and how that blurry line between work and play lends itself to corporate outings to hostess clubs (paid for by the company).

This is anthropology through a feminist lens, so there's definitely an emphasis on including the voices of the other hostesses, the host club's 'mama', the wives of the men who visit the host club. But because it's a truly feminist approach to anthropology, and on a topic exploring male identity, she spends much of the text highlighting the many ways that patriarchy is the thing that underpins the suffering of the men within that system. If we let go of that belief system, she implies, these men would be able to have functional, loving, healthy relationships with their wives and children.

Indeed, the entirety of 'Nightwork' is written with an incredible amount of empathy for everyone involved, and, as stated by George Marcus of Rice University, "Allison manages to address with new power the elite Japanese work ethic, so much feared in the West, through the seamy, but finally sympathetic predicament of the 'sarariiman.'"

However, though the focus is a Japan-specific phenomenon, she is careful not to couch it as inherently Japanese, and critiques scholars who do. This was an important point to make because, though hostess clubs as such aren't entrenched in Western corporate culture, much of what she observes of how the hostess clubs operate to build up and reinforce the construct of masculinity applies to any patriarchal society.

She goes to great lengths to develop a somewhat (and by somewhat, I mean very) pathetic conclusion of how masculinity and the hostess club intertwine and why men spend so much money there despite rarely if ever actually having sex with any of the hostesses:

the sexuality [at a hostess club] is masturbatory; the erotic object is not the woman, but the man, and the female is just a device to enhance the male's self-image. (p.183) Whether he talks about his thirty-foot penis or his joy in collecting stamps, the hostess is supposed to hear him out, comment on what he says, and swear that the qualities he has revealed are exactly what a woman like herself finds irresistibly attractive. The hostess is not supposed to challenge the man's presentation of himself, and she is never to coopt his authority by reversing their roles. (p.177)

She also goes into the even more uncomfortable territory of how mothers are mixed up in all this. Given the relatively hands-off approach to parenting a patriarchal system takes when it comes to a man's relationship to his children, sons are almost exclusively raised by and live alone with their mothers. And their mothers' self-worth becomes tied to her son's academic and career success -- success she is de-incentivized to get for herself. Because of this, they tend to coddle their sons well into their teenage years and even into their young adulthood. And because the Japanese school system is designed to be so hyper-competitive, students have virtually no time and definitely no space of their own to form romantic relationships or relationships of any kind with women or girls outside of their mother.

These boys then become men with no sense of how to interact with a woman who isn't there to take care of them. But because being dependent on a woman would be emasculating, a key aspect of visiting hostess clubs that Allison points out is loudly objectifying and insulting the hostess' appearance. "A comment like "Your breasts are as flat as a board" is intended to be crude; it verifies the man's right to be crude at the expense of, and through the vehicle of the mizu shobai [sex worker] woman [...] it is less an overture to something heterosexual with a woman than it is a homosocial statement about being a man." (p.180)

All especially pertinent in a post-Barbie (2023) world. Really, much of the mis-reading of that movie comes down to not understanding that very phenomena in the above quote. But that's a discussion for another time...

The one ding in 'Nightwork' is the fact that some of the ideas feel a bit repetitive if you read the text straight through like I did rather than jumping between or only reading a few sections. I don't think it could have been easily avoided, but towards the end there are moments that feel like they're beating a dead horse. Par for the course in academic, text-book style texts, but worth noting.

Nevertheless, this is a fantastic piece of ethnographic anthropology, and despite being published in the early '90s, much of it (sadly) still feels relevant today.