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**Expanded Article**
4.5
Though he is told to work hard as a man, the image presented is that of a male who is tough, in control, and entitled to have his pleasures and desires satisfied by a woman who is not his wife. This image, however, comes at a cost. Not only does it require a man to continuously work hard to earn the money to maintain it, but it also keeps him so busy that his ability to enjoy the supposed sexual fruits of his success may easily become impaired. It serves as a sign of what corporate Japan extracts from a man and a charge that corporate careers can leave even the most successful white-collar workers feeling crippled and incomplete. (p.191)
I had the sense that many people who picked up this book were anticipating a 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. Frankly, I did too. But given that this is an expansion of her doctoral thesis, it is much more academic than salacious.
The author truly leaves no stone unturned when it comes to sources and further reading opportunities. Her bibliography is impressive, encompassing Japanese scholars, western scholars of Japanese studies, mangaka, theorists from the Frankfurt School of thought, and even Marx himself. All in pursuit of answering her central question: 'why are Japanese salarymen so obsessed with hostess clubs that the entirety of corporate culture revolves around them?'
We receive her answers to that question in due time, but we get more than just that. This is a wonderfully intersectional approach to the subject. We discuss the construct of marriage in Japan and how it is socially reinforced. We talk about the relationships that this construct leads to between wives and husbands, and mothers and sons, and how it is cyclical by design. We also explore 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, which are often paid for by the company.
This is anthropology through a feminist lens, so there is definitely an emphasis on including the voices of the other hostesses, the host club's 'mama', and the wives of the men who visit the host club. However, because it is a truly feminist approach to anthropology, and on a topic exploring male identity, she spends a significant portion of the text highlighting the many ways that patriarchy underpins the suffering of the men within that system. She implies that if we let go of that belief system, 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. 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 on a Japan-specific phenomenon, she is careful not to present it as inherently Japanese and critiques scholars who do. This was an important point to make because, although hostess clubs as such are not entrenched in Western corporate culture, much of what she observes about 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 about 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.
She also delves into the even more uncomfortable territory of how mothers are involved in all this. Given the relatively hands-off approach to parenting in a patriarchal system when it comes to a man's relationship with 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 achieve 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 grow into 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)
This is all especially relevant in a post-Barbie (2023) world. Really, much of the misreading of that movie comes down to not understanding the very phenomena described in the above quote. But that's a discussion for another time...
The one drawback in 'Nightwork' is the fact that some of the ideas can 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 seem like they're beating a dead horse. This is par for the course in academic, textbook-style texts, but it's 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.
4.5
Though he is told to work hard as a man, the image presented is that of a male who is tough, in control, and entitled to have his pleasures and desires satisfied by a woman who is not his wife. This image, however, comes at a cost. Not only does it require a man to continuously work hard to earn the money to maintain it, but it also keeps him so busy that his ability to enjoy the supposed sexual fruits of his success may easily become impaired. It serves as a sign of what corporate Japan extracts from a man and a charge that corporate careers can leave even the most successful white-collar workers feeling crippled and incomplete. (p.191)
I had the sense that many people who picked up this book were anticipating a 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. Frankly, I did too. But given that this is an expansion of her doctoral thesis, it is much more academic than salacious.
The author truly leaves no stone unturned when it comes to sources and further reading opportunities. Her bibliography is impressive, encompassing Japanese scholars, western scholars of Japanese studies, mangaka, theorists from the Frankfurt School of thought, and even Marx himself. All in pursuit of answering her central question: 'why are Japanese salarymen so obsessed with hostess clubs that the entirety of corporate culture revolves around them?'
We receive her answers to that question in due time, but we get more than just that. This is a wonderfully intersectional approach to the subject. We discuss the construct of marriage in Japan and how it is socially reinforced. We talk about the relationships that this construct leads to between wives and husbands, and mothers and sons, and how it is cyclical by design. We also explore 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, which are often paid for by the company.
This is anthropology through a feminist lens, so there is definitely an emphasis on including the voices of the other hostesses, the host club's 'mama', and the wives of the men who visit the host club. However, because it is a truly feminist approach to anthropology, and on a topic exploring male identity, she spends a significant portion of the text highlighting the many ways that patriarchy underpins the suffering of the men within that system. She implies that if we let go of that belief system, 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. 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 on a Japan-specific phenomenon, she is careful not to present it as inherently Japanese and critiques scholars who do. This was an important point to make because, although hostess clubs as such are not entrenched in Western corporate culture, much of what she observes about 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 about 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 delves into the even more uncomfortable territory of how mothers are involved in all this. Given the relatively hands-off approach to parenting in a patriarchal system when it comes to a man's relationship with 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 achieve 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 grow into 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)
This is all especially relevant in a post-Barbie (2023) world. Really, much of the misreading of that movie comes down to not understanding the very phenomena described in the above quote. But that's a discussion for another time...
The one drawback in 'Nightwork' is the fact that some of the ideas can 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 seem like they're beating a dead horse. This is par for the course in academic, textbook-style texts, but it's 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.
