This National Film Board of Canada film intrigued me because the whole idea of hostessing in Tokyo seems like such a bizarre concept: young women are paid huge sums of money to sit in a club, flirt with men and entice them into buying drinks! What's the catch? I kept thinking there has to be a catch. Not to mention the fact that sex is not a requirement. Hostesses actually make more money than prostitutes, without having sex with their clients. That's not to say sex never happens, but that's not what Japanese men expect when they go to a hostess club. It turns out Japanese men are looking for romance they can't seem to find either in their own home or in various forms of sexual commerce that flourish in the far East nation.

Hostessing is something that definitely could never exist in North America, because if a woman behaved the way a hostess is supposed to behave without "putting out," she would be labelled a "tease." Yet hostess clubs generate huge sums of money. Japanese men go to those clubs, knowing they will be treated like kings and for that evening can make believe that the hostess really is interested in him. Both the man and the woman get something out of the arrangement.

Here's the catch. Young women who go over to Japan to live that lifestyle tend to burn out quickly, or can develop problems with drugs or drinking or both. Or, they could get mixed up with someone who scares the hell out of them. That's what happened to one of the girls in this film who ended up as the kept mistress of a Japanese mobster, living in a luxury apartment and forced to flee the country because she saw it as the only way of escaping the relationship. But there's also happy tales too. There was another story in the film of a girl who went to work as a hostess, found herself on the receiving end of an "indecent proposal" by a client who offered her one million dollars to marry him for one year. At the time, she turned him down, but when their paths crossed years later, they ended up falling in love and getting married.

Karen Murray
Associate Producer, SEXTV