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Hiring Hostesses

© Rachel Gordon

As documentary filmmaking is as much of an art as fiction, this month’s Suite101 articles are going to be devoted to this under appreciated genre. Both films that I will review are recent releases of the National Film Board of Canada (www.nfb.ca). This review is of Tokyo Girls, an in-depth exploration of four young Canadian women who have worked as hostesses in Japan. In just a few days, Western Eyes, a depiction of Asian American women who are trying to look more American through surgery on their eyes, will be posted.

Tokyo Girls focuses on four young Canadian women, all in their 20’s, who venture to Japan in search of the easy money found in hostessing. Many of the 11,000 illegal clubs will hire any young foreign female, especially those will long legs and blond hair, because it’s marketed as a different “spice” that only some men can afford. The hostesses are paid to drink and talk, and paid a commission on the drinks they can convince customers to consume. It’s easy to make anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand dollars in one night.

Where being a hostess is similar to that of the traditional geisha role, it’s a more “modern form”. Hostesses are paid to talk to men in clubs, but they don’t train in any arts the way that geisha do from a young age. They dress in ultimate chic, but the white make-up and black wigs with kimono are nowhere to be seen. Like the geisha, hostesses are considered a separate species from club dancers and prostitutes, nobody expects to have sexual relations with them, but they can become unknowing mistresses as well if they accept gifts.

Fascinating from start to finish, each woman’s story is diverse and hypnotic in the lifestyle details they reveal. Dhana was a hostess who had a client that was obsessed with her. She backed out of the business because the basic idea of being paid to be fake was too much for her. Hillary needs to pay off student loans and focuses on who she is as a person so that she doesn’t get sucked into the money or gifts that push some other girls towards drugs and prostitution. Jamie became the mistress of a mafia head briefly, only to understand quickly it was prostitution and had to leave. Finally, Natalie is a dance student with a Japanese boyfriend, who doesn’t approve of her profession, who finds the experience even more negative because the older men are more aggressive than those previously described by the other women.