水商売

A fascinating interview with photographer Joan Sinclair here, promoting her new book Pink Box.

Some highlights...














Why document the Japanese sex industry?

It’s the second largest industry in Japan (automobiles are the first). It’s too much a part of Japanese modern culture to be ignored.


It's a pretty varied scene, is it not?

I was blown away. There are train clubs with all-you-can-grope commuting women....

There's “Sexual Harassment” offices where men can tear the pantyhose off their “secretaries.”...

Then there's the ‘imprint service’, where the customer paints traditional calligraphy ink onto the woman’s anatomy. She then sits down on Japanese rice paper and leaves an imprint of her body for the customer to keep. ...

There’s also the pantyhose ripping service. The customer chooses what kind of pantyhose—beige, black or sparkly—he wants the woman to wear. He can also select fishnet tights and panties. For an extra $20, the customer gets to rip them off the woman and keep the torn material.


So, how did you actually get in the door of these places?

Basically, it took a lot of singing karaoke with unsavory characters.


Many of the girls are educated and middle class. Do their parents know?

Many clubs offered so-called ‘alibi services’. A lot of the women still lived at home, which is common in Japan for individuals even into their 30s and 40s. They would tell their parents that they were makeup artists or waitresses. If the parents called that line, the club would answer, “Hello, Denny’s”—or wherever the women were pretending to work.


That’s ingenious.

Well, the clubs compete with each other for the women so fiercely that the women themselves are the prized commodity. The managers really want to keep them so they take good care of them.




















What about their futures? Do they get stuck in the sex industry, unable to break the addiction to quick cash, like so many American performers?


A lot of the women try it for a month or two, then quit, get married, and never tell their husbands.

It’s really hard work, and the ones who do it for years don’t stay in the industry for decades. A lot of them have college degrees, since Japan boasts a 99% literacy rate.

Generally, they can’t be on drugs—they’d get fired. In Japan, you need to use the more difficult formal form of honorable language to address customers, so any drug or alcohol abuse would be obvious and quickly discouraged. Their social demands are so much more complex than ours.