By RICHARD LLOYD PARRY
TOKYO - By day - unless you knew exactly what you were looking for - you could pass by a thousand times and never give a second glance to Bar Casablanca.
The building in which it nestles is brown and anonymous; from the street the only token of
its existence is a plastic signboard facing on to the fume-hazed, traffic-choked street. Inside are tiny establishments with intriguing names such as Raki Raki and the Gay Arts Stage. Casablanca is on the sixth floor, and during the hours of daylight it is locked and silent. But this is Roppongi - a few square kilometres of jumbled concrete and tarmac which transforms itself every evening into Tokyo's capital of the night.
The changes begin at dusk when the lights begin blinking on the scruffy buildings. In this small city quarter are 1150 bars, pubs, cabarets, nightclubs, karaoke bars, lap-dancing joints and hostess bars.
In Japanese, this jumble of establishments - downmarket and upmarket, decent and disgraceful - is encompassed by a beautiful and suggestive phrase: mizu shobai; literally, the "water trade."
At one extreme, the water trade includes the geisha, female entertainers of exceptional skill who are only to be found in the most refined parts of Kyoto and Tokyo; at the other are the Korean and Chinese prostitutes who provide hurried relief in massage parlours and sauna baths. And somewhere in the middle are the Roppongi hostesses, girls such as Lucie Blackman, a 21-year-old British woman who worked at Casablanca until she disappeared without a trace two weeks ago.
At the Roppongi Sports Bar, where the foreign hostesses gather after work, at two, three and four in the morning, the talk is all about Lucie. There is little else but talk, for the facts are so sketchy.
Blackman was a British Airways stewardess who left her job and flew to Japan on May 4 with her friend, Louise Phillips. Within a few days of arriving in Japan, they had jobs at Casablanca as hostesses. Two Saturdays ago, according to Phillips, she left her lodging house with a promise to meet a group of friends later in the evening; she telephoned that afternoon to say she was on her way home. And that, apparently, was the last anybody heard from her.
The following day, Phillips reported receiving a weird phone call from a man, seemingly Japanese, who claimed Blackman had joined a religious cult.
There has been no ransom demand, no sightings. The police report no progress (according to Detective Inspector Toshihiko Mii, the officer in charge, "all possibilities are open").
But the incident has revealed the vulnerability of the Roppongi hostesses, marginal figures living close to the edge in the world's second-richest country. "I was getting sick of it anyway, but this really made up my mind," says Helena, a British hostess who worked with Lucie at Casablanca. "This job is terrible, this whole industry is terrible. It wears you out mentally and physically. I would never, never recommend anyone to become a hostess."
To Western ears, the word "hostess" sounds laughably euphemistic, suggestive of dingy basements in Soho or Times Square. But for many hostesses - and their male customers - the worst it can be called is a kind of commercialised flirtation. Japanese families seldom entertain at home, and it is rare to see husbands and wives out together. Instead, men drink with men from work, or with unmarried female colleagues. In their absence, and in the tradition of the geisha, they pay for female company and conversation.
Casablanca is an exclusive establishment and since the news of Blackman's disappearance broke this week, anyone resembling a journalist has not been welcome during business hours. But around the corner is One-Eyed Jack's, where anyone with money can sample the hostess experience. The front is decorated with neon signs and photographs of semi-naked dancers; a curving staircase leads down to a dimly lit bar. It costs 3000 yen ($54) to enter. A polite Australian waiter asks customers what they will drink - another 1000 yen each. Then comes a mysterious question: "Any requests?" Here the customer specifies: Japanese or foreigner, blond or brunette, tall or petite.
And that, usually, is as far as it goes. "The customers pay for our drinks," says Martine, another British hostess, another friend of Blackman. "You talk to them, you light their cigarettes, you laugh at their jokes. When they're Japanese, it's often the talking that's the hardest part - a lot of them seem to come to practise their English ." For this, a hostess will typically earn 2000 yen an hour.
And that is only the beginning. For the hostess scene has evolved a complicated system of bonuses and incentives. A girl who impresses a client one night may be "requested" by him the next, and for this she gets a bonus. Hostesses are encouraged to go on "dohan" - dinner dates with men who have taken a shine to them - after which they bring them back to the club.
The customer enjoys an evening out with an attractive young woman, the hostess gets time off work and a free dinner, and the club gets custom. At One-Eyed Jack's, a dozen dohans in one month brings a bonus of 50,000 yen. "In Casablanca, it was always dohan, dohan, dohan," says Helena (her name, like those of all the hostesses, has been changed). "Girls who didn't get any dohan were asked to leave. But the ones who got a lot were the top girls. Lucie was a top girl."
Beautiful, privately educated Lucie Blackman might seem an unlikely participant in this strange game of voluntary servitude. But she was fairly typical of the Roppongi hostesses. Helena and Martine are both university graduates; their friend Rebecca has come over to earn some money in her summer holidays.
Many are on trips round Asia, from Australia, New Zealand, Europe and America, and are saving up for the next stage of their journey. With bonuses and dohans, a moderately successful girl can earn $6400 a month. But few last more than half a year. "It gets lonely," says Mira, who started three weeks ago at One-Eyed Jack's. "You talk so much to earn money, but you never have a proper conversation with anyone."
The other reason for the fast turnover is that the girls are all here on tourist visas, extendable only for a maximum of six months; they are illegal workers.
"If something gets stolen, or you end up in trouble, you're not going to go to the police, because you could end up deported," says Mira. But the greatest danger is much simpler: the random and unpredictable nature of a job that depends on meetings between young women and male strangers.
Japan is justly celebrated as the least crime-ridden and violent of any industrialised country but, even so, everyone who has been in Roppongi more than a few weeks has her horror stories. For Helena, it was a customer who had an obsession with Audrey Hepburn. "He went for brunettes with that look - pale skin and big eyes. There was one girl who left after two weeks because he was so creepy. He'd sit next to her and says things like, 'Now you are mine,' and 'I paid for you, now I own you,' and he'd grip her tightly round the arm."
The one girl at Casablanca who never appeared to have problems was Blackman. "She always seemed so positive, so energetic," says Helena. Nobody I spoke to held any store by the cult theory. "I don't believe it," says Mira. "More likely someone kidnapped her somewhere and phoned up to say it was a cult to put the police off."
"Maybe this is a warning," says Mii. "If I compare my policewomen who go on patrol and the hostesses in the bars, the hostesses are in more danger. But the fact is that there are so many of these hostesses and they keep coming."
For all those who sail unharmed through the lucrative water trade, there will be a few - like Lucie Blackman - who sink without a trace.
- INDEPENDENT
By RICHARD LLOYD PARRY
TOKYO - By day - unless you knew exactly what you were looking for - you could pass by a thousand times and never give a second glance to Bar Casablanca.
The building in which it nestles is brown and anonymous; from the street the only token of
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