Welcome to Kabukicho!

After a brief and relatively boring stint covering local polictics in Saitama, it wasn’t long before the police beat came calling again, this time in Tokyo proper. I was finally hitting the big time. And when it was time for all of us new to the Tokyo shakaibu to be assigned to our prospective beats, I was assigned to Hell. The vice squad.

I was married by now, and Mrs. Sunao Adelstein was not excited by my posting to temptation alley. We’d been married for about three years. It had been a whirlwind romance. I’d met her at an event she was covering as a reporter for Nikkei Publications, and I’d managed to ask her on a date. She was twenty-nine and wanted to be married before she was thirty. After several dates, she laid down the terms: we could go out for three months, but if at the end of those three I wasn’t serious about marriage—sayonora. She was funny, bilingual, and foxy—still is—and it seemed like an excellent business deal. I stated my terms: marriage—okay! but I demanded a three-year ban on producing offspring. She agreed, and we were engaged in record time. We actually got married the day before her thirtieth birthday, on my lunch break at the Urawa City Hall. It was almost nullified the same day because I had written my birthday down according to the traditional Japanese imperial calendar, Showa 44, rather than the Western calendar, 1969. However, a little yelling and screaming made things work out just fine.

She was excited about moving up to Tokyo, and so was I. Out of New Jersey at last. I was back on the police beat in the big city.

Technically, it was the Fourth District of the Metropolitan Police, but in reality it was like being assigned to a combat zone. The Fourth District contained the Shinjuku police, almost all of Shinjuku Ward, and the notorious Kabukicho. Kabukicho had nothing to do with kabuki, the traditional theater art performed exclusively by men (including the roles of women), but a lot to do with the traditional sex industry.

Kabukicho used to be the largest and most volatile and profitable red-light district in Tokyo. Under Governor Shintaro Ishihara, the TMPD has made a concerted effort to clean it up, leaving it a shadow of its former self. The impetus probably was the horrific fire at the Mei-sei 56 Building in September 2001, which killed forty-four people. The building was owned by Shigeo Segawa, a yakuza-backed flesh merchant also known as the King of Soapland, whose buildings had been cited time and again for safety violations.

It focused attention on what a lawless area Kabukicho had become.^1* Something needed to be done. Maybe not a full-scale cleanup but forced compliance with safety regulations would have been enough. Maybe.

I’m not a New Yorker, but I guess you could compare it to the old Times Square versus the new post-Giuliani Times Square.

As far as entertainment districts went, in 1999 nothing beat Kabukicho for pure sleaze. Drugs, prostitution, sexual slavery, rip-off bars, dating clubs, massage parlors, S-and-M parlors, pornography shops and porn producers, high-dollar hostess clubs, low-dollar blow job salons, more than a hundred different yakuza factions, the Chinese mafia, gay prostitute bars, sex clubs, female junior high school students’ soiled uniforms/panties resale shops, and a population of workers more ethnically diverse than anywhere else in Japan. It was like a foreign country in the middle of Tokyo. Of course, I didn’t have any idea of how seedy the place was at that time. All I knew was that I had been assigned to cover it.

I hadn’t been there in years. I wondered if the mysterious tarot machine that had so accurately predicted my future in 1992 was still there. Maybe it was time for an update. I could use some advice. The Fourth District was a heavy burden to carry.

I wasn’t left to do it on my own. Inoue assigned Okimura to cover it as well. Okimura was a 1993 entry, like me, and a lot more savvy about those things than I was. He had been in Yokohama, another hotbed of criminal activity, and been tested and tried on the fields of the police beat. He had married a hostess, one of the most beautiful in Yokohama, alienating at least one senior editor at the Yokohama branch who had been courting the woman at the same time. Okimura had been a kickboxer in college, and he still had that lean and fit look. He had the thousand-yard stare that you see in some Special Forces veterans.

The police beat district reporters were under the command of the TMPD reporters, who were stationed at the headquarters of the TMPD. They commanded; we obeyed. We also were at the mercy of the yu-gun (reserve corps) reporters, who could generally pull us off the beat any time they wanted a warm body. Inoue had given orders that this year, we newbies were going to actually be allowed to cover our beat and not be errand boys for the senior reporters in the Yomiuri office on the day shift. It would be an interesting experiment.

