Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club

In popular culture, the image of the typical Japanese male is that of a “salaryman” (or “sarariiman in Japanese) or a “corporate warrior”. As usually represented in film and literature, the figure of the salaryman is a neatly groomed, middle-aged, grey-suited, briefcase-carrying, white-collar male office worker who leaves his home in the suburbs early each morning, commutes in an overcrowded train to some faceless downtown office block, spends long hours at the office, and ends the day by lurching drunkenly back to the suburbs on the last train after a drinking session with colleagues or clients. These are the realities of a salaryman’s everyday life, and studying this figure and his realities may provide information about how the salaryman has come to embody all Japanese masculinity in Japan. Along this line, Anne Allison’s book Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994) attempts to shed light on this important figure.
Nightwork is an ethnography on the production of masculinity and the corporate Japanese elite. As a participant observer, Allison spent four months in 1981 working as a hostess to learn what goes on in a hostess bar, and why. The setting is a high-class club in Roppongi, Tokyo, where Japanese men go to relax and unwind with their corporate colleagues. In this book, Allison investigates the conflation between work and entertainment among Japanese salarymen. She analyzes how the masculinist behaviors practiced at the hostess clubs strengthen internal and external corporate relations. Specifically, Nightwork explores how Japanese cultural and ideological structures shape and support these behaviors.
Allison also explores the hegemonic view of corporate entertainment. In the Japanese perspective, the role of the hostess club is to provide release from work while at the same time renewing men's commitment to their work. By extending long hours of work into evening outings corporations encourage their salarymen to identify with their coworkers and feel at home in the clubs. At first sight, these services seem relatively minor. In elegant, scrupulously clean settings, Japanese salarymen have their glasses filled with ice, their drinks poured, and their cigarettes lit by young, conventionally attractive women. They always go in groups, with one of their number higher on the corporate ladder than the rest of the group, and with the night's activities in one or more hostess clubs paid for out of corporate funds. Though clients or potential clients of a corporation also are entertained in this fashion, the hostess club is primarily used by the corporation to foster goodwill among its employees, for the company, and for each other.
The hostess club manages this function by providing an atmosphere in which men can relax by getting drunk, flirt with the hostesses, make what can be construed as rude or insulting comments to the hostesses (and sometimes to their corporate superiors), sing songs to piano or karaoke, and generally engage in behavior said to foster ningenkankei, or the human relationships that define the specifically Japanese dimension of Japanese business. Hence, the title of Allison’s book is all too appropriate: the after hours of the Japanese salarymen are not play but, rather, nightwork; they are not having a nightlife, but nightwork.
In Nightwork, Allison describes the “real events in a hostess club’" (p.26), depicting the interactions between the customers and the hostesses. The hostesses play an important role in the Japanese businessmen’s nightwork: they are the facilitators of the exchange of group feeling and corporate masculinity among the salarymen. They provide three services: lighting cigarettes, filling drinks, and lubricating social interaction, often at their own expense. They take care of and flatter customers, always careful to agreeh them and make them feel good, even when the businessmen are offensive. Their own feelings are immaterial since her job is to enhance the men's pleasure. The public performance of woman-as-subordinate, which is the heart of corporate entertainment in the hostess clubs, not only reflects the Japanese character and the culture of work but constructs the male subject and his desire at the same time that it constructs the Japanese “woman” as a sexual object in the service of men.
The author goes beyond the functionalist explanation that “nightlife serves corporate needs for male bonding and male relaxation” (p. 150), and she presents an insightful account of the power relations encoded in the interactions inside the hostess club. According to the author, corporate entertainment is a complex relation somewhere between total manipulation, male privilege, and Japan-ness. In applying Lacanian and Marxist theories, Allison sees corporate nightlife as a ritual of male dominance that depends on and uses the hostess to achieve its end. According to her, in this highly commodified form of entertainment, Japanese companies buy the fiction of masculine privilege and superiority for their salarymen, which results in the loss of intimate personal relations and the loss of identity outside of work.
One of the major contributions of this book is that, unlike previous work on the Japanese salaryman, Allison examines the salaryman as a gendered construct. While there is a substantial body of literature that focuses on the salaryman, what has been largely missing is an analysis of the salaryman as a gendered construct, a manifestation of a culturally privileged, hegemonic masculinity created and recreated through socioeconomic and cultural institutions and practices.