Ayano, a 20-year-old pre-med student, has a lucrative part-time job. She dispenses oral and manual sex at a “fashion health” massage parlor in Shinjuku’s Kabukicho red light district.
Since high school she had dreamed of becoming a physician, and after achieving a high score on the entrance examination was admitted to a medical school.
Unfortunately, reports Weekly Playboy (May 3), her tuition is damn high.
“Most of the students are from affluent families, but recently even some of them are in arrears of their tuition,” she says. “I have a friend who dropped out and began training as a emergency rescue worker.”
Ayano tells the magazine she has three siblings in school and for various reasons is responsible both for her own livelihood and university tuition. She first tried working as a waitress in a café where her monthly take-home pay was 160,000 yen. Then she found a job in a cabaret club where payment was 5,000 yen an hour.
“But it was rough working by night and taking classes by day,” she says.
And when her parents found out about it they put pressure on her to quit. Little did they know what she found next…
“So I looked for a part-time job that would bring in big money that I could also conceal from my parents,” she says. “At first I felt scruples against working in the sex industry, and wept in despair, thinking, ‘My life has hit rock bottom.’
“But then I rationalized to myself, that ‘I’m doing it to become a doctor,’ and so I created another personality for myself who’s doing this work.”
Shedding her last articles of clothing in front of a customer, stretched out supine on the massage table, initially took courage.
“It may be rude of me to say this,” she says, “but in my mind my customers became like the cadavers on which we perform autopsies in anatomy classes. I feel completely indifferent toward them. You learn to overcome your feelings of repulsion toward a dead body — it’s the same way with a customer at the shop.”
So far the hardest thing on Ayano has been the urge for sweets created by stress from the job, which she says caused her to put on seven kilograms in just three months.
It’s ironic that she is studying to become a doctor to heal the sick and has become sick in a sense of binging on sweets. But she plans to keep her part-time job until graduation from med school.
“Unlike northern Europe, where education is free, a medical student in this country has to work like crazy,” she sighs. “For a girl from a salaried worker’s family, this is the only way to make it happen.” (K.S.)
Source: “Watashitachi, iryo hokai de fuzokujo ni narimashita,” Weekly Playboy (May 3, page 162)