The Shinjuku police station was a ten-minute walk from Kabukicho, next to the Nishi Shinjuku station, close to an island of office buildings. It was fairly new and towered over the area. It was at least seven stories tall. A police officer with a long pole was always stationed in front of the police station, standing guard. I had to get past the guard to even enter the police station. I told him I was a reporter for the Yomiuri. He didn’t bat an eye. He looked at my ID and waved me in. I guess they were a little more used to dealing with foreigners in Tokyo, or at least at the Shinjuku police station.

Almost every district in Tokyo has one police station with a press club inside. The Shinjuku police station held the press club for the Fourth District. I took the elevator to one of the upper floors. The club was huge by most standards. It was a giant square room with a reporter’s desk from each newspaper/television outlet lined up against the wall, forming an L from the front to back. Next to the door was a closed-off tatami room, loaded with futons and completely dark unless you went in and turned on the light. A place to sleep. I felt in my bones that I was really going to like this assignment.

The tatami room would definitely come in handy. Sunao and I were trying to have children, and come hell or high water, night or day, we were not missing her ovulation day. In a pinch, this room would do.

The current tenant of the desk I was about to occupy was snoring when I got there, leaning as far as possible on the low-backed desk chair, on the edge of teetering over, his arms dangling limply, his nose pointing at the sky, his messy hair sticking up. He was making gurgling sounds. His shirt was covered in rice cracker flakes; a half-open pack lay discarded at his feet. I’ll call him Crumbly.

The young female reporter from the Asahi sitting two seats away from him—Ms. Beanpole is how I’ve always thought of her—was curling up her lips in disgust at him when I walked in. She gave me a funny look, made eye contact, but didn’t say anything. I dropped my backpack filled with books, my camera, and my computer on top of Crumbly’s desk, casually. It made a loud thud when it hit. It startled Crumbly, who slid off his chair and landed near my foot.

“Sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.

Crumbly stood up, grabbing the rest of the rice crackers as he came to his feet.

“No problem. Just catching up on some sleep. So.”

“So.”

“So you’re taking over, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t have much information or wisdom to pass on to you. It’s not like I’ve been doing the Fourth District for long, and frankly, the district reporters are kept so busy doing odds and ends, we are barely here at all.”

“Inoue-san said the same thing. He said this year he’s going to encourage the district reporters to really cover their beats. It’ll be good prep work for being a police reporter at headquarters.”

He pulled a red notebook out of a pile of notebooks on the desk and said, “Yeah, well, I wish that it had been that way with me. Here’s the list of officers’ addresses I have. It’s not much.”

It wasn’t. The list hadn’t been updated in more than a year. If that was all he had, I would basically have to start from scratch, compiling my own list of police officers and where they lived to make the evening rounds. He handed me a collection of Fourth District police station announcements, newspaper clippings, a guidebook to Kabukicho, a plastic bag full of meishi. I noticed that there was a pile of discount tickets to sex shops in the trash basket next to the desk and an empty box of condoms, but I couldn’t say if they were his and I didn’t want to ask.

I asked Crumbly what I should do to cover the area effectively.

He bit off half a rice cracker and offered me the other half. I took it.

While he chewed, crumbs blew through the air. Some of them caught in the breeze from the fan, then wafted to and hovered over Ms. Beanpole, who swatted at them like flies. Crumbly gave me his take on what it meant to be a district police reporter.

“Basically, Adelstein, you’re cannon fodder. The district police reporters are errand boys for the TMPD police reporters and the guys in the head office. All the big cases are done under the direction of TMPD headquarters, and anything that the local police do on their own is probably not newsworthy. You’re lucky if it even gets into the local edition, let alone the national edition. Nobody expects you to get a big scoop on this beat, and nobody gets too pissed off when you get your ass handed to you on a silver platter. Get to know a few cops, write a couple human interest stories, feed some intel to the real police reporters, and you’ll have done all right.”

“I thought Kabukicho was a hotbed of criminal activity.”

