| Posting this review of a documentary about host clubs because I thought it might be interesting to see how a real host club contrasts with the fictional hosts and clubs portrayed in When a Man Loves a Man.
The Great Happiness Space specifically focuses on a host club in Osaka called Café Rakkyo. Snapelike actually recced this awhile back, but somehow I never got around to watching it until now--I recently got a Netflix (dvd rental) account, and saw that it was available both on dvd and for streaming.I’ve been interested in host clubs ever since I saw the J-drama Yaoh (“Night King”), which I mentioned in the afterwords of Going Steady Part 2 and Yoshizumi's Night Out Part 3, and of course there’s the host club connection in WMLM, too. I must admit, when I watched the first episode of Yaoh, which takes place mostly in a high-class host club called Romeo, I was dazzled by the sight of all the incredibly handsome hosts lining up to greet each customer with a “Welcome to Romeo, Juliet!” Okay, I know that line is totally corny, but I couldn’t help swooning a bit and thinking that it might be fun to have a bunch of beautiful men treat me like a princess for just one night! ^_^At least until the show starting showing us the vicious behind-the-scenes backstabbing rivalry between the hosts, and how contemptuously some of the hosts regard their clients, milking them for every yen they have, and in at least one case, encouraging a client to take up prostitution so that she can afford to keep paying him. After that, the idea of going to a host club kind of lost its luster. This being fiction, though, the hero of the show, Ryo, is a host who sincerely just “wants to make women happy,” whether or not they have a lot of money, as opposed to the cynical and mercenary top host Seiya (who actually turns out to be not quite as cold-hearted as he appears at first glance).Getting back to the real world, Café Rakkyo is a bit less glamorous than Romeo, or Rusty Nail and Schnapps (the host clubs from WMLM). The interior isn’t as classy, and the atmosphere is a bit more rowdy, more like a regular nightclub. In Yaoh and from what I’ve seen of WMLM (I haven’t read the whole series), the hosts mostly sit around on couches with their clients and make conversation--charming them with compliments and flirtation and such. At Café Rakkyo, they sing karaoke and make a big production out of “bottle calls” (when a customer orders an entire--and very expensive--bottle of champagne). The host calls out the order over a microphone to the accompaniment of loud music, and the bottle is poured out into a big pitcher, which either the host or the customer then proceeds to chug down while the other hosts cheer them on. This may be partly because Café Rakkyo is a club designed to appeal to young women (and all the hosts look pretty young, too), while the crowd at Yaoh had a much wider age range. (There were bottle calls in Yaoh, too, but the host simply called out the order without any microphones, music, or chugging.)The bottle calls give you an idea of how much alcohol these guys have to consume as part of their jobs, considering that a top host can get several bottle orders in one night. Rakkyo’s top host Issei admits that “my liver is probably fucked,” and says that he continuously drinks and throws up. Which makes sense, since I had been wondering how the hosts manage to remain conscious for the entire evening not to mention keep from killing themselves with alcohol poisoning. That’s not really a healthy solution either, though, since Issei says that some of the guys end up throwing up blood.They do reap a pretty big financial reward in exchange for wrecking their livers: the popular hosts make the equivalent of $20,000-$50,000 a month. There’s a dark side to that wealth, though--it turns out that a large number of their clients are prostitutes, because women with ordinary jobs can’t afford to spend that much money at the host clubs regularly. It’s a darker side to the industry that’s hinted at in Yaoh, but mostly glossed over--most of the customers of the top hosts at Club Romeo appear to be legitimately wealthy women, although it turns out that one girl is only pretending to be an heiress and has used up all her money on her chosen host. She’s so infatuated with him that she considers taking a job in the sex trade so that she can afford to keep seeing him. Ryo eventually manages to change her mind, and she regains her self-respect and decides to leave Tokyo and return to her hometown. However, most of Ryo’s customers are cabaret girls--which I think means that they’re hostesses rather than prostitutes, but still, I found myself wondering if he was being just a bit hypocritical. He doesn’t pressure them to spend beyond their means, and his goal is to sincerely make women happy, but I couldn’t help thinking that in the long run, the women would be better off saving their money instead of blowing it at a host club, no matter how nice and well-intentioned the host is.Getting