You may have already noticed from the previous photos that my hotel is located not far from a small red-light district area. It is very different from the famous Kabukicho in Shinjuku: there are no high-rise buildings and it is located right in the middle of a quiet residential area, which is amazingly surreal. As you pass by quirky neon-lit windowless facades adorned with plastic statues of Venus, palm trees, fake marble panels, etc. and read detailed pricelists and teaser photos of the services offered behind closed doors, happy school kids ride their bicycles up and down the street and seem to completely ignore the silent presence of very serious men in tuxedos loitering around every establishment’s entrance. Prostitution is illegal in Japan, but the definition of prostitution in the law is quite old-fashioned — it’s extremely easy to go around the words, so now you can freely visit “image clubs”, “soaplands”, “peeping rooms”, “touch bars” and “pink salons” and get whatever your body and imagination desires and more. In the 1970s with the economic growth such services became available to the middle class men and in some companies even became a part of corporate bonding culture (a boss taking his department out for a night at a host club and paying with the company money is a completely normal phenomena). Therefore, this part of the entertainment industry is not completely stigmatized as it can be in European countries, so I guess it is rather usual here for school children to coexist with explicit banners (some are so explicit I couldnt even upload them here) and love hotels in the same neighborhood. I really want to take more photographs of the buildings’s facades — it’s the same “Western-style” commercial architecture that I wrote about before but in its most maximized form with no moral restrictions. However, the tuxedoed doormen scare me away with their deadly faces and I need more courage and training.

A kid in the midst of adult chaos

I haven’t left the room today so I can only share some memories. A rainy day at Okayama University campus where I found Junzo Fukutake concert hall by SANAA. One of the lesser-known masterpiece of the duo.