“It is. But that doesn’t make it newsworthy. People get killed or injured here all the time. But who cares if some Chink, yakuza thug, or whore gets whacked? The cops don’t, and the public doesn’t either. Nine times out of ten, no matter how much it looks like a murder, the Shinjuku police will write it up as a case of assault resulting in death—or manslaughter. Why? So they don’t have to launch a full-fledged investigation. They could find a Chinese skimmer^2* stabbed thirty-six times in the back on the streets of Kabukicho, and they’d call it an accidental death. Probably they wouldn’t announce it either.”

“So what is newsworthy here?”

“Anything involving someone famous or a civilian or a teenager. That’s about it. If yakuza start whacking each other and it looks like a gang war—maybe newsworthy.”

“I thought I was supposed to get to know the names and addresses and phone numbers of every major detective in the police station.”

“Ahhh, they tell you that, but it can’t be done. It’s not like the old days. In the old days, you’d go to the vice police chief and he’d give you a list with the names and addresses of the head of each investigative division and the squad leader names as well. They won’t do that anymore. Especially not the Mole.”

“The Mole?”

“That’s the vice police chief here. He’s always squinting like he can’t stand being in the light. Spent his whole career in administration. He believes his job is to keep you from getting any information, including press releases. He’ll do everything possible to interfere with whatever story you want to work on. Totally worthless and hates reporters. Good luck.”

Ms. Beanpole snickered at that. I turned to her.

“Is that true?”

“Absolutely. Maybe he’ll be different with a foreigner. Who knows?”

He wasn’t. I asked The Mole when I could see the chief of police and make my formal greetings. Refused. I asked when I could speak with detectives from each section and was told, “Never.” The Mole’s answer to everything was always the same.

“I handle public relations. Anything you want to know, you ask me. Besides, the TMPD headquarters handles all the big stuff. Don’t bother the detectives.”

Fortunately for me, the chief of police had heard about me from Misawa, the most senior and most venerated police reporter at the Yomiuri, and while The Mole was busy brushing me off, the chief emerged from his office and invited me in. I ended up asking if it was all right to at least greet the head of each section, and the chief told The Mole to set it up. I could see The Mole cringe when he was given the order, but he did what he was told.

It wasn’t my charming personality alone that got the chief on my side.

I’d come prepared, of course. I knew the chief was a heavy smoker and I knew he liked Lucky Strikes, so I’d had a friend stock up at the duty free for me. They were packed in the hard-shell case rather than the soft pack, which was rare at the time, I was told. A carton of cigarettes could buy a lot of goodwill in Japan.

After exchanging business cards with about ten police officers under the watchful eye of The Mole, I headed back to the press club.

Beanpole was waiting. She introduced me to the reporters from Jiji, Kyodo, NHK, the Mainichi, and Nikkei. We made chitchat. I got the usual twenty questions. I was a good sport. I explained how I’d gotten into the Yomiuri. Yes, I could eat sushi. Yes, I liked the cops. Yes, I could read and write Japanese.

I complained about The Mole. We all disliked him. In that sense, he did a lot to unify the club. There was nothing exciting on the news and no announcement scheduled for the day, so the first thing I did after lunch was pull out a futon, turn out the lights in the tatami room, and sleep. The Fourth District is Hell? Hah. It was the sixth realm, the Western Paradise—or so I thought as I was nodding off.

Paradise didn’t last long. At two in the afternoon, The Mole called from downstairs to let us know that the Shinjuku police would be announcing an arrest for violations of the Prostitution Prevention Law. The vice squad head, Shimozawa-san, would be giving us a lecture downstairs in the chief’s office. I called the TMPD club to let them know. We all hustled down to the room, and there was the chief behind his desk and the lead detective on the case standing in front of the desk with handouts. Another detective was sitting in the corner, taking notes. The press handouts didn’t have a lot written on them. It was always that way with the TMPD. The Saitama police press releases were like novels compared to the skimpy materials TMPD handed out.

Two days before, the Shinjuku police had arrested the owner and manager of a club in Kabukicho known as The Mature Hot Wives Party Palace for managing prostitutes. He had been running the establishment for more than a year and raked in close to $400,000. Shimozawa showed us all an advertisement for the club taken from Tokyo Sports, a popular newspaper sold at every train station in the city:

The ads showed several women in their late thirties, most of them with black bars across their eyes, partially obscuring their faces. Akimoto also had been advertising on the Internet and on mobile telephone Web sites. That was a big deal at the time: people using the Internet for criminal activities!

