Inside Kabukicho After Midnight
By Anastasia Malugin
Kabukicho. It's dark. The switch-over has begun.
The salary men begin to emerge out into the red glow, hunting for company to compound their loneliness after a gruelling day at the office. They've missed the last train home - trains don't run after midnight in Tokyo, so staying out isn't really a choice. It's just what happens next.
I specifically get up at midnight to venture out and follow their trail. Girls and boys around my age - Hosts and Hostesses, as they're formally known - line the streets holding up menus of their offerings. Time is oddly suspended here. That's almost the point.
My Canon A1 is already causing unease around the hostesses who immediately cower behind their menus as I ask to take a photo of them. Upon the premise of them obscuring their faces, only characterised by their school girl outfits, they kindly agree. The schoolgirl aesthetic is everywhere in Japan, mixing innocence with availability, wrapped in the soft language of manga and sold openly on the street. It barely registers as strange anymore.
I have to be careful not to let assumption outrun observation. The menus, when you actually look at them, offer what they say: karaoke, conversation and time. Prostitution is strictly illegal in Japan and is heavily prosecutable. What's being sold here is company and in a country with an established cabinet office for Loneliness and Isolation, that’s everything.
I end up getting a drink and get chatting to a salary man. Takumi works at a Japanese telecoms company. He's about to go to a companionship club where he meets his favourite hostess. Like clockwork, he says - they prearrange his visits, so she'll be working when he arrives. I'm really lucky he speaks English.
"We've developed a real friendship. She's my top choice when I go - I only come when I know she's there. We sing and dance and then we call it a night. She is very fond of me."
There's no shame in how he says it. Just warmth and genuine excitement.
A few blocks over I find a few Host Boys. Young, well dressed and hair that took effort. I ask to take a photo and the reaction is instant — they're already moving towards me, arms around each other, huge grins, jostling to get in frame. One fixes his collar. Another tilts his chin. They want to be seen. The energy is entirely different. No negotiation required. I couldn’t help but think back to earlier with the girls.
The dynamic runs both ways. Men pay to sing karaoke with women who will listen and laugh at the oh-so-repetitive stories. Women pay to drink with young male hosts who take their jackets, remember their names, their favourite drink, their favourite film. The transaction is the same on paper. Something about it isn't.
The neon, the menus, the rehearsed laughter drifting out of the clubs. It all exists alongside a country where hikikomori - severe social withdrawal - is common enough to have its own word. Nothing is ever said directly in Kabukicho. The schoolgirl aesthetic sits openly across the district while everything else operates through implication.
There's a hint of sadness in their eyes - on both sides of the transaction. But then again, Takumi seemed genuinely happy. The Host Boys definitely were. Maybe I'm projecting… I reckon the European Hinge epidemic is our equivalent - a different packaging of the same problem, just with worse chat and a 30-minute ride home.
