Tokyo After Dark

Tokyo after dark -- where the girls are easy and inexpensive, the boys handsome and willing, and the sex is the wildest in the world. Who could resist a tagline like that? They just don't make gaijin-in-Japan books like this anymore.

"People may talk about transistor radios, portable television sets, lenses, cameras, and pearls," opens author William Fitzpatrick in his 1965 non-fiction sleazefest Tokyo After Dark, "but to me, the greatest product of Japan is the cabaret hostess." What follows are 128 pages of the most breathless, overblown descriptions of Tokyo's nightlife ever to grace the pages of fifty-cent pulps. It's packed with amazing chapter headings like "I Wanna Geesha" and great sound bites like "The Shimbashi Girl: Most beautiful of Japanese prostitutes, who offers something different in bed -- for the Shimbashi Girl is a boy." The funny thing is, it's actually sprinkled with a surprisingly nuanced portrait of traditional Japanese sexual mores, the sort of thing we've all read about a hundred times before in dry academic works like Permitted and Prohibited Desires or Pink Samurai. Only this time, the history is totally in the service of the hardboiled, You Only Live Twice-style Oriental sexploits taking place in the author's personal "pleasure quarters."

Fitzpatrick frolics his way through everything from Asakusa hostess clubs to "Turkish bathhouses" to private sex shows in the Ginza, all of it told in an era where $150 in US currency was worth 50,000 yen (you'd be lucky to get 15,000 now.) And the dialog. The dialog! "Why she no abolish babychan?" queries a Tokyo call-girl after Fitzpatrick describes the plot of Madame Butterfly to her. "Every Japanese girl think about abolishing baby if no husband. American man, he have takusan money? He give her takusan kimono? If no buy, she baka!" A perfect lead-in to a later chapter with the chipper title of "Abortions Are Cheap... And Legal!"

Such was life, it seems, in mid-Twentieth century Tokyo, where "the Japanese take their sex directly, honestly, lustily, and obviously." I wonder what Fitzpatrick would make of the antiseptic "maid cafes," infantile "gothic lolitas," and asexual moe fanatics that populate Neo-Tokyo today?

Comments

[Steve Harrison]

What would Fitzpatrick say about all that today?

I rather imagine mostly it would be "Damn! 50,000 Yen doesn't buy nearly as much coochi as it used to!"

The explosion of twists and fetish might actually leave him with a let down feeling...too much, too flippin' strange...

I mean, boys dressed as women are one thing, girls dressing up as 'damaged' is...yikes...

but hey, I'm more Scottish than Irish, so maybe I just don't know. ;)

[Matt Alt]

From the friend who gave me the book:

"Fitzpatrick, by the way,also did "after dark" guides for Hong Kong & Istanbul ... I can only imagine the exotic STDs he was battling by the early 70s ;)"

[Ginrai]

Wow, I thought I was the only one who read, "Permitted and Prohibited Desires". But I bet you didn't write a paper about it and Laura Mulvey's Freudian film analysis. Fitzpatrick's book does sound more fun!

[Gandalph Mantooth]

What would he say about it? He still exists in the guise of many who write about Japanese subculture today. So I don't think he'd say anything different than that which floats about now.

[Matt]

No doubt, Fitzpatrick's a direct ancestor of the current crop of Japanese pop-culturephiles. (The "founding father" would probably have to be Lafcadio Hearn, the first man to track down and catalog Japanese horror tales for a foreign audience.) But I suspect even he couldn't have predicted the long, strange trip Japan would be taking in the decades hence.

[amee]

reading it right now-just about to write on it!