What is a “real seller?” Is the debate pointless? The “battle of the top” among hosts begins with the abolition of accounts receivable.

On December 5, a meeting was held between the mayor of Shinjuku City and representatives of each of the 13 host club groups in Kabukicho regarding the issue of accounts receivable at host clubs.

During the discussion, it was clarified that the policy is to gradually reduce the percentage of accounts receivable and eventually “abolish it from next April. Of the approximately 300 host clubs in Kabukicho, more than 200 are operated by the 13 groups that participated in the meeting.

The host clubs really do have their own colors,” he said. The way they conduct business, the type of face, and so on. In the case of cabarets, the image changes depending on the area, such as Roppongi or Shinjuku. In a host club, it’s like a group.

Hinata (pseudonym, 23) calls herself “born and raised in X Group.

In the X Group, the princesses and hosts are all beginners. They only hire boys with little or no experience. I used to go there with my friends after college and pick a host who looked like a normal boy. But as you get used to it, you want to look at other places. So I went to Z Group.”

It was there that Hinata realized the difference in the “color of the group.

Z Group has a lot of plastic faces, and they’re pretty aggressive,” she said. I had an image from the past that they were very aggressive in selling pillows and having sexual relations.

I grew up there, too, but when I first met the host, he told me that he was told behind my back by a senior staff member at the store that ‘if you give a girl like that a pillow, she’ll fall for you’ (laughs).

In fact, true to his word, I was swamped with love from the first pillow hit, and the average price was 30 (300,000 yen), but it went up to 100, 200, and so on. ……

Major host clubs are called “group stores,” while others are called “individual stores.

I used to go to a medium-sized group store, but my manager was transferred to a very large shop. At the store I used to go to, there were not many girls who spent 1 million yen a month, so when I went to the store, almost all the cast members followed me around and chased me around.

But at the big companies, they don’t even remember your face if you spend only a million yen a month. Even if I worked hard and spent a lot of money, there were girls who spent more than that, so I couldn’t shine and neither could my staff. …… Now, I nominate a host at a different private store.

Both hosts and customers choose their stores because big companies have their own merits and demerits, while private stores have their own merits and demerits.

Hosts who belong to a major company have the ultimate goal of becoming a “group number,” in which they compete not only for sales numbers at their own store, but also with other hosts in the group as a whole. For them, “being a group ranker” is the highest honor.

The more successful the host is, the more he/she is concerned about the group number. The hosts at their own restaurants are their rivals, but they want to be at the top of the group even more than that, but their rivals there are also their friends who make Kabukicho a lively place. It’s like a boys’ manga, isn’t it?

Although the group’s rankers are determined by sales, the detailed rules differ from store to store.

There is even a mix at the top of the ranks of hosts who boost their immediate sales with accounts receivable that they have no intention of collecting, and those who do not rely too heavily on accounts receivable and keep cash on hand with a style that does not overdo it.

This sparked a firestorm and a debate among the hosts as to what constitutes a real seller.

If the sales allowances are uniformly abolished, these debates will no longer have any meaning, and everyone will be competing for sales under the same conditions. The day is approaching when the true “number one host in Kabukicho” will be decided.

From the December 29, 2023 issue of FRIDAY