kabuki cho

Kabuki-Cho: Tokyo’s Red Light District in the Morning

kabuki cho

By John Lloyd Clayton

The hosts and companions of Kabuki-Cho are at their full glory only late at night. I never see them then. Waking up every morning at 6:00 for a walk through Shinjuku, I get them deflated and glazed, like donuts under a gas station heat lamp. At night this side-street in one of Tokyo’s busiest districts resembles Las Vegas, condensed into a white-hot neutron star of lust, addiction, glamour, sex, drinking, workplace abuse and play acting.

In the morning, though, everything is finished, spent, packed up into cash boxes, wrapped in cellophane, topped with a cork and stuck back in the cooler. The hosts, young men who work in nightclubs and small bars, walk together with shoulders drooped, their black suits in sunlight cheap nylon what looked like silk under a blue floodlamp just three hours before. Spiked hair red and orange and blond, skin tanned from salons or self-bronzer put on with a puddy knife, now that just looks like plaster. Two of them are standing on the second floor balcony of a bar with a rococo front and a stone staircase made of cardboard, faces sallow after a night of pretending.

Their prey, bored housewives and lonely office workers and old ladies whose husbands gave them a night out, have long since returned to their comfortable homes out in Azabu or across the tracks from the station where the normal people live. The hosts won’t remember their names or their faces unless paid enough to write it down. Then it’s less by choice than because their boss will force them. On paper there is no sex involved, just talking and pouring drinks and flirting. Off the books is anybody’s guess. The two boys on the staircase talk about motorcycles and going to the beach; they can probably be heard as far away as Shibuya. Either they are trying to sound cool or they’ve gone deaf from music systems designed for stadiums placed into bars the size of a one-car garage.

On the street female companions walk home as well, one arm-in-arm with another host; she wears a garish festival kimono and the others party dresses with stiletto heels. What does the happy couple talk about? Going back to a shoebox-sized apartment in Shinagawa or Ueno or out in Funabashi, reeking of smoke and the gin, beer, Sake, or Shochu spilled on them by mistake, do they read poetry or go to Yoga? Do they watch corny romance movies? Do they walk to the convenience store to pay the electric bill? Do they have a favorite coffee flavor, sipping in cheap mugs while writing New Year’s Greetings? They walk off in one direction and soon are out of sight.

The stench of morning Kabuki-cho is terrible; the garbage, alcohol, vomit, urine, and you-name it comes off the concrete as bartenders hose down the sidewalk in front of the shops. Garbage trucks roll through at the same time, lifting up bags soaked with cheap tequila oozing out the bottom. Crows and cats claw at the bags in back alleys; the trucks lift them up often spilling out into the street, but everybody is either too tired or too uninterested to do anything about it. Waiting until dark, nobody will see it anyway and the next morning it can just be hosed off into the gutter.

Kabuki-cho is forced by daylight to tell the truth of a night spent pretending. Everybody there always eventually wants to go home, everything there is for sale, and everything smells like shit. In the dark, though, everything is golden and at least for a few hours, everybody cares. The glistening shimmer for those fleeting moments underneath the rainbow-colored track lighting isn’t the slightly musty sweat of a high-school dropout a decade past whatever age he told you when you sat down. He’s just trying to pay his rent; and though he wears one every night, has never been shown how properly to wear a three-button suit.

About the author

John Lloyd Clayton is a writer and teacher who lived for nearly a decade in Japan before returning to the United States. Contact him at www.johnlloydclayton.com

Photo of Kabuki Cho via Shutterstock

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