back to the real world, the prostitutes in the documentary say that they hate their jobs, so they go to the host club to feel better about themselves. However, it turns into a vicious circle, because they get so addicted to going to the host club that they have to keep prostituting themselves so that they can afford to go there.Some of Issei’s clients talked about how much they were in love with him, and one of them even said that she wanted to marry him. I boggled at how completely in denial they were, to actually believe that the host was interested in anything but their money, but later in the movie I thought that they might not be so deluded after all, and were only playing along with the illusion that the hosts create. Because it’s eventually revealed that most of these girls who are professing such love and devotion for Issei already have boyfriends! (Though they all say that they keep their visits to the host club a secret from the boyfriends.) And one of the hosts said that the girls go to other host clubs besides Café Rakkyo, that he stopped by another club one night and saw one of his customers there, and that everything the girls say to him (their expressions of devotion, I assume), they say to the other hosts, too.Ironically, Issei expressed contempt for a girl who seemed to be his most devoted customer, the one who wanted to marry him. Even though she regularly spends thousands of dollars (or the equivalent in yen) on him, he called her a “freak” and said that he hated her (to the interviewer for the documentary, not to her face, of course). He believed that all the things she was telling the interviewer about loving him and wanting to marry him was a deliberately calculated and manipulative ploy designed to make him feel more warmly towards her. If so, she failed miserably, since it obviously had the opposite effect. He did concede, however, that even if she’s lying to him, he’s lying to her as well.He sounded pretty cold in that segment, but maybe it’s a host defense mechanism. The hosts said that if they feel affection for the girls, then they start to feel guilty about taking money from them, and tell the girls not to spend so much on them--which is obviously bad for business. Issei admits that being a host gives one a cynical view of love and relationships, and yet he still says that he wants to fall in love and get married someday. It was sort of interesting, that desire to hold onto a hint of idealism in the midst of all the cynicism.One thing that surprised me was that I didn’t see any of rivalries that went on in the fictional host clubs of Yaoh and WMLM, with hosts being jealous of each other and trying to steal each other’s clients. It might be because the hosts all knew that the filmmakers were going to show their interviews to the other hosts, so perhaps they were being careful about what they said. Or it may be that in real life, hosts can’t steal clients away from each other so easily. At Café Rakkyo (and from what I understand, this is standard practice in the industry), a first-time customer is allowed to look over the “menu” of hosts and talk to the different hosts to see whom they like, but after that, they’re expected to make a choice about which host will be “theirs” and they aren’t allowed to switch hosts once they’ve made that choice. (So in WMLM, Ishii should not have been able to take clients away from the other hosts at Schnapps, although they still might have had to worry about another host club luring the clients away.)In any case, if there was any jealousy or rivalry going on, they kept it well-hidden, and they even seemed to look out for each other. When the club finally closed, there were a few guys who were passed out unconscious--probably from the booze as well as exhaustion (the sun was up and it appeared to be early morning by the time the club closed and the hosts were ready to leave). Instead of just leaving them there, the other hosts woke them up, and the more sober hosts made sure that the half-conscious hosts got home safely. At least, I hope that they all got home safely--a couple of the guys took a cab, but another was riding a bike home, and another one was driving a moped. I’d be worried about them driving a vehicle of any sort, considering how much alcohol they consume as part of their job. However, I assume that the film would have mentioned if anyone got killed in a DUI accident, so hopefully they all made it home okay. I may be reading too much into it, but I thought the way they looked out for each other was kind of sweet, especially since I wasn’t expecting it.Overall, the film completely killed any last lingering desire I might have had to visit a host club. On the surface, the concept of host clubs seemed glamorous and exciting at first, but the reality of it turned out to be sleazy and sad and pathetic. Still, it was a very fascinating and informative, though ultimately bleak look at the world of host clubs. |
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