Found via today's 3Yen [dot] com
"The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief is a 2006 documentary film by Jake Clennell, describing a host club in Osaka. The male hosts and their female customers are interviewed, and through the interviews we learn about the nature of hosts clubs and why the customers are coming there."
Issei, the number one host in Minami ward claims "I've done whatever girls ask of me. Sure I had sex. I was having non-stop sex. I had sex with 365 girls a year."
Say the hosts who have to hustle for customers on the streets (this solicitation needs to be seen or experienced to be believed, particularly in certain regions of Osaka - there are public complaints) "When we look at girls, we can tell which girls have money. They carry brand name stuff. We can tell which girls are party animals. We talk to girls on the street and do 'nampa' (pick up girls). If they like us, we ask them to come to the club for a drink."
Says one woman walking holding hands with another, rebuffing a host's advances in her Osaka accent, "As long as you have a penis, we don't like you."
LOL.
Back to Issei, a self proclaimed and acknowledged master by his peers, "If she wants a humble, cool guy, I will be like that. If she wants a funny guy, I can be like that, too. That's how I make girls fall for me. Once she is in love, she is hooked. Some people are clumsy at it. I find it easy. That's why I have a lot of customers."
Cut to female customers declaring their love for Issei. Says one: "My life without Issei is unimaginable right now . . . When I met Issei, I already had a fiance. I had promised to marry him. But I fell in love with Issei. So I broke up with my boyfriend." Others: "I want to tell him 'Look at me! Love me!" Another: "I want him to be only mine, right?"
What should be obvious to viewers and prospective customers, is as with hostesses, the charm of the host is an act, for the purpose of finding and keeping paying customers. Issei admits, "When people ask me what a host does, I say it's a business of selling dreams to people. In other words, we have fake love relationships."
That is the host's view. His female customers appear to feel the real thing: "The girls fall in love."
Issei: "The world of the host club, to make it sound cool, we can call it Neverland. Peter Pan . . . He took people to a world that doesn't exist. We take the girls to a dream world. That's the best way to describe it. Girls spend their money to buy a product, 'Dream.'"
He is then immediately shown bullshitting a customer who asks, "So do you fall in love with your clients?" Issei: "I guess I do. It would be weird if I didn't. There's nowhere else for me to meet girls other than this club. This is the only place I meet girls. This is the only place I can fall in love, right? All my ex-girlfriends were customers. There's no other way." Customer: "How does a relationship develop?" Issei: "I don't know. Just a feeling. But you have to be a long term customer . . . So you're in a good spot."
Issei narrating: "We have to keep them dreaming so when we have to lie, we lie."
Kaching. So ends part one of eight.
So many issues. One: these hosts are shown selecting those they want as customers ("party girls" with emphasis on girls), then aggressively soliciting them on the street, resulting in a different sort of customer (traditionally attractive) than men with enough money to seek out female hostesses in clubs. The hosts must put on the same act as hostesses (have fake love relationships/sell a dream/lie) to keep in business, but for popular hosts, it certainly appears less creepy, and less like exploitation of the host. Issei doesn't sound bothered having sex with "365 girls a year" who ask him, either.
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"Cut to female customers declaring their love for Issei. Says one: "My life without Issei is unimaginable right now . . . When I met Issei, I already had a fiance. I had promised to marry him. But I fell in love with Issei. So I broke up with my boyfriend.""
That guy's probably better off without such a shallow idiot as a fiancee anyway...
As noted, there are eight parts to the documentary up on YouTube. It gives a fuller picture of the lives of hosts (and their customers, as you will see).
I believe the issue for many (it certainly was for me) was part four. MATURE CONTENT WARNING (And if you can make it all the way to the end, you can see how screwed up the minds and lives of the male hosts are. You will see the manager cry.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsR3y6hfnY0
The featured female customers interviewed (it appears ALL of them) have turned to hostessing and explicit sex work to pay for their time with hosts, to be able to pay hundreds, even thousands of dollars a day on them. Despite what the hustlers on the street claim, it is NOT "just $12 an hour, ladies" or $50 per hour for the special seat where one can have the undivided attention of the host. (Same applies to men going to hostess clubs or cabarets.)
One of Issei's apparently more aggressive or persistent customers, the lady who can't live without Issei and broke up with her fiance? She sells her body to afford to pay to see Issei, because naturally, no one with an ordinary job can afford to see him so regularly. She claims: 70 or 80 percent of a host's earnings come from Fuzoku [sex industry] clients." Men who go to hostesses aren't selling their bodies or engaging in high risk behavior to be able to afford to buy the company of women. Male customers are probably high earning businesspeople, possibly on expense accounts (government officials have caused scandal using public funds on hostesses).
Issei: "The girls who work as prostitutes . . . for them, work is work, nothing more. They're having sex with someone they don't love. They're human, after all. They'd rather do it with someone they love. The reason they choose prostitution is basically, they want to spend lots of money on guys they like, or . . . We create the situation that, forces girls to turn to prostitution. For most of the girls . . . how should I put it? Their lives revolve around me, as their host. The reason they choose to make money by working as prostitutes . . . is all for me."
Another issue: Money as power in contemporary Japan, and the ways some common people will do nearly anything to obtain it, even if it is explicitly against their personal morals. The story of the long haired brunette woman in the darkened corner is pretty heartbreaking. "After work, I feel so bad. And I regret having sold my body again. But when I get paid, I think I can get anything I want. I can buy anything. But . . . I think really hard about how to spend the money. And I think I really want to smile. And smiling is good. So I decide to take the money to Rakkyo [Issei's host club].
I'm not going to comment on sex work. But as far as stories like those of Issei's featured customers, it is not necessary to go to a male host to feel happy, and to turn to a line of work you explicitly don't like, just to keep going back to the host club. How are relations with their families? Do they have ordinary friends outside the business? Hobbies? Therapy? They themselves explicitly understand how they are lying and selling dreams to their own male customers. Why do they believe their relationship with the hosts (their male counterparts) are any different?
And once more, despite common claims, I'd like to differentiate hostesses (which some female customers are) some of whom date or have sex with customers OUTSIDE their club, vs. women engaged in explicit sex work. The "fuzoku" girls have specialized training (that's right, they are trained) use their bodies at work full time, and it is a known and expected part of their job from the beginning.