Another thing about the Web page that was ahead of its time was that if you printed out the home page and brought it with you, you got a discount of several thousand yen. The Web site was very professionally done. It had a full menu of services and options listed, but I couldn’t figure out what they meant. Wakamesake? Shakuhachi?

Why would they offer sake with seaweed? And shakuhachi? Were they using wind instruments as dildos? Was I not getting something?

Shimozawa laid it all out for us but didn’t explain the menu.

“Unlike many sex clubs in Kabukicho, this place was openly providing honban. They had a staff of more than thirty women on call and ten on site at any given time. We suspect an organized crime presence in the background. Any questions?”

No one raised his or her hand. I did.

“What’s honban?” I asked.

Shimozawa looked surprised.

“You don’t know what honban is?”

“No.”

Beanpole giggled.

“That’s actual sexual intercourse. Insertion of the penis into the vagina,” he answered succinctly.

“Isn’t that what all the sex clubs are doing?”

“Not quite.”

“Well, if the customers aren’t inserting the penis in the vagina, what are they doing with their penises, anyway?”

Shimozawa laughed. “Have you ever covered the Crime Prevention Bureau before?”

“Not really.”

“So you don’t know how this works?”

“What works?”

“The whole sex industry.”

“Not really.”

“Well, you’d better read up.”

Nagoya-kun from Kyodo asked if there had been anyone famous there when they’d made the arrests and raided the club. There hadn’t been.

I had another question: “How many of the prostitutes were arrested?”

“None.”

“And the customers?”

“None.”

“Just the manager?”

“Just the manager.”

People were looking at me as if I were a total idiot. But it didn’t make any sense to me. Why did the cops bust only the manager of the club if there was an antiprostitution law on the books? I realized that I was in completely new territory now. I wanted to ask more, but I felt I was trying the patience of the cops, so I shut up, but there are limits. One of my favorite Japanese sayings goes along the lines: “To not know and to ask a question is a moment of embarrassment; to not know and not ask is a lifetime of shame.” I always thought it was better to look like an idiot and ask a lot of questions about new materials rather than fake it.

I asked another question: “This club marketed itself as being staffed by all married women, but how many of them were actually married?”

Shimozawa didn’t even need to look at his notes. “Good question. Only about a third of them were actually married to someone. Most of them were divorced or single.”

After the lecture, as I was packing up my computer, the detective sitting in the corner came up to me and introduced himself. I was later told that people referred to him as Alien Cop. He was a striking figure. About six feet two—tall for a Japanese guy—very thin, shaved head, and his eyes were jet black, almost all pupil and no white. He was dressed in a dark gray suit, navy blue tie, and a pair of black loafers.

“You don’t get this stuff, do you? Ever done the police beat before?”

“I covered the Organized Crime Control Bureau in Saitama.”

“OC stuff, huh? This is a different ball game.”

“I can see. I should study up.”

“Tokyo vice is a complicated thing. Books won’t tell you how it works. You can study the laws, of course, but what’s on the books and what’s enforced—different things.”

He gave me the card of a bar in Kabukicho.

“I get out of here at nine. Meet me at this bar. I’ll walk you through Kabukicho, explain the deal to you.”

I was grateful. It’s not often that a cop decides to take you under his wing. I agreed to meet him, quite happily.

First, I had to finish up an article I was working on about a “hot wives” club. I typed it up in about an hour and sent it to my editor. Then I walked fifteen minutes to Kinokuniya bookstore, picked up a copy of the Japan Criminal Code and related laws, and started thumbing through the adult entertainment laws. It was not easy to understand. Alien Cop knew what he was talking about.

The bar where I was supposed to meet Alien Cop was a dive. Tiny. It was more like a walk-in closet. There was a standing bar counter with an obsidian top that ran across the room. There were no windows and no tables to sit down at. It was so dark that when I lit my cigarette it seemed as if I were setting off fireworks. The master of the place was dressed in a tuxedo, and his head was completely shaved. I tried to order a drink, but he said, “You’ll have a whiskey” and poured me one.

