The Great Happiness Space

Oi.

Our brief conversation about the Japanese "online suicide" got me thinking about a documentary I watched recently called "The Great Happiness Space." It's about the "host" industry in Osaka, Japan. Hosts are sort of like a modern, male equivalent of geisha. The work for a certain club where women with disposable income go to have a good time. Although that can mean intercourse, apparently sex is NOT the norm.

Rather, these hosts make money by simulating an entire relationship with each of their clients. Engaging in a physical relationship may sate a client who then loses interest; dangling the possibility of physical intimacy "at some point," or "when it feels right" in their "relationship" keeps the clients interested, and keeps their pocket-books open. So hosts simply make jokes, ask sensitive questions, and tell women exactly what they want to hear. The hosts talk very candidly about this in the documentary--the fact that it's all a sham, and that they have zero personal interest in women that they fawn over in the club. The female clients also KNOW, intellectually, that this is a host's job, and it's not real--however, the documentary reveals how privately many of them think they have a chance to lure hosts away and eventually marry them. They hope against hope that THEIR particular sham relationship has a real foundation (disclaimer: it never does).

A final weird thing is that, as it turns out, many if not most of the women who frequent these clubs are prostitutes. They need to sell their bodies to earn enough money to pay for time in the lavish host clubs, which makes them feel better about selling their bodies. Crazy, right? They say the like the clubs because while society looks down on them, hosts treat them like princesses.

I almost brought this up because we were talking about weird, inorganic (internet based) social phenomena in Japan, and the host clubs are the epitome of an unreal social relationship. But then again, I'm not suggesting that the suicides of people who meet online are any more or less legitimate, or their feelings distinct in some way from non-internet users, whereas host relationships are very clearly fake. Anyway, just an interesting phenomenon from a social and developmental standpoint.