Kabukicho

What does a bride and groom do on their wedding night? How about taking your family to Kabukicho, home to bright lights, Love Hotels, pachinko parlours, and your garden variety sex clubs! Apparently, Yakuza are all over the place, but I wouldn't be able to distinguish any. Tokyo's red-light district is pretty clean and safe compared to a walk down Market Street in the City.

The bright lights of the pachinko parlours lured us inside. I wasn't aware of the gambling element of Pachinko. As a kid in Hawaii, I always associated it as a toy. The folks hanging out at the Pachinko parlours were like zombies, staring at the machines and plunking the metal balls, one after another, again and again, in the hopes of getting paid more metal balls (and the promise of yen!). Mindless stress relief, I suppose.

What caught our attention, more than the S&M club, the Kabuki-cho tourist information center (Always so service-oriented, even if you neeed assistance itching that scratch for a fetish), or the Love Hotels we passed was this:



Now, doesn't "Kai" look so coy? Host bars are the hot thing here. The "look" doesn't evoke any desire from me: 80's shaggy mullet with a dose of Sun-In, a cheesy grin and pose like a Soap Opera actor. Men that use more hair product than I do just don't do it for me. Then again, I'm not their target market: women with plenty of cash to drop a few G's per evening. Japanese women have more disposal income now, so this seems to be the female equivalent to Hostess Bars that salarymen frequent (with women from my motherland as the hostesses, no doubt). Here, women can spend money as they choose, buy and consume rounds of drinks in a safe atmosphere. The best Hosts can rake in tens of thousands of dollars per month. Norv contemplated growing his hair out and bleaching it blond, in the hopes of making 'easy' money off of his wit and charm.

Before the end of the trip, we all started making the "Kai" pose for any photo opportunities - especially Norv.