From Publishers Weekly
Japanese companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to hostess clubs that provide certain employees a release from job tensions. Here hostesses perform ritualized tasks--lighting cigarettes, pouring drinks, conversing in a stylized flirtatious manner--and while there is an erotic charge, the sex is implied, not performed. Duke University cultural anthropologist Allison's account of the four months she spent as a hostess at Bijo, a high-class Tokyo hostess club, is the first written description, in English or Japanese, devoted wholly to these after-work hangouts for corporate, white-collar sarariiman ("salaryman," an English/Japanese linguistic concoction). Allison has not written a voyeur's account, but a soundly researched study that provides substantial insights into the meanings of work and play for the Japanese. Whatever else they may do, the hostesses' first duty is to emphasize the client's strengths and his status as a desirable male, which, Allison argues, helps create the ideal sarariiman , one committed first and foremost to his job. Allison interviewed not only the hostesses and other Bijo staffers, but also wives of the men who frequent the club, club neophytes, managers of other hostess clubs, Japanese sociologists, journalists and others. Unlike previous books on Japanese nightlife, Allison's ethnography views Japanese night life from the eyes of a woman and feminist anthropologist. If the writing is occasionally dryly academic, Nightwork nonetheless provides valuable, thought-provoking reading for those interested in Japan, contemporary society or in gender roles.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
A fascinating look at the Japanese hostess club culture, where businessmen go to "feel like a man." The clubs are lavish or glitzy, depending on their quality and cost, but the focus is always the same for the men: to be entertained, cajoled, and flirted with by a young, attractive woman. Sex? Not necessarily. While flirting is open and expected, and intimate touching is not unknown, the purpose of these clubs is to offer an atmosphere where masculinity is "collectively realized and ritualized." Allison argues that this activity reinforces certain ideas of male dominance which so define the Japanese corporate world. Scholarly but never pedantic, the book is further bolstered by the author's own experience as a hostess. A penetrating look at a slice of Japanese business life. Brian McCombie
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From Kirkus Reviews
An assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, Allison worked as a hostess in a Tokyo club, where she examined how the rituals of a hostess define gender identities in Japan. Allison combines feminism with Asian studies in her examination of night work. Japanese corporations bond their white- collar workers to the company with after-hours drinking sessions that employees are expected to attend--and their wives to allow. Allison partially criticizes her subjects, who justify these sessions as part of their culture. As she digs into their points of view, she tells us, ``My goal here is to lay out the cultural ideas that support corporate entertainment by framing and legitimizing it as cultural custom.'' As far as possible, she ``lets the voices of Japanese speak for themselves.'' Men often come to these bondings ``straight from work, tired, uptight, and insecure.'' As part of the corporate life, bonding is work, even though it is made to seem like nonwork. The hostess's job is to create a warm, pleasant atmosphere and lively discussion. Even so, she can also ``be insulted, ignored, and walked away from [and] `put in her place' by the men for whom she's lighting cigarettes, pouring drinks, and instigating conversation. She is lectured, her appearance is evaluated and criticized, her body is ogled and pawed....'' Allison describes the Japanese take on the meaning and place of work; the family and home; male play with money, women, and sex; male rituals of masculinity; and the ways in which white-collar workers are impotent. After retirement, deprived of the money for expensive booze and hostesses, the poor male finds himself in a reverse role, ruled by the absolute master of domestic space, his wife. Serious anthropology but also much like a long night out, expenses paid. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Anne Allison is the Robert O. Keohane Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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