Rule number one of drinking with cops: you are permitted to order only (1) sake, (2) shōchū, (3) beer, or (4) whiskey. Tiki-tiki drinks are not allowed. A dry martini may be acceptable since 007 drank them. Order a Blue Hawaii, and you might as well pack your bags and start covering family affairs.

Alien Cop sauntered in thirty minutes late. He wore blue jeans, red sneakers, and an AC/DC shirt. I felt overdressed. He nodded at the master, who nodded back, poured him a shot of Jameson’s, and slid it down the bar to him with the precision of the Scottish curling team at the Olympics. Alien lifted the glass to his mouth in one motion as it slid into his fingers and knocked it down.

“So what do I call you? Adelstein-san? Jake-san?”

“Just Jake will be fine.”

“Okay, Jake-san. So this stuff is a little confusing for you?”

“Well, yeah. If prostitution is illegal, shouldn’t everything in this area be closed down?”

“Depends on your definition of prostitution. Let’s go for a walk. I’m off duty, and this is off the record.”

And so we sauntered out into the night.

We started our walk in Kabukicho near Tokyo Topless, a legendary strip club. Alien pointed out various types of shops as we passed them and began to expound on the life of a vice cop.

Kabukicho in the evening in 1999 looked like the Disneyland Festival of Lights Parade, except that the neon signs were advertising blow jobs instead of family vacations. In front of the buildings and in the middle of the streets, touts dressed in formal black suits and white shirts aggressively sought out customers, grabbing sleeves and shoving pamphlets into the hands of meandering salarymen. From some of the buildings, loudspeakers vomited out the husky voices of women advertising sexual pleasures beyond imagining: $200 for forty minutes. A few shops displayed seminude pictures of the women working the club on the lit-up billboards in the shop entrances. Every building seemed to be crammed with shops and bars and covered in signs advertising them.

“I don’t understand why the prostitutes weren’t arrested on this last case. Did they make a deal or something?”

“You have to understand that the Prostitution Prevention Law here is really about protecting the prostitutes. You could call it the Prostitute Protection Law.”

“How does that work?”

As we were walking past Bareo, he pointed out a Thai prostitute lurking near an alley, hoping to drum up customers.

“I could arrest her if she’s openly soliciting. That’s illegal. However, if the guys come up to her, that’s not a problem. Anyway, here’s the deal. After the war, there were lots of people basically selling their own daughters into the sex trade. Kind of like slaves.”

I nodded.

“Well, in 1958, prostitution as it used to be was banished. It used to be a licensed industry. The idea was to make sure that women couldn’t be forced into sexual servitude. So basically, the people the law punishes are the pimps, the brothel owners, and the guys who solicit for the prostitutes. The idea at the time was that many of the women in the industry were being coerced into it and if you punished them, it would be punishing the victim. Plus, no one would come forward to the cops. For the john and the hooker, there’s no punishment. If the woman is under twenty, we might put her in a shelter.”

“Why doesn’t the law punish the customers? Wouldn’t that discourage the trade?”

“Sure it would, but who the fuck do you think wrote the laws? Guys. Hell, in the 1950s probably half the Diet was frequenting Soapland.^3* It was a huge social problem, with girls being sold like cattle, and something had to be done, but that didn’t mean the guys were going to put their own dicks in the sling. So that’s how it stands.”

“So there’s no punishment for being a prostitute or sleeping with one. What about all the other stuff that goes on here? That’s got to be illegal, right?”

“Nope. The general rule is that as long as it’s not straight intercourse, a store or shop can offer any kind of sexual service you could want. Just as long as it’s not vaginal penetration with a penis. There are zoning issues and stuff, of course.”

“That’s why they can advertise, right?”

“Absolutely. In the newspapers, on billboards, on packets of tissues. Check out this storefront.”

We were in front of a shop called, more or less, Dick Nurse.

The billboard displayed pantyless Japanese women in white nurse uniforms complete with little white hats, squatting over an anonymous Japanese man, their hands on his crotch. The ad was not subtle:

“And this is legal, right?”

“Yes. As long as the girls aren’t fucking the customers—not a problem. Look, you can see we’ve even approved them to do business under the adult entertainment laws.”

He pointed at the seal on the door.

I was looking at the options menu, but there were a lot of terms I didn’t understand.

