TOKYO (TR) – Miyuki Ariga, a second-generation exotic dancer, is pulling back the curtain on the chaotic, crime-fueled underworld of Japan’s Showa Era (1926-1989) strip clubs.
In a discussion with Spa! (June 7), she details her late mother’s deep yakuza ties, ritualistic finger-severing and highly lucrative underground animal shows.
Born into a family deeply entrenched in the criminal underworld, Ariga grew up surrounded by the Japanese mafia. Both of her parents sported matching full-back tattoos. Her father, a member of the Yamaguchi-gumi syndicate, died of throat cancer when she was 16. However, her parents’ marriage ended much earlier in a violent clash.
According to Ariga, when she was just a year old, she unwittingly outed her father’s infidelity by telling her mother, Miyuki Hama, that a woman had put him in a bubble bath. Enraged, her mother chased her father around with a kitchen carving knife, leading to their divorce. Her mother later dated a legendary yakuza hitman and boss’s bodyguard who constantly carried a Derringer pistol.
Hama, who passed away four years ago, was a trailblazing and ruthless figure in the stripping world who often settled disputes with gangsters through yubitsume (ritual finger-severing).
“The world of striptease is full of all sorts of people besides the performers and their families,” Ariga says. “Drug addicts, ex-convicts, guys who are pimps to strippers, and so on. It’s like a cesspool for people who don’t have a place in normal society.”
Chopped off her own pinky finger
Ariga only has a middle school education. That was largely because the nature of her mother’s work caused them to move continually.
“There are hardly any strip theaters left now, but when I was little, there were probably around 400 nationwide. The duration of the performances varied, and we would move every 10 days or so,” Ariga says.
Ariga recalls an incident involving Hama at a theater in Shin-Maruko, Tokyo when she was just four years old. After a group of rival thugs arrived to aggressively claim the turf, Hama didn’t back down. She abruptly chopped off her own pinky finger in front of them, demanding, “How’s this?” The stunned rivals were forced to sever their own fingers in return and pay a cash settlement.
On another occasion at a theater in Himeji City, Hyogo Prefecture, members of the Takenaka-gumi syndicate interfered with Hama’s cast of dancers. Hama demanded proper mob retribution, forcing the syndicate to send a young foot soldier to deliver his severed finger and cash. Over her lifetime, Hama severed her own fingers a total of five times, leaving her missing both pinkies from the second joint and a ring finger from the first.
Clever stagecraft
Hama also made a fortune pioneering bizarre, taboo-breaking stage performances, with “animal mating” shows being among the most popular. At the time, Ariga was working as her assistant.
“It was my job, when I was 3 or 4 years old, to take the dogs in and out of the shows. Of course, I didn’t understand what was going on back then,” she says. “But when I was about 7, I started to understand more and more. When we went to a public bath, everyone would look at my mother’s tattoos, and she was missing the tip of her little finger.”
While Hama gained infamy for bestiality shows, Ariga reveals that the acts relied on clever stagecraft rather than actual penetration. During a show with a chimpanzee, pieces of fruit were hidden inside Hama’s vagina; the animal’s attempts to retrieve the food appeared to the audience as shocking foreplay.
Copulate with a goat
These spectacles generated massive illicit wealth. When Hama was 46, she performed a show utilizing a horse at a theater in Tokyo’s Ueno district. Despite a steep 10,000-yen admission fee, crowds formed a massive line stretching all the way from Ueno Station to a nearby department store.
The underground shows were a family business. Ariga notes that her uncle, known for producing male-on-male “Black-Black shows,” once dragged low-ranking yakuza onto the stage and forced them to copulate with a goat. The theater grossed roughly 1.2 million yen every 10 days, though Ariga notes the yakuza performers saw almost none of the profits.
Backstage, the environment was completely lawless. She recalls how, even as a young child, she regularly witnessed performers dissolving Philopon (methamphetamine) on the overturned bottoms of teapots before casually injecting the drug.
Like mother, like daughter
Hama opened her own theater in Gunma Prefecture when Ariga was eight years old. However, among the dancers she employed, there were three who were under 18 at the time. This was deemed to be a violation various labor laws, including the Child Welfare Act. Hama wound up serving a prison term of three years and five months.
It was around the time of her mother’s release that Ariga turned to stripping.
“I was in middle school, but I wasn’t even attending; I was riding around on my motorcycle,” she remembers. “My mother had already returned from prison by then, and she was furious at my pathetic state. So I ran away from home. My father wasn’t around. I waited two or three weeks, but she didn’t come back, and I realized, ‘Ah, she’s abandoned me.'”
With her funds dwindling, she contacted her uncle.
“That’s how I ended up making my debut as a stripper,” she says. “My uncle also had connections to strip clubs. I entered this world without my mother knowing. At first, I trained at a strip club in Chiba Prefecture, and it was quite a Spartan training. Back then, they didn’t even teach you how to take off your clothes, so they’d just suddenly tell you to ‘get on stage’ and ‘massage your breasts.’ It was really tough. Some of the performers were drinking alcohol from the morning, so it was quite a wild and intense world.”
She later debuted at the prestigious Asakusa Rock-za in Tokyo.
“The style was different from the shows I did at the theater in Chiba,” she says. “Apparently, at Rock-za, they enjoy the ‘almost visible, but not quite’ aspect. I didn’t know that, so I got scolded at first.”
With authorities having long since cracked down on syndicate-linked entertainment, Ariga now plans to publish an autobiography to document the unfiltered truth of the era.
“The people who truly know the chaotic Showa strip scene are disappearing, while fakes speak about it with a knowing look,” Ariga says. “I want to record the things I actually saw and heard.”
