A soapland with an exterior reminiscent of a white palace, projecting an extraordinary atmosphere and a sense of luxury (Takamatsu Castle East District, ’06) A drastic change in play styles in the 1990s When the era name changed and the first year of Heisei (1989) arrived, image clubs began to spring up in entertainment districts. One of the factors behind this boom was the new Entertainment Business Law that came into effect in Showa 60 (1985). Private-room massage parlors offering manual release, known as fashion health or private-room health, were widely thought to be unable to open new locations in most areas after the new law was enforced. Contrary to expectations, however, these types of private-room massage parlors continued to open one after another. They were image clubs. The reasoning was that “if a woman touches a male customer, it is considered a massage and requires notification. But if the customer touches the woman, it is not a massage, so no notification is necessary.” With this logic, sex-industry operators began running private-room massage parlors that incorporated image play such as groping, sexual harassment, and restraint. In the early days of image clubs, women were almost always in a passive role. In the 1980s, SM clubs with image-club-like elements also appeared. Shops that had toys like rattles and a baby room where diaper play was possible claimed, “The customer only wants to be put in diapers and treated like a baby; he does not want to caress the woman. Therefore, this is not the sex industry.” At the time, rumors circulated that “the authorities will not touch these kinds of establishments,” and as a result, such shops sprang up everywhere and filled the three-line classified ads. The AIDS scare that began at the start of Showa 62 (1987) was also one of the factors behind the popularity of image clubs. The panic over AIDS spread to entertainment districts nationwide, and customer numbers plummeted. Amid severe blows to the sex industry across the board, what drew attention were softer services. Unlike soaplands and the like, many image clubs at the time did not provide direct sexual services. It is said that some customers left fully satisfied even without any release. This was unthinkable in other types of adult entertainment. However, in the 1990s, the content of play changed drastically. Women at image clubs, who until then had done nothing, began adding services such as oral sex and thigh sex, just like other types of establishments. This was because the sex industry has a tendency to actively adopt services that are popular in other genres. Around this time, a typical time allocation was that the first one-third of the session was story-based play, followed by the remaining two-thirds as bed play. In the early 1990s, image clubs reportedly saw sexual harassment play as the second most common theme after night raid play. Gradually, image play spread to other forms of adult entertainment, blurring the boundaries between genres and leading to increasing borderlessness. By the mid-1990s, image clubs had become firmly established as one category within the sex industry. Then, from the late 1990s through the early 2000s, shops equipped with unique image rooms that realized wildly imaginative ideas began appearing one after another, ushering storefront-style image clubs into their golden age. 〔References〕Fūzoku Evolution Theory, Fumio Iwanaga, Heibonsha, 2009Paris: Houses of Prostitutes, Shigeru Kashima, KADOKAWA, 2013A Lifetime of Love Hotels, Tatsuo Koyama, East Press, 2010Postwar Sex Industry Compendium, Keiichi Hirooka, Asahi Publishers, 2000Chronological Table of the Sex Industry: Showa [Postwar] Edition, edited by Koji Shimokawa, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2007 In addition, many other books and online media were consulted.