“What’s this mean?”

“Anaru name? That’s anilingus. She licks your ass if you pay extra. You also can get a prostate massage. That’s when the girl sticks a finger up your ass while she blows you. Standard stuff.”

We kept walking. Alien broke down all the shops and businesses for me by types and services.

There were sexual massage parlors and fashion health shops. Those usually offered hand jobs, blow jobs, and anal massage or anilingus. Some were now offering anal sex. The so-called image clubs were like sexual theme parks. You could choose from several motifs: virgin brides, schoolgirls, nurses, nuns, and animated characters. Most of the girls in those places wore some kind of costume and did some mild role playing, much like the girls at the Maid Station.

He took me by Shinjuku Joshi Gakuen (Shinjuku School for Girls). This was the most famous spot in Kabukicho for getting serviced by women dressed as schoolgirls. Many schools in Japan require students, male and female, to wear uniforms, and apparently this seems to create some kind of Pavlovian association of school uniforms with the first feelings of lust. At 10 P.M., there was actually a line in front of the place.

“Have you ever been inside?” I asked Alien.

“No, not for business or pleasure. It’s a popular place, though. There’s a huge selection of uniforms, a copy of practically every uniform from every high school in Tokyo. It gets some guys pretty hot.”

Of course, at every one of these places, as soon as they saw my face, they immediately told Alien, “No foreigners allowed.”

That was one reason I don’t think I ever really got to explore Kabukicho as well as my coworkers did, which was probably just as well.

Alien did manage to get me into a couple of lingerie pubs, a cabaret, and some other seedy places where I normally wouldn’t have had access. Of course, I footed the bill.

Some pubs offered blow jobs to the clients. There were still one or two pink salons, where, for 3,000 yen (about $30), you would go in and order a cup of coffee, and while you were drinking it, one of the female staff would unbutton your pants, wash your penis with a warm towel, and then fellate you. I have to take his word for it because foreigners were banned from entry, of course.

There were strip clubs where audience participation was allowed. Alien dragged me into one of the smaller ones; it might have been Art Shower—the name escapes me. The club was like a giant living room with a large round platform in the middle surrounded by tables with yellow tablecloths on them and chairs that looked as if they were covered in red velvet. The dancer was gyrating to Japanese pop. She stripped off everything, and then she masturbated onstage, making high-pitched squealing noises while spreading her legs in the butterfly pose. She was supposed to be versed in the arts of the “flower train.” That is to say, she was supposed to be able to hold a pen in her vagina and write things or shoot blow darts. We weren’t in luck that night because there was no such spectacular performance.

The club smelled of piss, ammonia, sweat, cigarettes, musk, and body fluids. The smell of woman was pungent and powerful. At the end of the performance some of the customers were invited to masturbate the dancer onstage with a vibrator at the conclusion (irepon). We didn’t stay long. Alien didn’t seem particularly interested in any of it. He was very much into his role as a tour guide. He ran through the entire hidden language of strip clubs for me, elaborating on the difference between “pachinko” and “open.” Some of the strip clubs had separate rooms where you could go with a dancer and she would do what it took to make you ejaculate for an extra fee. The strip clubs employing foreigners were often said to offer actual intercourse as part of the package.

We next walked past the host clubs. He showed me the giant amusement center/office building Furinkaikan, which was where all the local yakuza congregated during the day and night. There was a giant open-space coffee shop on the ground floor. There were more than a hundred different yakuza groups with offices and business in Kabukicho, and Furinkaikan was their Grand Central Station and their convention hall.

We walked past the love hotels and the Thai prostitutes standing near the park close to Okubo station. Iranian males were servicing gay Japanese men in the restroom of another park in the area. There were several bars staffed by transsexuals and even a few bars offering drag queen performances.

On a narrow road to Koma Stadium, a pencil-thin building with a sign advertising THE SEXUAL HARASSMENT CLINIC caught my eye. Alien said it was another variation of the nurse-themed image club. However, it had a real ob-gyn examining table with stirrups, making it all the more “authentic.”

