Word: hostessing
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...Very loosely descended from the geisha house tradition, hostess bars hire out women by the hour to act as companions for customers. Hostesses are not prostitutes; they are more like paid, platonic girlfriends. They may choose to sleep with a client, they may not. Although there are no official numbers on how many women work in hostess bars, it's estimated that hundreds of thousands labor throughout Japan in what is surely a multibillion-dollar industry. For the salaryman customers, hostess bars, with their posh atmosphere, beautiful women and steady flow of drinks, are a choice venue in which...
...first few weeks for a novice hostess can be disorienting. First of all there are the hours. You become a purely nocturnal creature, showing up for work at about 9 p.m., finishing at around 2 a.m., and then unwinding until dawn at bars like Gas Panic or higher-priced clubs like Lexington Queen. The girls earn $150 to $400 a night in salary, in addition to the perquisites and gifts that adoring customers shower on them. But in this saturnalian spectacle there are even more opportunities to burn the money. In addition to the booze, clubs and clothes, there...
...Lucie were the peculiarities of the business. For example, every evening between 9:00 and 10:00 when the clubs were just opening up, a steady stream of Nissan Cimas and Jaguar S-TYPEs pulled to the curbs in front of the six- and seven-story buildings housing the hostess bars to drop off foreign girls in their knocked-off finest. The girls, nearly always Caucasian and usually in their early 20s, insouciantly climbed out through doors held open by men who were always Japanese and usually twice their age. The girls cut through the Roppongi sidewalk with a disinterested...
...quit her job as a stewardess because, she complained to her sister, it left her feeling "permanently jet-lagged." Her annual salary at BA had been $18,700. A good hostess could earn that in two months. Before even boarding that flight for Tokyo she was anti-cipating the hostessing windfall, charging $1,400 to her credit card to buy a new bed that she planned to use when she returned from Japan. "Lucie was not the most intelligent person," says her sister Sophie, "nor was she stupid. She did the things a normal 21-year-old would...
...Lucie e-mailed her sister that working in the club was "like being an air hostess without the altitude." She phoned her mother once to tell her that a customer had offered her "a fantastic sum of money to sleep with him." Lucie said she laughed off the proposal, reminding her mother that her job was to pour drinks, light cigarettes and "discuss boring subjects like volcanoes." She confessed to Sophie that sometimes her customers spoke English with such thick accents, all she could do was nod. "I can't believe I am paid so much money just to pretend...