Book Review #97: Pink Box: Inside Japan’s Sex Clubs, by Joan Sinclair
Cleveland has a secret: It holds one of the greatest wonders in the whole world, below such delights as the Pyramids of Giza but certainly somewhere in the top twenty.

That wonder is named the Velvet Tango Room, and it is where a man named Paulius and his ever-friendly staff are working overtime to push the boundaries of cocktail technology. From the secret laboratories of the Velvet emerge alcoholic wonders.

They have a Bourbon Daisy that shimmers across the tongue, quietly metamorphosing from subtly cherry flavors to bourbon as you breathe in and out. They have a Ramos Gin Fizz that is like a meringue laced with beautiful aromas. The VTR is a place where you will pay fourteen dollars for a drink, and that drink will be worth every fucking dime.

The VTR is dedicated to making a glory out of something that most people glug down to get blotto, or pour down their throats numbly as they watch The Game. Alcohol isn’t supposed to be that elegant – it’s supposed to be an accessory to elegance, something you do while doing other cool things.

But Paulius takes these humble spirits and makes them into something elegant in themselves. Which is glorious.

Not everyone agrees, of course. There was a gentleman who arrived at the VTR and was creeped out by the expensive drinks and the very firm culture (they expect their clients to behave a certain way, and get it), and he called it “something out of Eyes Wide Shut.”

Which led me down a primrose path of wondering what would happen if Paulius was allowed to run a brothel.

American shame being what it is, we can barely allow ourselves to think of sex being sold in any fashion, and so we doom thousands of poor young women to selling themselves with no oversight in streets, supervised by pimps and ever-wary of dangerous customers. Yes, of course there are escorts who call in, and high-class prossies who do better; the sex-selling business is considerable safer than you’d believe. Yet the concept of a prostitute who can really push the technology of sex to bring it to new heights is nearly unthinkable. Hell, they can’t even buy a house for the purpose of sex without having it raided by the cops.

If someone like Paulius was allowed, legally, to turn his hand to sexual pleasures, one can only imagine what would happen. There are probably whole avenues of sexual experiences that could be opened to a capitalist imagination and some consumer’s full wallet.

As it turns out, that’s sort of happened already in Japan.

Japan’s always been less retentive about sex than Western cultures, and fuse that with their consumer sentiments and you get an astonishing number of truly interesting sex clubs. Pink Room is a photo book that documents these clubs, showing off a wide array of pleasures.

There are replicas of subway cars filled with escorts, whom you can rub up against as a sarariman in an ecstasy of allowed frottage and then choose one to go into the back room with. There are the school room replicas, complete with blackboards and desks (and posted warnings about “NO SEX IN THE CLASSES”), where you can play the teacher seducing an innocent student or be seduced by an older lector. There are the chikan rannyu clubs that specialize in breast-fondling, and the cosplay clubs where you pay good money to sodomize your favorite manga character.

One of the highlights of Pink Room is the form that one club asks you to fill out in advance, asking without irony exactly what sort of experience you’d like. It’s got all of the options of a lube stop oil change, but instead you have questions like:

F. Simply Penis Course

Basic Course: You are allowed to cum two times

A. Basic play style (circle one):
1. girl watches penis and makes conversation
2. no conversation
Option: I want an emphasis on A1

B. Soku-shaku (immediate blowjob, without foreplay):
1. I want to have pants taken off
2. take off pants myself

And

E. Anal Licking Course

…

5. During anal licking (more than one choice is OK):
1. girl makes a lot of embarrassingly loud noise
2. want girl to observe anus deeply and tell me how it is
3. no need, just lick

Of course, none of this is high sexual technology; given that in Western Culture, your choices are often limited to “a girl, and what she does to you,” altering the environment to roleplay certain activities is just the first step out. It’s not a huge change, but it’s there.

The book itself is, however, sadly uninformative. The author’s taken a lot of pictures, but she misses the rudiments of instructions. For example, she tells us early on that a man at a Japanese sex club appears to be freer than his Western counterparts, but in actuality he has to follow a very rigid set of rules that make it a constricted experience. Furthermore, we’re shown shots of doors with “NO FOREIGNERS” or “JAPANESE ONLY” on the front, because Western men frequently have no idea how to follow these rules and cause all sorts of trouble. Yet we’re never shown what those tight rules are, or why she thinks they’re rigid. As far as we’re shown, it’s anything goes.

Then there’s the conversion rate. We’re given lots of prices in yen for how much a given service is, but I personally don’t know the yen-to-dollar ratio in my head, and I certainly don’t know what it was back in early 1996 when this was photographed. Given that these clubs seem to be a favored habit among sararimen (and a handful of women’s clubs), it would have been nice to know exactly how much of their weekly salary they were spending on this crap. As it is, I don’t know whether they’re addicts or hobbyists.

And lastly, we see a lot of fascinating photos, but they’re all posed in some form or another. There are quotes, but no in-depth interviews with the girls to ask them what it’s like doing this, nor much of an idea how the men take to it (aside from revealing quotes as “It’s not cheating if I pay for it” and “For forty minutes, I fall in love”). We get lots of brochure-like snapshots, but no real light into the actual experience.

As such, Pink Box is an interesting book because it hints at what could be in a less-repressed culture. But it doesn’t give a full window. I’m not sure what would.

(Thanks to The Doctor for this awesome Christmas gift! And I remain amazed that, as stupid and sick as I am, that I can still toss this out.)