The most memorable sex club of the evening was Bareo. It had an actual subway car inside, and when you paid your cash and got onto the train, one of the girls, pretending to be another passenger, would board the train and molest you, whisper in your ear, stick her hands down your pants, and perform other lewd acts. For an extra fee, you could take one of the girls out on a date and she would molest you on an actual train. This was the hot sex club at the time. There were already one or two clubs where men could pay for the privilege of pretending to molest a woman on a subway train, but the role reversal was what made this club such a hit.

Amaenbo was close to City Hall and supposedly popular with midlevel bureaucrats. They had a glass toilet that would let you see your hostess perform any of the standard bodily functions. You could stick your head in the bottom and be pissed on if that was your thing.

I didn’t find any of this as disgusting as I thought I would. However, I passed on a chance to see the magic toilet in action.

We dropped in at one S-and-M club. Alien knew the owner, a short little bald guy with a ponytail who wore a sarong, and chatted him up. The owner let me peek at the show behind the curtain. In the center of a huge room filled with eight or nine tables, there was a small platform, and on it was a dominatrix clad entirely in leather. Her breasts jutted out of her leather blouse, and the nipples were pierced with what looked like safety pins. Her hair was pulled back in a bun. The only thing not leather on her was a huge white strap-on dildo, which she was using to sodomize a middle-aged man in a navy blue suit.

I didn’t need to see more. We went back to the street.

By one in the morning there were several Chinese prostitutes walking the streets openly. They didn’t seem to care whether I was Japanese or not. I had to peel one off every five minutes.

Around two in the morning, Alien took me to a no-panty shabu-shabu restaurant where half-nude young women prepared beef dishes at your table and flirted with you while you ate. I picked up the tab for that, too.

“So, I get the picture. Well, what is illegal besides actual normal sexual intercourse?”

“Not much. Hard-core pornography. Uncensored stuff.”

“You mean it’s illegal to sell pornography showing someone getting fellated or something but not illegal to get the actual blow job?”

“Yeah, that sums it up. You catch on fast. You can do it, but you can’t watch it. At least not on your VCR.”

“So what’s to enforce?”

“Mmmmmm.”

It was hard to understand Alien because the twenty-four-year-old girl serving him his dinner was playfully stuffing her nipples into his mouth. He tongued them while talking. Her moaning, fake or real, made it hard to follow the conversation.

“Well, every now and then you have to take down the places that are blatantly offering intercourse. You have to draw a line somewhere.”

“Why don’t they just make normal sex legal? I mean, you can do almost everything else.”

“Actually, the restriction on normal intercourse makes it more interesting, I think. It forces people to search for new avenues of erotic pleasure. There’re a lot of ways to get your rocks off besides the standard screw.” He popped the woman’s nipple out of his mouth and had a drink.

After dinner I was ready to catch a taxi home, but Alien wanted to take me to one more place. It was a Korean massage parlor and sauna.

Alien assured me it was a legitimate place. “Hey, I’m not going to get either of us in trouble. I come to this place now and then. Koh-san will take care of you. This is my treat.”

The setup reminded me of a place in Omiya. I was led into a small, windowless room. There was a massage table in the center and a shelf next to the wall, stocked with various lotions, a basket for clothes, a couple of vibrators, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, cotton sheets, and towels.

Koh-san was wearing a beige nurse’s outfit and round wire-rimmed glasses. She had on long white latex gloves. Her Japanese was fairly good, and she had me strip and lie down. She gave me a twenty-minute massage, using a very sticky clear massage oil. It was like being rubbed with hot glue. I was facedown, and then she had me turn over. I didn’t want to turn over, but she laughed and literally flipped me in a second. She commented on my anatomy. She giggled. She told me to wait, and she called in two of her friends to look. She and her friends made comments to one another in Korean or Chinese and giggled some more. Then they left. I caught the word katsurei, meaning “circumcised.”

The rest of the massage was not relaxing but not unpleasant. The massage was for forty minutes, so after a total of thirty minutes had passed, I started to get up but she would have none of it. “Massage not over. Please wait. Relax.” And with that she grabbed my shaft in one hand and speared my anus with her other.

Maybe Alien Cop was testing my sense of humor? My curiosity? I was wondering if refusing the service would be insulting his hospitality. I didn’t have to wonder for long. After finishing me off, Koh put me into the shower. Then I got dressed and walked out to the lobby, where I met up with Alien.

