A host club in Kabukicho, a sacred place in Tokyo, is a breeding ground for “stand-up” girls… The man who rose to the top of the host club has run aground after only three months.
Kabukicho in Shinjuku, Tokyo, can be called the “sacred land of host clubs.
Today, host clubs can be found all over Japan, but if you trace the origin of these clubs, you will find them all in Kabukicho. This is because in 1971, Takeshi Aida, the father of host clubs, opened Japan’s first host club called “Ai,” and many host clubs were born to imitate his business, which has developed over the past half century.
Today, host clubs have become a breeding ground for many social problems, such as women who are in debt to host clubs and sell their bodies “on the spot” in order to pay back the money they owe. If you walk around Kabukicho, you will see host clubs everywhere with their gaudy billboards and advertising vehicles, and until recently, you would have seen sales figures of tens or hundreds of millions of yen.
Who are the people who have risen to the top of this entertainment district, which is currently in a state of rapid rise and fall?
In the form of excerpts from my book “Yumegen no Machi: Kabukicho Host Club no 50 Nen” (Kadokawa Shoten), the only nonfiction book in Japan that reveals the history of Kabukicho, I would like to write about the “owners” who reign supreme in this town.
A lonely boyhood as a “key child
Group Dandy” is the largest group in the host club world. Sho Takami is the founder of this group and has served as its chairman for about 30 years.
Group Dandy” currently has 59 host clubs with approximately 1,900 hosts. It is truly a “giant” in the host industry.
Before we look at how Takami rose to the top of the host club world, let us take a look at his background.
Takami was born in Fukuoka Prefecture in 1973 and later moved to Hiroshima. His father worked at Yoronotaki, a chain of taverns in the downtown area near the Atomic Bomb Dome, and his mother was an organist.
When he was in the fourth grade, the family broke up. His mother could no longer stand his father’s infidelity and left home. Takami spent his lonely boyhood as a “key child,” staying up late every night at the tavern where his father worked.
After dropping out of high school in his junior year, he began working at a show pub in Hiroshima City. Because of his height and cheerful personality, he was well received by customers.
However, young Takami’s heart began to swell with a desire to play big in a big city like Tokyo, rather than in a provincial downtown. One day, he saw a late-night TV program featuring the host club “Ai” and made up his mind to move to Tokyo.
In 1992, Takami joined “Cat’s Eye,” a host club in Kabukicho.
At the time, Kabukicho was home to several new large-scale host clubs that imitated the “Ai” business, and “Cat’s Eye” was one of them. In the club, 50 to 60 hosts were competing for the top position, and Takami was ranked No.1 within a few months of joining the club.
However, Takami quit “Cat’s Eye” after just over a year. The owner was involved in illegal drugs, and the hostesses were bad behavior, so he decided to give up on the restaurant as it had no future.
For a time, he tried working at a supper club in Roppongi, but his desire to compete in the host world increased day by day. A year later, he returned to Kabukicho, the sacred place of host clubs.
However, in just one year, the map of the host industry in Kabukicho had been drastically rewritten. With the bursting of the bubble economy, most of the existing large-scale host clubs had collapsed, with the exception of “Ai”.
In their place were new types of host clubs, known as “new host clubs.
Commercial buildings in Kabukicho contain countless small snack bars and clubs with seating for 10 to 30 customers. Many of these establishments were having trouble running their businesses because they could not attract customers due to the recession, even though their rents were high. Therefore, some of the owners would rent out their stores after business was over, as is, for 200,000 to 300,000 yen per month.
Two Faces: Ace Hosts and Managers
Young hosts who had no place to go after the collapse of large host clubs took notice of this. They rented such snack bars and clubs at low prices and began operating them as small host clubs from 1:00 a.m. until morning after the clubs closed, without a license. These were the new host clubs.
Takami joined “Johnny,” one of the new host clubs, to study the new type of business. Then, together with friends he met in Kabukicho, he invested the 5 million yen he had in his pocket to open his own restaurant, Cecil 30. That was 30 years ago.
Cecile 30, like other new host clubs, was a snack bar that was used after business hours. It was only about 3.5 square meters in size, and the name was taken from the name of the snack bar. It started with only a few hosts.
With the opening of “Cecile 30,” Takami had to work as both an ace host and a manager. It was a two-faced job.
Takami’s strategy was to first attract female customers as the ace host, then have other hosts entertain them, and then attract new female customers from there.
To achieve this, Takami aimed for top-down management with dominant leadership. The owner would have absolute power in the restaurant, yell at the hosts, and sometimes even raise his hand to blast them. He believed blindly that this would lead to the momentum of the restaurant.
Takami was only 23 years old when he came to this conclusion, but even more significant was the atmosphere of the host clubs at the time.
In the 1990s, host clubs were tied up with gangs, and many of the hosts were former members of motorcycle gangs and yakuza-like roughnecks. Therefore, in order to keep them together and keep the club running, the owner had to have a great deal of power and pull them along by force. In fact, it was not uncommon to find a former head of a motorcycle gang running a host club bearing the team’s name and having members of the gang work there as hosts.
Takami followed such a management approach and tried to lead the hosts with an athletic flair. However, after only three months, the business hit a deadlock.
Very uncool!”
First of all, no matter how adept Takami is at handling female customers, he is not a famous host who represents Kabukicho, and he cannot single-handedly attract enough female customers to run his restaurant. There were limits to what Takami could do on his own.
In addition, he is a cheerful character, not the type of strong man who rules people with fear, nor is he someone who has a proven track record that everyone recognizes. For this reason, he was unable to organize his hosts well.
If things continued as they were, the company would go bankrupt. When Takami was having a hard time thinking straight, his girlfriend, who later became his wife, gave him the following advice: “You are doing the wrong thing.
Your way of doing things is wrong. You can’t do everything by yourself. To put it bluntly, you are so uncool right now!”
What she pointed out to me was the importance of respecting each host’s individual ways and intentions and building the restaurant together, rather than self-righteously leading everyone.
This may seem obvious now, but at the time it was an unorthodox way of thinking. It was a common belief that hosts were bad guys, and that if they showed any signs of weakness, they would be caught red-handed and either take over the sales or take over the restaurant.
In Part 2, we will discuss in detail the innovative strategy of “the man who rose to the top” to conquer Kabukicho.
Interview and text： Kota Ishii
Born in Tokyo in 1977. Nonfiction writer. He has reported and written about culture, history, and medicine in Japan and abroad. His books include "Absolute Poverty," "The Body," "The House of 'Demons'," "43 Killing Intentions," "Let's Talk about Real Poverty," "Reporto: Who Kills Japanese Language Ability," and "Hurtful Children.
