Recent editions of Tokyo publications seeking the services of working girls have been heating up right along with the rising mercury to provide an inside look into this immensely intricate industry.
For those just breaking into the trade, the August issue of Hanamaru Work provides a breakdown of the wages that can be expected at each job. Clubs where girls dress in costume (“image club”) or massage parlors (“fashion health”) and provide customers with oral and hand services pay between 30,000 and 35,000 yen per day. Ladies will pour drinks and light cigarettes for 2,000 yen an hour at hostess clubs. Out-call sex services (“delivery health”) and “soapland” brothels pay 35,000 yen per shift. Bolder gals can take the plunge into the world of adult video at a rate of 35,000 yen per day. Less lurid ladies may field calls and emails from lonely guys for 1,000 yen an hour.
In its back pages, following numerous ads for establishments — many seeking women willing to wear sailor uniforms — Hanamaru gives profiles of success stories. Kaede, 18, boasts a robust monthly take-home salary of 1.3 million yen. She works four to five days a week at an image club in Nishi Kawaguchi in Saitama Prefecture. The glossy also lists expenditures these ladies typically outlay as a result of these handsome pay packets. Eri, working at an image club on Dogenzaka in Shibuya, each month doles out 30,000 yen for new clothes and 20,000 yen for her mobile phone. Yayoi, a 24-year-old former office lady turned trick-turner, splurges 100,000 yen on food alone.
Hanamaru Work also includes survey results, in the form of pie charts, that detail such things as whether girls enjoy sex and where they learned appropriate techniques. For the latter, a whopping 56 percent received instruction from magazines and a quarter from adult films.
Paradise Queen, published by Creators Company Connection, features Momo Aikawa from the club Princess Doll on the cover and splashes its pages with gals sporting glittering pendants and rings, sparkling bras, body oils, glimmering nails, and the omnipresent phrase “We Love Shopping.” Features include vacation destinations to the beaches of Shirahama and Yumigahama. Ads for apartment complexes conveniently boast of accepting applications from fuzoku (sex service) employees. Special listings for boutique love hotels make it simple to pick a fashionable place for relaxing with a boyfriend.
Paradise Queen (August) also includes ads for the premiere issue of Y!GIRL (July 31st, vol. 1), another title from the prolific Creators Company Connection. This new sheet offers a five-point, step-by-step guide for picking that perfect go-go gig. Equally didactic is Hanamaru Work’s lesson on proper hand and tongue placement on a male’s manhood.
September’s LunLun Work, which this reporter picked up in front of a coffee shop in Otsuka, Tokyo, profiles Tomoko Tamogami, who by all accounts appears to be — gasp! — simply a run-of-the-mill model. Moving along, the rag reveals tips on how to take a photo of oneself in a number of sexy poses and from multiple angles. Bikini underwear and a tripod, it would seem, are all that is required. Life can indeed be a party for these ladies, who are shown in later pages receiving makeup tips, lounging in frilly, tight-fitting fashions in dozens of colors and degrees of gaudiness, and unwinding in the evening at nightclub Shibuya Nuts. But lest one believe these babes to be braindead bimbos, the rag also reviews the book “In Bed with Lily,” which offers tales of life in the sack by a columnist born in Kanagawa Prefecture.
Then there is the rather mundane — yet phone book-thick — Momoco (August), the flashy BBCute (July), which features leggy model Ayu Tomoda in a number of flowery outfits and the tag line “wanna be erotic and cute!,” and Chibi Maru (August), yet one more publication pushing the positives of prostitution.
Though LunLun and BBCute have alternative versions for purchase at convenience stores, all these mags are free and readily available outside restaurants and bars in major entertainment areas throughout the metropolis, making perhaps the perfect means for a glimpse into the life of that lass lasciviously laboring before you.