He was glowing. He had something approaching a smile. I thanked him for setting me up with such a good masseuse. What else was I supposed to do?

“No problem. Now you understand what Kabukicho is all about. Sexual desire. Selling it and satisfying it. As long as the shops don’t go too far over the line, they can do whatever they want. Our job as vice cops isn’t to put these places out of business, it’s to keep them in line.”

I nodded in understanding. Alien had a question for me.

“You like Japanese women?”

“I don’t have an Asian fetish, but yeah, I like Japanese women. I married a Japanese woman.”

“I’m the same way as you.”

“You like Japanese women?”

“No, I like foreign women. Blondes and redheads. Can you introduce me to one? I don’t meet many foreigners—well, not the kind, you know, you could date or anything.”

So that was what this was all about. I said I’d see what I could do. And I did. It was the start of a long-term partnership, of sorts. Alien Cop was the guy who gave me my first and maybe only real scoop on the Fourth District.

As I was getting into a taxi, my cell phone rang. It was the editor.

“Adelstein!”

“Yes?”

While I’d been hanging out with Alien Cop, I hadn’t checked my phone or my beeper once. It was now way past the time when any additions or corrections to an article could be made. I thought I was in deep shit.

“What’s with that article you sent about the hot wives club thing?”

“What about it?”

“You wrote in the last line, ‘In reality, only a third of the women were actually married.’ Why the fuck did you put that in?”

“It seemed relevant. False advertising. I mean, all the customers thought they were screwing someone else’s wife, but that wasn’t the case. It just seemed like an important detail to show how shady the operation was.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind? This is the Yomiuri, not Tokyo Sports. We aren’t about protecting the consumer rights of goddamn perverts. That fucking line stayed all the way to the last edition. Think before you write, idiot.”

And he hung up.

Well, at least the article had made the paper. I was happy about that. I got home at five in the morning, and Sunao was waiting for me. She was still up, in her bathrobe, typing an article on the latest trends in Japanese socks. She had a bath waiting for me and some fried rice on the table ready to be heated up.

She asked me how my day had been, and I told her. I didn’t hold anything back. I felt Jewish puritanical guilt, a need to confess. I thought she’d rake me over the coals, but she was neither shocked nor angry. She listened with some interest while I explained to her everything I’d learned and the whole evening’s events. Even the massage parlor. She did have questions, though. She massaged my shoulders while she interrogated me, occasionally really jamming her thumb in.

“So she just gave you a hand job? She didn’t suck you off or anything?”

“No. Just a hand job.”

“Well, if this cop invited you to come along, I guess that’s what you had to do. Just don’t make a habit it of it. And if you do, I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Understood.”

“And if you do something, wear a condom, honey. I don’t want any diseases.”

“Of course.”

“Do you have any left?”

“Any what left?”

“Any sperm. It’s that time of the month. Check your reporter pad, Jakey.”

I opened my Yomiuri-issued calendar/notepad, and sure enough there was a big O in Sunao’s handwriting marked in red on the date. The big O. Ovulation day. I guess crawling into bed was not an option.

I winced a little. Sunao just smiled.

“Don’t worry, Jake. I won’t even charge you today. It’s on the house.”

It was a long day.

Well, at least I knew that this “hot wife” was really married. I was definitely not getting ripped off. I thought to myself, it’s good to have my own hot wife rather than be paying another man’s wife. Maybe it would keep me out of trouble.

The Soapland shops in Japan used to be called toruko, short for Turkish baths. This so offended one Turkish resident of Japan that he launched a campaign to get the name changed, which the Yomiuri reported on in the late sixties or seventies. I remember one particularly obnoxious editor from the Foreign Affairs Bureau showing me his article about it. Eventually, Japan gave in to international pressure and solved the problem by giving the sex shops a wholesome moniker. It sounds like good, clean fun. “Soapland.”

Incidentally, the Japanese term for blow-up sex dolls is “Dutch wife.” The Embassy of the Netherlands has yet to launch a formal protest or make counterassertions that “Dutch women are not frigid and thus we are outraged by the term ‘Dutch wife’ in the selling and use of inanimate sex dolls,” but when it does it’s my scoop.